Recent Land Use Changes: USA

This is interesting: A Shift in What’s Shaping U.S. Landscapes

The three main types of land use changes are urban sprawl, logging, and agriculture & here the New England has remained pretty stable over the last 40+ years or so. Why? The main land use changes had already occurred by 1988.

Food Deserts / Grocery Deserts

Great web map: Mapping Food Deserts and Grocery Store Consolidation

Now...if they would only offer a way to download the data!

No More GDP!

Great article in Nature by Constanza et al.: Beyond growth — why we need to agree on an alternative to GDP now

Here's the summary: GDP was never designed as a metric for human well-being. It kind of worked as a proxy for that for a couple of decades after WWII, but no more. Using GDP assumes substitutability between labor, technology, and natural resources in the context of production. But this obviously ignores ecological limits or planetary boundaries, or, in other words: it decouples economic activity from natural resource use.

We need instead to adopt a universal goal: sustainabilty & inclusive well-being. Not sure why inclusive well-being is separated from sustainabilty here, but ok. The question then is how do we a) measure that and b) how do we aggreate our metrics into some kind of index or proxy? Here are some of the metrics: Well-being components: these 19 core factors are common to most beyond-GDP indicators.

Human

• Life satisfaction
• Health
• Life expectancy at birth
• Education

Social

• Crime
• Civic engagement
• Governance
• Income equality
• Gender equality

Built

• Housing
• Infrastructure
• Financial security
• Employment
• Per capita consumption
• Business health

Natural

• Natural capital
• Water quality
• Air quality
• Greenhouse-gas emissions

Sounds a lot like donut economics to me!

The Nature-Positive Movement

This looks like a great book: Becoming Nature Positive: Transitioning to a Safe and Just Future and here's the review in Nature: How to build nature back better — read this manual

The idea is that it is insufficient to just reduce environmental harm or become sustainable, but rather to regenerate nature in an active way = become nature-positive. This would be the opposite to the standare greenwashing that we see all over.

Here's an interesting angle mentioned in the review:

• Purpose-led businesses (e.g. Patagonia, etc.) can pursue ambitious goals & lead by example.
• Smaller companies can be agile and influence their local communities.
• Large companies have a) the resources and b) the scale throughout their entire supply that even small improvements can have a large aggregate impact.

Related: Rengerative Agriculture. I'm not a farmer, but these all seems like no-brainers: plant cover crops, rotating crops, reduc tilling, and integrate trees all to a) prevent soil erosion and b) improve the soil. Read more about here: A revolution is sweeping Europe’s farms: can it save agriculture?

Let's Eat!

America’s Chain and Independent Restaurants maps out all restaurents across the USA coded by their degree of 'chainness' from the 310,000 or so single-location restaurants to the 24,333 Subways. Now if they only would make the underlying restauranr address data available!

More @ https://friendlycities.gatech.edu/data-interactive/

The Hidden Environmental Costs of Food

Great 'scrolly-type' story here from the NYT: The Hidden Environmental Costs of Food.

The Protein Problem

The Protein Problem is a pretty cool interactive website / scrolly map. The embedded quiz How do your protein habits compare? could be useful for teaching & learning.

Classic The Onion

I was reminded of this 2010 classic by The Onion: 'How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?' 30 Million People Wonder

Map of the Best

Seen on MapsMania: Map of the Best.

I like it - this web map simply shows you the best restaurents say in a given city. You can adjust the parameters to your liking, but this web map makes it really easy to find 'the best one' = the one you dine at when you visit for the first time.

Climate & Conflict

The connections between climate change impacts and violent conflict seem pretty intuitive, but of course climate change is only one factor of many. Here are two recent web maps trying to visualize the locations and connections:

• Climate & Conflict
• How Climate Change Fuels Deadly Conflict

Food & Climate Change

Cities In Africa

AFRICA’S RISING CITIES: How Africa will become the center of the world’s urban future is a great 'scrolly-map' showing how the centers of urbanization are shifting towards Africa.

Soil Erosion

UN FAO Data Portal

Have a look: https://data.apps.fao.org/

I'm just not into these map-based (or now 3D) search interfaces: too complicated, too slow, too much. Give me a nice scrollable list and a well-developed text-based search tool.

Beer vs Food

Or, is beer a food? Regardless, Where Bars Outnumber Grocery Stores is a great mapping effort. The pattern in the US is obvious, but what does it mean? Some of the other countries are interesting too: the UK, France, and Spain seem to have a lot of bars, whereas grocery stores dominate in Poland and Germany. I should 'test' this for my hometown!

Preventing erosion in Japan

A Windbreak Grid in Hokkaido is just a cool example of what you can see from space!

Vertical Urban Farms

The basic idea is not new, but These vertical farms could turn Brooklyn into an agricultural oasis definitely look cool. To me this looks like a case of where form dictates function, but, maybe this works!

Cyber Agriculture

Cyber Agriculture: read more about it The future of agriculture is computerized (MIT News). That's all fine - now please show me that this works for growing something useful such as potatoes, cassava, tubers, etc. - then I may get excited.

Let's Talk Phosphorus!

Food Insecurity in The United States

Map The Meal Gap offers a nice interactive map of food insecurity across the U.S. at the county level. The data are available as PDF tables.