Arctic Stronghold of World’s Seeds Flooded After Permafrost Melts

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No seeds were lost but the ability of the rock vault to provide failsafe protection against all disasters is now threatened by climate change. It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel. The vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and contains almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an important food crop. When it was opened in 2008, the deep permafrost through which the vault was sunk was expected to provide “failsafe” protection against “the challenge of natural or man-made disasters”. But soaring temperatures in the Arctic at the end of the world’s hottest ever recorded year led to melting and heavy rain, when light snow should have been falling. “It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,” said Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government, which owns the vault. […]

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Bumblebees Across America are Dying but What is the Cause?

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Bumblebees are dying all over the world — the United States has even added one species of bee to the endangered species list as of the beginning of 2017. Why are bumblebees dying, and what sort of impact will that have on agriculture? Colony collapse disorder is one of the main things being blamed for the drop in bumble bee populations. This occurs when the worker bees disappear from a bee hive — the queen and immature bees are left behind, but there are no workers left to collect food. Without the food resources provided by worker bees, a hive cannot survive, so the immature bees and the queen eventually die off, causing the whole structure of the hive to collapse. Other than eliminating the pesticides that are killing our bees, how can you help protect the bees that make our produce section possible? Here are three ways.

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An Immodest Proposal: Make America Beautiful Again

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Communications strategist and linguist George Lakoff has often warned that the Left communicates through policies and the presentation of factual data while the Right deals in moral themes and a focus on values. Lakoff has suggested that campaigns must appeal to a moral vision, and one that understands the needs and longings that are common to all of us. As for policies, he would focus on themes and legislation that can simultaneously address many of these common needs and longings. He calls such campaigns “strategic initiatives” and, a decade ago, pointed to one — the Apollo Project, a major investment in alternative energy that would simultaneously have created jobs and challenged climate change. A new suggested initiative for progressives is a “Make America Beautiful Again” campaign which is first a jobs program.

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Cheers to This: Beer That’s Good for the Climate

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Long Root Ale, a pale ale hitting the market from Patagonia Provisions and Hopworks Urban Brewery, is sustainably brewed and made with organic ingredients, but that’s not what sets it apart. The big difference here is in the grains—and the farming practices behind them. While most beer is brewed with malted barley or wheat that is grown in an annual rotation—meaning the grains are planted every spring, harvested in the fall, to be repeated the following year—Long Root Ale is the first beer to incorporate Kernza, a perennial grain. Once planted, this “superwheat“ derived from an ancient form of intermediate wheatgrass can remain in the ground for years at a time.

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Paul Stamets Holds The Patent That Could Destroy Monsanto And Change The World!

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In 2006, a patent was granted to a man named Paul Stamets. Though Paul is the world’s leading mycologist, his patent has received very little attention and exposure. Why is that? Stated by executives in the pesticide industry, this patent represents “the most disruptive technology we have ever witnessed.” And when the executives say disruptive, they are referring to it being disruptive to the chemical pesticides industry.

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Agriculture: Then, Now & What the Future Holds

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In a society that has gotten used to disposing of the last-greatest for the latest and greatest, there is one thing most Americans forget won’t be replaced by the newest, fastest gadget or application. Something as incredible and beautiful as planet Earth. After all, it’s the Earth that provides the food that we eat. What we need to consider is how we produce this food. Sustainable agriculture is the answer to a world that commonly uses pesticides and pollutants to produce the crops that we take for granted. Unfortunately, the price may be too high for the planet to pay.

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The Humane Eating Project App Makes Eating Ethically and Eco-Friendly, Easy

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How can we make informed eating choices when dining out at restaurants? There is a mobile app called The Humane Eating Project that can help consumers know whether or not a restaurant is serving ethically raised and eco-friendly, animal products. Produced by the non-profit animal welfare charity America For Animals, the app helps you to locate humane dining options in your locality – a nearby restaurant selling humanely-raised meat dishes, for example, or an eatery where meals are made using free range eggs.

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The Greenhouse of the Future — Grow Your Own Food Year-Round With This Revolutionary System

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With drought, economic instability, erratic weather and interruptions in transportation a very real threat, it really doesn’t take much to have the food supply disrupted. As the famous proverb says: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Taking this proverb and running with it, a team of innovators from Quebec, Canada have developed an eco-friendly and exceptionally cost-effective solution to our food woes — The Greenhouse of the Future. Combining the principles of Earthships, aquaponics and passive solar greenhouses, Gendron — along with friends, Christian Désilets and Curt Close — designed and built a radically different food growing system. Not wholly surprising, they christened it The Greenhouse of the Future.

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One Revolutionary Company Composts the Mountains Of Food Waste Left From Festivals

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People go to music festivals for a lot of reasons: to see their favorite bands, to burnish their Instagram feed, to sweatily camp out under the stars. But a group of volunteers came to the recent Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee for a fairly unique reason: to save uneaten food from being thrown out and sent to landfills. A group of 300 volunteers managed by Clean Vibes, a waste management company that works with dozens of music festivals to make them more environmentally friendly, spent the four days of the June festival helping to compost 230,000 pounds of food that was left over from caterers or that vendors were unable to sell. The volunteers received free tickets in exchange for their work.

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Kids Say Commercials Make Them Pester Parents for Junk Food

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Television commercials featuring the Kool-Aid Man, the newest cereal flavor, or McDonald’s latest Happy Meal toy are common sights during Saturday-morning cartoons. But two studies published last week suggest that the barrage of junk-food advertisements on television is a driving factor behind rising childhood obesity levels. Some health experts believe the days of junk-food advertisements being shown during times children are probably watching should come to an end.

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