Hi Colleagues,This summer I requested information on food and energy sustainability case studies/etc. Thank you so much for your responses! I copied them below. If you know of anything else, please let me know!Thank you,Shelly
-------------------------------------Dear Colleagues,This fall I will be teaching an undergraduate general education science course that will focus on sustainability, especially concentrating on how our daily choices of food and energy (procurement and use) affect people and the environment around the world. 1) I am looking for papers (peer-reviewed would be excellent), book chapters, websites, (possibly movies), etc. - especially those that have a strong scientific background - that describe either the big picture or case studies. Students will read these for class discussion. (Are there any examples with positive results? There was a problem, it was addressed, now things are good/better).For example,Food:-In Peru, under the Bush administration, asparagus agriculture was begun and subsidized in order to provide a product to replace poppies for the drug trade. Unfortunately, asparagus uses much more water, and the aquifer is quickly being drained = unsustainable, but important for jobs.-Low worker protection standards in developing countries (ex. exposure to pesticides) = cheaper products for US consumers, but pollution & health issues on the farms.Energy:-Wind power = renewable, but problems for birds and bats and some bugs-Fracking = short-term incomes & job opportunities, but massive short- and long-term health and ecological problems. 2) I am looking for potential projects that students can do as a group of 4-5 students that will also address these same issues. For example, tracing food to its source (ex. buy all the products from local supermarket, follow it back, see how much energy is used, etc). Other ideas? My class is too large for field trips.If you have any ideas, please email them to me directly (or through ECOLOG if you prefer).I will be happy to make a list of the responses and post it to ECOLOG. Thank you,ShellyShelly Thomas, Ph.D.James Madison UniversityHarrisonburg, VA ------------------------------------- I have been teaching a similar course at the local county college this summer and the students have found a number of things novel and interesting. Re: Waste - emphasize e-waste & plastic. You can easily show a YouTube clip that shows where e-waste is going & the devastation it is having on Asia. Great Film - really gets them going: "Bag It". Trailer available online. Can then use as a platform for talking about Pacific Gyre, marine impacts, etc. Climate Change: "NOW" a PBS news program has a 20 min. clip on the Maldives and the effect of rising sea levels. Shows the cultural impacts vividly. "NOW" also has a segment called "Ocean Tipping Point" that gets into the science a little more. I was able to use current events/clips effectively to get them 'hooked' into the topic before getting into the science. When I introduced scientific concepts too early they got a bit glassy-eyed. But perhaps your students will be more sophisticated than mine... ----------------------------You might be interested in the "Sustainable Prisons Project" I created several years ago in Washington State. This is a collaboration between the Evergreen State College (where I am a faculty member in forest ecology) and the Washington State Dept of Corrections. The idea is to bring sustainability, science, and nature to incarcerated men and women in positive ways for the inmates, scientists, and conservationists. We work in five prisons, from minimum to maximum security. Our project has three parts: 1) sustainable operations (recycling, organic gardening, water catchment, bee-keeping); 2) education (lectures in science and sustainability, workshops in composting and gardening, greencollar job training in arboriculture); and 3) conservation projects (captive rearing of endangered frogs, prairie plants, and butterflies that the inmates raise and which are then released to protected areas). All of this is done in partnership with community groups, state agencies, and conservation non-profits. We are mainly funded by the Washington Dept of Corrections, but also the College, the US Army, The Nature Conservancy, and individuals who are interested in social justice. Media coverage of our project has been amazing - local, regional, national, and international, including newspaper, NPR, CNN, and even Playboy. You can check out our project at our website, including some good videos (www.sustainableprisons.org) ----------------------------I saw your post on ECOLOG about case studies for sustainability. I don’t have a “silver bullet” for you, but a few ideas. 1. The Ecological Society (on their website) has a white paper on ecology of biofuels…ties in well. This issue can be overwhelming, because so much of the sustainability aspect has to do with HOW the fuel is derived, rather than a simple equation of biofuels = good (or, bad). 2. There are a number of new books & websites devoted to Life Cycle Analysis of various products/services. These are the sort of specific case study approach we need. Even for one specific product however, it will be simplified. 3. A fun specific example in terms of carbon footprint is Fat Tire Beer made by New Belgium Brewing Co. in Colorado. It is quite complete (but only for carbon footprint). I hope this helps a little. If you find some good resources, I’d like to hear about them. I do talk about this in my Environmental Science class. My institution (Central College) actually has a Sustainability graduation requirement, and many classes across campus dedicated to incorporating the theme. ----------------------------This book has good references: "The omnivore´s dilemma" from Michael Pollan and the documentary "Food Inc" are a good way to start in-class discussions. Looking myself to projects where farmers and communities got positive results, I was told to look into "tikapapa", a commercialization project of potato in Peru ( http://www.entrepreneurstoolkit.org/index.php?title=A_Case_Study:_Tikapapa_and_PMCA ). I didn´t dive in researching, so their might be aspects to read with careful eyes. You may want to take a look also to some papers that I attached with this paper.Wish you a good semester, good discussions! Sustainable pest regulation in agricultural landscapes: a review on landscape composition, biodiversity and natural pest control. F. J. J. A. Bianchi1,*, C. J. H. Booij2 and T. Tscharntke. Proc. R. Soc. B (2006) 273, 1715–1727. Agricultural sustainability: concepts, principles and evidence. Jules Pretty. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2008) 363, 447–465. ----------------------------For food - http://realfoodchallenge.org For energy (project) - I'd take on the university's electricity source: http://ssc.sierraclub.org/get-involved/campaigns/beyond-coal.htm For general student activism: www.campusactivism.org (notably www.campusactivism.org/listresource-1.htm - 400+ resources on skills and issues). ----------------------------I would really recommend assigning the radio documentary called Saving Salmon. It looks at food from two very interesting perspectives, food as being highly politicized and wild vs farmed sources of food. It talks about social-ecological food systems, and could bring about really interesting discussions on a whole range of topics related to your course. Some examples... you could look at the energy input/flow through wild food systems vs farmed systems focusing on aquaculture including how wild systems subsidize farmed systems. The documentary focuses on one woman who is a scientist and became interested in salmon and the politics behind it realizing the implications for sustaining the health of the wild system that she studies. Here's the link: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2011/01/10/saving-salmon/ Have a listen and if you want any recommendations about social-ecological systems, wild food systems & foraging, etc. I'm a graduate student in Ethnoecology, and my work focuses on these topics in forested systems. In my same department one of the labs focuses on Seafood Ecology and someone from that lab could probably point you toward complementary articles related to salmon farming. I think structuring your course around understanding the connections (or disconnections) we as humans have from our food systems would be really great. Then you could build on main themes around this relationship each week. ----------------------------I used ecological network analysis in initial attempt to see if non-human food webs could serve as sustainable reference systems for human food systems. My data for US food system was very limited...small subset of aggregated/simplified beef supply chain...but I think this a good test of the idea and does show potential. Many difficulties revealed, such as how to treat corporations and other human organizations - are they analogous to separate species, functional groups or trophic entities? Main result was suggestion that while non-human food webs seem widely limited to about 5 effective trophic levels, the beef supply chain (given my assumptions) puts humans at about the 8th trophic level. Comparative network analysis toward characterization of systemic organization for human–environmental sustainability. Daniel A. Fiscus. Ecological Modelling 220 (2009) 3123–3132. ----------------------------Attached are a couple of papers that I like that talk about sustainability in agriculture that are short and written for more general audiences. [Reconciling agricultural productivity and environmental integrity: a grand challenge for agriculture. G Philip Robertson and Scott M Swinton, Front Ecol Environ 2005; 3(1): 38–46 Benefi cial Biofuels—The Food, Energy, and Environment Trilemma. David Tilman, Robert Socolow, Jonathan A. Foley, Jason Hill, Eric Larson, Lee Lynd, Stephen Pacala, John Reilly, Tim Searchinger, Chris Somerville, Robert Williams. 17 JULY 2009 VOL 325 SCIENCE] A couple of good movies that address food sustainability are Food, Inc. and King Corn. An interesting movie about sustainable neighborhood design is Designing a Great Neighborhood (it is a case study). Another good sustainability movie is NOW on PBS: Fixing the Future. All of these can be streamed online from Netflix. There is an excellent case study of an island in Denmark that is now totally energy independent (and they did it by being very resourceful) - but I don't remember the name of the island. ----------------------------Have you seen this video? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EUAMe2ixCI It's a TED talk about a polyculture/aquaculture farm in Spain that is a fully functioning healthy ecosystem. I really enjoyed this talk, I think it would be great for an undergrad class (only 20 minutes). ----------------------------I’ve been involved with teaching sustainability issues to undergrads the last couple of years. A semi-dry book that gives decent overviews (in some cases) is Linkages of Sustainability edited by Tom Graedel and Ester van der Voet. http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=11898&ttype=2 One thing we did with students was to have them read Green Manhattan by David Owen http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/10/18/041018fa_fact_owen and write whether or not they agree that everywhere should be like Manhattan – we even got David to come talk to the class. It was pretty cool. The biggest challenge for students was trying to define sustainability since it can mean all things to all people and then use their definition to defend their stance. Another good choice for food issues is Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma – the undergrads really loved reading the selections I chose for them to learn about corn, corn subsidies, and why it’s in everything. He actually explains C4 vs C3 photosynthesis so it gets pretty scientific. I also like Food Inc., if you have enough time to show the whole thing – I showed the trailer to my class and a lot of them went on and watched it on their own. And for energy the book that I draw from in my lectures is Sustainable Energy – without the hot air by David Mackay http://www.withouthotair.com/ - he does this exercise where he calculates average energy demand for individuals in the UK and then goes through and does a super optimistic calculation of how much energy per individual renewable sources could provide and it ends up that using just renewables can’t provide enough energy even if they use all their farmland for biofuels, cover most of their ocean land in wind turbines, etc, etc. So he comes up with a more balanced plan (including nuclear) that would still mean covering most of the UK in renewable energy structures. It does a great job of laying out the issues/demands of renewable energy and gives a very realistic overview of its utilities and shortcomings to meet society’s demand. As for happy sustainability examples this one details how a village in China has been able to harvest rainwater paired with other methods to avoid water shortages: Cook, Seth, and Huilan Wei, The Anomalous Nature of Development Success: A Case Study from China, Development 45(3): 76-80, 2002. Another good assignment is to have them calculate their C and N footprints (this website was newly released to do this http://www.n-print.org/N-Calculator ) and then write what lifestyle choices they can make to lower their impact. My students really enjoyed that assignment. ----------------------------I'm a marine scientist, but this is a topic dear to my heart as I've been vegan for 9 years and I did my PhD amongst a large troupe of fisheries-minded students at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. A few resources that you might find helpful: The book "The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices" - published in the early 2000s by the Union of Concerned Scientists. It carefully calculates how various daily activities affect energy usage.The major conclusion is that food and transportation are the two areas where humans have the biggest impact- and opportunity to reduce that impact.http://www.amazon.com/Consumers-Guide-Effective-Environmental-Choices/dp/060980281X The Environmental Working Group just took up the issue of food sustainability - encouraging everyone to go meat-free for one day a week due to the massive environmental impact of meat production. I would imagine they provide a lot of primary literature references once you dig in:http://breakingnews.ewg.org/meateatersguide/ David Pimental is a scientist at Cornell who has written quite a lot about relative effects of various types of food on land, fuel, and water usage. He did calculations of the amount of energy it takes to produce one pound of corn, lamb, eggs, chicken, etc. The Energy in-out ratio was ~2.2 for corn and up to 44 for certain kinds of meat! The PDF of this paper is free at: http://www.ajcn.org/content/78/3/660S.full A couple specific ways people are trying to improve things... In the Caribbean, the invasive Pacific lionfish is starting to be a popular food because it's delicious and helps remove an unwanted species from the reefs while reducing pressure on threatened grouper and snapper populations. The New York Times even wrote this up a couple weeks ago.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/science/earth/10fish.html The President of InterfaceFLOR, a carpet company, read Paul Hawken's book the Ecology of Commerce 10+ years ago and it changed the way his entire company functions. They now attempt to completely "close the loop" by making carpets out of reused and biological materials. I think the carpets even contain hair from goats and pigs, but I can't find the evidence for this anymore.http://www.interfaceflor.com/default.aspx?Section=3&Sub=2 There are also a lot of campaigns to get people to eat lower on the food chain when they decide to eat fish- Seafood Watch was one of the earliest groups to issue a seafood choices card, but now other groupsissue these types of things too: http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx ----------------------------Dr. Thomas, as you probably realize, one of the biggest challenges in discussing sustainability is the great range of definitions for this term. In case it may be of help to you, I'm attaching an article on this topic and a list of definitions that I generated. John Locke, the U.N., and how to figure out if an acre of land would rather be a swamp or a cornfieldRonald Bailey | July 6, 2010. http://reason.com/archives/2010/07/06/sustainability-semantics ----------------------------As it is known, animals are important components of ecosystems and its impact on ecosystems is intrinsically dependent upon the management method (ie: management intensive grazing vs. traditional grazing vs. confinement) adopted by farmers. My 2 cts. contribution goes regarding tracing food to its source. I think it is interesting to point out the experience of Uruguay, which is the first country that electronically traced all its beef cattle, from pasture to supermarket shelf. This process considers all the events in the life of each animal assuring quality to customers. Uruguay is also one of the first countries declared free of "mad cow" disease (BSE) and raises all of its herd on pasture. Uruguay also practices the principles of ethology in handling cattle assuring a more humane experience for animals. Here is a presentation about the process:http://www.globalgap.org/cms/upload/Documents/temp_upload/TOUR2009/Presentations/091111_Experiences_of_Uruguay_-The_Traceability_from_Nature_to_Consumer.pdf ----------------------------While I doubt that what I'm offering is exactly what you're asking for, I'll throw out a couple of things anyway. 1. Bananas - We're on the verge of a crisis with bananas because of the monoculture (Cavendish clones) we have and the fungi becoming resistant to the toxic pesticides. I taught a course a couple years ago and took students to Nicaragua. In Managua there is a huge homeless tent community made up entirely of people who have been made disabled from working on banana plantations and their exposure to DBCP. There are tons of resources on this issue, I just don't have them at hand. 2. Sustainable Harvest International - This is an organization based out of Maine that promotes sustainable agriculture in Latin American countries. They likely have lots of resources about the effects of poor farming practices. 3. Palm plantations - Increasingly big news with deforestation to supply us with cheap palm oil. 4. Joel Salatin - Right in your backyard (I went to high school in Harrisonburg and my mother teaches at JMU) . . . He was made somewhat famous in Omnivore's Dilemma, but he has his own books out. I really got a kick out of "Everything I want to do is illegal." 5. GMO/vegetarianism - This is probably not at all what you're really looking for, but I find it to be a really interesting case study for critical thinking for my students . . . In our freshman bio course I do an enzyme lab where students make cheese. Because we're an environmental college, I often have a number of students who are vegetarian and knee-jerk anti-GMO. I explain where chymosin comes from and they're usually horrified to learn about that. I explain there's a GM chymosin that doesn't require calf stomachs, and they're still opposed to it. Last year I went to reorder my GM chymosin and couldn't find it. Almost everyone has stopped carrying it. So I did some digging and found out that the rules have changed on labeling of cheese. It used to be that if you used GM enzyme you didn't have to label your cheese as GM because the enzyme didn't end up in the product. This changed and all the manufacturers now have to label their cheese as GM if they use the GM enzyme. My anti-GM students cheer at this point of the story. However, because there's such a stigma associated with GM, all of the cheese manufacturers have switched back to the real stuff, meaning lots more calf stomachs. Needless to say this causes quite a mental quandary for my vegetarian, anti-GM students as they try to make this fit with their paradigm. ----------------------------The first volume of a brand new book series from Springer of which I am Co-Editor-in-Chief has just been released. I have attached the flyer for your information and for your library to purchase. I hope it helps! [SERIES: ISSUES IN AGROECOLOGY - PRESENT STATUS AND FUTURE PROSPECTUS VOLUME 1. Integrating Agriculture, Conservation and Ecoutourism: Examples from the fieldDr. W. Bruce Campbell, Dr. Silvia Lopez Ortiz (Eds.) 2013. www.springer.com]
