Tag: Food

TED & Future Stewards Host Countdown Global Launch

/ activist360 / Leave a comment

TED and Future Stewards Host Global Countdown Event Mobilizing Millions to Halve Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2030 in the Race to a Zero-Carbon World

Countdown, a global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis, launches today, Saturday, October 10, 2020 with a free five-hour live virtual event featuring leading thinkers and doers.

Countdown is one part of a broader series of actions and events this fall including the Bloomberg Green Festival, Climate Week NYC, and others, all with the collective objective of informing and activating millions in the lead-up to a successful UN Climate Change Conference in November 2021.

Speakers will touch on topics such as:

  • Climate science and the climate crisis: Where are we today?
  • Why climate justice matters
  • Putting climate back on the political and social agenda
  • What businesses can do—and are doing—to transform and transition
  • Rethinking our cities
  • Stepping up at work and at home
  • The path to a safer, cleaner, fairer future for people and the planet

A full agenda and speaker list can be found here.

The moment to act on climate change has been upon us for too long, and now is the time to unite all levels of society—business leaders, courageous political actors, scientists and individuals—to get to net-zero emissions before 2050.”

—Chris Anderson, Countdown founding partner and Head of TED

“Countdown brings together a powerful collaboration of partners from all sectors to act on climate change.”

—Lindsay Levin, Countdown founding partner and CEO of Leaders’
Quest

Countdown aims to answer five fundamental, interconnected questions that inform a blueprint for a better future:

  • ENERGY: How rapidly can we switch to 100% clean power?
  • TRANSPORT: How can we upgrade the way we move people and things?
  • MATERIALS: How can we re-imagine and re-make the stuff around us?
  • FOOD: How can we spark a worldwide shift to healthier food systems?
  • NATURE: How do we better protect and re-green the earth?

Countdown is asking companies and organizations to join the Race to Zero through Business Ambition for 1.5°C, which is a commitment to set science-based targets aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5°C, and through The Climate Pledge, which calls on signatories to be net zero carbon by 2040—a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement goal of 2050.

We can inspire others through action and example, because there is no hope without action.”

—17-year-old climate justice activist Xiye Bastida, a lead organizer of the Fridays for Future

Five years after the unanimous signing of the Paris Agreement, many countries, companies and citizens are doing what they can about the climate crisis. But this is not enough.”

—Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief (2010-2016), now co-founder of Global
Optimism

About TED
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, often in the form of short talks delivered by leading thinkers and doers. Many of these talks are given at TED conferences, intimate TED Salons and thousands of independently organized TEDx events around the world. Videos of these talks are made available, free, on TED.com and other platforms. Audio versions of TED Talks are published to TED Talks Daily, available on all podcast platforms.

About Future Stewards
Future Stewards is a coalition of partners (Leaders’ Quest, Global Optimism, and We Mean Business) working together to build a regenerative future – where we meet the needs of all, within the means of the planet. Founded after the Paris Agreement, Future Stewards equips individuals, businesses and communities with the awareness and tools required to tackle systemic problems, scale what works, and build cross-sector collaboration.

Corn’s Effect On The Environment, Q&A With EarthTalk

/ activist360 / Leave a comment

How did corn become such a dominant crop in the U.S. and what’s the effect on the environment of growing so much of it?
—J.S., Washington, DC

It’s true that corn is the most dominant agricultural product in the U.S., and perhaps the world. Originally domesticated in Central America, European explorers initially shunned it. But when their crops failed, the conquerors of the New World decided to integrate corn into their agricultural efforts. Fast forward: A couple of hundred years and this tall grass now covers 90 million acres of land in America alone, and accounts for some 10 percent of total crop production globally.

Although Americans love corn, its ubiquity in our diets and agricultural sector isn’t so good for the planet. Credit: Livier Garcia, Pexels.

Corn is so ubiquitous in our food system that an estimated 70 percent of the atoms in the body of the average American originally came from it.

One of the reasons corn is so dominant is that, as far as crops go, it excels at converting raw materials into chemical energy. Growing corn generates far more calories per unit of land than nearly any other crop. Another key factor in corn’s rise was the surplus of ammonium nitrate after the end of World War II. Agricultural scientists repurposed this compound, originally stockpiled for explosives, into a cheap form of fertilizer. This allowed corn to be grown in the same fields year after year, without depleting the nitrogen already in the soil. Additionally, corn is incredibly versatile. We can eat it, process it into syrup and use it as a sweetener, fuel our cars with it, and feed it to our animals.

Currently, we use approximately 40 percent of corn grown in the U.S to create ethanol, and 36 percent to feed animals. Unfortunately, both uses wreak havoc on the environment. Ethanol has a low “energy-returned-on-energy-invested” ratio, meaning we must put a large amount of energy into producing it, in some cases even more than ethanol itself generates.

Even just growing corn is far from environmentally friendly. Conventional monoculture farming (the way most corn is grown) degrades soil and often leads to harmful runoff into streams and rivers. Pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers can all wreak havoc on aquatic organisms.

An indirect negative effect of the supremacy of corn has been its help in fueling explosive growth in the livestock industry at home and abroad. These days we use about 80 percent of the world’s farmland for animal production. But as a result of animals’ inefficiency in converting feed to energy, animal agriculture produces only 18 percent of the world’s calories.

So, what can we do? On a political level, agricultural subsidies for corn can be either eliminated or redistributed. Some 60 percent of farm subsidies in the U.S. go toward corn and other grains, while only one percent goes toward promoting healthier and more eco-friendly fruits and non-grain vegetables.

Farmers themselves can transition from monoculture practices to those that incorporate a wider variety of species into the mix. As consumers, one of the best measures we can take is to buy organic corn. Organic agriculture is not quite as eco-friendly as some make it out to be, it’s miles ahead of conventional farming.

CONTACTS: “The Environmental Risks Of Corn Production,” “How a national food policy could save millions of American lives.”

EarthTalk® is produced by Roddy Scheer & Doug Moss for the 501(c)3 nonprofit EarthTalk. Send questions to: question@earthtalk.org.

In A Forest Of Gods

/ activist360 / Leave a comment

In this beautiful short film by The Source project, we learn about the profound importance that forests have on India’s indigenous people, the Adivasi (first people).

Dokri shares the meaning the forests have to her Kondh community. The Kondh tribe is from Niyamgiri in the state of Odisha in eastern India, an area of densely forested hills, deep gorges, and cascading streams.

The forests mean everything to Dokri and her Kondh community. Everything they need to live comes from the forests. The forest gives them green leaves, mushrooms, plants, and foods to harvest so they can eat. It offers wood to provide shelter.

The Kondh community are gatekeepers to these remote, resource-rich fragile ecosystems. Their lands and lives are under threat from those seeking to exploit these lands.

https://youtu.be/6qBdGeeYvmQ

Globally, around 1.6 billion people depend on forests for their survival. Yet, every year 130,000 square kilometers of forest, face destruction.