Zeger Reyers's “Rotating Kitchen,” in the Eating the Universe at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf:
Rotating through 28 Feb 2010.
(jg)
Category Archives: food
Carbon footprints
under environment, food, international, trend
Trash. Albatross chick remains on the on Midway Atoll, Sept/Oct ’09, courtesy of Chris Jordan:
Many more here.
“Think of us like a coast guard”
under crime, economics, environment, food, government, international, law, media, security, trend
Jordan Zinovich and Hans Plomp:
Before warlords toppled Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, Somalia had a kind of stability recognized by the “community of nations.” As early as 1971, Somalia’s fishery was considered an increasingly promising economic resource. By 1982, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the UK, and the USSR had negotiated fishing deals with the Somali government.(20) The so-called “piracy” we’re witnessing today seems to have started about 15 years ago in response to the international fleets that moved in to plunder the country’s rich fishery after the Barre regime collapsed.(21) [...]
But Somalia is without a functional government, and boats from many countries now freely ignore Somali territorial sovereignty. Foreign fishermen steal an estimated US$300 million worth of Somali tuna, shrimp, and lobster each year. And they reportedly use such internationally prohibited fishing gear as very small mesh-size nets and sophisticated underwater lighting systems.(23) Peter Lehr, of the University of St. Andrews, characterizes the recent incidents of “piracy” as “a resource swap,” where “Somalis collect up to US$100 million a year from ‘pirate ransoms’ off their coasts [while] the Europeans and Asians poach around US$300 million a year in fish from Somali waters.”(24) [...]
Illegal fishing wasn’t the only assault that forced these young men to sea: the illegal dumping of toxic and nuclear waste in their waters was another powerful motivator.
Healthcare debate: generational warfare
under economics, education, energy, environment, food, government, trend
That is why they’re bringing out the guns. It‘s not just the right-wing gothic imagination run amok (though it is that). It’s war.
The healthcare debate in a nutshell: declining revenues + rising costs = growing competition for shrinking resources. And on one side of that conflict, an aging segment of the population, weaned on and wedded to the postwar cult of youthfulness, painfully aware that as its ideals fade its healthcare costs will rise. They’ve grown fat on a diet of screwing younger people out of everything: cognitive capture through branding empires imprinted (literally) from diapers onward, consumer culture that’s cheap in substance only (young pay old), the compounding bloat of educational costs (we skipped out on our student loans therefore you can’t), the abyss of debt culture, the wilderness of mirrors called credit reporting, skyrocketing housing costs (lease-to-own mutated into default-to-turns-out-you-rented-sucker), the infinite proliferation of unaccountable “fees,” dwindling pay (and the threat of endless “internships”), the informalization of work (and destruction of labor), a ubiquitous cult of waste (whose roving shrine is the “SUV”), and social safety nets as frail as the generations that benefited from them. The old-timers are terrified on two fronts that granny really will be unplugged: first, because they secretly identify with “granny” and, second, because they (also secretly) know the values they’ve inculcated in their young all but guarantee it.
Bears in the MYST
NYT infographic on ursine cryptography:
Where’s Jared Diamond when you need him to reaffirm your master narrative?
Odd factoid of the day
under agriculture, environment, food, rural
National Pork Producers Council:
[S]ince 1948, manure generated by U.S. meat-producing animals has been reduced 25 percent while production of meat has increased 700 percent.
The US population increased roughly 110% in the same period.
Lynx to the past
under agriculture, environment, food, law, rural, science
“Lynx and logging share interests,” (Carpenter, Boston Globe, 27 Apr ’09):
Strangely, it’s not an excess of clear-cutting that is the problem; this time, it’s a lack of clear-cutting that is creating environmental worries. Environmentalists may hate clear-cutting, but lynx love it—because when trees are cleared away, a dense spruce-fir thicket often crops up in their place, and those thickets attract snowshoe hares, the lynx’s primary prey. Biologists say lynx are thriving in Maine because massive industrial clear-cuts following a spruce budworm epidemic 30 years ago have grown into hare-rich thickets. But regulations reducing the size of clear-cuts in the Maine woods—products of state legislation passed in 1989 and amended after a divisive environmental campaign in the late 1990s—are now eliminating those thickets, and eventually, the hares that live in them. Over the next decade, the unintended chain reaction is expected to dramatically reduce the number of Maine lynx—the only lynx in the Eastern states, and listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
The sooner we do away with the idea of nature, the better it will do.
