I wrote here a while ago about food miles - see under Transportation of Food.  I looked at two arguments:  that the long distances we transport food has a discernible impact on the production of greenhouse gases - and that it doesn’t.  From what I’ve been reading over the past couple of years, the weight of evidence seems to be tipping in favor of the latter argument.

Airbus, the airplane manufacturing giant, in partnership with National Geographic Magazine, has published an interesting supplement:  Lift.  This details the many important contributions that the airline industry is making.  (I also wrote a story on Sustainability at the Airports for the American Planning Association a couple of years ago.  It turns out there’s quite a lot going on.)

In Lift, there is a compelling article about how air freight is significantly enabling developing world farmers to get their products to market, improve their livelihoods, and at a minimal cost to the environment - perhaps even at a net gain.  From Field to Fork: Reassessing the Value of Food Miles talks about how developing economies are taking full advantage of developed economy consumers’ appetite for fresh, largely organic food and flowers.  One NGO executive notes:  “People in Kenya have made an investment, and the consumer is now getting healthier, better grown and ecologically sound produce, with hardly any chemicals used on it.”  This is now Kenya’s fastest growing economic sector.  The article also notes that “…the majority of energy use in the food supply chain in developed countries is in distribution and consumption, not in transport from the place of origin.”  The argument here is that the Kenyan farmers and others are generating even fewer GHGs in their production.

Here’s a graphic the “NY Times” did on the environmental footprint of orange juice.  It indicates that the carbon dioxide emissions generated by transportation are a small fraction of the total generated throughout the entire life cycle of the product.

There’s a new book out from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) called Fair Miles: Recharting the food miles map that underscores this message.  “…while food miles loom large in our carbon-aware times, transporting it counts for less than you might think.”

It’s always important to consider environmental impacts, something that in the United States we established in law on January 1, 1970.  The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires public agencies to look at this in all things.  But it’s also important to look at the net benefits of any activity throughout its life cycle.  That’s what these thoughtful re-examinations of the impact of food miles are doing.

I went to this event several weeks ago and came away with a great feeling about where urban agriculture and the global movement for “cooler” approaches to farming and eating are heading.  I’ve written any number of times here about food and agriculture, including this view into the work of one particularly amazing urban farmer.

The morning plenary session began with remarks from the Manhattan Borough President, Scott Stringer, one of the sponsors of the summit and a driver of the NYC Sustainable Food Charter, Jacquie Berger from Just Food, and, via video, Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, and Vandana Shiva, director of Navdanya International.  Shiva has a particularly compelling story to tell about Big Agriculture, and how small farmers, working organically, can produce more food, with hugely fewer chemical inputs to the soil and water and much less of a burden of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

An opening panel was moderated by Anna Lappé, founder of Take a Bite out of Climate Change.  Take a Bite is itself a project of the Small Planet Institute, founded by her and her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, author of the seminal Diet for a Small Planet, a book that came out at about the same time as my old, now-dog-eared standby, The Vegetarian Epicure.  Lappé fille is, not surprisingly, quite articulate on the benefits of reducing animal agriculture’s extraordinarily negative impact.

Don’t think this perception’s not taking hold?  Like the quantum leaps that renewable energy and other clean tech are taking - and I never thought I’d live to see - so too is the recognition that we need to think differently about how we eat and how we produce our food.  This is all well beyond the hippie activist stage too.  I’ve been reading and hearing more and more about agroecology, and climate change superstars like Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri and Lord Nicholas Stern are talking about reducing meat consumption.  (See these recent posts:  Meat, More Meat and Al Gore’s New Book - and Copenhagen.)  Don’t think some special interests aren’t concerned?  See Food Fight: Big Beef Challenges EPA Climate Change Finding from BNET yesterday.

One of the panelists with Lappé was the world-renowned food policy wonk, Marion Nestle, author of, among other things, the very important Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.  (As Eric Schlosser, author of the also very important Fast Food Nation, said about her book:  “If you eat, you should read this book.”  [Fast Food Nation is one of the best - and most depressing - non-fiction books I've ever read.]) Nestle blogged about the summit at her website.  She said:  “More than one thousand New Yorkers signed up for thirty workshops at the amazing event.  Why amazing?  Because this summit is about advocacy for a more just and sustainable food system, and right now.”

There was more exciting discussion at the workshops.  These brought together some of the top policymakers, wonks, and activists in the fields of urban agriculture, energy and waste management, food and nutrition, economic development, social policy, and other key areas, not just from New York, but throughout the country.  I sat in on a session that got me thinking about how “distributed farming” and “distributed generation” could and should co-exist.

This movement’s coming through.  The times, they are indeed, a-changin’.

I wrote about The Earth here a while back.  It was really about soil and focused on a fantastic article in “National Geographic Magazine.”  I’ve become more and more interested in “cool farming,” teach this stuff in my climate change classes, and have even had the opportunity to write an article about biochar.

Here is a new movie, website and blog that’s all about dirt - what it means to a healthy ecosphere, how it’s been degraded and lost, and how it’s being saved.  “DIRT! The Movie” is narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis and “…brings to life the environmental, economic, social and political impact that the soil has. It shares the stories of experts from all over the world who study and are able to harness the beauty and power of a respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with soil.”

Looks really great.

Vice President Al Gore, Nobel Peace Laureate, venture capitalist, author, lecturer, Academy Award winner, activist, the man Denialists love to hate, and the man some others canonize as the path-breaking visionary on the threat of global climate change, has a new book out:  Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.  It has a series of solutions and it’s a call to action for people all over the world.  Gore is making the rounds to both promote the book and to talk about the looming crossroads at Copenhagen.

The preeminent journalistic voice on climate change, Betsy Kolbert, interviewed Gore at her blog for “The New Yorker.”  It’s a wide-ranging conversation and Gore’s optimistic about prospects, both for Copenhagen and beyond.  I had one cavil which I expressed in a comment there:  “I’m somewhat at a loss, though, in reading this conversation, to note the absence of reference to greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide. As we all know, methane, nitrous oxide, the F-gases, ozone and black carbon are all pernicious actors in warming and need to be addressed.”  I think they both know this perfectly well, but there seems to be a sense that the issue has to be dumbed down for the general public, a perception that I challenged when Bill McKibben did it last summer in a book review.  In any event, Kolbert, McKibben, and Gore are three of the greatest rainbow warriors of our age and should be regarded as such.

Gore was at the American Museum of Natural History earlier this week and “Scientific American” covered the event.  Gore talked about population, a too-neglected part of the equation in the climate change calculus, and he talked about gender equality.  “Near-zero growth, however, could be attained with four basic societal achievements, he said. The goals include: the education of girls, the empowerment of women, the spread of fertility management and a higher child survival rate. Regardless of climate change, he noted, these aims are ‘all things we should be doing for good and beneficial reasons otherwise.’”

The good folks at Salon.com did an interview with him too.  Asked his expectations for Copenhagen, he said:  “I think it is realistic to expect a treaty. It will not be as strong as I would like it to be. But it will put a price on carbon and change the forward planning of businesses and cities and states, provinces and nations.”  Putting a price on carbon is one of the cornerstones of climate policy that the IPCC, the Stern Review, the EU, and most economists in the world concerned about the issue have all trumpeted.

Perhaps some of the most visible and controversial commentary he had this past week happened in an ABC interview.  He said that people should eat less meat, agreeing with Lord Stern’s recent pronouncement.  (See the two posts immediately below for more on this approach.)

In a happy coincidence, the author of the book I referred to in my post below on Meat, Bloodless Revolution, has a review of Gore’s book in this past weekend’s “FT.”  Tristram Stuart’s highly laudatory review is itself very much worth reading.  He notes, among other things, Gore’s embrace of biosequestration as a vital tool in fighting climate change and his disavowal of the massive biofuel development for which he had formerly been an advocate.  (See, for example, my posts on biochar and Are Biofuels a Bummer?)

Gore is going to Copenhagen as a sort of Ambassador Plenipotentiary for the planet.  He’s well suited to the role.

As I noted yesterday, I’ll be visiting the subject of the intersection of animal agriculture and climate change more often here.  For now, I want to note two recent items, one a “NY Times” op-ed, the other a book review in the “New Yorker.”  (Yes, I live in New York City.)

The former, an op-ed by a “livestock rancher” and author, basically says yes, meat consumption as we know it today has serious problems globally but if you buy only “green” beef it’ll all be fine.  We are given a reasonable survey of the environmental burden of modern meat production and told “Don’t worry, be happy.”  The letters in response are revealing.  One comments “Ms. Niman’s argument amounts to lowering an ethical standard to fit the demands of our meat-centric culture and Western privilege.”  (See, for instance, Nature, Poison and “Eco-Nomics” at the blog.)  One letter argues for hunting and fishing for food, another for eating poultry instead of beef.  And one letter posits the humane argument:  “When Nicolette Hahn Niman refers to ‘a conscientious meat eater,’ she is using an oxymoron. Can anyone in good conscience be complicit with the unnecessary suffering and slaughter of another sentient being?”  (That’s where I started with my vegetarianism 38 years ago.)

This brings us to the subject of Betsy’s Kolbert’s “New Yorker” review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.  Foer is a novelist, but delves into some new, not-uninteresting territory in this book.  He looks at the massive pollution engendered by industrial meat production.  “The pigs processed by a single company, Smithfield Foods, generate as much excrement as all of the human residents of the states of California and Texas combined.”  And, “According to the Environmental Protection Agency, some thirty-five thousand miles of American waterways have been contaminated by animal excrement.”  He looks at the extraordinary amounts of antibiotic pumped into animals we eat and how this has led directly to “…producing new, resistant strains of germs-so-called superbugs.”  And he looks at the pain inflicted on the animals on which we feed.  Good review of what appears a most compelling book.

This discussion appears to be one that is not soon going away.

Not everybody would have caught the headline, but when you’re as tuned into Climate Change as I am - and many of you are - then Climate chief Lord Stern: give up meat to save the planet is going to grab your attention.  Who is Lord Nicholas Stern?   He is a world-class economist and leader of the UK’s seminal “Stern Review on the economics of climate change“ that boosted the potential economic devastation of climate change into the forefront of public policy discussion.  When Lord Stern starts talking about animal agriculture as a concern, people are going to listen.

He gave a wide-ranging interview recently to “The Times” in which he said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”  “The Times” also reports that “UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds such as soy.”

(If full disclosure from me is of any note, I’ve been a vegetarian for pretty much the entirety of my adult life.  I had my last hamburger 38 years ago and have never looked back.)

Not surprisingly, when someone as prominent as Stern makes a pronouncement as unequivocal - and controversial - as this one, there’s going to be a rapid backlash.  Thus, Critics round on Lord Stern over vegetarian call is a headline from the very next day from “The Times.”  They wrote:  “Farmers and meat companies across Britain reacted with a mixture of anger and exasperation yesterday after one of the world’s leading climate change campaigners urged people to become vegetarian to help to fight global warming.”

When another highly visible and respected climate change leader, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, delivered the same message a year ago, there was a not-dissimilar reaction.   See this from “The Guardian.”

There is a fair bit to be said on this subject - and I will be saying more here.  There are an awful lot of reasons why meat consumption is a big net negative for people and the planet, and climate change is high on the list.  There is a growing movement to highlight the connections.  Witness, for instance, this useful comment on a recent post.

I’ve been reading a great book on the history of vegetarianism, The Bloodless Revolution by Tristram Stuart, and find, quite to my surprise, that many of the same arguments made today regarding natural resource protection and the medical benefits of vegetarianism were made hundreds of years ago.  Pierre Gassendi, for instance, the 17th Century French philosopher and scientist, was a prominent proponent of a vegetarian diet.  As the book notes, “…Gassendi produced the mandate for philosophical vegetarianism, by proclaiming that ‘The entire purpose of philosophy ought to consist in leading men back to the paths of nature.’”

This echoes a quote that I love from Alex Steffen, the Executive Editor of Worldchanging, here (in the context of geoengineering as “bad planetary management”):  “Our goal should be to cool the planet in ways that reinforce and restore the resilience of its natural systems.”  Many would argue that animal agriculture - and certainly the industrial farming that produces most of the world’s meat today - does not reflect how earth’s natural systems were meant to operate.

The venerable Matt Wald at the “NY Times” had a revealing story yesterday:  Fossil Fuels’ Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says.  He cites a study, commissioned by Congress, just out from the National Research Council.  Monetizing the value of human life cut short by air pollution - “small soot particles, which cause lung damage; nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog; and sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain” - the NRC estimated $120 billion a year in health costs, based on 20,000 premature deaths valued at $6 million each.

The study did not measure the impacts from trains, shipping, or aviation, nor from the impacts of climate change.  The NRC study neglects then, among other things, what James J. Corbett, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Engineering at the University of Delaware, asserted in a study published two years ago that attributed 60,000 cardiopulmonary and lung cancer deaths each year globally to shipping emissions - and forecast an increase to nearly 85,000 deaths by 2012 under current trends.

The NRC study “…also found that renewable motor fuel, in the form of ethanol from corn, was slightly worse than gasoline in its environmental impact.”  (See Are Biofuels A Bummer? for more on the problems of ethanol production.)  The NRC study did not, however, delve into environmental or health damage from coal mining, oil extraction and refining, nor nuclear power operations and radioactive waste disposal.  (For more at the blog on coal, see Coal - Besides Carbon Dioxide, There’s …)

I’ve highlighted many other problems with fossil fuel and nuclear power here, including the massive capital and operating costs and the extraordinary inefficiency of conversion loss in conventional central power generation.  I’ve touched on the “resource curse” too.  What I and others have been saying is let’s all of us, in the developed and the developing world, be free of these many and diverse drags on our societies.  What the National Research Council is affirming in their study is that health impacts count!

(There’s a P.S. here:  the study found that the health impacts from natural gas are quite small relative to those from coal and oil.  Not surprisingly, there’s a nearly full-page ad from America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) tucked in right next to Wald’s article.)

I wrote in July on a number of comprehensive reports on how climate change is devastating many parts of the world and many different sectors.  (See Impacts.)  I also referenced a stunning “National Geographic Magazine” article on the drought in Australia.

Well, the “Financial Times” has a story on drought right here in the US, in Arizona.  See the audio slide show here and learn more about why the threat of climate change isn’t only about rising sea levels in the vulnerable developing world and melting Arctic ice.  It’s also about the impacts to farmers, ranchers and other people dependent on the land for their livelihoods - and right here in the US of A.

This message is echoed in a recent report from the thorough and thoughtful Environmental Working Group - Crying Wolf: Climate Change Will Cost Farmers Far More Than a Climate Bill.  Why farmers, ranchers, and the timber industry aren’t breaking down the doors of Congress to get vigorous climate change legislation - with offsets for biosequestration  initiatives - is beyond me.  (See my article for Grist on biochar.)

Political note:  It’s a sad thing that Tom Harkin left the chair of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee to take over Ted Kennedy’s chairmanship of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.  Harkin gets the dangers to farmers and the potential benefits.  His successor, Blanche Lincoln, doesn’t.

The good folks at “The Economist” went to the North American Biochar Conference 2009 in August.  I’ve been bitten by the biochar bug.  See my post here, plus the article I wrote for Grist.  The virtues of biochar - A new growth industry? has some good insights, many of which were gleaned from the papers given at the conference.

One paper spoke of “…another advantage if poor-world farmers can be brought in.  Many of them burn wood, waste and dung indoors for heating and cooking.  The soot released into the air as a consequence is also a climate-changer because, being dark, it absorbs heat.  Much worse, though, about 1.6m people are killed each year by inhaling it.  But pyrolytic stoves produce almost no soot-the carbon is all locked into the biochar.  Worldstove, a firm based in Italy, seeks to provide small and simple pyrolising stoves to poor countries.”

I’ve written about the problem of black carbon from cooking a number of times, including here from April.  It’s an insidious problem and the Economist is right to note that biochar production is one way to solve it.

We were over in Europe in the summer of 2003, just a few days after the heat wave broke.  It was plenty hot even then.  In this article from the “FT” from last weekend, the experience of the proprietors of a famous French vineyard, returning early from their holiday, is recalled.  “Instead of rows of plump, light golden fruit, the couple found shrunken berries, burnt brown by the sun. ‘We’d never seen anything like it,’ says Christine, a 52-year-old mother of two, who took over the renowned Vernay estate from her father in 1997. She scrambled to arrange a harvest within three days of their return. Even so, the vineyards produced only half its usual volume of wine that year. The grapes were simply too desiccated.”  The article looks at a number of concerns of the French wine industry relative to climate change.

We are also apprised of a letter to President Sarkozy from 50 prominent players in the French food and wine industry in which they issue an urgent call to action. See this from “The Telegraph” from August.

Meanwhile, here’s a video from the California wine industry about sustainability.  Good stuff.