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	Feeding People on a Stressed Planet will require a ''Revolution'' by American Geophysical Union, agencies USA   Feeding People on a Stressed Planet will require a ''Revolution'', writes Brian Bienkowski, for Environmental Health News.   Two renowned scientists—Stanford''s Paul Ehrlich and UC-Berkeley''s John Harte — argue that feeding the planet goes way beyond food. Revolutionary political, economic and social shifts are necessary to avoid unprecedented chaos.   How do you make sure billions of people around the world have access to food? You start a revolution.   At least that’s what two leading U.S. scientists argue in a new report. Feeding people will require cleaner energy, smarter farming and women’s rights, but also a “fundamental cultural change,” according to Paul Ehrlich, president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, and University of California, Berkeley, professor and researcher John Harte.   “What is obvious to us is ... that if humanity is to avoid a calamitous loss of food security, a fast, society-pervading sea-change as dramatic as the first agricultural revolution will be required,” they wrote in their report published last week in the International Journal of Environmental Studies.   The amount of humans on Earth is growing—projections point to an extra 2.5 billion people by 2020. But tangled within the problem of more hungry mouths is environmental degradation, social injustice and humans pushing toward the very boundaries of the planet when it comes to resources such as food, water and energy, according to Ehrlich and Harte.   For many people across the world growing, buying or finding food is a daily struggle. More than 800 million people are estimated to be malnourished, according to the United Nations. Billions don’t have stable, secure access to food.   “Some people say the whole problem is too many people and other people say it’s misdistribution of the crops we grow,” Ehrlich said in an interview. “They’re both right but this can’t be fixed by dealing with only one end of the problem.”   Scientists for too long have been looking at how to feed the world in “fragments,” Ehrlich said.   “Some look at solving food problems with crops grown in higher temperatures; some look at reducing waste,” he said. “It’s crystal clear that none of the things that need to be done are being done on a scale that would be helpful.”   It’s not just about pumping out more crops or reducing the amount of people. “Planning for a sustainable and effective food production system will surely require heeding constraints from nature,” Ehrlich and Harte wrote.   They argue that economic equality, population growth and environmental health are all linked. Governments must address the whole system to avoid future famine.   This means limiting greenhouse gases that warm the planet, avoiding biodiversity losses and reducing populations, they say. It means cutting back on all of the pesticides and antibiotics used to grow food. It means moving climate change to the top of political agendas and ending incentives to pull fossil fuels out of the ground.   As the planet’s population grows, environmental issues will grow too, Ehrlich said.   "We need to get a grip on population," Harte added. But addressing climate change will be a “critical issue.”   “Nothing is worse for future food security than a future climate with more extreme events like droughts, floods,” Harte said.   Harte pointed to the ongoing California drought as an example. A University of California, Davis, report in June estimated that, in 2015, the drought would cost the California farm industry $2.7 billion and 18,000 jobs.   Solutions, like challenges, are intertwined Ehrlich and Harte say. But they exist. Ehrlich said a good start in addressing population growth would be full women’s rights, including access to contraceptives and abortions. For agriculture, it’s a “big shift” toward organic farming, getting rid of large industrial farms that rely on pesticides.   Harte said curbing continued climate change has two natural solutions: the wind and the sun. He said expanding wind and solar farms combined with greater efficiency in electricity use is entirely possible.   “Germany is much less sunny than most of the United States, and they’re approaching almost half of all electricity production from renewables," Harte said. "There’s no reason we can’t too.”   Underlying all this, the two say, is a fundamental shift in people’s values, including a turn away from everything being driven by financial interests. Instead, they write, society''s focus should shift to “resilience, a striving for virtue, equitable distribution, and extreme vigilance to insure that governance is working in parallel, not in opposition, to achieve these goals.”   In other words, a revolution. Ehrlich and Harte are optimistic about the solutions. But when it comes to the full-scale revolution, not so much.   “U.S. Congress is ruled by a majority that doesn’t want to listen to facts.... Most don’t believe in science,” Harte said. “They don’t understand the magnitude of the threat civilization is facing.   “If they listened to engineers and scientists and did the right thing, I’d be optimistic. There are solutions out there.”   http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2015/aug/food-security-planet-planetary-boundaries-climate-change-agriculture-farming-organic-solutions-revolution   01 May 2015   American Republicans latest attempt to stymie climate research   Republicans in the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on Thursday voted to slash NASA spending on the branch that studies climate change issues.   According to news reports, the NASA authorization proposal, passed along party lines, would cut between $300-500 million in funding to NASA''s Earth Sciences division, which researches the planet''s natural systems and processes—including climate change, severe weather, and glaciers. The bill will now go to the full House for a vote.   The vote follows the committee''s decision to cut the [National Science Foundation]''s geoscience budget and comes after a prominent attack on NASA''s Earth sciences work during a Senate hearing.   In a statement released Thursday, the space agency''s administrator Charles Bolden said the proposal "guts our Earth science program and threatens to set back generations worth of progress in better understanding our changing climate, and our ability to prepare for and respond to earthquakes, droughts, and storm events."   Other scientists have added their own criticisms. In a letter to the committee, the head of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) said that group is "extremely concerned" about the funding cuts.   "The research performed and supported by the [NASA] division helps us understand the world we live in and provide a basis for knowledge and understanding of natural hazards, weather forecasting, air quality, and water availability, among other concerns," wrote AGU executive director Christine W. McEntee. "The applicability of these missions cannot be overstated given their impact on your constituents."   Astronomer Phil Plait, agreed that "the evisceration of Earth sciences means this bill is seriously, critically flawed."   Several Democratic lawmakers have also expressed their opposition to the spending cuts.   U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), the House committee''s ranking member, wrote this week: In addition to other problems in the bill, it cuts earth science funding by more than $320 million. Earth science, of course, includes climate science. Despite the fact that in January NASA announced 2014 was likely the warmest year since 1880, it should come as no surprise that the majority wants to cut funding for climate science. Embarrassingly, just last week, every single Republican member of this committee present voted against the notion that climate change might be caused by people.   In an analysis published by the Washington Post, Dr. Marshall Shepherd, professor of atmospheric sciences and geography at the University of Georgia and 2013 president of the American Meteorological Society, wrote:   As the former deputy project scientist for the Global Precipitation Measurement mission, I assure you that the level of cuts proposed for NASA’s earth sciences program would not only harm but end many programs. The engineering, ground systems, science, and support work of NASA earth science missions is supported by some of the most vibrant private aerospace and science-technology companies in the world.   "More importantly," Shepherd continued, "none of us has a ''vacation planet'' we can go to for the weekend, so I argue that NASA''s mission to study planet Earth should be a ''no-brainer''."   http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-administrator-statement-on-house-authorization-bill http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-point-of-no-return-climate-change-nightmares-are-already-here-20150805 http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-info/global/201507 http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122342/2015-year-record-breaking-extreme-weather http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/global-warming/science-and-impacts/global-warming-science#.Vc0--rWpVow Visit the related web page
	Stepping into other people’s shoes has been a catalytic force for social change by Roman Krznaric Open Democracy   You can always tell when a good idea has come of age: people start criticising it. That’s certainly the case when it comes to empathy.   Empathy is a more popular concept today than at any time since the eighteenth century, when Adam Smith argued that the basis of morality was our imaginative capacity for “changing places in fancy with the sufferer.” Neuroscientists, happiness gurus, education policy-makers and mediation experts have all been singing its praises.   This has, of course, got the critics charging in, led by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who claims that “empathy is biased.” In his view, empathy is a dangerous emotional force that draws us towards identifying with the suffering of particular individuals or our nearest and dearest, while we blithely ignore the plight of distant strangers or people outside our tribe, be it based on religion, ethnicity or class. It also fails to confront the structural barriers to social change.   Philosopher Peter Singer takes a similar position in his latest book, The Most Good You Can Do. He cites a study in which one group of people were shown a photo of a single child, with her name and age, and were asked to donate money for a $300,000 drug treatment to save her life. Another group were shown photos (with names and ages) of eight children, and told $300,000 was required for medication that would save all their lives.   The result? People gave more to the single child, which is an “absurd outcome” in Singer’s view. His conclusion is that “emotional empathy” biases us towards individual cases, whereas a more rational utilitarian approach—what he calls “effective altruism”—would prompt us to save the larger number of children. It is reason and argument, not empathy he contends, that should be our primary moral guide.   This sounds logical, but I believe the anti-empathy brigade is badly mistaken, for two main reasons.   First, they show an astonishing willingness to ignore different types of empathy. A standard psychology textbook reveals that there are two forms. One is ‘affective’ empathy, which is about feeling or mirroring others’ emotions—as when Bill Clinton famously told an HIV/AIDS activist that “I feel your pain.” The other is ‘cognitive’ or ‘perspective-taking’ empathy, where you focus on imagining what it’s like to be another person, with their beliefs, experiences, hopes, fears and views of the world.   Bloom and Singer only give attention to affective empathy (which they describe as ‘emotional empathy’). I agree with them that a strong emotional resonance can make us unfairly favour individual cases, so of course we should save the eight lives rather than one. But while they both acknowledge the existence of cognitive empathy, they fail to explore its power to promote ethical behaviour.   In doing so, what they really miss is that cognitive empathy has been a crucial force in the struggle for human rights and the task of shifting social and political structures. Let me give an example: the campaign against slavery and the slave trade in eighteenth-century Britain.   In the 1780s, at a time when half a million slaves were being worked to death on British sugar plantations in the Caribbean, opponents of slavery launched an empathy-based political campaign to get members of the public to understand what it might be like to be a slave. They printed tens of thousands of copies of a poster showing how many slaves could be squeezed onto a slave ship, published oral testimonies of violence against slaves, and got former slaves to give public talks about their ordeals. In other words, they were tapping into the cognitive empathy of some sections of British society.   The results were spectacular: public protests, parliamentary petitions, and the world’s first fair trade boycott (of slave-produced sugar). According to historian Adam Hochschild in his book Bury the Chains, the campaign—when combined with other factors such as slave revolts on plantations and structural shifts like the diminishing profitability of the slave economy—played a key role in the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the eventual abolition of slavery itself.   Hochschild injects a missing ingredient into this story by showing that there was a “sudden upswelling” of human empathy, remarkable for the fact that “it was the first time a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years, over someone else’s rights.”   The end of slavery illustrates a larger historical pattern: cognitive empathy cracks open the door of moral concern for neglected or marginalised groups, and rights and laws wedge that door wide open. This has happened over and over again since the eighteenth century—in the struggle for civil rights, gay rights, and the rights of women, indigenous people, and disabled people.   The key is ‘perspective taking’—trying to imagine what it might be like to be ‘the other’—which makes us care about the plight of those outside our immediate community and treat them as human beings of equal value to ourselves. Political instruments such as public policy and human rights legislation typically play the role of codifying and universalising this moral concern.   I put this point to Singer in a public discussion we had recently in Oxford. Doesn’t the slavery case, I asked him, show that ‘reason’—in the form of laws and rights—actually works hand in hand with cognitive empathy to produce the kind of ethical world we both care about? He paused and then said hesitantly, ‘Well, yes, slavery is a good example. Cognitive empathy can make a difference.’   In my view, thinkers such as Singer and Bloom are on shaky empirical ground when they put so much faith in the power of reason and rational argument. Even that arch-rationalist Steven Pinker has come round to the importance of cognitive empathy in his vast study of the decline of violence in human history called The Better Angels of Our Nature. Drawing on the work of cultural historians such as Lynn Hunt, he argues that the humanitarian revolution of the eighteenth century—which generated the first campaigns to tackle child poverty, the anti-slavery movement and associations to improve working conditions—was rooted in “the rise of empathy and the regard for human life.”   Simply put, taking on the perspective of others is one of the fundamental stepping stones to acknowledging their humanity and inspiring political action. As the cognitive linguist George Lakoff puts it: “Empathy is at the heart of real rationality, because it goes to the heart of our values, which are the basis of our sense of justice. Empathy is the reason we have the principles of freedom and fairness, which are necessary components of justice.” The latest research by leading neuroscientists suggests that he’s right.   Cognitive empathy matters because it is part of the toolkit we need to confront the great social, political and ecological challenges of our age. Our failure to act on climate change is, to a significant degree, a failure to step into the shoes of future generations and take into account the impact that our carbon-intensive lifestyles will have on them.   The growing wealth inequalities in countries like Britain and the US are fuelled by the failure of the rich and of political elites to step outside the cocoons of their privileged lifestyles and understand what it might be like to be someone lining up at a food bank or having their home threatened with repossession by a bank. And we can never have a cogent or just debate about the influx of immigrants into the European Union until we hear the voices of refugees squeezed onto death-trap boats in the Mediterranean.   Ultimately, the place to start creating a more empathic civilisation is in the education system. We need to teach empathy skills to young people so that they develop the deep sense of social and ecological justice that will motivate them to be active citizens —and as a new report from Friends of the Earth reveals, there’s plenty of evidence this can be done. Filling their heads with a list of moral rules from religious texts or rationalist writings isn’t enough. Empathy, especially its cognitive form, is one of the most powerful ways we have of escaping the boundaries of our egoistic concerns, changing our values, and inspiring social action.   The historical truth is that reason without empathy is potentially lethal—just think of the Nuremberg Laws that were underpinned by the apparently ‘rational’ racist ideology of the Untermensch, a term meaning ‘subhuman’ that was used to denigrate Jews and Roma. We certainly shouldn’t reject reason. But if we care about forging a world of social and political justice we have to give equal weight to expanding our empathetic imaginations.   * Roman Krznaric’s new book is titled Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It. He has taught sociology and politics at Cambridge University and City University, in London: http://www.romankrznaric.com/about Visit the related web page
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