HUCE Video Library | Harvard University Center for the Environment

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
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The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future: Tom Wessels

In this compelling and cogently argued book, Tom Wessels demonstrates how our current path toward progress, based on continual economic expansion and inefficient use of resources, runs absolutely contrary to three foundational scientific laws that govern all complex natural systems. It is a myth, he contends, that progress depends on a growing economy.

Wessels explains his theory with his three laws of sustainability: (1) the law of limits to growth, (2) the second law of thermodynamics, which exposes the dangers of increased energy consumption, and (3) the law of self-organization, which results in the marvelous diversity of such highly evolved systems as the human body and complex ecosystems. These laws, scientifically proven to sustain life in its myriad forms, have been cast aside since the eighteenth century, first by Western economists, political pragmatists, and governments attracted by the idea of unlimited growth, and more recently by a global economy dominated by large corporations, in which consolidation and oversimplification create large-scale inefficiencies in both material and energy usage.

Wessels makes scientific theory readily accessible by offering examples of how the laws of sustainability function in the complex systems we can observe in the natural world around us. He shows how systems such as forests can be templates for developing sustainable economic practices that will allow true progress. Demonstrating that all environmental problems have their source in a disregard for the laws of sustainability that is based on the myth of progress, he concludes with an impassioned argument for cultural change.

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice
Food-Matters
Public Health

Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System: Raj Patel

Revised and Expanded Edition

“For anyone attempting to make sense of the world food crisis, or understand the links between U.S. farm policy and the ability of the world’s poor to feed themselves, Stuffed and Starved is indispensable.”
—Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma

It’s a perverse fact of modern life: There are more starving people in the world than ever before, while there are also more people who are overweight.

To find out how we got to this point and what we can do about it, Raj Patel launched a comprehensive investigation into the global food network. It took him from the colossal supermarkets of California to India’s wrecked paddy-fields and Africa’s bankrupt coffee farms, while along the way he ate genetically engineered soy beans and dodged flying objects in the protestor-packed streets of South Korea.

What he found was shocking, from the false choices given us by supermarkets to a global epidemic of farmer suicides, and real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa.

Yet he also found great cause for hope—in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable and joyful food system. Going beyond ethical consumerism, Patel explains, from seed to store to plate, the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of both farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance.

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice
Food-Matters

The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems: Fritjof Capra

The vitality and accessibility of Fritjof Capra’s ideas have made him perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson of the latest findings emerging at the frontiers of scientific, social, and philosophical thought. In his international bestsellers The Tao of Physics and The Turning Point, he juxtaposed physics and mysticism to define a new vision of reality. In The Web of Life, Capra takes yet another giant step, setting forth a new scientific language to describe interrelationships and interdependence of psychological, biological, physical, social, and cultural phenomena–the “web of life.”

During the past twenty-five years, scientists have challenged conventional views of evolution and the organization of living systems and have developed new theories with revolutionary philosophical and social implications. Fritjof Capra has been at the forefront of this revolution. In The Web of Life, Capra offers a brilliant synthesis of such recent scientific breakthroughs as the theory of complexity, Gaia theory, chaos theory, and other explanations of the properties of organisms, social systems, and ecosystems. Capra’s surprising findings stand in stark contrast to accepted paradigms of mechanism and Darwinism and provide an extraordinary new foundation for ecological policies that will allow us to build and sustain communities without diminishing the opportunities for future generations.

Now available in paperback for the first time, The Web of Life is cutting-edge science writing in the tradition of James Gleick’s Chaos, Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Matter, and Ilya Prigogine’s Order Out of Chaos.

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice

The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century: William Rosen

How a seven-year cycle of rain, cold, disease, and warfare created the worst famine in European history

In May 1315, it started to rain. It didn’t stop anywhere in north Europe until August. Next came the four coldest winters in a millennium. Two separate animal epidemics killed nearly 80 percent of northern Europe’s livestock. Wars between Scotland and England, France and Flanders, and two rival claimants to the Holy Roman Empire destroyed all remaining farmland. After seven years, the combination of lost harvests, warfare, and pestilence would claim six million lives—one eighth of Europe’s total population.

William Rosen draws on a wide array of disciplines, from military history to feudal law to agricultural economics and climatology, to trace the succession of traumas that caused the Great Famine. With dramatic appearances by Scotland’s William Wallace, and the luckless Edward II and his treacherous Queen Isabella, history’s best documented episode of catastrophic climate change comes alive, with powerful implications for future calamities.

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice
Public Health

Altered Genes, Twisted Truth: How the Venture to Genetically Engineer Our Food Has Subverted Science, Corrupted Government, and Systematically Deceived the Public

This book uncovers the biggest scientific fraud of our age. It tells the fascinating and frequently astounding story of how the massive enterprise to restructure the genetic core of the world’s food supply came into being, how it advanced by consistently violating the protocols of science, and how for more than three decades, hundreds of eminent biologists and esteemed institutions have systematically contorted the truth in order to conceal the unique risks of its products–and get them onto our dinner plates.

Altered Genes, Twisted Truth provides a graphic account of how this elaborate fraud was crafted and how it not only deceived the general public, but Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Barack Obama and a host of other astute and influential individuals as well. The book also exposes how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was induced to become a key accomplice–and how it has broken the law and repeatedly lied in order to usher genetically engineered foods onto the market without the safety testing that’s required by federal statute. As a result, for fifteen years America’s families have been regularly ingesting a group of novel products that the FDA’s own scientific staff had previously determined to be unduly hazardous to human health.

By the time this gripping story comes to a close, it will be clear that the degradation of science it documents has not only been unsavory but unprecedented–and that in no other instance have so many scientists so seriously subverted the standards they were trained to uphold, misled so many people, and imposed such magnitude of risk on both human health and the health of the environment.

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice
Food-Matters

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters: Gregory Zuckerman

Everyone knew it was crazy to try to extract oil and natural gas buried in shale rock deep below the ground. Everyone, that is, except a few reckless wildcatters – who risked their careers to prove the world wrong.

Things looked grim for American energy in 2006. Oil production was in steep decline and natural gas was hard to find. The Iraq War threatened the nation’s already tenuous relations with the Middle East. China was rapidly industrializing and competing for resources. Major oil companies had just about given up on new discoveries on U.S. soil, and a new energy crisis seemed likely.

But a handful of men believed everything was about to change.

Far from the limelight, Aubrey McClendon, Harold Hamm, Mark Papa, and other wildcatters were determined to tap massive deposits of oil and gas that Exxon, Chevron, and other giants had dismissed as a waste of time. By experimenting with hydraulic fracturing through extremely dense shale—a process now known as fracking—the wildcatters started a revolution. In just a few years, they solved America’s dependence on imported energy, triggered a global environmental controversy—and made and lost astonishing fortunes.

No one understands these men—their ambitions, personalities, methods, and foibles—better than the award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman. His exclusive access enabled him to get close to the frackers and chronicle the untold story of how they transformed the nation and the world. The result is a dramatic narrative tracking a brutal competition among headstrong drillers. It stretches from the barren fields of North Dakota and the rolling hills of northeastern Pennsylvania to cluttered pickup trucks in Texas and tense Wall Street boardrooms.

Activists argue that the same methods that are creating so much new energy are also harming our water supply and threatening environmental chaos. The Frackers tells the story of the angry opposition unleashed by this revolution and explores just how dangerous fracking really is.

The frackers have already transformed the economic, environmental, and geopolitical course of history. Now, like the Rockefellers and the Gettys before them, they’re using their wealth and power to influence politics, education, entertainment, sports, and many other fields. Their story is one of the most important of our time.

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice

Food injustice in a changing climate

New research from Food Tank, CARE International, and the Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) program showcases ways forward in cultivating equality in the food system.

(12 October, Washington D.C.) Climate change threatens to put hundreds of millions people – mostly women and children – at risk of hunger unless inequalities in the food system are tackled simultaneously with climate change.

A new report from Food Tank, CARE International and the CGIAR Research program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) – Cultivating Equality: Delivering Just and Sustainable Food Systems in a Changing Climate – shows how inequality determines who eats first and who eats worst, and how this shapes people’s ability to adapt to climate change. Food Tank, CARE International and CCAFS argue that solutions around food production are not enough, and demand more dialogue and action to address inequality in food systems.

“The impacts of climate change are felt most by those least responsible for the problem and with the least capacity to adapt. Efforts to address hunger and malnutrition in the context of climate change must address inequality in food systems at all levels,” says Tonya Rawe, Senior Advisor for Policy and Research for CARE International. “As governments work to realise the targets of the new Global Goals for Sustainable Development, they must ensure that the needs, interests, and rights of women and small-scale food producers are not forgotten. The first step is to make sure we get a just climate change agreement from the UN climate talks in Paris this December.”

…(read more).
See also:

• FoodTank.com October 13, 2015
• Cultivating Equality | CARE October 13, 2015

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice
Food-Matters

FoodTank.com

About Food Tank

Our Vision: Building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.

Our Values: Educate. Inspire. Advocate. Change.

Our Mission: Food Tank is focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters. We spotlight environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable ways of alleviating hunger, obesity, and poverty and create networks of people, organizations, and content to push for food system change.

Additional Background:

Our food system is broken. Some people don’t have enough food, while others are eating too much. There’s only one way to fix this problem—and it starts with you and me.

Food Tank is for the 7 billion people who have to eat every day. We will offer solutions and environmentally sustainable ways of alleviating hunger, obesity, and poverty by creating a network of connections and information for all of us to consume and share. Food Tank is for farmers and producers, policy makers and government leaders, researchers and scientists, academics and journalists, and the funding and donor communities to collaborate on providing sustainable solutions for our most pressing environmental and social problems.

As much as we need new thinking on global food system issues, we also need new doing. Around the world, people and organizations have developed innovative, on-the-ground solutions to the most pressing issues in food and agriculture. Through years of field visits (and years of trying to eat better in her own community) our President Danielle Nierenberg has helped to highlight and promote these best practices. Today, we hope to bridge the domestic and global food issues by highlighting how hunger, obesity, climate change, unemployment, and other problems can be solved by more research and investment in sustainable agriculture.

…(read more).

See co-published report with CARE and CGIAR

• Cultivating Equality

Global Climate Change
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Food-Matters

Cultivating Equality | CARE

Posted 10/12/15

Globally, 795 million people are chronically hungry; 161 million children under five are stunted. Yet we use 1.5 times the planet’s resources every year, exhausting resources faster than the planet can naturally regenerate them. A fifth of cropland has been so degraded it is no longer suitable for farming, while 90 percent of fisheries are fished at or above capacity. At the same time, changes in climate in the last 30 years have already reduced global agricultural production 1 to 5 percent per decade and could reduce it by 2 percent per decade for the rest of the century. Up to 600 million more people could be at risk of hunger by 2080 as a result. Proposed solutions to hunger in a changing climate often emphasize increasing food production. Improving yields where there is not enough food or among small-scale food producers is key. But simply increasing small-scale food producers’ yields is not enough to end hunger.

Inequality shapes who has access to food and the resources to grow it and buy it. It governs who eats first and who eats worst. Inequality determines who can adapt to a changing climate. Hunger and poverty are not accidents—they are the result of social and economic injustice and inequality at all levels. The reality of inequality is no truer than for women—half the world’s population, with far less than their fair share of the world’s resources. To end hunger and malnutrition in a changing climate, we must address the underlying inequalities in food systems.

See:

• http://careclimatechange.org/publications/cultivating-equality-report/
     and
• Cultivating Equality

…(read more).

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice
Food-Matters