Monsanto Sustainability

Monsanto’s PR like any good PR department has incorporated a “green” dynamic to their business. Unfortunately, Monsanto’s take on “green” is far from true sustainability and more in line with Washington’s feeble politicians who invoke policies focusing on efficiency and technocratic solutions to the climate debate.  The “Sustainability” portion of their website focuses on efficiency and proper resource use to maximize yields. Solutions that sure as hell won’t be altering the course of climate change any time soon. Here’s some pictures from the “sustainability” portion of Monsanto’s website take note of the language (“precise”, “inputs”, “outputs”, “efficient”, “minimization”, etc.) and focus on technology and efficiency. It’s all quite Tayloristic, industrial, carcinogenic, grungy, and cancerous. Enjoy…

UN World Population Predictions

The UN just released this report on predictions for the coming century for population demographics. There is an expected increase in the world’s current population by approximately 3 billion people by the end of the century. A conservative estimate by some standards.  Education and contraception seem to be the main methods of combating unfettered population explosions in the developing world, particularly in Africa where fertility rates are disproportionately larger than the rest of the global South. Africa is due to triple its population this century if current trends continue.  Efforts to mitigate population overburdening in such developing regions have mostly come in the form of contraception and female education – two methods that have faced resistance from the church and other institutions.

A NY Times graphic of population projections over the coming century.

Wealth and Climate Change: The [Rich and their] kids are alright

Large-scale coastal erosion at Torrey Pines State Reserve, California

There’s many despicable aspects of the global environmental crisis.  None really exemplifies how intertwined America’s socio-economic stratification is with environmental decline as well as how the rich plan to adjust to changing sea levels, regional climates, and food and water shortages.  Ironically, even though the poor will be the ones suffering most from coastal climate change they were never the main facilitators of human induced climate change.  Rather it was their rich counterparts.  The Hampton’s residents and other posh coastal town residents of the upper echelon, who’ll not doubt be evading the worst of climate change to come, have generated most of if it with their large industrial NYT writer Felicity Barringer reported a few weeks back on a study that posed the question: “What happens if physical predictions about the erosive force of future storms are entwined with economic predictions of how coastal towns deal with the loss of their beaches?”  The answer they came up with wasn’t too encouraging. They predicted based on models coupling economically driven shoreline nourishment with wave- and sea level rise-driven coastline change they determined that a rise in sand prices caused by a decreased supply would enable only the wealthy to buy up sand to protect their communities, excluding their poorer counterparts.  This is nothing new and can be seen in Nicole Youngman’s analysis of the Katrina disaster where many low-income residents were left stranded in the Superdome without a car or means to escape oncoming waters. “For low-income residents, the physical vulnerability of living in a disaster prone locatio is frequently compounded by the physical inability to leave when a disaster threatens.” Obviously, in the case of low-income East Coast residents the time crunch of moving before the sea envelopes their homes isn’t a huge concern at the moment. Regardless, through this study we can see the devastating and disproportional impact of climate change on low-income individuals.

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