Jonathan Foley,  director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of the Minnesota, where he is also a professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the Department of Ecology,  Evolution and Behavior, recently wrote for Yale Environment 360.   His concern, the global crisis in land use.

He says,  “Although I’m a climate scientist by training, I worry about this collective fixation on global warming as the mother of all environmental problems. Learning from the research my colleagues and I have done over the past decade, I fear we are neglecting another, equally inconvenient truth: that we now face a global crisis in land use and agriculture that could undermine the health, security, and sustainability of our civilization.

“Our use of land, particularly for agriculture, is absolutely essential to the success of the human race. We depend on agriculture to supply us with food, feed, fiber, and, increasingly, biofuels. Without a highly efficient, productive, and resilient agricultural system, our society would collapse almost overnight.”

What might have been a companion piece was written this week by David Owen of The New Yorker.  In commenting about the Forbes rankings on the environment,  he says:

Green rankings in the U.S. don’t tell the full story about the places where the human footprint is lightest. If you really want the best environmental model, you need to look at the nation’s biggest — and greenest — metropolis: New York City.

Two opinions worth reading, worth considering. http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2203

Copyright 2009 Rita Watson