The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 21 or CMP11 will be held in Paris from 30 November to 11 December 2015. It will be the 21st yearly session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The objective is to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, from all the nations of the world. Space tools are key for understanding the planet.
Wes Jackson, Ph.D., President of The Land Institute. Salina, Kansas, talks about confronting the planetary challenges we face and making the necessary transition from an “extractive” economy to a “stable state economy” imitating natural systems: no topsoil disruption; no fossil-fuel inputs; no chemical pollution.
Dr. Jackson resigned a professorship with tenure to found The Land Institute in 1976. Pew Scholar, MacArthur Fellow, and Right Livelihood Award. Books include Man and the Environment, New Roots for Agriculture, Meeting the Expectations of the Land (edited with Wendell Berry and Bruce Colman), Altars of Unhewn Stone, and Becoming Native to This Place. Life magazine named Jackson one of 18 individuals it predicts will be among the 100 “important Americans of the 20th century.” He was named one of Smithsonian magazines “35 who made a difference” in November 2005.
Thanks to Pt. Reyes Books for the use of the interview space: www.ptreyesbooks.com
Interviewed by EON’s Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle http://www.eon3.net/
Please check the EON store for DVD’s on this topic: http://www.eon3.net/store/store_main….
“Agriculture is the oldest environmental problem,” the Land Institute’s Wes Jackson tells us early in this 27-minute video. Through interviews with 11 scientists, researchers and environmental experts, this short documentary considers that fate of agriculture and the environment in the age of agri-business and climate change. Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, Tad Patzek , Wendell Berry, Mark Shepard and the rest of the cast explain that big agriculture’s insatiable need for revenue not only afflicts the environment with toxic fertilizers, pesticides and carbon emissions, it degrades the state of agriculture itself by destroying the soil and subverting the natural evolution of animals, plants and insects. It is as unsustainable as it is unstoppable.
The local food movement and the resurgence of small farms provide a glimmer of hope on a gloomy horizon. “Last year was the first time in 150 years there were more farms and not fewer,” McKibben says. Chomsky puts the dilemma in perspective when he says, “On the one hand you have highly concentrated capital supported by state power. On the other hand you have people trying to do things on their own. That’s not just agriculture that’s over the whole society.”
Recorded May 7 2013 in Denver, Colorado at an event organized by community radio station KGNU (http://kgnu.org). Noted social critic Noam Chomsky talks about the willful and reckless destruction of the environment by the US and other Western nations. Corporate-run governments have abdicated their responsibility toward protecting the welfare of their citizens and are rushing the world toward climate catastrophe.
“Agriculture is the oldest environmental problem,” the Land Institute’s Wes Jackson tells us early in this 27-minute video. Through interviews with 11 scientists, researchers and environmental experts, this short documentary considers that fate of agriculture and the environment in the age of agri-business and climate change. Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, Tad Patzek , Wendell Berry, Mark Shepard and the rest of the cast explain that big agriculture’s insatiable need for revenue not only afflicts the environment with toxic fertilizers, pesticides and carbon emissions, it degrades the state of agriculture itself by destroying the soil and subverting the natural evolution of animals, plants and insects. It is as unsustainable as it is unstoppable.
The local food movement and the resurgence of small farms provide a glimmer of hope on a gloomy horizon. “Last year was the first time in 150 years there were more farms and not fewer,” McKibben says. Chomsky puts the dilemma in perspective when he says, “On the one hand you have highly concentrated capital supported by state power. On the other hand you have people trying to do things on their own. That’s not just agriculture that’s over the whole society.”
Poet, novelist, philosopher, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer Wendell Berry will present the next Chubb Fellowship Lecture as a guest of Timothy Dwight College and the Yale Sustainable Food Project (YSFP).
Join us for a public conversation with Wendell Berry at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 7th.
A pioneering and influential advocate for change, Berry has spent more than 50 years helping to shape the movements for agricultural and ecological sustainability. His poetry and essays flow from the rich agrarian tradition of American writing, and Berry’s relationship to his Kentucky farm has been compared to that of Thoreau’s to the forest — a place that nurtures his thinking about the value of physical labor, self-sufficiency, and communities of people living in harmony with the natural world.
Berry has garnered international honors for his writing, winning the T.S. Eliot Award, the 2000 Poets’ Prize, the Thomas Merton Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the John Hay Award, the Art of Fact Award for non-fiction, the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement, the National Humanities Medal and the Russell Kirk Paideia Prize, among many others. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013.
A prolific author, Berry has generated dozens of novels, short stories, poems, and essays since publishing his first novel, titled “Nathan Coulter,” in 1960. Some of his other well-known works are the “Port William” stories and novels, “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture,” “A Place on Earth,” “A Continuous Harmony,” “What are People For,” “The Broken Ground: Poems,” “The Art of the Commonplace,” “Life is a Miracle,” and “The Country of Marriage.”
Fred Kirschenmann has been involved in sustainable agriculture and food issues for most of his life. He currently serves as both a Distinguished Fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, and as President of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York. He also still provides management over site of his family’s 2,600 acre organic farm in south central North Dakota. He was recently named as one of the first ten James Beard Foundation Leadership Awards which recognizes visionaries in creating more healthful, more sustainable, and safer food systems. He is the author of a book of essays which track the development of his thought over the past 30 years; Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays by a Farmer Philosopher, published by the University of Kentucky Press.
Wes Jackson, President of The Land Institute, was born in 1936 on a farm near Topeka, Kansas. After attending Kansas Wesleyan (B.A Biology, 1958), he studied botany (M.A. University of Kansas, 1960) and genetics (Ph.D. North Carolina State University, 1967). He was a professor of biology at Kansas Wesleyan and later established the Environmental Studies department at California State University, Sacramento, where he became a tenured full professor. He resigned that position in 1976 and returned to Kansas to found The Land Institute.
Dr. Jackson’s writings include both papers and books. His most recent works, Nature as Measure (2011) and Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture (2010), were both published by Counterpoint Press. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (2008) and Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place (1996), were co-edited with William Vitek. Becoming Native to This Place, 1994, sketches his vision for the resettlement of America’s rural communities. Altars of Unhewn Stone appeared in 1987 and Meeting the Expectations of the Land, edited with Wendell Berry and Bruce Colman, was published in 1984. New Roots for Agriculture, 1980, outlines the basis for the agricultural research at The Land Institute.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
Welcome to Transition Studies. To prosper for very much longer on the changing Earth humankind will need to move beyond its current fossil-fueled civilization toward one that is sustained on recycled materials and renewable energy. This is not a trivial shift. It will require a major transition in all aspects of our lives.
This weblog explores the transition to a sustainable future on our finite planet. It provides links to current news, key documents from government sources and non-governmental organizations, as well as video documentaries about climate change, environmental ethics and environmental justice concerns.
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