"the whole biosphere is in trouble"

Are there too many people on Earth?  Probably!

Can we feed them all?  Yes, but with great damage to the planet itself:

"Even if another 4 billion people were added to the planet, as was being predicted at the time, Lam felt confident they could be fed. At last month’s webinar, he pointed out that population growth had slowed since 2011, with the addition of about 850 million people since then, while poverty had continued to decline and per capita food production had continued to increase. This was true even in sub-Saharan Africa, where food production lagged behind population growth until the last decade.

Becker, of Johns Hopkins University, objected both in 2011 and a decade on, not that it was impossible to feed 11 billion people, but that this prospect ignored the collateral damage to other species and to the planet for which humans would eventually pay. He pointed to Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics showing that nearly 70% of fisheries are already fully or over-exploited. Others mentioned the shrinking stock of fresh water and the erosion of biodiversity. 'The whole biosphere is in trouble,' Becker said."

Humans are very good at adapting, but not so good at recognizing larger, long-term threats.  There's plenty of room for more innovation, but innovation will always have limits. 

"the smarts in cities are always going to remain human"

Kim Stanley Robinson on what cities need to do to fight climate catastrophe:

"Talk of 'smart cities' is a little bit overblown, part of the AI craze, because the smarts in cities are always going to remain human. But a highly systematized, quantified, and automated coordination of city functions, not just transport but also inputs and outputs of all kinds of supplies and wastes, will help cities achieve the good efficiencies necessary to make them superior in carbon-burn terms.

Even after we transition to carbon neutrality or turn carbon-negative, the multiple levels of coordination necessary for cities to work will benefit from conscious study and design, extensive recording systems, quantification, and, yes, computers. The city will not become a computer, or even much like a computer, but it will use computers. The climate gains from this effort in system coordination will include a reduction in wasted resources, unnecessary transport, and recycling failures."

I love the fact that while Robinson never hesitates to tell us how bad things are, he's also never short of ideas to mitigate and hopefully solve the problem of our Earth becoming too damn hot. 

Hoping For Better in 2020 And Beyond

Darlene Love, "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)"

I've linked the incredible last Letterman appearance version of this song plenty of times on this here blog, so as we enter 2020 let's go with Phil Spector's original.  Ms. Love's dynamic vocal range actually comes through a bit better here.  (Hell, even Bono is capable of good taste sometimes.)

Grading is finished.  In typical Because Korea style, I was not informed of a pretty significant change to our grading curve policy.  This means next week I'll be getting some angry calls from students who deserved "A"s but will end up with "B+"s.

I'm still planning on going downtown tomorrow night for Christmas Eve beers, with a tentative plan to meet up with my boss and his family for coffee.  I'll call my sister, and then my dad even though it's stressful to think he might ask me about impeachment.

Every year I usually buy myself something nice as a present and this time around, I was honestly stumped.  I'd like to think my recent interest in minimalist survival videos had something to do with it (not kidding!), and I can always use a new pair of jeans or a dress shirt.  But in terms of, say, a 250-400 dollar indulgent purchase for myself, I just wasn't feeling it.  (Last year it was a Freitag messenger bag which honestly I haven't used that much.)

I mean, the world is literally on fire.  Peace on earth and goodwill towards all but Jesus, are we really going to make it to 2030 without major civil wars, resource-based wars, and massive depopulation events, animal, human, and otherwise?  I honestly doubt it.

So Merry Christmas from South Korea, for what it's worth.  We all deserve better than the last few years, that's for damn sure.  Stay healthy, and keep fighting despite the fact that the worst is yet to come.

"not just by guns and the police, by all sorts of structural violence"

Cleveland is home to one of many urban "food deserts" throughout America.  A group of local activists are taking positive steps to change things for the better:

"'People of colour are constantly under attack, and not just by guns and the police, by all sorts of structural violence like corruption, food deserts, educational and health inequalities,' said Amanda King, founder of Shooting without Bullets, an arts and social justice organization in Cleveland.

Rid-All’s ethos is community building through education and experience: over the past decade, hundreds of Clevelanders – mostly African American men – have completed its urban farming training programmes, including most recently a group of veterans with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Aided by an army of volunteer sustainability converts, the farm has become a community hub, hosting vegetarian food festivals, weddings, cooking classes, school visits and guided tours."

There's a lot to cheer for here, obviously.  And this was a relatively tough article for some of my students, since one of the great things about Korea is that you can find fresh, cheap produce being sold on sidewalk corners easily, or even in roving blue Bongo trucks.  (The stinky ones sell fresh seafood, even.)  The idea of a blighted neighborhood with no fresh produce options is simply unthinkable throughout the developed world, except America.

Nobody should have to struggle for access to reasonably affordable, fresh produce, especially children who are developing eating habits (good or bad) for life.

Sock It To 'Em, G.T.

Esther Wang on the obvious misogyny (and general creepiness) of the older men who criticize Greta Thunberg:

"'Climate change disproportionately affects women and girls around the world—they are more likely to be displaced, more likely to be living in poverty and thus more vulnerable to climate change’s destabilizing effects. It is also women and girls who are leading the global movement to ensure a livable future.'

Yet to conservatives, climate change activism has become wrapped up in the so-called 'war on men,' and Thunberg, as well as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with her championing of the Green New Deal, have come to symbolize all that they fear to lose. But for all their whining and their rage, as Thunberg said on Monday before the United Nations, 'The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.'”

And let's be honest -- "shut up and put on a dress, little girl" isn't criticism at all, it's the desperate plea of men who can't handle strong, smart women.  (Of any age.)

Eating For The Planet

Going vegetarian or even vegan used to be considered as promoting a greener, healthier individual lifestyle.  With global warming coming in faster than anyone ever imagined, it now may be a moral imperative to save the planet and human civilization as well:

"'The planetary health diet is based on really hard epidemiological evidence, where researchers followed large cohorts of people for decades,' said Marco Springmann at Oxford University and part of the commission. 'It so happens that if you put all that evidence together you get a diet that looks similar to some of the healthiest diets that exist in the real world.'

The report acknowledges the radical change it advocates and the difficulty of achieving it: 'Humanity has never aimed to change the global food system on the scale envisioned. Achieving this goal will require rapid adoption of numerous changes and unprecedented global collaboration and commitment: nothing less than a Great Food Transformation.'”

My New Year's resolution was to cut down on meat and go up on fruit and veg intake.

And I'm not sure if there's a harder place to do this than in South Korea.  Especially outside of more progressive cities like Seoul, vegetarianism just isn't happening.  Daegu has a couple of vegan joints with mediocre food and terrible service that happen to be run by a literal cult, so that doesn't help much either.  Indeed, the idea of a "salad" as a whole meal unto itself rather than a side-dish is anathema.

Baby steps, I guess.  There is a really good juice bar near my office, and I've come to like plain tofu with kimchi on top for a quick and very cheap lunch or dinner.  (If we're getting technical, kimchi is not vegetarian, but I think the food gods will forgive me if it's that or a can of Spam.)

So like everyone and everything else, I'm workin' on it.