How to Save the World by Michael Pollan

The worldwide crisis over food prices is the direct result of the decision, made by the Bush administration in 2006, to begin feeding large quantities of American corn to American automobiles, in the form of ethanol. This fateful decision led to a run-up in corn prices, which in turn led farmers to plant more corn and less soy and wheat–leading to the surge in the price for all grains. But make no mistake: we’ve created a situation where American SUVs are competing with African eaters for grain. We can see who is winning.

The quickest way to relieve pressure on world food prices would be to cut U.S. subsidies for ethanol and drop import tariffs on Brazilian ethanol. But there are longer-term steps we need to take as well if we are to ensure food for everyone. The other reason grain prices have spiked is that oil prices have spiked, and industrial agriculture has become heavily reliant on fossil fuel–for fertilizer, for pesticide, for processing and transportation. Today it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy. We need to reduce the dependence of modern agriculture on oil, an eminently feasible goal–after all, agriculture is the original solar “technology,” and sustainable farmers have shown us how we might put our food system back on a foundation of sunlight. For example, when you take cattle off their typical feedlot diet of grain and allow them to eat grass, those hamburgers put less pressure on the prices of both oil and grain.

That brings me to the third, and perhaps least tractable, factor behind the run-up in world grain prices: the growing appetite for meat in places like China and India. Most of the world’s grain goes to feed animals, not people, and meat is a very inefficient use for that grain–it takes 10 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. There would be plenty of grain for everyone if we actually ate it as food and didn’t use it to make meat. Reducing world meat consumption–or feeding our food animals differently–would leave more grain for the world’s hungry.

It comes down to this: the world’s agricultural lands make up a precious and finite resource; we should be using it to grow food for people, not for cars or cattle.

Copyright © Michael Pollan

SBTV.com Green Business

Excellent video content from www.sbtv.com, a small business / entrepreneurial website,: 

Walking the Talk: Being True Blue Green

Marketing your sustainable business practices is a great way to gain customers. But in order to keep their loyalty you need to be “on top of your game” when it comes to “going green”.  Find out how two small businesses are “walking the talk” when it comes to being green.

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Jeff Schweitzer Ph.D

The first country to master green technology and renewable energy will be the next economic superpower.  We sit at the threshold of the next industrial revolution.  The mantle of global leader is ours to lose, but that appears what we may well do unless we recognize the imperative of green technology.  We need leadership at the national level to shift from fossil fuels to renewables, to evolve rapidly to a hydrogen economy, to turn trash to cash, to instill efficiency at all levels of production and minimize materials consumption and waste in homes, farms and factories, to encourage green construction in houses and offices, to leap-frog to the next generation of battery and energy storage technology and to develop the technologies that will be needed to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

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Dr. Jeff Schweitzer

Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World

The Da Vinci Code couldn’t begin to rock the foundation of the church like scientist and former chief environmental officer at the Agency for International Development, Dr. Jeff Schweitzer, author of the upcoming book, Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World.

Visit   www.jeffschweitzer.com

From his experience in international development and as a science advisor in the White House in the first Clinton Administration, Jeff says he realized “that one critical element was missing from global efforts to bring science, conservation and development together; there was no appropriate ethical foundation providing a compelling mandate.” In the western world, morality is derived directly from religion, and has been for 2000 years. “But that morality is deeply flawed. What was appropriate in the ancient world works no longer. Since religion is based, by definition, on faith rather than facts, no mechanism exists to arbitrate between competing ideas.20As soon as logic is removed from the debate, competing positions cannot be evaluated based on relative merit, but are supported as inherently right, immune to any reasonable counter arguments. The only way to support a position is simply to assert supremacy as loudly as possible since no objective facts are available to evaluate any particular claim. War, unrelenting poverty, overpopulation, re-emerging diseases and pandemics, environmental degradation, famine, indifference to the needs and rights of other life forms and intolerance of our fellow humans all result, to an important extent, from competing concepts of religious morality that are unable to check our behavior in modern times. We can ill afford to wait another 2000 years to figure out that our existing world-view is not sustainable.”

Americans today are debating, with ever more animosity, the role of religion, science and ethics in our lives at a time of great vulnerability and opportunity. As chief environmental officer, Jeff oversaw projects in more than 80 countries, where he witnessed the devastating impact of ill-conceived policies perpetrated in the name of religion. “Our policies are not some theory – they affect real people every day. We pursue population policies that deny millions of women worldwide the right to choose their own reproductive destiny, perpetuating the cycle of poverty and despair. We deny funding for stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, which could cure devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, spinal cord20injury, stroke, burns, heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. We tragically missed the boat when the United States walked away from the Rio treaty to project biodiversity, and bailed from the Kyoto Protocol, unwilling to admit to the reality of climate change.”

Religion penetrates ever deeper into our secular government. “Our Founding Fathers would despair if they saw what we have done with their precious gift. We now support federally-funded faith-based initiatives, promote prayer in school, advocate the display of the Ten Commandments in public spaces, even courtrooms, attempt to insert the teaching of Intelligent Design in science curricula, and teach Bible school at public schools. Religion now permeates government policies at all levels.”

In Beyond Cosmic Dice, Jeff proposes a completely new way to look at morality and ethics, free from any religious influence, and challenges the intrusion of religion in public life. He proposes a new natural ethic that offers a real alternative. “We can begin by embracing our heritage as natural members of the animal kingdom, with no special privileges on earth and no special mandate from above. Our claims to superiority and our self-promotion to the image of god are simply embarrassing in the face of the biological reality on the ground. With a fresh and more humble perspective, we can do something uniquely human, something that no species in the history of life has done before: we can change our ways. We can adopt a new moral code firmly ro oted in a modest view of our evolutionary history, one that encourages sound environmental stewardship, promotes a general respect for life, and strengthens humankind’s better side.”

Jeff has published more than 100 articles in an eclectic range of fields, including neurobiology, marine science, international development, environmental protection and aviation.

Jeff spent much of his youth underwater pursuing his lifelong fascination with marine life. Observing the antics and heroic aggression of little territorial damsel fish sparked an intense interest in animal behavior. Not satisfied with field observation alone, he went on to study brain function and organization in a wide range of critters. In graduate school, he moved on to shark brains and behavior, eventually graduating with a wife and a Ph.D. in neurophysiology. He has published in an eclectic range of fields, including neurobiology, marine science, international development, environmental protection and aviation. Jeff and his wife now live in central Texas, moving there after retiring from service in the White House as Assistant Director for International Science and Technology.

Dr. Schweitzer is an avid pilot and is the founder and editor of a popular aviation magazine.

Additional Areas of expertise:

• Stem Cell Research
• DNA
• Pandemics and Diseases (i.e. Bird Flu, Polio, AIDS)
• Weather
• International Development
• Politics
• Evolution VS “Intelligent Design”
• Religion
• Morality
• Biological Diversity (aka Biodiversity)
• Population Issues
• Pharmaceutical Development
• Federal Funding
• Environmental Sustainability