Environment

When well-meaning people in Madagascar, urged on by poorly-informed environmentalists and carbon credit companies, rushed to plant a million trees in one January day, scientists were outraged. They were planting them in the country’s barren Central Highlands - and destroying an ancient ecosystem. Ancient Madagascan grasslands fell victim to a modern frenzy to afforest the world that has gripped political leaders - and that is thanks to lobbyists paid by environmental lawyers. A new paper debunks beliefs that grasslands must be simply degraded forest, razed by humankind and in need of…

The last three years have been a banner time for environmental crisis hyperbole, especially when it comes to reporting about insects and agriculture. In article after article, journalists have ballyhooed a catastrophic ecological disaster on the horizon. CNN dubbed it “the insect apocalypse.” The Guardian, the London-based daily known for its doomsday environmental views, riffed on the “risk to all life on Earth” posed by insect declines. There was modest pushback from more responsible journalists at the BBC, ScienceNews and other places, and of course the …

In November of 2019 The Atlantic asked "experts" what they would change if they could go back in time. The experts had titles like "mythographer" - no scientists invited - so it's no surprise only one response had real-world relevance.(1) A historian at Rutgers wished agriculture had never been invented. Agriculture, that fundamental progressive achievement which made food plentiful so that we no longer spent our days foraging and could learn things and, you know, create universities, had to be undone. How out-of-touch with the world must you be when you wish to go back in time 10,000 years…

Cover crops are touted for their soil and water quality related benefits. A new paper found that incorporating cover crops with tillage results in increased cover crop decomposition rates and increased mineralization of nutrients from cover crop biomass. Other studies have reported mixed results for corn-soybean grain yields when planted after cover crops. In an Agronomy Journal article, researchers report results of a four-year study on corn-soybean rotation. Treatments were completed under either conventional tillage or no-tillage, and with and without cover crop. Researchers included…

Conservation groups have frequently sued the U.S Army Corps of Engineers claiming that government scientists do not "properly" evaluate the environmental impacts of its plans to mitigate flood risk. They sued in the 1990s when the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to shore up the levees in the Mississippi Delta, because there was concern that a tropical storm or hurricane would overwhelm them. Since they had a friendly administration in power - a President who removed supplements from FDA control, banned nuclear research, and even gutted NASA - there was only token legal objection before the…

Fire breaks and responsible logging are overwhelmingly considered positives for forest management. Every native culture practiced removal of trees and controlled burns to mitigate risk of uncontrolled ones. Australia is different, claims an environmental paper. Logging made their recent wildfires worse, the authors suggest, due to more plant matter on the ground, more drying, and shorter forest height. But when you read that paper, it is instead that logging does not clear enough. They estimate it can leave up to 450 tons of combustible fuel per hectare on the ground, which is an…

If we want to get a snapshot about what the ancient ways really meant for food, we need look no further than the Amazon, where despite living in the most biodiverse place on Earth, people go hungry. The reason is simple; they don't harness nature, they exist at the whim of it.  Ribeirinhos live alongside rivers in Brazil's Amazonian floodplain forests but struggle to catch enough fish to eat and can go hungry. The reason is nature. The Purus River undergoes one of the largest annual variations in water levels on the planet. When it floods, large areas of forest become submerged. River…

In western countries, there is a lot of talk about globalization and agriculture being negative things about the modern world. They instead offer terms like "agroecology" and "locally grown" and "sustainable." To paraphrase U.S. President Eisenhower, when the only hoe you have ever seen is in a Twitter posting by an organic industry trade group, farming is easy. In the real world, globalization and modern agriculture have prevented the kind of famines that occurred often in the past. It is true that in North America and much of Europe you can grow plenty of wheat locally, but in most of the…

The locally grown effort was always fine for people fortunate enough to be born into agriculturally rich areas but for everyone else it historically meant famine, poor diets, or high costs. Modern agriculture and free markets changed all that. A new study finds that as the world has increased its standard of living - there are fewer people in poverty than ever in history and it continues to drop fast - it can lead to concern about food system sustainability. As people get wealthier, they move out of rural areas and into cities, but as we have seen during the SARS-CoV2 panic, when 2 percent of…

Assuming the organic manufacturing process is able to sustain premium pricing levels. organic soybean producers using reduced-tillage production methods can achieve similar revenue, finds an ongoing experiment. It used cover crops to reduce tillage - the thousands of years old approach of preparing soil by plowing or overturning soil - in organic field crop production systems. Since organic food is now a gigantic $130 billion industry the scholars wanted to see if domestic organic soybeans could be competitive with their modern scientific counterparts. To become competitive among a wider…