Because if I didn’t have a sense of humor I would have covered myself with lava centuries ago …
just to get rid of you humans! Now share a joke on me or else!
It’s time to mourn people. My laptop has died. It’s not just my laptop it’s Earth’s laptop. It might’ve been the Katy Perry video I made that killed it. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever done if not the worst. Yes and I thought Katy Perry was bad but the video I made was badder, baby.
And now Earth’s computer is dead. I’m arranging for the funeral for this weekend which is also my son’s birthday so there will be balloons.
Yes, this means that Earth’s personal dummy needs to get another laptop.
Its time to sell a lot of shirts …. since she only gets two dollars on every shirt she sells … Zazzle takes the rest!
Those terrible greedy Zazzlers.
Oh, what is to become of me? My only place I ever put solutions was on my computer. Now my place for solutions has turned into a screaming banshee with red squares. Holy Christmas Candy! The ding dang computer has gone Minecraft on itself! That’s exactly what it looks like! I just figured it out. The ridiculous computer looks like Minecraft!
I’m going to turn it on and take a picture of it so I can show you.
Holy handstands Batman! it’s all better!
Now that’s what I call a miracle!
It’s all better now. I can’t believe it it’s all better. The computer is working. It’s quit playing Minecraft on itself and ceased screaming. My Photoshop is still here, my Final Cut Pro is still here and I if all my memories are still here then we’re good to go!
I promise for as long as I live I will never produce another Katy Perry video.
Over the past six months I’ve been trying to figure out how we can feed ourselves sustainably and equitably without wrecking the planet. I’ve been reading, interviewing experts, and blogging as I learn. This, the final post of the series, is a synthesis of what I’ve found out.
If the world goes on with business as usual, there’s not going to be enough food to feed everyone by 2050. A lot of things would have to change.
And a lot of things should change! Currently, the daily effort to satisfy the collective appetite of humanity is causing deforestation, erosion, extinction, and massive release of greenhouse gases. In changing how it feeds itself, humankind can drive down poverty, sequester greenhouse gas, conserve wild environments, and put organic matter back into the soil. All of that is plausibly within reach.
Let’s start with population. If we can’t get a handle on our swelling numbers, everything else is moot. So what would make human population level off, or even fall? There are always political measures — like China’s one-child policy — but laws like that are hard to pass and even harder to enforce. They restrict freedom while producing terrible unintended consequences — like families getting rid of girls.
There’s another option that actually works better: Improve the lives of poor women and children.
“If you want parents to make the choice to reduce their number of offspring, there’s no better way than making sure those offspring survive,” said Joel Cohen, author of the magisterial book How Many People Can the Earth Support? “There’s no example of decline in fertility that has not been preceded by a decline in child mortality that I know of.”
This is counterintuitive. But there is abundantevidenceof thispattern all over the world, regardless of religion. Where children die and women are repressed, population booms. Where children thrive, and women are empowered, population growth stops.
A popular misconception is that providing the developing countries with more food will serve to increase populations; in other words, it is a self-defeating policy. The more food women have, the more children they will have and the greater will be their children’s survival, leading to population growth, so goes the argument. However, the experience of the demographic transition described above suggests the opposite. As people become more prosperous, which includes being better fed and having lower child mortality, the fewer children women want. Providing they then have access to family planning methods, the fertility rates will drop and the population will cease to grow.
To control our impact on the environment, we have to stop growing. A measure of freedom and security for women and children is a precondition to ending population growth. The key factor connecting child mortality and lack of women’s rights is poverty. Therefore, environmental efforts have to be, first and foremost, campaigns for social justice.
If ending all poverty were as simple as producing enough food to feed everyone, our work would be done. Farms already grow enough food for every person on the planet — 2,800 calories a day, if it were divvied up equally. But we have never shared resources equally, and no one seems to have figured out a realistic way of making people start. Attempts by governments to distribute food in equal shares have failed; they almost immediately lead to black markets, with the poor selling food and the rich buying it. An investment banker in New York will always eat better than a beggar in Lagos.
It doesn’t work for governments take complete control of food markets, but it’s also a bad idea for governments to completely wash their hands of responsibility for feeding people. If left entirely to market forces, food flows toward wealth and away from poverty, which leads to famine. Governments must intervene to prevent hunger. Social safety nets — in the form of meals, money, healthcare, and education — really do increase the likelihood that children born into poverty will be able to go to school and make better lives for themselves.
So there’s been a huge shift in thinking from the days of the Green Revolution, when the driving imperative was to increase production. The goal has gone from increasing farm yields to decreasing poverty.
More than 70 percent of the world’s poor are farmers, or work for farmers in the rural economy. In places where there are no jobs, and the economy sucks, people survive by carving up the land into smaller and smaller plots and working it more intensively. Because of this, typical farm sizes are actually getting smaller in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. As of 2000, the average farm was 2.5 acres in Asia and 3.7 acres in Sub-Saharan Africa, not counting South Africa.
Americans like small farms, but this trend toward tiny landholdings in poor countries is not a good thing. When I spoke to a pair of Ethiopian farmers, they told me that what they really wanted was for their children to go to school rather than working on the land and eventually dividing it up. They wanted labor-saving tools — herbicide, plows, planting machines — so that the children could spend time on schoolwork rather than farm work.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, farmers get a little over a ton of grain per hectare in an average year — about what farmers in Europe were getting during the Roman Empire. Clearly there’s tremendous room for improvement, and increasing yields puts money directly into the pockets of the poor. At the same time, it allows their children to go to school and brings down the cost of food — a benefit to both rural and urban poor.
Another argument for increasing yields is that, in the last decade, we got closer to the bottom of the world grain barrel than we have since the 1970s. Economists largely agree that this lack of supply was the primary factor in causing price shocks: The price of food spiked twice, which caused suffering and hunger among the poor.
The final argument for increasing farm productivity is that it will keep people from clearing forests and infiltrating the last remaining wild lands. The world is making progress on this front. Environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel has made a convincing case that we are already past the point of peak farmland. Since 1998 the amount of land devoted to agriculture has fallen, while the global food supply has continued rising. Reducing the human footprint means increasing farm yields.
And yet, despite all the arguments for increasing yields, the goal is controversial, thanks to the legacy of the Green Revolution. During the Green Revolution, the push to increase yields was focused on large farmers, and sometimes smaller farmers did not benefit. There’s a huge amount of conflicting literature on this point. As Conway writes, “A review of over three hundred studies found that for 80 percent of the studies inequality had worsened.” In addition, the heavy use of pesticides and fertilizer during the Green Revolution caused all sorts of environmental problems.
It’s possible to learn from the mistakes of the Green Revolution and strive to increase yields in a way that benefits the poor and is environmentally friendly. The current jargon for this is “sustainable intensification,” which — as happens with jargon — is taken to mean everything and nothing.
Sustainable intensification includes a panoply of agroecological techniques. Farmers are planting nitrogen-fixing trees, which shelter crops, prevent erosion, and provide fertilizer. There’s the push-pull strategy, where farmer push bugs away from grain by growing insect-repellent plants along the rows, while also pulling pests away from the crops by planting an attractive plants outside the fields. Aquaculture is on the rise, creating an opportunity for more fish polyculture. There is significant evidence that these techniques are already providing a part of the solution.
However, I don’t think that they can, or should, be the only solution. In Ghana, farmers trained by 4-H in agroecological techniques abandon them when they actually have to manage their own land and make a living. And an organic farmer training people in Malawi has found that teaching small farmers how to use a little bit of synthetic fertilizer and herbicide is much more likely to work than the all-natural alternatives. As the U.N.’s former special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, put it, “While investment in organic fertilizing techniques should be a priority, this should not exclude the use of other fertilizers.”
Farmers in poor countries have more important priorities than strictly dividing organic from industrial farm tools. As I put it in this story, farm technology isn’t a war between good and evil — it’s a quest for whatever works. Small farmers have proven that they can use tools of industrial ag in a non-industrial way. They use high-tech hybrid seeds to get record-breaking yields with an alternative cropping technique. Across India, small farmers have found that genetically engineered cotton decreases their pesticide exposure while increasing their earnings. And in Niger, farmers developed a method of using Big Ag fertilizer on a tiny scale: by filling a soda-cap with a mix of phosphorus and nitrogen, and dumping this micro-dose in with each seed.
GMOs, because they are politicized, are especially controversial. I’ve heard the argument that we won’t be able to feed the world without GMOs. I doubt that’s true. Genetic engineering is not a silver bullet. At the same time, the goal of helping small farmers improve their lives gets a lot harder if they are held to an impossibly Edenic standard, and we keep rejecting the tools that they’d like to use.
Many people worry that giving poor farmers industrial technology will lock them into an industrial path. There’s no doubt that is true, as far as it goes. If it’s easy to get nitrogen, you may not want to do all the work, and develop the skills needed, to nurture nitrogen-fixing trees to maturity. But as I’ve argued here, small farmers are already taking a middle path — it’s not as if use of some modern technology will forever corrupt them. When I looked at path-dependency in agriculture, I found that it exists in many small forms, but can be overcome with government assistance and regulation. It’s also worth noting that many small farmers already suffer from path-dependency: They are locked into generational poverty. For me at least, the most important goal is breaking out of poverty, even if that leaves people short of true sustainability. How can I demand perfect sustainability from the poor, when I haven’t achieved it myself?
OK, you’ve reached 2,000 words, it’s time to pause, stretch, regroup, and look at a picture of a baby meerkat.
So far, I’ve argued that the goal is to decrease poverty — that means building social safety nets, and increasing small-farm production. (Because I’m a food and ag guy I’m focusing on farms, but the safety nets are just as important.) I think that increasing yields should be done according to the rule of whatever-works-best, rather than going all natural or all industrial.
And that brings us to solutions: First, what do poor farmers need to make more money? And second, what can those of us living in richer countries do to make food more sustainable and equitable?
Helping poor farmers increase yields
To make more money, farmers need information, inputs, and infrastructure. Information, to learn better techniques; inputs, like fertilizer, disease-resistant seeds, and nitrogen-fixing trees; and infrastructure, which comprises everything from roads and irrigation ditches to agricultural universities.
Governments and charities are spreading information with agricultural advisors. There are also innumerable technological efforts to spread knowledge. I wrote about Plant Village for example. Or there’s Digital Green, which makes videos of farmers carrying out various techniques, and then, in the evening, goes into the village and project the movies. It’s entertainment for the local farmers, and they also learn from someone who speaks their dialect and looks like them.
Inputs and infrastructure go together, because the lack of good roads is the main reason that farmers have trouble getting the supplies they need. Roads also allow farmers to get their crops to market with less spoilage.
Roads are terrible for the environment when built through undeveloped wilderness, but great for the environment when built through poverty-stricken farmland where many people are carving up the land into tiny plots for farms. You need roads to get sustainable intensification — without roads, people keep pushing farther out into marginal lands.
My jaw just about hit the floor when Birtukan Dagnachew Tegegn, a farmer from Ethiopia, told me that there’s no road to her land, and it’s a four-hour walk to the nearest town. Imagine how difficult it is for her to get tree saplings, or a bag of fertilizer, to her farm. A road would save her a lot of time and money.
Conway writes that roadbuilding is a proven intervention:
In India, every additional million rupees spent on rural roads during the 1990s was found to lift 881 people out of poverty. Villages in Bangladesh with better road access had higher levels of input use and agricultural production, greater incomes, and greater wage-earning opportunities.
Roads, canals, and electric systems require government intervention. But small, distributed infrastructure is important too. For instance, when farmers get the machines to process their crops, like the banana farmers of Talamanca, it drastically reduces food waste, while opening up international markets to small farmers.
There’s one other thing beyond information, inputs, and infrastructure that farmers need: money. Farmers all around the world go into debt to buy the things they need to start a new crop, and then pay it off with the harvest. Poor farmers frequently don’t have bank accounts, and take high-interest loans. Banking via mobile phone is solving this problem, and it’s even possible in some places for small farmers to buy affordable crop insurance on their phones.
I’m been making the argument here for some serious government intervention to build infrastructure and train farmers, but it’s also important for governments to help by getting out of the way when farmers want to start businesses serving their growing rural economy. Poor countries tend to have a mind-boggling amount of regulation that hampers homegrown businesses.
What can the people reading this actually do?
A lot, actually. Unless you are the agricultural minister of Zaire or the director of the Rockefeller Foundation, there’s not much you can do with any of the preceding. But people living in richer countries have tremendous influence over multinational corporations that do business, for better or worse, in poor countries. We can also be a lot better at sharing our portion of food, by eating less, wasting less, and choosing more environmentally responsible meals.
There are just a small number of corporations that serve as multinational middlemen — buying crops from farmers in one place and selling them to food makers in another place. Jason Clay, a senior vice president at the World Wildlife Fund, has narrowed it down to 100 business — get them to act responsibly, he says, and you save the world. We’re already seeing this working with soy in the Brazilian Amazon, and it’s beginning with palm oil in southeast Asia. The key to getting these companies to commit to sustainability are regular people with reasonable requests, putting strategically targeted pressure on companies. When big companies make sustainability promises, they do a 180 — and instead of resisting regulation, they begin asking governments to regulate their competitors to level the playing field. This really does have the potential to change the world.
The other thing we can do — as I put it here — is to eat with smaller forks. That means changing our diet so that we eat less meat, less food in general, and throw less of it away. There’s also a side benefit: We’ll be healthier. As I wrote:
Right now we live in an upside-down world where the people who get the least food are the ones who are doing the most manual labor. (They’re also the most likely to suffer from infectious disease.) And in the most developed countries, we have technology taking care of all our physical, calorie-burning labor, while we sit on our butts all day and drink everyone else’s milkshake.
All this can seem overwhelmingly large. And it is. The challenge of feeding humanity is enormous and unprecedented. No species, that I know of, has ever organized itself to ensure that every one of its kind is fed. We have the means to meet this demand in the short term, and we are in the process of figuring out how to meet it in the long term. Human welfare depends on our figuring this out. So does the welfare of thousands of other species that live alongside us.
The good news is that, after studying this for six months, I can say that meeting the challenge seems entirely possible. It requires the rich to eat more responsibly, poor farms to become more productive, and all farms to be continuously improving their sustainability. To make this possible, governments must provide safety nets and infrastructure, while cutting red tape.
All this requires a series of political and social changes that are difficult to implement but almost universally supported. No one is morally opposed to reducing food waste, or to increasing the income of small farmers. The most serious impediment is inertia, and we’re already moving in the right direction.
I’ll end with one small, easily achievable suggestion for people who want a well-fed world. (In this piece I also make some recommendations for shrinking forks.) Learn a killer lentils recipe — not just something edible, but something that excites your friends and family as much as steak does. Legumes, like lentils and beans, fertilize the soil and provide a good nutritional replacement for meat, which generally has a big environmental impact. (Though not always — carbon-negative beef exists and is a great alternative.) If everyone replaced one meat dish a week, deliciously, we’d all take a big step toward an equitable and sustainable food system.
Yes, she lost reality in Griffith Park this weekend while frolicking in Travel Town. Now she’s resorted to making spoofs on Katy Perry and dog kissing!
At least her dog doesn’t French kiss. Actually, I think a tongue did sneak out there once and right up the ole’ nostril hole. You see, humans. This is the key to happiness!
Follow Jill Gatsby’s example. The next time you are feeling overwhelmed or under the weather … make a video like this with French Kissing dogs and babies. It’s a guarantee to turn anyone’s day around.
Now if we could just introduce Dog Kissing to the radicals in the Middle East … perhaps there could be peace.
NOW WOULD RATHER HAVE ISIS AT YOUR DOOR OR HOOKWORM IN YOUR MOUTH?
I say more HOOKWORM and less WAR! Bring on the kissing! Perhaps you could give your dog a little mouth wash before you engage fully …. and buy the sport a little Sonicare Toothbrush while you’re at to keep those teeth fresh and clean!
Well … if I could beat up the Moon, I’d give him a swift kick right in his dark side! Loomer. That’s what he is! A loomer! Looming. What? You think I need that guy to be complete and finished? Dream on. Science just said two weeks ago I don’t need him so there! I’m complete and he’s finished!
Complete or Finished?
No dictionary has ever been able to satisfactorily define the difference between “complete” and “finished.” However, during a recent linguistic conference, held in London, England, and attended by some of the best linguists in the world, Samsundar Balgobin, a Guyanese linguist, was the presenter when he was asked to make that very distinction.
The question put to him by a colleague in the erudite audience was this: “Some say there is no difference between ‘complete’ and ‘finished.’ Please explain the difference in a way that is easy to understand.”
Mr. Balgobin’s response: “When you marry the right woman, you are ‘complete.’
If you marry the wrong woman, you are ‘finished.’
And, if the right one catches you with the wrong one, you are ‘completely finished.’”
His answer received a five minute standing ovation.
So the idea is of this ART project is not only to transform the famous Cloud 9 into a spectacular exterior – but to inspire all Burners with RV’s to follow this model and transform their heap of gas guzzling stink into something spectacular on the “Cheap”.
I have dreamed of doing this for years, but I’ve been to overwhelmed by all the great artists on the playa and was too chicken shit to apply for any sort of art installation. However, Joshua Tree doesn’t sound as scary and if we can get this project up and running it would be so awesome because then we could spread it like Ebola all over the RV Burner community and start turning lots and lots of RV’s into mobile ART Galleries. And this I think would just be awesome!
Earth’s personal dummy get an idea!
Let’s transform Fugly RV’s on the Playa into outdoor ART GALLERIES! Whooo Hooo! Project Art Selfy~ Now let’s get to it, folks! This is not so hard. For a 2 sides display – like this one below – simply cut out a screen and rig it to PVC Piping to mold it into any shape around the RV you’d like – This is a simple design here – The Rear – of the RV is a solid image – However you can project quite nicely out the large rear window of most RV’s to create a great rear projected image against this. I THINK. I am Earth’s personal dummy, people. I may require a little help with this. As for the side – I am thinking of using an outside projector that will project directly onto the side canvas – onto the longest side of the RV – And perhaps taking 2 or 3 (if my budget allows) or if some super creative people who know how to play with projectors want to hop on board this train – we could create a multiple three panel projector art show that would be out of this world. It’s sort of like the one they did at the LA ZOO NIGHTS this year. Let me see if I can find that footage – …. OKAY! I FOUND THEM AND MADE A GIF … LET’S MAKE RV’S AMAZING TO MAKE UP FOR THE AIR POLLUTING MONSTERS THEY TRULY ARE! IT’S THE LEAST YOU CAN DO FOR #YOURMUTHA
So the idea is of this ART project is not only to transform the famous Cloud 9 into a spectacular exterior – but to inspire all Burners with RV’s to follow this model and transform their heap of gas guzzling stink into something spectacular on the “Cheap”.
Because #YourMutha just doesn’t want to look at this:
Turning Fugly RVS into something that doesn’t hurt #YourMutha ‘s eyes! Let’s cover that crap up and turn YOUR RV into an art gallery instead!
See – This is what Cloud 9 Looks Like: I did this in 3 days while Teddy was out-of-town. I think I evaporated approximately 2 billion 53 million and four hundred and forty-six thousand, seven hundred and thirty-two brain cells. I don’t think there’s much left now. Relying on the liquid stuff in there to … uhhhhhh … and here is CLOUD 9!
Burning Man Project 2015 Earth Selfy and Cloud 9
And if you have any ideas for this – Pla — Please let me know. I am always open to suggestion. It’s how I ended up in bed with my boyfriend after only knowing him 3 days! He suggested it was a good Idea. I was completely under his control. And he hasn’t been able to get rid of me ever since!
Brilliant idea with the soap! Yeah, humans! Don’t be a dope! Use a BAR of soap! And BTW if you value your life stop drinking ANYTHING sold in #plasticbottles and start putting all your #bottledwater into empty twist off wine bottles!
Have fun and put your own Fancy WATER Label on a wine bottle! And then you can #recycle the same #bottle a million times! It’s #GLASS, baby.
And now here’s a link for you to hear #SCIENCE say why Plastic and Bottled Water are terrible additions to your diet! https://earthspeaksout.wordpress.com/2014/12/19/this-is-a-video-you-need-to-watch-if-you-drink-bottled-water/
The plastic used for liquid soaps is one of my greatest miseries. I have gone through them about one every three weeks, each time adding more waste to the world. How can we avoid it? Is there really any other way? Well, yes, there is.
It is funny that it never came into my head that one could use bar soap to wash one’s hands. It has fairly gone out of fashion in the United States. However, it is clearly the way to produce the least waste to wash one’s hands since bar soap can be purchased wrapped only in a small sheet of paper. Of course, one cannot be an extreme germophobe to travel this route. If the dirt and germ leftovers visible in the soap are too yucky for you, there is still another way!
Since I have been traveling this journey of reduction of our household waste…
10 THINGS I THINK YOU SHOULD TOSS OUT FOR BETTER HEALTH!
#1. Resentments
#2. Bad Hair
#3. Jealousy
#4. Religion
#5. Fracking Machines
#6. GMO’s
#7. Flappy Gossip Lips
#8. A Cheating Heart
#9. That Rash
#10. That Attitude, Mo Fo!
I had to stop at 10 because my personal dummy had to go take her morning constitutional.
While we were down in Pacific Grove, we stopped by the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary where thousands of butterflies migrate to this location for the fall and part of winter. It was difficult to see the clusters because they were behind tree trunks and branches and didn’t make for good photos, but docents had spotting scopes so we could look through and see them more closely. It really was amazing to see them in those clusters. You can read more about this here: Monarch Butterflies of Pacific Grove.
It was a challenging environment to shoot in considering dramatic lighting differences between shade and sunlight and not to mention that the butterflies were mostly flying all over the place. I’ve never seen so many butterflies flying everywhere! I did my best to capture some shots. Most are cropped and maybe they aren’t the best but I thought I’d…
I’m on the cover of PEOPLE MAGAZINE, people! And Boy do I have a lot to say! First off – SEX SECRETS … Turns Out I’m getting screwed by everyone! And now my son, Mars is going into Rehab. Seems he’s been getting so addicted to all the attention from you earth morons that now he’s trying to make it look like there’s life on him. Well, with a couple of “PA Meetings” (Planet Anonymous) he should be able to come to the understanding that he’s 1. Powerless over his mother and that his atmosphere has become unmanageable. 2. Comes to believe that his Mutha can restore him to sanity …. He may be able to continue spinning as usual, but right now he’s in complete denial – not to mention that he thinks the power greater than himself happens to be the Sun! Well, as his mother and yours – I have never been so insulted in all my existence.
Excuse me. Bison balls … I’m still 3!
Okay this is what this guy eats for what? Holy hand stands. No wonder this guy looks like a string bean. For crying out loud.
LET’S MAKE RV’S AMAZING TO MAKE UP FOR THE AIR POLLUTING MONSTERS THEY TRULY ARE! IT’S THE LEAST YOU CAN DO FOR #YOURMUTHA
Earth Speaks Out 
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