I’ve just finished reading the blue plate a food lover’s guide to climate chaos by Mark Easter and published by Patagonia.

Here are some thoughts and some interesting links raised in the book.

• If Society use just 1% of GDP on climate Solutions instead of slightly more than 0% we’d not only reach net zero but we’d lower temperatures by 2050.
• Can we transform agriculture from A system that literally consumes the planet to one that nurtures and respects this home that is all we will ever know? Can we cultivate from the earth meals that’s nourish us rather than the earth being the meal itself?
• Consider the simple act of a tractor dragging a plow through a field. The carbon bled into the atmosphere from that radically disturbed soil far exceeds the greenhouse gases from the diesel fuel burned in that tractor engine. Modern electrical grids and pumps make it possible for livestock feeding operations to store trillions of gallons of liquid manure in open Lakes. Emissions from these lagoons rank in the top tier of globally missions. Food waste once a relative rarity accumulates at the rate of hundreds of millions of tons per year in the oxygen depleted depths of town dumps. The methane emissions from these dumps for exceeds those from the diesel fuel burned to transport and bury the food there in the first place.
• The vast store houses of carbon currently in the soil in forests and in the fossil fuel reserves must be left where they are it is increasingly clear that there is now little margin for error in creating a zero carbon emission Future. Keep it in the ground has become a mantra for agriculture. Humanity must stop clearing any remaining forests and grasslands to make fields or passages to raise food. We must make do with the fields and pastures we already have. We must also leverage the billions of acres of crops forests pastors and rangeland to pull more carbon from the atmosphere into the soil and keep it there.
• It is possible to farm for carbon drawdown rather than the carbon loss of so much of current bad farming practice.
• The Contribution of Spawning Pacific-salmon to Nitrogen Fertility and Vegetation Nutrition during Riparian Primary Succession on an Expansive Floodplain of a Large River
• A sustainable farmed seafood future might look like this. Fish raised in fully enclosed recirculating tanks to protect wild fish from fish escapes and to eliminate pollution releases into local water sheds nourished by a sustainable feed based on flies powered by renewable energy and near population Centers.
• Recirculating aquaculture systems resolve many of the problems present in aquaculture but their potentially high carbon footprint can make them a mixed bag.
• The best low carbon choices for seafood are farmed mussels followed by farmed oysters clams and scallops.
• “Climate Change Is Already Killing Us: How Our Warmer and Wetter Planet Is Getting Sicker and Deadlier by the Day,” Foreign Affairs (September 2019), viewed on April 21, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-09-23/climatechange-already-killing-us
• “Climate change,” Fact Sheets, World Health Organization, 2018, https://www.who.int/newsroom/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health.
• 5 Steven T. Summerfelt and Brian J. Vinci, “Better Management Practices for Recirculating Aquaculture Systems,” in Environmental Best Management Practices for Aquaculture, ed. Craig S. Tucker and John Hargreaves (Wiley Online Books, 2008), 389–426, https://doi.org/10.1002/9780813818672.ch10.
• “Best Practices for Finfish Aquaculture in Connecticut,” CT Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Aquaculture, 2023, https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DOAG/Aquaculture/Aquaculturepermitting-and-guidance/Best-Management-Practices-for-Finfish-Aquaculture-in-CT.pdf.
• When combined the greenhouse gas emissions from facilities that make fertilizer like that around the world produced more emissions than the total impact of the 65 lowest emitting countries in the world
• Nitrogen fertilizers contribute about 2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases annually to the atmosphere which is about 4% of the world’s total carbon footprint and 1/6 of foods carbon footprint. Farmer’s apply more fertilizer to corn than any other crop
• Raising meat and especially meets from cattle sheep and goats creates more emissions by a factor between 10 and 50 then any other food source except shrimp farmed in clear cut mangrove forests
• The dairy industry alone accounts for 5% of the world’s total carbon footprint.
• If stored in a lagoon the manure from a relatively typical industrial dairy of 1,000 cows produces the same emissions in the year as more than 4,500 typical American cars.
  one cow equals 4.5 cars.
• . If the United States went grocery shopping we would leave the store with five bags and drop two in the parking lot. And leave them there. Seems crazy but we do it every day.
• Carbon storing soil protecting perennial grains are becoming more profitable than unsustainable annual crops and farmers are taking them up. Growing food in agricultural ecosystems that mimic perennial diverse natural ecosystems has the potential to reverse problems that have plagued agriculture since its beginnings
• No apparent downsides to carbon sequestration and reducing emissions have emerged in decades of research into carbon farming
• Bronson Griscom et al., “Natural climate solutions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 114, no. 44 (October 2017):11645–11650, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1710465114. 274 Keith Paustian, Johannes Lehmann, Stephen Ogle, David Reay, G. Philip Robertson, and Pete Smith, “Climate-smart soils,” Nature 532 (April 2016): 49–57, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17174.
• Follett et al., Carbon Sequestration and Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Agriculture: Challenges and Opportunities, CAST Task Force Report R142 (October 2011), https://www.castscience.org/publication/carbon-sequestration-and-greenhouse-gas-fluxes-in-agriculturechallenges-and-opportunities/.
• Kathleen Dean Moore, “How Big Oil is manipulating the way you think about climate change,” Commentary, Salon, May 13, 2023, https://www.salon.com/2023/05/13/how-big-oil-ismanipulating-the-way-you-think-about-climate-change/.

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