SustainabLINKS April 14, 2015

This blog took a multi-month hiatus (admittedly a bad sign for such a new enterprise) as I moved between countries and had a baby (good enough excuses I think). But now I’m back and I won’t be stopped.¹⁾There were some technical difficulties last week, my apologies. Too much of interest has happened to list here but here are some of the more recent highlights:

• Robert Putnam is on a campaign ^[3] to raise the alarm about the accelerating inequality among our youth (a book tour with a purpose ^[4]).²⁾I reviewed the book that made him famous ^[5].
• Describing new power plants as powering X thousand/million homes is misleadin ^[6]g at best and sometimes purposefully deceptive.
• Just as our definitions for wild and natural are arbitrary and contrived so is our definition of native. Horses make a great example ^[7].
• “I think we need to stop kidding ourselves that meat production doesn’t have profound impacts on ecosystems – it clearly does, whether your beef comes from Britain or Brazil. The best way to reduce this impact is by eating less of the stuff.” ^[8] On a related note a new study details ^[9] just how destructive cattle are to our public lands (with photos ^[10]).
• We scientists need to change too. Whether it is what we are doing (can science be driving the creation of a more Sustainable world? ^[11]) or how we are doing it (can scientists fly to fewer conferences ^[12]).
• Can we shift or re-define labels around Sustainability instead of inventing new terms, history suggest that would be a better approach than inventing new words ^[13].
• In Sustainability we talk about Food Systems because the humans from consumers to workers are centrally important but as this article details ^[14]3)Somewhat bizzarly this article spends a long bit talking about B-corp which while an important certifying entity has nothing in particular to do with food or food laborers in particular. Perhaps a little dilegence might have yielded something like the new Fair Food Program ^[15]. that has been slow to trickle into the “Food movement” as a whole.
• Good news: Bald eagles are making a comeback! ^[16]