Rockefeller University

Program for the Human Environment

Area of Research: Forests, Farms and Materials

Podcast with Jesse Ausubel

Jesse reflects on decarbonization, dematerialization, land-sparing, industrial ecology, industrialization of the oceans, biological traces of fishes and of Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Seven Deadly Sins in an 83″ podcast with Robert Bryce, author of Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: and A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations.

The Podcast is also on YouTube where you get to see who sings Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

Plant and animal diversity is declining, but what about microbial diversity?

Spurred by PHE Guest Investigator and microbiologist David Thaler’s publication, “Is global microbial biodiversity increasing, decreasing, or staying the same?” , David and Jesse Ausubel co-author a 900-word essay raising the question of what’s happening to microbes in RealClear Science.

Quantifying forest change in the European Union

Iddo Wernick, our long-time collaborator Pekka Kauppi, and other forestry experts published Quantifying forest change in the European Union in Nature vol 592 pages E13–E14 (2021). The authors argue that net carbon stored in the EU continues to increase as forest volume accumulates faster than additions to (and fluctuations in) the annual harvest.

For some of our earlier forest work, see PNAS publishes Forests paper and Quandaries of forest area, volume, biomass, and carbon explored with the forest identity.

Precision agriculture in Wall Street Journal

Robert Paarlberg’s article “The Environmental Upside of Modern Farming” cites our work about land-sparing. Rob has just published a new book Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat.

We continue to follow the achievements of farmers. Corn yields have gone insane.  Average USA yields have continued the gradual climb to about 170 bushels/acre or 12 tons/ha. Peak yields have soared.  The National Corn Yield contest in the conventional category  was 476 bpa or 32 tph in 2020. In 2019 however, David Hula and Randy Dowdy, doing some unconventional things, got to ~600 bpa or more than 40 tph.

At yields this high, the question is what to do with the product – vast surpluses and low prices are not good for farmers.  The amounts are so immense that they must become hamburgers and ethanol, but if we wanted polenta, we could release enormous amounts of land for Nature. The incentive to lift yields further is probably going to be weak the next few decades.  It would not surprise us to find corn farmers stay on a plateau now for a couple of decades until humans figure out what to do with all the product.  This may not be true of some other crops.

The Dutch greenhouses are another important story, another big step toward what in the 1980s we started calling Landless Agriculture. This National Geographic story 2017 shows the importance of greenhouses.  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/ .

The potential for land-sparing, for E O Wilson’s Half Earth strategy remains very real.

COVID & The World Interview with Jesse Ausubel

The website Human Progress launches a new video series called The Covid Tonic. The series features conversations between renowned scholars and editor, Marian L. Tupy. The interviews focus on the global impact of COVID-19 and the continued importance of rational optimism. Episode 1 features the environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel, a Human Progress Board Member and Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University in New York City. 


Watch the full video here.