4 foods that are likely to suffer from climate change

Climate change threatens many of the world's favorite foods. A writeup in National Geographic's Earth Day 2020 magazine by Daniel Stone lists seven "charismatic foods" that we can expect to "morph in appearance, nutritional value, availability, and price as growing regions shift and farmers turn to warm-weather crops."

Right now, it's easy to take for granted foods that grow far away and are imported to wherever we live. It's easy to deny that climate change will affect their production, or to assume (erroneously) that warmer weather means longer and better growing conditions. The former may be true, but the latter not necessarily: "Lack of rainfall or insufficient cold weather could stunt even the best-laid seeds and plans," Stone writes.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not expect the world to lose much arable land before 2050 and says that few foods will disappear by then, but we should certainly brace ourselves for changes to crops and diets. The best thing we can do is start to accustom ourselves to a more locally-sourced diet. For someone like myself, living in Ontario, Canada, that means acquiring a taste for cabbage and apples in January over lettuce and strawberries flown from California.

Read the story from Treehugger by Katherine Martinko - “4 foods that are likely to suffer from climate change.”

Endless Combustion

From the moment that a light gets turned on in the morning, every action of a Western life uses energy. Its easy availability—thanks largely to the so-called fossil fuels—gave us modernity, and now the endless combustion of all that coal and gas and oil has triggered the end of the Holocene and is calling into question the very survival of our civilization. Some of the richest companies on earth have been in the energy business, and geopolitics has long followed the oil derrick. Even our domestic politics is dominated by this industry more than any other; it is, after all, where the Koch brothers made their mint.

Illustration by Tim Robinson.

So the wonder is how little attention we actually pay to the subject. In the Western world, we have taken abundant energy so much for granted that it might as well be air or water—only its absence, during a blackout or an oil embargo, really attracts our notice. I only viscerally grasped the meaning of energy when in rural Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, where newly cheap solar panels were providing the first reliable flow of electrons to villages that had never known artificial light or the breeze of an electric fan. Seeing the pure, undistilled pleasure that this small miracle provided was like traveling back in time—or, given the high-tech and sustainable source of this newfound power, traveling forward.

Read the story from The Nation by Bill McKibben - “Endless Combustion.”

Think twice before going 'off the grid'

Australia is currently experiencing soaring power costs that are dramatically intersecting with the increasing availability of affordable and efficient renewable energy, such as solar panels and battery storage units.

The Solar Settlement, a sustainable housing community project in Freiburg, Germany. 

So why wouldn’t it seem attractive, even liberating, to take your home and yourself “off the grid”?

You could draw your electricity from your roof via an inexhaustible sun, while saving dollars and escaping gouging corporate providers. At the same time, you’d be doing your bit for the environment.

Perhaps, as a step further, you could take a small community of like-minded people with you.

Certainly, Australians are embracing solar.

Read the Pursuit piece by Gary Tippett from the University of Melbourne “Think twice before going 'off the grid'.”