Area of Research: Forests, Farms and Materials
Worthless Nature
Thanks to Marian Tupy for republishing Jesse Ausubel’s short essay, We Must Make Nature Worthless, in Human Progress.
Peak stuff?
Fred Pearce writes about our exploration of whether humanity is nearing peak use of stuff in this article in Anthropocene magazine: Are We Approaching Peak Stuff? Almost imperceptibly, we are stepping off the consumption treadmill
Potato and Prius
We post ‘The Potato and the Prius,’ the January 2018 keynote address by Jesse Ausubel to the Potato Business Summit of the United Potato Growers of America.
2018 Potato Summit
Jesse Ausubel will present the keynote address to the 2018 Potato Business Summit of the United Potato Growers of America at Potato Expo, 8am Wednesday 10 January. The slides and video are linked at www.potatobusinesssummit.com
Toward landless agriculture talk at Wash DC natural history museum
Jesse Ausubel will give a free seminar open to the public Wednesday 6 December 2017 in Washington DC at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History on landless agriculture and rebounding nature.
New Harvest conference
Alan visited the second annual New Harvest conference on cellular agriculture in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which included a variety of talks and exhibits on the science and broader implications of manufacturing food in vitro (from cell culture), as opposed to in vivo (from plants and animals). Technological advances have been achieved in growth media, more “lifelike” tissue engineering, and novel bioreactors designed to “brew” meat. Remaining challenges include the ability to successfully match the taste, texture, and cost of conventionally-sourced meat- and plant-based foods, as well as successfully scaling-up production processes. R&D is spread among a variety of corporate startups (e.g., Memphis Meats, Finless Foods), traditional academic labs (e.g., Tufts, NC State), and citizen science efforts (Shojinmeat Project).
Shrinking footprint of meat in US
“The Shrinking Footprint of American Meat” by Iddo Wernick and Jesse Ausubel is published by The Breakthrough Institute. We estimate that between 1969 and 2014 the amount of cropland used for raising land meat for Americans fell by nearly a third: around 9 million acres, about the size of Maryland. The data used for the calculation can be found here.
Using different Feed Conversion Ratios (FCRs) for the calculation yields different results for the amount of cropland used (or spared). For a detailed discussion of the factors involved in converting animal feed into animal live weight and edible meat, see Smil, Vaclav, 2013, Should We Eat Meat? Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory, Wiley-Blackwell.
Taipei Acer Meeting
On 4 January 2017, PHE Researcher Iddo Wernick delivered the keynote address ‘Creating a circular economy: The challenges and opportunities presented by Technology Metals for future business‘ kicking off a conference on the topic of Sustainable Resource Management organized by Acer Inc., in Taipei, Taiwan. Iddo also gave a talk on ‘Conflict Minerals and Tantalum’ from the perspective of Supply Chain managers in the electronics industry. Below are some pictures of the event.
Lux interview with Jesse Ausubel
Paul Kedrosky and Sam Arbesman of venture capital firm Lux posted a podcast in their Intersections series of an interview with Jesse Ausubel about energy and resources, transportation and food.