As a sort of chaser to Thursday’s post, I want to applaud the ecumenical convocation of world-wide religious leaders at the foot of a melting glacier in Greenland, as reported by ABC News and Reuters. Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Christians of several stripes, and indigenous people united in a silent “prayer for the planet” as part of an effort to withstand global climate change. The event was part of a weeklong symposium sponsored by Religion, Science, and the Environment, an NGO based in Greece.
Month: September 2007
Thinking globally, eating locally
Via kottke.org: the question of whether eating locally is better for the environment isn’t quite settled, argues Sarah Murray, writing for the Financial Times (a publication, admittedly, with its own slant on things), in support of her recent book. She points to recent studies that indicate that shipped food performs as well as local food in terms of environmental impact.
Keep in mind that Murray is writing for a British publication, and food shipped into the U.K. needs must travel over water (often by efficient container ship) while food that travels within the U.S. and North America more likely came by truck. And her quoting a study by New Zealand’s Lincoln University that New Zealand lamb is more efficiently produced than its British equivalent, even after accounting for shipping, is disingenuous.
Nevertheless, Murray makes the good point that transportation may not be the most important environmental factor in the production of a lamb and boiled potato dinner. And
the environmental trade-offs can be perplexing. While water conservationists point out that pressurised sprayers and drip irrigation systems distribute water to crops more efficiently than traditional gravity-based methods, they require mechanical pumping and therefore consume more energy.
Along with the carbon dioxide emissions generated by agriculture come other, more potent, greenhouse gases. Animal manure, soil management and heavy use of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers in crop production all contribute to an increase in nitrous oxide emissions, which are up to 300 times more effective at heating the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
On the other hand, whether a locally-produced piece of fruit, picked and carried a short distance to a farmers market, just plain tastes better than one engineered for long-distance travel, harvested green, wrapped in plastic, and shipped thousands of miles is a question that Murray doesn’t pick up in this article.
It’s not working
Okay, it’s against my better judgement, but I’ll bite—I don’t normally respond to goads from creationists, because what results is not dialogue but mutual sniping, but I am rising to the bait from Robert Bowie Johnson Jr., who proposes the expression “Slime-Snake-Monkey-People” to refer to adherents of “Darwinism, a closed-minded, anti-Creator mindset which compels them to ignore or deny any evidence which tends to validate the Book of Genesis.” Supposedly, as the press release suggests, skeptics will be shamed by such a risible epithet. Oh, yes, and “since Slime-Snake-Monkey-People insist they evolved over millions of years through a countless series of random mutations, Christians should also refer to them as ‘mutants.'”
Online, at least, Johnson doesn’t seem to be getting much traction with his intended audience. Most of the current search results point to blogs unsympathetic to his cause. It might have something to do with his unconventional thesis that Greek art recapitulates the stories in Genesis.
International Rock-Flipping Day
I had just a little time yesterday morning, before we scurried off to the theater, to get out for the first International Rock-Flipping Day, so I poked around in the wooded strip between my townhouse cluster and the middle school grounds. As a result, it turned into one of my quasi-periodic Clear the Trash jaunts. I picked up a grocery bag’s worth of rubbish, a serviceable basketball, and (alas) a seventh-grader’s lab book for Understanding Our Environment.
I turned up a couple of candidate rocks, but nothing more than a retiring earthworm, so I fudged a bit and flipped some bits of wood (unwanted leftovers, probably, from some neighbor’s woodpile). I found a couple of what I make to be Gryllus sp., Field Cricket. Borror and White offer this helpful distinction:
The House Cricket, Acheta domesticus (Linn.), is a species introduced from Europe that often enters houses; it differs from field crickets in having the head light-colored with dark crossbands.