Goal: Engage thinkers of all ideologies

SoGES Associate Director of Research and Development, Dr. Gene Kelly, has been asked to write a monthly column for the Fort Collins Coloradoan. We will share Gene's column here with you each month.

Article originally published in the Coloradoan.

We often hear the terms green and sustainable tossed around together with words like business, leaving us to wonder: What do they mean? What do they have to do with me and life here in Colorado?

I think one of the fundamental problems with this language is that the words green and sustainable are often used interchangeably. My personal definition of green is relatively simple: Green means environmentally friendly, or, in one or more ways, our activities place less of a burden on our declining natural resources. Living green to me merely means we are making intelligent use of resources, which includes doing things in ways that use less energy, consuming fewer resources and reducing many of the harmful impacts our activities have on our environment. For example, a very common set of green activities across Colorado involves the three R's: reduce, reuse, recycle. Each of these activities adds to the greening of our communities.

Sustainability encompasses a broader, more long-term view, but at the same time incorporates plenty of right-now activities. Sustainability actually has a more precise meaning that is often obscured, distorted and diluted by the commercialization and marketing of the green movement. Sustainability in the environmental realm is commonly used in sustainable agriculture, or the ability to produce food indefinitely, without causing irreversible damage to ecosystem health. This is something Colorado State University has been pioneering and supporting for years with research, teaching and outreach in close collaboration with our agricultural communities. This partnership has fostered real change over the last century in the way we manage Colorado's agricultural and natural resources.

However, while the concept of sustainability traditionally emphasizes the environment, CSU, like other major universities, is moving in a relatively new direction by recognizing the importance of the three legs of the sustainability stool - environment, economics and social equity - with the formation of the School of Global Environmental Sustainability. We are now poised to gain from lessons learned outside of academia and are beginning to reach out not only to environmental interests but also to social and economic constituencies. Furthermore, we believe this broader and more inclusive view of sustainability is the only way to address the complexity, volatility and ever-broadening spectrum of issues that now influence local and global communities.

Sustainability is far more encompassing than green. Proponents of sustainability agree that without broad interdisciplinary buy-in, it is not a tenable solution to our environmental issues. This, in essence, will be one of CSU's, our city's and our region's major challenges now and in the future.

I am honored to have been asked to write this monthly column for the Coloradoan. I hope along the way to engage readers in a conversation that regardless of our individual political, ideological and professional positions can help lead to increased knowledge of and thoughtful discussion about these and other important issues in our community.

Gene Kelly is a professor of pedology in the College of Agricultural Sciences and associate director of research and development for the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University. Send e-mail to pedoiso@colostate.edu.

The Dirt- a new SoGES affiliated blog

We wanted to pass along some information about a new blog that is being put on by the School of Global Environmental Sustainability's Global Soil Sustainability Working Group. The Dirt will be a great annex from the regular SoGES blog and will focus specifically on soil sustainability issues. Check out their first post by Dr. Rich Conant:

Many have waxed eloquently about the importance of soil (e.g., “The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself” — FDR) or lamented our lack of knowledge about the soil (“We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.” — Leonardo daVinci).

Plan to see a lot of both on this blog!

My goal here is to present the latest scientific information and my thoughts on how that new knowledge fits in with – or contradicts – what we already know. I also want to foster discussion about that new soil science knowledge means for environmental sustainability and human well-being. Soils are at once integrators of diverse ecosystem processes and a fundamental resource that is often taken for granted. We know quite a bit about the world under our feet, but there is still a lot to learn. I hope that this blog facilitates that.

This blog follows fast on the heals of a release of a new documentary – DIRT! The Movie. I haven’t seen it, but I did read the excellent book that was it’s basis: Dirt: the ecstatic skin of the Earth. It is a really good read. It is especially interesting to think about how soil shapes major events like the US civil war. To learn more, visit the PBS DIRT! web site or check out the book from your local library.

On the road in Antarctica: The Secretary’s travel journal

This week we want to share with you a great article by Wayne Clough on his journey to Antarctica, and time spent in the Dry Valleys with Dr. Diana Wall and her research team.

Wayne Clough is the 12th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Since beginning his tenure in July 2008, Secretary Clough has overseen several major openings at the Smithsonian, including the Sant Ocean Hall at the Museum of Natural History and the reopening of the American History Museum. He has initiated long-range planning for the Institution that will define the Smithsonian’s focus for the future

Please check out the article- it is a great inside perspective for those of us who can't make the trip.

Click HERE to read the article.

Photo: From left, Fred Ogden, Steve Koonin, Kristina Johnson, Wayne Clough and Diane Wall at Lake Hoare. (Photo by Tom Peterson)

خداحافظ (xodâhâfez): War, Afghanistan, and the Environment

The woman who watches my children during the day while I am away at work (spreading the word about SoGES and environmental sustainability) is from Afghanistan. I have felt very blessed to find someone who is open to sharing her deep roots to her culture with my children- my 3 year old can speak about 10 words in Persian, and instead of chicken nuggets and french fries for lunch, she regularly has basmati rice with raisins. When I have the chance, I always like to talk to her about her life before America (they came over when Russia invaded Afghanistan in the 1970s) and her culture. Recently she went back to visit her country- to attend the wedding of her son- and as she discussed her trip, you could see sadness behind her eyes. She did not speak much of the war, and the family she has lost, which I’m sure contributed to her heartache, but of how the landscape had so drastically changed from the beautiful green country she remembers from 40 years ago.

This story struck me again this week as the first case study for SoGES’s Educating for Sustainability, Peace and Reconciliation: Managing the Conflicts of Human Needs and Place with Finite Resources Research Working Group came across my desk. In the study, Connecting the Dots of Sustainability, Diversity, and Violence: The “Canaries” in the Afghanistan “Mineshaft,” an article written by Joshua Frank for Truthout, is quoted as describing the clear but neglected connections between the running wars in this region, their devastating impact on the environment, and how seriously the future has been already compromised. Frank writes: “Natural habitat in Afghanistan has endured decades of struggle, and the War on Terror has only escalated the destruction. The lands most afflicted by warfare are home to critters that most Westerners only have a chance to observe behind cages in our city zoos: gazelles, cheetahs, hyenas, Turanian tigers and snow leopards among others. . . As bombs fall, civilians are not the only ones put at risk, and the lasting environmental impacts of the war may not be known for years, perhaps decades, to come.”

For me, it is one thing to read articles that describe the never ending impacts of war on both the human and environmental condition, but it is another to have it described by someone who is truly connected to the devastation.

I feel that the work the Educating for Sustainability, Peace and Reconciliation: Managing the Conflicts of Human Needs and Place with Finite Resources Research Working Group is doing is critical to providing another level of understanding to the devastation war can take on a country, their culture, and their people. Our environment is such a part of who we are and when that is destroyed - as quickly and in such a destructive manner as war - what does that do to the psyche of an entire culture?

The Research Working Group raises other important questions:

Where are the environmental activists on these issues of war and violence? When will the diversity advocates connect their arguments to the larger issues of biodiversity that underlie all life? How can the advocates for peace and reconciliation broaden their base and build bridges to both the environmental and the multicultural movements?

When my daughter waves خداحافظ (xodâhâfez - goodbye) to the cheetah at the Denver Zoo, these thoughts will resonate with me...another way of viewing the destruction of war, and its impacts on future generations – when will something be done?


Read the full case study: Connecting the Dots of Sustainability, Diversity, and Violence: The “Canaries” in the Afghanistan “Mineshaft” in the January edition of the SoGES Scholars Newsletter to be published later this month. Join our mailing list to be notified when it is out.

Blog written by Kerri McDermid, School of Global Environmental Sustainability

New farm tactics urged to stem climate's impact on food supply

Although it has been posted for several weeks now, we recently ran across an article in The Globe and Mail, discussing climate change and global food supply. One of the things that was most interesting about this article is that they provided a sampling from the CGIAR (the food-security arm of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) wish list, that states what we can start doing now to slow down or prevent further obstacles to feeding world populations.

-------------------------------

Here is their wish list:

Water
In developing countries, 70 per cent to 90 per cent of total water use is devoted to agriculture. Technologies such as water harvesting, better storage, use of wastewater and drip irrigation must be more widely employed, particularly in the southern-hemisphere countries where temperature increases will have the most dramatic effects.

Crops
With less water, higher temperatures and more people, farmers will need to grow more with less. Stress-tolerant varieties of staple crops such as maize, potato and rice are already available, and more advanced varieties are on the way, including drought-tolerant beans and flood-tolerant rice. The key is getting more of the new, high-powered seeds into fields everywhere, including poor and hungry countries.

Soils
Teaching farmers in vulnerable countries how to increase the organic nutrient content in soil is also critical to the success of the new-age, hardier crops, and for realizing the potential for plants to hold carbon. Key options are advocating "conservation agriculture," in which soil is minimally disturbed, and "eco-farming," which promotes planting of several crop varieties to achieve ecological balance in the field.

Pests and diseases
Balmier year-round temperatures are expected to breed new pests and give familiar seasonal bugs lengthier lives. Computer models to predict the impact of temperature increases on pests will add a degree of predictability to where and when outbreaks are likely to happen, so strategies such as breeding disease-resistant crops can be implemented in advance.

Livestock
Raising livestock - from producing feed to end-stage processing - already accounts for about 18 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Demand for meat and milk protein is on an upswing in developing countries in spite of the ever-looming climate crunch. Breeding more efficient and less-methane-producing animals can lessen the public health toll.

Fish
As climate change puts pressure on other food sources, people are expected to eat more fish. But an over-reliance on aquaculture also poses dangers. Pilot projects are investigating ways to mitigate the risks of over-fishing, develop salt-tolerant fish varieties (to increase supply) and help farmers diversify by adding fish farms, which can help water and feed livestock.

-----------------------

Their wish list really is comprised of things that we can start doing now. These are in no means an answer to all of our problems, but they are certainly a step in the right direction.

Original Globe and Mail article written by Jessica Leeder, and published on 12/10/2009.

The Other Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis in Global Land Use

The Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota tackles global food security through looking at global land use issues. In October, Jon Foley, director of the Institute wrote a very thought provoking piece for Yale's E360 magazine, which inspired this great video on the subject:

Soils and Food: SoGES develops new working group

As Americans prepares for their Thanksgiving dinners this week, it is interesting to walk through the grocery store and see so many people with carts filled to the brim containing potatoes, butter, squash, turkey, and bread. As we consume our big meal of excess, how many people’s dinner conversations will drift to food security in future years? As Americans, these are things we don’t think usually about- especially this time of the year- but this is not necessarily the case on other parts of the world.

We’ve spent our last few blog posts discussing climate refugees and climate change, and the impact it will eventually bring to our own supermarkets and dinner tables. This week again, we can’t stop thinking about how much climate change is currently effecting populations and food supplies- although for now, mainly in the developing world. When looking at soil degradation related to climate change, global hotspots of soil degradation with a high priority for soil restoration and carbon sequestration include Sub-Saharan Africa, central and south Asia, China, the Andean region, the Caribbean, and the acid savannas of South America. As stated in R. Lal’s viewpoint paper, ‘poor farmers have passed on their suffering to the land through extractive practices. They cultivate marginal soils with marginal inputs, produce marginal yields, and perpetuate marginal living and poverty.’

On this thought, we have worked to pool together Colorado State University’s extensive intellectual resources on this subject and created our first Soil Sustainability Working Group. Recognizing the issues regarding soils and food security, the Soil Sustainability Working Group aims to transform the information topology of soil science and enable scientists to more effectively test theories and advance knowledge. Understanding soil dynamics is fundamental to dealing with environmental issues such as climate change, food and energy production, clean drinking water, management of reactive nitrogen, and conservation of biodiversity. The working group is comprised of seven experts in the field of soil sciences and will leverage the diverse strengths of Colorado State University scientists by coordinating research activities and providing a platform that integrates soil data from disparate sources to facilitate more productive interaction between soil scientists and decision-makers.

Soil Sustainability Working Group Members

Diana Wall from the School of Global Environmental Sustainability
Rich Conant from the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory
Francesca Cotrufo from Department of Soil and Crop Sciences
Gene Kelly from the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences
Keith Paustian from Department of Soil and Crop Sciences
Lee Sommers from the Agricultural Experiment Station
Joe von Fischer from the Department of Biology