Articles by Chris Schults

Universities considering adding organic-farming to curriculum.

Recently in Daily Grist we reported how locally grown foods are catching on at college dining halls.

Now wouldn't it be nice if the students knew the in's and out's of how that food was produced? Well, they may get their chance, as several universities are offering (or are considering offering) organic-farming majors.

But as KATU 2 in Portland, Ore., reports:

... starting up such a major can carry an implicit critique of traditional programs, said Matt Liebman, director of the graduate program in sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University in Ames.

"It implies that everyone else is non-sustainable, and they find that fairly threatening," Liebman said. "It can imply a critique of traditional agriculture, and its effects on the environment, or farm size."

Kinda like saying that slapping on non-GMO labels implies that there is something wrong with genetically modified foods.

Now, the question is, will organic-farming majors think that they are morally superior?

Oh crap, there it goes.

A little over three years ago, an enormous section of Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf collapsed and splintered into thousands of icebergs. You'd think nothing positive would come out of this (except maybe a little awareness), but you'd be wrong.

Thanks to the collapse, researchers have discovered that an "expansive ecosystem of knee-high mud volcanoes, snowy microbial mats and flourishing clam communities lies beneath the collapsed Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica."

This discovery, as reported by AP, was detailed this week in Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union.

You can read the PDF here.

Sadly:

Now that the ecosystem has been exposed, it is imperiled by fattening deposits of sediment produced through erosion runoff from the advancing glaciers and from dying algae settling to the bottom. The sediment is not only burying the ecosystem, but it is also introducing carbon and other new chemicals into the methane-powered environment ...

Sigh -- yet another reason to prevent climate change.

Is the popular Potter author a ‘Luddite fool’?

While enviros were praising the Canadian publisher of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for printing the book entirely on recycled paper, I didn't hear any talk about the greener eBook option. Maybe because there isn't one -- at least not legally. As Wired reports:

Although Potter has become a multimedia cash cow, with 52 million books sold and products ranging from figurines to a $2.35 billion movie series, Rowling has so far decided against publishing the stories in e-book format, a medium growing by up to 40 percent annually, according to the New York-based Open eBook Forum, a trade body.

Which of course has contributed to this:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had been scanned and put online by an underground collection of fans capitalizing on Rowling's decision not to release an official e-book version. Rowling's publisher had hoped to maintain a strict embargo until midnight Friday. But by then, hundreds were already reading the book thanks to Potter fans who organized over Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, to scan and distribute the book.

Potter fans coordinated a worldwide effort to turn the book's 672 pages into a home-brew digital copy -- now available on file-sharing networks and by using BitTorrent.

So, is Rowling a "Luddite fool"? And should greens support the eBook market?

Sustainable, yes. Possible, not so sure.

So you want to make sure your eating habits are not contributing to global warming, but aren't ready to go veg. You like the idea of eating only organic food, but worry about the long trek much of it makes to get from producer to grocer. So you're thinking about consuming only locally produced fare. But is it possible? Well, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon are giving it a go and sharing their experience with our friends to the north, The Tyee.

In part one, we get the background:

For the average American meal (and we assume the average Canadian meal is similar), World Watch reports that the ingredients typically travel between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometres, a 25 percent increase from 1980 alone. This average meal uses up to 17 times more petroleum products, and increases carbon dioxide emissions by the same amount, compared to an entirely local meal.

Let's translate that into the ecological footprint model devised by Dr. William Rees of UBC which measures how many planets'-worth of resources would be needed if everyone did the same. If you had an average North American lifestyle in every other way, from driving habits to the size of your house, by switching to a local diet you would save almost an entire planet's worth of resources (though you'd still be gobbling up seven earths).