Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Just Planting Trees Won’t Stop March of Deserts

June 16, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
USDA map of world desertification

Attendance was sparse at a press conference following last fall’s first ever U.N. General Assembly devoted to desertification, as the loss of fertile land in dry areas is known. “If this were about climate change, the room would be full,” Luc Gnacadja of Benin, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, began his remarks to the press. On the 20th anniversary of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, where the desertification convention was established, it remains a poor cousin to other groundbreaking treaties set up at ... Read More

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Trading Protests for Sustainable Energy in Middle East

October 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

We were traveling by car to Palestinian Susya, deep in the dry, patchy terrain of the South Hebron hills, to observe low-tech sustainable energy projects to help villagers meet their basic needs. The road petered out — we’d gone too far — so we turned back toward another Susya, an Israeli settlement of about 100 families. Israeli Susya — established in 1983 about 40 road miles south of Jerusalem — has paved roads, tall pines and two-story homes with skylights and red roofs, running water, and phone and electric lines. Just off the road we saw a car and a scattering of tents ... Read More

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Botanist Brings Trees to the Israeli Desert

July 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The desert sky was an odd brooding gray as we pulled into McDonald's, the arches looming bright and preternaturally yellow out of the dusty landscape. By the time we'd finished our McKebab sandwiches — much better than you might expect — it was raining: a steady, drumming, respectable rain. It almost never rains in Israel's Arava Valley, the driest, hottest and southernmost part of Israel. I was about to meet a desert botanist, Elaine Solowey, so I was anxious to hear what she'd say. I assumed she'd be excited about the rain and wax rhapsodic about making the desert bloom and all ... Read More

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Pricing Carbon to Reduce Emissions, Create Dividends

May 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Cap and trade is dead — long live the Green Dividend. That was the consensus of a conference on pricing carbon held late last year at Wesleyan University that produced the "Wesleyan Statement," a kind of working manifesto on carbon-pricing principles. According to the resulting statement, an effective pricing strategy would be "upstream" (i.e. paid by the supplier), calibrated to reach emissions levels recommended by climate scientists, and steadily rising so that businesses and individuals can plan. Speakers advocated a direct, transparent price on carbon as an economic incentive ... Read More

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The Social Cost of Carbon

February 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

While federal climate legislation ground to a halt in July, the U.S. government began regulating carbon dioxide through the Environmental Protection Agency's mandate to uphold the Clean Air Act. CO2, a so-called greenhouse gas, was declared an "air pollutant," which therefore fell within the EPA's regulatory reach. Whether this has any meaningful impact turns on a little-known data point called the "social cost of carbon." It is, says economist Frank Ackerman, "the most important number you've never heard of." The social cost of carbon, or SCC, is the value in today's dollars of the ... Read More

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Settling a Beef With American Cattle Productions

November 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Why did Chuck Lacy and Ridge Shinn charter two 747s to fly 87 bovines from New Zealand to New England? For healthier beef. Lacy and Shinn are founders and principles of Hardwick Beef, a leading distributor of 100 percent grass-fed beef in the Northeast. In building their business, they faced a challenge: most beef cattle in the U.S. are bred to fatten up quickly under industrial farm conditions, which means standing around in feedlots and eating corn and other grains for concentrated periods of time. But after decades of selection for these traits, few cattle fattened up nicely and ... Read More

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Roving Herds of Grazing Climate Helpers

September 14, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

In reports of rising CO2 levels, there's an impression that the carbon-and-oxygen molecule is some kind of toxin, an alien vapor coughed up by a century-plus of heedless industrialism that's come back to haunt us. On closer inspection, it seems the problem isn't carbon dioxide's presence, but that there's too much in the air and not enough in the ground where it lends fertility to agricultural soil. How do we get that carbon back in the soil? Some suggest placing calcium carbonate or charcoal (aka "biochar") directly into agricultural soil, as Miller-McCune examined last year. But ... Read More

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Energy Oasis in the Desert

July 13, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

By 8 a.m., you're already scrambling for shade. The sun is a force in the Negev, the desert that comprises more than half of Israel's land mass. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister and a passionate champion of the desert, said Israel's success as a nation would ride on how its citizens make productive use of the sun. In 1956, he wrote: "The mightiest source of energy in our world ... is the sun, which favors us day by day, with astronomical quantities of energy, which runs to waste." He called on scientists to find ways for "absorbing even a very small part of this tremendous ... Read More

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Lexicon of Change: The Rise of Transition Culture

March 12, 2010 • By • 5 Comments

You may or may not have heard of the Transition movement — described by its founder, Rob Hopkins, as "an exercise in engaged optimism"— yet Transition's ideas are informing and even guiding the conversation of how communities confront the twin crises of peak oil and climate change. The movement is driven by one simple idea: Rather than hand-wringing and lamenting dwindling energy reserves and climate change, Transition wants people to envision and create models for that future — and find much to be cheerful about. A variety of activities take place under the Transition banner. ... Read More

More like this: CAROUSEL, Culture, Culture & Society, Environment, Science & Environment
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This Import Might Preserve American Jobs

December 3, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

As the U.S. unemployment breaches the 10 percent mark — with manufacturing sector rates even higher — policymakers and industry representatives in the Midwest are seeking strategies to keep the Rust Belt from getting even rustier. In this war for economic survival, groups in cities like Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago, as well as the million-plus-members-strong United Steelworkers Union, have turned to a model borne of another war-torn region: the Mondragón Corporation in the Basque area of Spain. The Mondragón Corporation (MCC) is a multilayered organization with worker-owned ... Read More

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