Breakthrough Institute – Saudi Mirror http://www.saudimirror.com News On-line Tue, 26 Jul 2022 10:05:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.3.2 Now on Store Shelves: Breakthrough Journal Releases 2022 Summer Issue “Produce Problems” http://www.saudimirror.com/now-on-store-shelves-breakthrough-journal-releases-2022-summer-issue-produce-problems/ Tue, 26 Jul 2022 10:05:00 +0000 http://www.saudimirror.com/?p=213050 Berkeley, Calif., July 26, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The new issue of the Breakthrough Journal, "Produce Problems," challenges the misleadingly simple concept of "farm to table" by exploring the environmental impacts of the complex, and sometimes murky, supply chains that actually bring food from where it is grown to our mouths.

The Breakthrough Journal is the Breakthrough Institute's quarterly magazine delivering pragmatic opinion and analysis grounded in the belief that even our most wicked environmental problems have technological solutions.

Now on shelves in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East.
Look for it at Barnes & Noble and other magazine retailers.

Click here for the online edition.

This issue includes ten essays and one movie review. Authors include:

  • Tamar Haspel, James Beard Foundation award–winning columnist at The Washington Post;
  • Michael Hathaway, Professor of Anthropology, Associate Member of the School for International Studies, and the Director of Simon Fraser University's Center for Asian Studies;
  • Rober Paarlberg, Associate in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard Kennedy School;
  • Jenny Splitter, award–winning journalist and Managing Editor at Sentient Media;
  • And more!

A sneak peek at this issue's incisive commentary:

This issue starts in the backyard: Washington Post columnist Tamar Haspel's. In "Plants Everlasting," she shows how growing your own garden can even be ripe with dilemmas: pursue supposedly sound permaculture with perennials and end up with basically nothing you want to eat, or plant annuals and then prepare to arm yourself with pesticides.

If you do opt for pesticides, you certainly won't win any organic certifications. But maybe that doesn't matter, write authors Linus Blomqvist, Breakthrough's Dan Blaustein–Rejto, and Dave Douglas in "Measuring What Matters." Such labels measure practices rather than outcomes and, in doing so, miss the metrics that matter most. What's more, they create opportunities for fraud, points out Breakthrough's Alex Smith. To consumers, an avocado looks like an avocado no matter how it is farmed. But call it organic, and you can charge twice as much. Not surprisingly, hucksters have caught on, Smith writes in "Fraudulent Foods."

You may also be paying a premium for alternative meat, not only for its environmental benefits but also in the hope that its production is better for workers. In that respect, reports journalist Jenny Splitter in "Out of The Jungle," it can be a tool for a just environmental transition for animals and people alike. But it is no silver bullet. Meanwhile, alternative proteins, points out Harvard's Robert Paarlberg in "It's What's for Dinner," won't replace animal meat any time soon. Until then, there's plenty we can do to make livestock lives better. Almost none of it involves the kinds of things many environmentalists imagine.

Complications to the farm–to–table story don't stop once produce moves off the farm or feedlot. Politics, geopolitics, and trade systems also matter. In "Food Has a Shipping Problem," AEI's Elisabeth Braw writes about the logistical problems stemming from Russia's war in Ukraine. And Breakthrough's Saloni Shah walks through the cascading disaster that has followed Sri Lanka's decision to ban chemical fertilizers, which comes just as many states in India are attempting to do something similar. Both cases, she argues in "The High Costs of Organic Farming," reveal that such practices are no blueprint for pulling smallholder farmers out of poverty""or for making food systems more sustainable.

"Produce Problems" closes by turning back to the small scale. In "Matsutake's Journeys," Professor Michael Hathaway shows what the history of the humble matsutake mushroom reveals about diet, trade, nation–building, war, and planetary ecology.

From the executive editor, Kathryn Salam:

In some circles, one phrase has come to dominate modern cuisine: "farm to table," a simple idea denoting an apparently straightforward process. Food springs up from the land and into your mouth. Meals are nourishment, not products""and certainly not processed, packaged, shipped, and marketed ones.

But food is never just sustenance. Whether you grew it in your backyard or farmers in Ukraine did""whether it is organic, GMO, made in a lab, or factory farmed""plants and animals become food through a complicated web of values, logistics, labor, markets, and technologies. If we take those out of the equation, we misunderstand what we eat, why we eat it, and what the real environmental costs are.

The arguments collected in this feature paint a picture of food that is at once more complicated and more hopeful than most discussions allow. We get a lot of things wrong, especially around questions of sustainability""and correcting those mistakes matters. It is hard to see a path to carbon neutrality that doesn't cut through our ideas about labels, about organics, alternative proteins, and more.

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Now on Store Shelves: Breakthrough Journal Releases 2022 Spring Issue “Climate Geopolitics” http://www.saudimirror.com/now-on-store-shelves-breakthrough-journal-releases-2022-spring-issue-climate-geopolitics/ Tue, 24 May 2022 10:33:00 +0000 http://www.saudimirror.com/?p=214552 Berkeley, CA, May 24, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — For the first time in its decade–long history, the Breakthrough Journal has received a makeover and is now on US and global shelves, including in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East. The new issue, "Climate Geopolitics," focuses on how global climate action efforts often divorce geopolitical problems from their historical contexts in order to make them fit within the framework of climate change.

The Breakthrough Journal is the Breakthrough Institute's quarterly magazine delivering pragmatic opinion and analysis, grounded in the belief that even our most wicked environmental problems have technological solutions.

Now on shelves in the US, Canada, Europe, and Middle East.
Look for it at Barnes & Noble and other magazine retailers.

Click here for the online edition.

The issue includes 7 essays, 3 responses, and one board game review. Authors include:

  • Ted Nordhaus, Breakthrough's Founder, and Executive Director;
  • Nils Gilman, VP of Programs at the Berggruen Institute;
  • Vijaya Ramachandran, Director for Energy and Development at Breakthrough;
  • Arthur Baker Associate Director at the University of Chicago's Development Innovation Lab;
  • Yaqiu Wang, Senior China Researcher at Human Rights Watch;
  • And more!

Sneak peak at this issue's incisive commentary:

Breakthrough executive director Ted Nordhaus opens the issue with "Am I the Mass Murderer?" a searing look at efforts to discredit all but the most apocalyptic visions of the planet's future. It is far better, he urges, to understand the possible consequences of climate change as a race between two trends: The planet is warming, yes, but greater societal wealth is also increasing our resilience against the very changes warming will bring. The choice, he concludes, is not between survival and extinction, but "rather between marginally better and worse futures""futures that will be shaped by a kaleidoscope of forces, most of them having not so much to do with climate change."

In "The Guns of Warming," Berggruen Institute's Nils Gilman explores the genesis of the idea that climate change will have serious national security implications""an effort, he writes, led by security analysts looking to get the government to take warming seriously. "As time has gone by," though, "that strategy has become more and more dubious." Rather than "motivating a Great War on Climate Change," he argues, "the defense establishment's focus on climate–related security challenges has instead served as little more than a justification for enriching the military–industrial complex" in support of the same old goals it always had.

In "Beijing's Green Fist," Human Rights Watch's Yaiqu Wang notes that because of the scale of Chinese emissions, many are desperate for China's cooperation and have applauded its bold commitments to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. Before people "get giddy about working with Chinese authorities on climate change," Wang warns, "they should have a better understanding of the work Chinese authorities actually intend to do, and the human rights abuses built into it." From recording devices in trash can lids to forced labor in Xinjiang, "it is increasingly clear that the Chinese government has been exploiting environmental causes to consolidate political control and expand its power at the expense of human rights."

In "Let Them Eat Carbon," BTI's Vijaya Ramachandran and University of Chicago's Arthur Baker find that the World Bank and others are increasingly bowing to pressure to ban loans to the least developed countries for fossil fuels. That makes little sense, though, as either a development strategy or a way to combat climate change, they write in "Let Them Eat Carbon." "Pressuring low– and lower–middle–income countries to replace plans for gas power with solar or wind energy will have limited climate benefits," since "those countries' emissions are drops in the bucket." Meanwhile, "reducing poverty is not feasible without access to cheap and reliable energy," and that energy won't come without investment in existing energy infrastructure.

From the executive editor, Kathryn Salam:

Before I came on as editor of the Breakthrough Journal, I spent years in foreign policy journalism. From that perch, covering the climate always presented a challenge. It was clear that it was important to do, but how to do so both responsibly and in a way that would attract eyeballs was less straightforward.

The stories that did the best were routinely the ones that flouted my sense of best practices. They catastrophized, they decontextualized, they treated climate change as divorced from the big international relations concepts""sovereignty, realpolitik, self–interest""that were more rigorously applied to other topics in global affairs.

In turn, climate became less a subject to examine through existing frameworks and more a framework into which every other topic might be jammed. Coverage looked to the implications of global warming for conflict, democracy, development, international cooperation, and the like, rather than what geopolitics, for example, might mean for dealing with the climate.

I think that's unhelpful""or at the very least, inadequate. And I hope the pieces collected in this issue offer a corrective.

From security, to development, to human rights, and beyond, these essays show how a big issue in geopolitics came to be wrapped in a climate coating, why that's harmful to international progress and the climate, and what a more serious approach to both might look like.

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