A 'Vertical Greenhouse' Could Make a Swedish City Self-Sufficient

By Julie Ma
The future of urban farming is under construction in Sweden as agricultural design firm Plantagon works to bring a 12-year-old vision to life: The city of Linkoping will soon be home to a 17-story "vertical greenhouse."

The greenhouse will serve as a regenerating food bank, tackling urban sprawl while making the city self-sufficient. Plantagon predicts that growing these plants in the city will make food production less costly both for the environment and for consumers, a key shift as the world's population grows increasingly urban-80 percent of the world's residents will live in cities by 2050, the United Nations estimates. "Essentially, as urban sprawl and lack of land will demand solutions for how to grow industrial volumes in the middle of the city, solutions on this problem have to focus on high yield per ground area used, lack of water, energy, and air to house carbon dioxide," Plantagon CEO Hans Hassle says.

The greenhouse is a conical glass building that uses an internal "transportation helix" to carry potted vegetables around on conveyors. As plants travel around the helix, they rotate for maximum sun exposure. Hassle says the building will use less energy than a traditional greenhouse, take advantage of "spillage heat" energy companies cannot sell, digest waste to produce biogas and plant fertilizers, and decrease carbon dioxide emissions while eliminating the environmental costs of long-distance transportation. And growing plants in a controlled environment will decrease the amount of water, energy, and pesticides needed. 


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Fake Meat America Could Love by Tom Philpott

By Tom Philpott
I've always recoiled from highly processed and packaged fake meat: you know, turkeyesque tofu logs for the holiday table, or pink, spongy "not-dogs" for the summer grill. But in last Sunday's New York Times, Mark Bittman raised a provocative question:

 Isn't it preferable, at least some of the time, to eat plant products mixed with water that have been put through a thingamajiggy that spews out meatlike stuff, instead of eating those same plant products put into a chicken that does its biomechanical thing for the six weeks of its miserable existence, only to have its throat cut in the service of yielding barely distinguishable meat?  Why, in other words, use the poor chicken as a machine to produce meat when you can use a machine to produce "meat" that seems like chicken?            

Bittman's point is spot-on. You can't directly eat the kind of corn and soy that dominates US farmland-it isn't readily digestible. Modern livestock farms are really factories for turning those crops into animal flesh that can be transformed into steaks, chops, wings, nuggets, and whatnot. And in doing so, Bittman points out, factory farms rack up enormous collateral damage: horrific suffering for sentient creatures, huge stores of manure that can't be safely recycled into soil, over-reliance on antibiotics, routine abuse of labor in factory-scale slaughterhouses, and more.

It's especially tragic, then, the meat produced in these factories is pretty flavorless, especially if you've tasted a truly free-range chicken against a factory one, or a grass-fed burger alongside its feedlot analogue. So why, Bittman asks, not leave the birds, hogs, and cows out of it and just directly consume the feed crops after they've been processed to taste something like meat? By doing do, you sacrifice little or no flavor, while sidelining a whole raft of destructive practices.

Bittman points to a company called Savage River Farms that has produced a soy-based product that mimics chicken, down to the way it shreds. Bittman says he couldn't tell it from real chicken when he was served a burrito made with it.


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U.N. Climate Conference: Geoengineering Could Save Earth -- Or Destroy It

By Joanna Zelman

DURBAN, South Africa - Brighten clouds with sea water? Spray aerosols high in the stratosphere? Paint roofs white and plant light-colored crops? How about positioning "sun shades" over the Earth?

At a time of deep concern over global warming, a group of scientists, philosophers and legal scholars examined whether human intervention could artificially cool the Earth - and what would happen if it did.

A report released late Thursday in London and discussed Friday at the U.N. climate conference in South Africa said that - in theory - reflecting a small amount of sunlight back into space before it strikes the Earth's surface would have an immediate and dramatic effect.

Within a few years, global temperatures would return to levels of 250 years ago, before the industrial revolution began dumping carbon dioxide into the air, trapping heat and causing temperatures to rise.

But no one knows what the side effects would be.

They could be physical - unintentionally changing weather patterns and rainfall. Even more difficult, it could be political - spurring conflict among nations unable to agree on how such intervention, or geoengineering, will be controlled.

The idea of solar radiation management "has the potential to be either very useful or very harmful," said the study led by Britain's Royal Society, the Washington-based Environmental Defense Fund and TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world based in Trieste, Italy.


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Smoking Could Kill 8 Million a Year by 2030: WHO

By Kate Kelland

Tobacco will kill nearly six million people this year, including 600,000 non-smokers, because governments are not doing enough to persuade people to quit or protect others from second-hand smoke, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.

Since there is often a lag of many years between when people start smoking and when it affects health, the epidemic of tobacco-related disease and death has just begun, the WHO said. But by 2030, the annual death toll could reach 8 million.

The United Nations health body urged more governments to sign up to and implement its tobacco control treaty, warning that if current trends persist, tobacco could cause up to a billion deaths in the 21st century, a dramatic rise from the 100 million deaths it caused in the previous century.

So far, 172 countries and the European Union have signed up to the WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which came into force in 2005 and obliges them to take steps over time to cut smoking rates, limit exposure to second hand smoke, and curb tobacco advertising and promotion.

The WHO noted some encouraging recent moves -- Uruguay now requires health warnings that cover 80 percent of the surface of tobacco packs, and China last month implemented a ban on smoking in public places such as restaurants and bars.

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How the Places We Live Make Us Sick, and How They Could Heal Us Instead

The news came out a couple of weeks ago, and then it got swept away in the ongoing torrent of information: The Centers for Disease Control projects that by 2050, one in three American will have diabetes.

One. In. Three.

If we needed any more of a wakeup call about the catastrophic state of American public health, this should provide it.

Why is this happening? According to the report, "These projected increases are largely attributable to the aging of the US population, increasing numbers of members of higher-risk minority groups in the population, and people with diabetes living longer."

Fair enough. But why are people -- minority or otherwise -- getting diabetes in the first place? Scientists have proven the link between diabetes and obesity. And we have become a society where the road to obesity is quite literally built into our environment. Studies have shown that more vehicle miles traveled result in more obesity. Our broken food system is another huge contributing factor, but even there, the built environment factors in -- our inner cities are quite often "food deserts" where no healthy nutrition is available.

So if the places we live are making us sick, could they heal us instead -- if only they were designed better?

That's the fascinating question being raised by the Healing Cities Working Group of planners and health professionals in Vancouver.

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Misguided FDA Opposition to Labeling Could Leave Public Permanently in the Dark About GE Animals

After a two-day public hearing on the approval of the first genetically engineered (GE) animal intended for human consumption, the AquAdvantage GE salmon, FDA held a public hearing today to discuss whether or not these GE fish should be labeled as such should they be approved. A 60-day public comment period on the labeling issue will be open until November 22, 2010.

"This transgenic salmon is the first GE animal intended for food, yet the human health impacts of eating these GE fish are completely unknown," said Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director at the Center for Safety  (CFS). "These GE fish also pose unacceptable risks to wild salmon and the marine environment." These "unknowns" were raised repeatedly at yesterday's Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee (VMAC) hearing, and the Committee was unable to come to any conclusion as to the safety or efficacy of the GE salmon.  The hearing on labeling is premature given that the VMAC has not approved this salmon for human or animal consumption.

The public has not been quiet about the possible approval of GE salmon. In fact, over 300 environmental, consumer, health, and animal welfare organizations, along with salmon and fishing groups and associations, food companies, chefs and restaurants signed joint letters to the FDA opposing the approval of AquaBounty's GE salmon.  CFS and a coalition of allied groups also submitted 172,000 comments from individuals opposing the approval and urging clear, mandatory labeling should the fish be approved despite overwhelming public opposition (CFS comments to the VMAC and the joint letters can be found on our website).  

Announcements by FDA officials and speakers today suggest that the Agency may not require labeling of GE salmon should it be approved. While FDA is operating under the fiction that transgenic animals are "new drugs," the Agency does not feel that they need to be labeled in the same way that drugs are.

A Lake Research Partners poll  commissioned by Food & Water Watch and released yesterday found that 91 percent of Americans believe FDA should not allow genetically engineered fish and meat into the marketplace; 83 percent felt strongly that it should not be allowed.  Additionally, a 2008 Consumers Union nationwide poll  found that 95 percent of respondents said they thought food from genetically engineered animals should be labeled, and 78 percent strongly agreed with this.

In his comments today, CFS Senior Staff Attorney George Kimbrell asserted that "labeling in the 21st Century cannot be based on 20th Century policy decisions."  The FDA currently uses its 1992 interpretation of "material" to inform its decisions on labeling, an interpretation that occurred prior to commercialization of any transgenic animal. 


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Could Eucalyptus Trees be the Kudzu of the 2010s?

Global Justice Ecology Project, August 25, 2010
Straight to the Source

There was a time in the South whenplanting kudzu was not viewed as botanical vandalism, but as acommunity-spirited gesture. The vine, imported from Asia, was intendedto control erosion and provide forage for livestock.

Some things just don't work out.

Todaykudzu is an invasive pest throughout the South, where it can grow up toa foot a day. It smothers trees, houses and if you move too slowly itmight even smother you. Pretty much the only thing that will eat amature kudzu vine is goats. If you lack goats, eradicating it takesyears of herbicidal dousing.

Whichleads us to a muddle-headed idea from an S.C.-based company: to plant330 acres of eucalyptus trees genetically modified to withstand coldweather. The idea is that the tree, native to Australia, could be usedcommercially to make paper and as fuel for power plants. TheSummerville, S.C.-based ArborGen, says the hybrid it would use can'teasily reproduce.

Peoplethought kudzu was a good idea, too. The problem of invasive plants isgrowing as fast as, well, you know. It's not just kudzu. Have you evertried to get rid of wisteria gone wild? Japanese honeysuckle, Englishivy or privet?

The majorharm from invasive plants isn't that they're landscaping annoyances;it's that they crowd out and smother native species. That means birdsand other animals that rely on those native plants die out, too. Awhole ecosystem fails.

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