Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: food – Page 276

‚Every day there are roughly 386,000 new mouths to feed, and in that same 24 hours, scientists estimate between one and 100 species will go extinct. That’s it. Lost forever.

To deal with the biodiversity crisis we need to find a way to give nature more space—habitat loss is a key factor driving these extinctions. But how would this affect our food supplies?

New research, published in Nature Sustainability, found it could mean we lose a lot of food —but exactly how much really depends on how we choose to give nature that space. Doing it right could mean rethinking how we do agriculture and altogether.

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If the global population adopted recommended North American dietary guidelines, there wouldn’t be enough land to provide the food required, according to a new study co-authored by University of Guelph researchers.

The researchers found that global adherence to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) guidelines would require one giga-hectare of additional land—roughly the size of Canada—under current farming practice. Their findings were published in PLOS ONE today.

“The data shows that we would require more land than what we have if we adopt these guidelines. It is unsustainable,” said Prof. Madhur Anand, director of the Global Ecological Change and Sustainability lab where the study was undertaken.

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This is not sustainable!

Every summer the U.S. Central Plains go dry, leading farmers to tap into groundwater to irrigate sorghum, soy, cotton, wheat and corn and maintain large herds of cattle and hogs. As the heat rises, anxious irrigators gather to discuss whether and how they should adopt more stringent conservation measures.

They know that if they do not conserve, the Ogallala Aquifer, the source of their prosperity, will go dry. The Ogallala, also known as the High Plains Aquifer, is one of the largest underground freshwater sources in the world. It underlies an estimated 174,000 square miles of the Central Plains and holds as much water as Lake Huron. It irrigates portions of eight states, from Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska in the north to Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas in the south.

But the current drought plaguing the region is unusually strong and persistent, driving farmers to rely more on the aquifer and sharpening the debate over its future. A current assessment by the U.S. Drought Monitor, published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows large swaths of the southern plains experiencing drought ranging from “severe” to “exceptional.”

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Almost everyone who eats fast food is familiar with the frustration of trying to squeeze every last drop of ketchup out of the small packets that accompany french fries.

What most consumers don’t realize, however, is that food left behind in packaging is not simply a nuisance. It also contributes to the millions of pounds of perfectly edible food that Americans throw out every year. These small, incremental amounts of sticky foods like condiments, dairy products, beverages, and some meat products that remain trapped in their packaging can add up to big numbers over time, even for a single household.

New research from Virginia Tech aims to cut down on that waste – and consumer frustration – with a novel approach to creating super slippery industrial packaging. The study, which was published in Scientific Reports and has yielded a provisional patent, establishes a method for wicking chemically compatible vegetable oils into the surfaces of common extruded plastics.

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https://paper.li/e-1437691924…

The term “transhumanism” was coined by Aldous Huxley’s brother, Julian, the evolutionary biologist and First Director-General of UNESCO founded 1954 London, now in Paris, Julian Huxley (1887–1975): “I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.” (“Transhumanism.” Julian Huxley. In New Bottles for New Wine, pp 13–17. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). https://www.newstatesman.com/2017/10/heritage-wars-politics-…out-unesco

The idea was developed by futurist FM 2030 was formerly known as F M Esfandiary, who taught in NY from 1966. “The contemporary meaning of the term “transhumanism” was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught “new concepts of the human” at The New School in the 1960s, when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles and worldviews “transitional” to posthumanity as “transhuman”. The Transhuman phase began with the Industrial Revolution, and in the Anthopocene era of today, many of us (especially in the West) have already progressed beyond the human (agricultural) stage, past the ‘transhuman’ Industrial era, to enjoy our current C21st posthuman post-industrial lifestyles.

The Posthuman Movement (posthuman.org) was announced by Steve Nichols in 1988, and has since become an influential idea in academia and the wider world. The Yahoo posthuman list ran through the 1990’s and has now been joined by various FB groups, the Posthuman Daily, and Posthuman Buddhism. See http://posthuman.TV for more information. MVT (Primal Eye) Theory of Mind is distinctively posthuman, see http::extropia.net and forthcoming http://posthuman.GURU site for MVT awareness generating engines, mind uploading and more.

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“I think we are on the verge of a massive disruption,” Ford told me recently. “We see stagnant wages, and we see an erosion in the quality of the jobs. A lot of solid middle-class jobs are disappearing, and that alone has been remarkably disruptive… This is a big deal and I think it’s going to get get vastly bigger, and I do think that this is a subject everyone should be a bit concerned about.”

To put it bluntly: Once cars and trucks become automated, what will taxi and truck drivers do for work? Same with factory workers, fast food employees, retail clerks, and millions of other low-skill jobs that could theoretically be phased out entirely with robotics. This isn’t some sci-fi future; one report compiled recently by the McKinsey Global Institute says that advances in AI, automation and robotics will displace between 39 and 73 million jobs by 2030.

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