What Does a Sustainable Shopping List Look Like?

What Does a Sustainable Shopping List Look Like?

 

Americans are eating healthier—but we have a long way to go in terms of sustainability.

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(Photo: Getty Images)

October 08, 2014  

By Sarah McColl

Sarah McColl has written for Yahoo Food, Bon Appetit, and other publications. She's based in Brooklyn.

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The most recent Greendex survey, which measures the environmental impact of consumer behavior, turned its focus to food this year. India’s diet ranked the most sustainable, featuring the fewest imported foods, the highest amount of self-grown food, the lowest amount of beef and pork, and the most fruits and vegetables.

The scorecard for American eaters, however, was at best a mixed bag. More people in the U.S. are eating local and organic foods and say they’re going to consume less meat and bottled water. But we also eat the most processed and packaged foods and the fewest fruits and vegetables of the 18 countries ranked.
The federal government is catching on to this health-ward trend in diets, and the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee is considering issuing sustainablility recommendations in its 2015 report, akin to those the Greendex survey looks at.]

The guidelines inform federal nutrition programs such as food stamps and WIC, the food aid program for women, infants, and children. “A dietary pattern that is higher in plant-based food and lower in animal-based foods is more health-promoting,” Miriam Nelson, a Tufts University nutrition professor who chairs the advisory panel’s subcommittee on food sustainability, said in a public meeting last month, “and is associated with lesser environmental impacts—energy, land, and water use—than the current average American diet.”

The Greendex survey suggests that we’re looking for ways to make our diets more sustainable. But for those of us who get confused at the grocery store, pitting one label against another, what would that look like?

With Plants, More Is More

“The best thing that people can do is simply to eat more vegetables,” said Barton Seaver, director of the Healthy and Sustainable Food Program at the Harvard School of Public Health’s Center for Health and the Global Environment.

“Before more nuanced categories such as organic/local are introduced to the decision process, we need to develop a culinary preference for meals that are mostly plant-based.” The best way to find inspiring vegetables is at—you guessed it—the farmers market. You’re eating fresh food from your local foodshed; there’s the opportunity to support biodiversity by buying the weird stuff, and you can chat with the purveyors to find out what, exactly, you should do with red mustard and salsify. The great thing about the farmers market being a culinary cliche? There’s a head-spinning array of cookbooks devoted to the subject.

It’s Not Just What You Buy—It’s What You Don’t

“Shopping is ground zero for wasting less food,” explained National Resource Defense Council staff scientist Dana Gunders. That’s easy to forget while you’re at the store and facing the multimillion-dollar marketing machine of big food, but the same economizing tactics your mom used can be as beneficial to the environment as to the household bottom line: Meal planning, making (and sticking to) a list, a healthy dose of realism about what you’ll have time to cook (you’re not gonna get to that tilapia in time, you’re just not), and properly storing food in the refrigerator can all reduce waste.

Buy Less Beef and Lamb

The Incredible Ways Skipping Meat Can Change the World

Throw out an extra hamburger and the water wasted is the equivalent of a 90-minute shower, Gunders explained. And while beef is considered public enemy number one, lamb actually has the largest carbon footprint of any food item—50 percent higher than even beef.

Buy More Beans, Legumes, and Organic Tofu

Sticking to a plant and vegetable-based diet one day a week (Meatless Mondays, anyone?) does far more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than eating an entirely local diet, says Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Beans and legume crops don’t require nitrogen-based fertilizers derived from fossil fuels, and they benefit future crops too. They’re nitrogen fixers, which means they take inert gases from the environment and turn them into useful ammonium which enriches soil environments. And they’re cheap, and loaded with protein! Buying dried beans and lentils from the bulk bin area of a food co-op or grocery store helps reduce packaging waste too.

But You Don’t Want to Be a Vegetarian?

An improvement can be as simple as trading out two “least efficient” beef or lamb-based meals for a couple of “more efficient” ones with chicken, turkey, or fish. When you do buy beef, opt for grass-fed options.

Replace Your Frequent (and Worst) Offenders

Check your usual grocery list items on the Environmental Working Group’s carbon footprint list or most frequently cooked recipes on Eat Low Carbon. If you grab a five-pound sack of potatoes on each trip to the grocery store or are whipping up salmon en papillote once a week, upgrade to the most sustainable options available. For the potatoes, that could mean buying the organic bag at the store, or asking a few questions of local purveyors at the farmers market to find out their growing practices. For the salmon, opt for wild Alaskan.

Does The Future Of Humanity Lie In Space? (via Planetsave)

Does The Future Of Humanity Lie In Space?

 

 

 

March 4th, 2014 by Ken Whitehead


World-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, are united by a common belief. They are members of an influential group of scientists and visionaries who believe that the long-term future of the human race lies in space, and that we need to grow beyond the confines of our home planet in order to ensure our long-term survival. The logic behind this viewpoint is that sooner or later the Earth will inevitably endure another planetary catastrophe, such as the asteroid collision that lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. Failing that, they believe we have a pretty good chance of accomplishing our own extinction through mismanagement of the planet.

While these arguments are compelling, future space travel would require a number of major technological advances to be made. The fact is that we are uniquely adapted to living here on Earth. Our bodies have evolved to cope with the unique environmental conditions which exist here, and very likely only here, in the universe. It is unlikely that any potentially habitable planet we could find would have the same concentration of oxygen in its atmosphere, the same gravitational pull, the same seasonal patterns, or any one of the millions of other factors which we never think about, but which uniquely characterize our home planet. Although many of us now lead lives completely isolated from nature, our survival is still dependent on the physical processes which drive the Earth system.

The Earth is unique in our solar system in that it provides the conditions which enable complex life to flourish. While scientists hold out the possibility that microbial life could exist on Mars, or perhaps on Saturn’s moon Titan, it is highly unlikely that complex multi-cellular organisms will be found anywhere else in our solar system. Contrast this with the Earth, where life is everywhere. Even physically hostile regions such as Antarctica and the Sahara support life in surprisingly large concentrations. Space is a vacuum, in which astronauts are totally dependent on life support, and where the smallest problem can be life threatening. The distances are also unfathomable. For example, Proxima Centauri, the next-closest star after our sun, is more than four light years away.

Given the current state of our technology, it is unlikely we will be venturing far into space this coming century. However over this same time period we will face tremendous challenges here on Earth. For our species to survive into the 22^nd century, we will need to find ways to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, solve a host of related environmental problems, and stabilize our population. This will need to happen within the lifetime of many people who are alive today. Achieving such a transformation requires that we turn away from unsustainable growth-based models of resource use, and transition to a steady-state economy.

Type I, II, and III civilizations

It is useful to look at where our current civilization stands in terms of theoretical models of planetary development. In 1964 the soviet astrophysicist Nicolai Kardashev developed a method for classifying the level of development of theoretical planetary civilizations. The so-called Kardashev scale recognizes three levels of advanced civilization, which are classified according to their energy usage. Type I civilizations are able to harvest all the energy falling on the planet from their local sun. Type II civilizations are able to gather all the energy provided by the entire star, whereas Type III civilizations would be able to utilize the energy resources of their entire galaxy. As to where we fit into this model; the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku believes we are currently at a level of about 0.7 and are on the way to transitioning into a full level I civilization within the next 100 – 200 years, if we survive that long.

The Kardashev scale suggests that our energy requirements will continue to increase indefinitely as our civilization develops. However, as we saw above, the future of humanity depends on us being able to stabilize our numbers and live sustainably on the Earth. This implies that our energy consumption will inevitably reach a peak sometime in the next century, and flatten out thereafter. Planetary limits dictate that this must be so. Our civilization simply cannot advance fast enough to allow to us to perfect space travel before we run up against the limits imposed by nature.

The reason for the contradiction is that the Kardachev scale is based on the idea of exponential growth. It is exactly the same logic that current economic theory is based on, except that in this case energy usage is used as a proxy for the level of development of a civilization. However, it is inevitable that our current growth economy must ultimately transition into a steady-state economy if we are to survive in the long term. This does not imply that our society will stop developing, nor that we will be confined to Earth in the future; it simply means that the advance of our civilization will not require the consumption of exponentially increasing amounts of energy, as Kardashev suggested.

For many years now people have wondered whether we are alone in the universe. Researchers from the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) Institute have scanned the skies for signs of intelligent life and have so far seen no conclusive evidence of other civilizations. Two explanations are commonly suggested for this. The first is that we really are alone; that in all the countless billions of planetary systems within our galaxy, and in all the billions of galaxies, no other species has reached our level of development. The second explanation is that when civilizations reach a certain level of development, they inevitably end up destroying themselves.

There is however a third possibility, which is to assume that as civilizations advance they must inevitably bump up against the physical limits imposed by their home planet, as we ourselves are now doing. At this stage of their development it is highly unlikely that they will have perfected space travel. Therefore in order for their civilization to endure, they would have no choice but to learn to live sustainably within the limits imposed by the planet. With stable populations, and a well-managed planet, there would simply not be the pressure for such a civilization to continually expand, thereby consuming an ever-increasing supply of new resources.

Such civilizations would still face challenges. However over time it is likely they would develop any technology they would need to protect their home planet from external threats. They would very likely develop space travel, but its primary use would be for research purposes, rather than to drive an exponentially expanding wave of colonization through the galaxy. The idea of a hostile alien civilization strip-mining the resources of the galaxy is a science fiction staple. However it is a perception which is derived largely from the assumption that economies must continually grow and consume ever-more resources in order to survive. It therefore says more about the perceptions and biases of our times than it does about the development of civilizations.

If we consider the alternative hypothesis that any civilization destined to survive in the long term would have evolved to a steady-state economy long before they perfected space travel, then it is quite possible that there could be millions of such civilizations scattered through the universe, each quietly going about their own business. This is probably the best option for a long-term sustainable future for the human race. It is a future which most likely will include space travel, but not one in which space travel is a prerequisite for our survival.

Photo Credit: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center via photopin (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license)
 
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