Sunday, February 16, 2020

Plant-Based Meat Has Roots in the 1970s

Americans looking to cut back on meat are following a movement forged by a groundbreaking book, ‘Diet for a Small Planet.’
Even as Americans mass in cities and their suburbs, the range-roaming cowboy has endured as a national symbol, along with the cholesterol-laden diet he represents: heavy on steaks, hamburgers, sausages and the like. What if that iconic image were replaced someday by, say, a technician in a lab coat producing a facsimile of a traditional burger, one made from plants and not animals?

Not very likely, you say? Perhaps not right away. But the lure of the cowboy notwithstanding, more Americans than ever are eating plant-based meat, convinced that it is less harmful to them and less taxing on the environment. Millennials in particular are giving the phrase “all sizzle, no steak” a positive spin it never had.

This slow but perhaps inexorable shift in food preferences is explored by Retro Report, whose mission is to focus on how the past influences present-day policies and customs. In this video offering, it turns to Frances Moore LappĂ©, whose 1971 best-selling book “Diet for a Small Planet” changed the way many people viewed global hunger in an era of rapid population growth. Ms. LappĂ© (pronounced Luh-PAY) concluded that there was plenty of food to go around. The problem, she said, was one of distribution. Too much of it went to nourish animals on four legs rather than directly to those on two.

“I just said, “O.K., I’m going to figure out are we really at the Earth’s limits — is that really the cause of hunger?” she told Retro Report. She took her father’s slide rule and “just sat there hour after hour literally putting two and two together.” Her bottom line: The world’s grain supply was “more than enough” to feed every human on the planet. (continues)

Saturday, February 15, 2020

Sustainable choices

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Planting Trees Won’t Save the World

Focusing on trees as the big solution to climate change is a dangerous diversion.
By Erle C. Ellis, Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis
The authors are scientists.


One trillion trees.

At the World Economic Forum last month, President Drumpf drew applause when he announced the United States would join the forum’s initiative to plant one trillion trees to fight climate change. More applause for the decision followed at his State of the Unionspeech.

The trillion-tree idea won wide attention last summer after a studypublished in the journal Science concluded that planting so many trees was “the most effective climate change solution to date.”

If only it were true. But it isn’t. Planting trees would slow down the planet’s warming, but the only thing that will save us and future generations from paying a huge price in dollars, lives and damage to nature is rapid and substantial reductions in carbon emissions from fossil fuels, to net zero by 2050.

Even a 16-year-old can tell you that.

Focusing on trees as the big solution to climate change is a dangerous diversion. Worse still, it takes attention away from those responsible for the carbon emissions that are pushing us toward disaster. For example, in the Netherlands, you can pay Shell an additional 1 euro cent for each liter of regular gasoline you put in your tank, to plant trees to offset the carbon emissions from your driving. That’s clearly no more than disaster fractionally delayed. The only way to stop this planet from overheating is through political, economic, technological and social solutions that end the use of fossil fuels... (continues)
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Margaret Renkl, What's better than planting a trillion trees...

Sunday, February 9, 2020

"How to Write Fiction When the Planet Is Falling Apart"-Jenny Offill

...In 2005, the naturalist Robert Macfarlane asked, in an influential essay in The Guardian: “Where is the literature of climate change? Where are the novels, the plays, the poems, the songs, the libretti, of this massive contemporary anxiety?” How should we understand the paucity of the cultural response to climate change, he asked, compared with the body of work cata­lyzed by the threat of nuclear war? In recent years, however, planetary collapse has emerged as a dominant concern in contemporary fiction; there have been major novels by Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, David Mitchell, Ian McEwan, Jeff VanderMeer, Kim Stanley Robinson and Jeanette Winterson. Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments,” which examines the connections between totalitarianism and despoliation, shared the Booker Prize last year. Richard Powers’s “The Overstory,”which follows a group of environmental activists, took the Pulitzer Prize in fiction... nyt
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In Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather,’ Paranoia Is Delivered With Humor
By Dwight Garner

My wife refuses to use Lyft or Uber in Manhattan because she thinks they’re evil. She thinks I’m a moral cretin for liking both so much. We don’t agree to disagree. We fight it out every time we step outside.

In Jenny Offill’s melancholy and satirical third novel, “Weather,” there’s a small subplot about the narrator’s friendship with a car service driver in New York City. His name is Mr. Jimmy, as if he were Mick Jagger’s friend in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

The narrator, Lizzie, can’t afford car services, not really. She’s a librarian who pays for garlic with pennies at the bodega. She and her husband worry about losing their dental insurance. Lizzie scans their apartment for her “least depressing underwear.” They’re not selling plasma, but things are tight. Lizzie grinds her teeth in her sleep.

In “Weather,” Offill is interested in the things we can save and the things we cannot. Lizzie calls Mr. Jimmy for rides to work because he’s threatened by the Lyfts and Ubers of the world; she thinks she can help him and his disabled son. Her other relief missions have more wobble in them. She’s trying desperately to save her brother, Henry, a former drug addict and a troubled soul... (continues)
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Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather’ Is Emotional, Planetary and Very TurbulentBy Leslie Jamison

When the narrator of Jenny Offill’s critically acclaimed and rightfully adored 2014 novel “Dept. of Speculation” discovers that her husband has been listening to a lecture series called “The Long Now,” she initially assumes these lectures are about “the feeling of daily life,” but eventually she realizes they concern “topics such as Climate Change and Peak Oil.” Her assumption and its wry correction gesture toward a familiar binary — between the implicit solipsism of caring mostly about “the feeling of daily life” and the more enlightened social consciousness of caring about capital-letter Issues.

But Lizzie, the narrator of Offill’s new novel, “Weather,” cares about both. Preoccupied by the apocalyptic horizon of climate change, the dark pulsing terror at the center of the novel, and by the “feeling of daily life,” Lizzie understands — or at least, enacts — the truth that we inhabit multiple scales of experience at the same time: from the minutiae of school drop-offs and P.T.A. activism to the frictions of our personal relationships all the way to the geological immensity of our (not so slowly) corroding planet. Offill takes subjects that could easily become pedantic — the tensions between self-involvement and social engagement — and makes them thrilling and hilarious and terrifying and alive by letting her characters live on these multiple scales at once, as we all do.

“Weather” is a novel reckoning with the simultaneity of daily life and global crisis, what it means for a woman to be all of these things: a mother packing her son’s backpack and putting away the dog’s “slobber frog,” a sister helping her recovering-addict brother take care of his infant daughter, and a citizen of a possibly doomed planet that might be a very different place for the son whose backpack she is packing, when he packs his own son’s backpack decades from now, or certainly when that someday-son does the same for his own children. (continues)

Monday, February 3, 2020

MTSU Honors Lecture: "There is a tomorrow"



Climate change honors lecture from Osopher


Dean Fischer (Basic and Applied Sciences) thought I may have been too optimistic. My response:

I often share a deep pessimism about the future, reflecting on the lapses of the recent past. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to encourage young people to "panic" in the face of the daunting obstacles before them. I'm a devotee of William James's "will to believe" idea, the notion that in dire circumstances requiring a heroic response - the climate crisis is certainly that - it's crucial that agents believe in their own ability to effect change. That's why I cited Michael Chabon's confident response to his little boy's query about the future existence of humans. But you were right, those of us who came of age in the 70s have plenty of cause for a lack of confidence... I side with Mark Twain: “There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.”  (So I don't call myself an optimist, but a meliorist.)


https://mtsunews.com/honors-lecture-series-climate-change-2020/

Saturday, February 1, 2020

Revkin's ideas