Peak Food:
Can Another Green Revolution Save Us?

By Nicholas C. Arguimbau
31 July, 2010 Countercurrents.org

Editors Note: Excellent overview article on the relationship between the "Green Revolution," and the resources required to sustain it and the global population growth it allowed. Sobering reading.
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Peak Food: Can Another Green Revolution Save Us?
By Nicholas C. Arguimbau

Norman Borlaug, widely seen as the father of the "Green Revolution," was a true savior. Many have considered him misguided or worse, but it is hard for a compassionate person to argue with what he accomplished: saving "more human lives than any other person in history."² It seems to be a professional disease among saviors, though, that only part of their message is heeded. The Green Revolution, like so many technical fixes, would only be, as he said when he picked up his Nobel Prize, "ephemeral" if we didn't deal with underlying social and economic problems, in this case, population and poverty.

Living in The Petri Dish

by Kurt Talking Stone

    As I am writing this, the Copenhagen Conference has already concluded and is widely considered a complete failure. Stymied by a resistant and sharply divided partisan Congress unwilling to pass any kind of climate legislation, President Obama came home with a just barely concealed public relations not-quite-a-disaster, no treaty and no binding agreements among the world’s industrial nations.
    As the designer of the Wheel of the Year Calendar, I am privileged to have a unique perspective in seeing “backstage” into the thoughts and ruminations of both the Board of Directors and the Editor of this publication. Over the years we have explored the subjects of Resource Depletion and Overshoot, Peak Oil, Sustainability and Climate Change, with the view of their relationship to our Earth Spirituality. When I compare the mind sets of thoughtful, observant people with the general public as reflected in the Main Stream Media, I sometimes wonder if we are living on the same planet.

 The Copenhagen Diagnosis

    Editors Note: This is a reprint fromn our 2010 Calendar, exerpting from "The Copenhagen Diagnosis," a ground breaking report prepared for the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference.
    As a report to aquaint the lay-person with climate science, I cannot reccoment this report more highly. Please do take a moment to download and read the full report.

Executive Summary

   Climate change accelerating beyond expectations, urgent
    emissions reductions required, say leading scientists

    Global ice-sheets are melting at an increased rate; Arctic sea-ice is disappearing much faster than recently projected, and future sea-level rise is now expected to be much higher than previously forecast, according to a new global scientific synthesis prepared by some of the world’s top climate scientists.
    In a special report called ‘The Copenhagen Diagnosis’, the 26 researchers, most of whom are authors of published IPCC reports, conclude that several important aspects of climate change are occurring at the high end or even beyond the expectations of only a few years ago.
    The report also notes that global warming continues to track early IPCC projections based on greenhouse gas increases. Without significant mitigation, the report says global mean warming could reach as high as 7 degrees Celsius by 2100.
    The Copenhagen Diagnosis, which was a year in the making, documents the key fi ndings in climate change science since the publication of the landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.

Searching For A Miracle

‘Net Energy’ Limits & the Fate of lndustrial Society

    by Richard Heinberg
    The Post Carbon Institute, September 2009

    From the Editor: Since 2003 we have included in The Wheel of the Year articles examining the developing global production maximum of liquid petroleum, commonly referred to as “Peak Oil.” Other articles printed in this calendar have examined the relationship between petroleum, food production and global population, as well as industrial resource depletion in general. These are complex issues that fundamentally question our global industrial economy’s
ability to continue to grow, or even to sustain its current level of development.