Power of the People

The BBC adds this interesting take to the flurry of human population related news stories that have come out over the past week or so (anyone know what the impetus for these have been?).  Here is the question posed by the BBC story:

As the world population reaches seven billion people, the BBC's Mike Gallagher asks whether efforts to control population have been, as some critics claim, a form of authoritarian control over the world's poorest citizens.

Unfortunately, ideas for how to manage human population growth do indeed have a history that is more than a little tinged with the inequities associated with race, class, and socio-economic power.  The eugenics and Social Darwin movements are cases in point.  More recently, the Sierra Club experienced a vigorous internal debate over its stance on population growth and immigration (mostly the illigal kind) into the US.  The beginning of this article gives a brief synopsis.  The potential inequities associated with managing human population have also been explored in a number of movies and books.  In Time just out in theatres has a Logan's Run-esque plot: people are only allowed to live until 25 as a way to sustainably manage resource use on the planet.  However, rich people can buy their way out the social contract....they get to live forever!

And of course managing population growth also always involves a whole other range of hot button issues such as the proper role of government in people's lives, abortion and other methods of contraception, and  religion.  Its perhaps because of these complexities that population growth is rarely talked about explicitly when we are thinking about sustainable resource management.

The Oldest Conflict

I came across yet another story this week about the growing human demand for the world's resources.  This one is from this month's National Geographic and is about the Albertine Rift, part of the Great Rift Valley in Africa. The Rift Valley is where we have the first evidence of our earliest human ancestors, and for want of more detailed information we can probably think of it as the cradle of human civilization.  Today, it is a place of enormous natural resource capital and intense competition for that capital by humans.  This resource competition is probably one of the underlying causes of the horrific violence that has plagued the region over the past several decades.  In fact many of our conflicts tend to come down to battles over resources.  See this video of Wangari Maathai talking about the relationship between conflicts and resources.

The Big Short

In the absence of any comprehensive federal action on limiting our carbon emissions, individual states have started to act.  One of the most significant is California's cap and trade program that was just adopted.  Read about it in this LA Times story.  Cap and trade programs are a great example of attempts to "internalize" the economic benefits of ecosystem services (and the costs of degrading those ecosystem services).  We did not discuss this in class, but there is actually a good deal of debate about what the best ways of internalizing those costs and benefits are.  For instance, there has been a vigorous policy debate about whether cap and trade systems or simple taxes on carbon emissions would produce the best results.  Check out this debate on the subject.   Other folks have questioned the value of the whole market approach altogether.  See this opinion piece by Larry Lohmann published originally in the New Scientist and this Film by Annie Leonard called the Story of Cap and trade

Green Acres

Check out this story about a commercial urban farm in New York City.  Think about this in this week's theme of human population growth and resource use, the idea of urban farming is an intriguing one.  I am just guessing (since I don't think we have any actual data to inform us), but I suspect that growing vegetables on a rooftop in NYC is more energy intensive then growing them on a traditional farm upstate. But what if the alternative is clearing a patch of second growth deciduous forest....or a patch of rainforest to provide food for our growing more resource intensive populations?

The last anchovy

Another story this week about human population growth, demand for resources, and the fate of the planet.  This one in the Washington Post.  It includes several nice photo essays.

7 billion

There was an interesting Op-ED piece in the New York Times this past Sunday by the Mathematical Ecologist Joel Cohen.  In it Dr. Cohen muses on the implications of our population passing the 7 billion mark.  It is an interesting read.  The Washington Post also has several human population related stories this week, including this infographic, this story about how we measure human population growth, and this story about the economic practicalities of managing human demographics

Commercialism

Check out this commercial from Chipotle.  It features Willie Nelson doing a nifty  version of Cold Play's The Scientist.  I sort of miss Chris Martin's falsetto, but who can argue with Willie?  The video itself is an interesting parable of sustainable agriculture.  I'm not sure what to make of it.  Can a corporation (or technically the non profit arm of a corporation) have lofty goals and ideals?  Doesn't it by necessity always come down to money and profits for shareholders?  Or is the dichotomy between profit and idealism a false one?

On an entirely different tangent, what is the value of a two minute commercial like this?  Is it educational?  Simplistic pablum?  Propaganda?

Shut Your Pie Hole

NPR and the New York Times had stories this week about the 64th anniversary of the first televised presidential address.  I'm not sure what prompted the press interest (although granted it was a momentous change in how we interact with our Presidents), but I found the actual speech Harry Truman gave to be interesting for a couple of reasons.  Truman asked Americans to stop eating so much so that we could send the surplus food to our friends and defeated enemies in Europe who were starving.  Among other things Truman suggested that we should refrain from eating meat on Tuesdays, and poultry and eggs on Thursdays.  The idea was to give the grain that would have gone to feeding livestock (to produce those meat and dairy products) instead directly to hungry people. The food shortage that Truman was trying to tackle was caused by war.  But a number of people fear that if we don't do anything to curb population growth, reduce the per capita consumption of the relatively well off, or improve food production, that we are headed for a more profound and long-term shortfall in our food supply.  A number of people have focused on the consumption bit, particularly our love of woefully inefficient to produce meat.  See this video of Mark Bittman (its also on our class reading list).  Apparently Truman was ahead of the times!

Another thing that struck me was the blunt and almost moralizing tone that Truman had.  He basically says that you would be selfish, heartless, and even un-American if you didn't do your part to lessen world hunger.  I am not sure what the reception to Truman's speech was, but I suspect that it was nothing like the response that our First Lady  received from some over her Let's Move campaign to encourage kids to be more active and to have healthier eating habits.  Can you imagine the reaction if President Obama said that we should re-introduce meatless Tuesdays to help lessen the strain on our planet?

Home Sweet Home

Check out this you YouTube clip.  It's taken largely from a longer film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand called HOME http://www.homethemovie.org/, and uses  music by Armand Amar. Setting aside a discussion of the film's agenda, by themselves the images of our planet are pretty amazing.

Water Wars Australian Style

Much of Australia has been in a more than decade old drought, and climate scientists fear that it is just a harbinger of a more profound drying coming as a result of human induced climate change.    This story from PRI's The World, describes some of the impact this drought has had on the Murray-Darling river basin. A very similar history and much of the same conflicts over water use have played out in the western U.S.  A number of great books describe this history including Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.  Also, NPR had a nice multi-part series on water use in the west.

Wangari Maathai has died

Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Greenbelt movement, Wangari Maathai, has died.  You can read a brief obituary here.

A fist full of weeds

This video was posted today on Aliens-L, a list serve for those interested in invasive species (mostly land managers and scientists).  The poster was Pankaj Oudhia who described it this way:

Two days back I was in forest for Ethnobotanical surveys. I observed mother and son engaged in hand weeding in rice fields. The mother was wearing traditional saree with shirt in order to get protection from sharp weedy plants. The son was in modern dress not usually preferred in field by rice workers. The son's new bike was parked in nearby field bund. During interaction they informed that they will cook the uprooted weeds after returning back. It will serve as breakfast as well as curry for dinner. Major part of it will go to cattle as fodder, locally known as Kandi. Weeds like Commelina in dry form will be kept for year round use as medicine (Home remedy) for gout. Small part will be for the Traditional Healers. It will be given as gift and in return the Healers will take care of their health round the year.The weed species they were dealing with were obnoxious to dangerous as per dictionary used by Invasive species experts but I enjoyed (rather appreciated) the unique concept of weed management through utilization by these Indian farmers.    Hand weeding is still popular method of weed management in rice fields. Farmers collect the uprooted weeds and serve it as fodder to their cattle. These weeds are also used as potherbs and as source of medicine. Many times the Traditional Healers purchase it in bulk for round the year use. Rice fields are source of many medicinal herbs having regular and heavy demand in national and international drug markets.Tens of promising weedicides are available in Chhattisgarh but still most of the farmers believe in this unique Traditional approach i.e. “Management through utilization.” Weeds are managed without polluting the crop fields. This film is a part of report titled “Management through Utilization: Traditional Approach of Weed Management in India.” by Pankaj Oudhia. For details please visit http://www.pankajoudhia.com/index.html This Film is a part of plus 40,000 parts series. It is better to watch this film after reading the research documents in order to understand it in real sense.  

When I watched the video, my first impression was that it looked like back breaking drudgery.  Don Strong, Professor of Ecology at UC  Davis, must have had a similar reaction, because he responded with this post:

"The yield loss may vary from 10% to complete failure of the crop depending upon the situation. In general, the potential yield loss from weeds is less in wet-seeded rice than in dry-seeded rice (Fig. 1). In a survey of upland rice-producing countries covering 80% of the total production area, weeds were the most widely reported biological constraint to yield (Johnson 1996)."

from one of many, many publications on the threats of weeds in rice. Small holders are especially hard put by weeds because they cannot afford more labor to pull weeds and they cannot afford herbicides.

I wonder how much longer the son with his new dress shirt and bike will be around to help hand weed? With India and much of the rest of the developing world hurdling toward modern prosperity is this type of agriculture still viable?  Is it ethical?  With world population hurdling toward 10 billion can we afford to do agriculture this way?  Can we afford not to do agriculture in this way? Oh the questions that a simple video of folks pulling weeds can bring up!

P.S.  Note how the weeds they are pulling look very much like rice (at least to an untrained eye like myself).  Many rice weeds are marvel crop mimics that match their looks and life history to that of rice to avoid detection by weeders and to ensure efficient dispersal into another rice field.

The last cowboy....or is it fish?

There is perhaps nothing more iconic about the west than a cowboy.  But there is also perhaps no bigger myth.  In fact much of the history of the west is about the inexorable decline of this economic system and way of life.  Barbed wire, farming, and eventually an industrialized food system long ago made the cowboy as profession an obsolete anachronism, even as the cowboy as symbol became the fundamental narrative that defines much of the culture of the west.  But we still have lots of cows, and a few actual cowboys that run some of them on the open range. This range is largely owned in trust by the people of the United States via the federal government .  The government ended up owning the land largely because (with the exception of cattleman looking for summer forage and the native Americans who were forcibly evicted from it), not many people cared about  it.  Most of it is unsuitable for more intensive forms of agriculture, is a long way from anywhere, and lacks reliable sources of water.  However, these lands are some of the most beautiful parts of our country, and they  have also become a refuge for many plant and animal species that have been crowded out from more urbanized and farmed places.  These lands have also increasingly become a cherished place for urbanites to hunt, fish, and otherwise enjoy the outdoors.  In some cases cows and these other uses are incompatible.  Negotiating these conflicts is tricky and is usually far more about sociology and culture than about ecology or even economics.  The history of cattle and the open western range is a long and fascinating one.  The latest flare up of this long simmering conflict is described in  this recent LA Times story..  There have probably been thousands of similar stories written over the last 200 years.  What largely caught my eye about this one was that it is about a place that I spent some time in and love.  But it also got me thinking  that these types of resource conflicts are probably only going to become more frequent and more bitter as the world's resources become increasingly coveted by different folks with different goals and aspirations.

Backyard conservation

The British passion for plants is legendary.  Nowadays this passion mostly is manifest in the ubiquity of well tended gardens and one of the biggest and most famous flower shows in the world.  But at the height of the British Empire, it also took the form of a massive army of global plant collectors that fed unique and potentially useful plants into a vast network of botanical gardens and plant improvement stations.  This was in a very practical sense another arm of Imperial power that among other things helped facilitate colonial expansion and the slave trade.

But a recent study reports that another legacy of this history is that UK gardens are now home to many Japanese species (such as Magnolia stellata pictured above) which are under threat in their native land.  It's sort of  like finding a lost Picasso in your attic.  I have often thought that home gardens could be utilized as a sort of decentralized repository of rare plants.  But of course, this brings up a whole host of questions related to the goal and purpose of plant conservation...

Bye-bye, peeing fly

The LA times had an interesting story today about the search for biocontrol agents to use against non-native pests.  It's a nice profile of Mark and Christina Hoddle, Entomologists at UC Riverside who have built a career searching the world for biocontrol agents.  It's also a nice summary of the problem of introduced pests (particularly for an intensively agricultural state like CA), the concept of classical biocontrol, and some of the concerns that people have with it. 

Who left the lights on?

We keep using more energy.  The Energy Information Administration has a new estimate out that predicts world energy use to jump 53% by 2035...fueled so to speak...by the burgeoning energy demand in developing countries.  Note that most of this energy is still expected to come from non-renewable sources that contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.  Cutting back on our energy craving seems to be as hard as deflating that muffin top or finding those long lost abs. 

The view from here

We may not be as unique as we think.  Although we can't directly see them, Astronomers have recently discovered a number of rocky planets outside of our solar system (the closest is only 20 light years away!) that seem to have just the right environmental conditions to potentially support liquid water.  So strong is the connection between life and water on our own planet that astronomers call the sweet spot around a star where conditions are potentially conducive to the formation of liquid water the "habitable zone".  Of course, for all we know there are perfectly living intelligent beings based on silicon or some other inconceivable combination of exotic elements bouncing around the universe who couldn't give a fig about water.  But there is still something  romantic about the idea that there might be another big blue marble out there somewhere.

On their way to the moon, the astronauts of Apollo 11 snapped this picture of earth sitting small, vulnerable and deeply alone in the vast void of space.  It had a profound effect on people, galvanizing many to join movements to protect the ecology of the planet.  I wonder what kind of effect a snapshot of an earth-like exoplanet would have?  Would we devalue our own planet if it seems we are just a dime a dozen?  Perhaps its even better than ours!   Or similar to the reaction to the Apollo 11 image would seeing a planet so beautifully similar to ours invoke a sense of deep gratitude for the one we call home?

Yet more talk about food prices

Food prices seem to be on everyone's mind of late.  Check out this interesting New York Times round table that asks the question "Is the world producing enough food?"  It includes viewpoints from several contributing authors.  One of them (Michael Roberts) cites a recent paper authored by Jeffrey Reimer and Man Li who are in the AREC department here at OSU!  They argue that many of the price controls and trade restrictions that countries use to keep food affordable and to support local producers actually have the perverse effect of  increasing global food costs.  But read the contrary opinions (Raj Patel) in the NYT round table.

NPR also has had a couple of recent stories about rising food prices.  Check them out here and here.

Speculating on Food

It was a bad year for winter wheat in China, and this is not doing anything to alleviate the concerns about global food prices. Read about it in the Washington Post here.  Also, watch this interview with Abdolreza Abbassian, senior economist at the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization.  In particular, note the discussion (around 2:04) about how investors can make money off the situation.  Abbassian brings up the topic of what he calls "investment tourists".....speculators who invest in food (or really a financial derivative representing food) with the  pure hope of turning a profit.  These speculators have been part of agriculture (probably since its invention) but at least since the development of modern futures markets, and there are a lot of reasons to think that they have had a generally positive impact on the livelihood of farmers and the availability of food.  Yet, there is growing concern that an increasing reason for the recent spikes in food prices is irrational speculation by investors rushing into the market and driving up the price in a speculative bubble. One of the purest examples of this was the great Dutch tulip mania of 1637.  Some see the current mania for gold as another classic bubble.  However, unlike gold or tulips, investor driven irrational spikes in food prices have a very real negative impact on all of our lives....in particular the poorest people on the planet.  But then again, maybe its not speculators, but something more profound like global warming.  Check out this article by Economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman.

Living Large

The world is getting fatter.  That's the conclusion of a recently published study looking at how risk factors for heart disease have been changeing around the world.  Read a Washington Post article about the study here and check out a cool interactive graphic depicting relative world fatness here.  One of the great paradoxes of our time is that even though as a whole the world is getting fatter, there are still 925 million hungry people in the world.  Resolving these two seemingly contradictory problems is another of the great global challanges that we face.

100 Questions For Agriculture

Anita Azarenko forwarded an interesting article recently published in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability titled "The top 100 questions of importance to the future of global agriculture".  You can read it for free here. It is an interesting list.  Do you agree these are pressing questions?  Did they miss any?  Are you hopeful that we will be able to answer them?

Growing Food

Check out this cool video about efforts to refocus farming in the Willamette Valley towards more localized food production.  Thanks Kelly Donegan for pointing it out to us.

The video touches on a number of topical questions and issues in agriculture.  Should we re-organize our food system so that it is more local and regionally focused?  Should we focus most agriculture on producing food (rather than say crops for biofuels)?  Should our society be better connected to where our food comes from and the  farmers who grow it?  Should we pay more for food to ensure that the people who produce it have equitable working conditions and standards of living?  I think that the makers of the video (Harry MacCormack and his Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project) would clearly answer yes to those questions...and the best part of the video for me is that it provides examples of how some of our local  farmers are trying to implement these ideas.  Harry is right here in Corvallis at Sunbow Farm.

Yet even if you agree with the video's vibe, being at a university requires us to be critical and skeptical!  Can a more local food system really work...particularly in places less blessed by climate and soil than the Willamette Valley?  Will most people really pay more for food?  How do you get a whole society to re-think its relationship to food and how it is grown?

Oregon Small Farms Conference

The 11th Annual OSU Extension Small Farms Conference is coming up this February 26 at the LaSells Stewart Center.  You can find information about the conference and how to register here.  The keynote speaker is Chuck Hassebrook, Executive Director of the Center for Rural Affairs with a talk titled: The Next Wave of Change in Agriculture, the Food System & Rural America.  A description of the talk from the conference program:

Small farms are creating a wave of change in the farm and food system that offers rural people and communities the opportunity to retake control of their destiny. Public research and federal policy have driven industrialization of agriculture and undermined family farms and rural communities. Now, American consumers are voting with their dollars for a new approach. Public policies can be changed. Chuck Hassebrook, Center for Rural Affairs.

 The conference is also on facebook here.

Also check out the associated AgrAbility Workshop also taking place February 24-25 at the LaSells Stewart Center.

Tragedy of the commons

Writing in Science magazine in 1966, ecologist Garret Hardin coined the term "Tragedy of the Commons" to describe the difficulties we face in managing a shared resource.  Hardin summed things up in a simple parable:

"The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons.....As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?... the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another.... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."

The article is one of the most cited in Science, and it sparked a fierce and still somewhat ongoing debate  that is very interesting...although it mostly revolves around a host of social, political, and economic questions and philosophies that are only tangentially related to understanding better resource management.

But all that is just a preamble to saying that the above video is one of the most visceral examples of the tragedy of the commons in real life action that I have ever seen!  Wow!

The Walmartization of sustainability

Michelle Obama recently endorsed  a five-year plan by Walmart  to make thousands of its packaged foods lower in unhealthy salts, fats and sugars, and to drop prices on fruits and vegetables  Read the New York Times article about the announcement here.  On the face of it, Walmart's effort meshes nicely with Mrs. Obama's focus on getting kids to eat healthier food...and what better place to start than the nation's largest grocery chain.  However, distrust of Walmart and its motivations run deep for many. Check out some of the skepticism from the blogosphere here.  Indeed, my wife pointed out the seeming contradiction between Walmart's desire to reduce the cost of fruits and vegetables with another news story that appeared that week:  this one about an agreement between farm workers, local tomato growers and several big-name buyers, including the fast-food giants McDonald’s and Burger King, that will pay the pickers roughly a penny more for every pound of fruit they harvest.  Read it here.  The murmurings around this particular announcement reflect a broader debate about approaches to improving the sustainability and lessening the impact of industry and agriculture.  One broad approach adopted by organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund, is to actively engage large corporations in helping them improve their sustainability metrics.  Check out their program in "sustainable markets" here. One big rationale for this approach is that getting Walmart or BP to make even modest  changes in their practices can have a really big overall impact on things.  Other notable folks like ecologist Jared Diamond support this approach as well.  Check out his op-ed piece in the New York Times here.  Others see this as nothing more than greenwashing; seem more commentary from the blogosphere here.

Solar powered streets

Check out an interesting concept for a solar powered street here.  Snowy and icy streets are obviously dangerous, but clearing streets of snow and ice also costs money and uses energy.  Plus there is at least the potential that the use of de-icers like salt have broader environemntal impacts.  So the upfront expense of a fancy solar road might be easily justified.

More squabbles over grain prices

Argentine grain farmers are on strike over the price they can get for their product.  Read a news story about it here.  The Argentine government wants to keep domestic food prices low (this is a country that has been hit by bouts of by crippling hyper inflation a few times in its history).  They are doing this by limiting the ability of grain farmers to export their product (thus increasing the domestic supply).  Understandably this doesn't sit too well with farmers who would like to take full advantage of the rising global price for grain.  This type of dispute is probably as old as there have been farmers, costumers, and governments.  But it is taking place in the context of seemingly increasing concerns about global food prices.  It is also a good example of a classic conundrum.  If you were in charge how would you go about trying to assure that people in your country have access to affordable food?  Make sure your farmers are happy and profitable?

Water Wars

Humans do four main things with water:  drink it, take baths and wash their dishes with it, make things with it,  and grow food with it.  But it is food production that uses the most water....an estimated 69% of the world's water use goes toward irrigated agriculture.  This makes agriculture a focus of efforts to reduce waste and improve efficiency.  California's watermaster has just released a report calling for a crack down on inefficient agricultural water use.  Read an LA times article about the report here.  But as the article implies (and the reader comments back up!) any talk about water often generates contentious debate...particularly in the arid west.   These debates seem likely to only increase as the human demand for water increases

We will talk a little bit about these issues in class, but if you want to learn more there are many good books that deal (at least in part) with the contentious issue of water, including Cadillac Desert,  The King of California, and The Great Thirst.   Also, a nice recent book that we recently read in book club is
Water in the 21st Century West.

You get what you pay for

To an economists everything has a price.  Or rather, a value that reflects how desperately we would work to get that thing or how bitter we would be if we lost it.  Economists can readily describe our collective value for some things, but have a much more difficult time valuing other things.  Many ecosystem services fall into the later category, and because of this they often get undervalued or overlooked altogether when individuals (and society as a whole) make management decisions.  There is a growing movement to develop schemes that better 'internalize" (to use economics jargon) the true value of these services into our land management decisions.

Listen to an interesting story from the BBC program One Planet about efforts to develop payment schemes for ecosystem services here.  It is part of a larger series called 2050: An Earth Odyssey.

Not your father's Oldsmobile

Check out this new environmentally friendly concept car GM demonstrated at the consumer electronics show.  Besides being electric, the car boasts sonar and a GPS guided auto pilot system that will allow you to avoid all the even more environmentally conscious walkers and bicyclists you encounter on your way to work....even if you get distracted tweeting how hip you are!

Food prices on the rise

Three years ago global food prices spiked dramatically leading to food riots in many poor countries (where lots of folks earn less than $2/day), and causing general concern that our golden age of food production was coming to an end.  Food prices subsequently eased, due in part to the global economic downturn.  However, prices are once again creeping up.  Check out this report in the New York Times.   The details seem to be a bit different than the last spike, but there is growing concern that increasing food costs reflect a global food system that is under strain.  What exactly is causing this strain and how exactly do we assure that the system doesn't break are profound questions that we we will have to deal with in the coming decades.  We will explore some of these issues as the course goes along.

Beautiful destruction?

I mentioned in class that there is a movement to augment the old terrestrial biome classification of the planet with a new system that reflects the profound influence that humans have on the planet.  Check out the anthromes project here.

A more visceral view of the global impact of humans is provided by the photographs of J. Henry Fair.  His photos vividly depict scenes of environmental degradation.  Check out an article about his work in this month's Smithsonian magazine here.  Besides being arresting beautiful, I think the pictures are interesting because they make you think about how much of our landscape is actually at least partly constructed and modified by humans.  The pictures also bring up interesting questions about perspective, scale, and perception.  Each of the pictures presents a very limited snapshot of human interaction with the natural world, almost totally devoid of context.  However, informed management decisions require a deep understanding of context.  We will explore some of these contextual details.....and the complications that arise form them....in this class.

Can we live with 7 billion people?

If current projections hold we better be able to.  National Geographic has an interesting special series that explorers the various implications of a world with 7 billion people (the current estimate for world population by the end of 2011)  Read the story here.

A fundamental (but rarely explicitly discussed) element of resource management is the number of people on the planet scrambling to use the earth's resources.  World population has been growing at a spectacular rate over the last few hundred years, (check out this video associated with the NGS story) and this has put an inevitable strain on resources.  Are these strains manageable or are they the harbingers of global doom?  Check out this vision of an overpopulated world from a classic Star Trek.  But, like most of the things we will discuss in this class, the topic is complex and there are no simple answers (like Captain Kirk's belief in the power of contraception).  For instance, the vast majority of the earth's resources are currently consumed by a small minority of it's human population.  Perhaps the inequitable intensity of resource use (by a privileged few) is more of  a problem than the fact that there will be 7 billion of us?

Bye Bye Bees?

There has been a lot written about the declining health of the domesticated honeybee.  But there is new evidence that other bees are  in peril as well.  Check out this news story on bumble bee declines.

If you are feeling particularly academic, check out the actual research article that the news story is based on here.

We will talk about pollinators and their importance a little bit later in the course.