Mark Notaras

What is good, clean and fair, and doesn’t cost the Earth? The answer is ‘Slow Food’, according to a growing number of people worldwide.

With peak oil moving closer globally and with oil prices spiking yet again (bouncing around over US$100 per barrel), subsidies become economically unsustainable. So the question becomes: at what point should a government begin to decrease an oil subsidy and how, if ever, can this be done without severely impacting the poorest?

In Food Insecurity and Violent Conflict: Causes, Consequences and Addressing the Challenges, uthors Henk-Jan Brinkman and Cullen S. Hendrix illustrate clearly that food insecurity is a “threat and multiplier for violent conflict”. Based on their fairly broad review of the research, in which more than 100 sources were referenced, “[f]ood insecurity, especially when caused by higher food prices, heightens the risk of democratic breakdown, civil conflict, protest, rioting, and communal conflict.”

“Transition towns, recycling, alternative power, enduring design; they are just attacking the symptoms. They are merely allowing us to continue living the way we are. They are buying us time. They are not embracing the root cause — our psychology.” Evolution and psychology explain our urge to consume, argues a new documentary film from the United Kingdom entitledConsumed — Inside the Belly of the Beast.

At the most basic level, climate changes that cause world surface temperatures to rise are rooted in increased fossil emissions in the atmosphere. Total fossil fuel emissions are a function of key variables, most notably population, per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) and the carbon intensity of an individual unit of GDP. Understanding these forces and their relationships with each other is critical to measuring the extent of climate change and how we may seek to deal with it.

Most Japanese cannot remember the last time they had to think deeply about where their next meal would come from. Only the eldest of Japanese with memories of food rations and scarcity from World War II and its aftermath would possess experience from which to draw. But that has changed since the triple disaster of March 11 as citizens inside and outside the catastrophe zone became increasingly concerned about both food security (e.g., food shortages at local stores) and food safety (i.e., radiation contaminated agricultural products).