Monday, July 6, 2009

SUSTAINABILITY...

It's becoming quite a trendy word.

I am taking a class this summer called Comparative Sustainability Practices in Local/Global Settings. It's an online class through UCLA. I am going to plan some more traveling for my final project (more on that soon). In the meantime, we get to read and write a few short papers on a variety of topics: Transportation, Food, Waste, Economics, etc.

I've found a few interesting tidbits to share...

- What is your ecological footprint? Apparently we need 4 earths to sustain my habits....geez and I dont even have a car!
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/

- Fish no-nos. It seems like these days most people are relatively aware of the fact that they should eat less meat, even though most people also dont do anything about it. But another detrimental problem is overfishing, and this seems to be more ignored. Did you know we shouldnt ever be eating Chilean Seabass? At least as of last year, this fish is on almost every restaurant menu in NY. And what about sushi? Cheap & Healthy = Good? Unfortunately the sushi market is huge enough to also cause huge problems for our ecosystems. :( Here's a fish guide to browse:
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/SeafoodWatch/web/sfw_factsheet.aspx?gid=17

- I learned an interesting fact at the Brooklyn Food Conference in May, that puts food practices into perspective: apparently eating locally for a year isnt NEARLY as impactful as eating normally, but giving up meat one day a week. (They provided the stats, in food miles, CO waste, etc, which I dont have on hand). Also, did you know Swine Flu and Bird Flu were born out of nasty industrial meat farms...! Eeek. Here is a great quote from Pollin's NY Times article Letter to the Chief:
Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil- fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine.

Enjoy your lunch :)

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