December 2009
225 posts
IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.
After nearly two decades of futile searching for a vaccine against the AIDS virus, researchers are reporting the tantalizing discovery of antibodies that can prevent the virus from multiplying in the body and producing severe disease.
ReligiousTolerance.org (via fuckyeahbisexuals)
AGREED - at LEAST a minimum of five…
[via David Becker Big Trend: America’s Chefs “Discover” Sustainable, Local Sourcing for Food]
According to a new survey of American chefs, sustainability and local sourcing and nutrition are the hot culinary trends. They’re much later to the party than trailblazers like Alice Waters and local co-ops, but they are very welcome indeed.
More than 1,800 professional chefs ranked nearly 215 food and beverage items, preparation methods and culinary themes to reveal the hottest restaurant menu trends in 2010.
[…]
Top 10 Trends
- Locally grown produce
- Locally sourced meats and seafood
- Sustainability
- Bite-size/mini desserts
- Locally produced wine and beer
- Nutritionally balanced children’s dishes
- Half-portions/smaller portions for a smaller price
- Farm/estate-branded ingredients
- Gluten-free/food-allergy consciousness
- Sustainable seafood
Although these chefs aren’t using the word, they are adopting the premises of grounded food.
http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060413.diet.shtml
The food that people eat is just as important as what kind of cars they drive when it comes to creating the greenhouse-gas emissions that many scientists have linked to global warming, according to a report accepted for publication in the April issue of the journal Earth Interactions.
Both the burning of fossil fuels during food production and non-carbon dioxide emissions associated with livestock and animal waste contribute to the problem, the University of Chicago’s Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin wrote in the report.
The average American diet requires the production of an extra ton and a half of carbon dioxide-equivalent, in the form of actual carbon dioxide as well as methane and other greenhouse gases compared to a strictly vegetarian diet, according to Eshel and Martin. And with Earth Day approaching on April 22, cutting down on just a few eggs or hamburgers each week is an easy way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, they said.
“We neither make a value judgment nor do we make a categorical statement,” said Eshel, an Assistant Professor in Geophysical Sciences. “We say that however close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet. It doesn’t have to be all the way to the extreme end of vegan. If you simply cut down from two burgers a week to one, you’ve already made a substantial difference.”…
The average New Yorker uses one-half to one-third the electricity of other Americans. Our carbon footprints are just 29 percent of people who live outside the five boroughs, and City Hall has practical plans to reduce even that amount by nearly a third over the next two decades. No wonder that this month, in a talk at the New York Academy of Science, Rohit Aggarwalat, the mayor’s chief adviser on sustainability, said the city was “the most environmentally efficient society in the United States.”
So it makes perfect sense that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is going to Copenhagen on Monday and Tuesday to address the international conference on climate change: his administration is working to head off problems that will not emerge until long after he is gone.
A strong case can be made that when it comes to energy and climate issues, Mr. Bloomberg is the most visionary public official in the country.
And a strong argument can also be made that on a personal level, he ranks among the worst individual polluters ever to hold public office…
Imagine a future where immense amounts of trash didn’t pile up on the peripheries of our cities: a future where we understand the ‘removal-chain’ as we do the ‘supply-chain’, and where we can use this knowledge to not only build more efficient and sustainable infrastructures but to promote behavioral change. In this future city, the invisible infrastructures of trash removal will become visible and the final journey of our trash will no longer be “out of sight, out of mind”.
I had the pleasure of attending Sustainable Silicon Valley’s (SSV) two-day Sustainability Change Agent Training with Alan AtKisson, November 16th and 17th. It was a packed workshop full of…
What is The Story of Stuff?From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.
