We've seen alternative protein take off with shocking speed. Just a few years ago I remember thinking it would take decades to be affordable, maybe never reach scale, and doubted people would accept it. It was another wildly exaggerated technology. A few years later, not only was it was available in burger chains and grocery stores but most people had tried it once. Now its rapidly becoming hardly noteworthy, like it was inevitable, obvious, and normal. I'm forgetting how weird and unlikely it sounded.
But what if I'm not thinking big enough? What if alternative proteins were just the start, and growing all our ingredients in vats is vastly more cost (and land) efficient than modern agriculture. Even with precision automated agriculture, we still grow the whole plant, raise it for years, and then harvest a tiny percentage of it. What if we just grew the part we needed, or better yet, just grew the nutrients we needed and then sold that. Wouldn't that make more sense and be cheaper once we have the technology? Don't we already have the technology? So isn't it the future we are heading toward? This is Precision Fermentation and what Reboot Food is about.
And it raises even more questions. What happens to the people who farmed? Who is in control of the food supply? How does this change our relationship with animals? Who will get there first? How will it spread to the rest of the world? Will it even happen?
There is enormous potential for good. It would be so easy to stop the factory farming hellscapes for animals. It would free up enormous tracts of the most fertile areas to transform into beautiful landscapes. It would make food enormously efficient and cheap and safe. There is enormous potential for harm too. Watch Precision Fermentation- Reboot Food to learn about historical food revolutions, technological ethics, how precision fermentation works, what is wrong with our societal structure now, and what our future might look like.
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Common failure modes:
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/quest-carbon-offsets-almost-anything-goes Some more stats on how much things are failing and poorly measured: https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/news-insights/carbon-offsets-cannot-be-our-primary-solution-to-climate-change/ Some underlying forces that are not being considered from this opinion letter in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/484007a A great report on the issues: https://www.fern.org/fileadmin/uploads/fern/Documents/Unearned%20Credit_0.pdf And offsetting in general: https://policy.friendsoftheearth.uk/insight/dangerous-distraction-offsetting-con An ethical lens on how offsetting is fundamentally unable to work: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8048868/ Greenpeace's take on GreenWashing: https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/golden-age-of-greenwash/ ClientEarth's response to carbon offsets: https://www.clientearth.org/latest/latest-updates/stories/the-legal-risk-of-advertising-carbon-offsets/ George Monbiot's thoughts on carbon offets: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/26/carbon-offsetting-environmental-collapse-carbon-land-grab Most Rainforest Credits are not improving anything, and carbon is 400% exaggerated by one of the 3 biggest carbon credit verifiers "Verra" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe Nature Based Solutions on carbon offset misuse: https://www.naturebasedsolutionsinitiative.org/news/on-the-misuse-of-nature-based-carbon-offsets
The Great Simplification : "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot"
Quick Summary: The tension between economy and ecology. Economists don't tend to consider the biosphere, ecologist tend to ignore human inputs & outputs / role inside ecosystems. So the area of human ecology is often neglected. He also mentioned the overshoot effect, which is basically, from what I understood, our tendency to simplify complexity. Youtube Description: On this episode, Nate is joined by systems ecologist William E. Rees. Professor Rees outlines why most of the challenges facing humanity and the biosphere have a common origin - ecological overshoot. Bill also unpacks “the ecological footprint” - a concept that he co-created, that measures the actual resources used by a given population. Bill also describes his experience as a leading thinker in public policy and planning based on ecological conditions for sustainable socioeconomic development, and the challenges he’s faced working in a system which (so far) rejects such premises. Is it possible for a different way of measuring the system to set different goals of what it means to be successful as a society?
A presentation from JYU.Wisdom about Planetary Wellbeing. (It's in Finnish. Captions are available under youtube settings: subtitles: auto-translate: English or language of your choice.)
Eileen also found this TedTalk on indigenous knowledge and conservation science.
Next Sunday Lyla June (Diné/Tsétsêhéstâhese) will be having a live presentation - register here!
15:00 UTC Lyla June (Diné/Tsétsêhéstâhese) will discuss native food systems in pre-Columbian times. Through her doctoral work she has seen that a common denominator in these systems is the strategy of habitat expansion. Whether it's burning grasslands to maintain habitat for deer, buffalo, antelope, etc, or building intertidal rock walls to catch sediment for clam habitat, native people have a knack for building a home for their food in reciprocal relationships. Through this maintenance of the home of edible plants and animals, whom we see as relatives, our food can come to us through consensual and respectful relationship. |