If you have a yard, how do you use it? Do you grow grass, or flowers, or have a garden? Is it large, or small, or non-existent? Are there any lawn activities that you enjoy?
Share why if you wish.
Category: Nature
How Do We Make Our Food System Healthy And Sustainable?
America’s food system is centered neither on health nor sustainability. It is not organized around providing people with healthy food grown in living soil or produced on well-managed pasture.
Much of what fills grocery store shelves today would be unrecognizable to our great-great-grandparents. Thousands of available products are less whole foods than engineered food-like substances, containing preservatives, emulsifiers, artificial flavorings, coloring agents, stabilizers, and even so-called “food glues” used to bind processed meats together. On average, food travels roughly 1,500 miles from farm to consumer.
At the same time, an enormous portion of our food is never eaten at all. The USDA and EPA estimate that 30–40% of America’s food supply is wasted, with approximately $161 billion worth of food ending up in landfills each year. This waste is especially tragic given that millions of people in the United States and around the world continue to experience hunger or chronic undernourishment.
Meanwhile, some estimates suggest that 55% of harvested U.S. cropland is devoted to growing animal feed crops such as corn, soy, and alfalfa, a very inefficient use of land to feed humans in need of healthy food.
Too often, the true costs of our food system are externalized onto the soil, water, air, farm workers, rural communities, public health systems, and future generations. Within a genuinely holistic system, those costs cannot simply be pushed out of sight or absorbed by others.
This raises difficult but necessary questions.
Should truly nourishing food be priced in ways that fully reflects its real costs, even if that makes it more expensive? If so, should subsidies be redirected away from large industrial producers and toward low-income households to ensure access to healthy food?
Or should cheap, highly subsidized food-like products continue to dominate grocery store shelves while their real costs remain hidden in our environmental, economic, and public health systems? What other options are there?
How can we change our current food system so that it is both more healthy, and also sustainable in the long term?
Related questions: How do you stay healthy? What is keeping us from sustaining the planet? Do you garden? What is the greatest problem facing humanity?
What Do We Owe Animals?
Humans live alongside animals of all kinds, and have a very complicated relationship with them. Do we owe anything to them?
The exact relationship we have with animals varies wildly depending on which ones we are talking about.
Some we have driven to extinction, or very near it. The once plentiful bison was overhunted, as was the passenger pigeon. The former, with protections, managed a population comeback after near extinction, but the latter was not so lucky.
Others have thrived living — willingly or not — alongside humans. Pets, like cats and dogs, have fared well. So have rats, which have lived in or near human civilizations since the introduction of agriculture.
As human populations have increased and spread out, we often inhabit land that used to be the home for various animals. Thus, you see odd videos of a moose walking down a street, or a bear entering a grocery store.
These interactions raise a question: what should the relationship be, between humans and animals? A predator could pose a danger to humans. People die each year in animal attacks. Animals can also spread disease, and it seems likely that the COVID pandemic started when a virus made the jump from bats to humans.
Of course, humans are animals too. And we are all part of a larger ecosystem, which has evolved over millions of years, with each species having a role to play. Changing or eliminating those roles can have significant impact on the web of life on the planet.
Beyond that, there is the ethical question: do animals deserve to be treated respectfully? And if the answer is yes, what does that look like? What happens when they inevitably come into conflict with humans?
Related questions: Do animals have rights? Does nature have rights? How are humans like other animals? How are they different? What do we owe the future?
Do We Have Too Much Stuff?
In many ways, our society is based on the idea of buying things. It helps keep our economy active, but does it lead to us having too much stuff?
Having a healthy economy seems to be good for everyone. Companies have the resources to produce goods, workers have money to buy those goods, and owners can turn a profit. Everyone wins, right?
Of course, it is not that simple. One problem we are seeing is that people buy things without necessarily having the money to be able to afford them. Credit, in the form of loans or credit cards, make it all too easy to buy things without necessarily having the money for them.
Another issue is with the environment. Making goods takes resources and energy, and those are available in finite quantities. Our consumer culture is leading to the depletion of natural resources, or environmental devastation in the effort to get more.
The primary problem we are talking about today regards the accumulation of stuff. In a consumer culture, an entire industry has been created around convincing you that you need to buy the latest tech, another car, tchotchkes and doodads of all sorts.
Some people have a problem with hoarding, bringing item after item into their home and never throwing anything out. Others move their excess stuff to a storage locker, if they have too much to fit in the home where they live. Or perhaps things just get dumped in a landfill if we no longer have space.
Is this a real problem in our society? Are we living in an unsustainable way when it comes to our belongings? Or is it just a case of some people having too much disposable income and too little self control?
Related questions: How much is enough? What material possession means the most to you? What possessions of yours will someone want when you die? How many pairs of shoes do you own?
Trail Or Road?
Do you prefer the natural beauty of a trail through the woods, or the smooth road that allows for fast and efficient travel?
Share why if you wish.