…week of Jan 25, 2021
Welcome to my weekly letter! This week is a continuation of last week’s environmental topic! Without further ado…
Weekly Read
- Is It Time for an Emergency Rollout of Carbon-Eating Machines? (Wired) – Good news, there are already technologies to capture the carbon in our environment (and perhaps we can make more diamonds!) But it will require global collaboration to plan and deploy it widely to make sufficient impact.
- Global food industry on course to drive rapid habitat loss (Guardian) – a good reminder that sustaining our environment also requires a ecological balance, which again requires global coordination – “making changes to what we eat and how it is produced”
- Will Rising Temperatures Make Superweeds Even Stronger? (Wired) – most of the population have lived through an era of steady food supply, which necessitated the heavy dependence on herbicides. This story highlights how nature will be fighting back stronger now and we really should consider an alternative strategy. (e.g. planting cover crops, or crop rotations)
- President Biden, Please Don’t Get Into Carbon Farming (Wired) – a more recent article that also brings up the topic of planting cover crops. Good reminder that while more corporations want to partake the effort of carbon reduction, we should be cautious of this mis-labelled ‘loophole’ of getting ‘carbon credit’
- Yellow mealworm safe for humans to eat, says EU food safety agency (Guardian) – I left the most yummy one for the last 😉 sorry. Pivoting to other means to reduce carbon footprint… We can also eat ‘different’ food with near-zero carbon emission, providing the equivalent protein value. They probably need a marketing/branding guru to help smoother adaption 🙂
Thoughts
Last week we visited the sustainability topics around transportation and energy use, this week we cut into an even more intimate topic: what we eat and how it’s produced.
Every time I read more into these topics I learn something new about how my generation’s privilege on steady food source was acquired: a healthy amount of ignorance against world ecology.
While it’s encouraging to see how the Biden administration is taking strong steps toward environment saving measures it’s interesting to see how this complex issue also poses complex loopholes such as the topic of ‘carbon farming’.
Perhaps, just like the half joke I made earlier about the ‘mealworm’ needing a marketing/branding guru, the same goes to everything in our food supply pipeline. We need help building a proper branding/labeling system so consumers have an easy to tell if their groceries were produced via a pipeline with low carbon footprint. (and I am pretty sure the ‘organic’ label is not good enough)
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