What are the food security implications of the ever worsening drought?

“Increasingly intense droughts in California, all of the Southwest, and even into the Midwest have everything to do with human-made climate change.” So says climatologist James Hansen, who co-authored one of the earliest studies on this subject back in 1990.

The food security implications of this are staggering in light of the way we currently farm on a land area roughly equal to the size of South America. Experts say we would have to add another Brazil to that land mass to feed the people expected to arrive by 2050.

Figuring out how to feed nine billion people by mid-century in a Dust-Bowl-ifying world is the task at hand. Working to slash carbon pollution and avoid the worst climate impact scenarios is a big enough challenge.

A 2009 NOAA-led paper warned that, for the Southwestern United States and many semi-arid regions around the world, “the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.” Impacts that should be expected if we don’t aggressively slash carbon pollution “are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the ‘dust bowl’ era.”

So what’s a body of six or nine billion to do? It’s clear a great humanity can’t turn on a dime. But we can begin to future-proof our food supply. And, we can discuss just how that may be accomplished right here.

To learn more about the ideas for transitioning that are already out there, visit our Modular Agriculture page.

Consider the Source

 Consider the First Source!

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word choreographed an assembly of amino acids into an exquisite array of specific proteins. Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” In so doing God demonstrated a penchant for genomic writing, preceeded by an amazing series of prebiotic events, in a highly orchestrated presentation of evolutionary overcontrol.

More about God’s Handiwork!

An affordable and effective alternative to glass greenhouses is the walipini (an Aymara Indian word for a “place of warmth”). Also known as an underground or pit greenhouse, it was first developed over 20 years ago for the cold mountainous regions of South America, this method allows growers to maintain a productive garden year-round, even in the coldest of climates.

A walipini combines the principles of passive solar heating with that of an earth-sheltered building. It utilizes nature’s resources to provide a warm, stable, well-lit environment for year-round vegetable production. Locating the growing area 6’- 8’ underground and capturing and storing daytime solar radiation are the most important principles in building a successful Walipini.

Consider the Source

 Consider the First Source!

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word choreographed an assembly of amino acids into an exquisite array of specific proteins. Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” In so doing God demonstrated a penchant for genomic writing, preceeded by an amazing series of prebiotic events, in a highly orchestrated presentation of evolutionary overcontrol.

More about God’s Handiwork!

“We scaled up our novel photobioreactor design and conducted independent functionality tests that confirmed the unit’s robustness,” said Proterro CEO Kef Kasdin. “The modular photobioreactors, which are made from off-the-shelf materials, including polyethylene, can withstand category 1 hurricane winds,” she explained, adding, “Because of the materials used and the innovative design, we also have been able to validate low fabrication costs.”

Consider the Source

Sustaining Life with micro-algae and flat panel reactors. This is where so-called life-sustaining circulatory systems come into play. Already, on the International Space Station (ISS), researchers have started reconstituting all kinds of things.

But the ISS has it easy: it’s relatively close to Earth. Several times a year it receives fresh provisions of food and water. But if people start traveling farther away from Earth, they’ll have to survive without the luxury of regular, fresh supplies.
And that’s why Jens Bretschneider at the Institute for Space Systems in Stuttgart is looking for new solutions. His team thinks the answer lies in biological systems, like micro-algae: “They make it possible to collect exhaled CO2 and create new oxygen, and at the same time build up biomass stocks.”

Brettschneider is working with a see-through plexiglass tank through which green water runs which bubbles away as exhaled air passes through it. “This tank is a flat panel reactor, with which we can cultivate algae on Earth in an efficient way,” Brettschneider says. “The advantage is that the gas is mixing with the algae constantly. That gives us a large contact area. We agitate the algae so that they move towards the light, and then move away from the light again – and that encourages them to grow faster.”

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Tooling Up for Hydroponics

Humans have grown plants atop structures since antiquity. The ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia (4th millennium BC–600 BC) had plantings of trees and shrubs on aboveground terraces. An example in Roman times was the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, which had an elevated terrace where plants were grown. A roof garden has also been discovered around an audience hall in Roman-Byzantine Caesarea. The medieval Egyptian city of Fustat had a number of high-rise buildings that Nasir Khusraw in the early 11th century described as rising up to 14 stories, with roof gardens on the top story complete with ox-drawn water wheels for irrigating them.

A study at the National Research Council of Canada showed the differences between roofs with gardens and roofs without gardens against temperature. The study shows temperature effects on different layers of each roof at different times of the day. Roof gardens are obviously very beneficial in reducing the effects of temperature against roofs without gardens. “If widely adopted, rooftop gardens could reduce the urban heat island, which would decrease smog episodes, problems associated with heat stress and further lower energy consumption.”
Consider the Source

Tooling Up for Hydroponics

 Consider the First Source!

“The foxes have holes, and the birds of heaven have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” and so it is today for many of his followers. Despite all the warnings about the snares laid by moneylenders, despite the fact that gage mort is literally translated as a pledge to give up one’s life, millions have lost their homes through mortgage exploits, and their quality of life through the service of debt.

Find Out How to Get Your Life Back!

Large, centralized irrigation schemes, often built around big water storage dams, were a major component of the Green Revolution that helped boost food production and reduce famine risks for millions of people, especially in Asia. But they have often proven environmentally destructive and, especially in Africa, expensive.

By contrast, decentralized irrigation – small individual systems designed to serve a single or community farm – can often be better tailored to local conditions, purchased and operated by private farmers, and avoid the environmental and social downsides of big dam-and-canal systems.

The emergence and spread of affordable pumps and other technologies that enable farmers to irrigate their small plots has begun to boost harvests and family incomes in some of the world’s deepest pockets of hunger, including parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

For millions of poor farm families in sub-Saharan Africa, access to water makes the difference between hunger and a full belly, between a well-nourished child and one stunted by malnutrition, and between a productive livelihood or one mired in poverty.

Tooling Up for Hydroponics

An unfortunate mix of drought, failed harvests and rising food prices have brought severe food shortages to the east and the Horn of Africa. The severe food crisis is already affecting around 10 million people in parts of Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia. Rains have failed over two seasons, with a strong La Niña event having a dramatic impact across the east coast of Africa. Now that this year’s wet season has officially ended, there is little prospect of rain or relief before September.
Charities have launched the biggest ever campaigns to tackle what they call a ‘creeping disaster’ in Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia. For Somali refugees arriving in neighbouring Ethiopia, rates of severe malnutrition are as high as 23%, according to Oxfam. A 4% incidence normally constitutes an emergency.
Up to 1,000 Somalis a day are also streaming across the Kenyan border to Dadaab, already the largest refugee settlement in the world, with 367,000 residents. Some 2.5 million people require food aid in Somalia, but access is tough, particularly in the south, where an Islamist insurgency has made it nearly impossible, for aid groups to operate. To the west, in Ethiopia, 3.2 million people require humanitarian assistance. Pastoralist communities there have seen 80% of their livestock die in some places, according to Oxfam, with the lost income making it extremely difficult for people to buy food.
In Uganda 600,000 people need assistance, and in Djibouti 120,000. But the greatest number of people in need, 3.5 million, are in Kenya’s arid northern regions, whose marginalisation by the government has magnified the effects of the increasingly frequent droughts. In Turkana malnutrition rates are more than twice the emergency level.
“High food prices, fluctuating rainfall, a rising population and ever dwindling natural resources have created the perfect storm,” said Leigh Daynes, director of communications for Plan, in the UK.
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Does the growing family have anything to learn from a growing business seeking new accommodations? We think so. This post kicks off the new home case study for Apple Computer.

The company wants to build one building that will hold 12,000 Apple employees. “There’s not a single straight piece of glass in this building,” according to Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs. The parking will be mostly underground. Each cafe will feed 3,000 people at one sitting. The campus “energy center” would be the primary source of power and the grid would serve as a backup.
“We have a shot at building the best office building in the world,” Jobs told the Council members, “Architecture students will come here to see this.” Apple hopes to move into the campus in 2015. Additional features include:

• The circular design with a courtyard in the middle and curved glass all the way around.
• Transforming an area that’s 20% landscaping to 80% landscaping by putting most of the building’s parking underground.
• There are 3,700 trees in the area at the moment, Jobs has hired an arborist from Stanford to take the tree population up to 6,000.
• The plan is to build a four-story high building and four-story underground parking structure.
• There will be an auditorium, fitness center and some R & D buildings.
• Jobs plans a 40% increase in Apple employees going from 9,500 today to 13, 000 in 2015.
• He wants to increase the campus’ space 20% from 2.6 million to 3.1 million square feet.
• Surface parking will decrease 90% from 9,800 to 1,200 .
• The building footprint will decrease 30% from 1.4 million to 1 million.

We join the show, already in progress, with a presentation to the Cupertino, California City Council by Steve Jobs.

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Price Charles spoke at a food conference hosted by the Washington Post. on May 4, 2011 at Georgetown University. In his speech, he criticized government subsidies for large-scale agriculture, and spoke against industrial pollution and global dependence on oil.  ✂ Transcript

Journey to Forever has established an online biofuels library with a wide variety of books and articles available at no charge.
Consider the Source: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library.html