Voices & Stories From a Warm Wet Planet

Podcast (the-green-blues-show): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

GPM Edition # 9

We’ve all heard it before: To avoid impending Earth crisis (if it isn’t too late), people need to change their eating habits. Those who have the choice, should opt to eat food grown or raised close to home.

Go for unpackaged, unprocessed food products. They contain less embodied carbon than products wrapped in cardboard, plastic or tin.

Grilled Meat (David Kattenburg)

And, experts says, eat less meat. Takes lots of energy to grow meat. Livestock production generates lots of CO2 and methane, and “leaks” nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment.

Aside from all this, people who get to eat probably eat too much. So says Allan Buckwell, a British agricultural economist. Turning to a concept associated with Swedish theorist Stefan Rockström, Will Steffen and other Earth scientists, Buckwell co-authored a 2018 paper entitled What is the Safe Operating Space for EU livestock.

Emeritus Professor Allan Buckwell taught agricultural economics at Newcastle University and Wye College, in the UK. He was Policy Director of the Country Land and Business Association, and is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for European Environmental Policy.

I spoke with Allan Buckwell about food consumption. Listen to today’s podcast. Click on the audio bar above, or go here.

Mention the word bacteria, some people recoil in horror. Truth be told, most prokaryotes are perfectly harmless, and even helpful. Better yet, bugs are fun to grow, observe, play with and harness for useful purposes – outside and inside your body.

In today’s podcast edition, Dutch microbiologist Marjan Smeulders shows off the mixed cultures she and her students assemble. Winogradsky columns, they’re called, after the Ukrainian microbiologist, ecologist and soil scientist Sergei Winogradsky.  Easy to assemble.

Marjan Smeulders in incubation room, Winogradsky columns at her side (David Kattenburg)

Winogradsky column in a soft drink bottle (David Kattenburg)

Listen to today’s podcast. Click on the audio bar above, or go here.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem. Gotta say it twice.

Gilo settlement, seen from Beit Jala, separating Beit Jala and Bethlehem from Jerusalem (David Kattenburg)

The “eternal, undivided capital” of what a growing number of credible observers call an apartheid state. Under Article 7(2)(h) of the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Apartheid is defined as an “institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

In search of Israeli Apartheid, go no further than East Jerusalem. Home to 362,000 indigenous Palestinians and 234,000 Jewish settlers, transferred into East Jerusalem, across the Green Line, beyond Israel’s legal borders, in flagrant breach of international law.

Demolished Palestinian home in Al-Walaja, south of Jerusalem (David Kattenburg)

East Jerusalem’s Jewish settlers get all the breaks. The Palestinians get surveilled, humiliated, harassed, arrested, attacked and shot, no questions asked.

Their homes get confiscated, or bulldozed.

Israel’s aim? To get rid of them, thereby boosting Jewish demographics, in ‘Judaized’ East Jerusalem.

Israeli flag and surveillance cameras above Jewish colony in Palestinian Silwan (David Kattenburg)

I toured East Jerusalem with a chap named Shai Goren. Goren is a teacher and tour guide with the progressive Israeli group Ir Amim. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the audio bar above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger — once again — for the wonderful guitar instrumentals in the GPM podcast.