Pushing my grocery cart down the aisle, I spot on the fruit counter a dozen plastic bags of bananas labeled “Organic, Equal Exchange.” My heart leaps a little. I’d been thrilled, months earlier, when I found my local grocer carrying bananas—a new product from Equal Exchange—because this employee-owned cooperativeme outside Boston is one of my favorite companies. Its main business remains the fair trade coffee and chocolate the company started with in 1986. Since then, the company has flourished, and its mission remains supporting small farmer co-ops in developing countries and giving power to employees through ownership. It’s as close to an ideal company as I’ve found. And I’m delighted to see their banana business thriving, since I know it was rocky for a time. (Hence the leaping of my heart.)

I happen to know a bit more than the average shopper about Equal Exchange, because I count myself lucky to be one of its few investors who are not worker-owners. Over more than 20 years, it has paid investors a steady and impressive average of 5 percent annually (these days, a coveted return).

Maneuvering my cart toward the dairy case, I search out butter made by Cabot Creamery, and pick up some Cabot cheddar cheese. I choose Cabot because, like Equal Exchange, it’s a cooperative, owned by dairy farmers since 1919.

At the checkout, I hand over my Visa card from Summit Credit Union, a depositor-owned bank in Madison, Wis., where I lived years ago. Credit unions are another type of cooperative, meaning that members like me are partial owners, so Summit doesn’t charge us the usurious penalty rate of 25 percent or more levied by other banks at the merest breath of a late payment. They’re loyal to me, and I’m loyal to them.


On my way home, I pull up to the drive-through at Beverly Cooperative Bank to make a withdrawal. This bank is yet another kind of cooperative—owned by customers and designed to serve them. Though it’s small—with only $700 million in assets, and just four branches (all of which I could reach on my bike)—its ATM card is recognized everywhere. I’ve used it even in Copenhagen and London.

With this series of transactions on one afternoon, I am weaving my way through a profoundly different and virtually invisible world: the cooperative economy. It’s an economy that aims to serve customers, rather than extract maximum profits from them. It operates through various models, which share the goal of treating suppliers, employees, and investors fairly. The cooperative economy has dwelled alongside the corporate economy for close to two centuries. But it may be an economy whose time has come.

Something is dying in our time. As the nation struggles to recover from unsustainable personal and national debt, stagnant wages, the damages wrought by climate change, and more, a whole way of life is drawing to a close. It began with railroads and steam engines at the dawn of the Industrial Age, and over two centuries has swelled into a corporation-dominated system marked today by vast wealth inequity and bloated carbon emissions. That economy is today proving fundamentally unsustainable. We’re hitting twin limits, ecological and financial. We’re experiencing both ecological and financial overshoot.

If ecological limits are something many of us understand, we’re just beginning to find language to talk about financial limits—that point of diminishing return where the hunt for financial gain actually depletes the tax-and-wage base that sustains us all.

Here’s the problem: The very aim of maximum financial extraction is built into the foundational social architecture of our capitalist economy—that is, the concept of ownership.
If the root of government is sovereignty (the question of who controls the state), the root construct of every economy is property (the question of who controls the infrastructure of wealth creation).

Many of the great social struggles in history have come down to the issue of who will control land, water, and the essentials of life. Ownership has been at the center of the most profound changes in civilization—from ending slavery to patenting the genome of life.


Throughout the Industrial Age, the global economy has increasingly come to be dominated by a single form of ownership: the publicly traded corporation, where shares are bought and sold in stock markets. The systemic crises we face today are deeply entwined with this design, which forms the foundation of what we might call the extractive economy, intent on maximum physical and financial extraction.

The concept of extractive ownership traces its lineage to Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. The 18th century British legal theorist William Blackstone described ownership as the right to “sole and despotic dominion.” This view—the right to control one’s world in order to extract maximum benefit for oneself—is a core legitimating concept for a civilization in which white, property-owning males have claimed dominion over women, other races, laborers, and the earth itself.
In the 20th century, we were schooled to believe there were essentially two economic systems: capitalism (private ownership) and socialism/communism (public ownership). Yet both tended, in practice, to support the concentration of economic power in the hands of the few.

Emerging in our time—in largely disconnected experiments across the globe—are the seeds of a different kind of economy. It, too, is built on a foundation of ownership, but of a unique type. The cooperative economy is a large piece of it. But this economy doesn’t rely on a monoculture of design, the way capitalism does. It’s as rich in diversity as a rainforest is in its plethora of species—with commons ownership, municipal ownership, employee ownership, and others. You could even include open-source models like Wikipedia, owned by no one and managed collectively.

These varieties of alternative ownership have yet to be recognized as a single family, in part because they’ve yet to unite under a common name. We might call them generative, for their aim is to generate conditions where our common life can flourish. Generative design isn’t about dominion. It’s about belonging—a sense of belonging to a common whole.

We see this sensibility in a variety of alternatives gaining ground today. New state laws chartering benefit corporations have passed recently in 12 states, and are in the works in 14 more. Benefit corporations—like Patagonia and Seventh Generation—build into their governing documents a commitment to serve not only stockholders but other stakeholders, including employees, the community, and the environment.

Also spreading are social enterprises, which serve a social mission while still functioning as businesses (many of them owned by nonprofits). Employee-owned firms are gaining ground in Spain, Poland, France, Denmark, and Sweden. Still another model is the mission-controlled corporation, exemplified by foundation-owned companies such as Novo Nordisk and Ikea in northern Europe. While publicly traded, these companies safeguard their social purpose by keeping board control in mission-oriented hands.


If there are more kinds of generative ownership than most of us realize, the scale of activity is also larger than we might suppose—particularly in the cooperative economy. In the United States, more than 130 million people are members of a co-op or credit union. More Americans hold membership in a co-op than hold shares in the stock market. Worldwide, cooperatives have close to a billion members. Among the 300 largest cooperative and mutually owned companies worldwide, total revenues approach $2 trillion. If these enterprises were a single nation, its economy would be the 9th largest on earth.

Often, these entities are profit making, but they’re not profit maximizing. Alongside more traditional nonprofit and government models, they add a category of private ownership for the common good. Their growth across the globe represents a largely unheralded revolution.

What unites generative designs are the living purposes at their core, and the beneficial outcomes they tend to generate. More research remains to be done, but there is evidence that these models create broad benefits and remain resilient in crisis. We’ve seen this, for example, in the success of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota, which remained strong in the 2008 crisis, even as other banks foundered; this led more than a dozen states to pursue similar models. We’ve seen it in the behavior of credit unions, which tended not to create toxic mortgages, and required few bailouts.

We’ve seen it in the fact that workers at firms with employee stock ownership plans enjoy more than double the defined-benefit retirement assets of comparable employees at other firms. And we’ve seen it in the fact that the Basque region of Spain—home to the massive Mondragon cooperative—has seen substantially lower unemployment than the country as a whole.

Together, these various models might one day form the foundation for a generative economy, where the intent is to meet human needs and create conditions in which life can thrive. Generative ownership aims to do what the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker have always done: make a living by serving the community. The profit-maximizing corporation is the real detour in the evolution of ownership, and it’s a relatively recent detour at that.


The resilience of generative design is a key reason that people have often turned to these models in times of crisis. When the Industrial Revolution was forcing many skilled workers into poverty in the 1840s, weavers and artisans banded together to form the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, the first modern, consumer-owned cooperative, selling food to members who couldn’t otherwise afford it.

During the Great Depression in the United States, the Federal Credit Union Act—ensuring that credit would be available to people of meager means—was intended to help stabilize an imbalanced financial system. Today, credit union assets total more than $700 billion. In the recent financial crisis, their loan delinquency rates were half those of traditional banks. Since the crisis, credit unions have added more than 1.5 million members. In Argentina in 2001, when a financial meltdown created thousands of bankruptcies and saw many business owners flee, workers—with government support—took over more than 200 firms and ran these empresas recuperadas themselves, and they’re still running them.

Last year, with financial and ecological crises mounting worldwide, the U.N. named 2012 the Year of the Cooperative, and cooperative activity, is advancing around the globe. Cooperatives were largely sidelined during the rise of the industrial age. But current trends indicate that conditions may be ripe for a surge in cooperative enterprises. As people lose faith in the stock market, feel mounting anger at banks, and distrust high-earning CEOs, there’s growing distaste for the business-as-usual Wall Street model. Meanwhile, the Internet has enabled the expansion of informal cooperation on an unprecedented scale—with the Creative Commons, for example, now encompassing more than 450,000 works. As the speculative, mass-production economy hits limits, cooperatives may be uniquely suited to a post-growth world, for they are active in sectors related to fundamental needs (agriculture, insurance, food, finance, and electricity comprise the top five co-op sectors).

If many of us fail to recognize an emerging ownership shift as a sign of progress, it may be because it arises from an unexpected place—not from government action, or protests in the streets, but from within the structure of our economy itself. Not from the leadership of a charismatic individual, but from the longing in many hearts, the genius of many minds, the effort of many hands to build what we know, instinctively, that we need.

This goes much deeper than legal or financial engineering. It’s about a shift in the cultural values that underpin social institutions. History has seen such shifts before—in the values that underlay the monarchy, racism, and sexism. What’s weakening today is a different kind of systemic bias. It’s capital bias: capital-ism—the belief system that maximizing capital matters more than anything else.


The cooperative economy—and the broader family of generative ownership models—is helping to reawaken an ancient wisdom about living together in community, something largely lost in the spread of capitalism. Economic historian Karl Polanyi describes this in his 1944 work, The Great Transformation, tracing the crises of capitalism to the fact that it “disembedded” economic activity from community. Throughout history, he noted, economic activity had been part of a larger social order that included religion, government, families, and the natural world. The Industrial Revolution upended this. It turned labor and land into commodities to be “bought and sold, used and destroyed, as if they were simply merchandise,” Polanyi wrote. But these were fictitious commodities. They were none other than human beings and the earth itself.

Generative design decommodifies land and labor, putting them again under the control of the community.

It’s no accident that the deep redesign of our economy isn’t beginning in Washington, D.C. It is rooted in relationships: to the living earth and to one another. The generative economy finds fertile soil for its growth within the human heart. The ownership revolution is part of the “metaphysical reconstruction” that E.F. Schumacher said would be needed to transform our economy. When economic relations are designed in a generative way, they’re no longer about sole and despotic dominion. Economic activity is no longer about squeezing every penny from something we imagine that we own. It’s about being interwoven with the world around us. It’s about a shift from dominion to community.

Marjorie Kelly wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Marjorie is a fellow with the Tellus Institute and is director of ownership strategy with Cutting Edge Capital consulting firm. She is author of the new book, Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution. She was co-founder and for 20 years president of Ethics magazine.

Interested?

• The Cooperative Way
  Co-ops—just like people—can get more done together than anyone can do alone. They come in many forms, and are more common than you might imagine.
  
  
• Gar Alperovitz on the Cooperative Economy: "I'll Bet My Life On It"
  Gar Alperovitz was in Seattle for the annual meeting of the National Cooperative Business Association and spoke at Town Hall Seattle immediately following a live screening of the first presidential debate. YES! Magazine’s executive editor Sarah van Gelder introduced him.
• Why Won't The Wall Street Journal Cover the Cooperative Economy?
  Cooperative businesses are proliferating quickly, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the Wall Street Journal.

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Imagine an artificial leaf that mimics photosynthesis, which lets plants harness energy from the sun. But this leaf would have the ability to power your homes and cars with clean energy using only sunlight and water.

This is not some far-off idea of the future. It's reality, and the subject of a jury-prize-winning film in the GE Focus Forward Film Competition.

Jared P. Scott and Kelly Nyks' short film, " The Artificial Leaf," showcases chemist Daniel Nocera, the inventor of the artificial leaf, a device that he says can power the world.

"The truth is stranger than fiction," Kelly Nyks, a partner at PF Pictures, told ABC News. "What I think is so exciting is that Dan has taken this science and applied it in a way that makes bringing it to scale to solve the energy crisis for the planet real and possible."

Nocera's leaf is simply a silicon wafer coated with catalysts that use sunlight to split water to into hydrogen and oxygen components.

"Essentially, it mimics photosynthesis," Nocera told ABC News.

The gases that bubble up from the water can be turned into a fuel to produce electricity in the form of fuel cells. The device may sound like science fiction fantasy, but Nocera said he hopes one day it will provide an alternative to the centralized energy system - the grid.

Worldwide, more than 1.6 billion people live without access to electricity and 2.6 billion people live without access to clean sources of fuel for cooking.

"This is the model: We're going to have a very distributed energy system," Nocera told ABC News. With the leaf, "using just sunlight and water, you can be off the grid. If you're poor, you don't have a grid, so this gives them a way to have energy in the day and at night."

With just the artificial leaf, 1.5 bottles of drinking water and sunlight, you could have enough electricity to power a small home, but the cost is still a problem, though Nocera said he believes that will come down with time and research.

The artificial leaf is cheaper than solar panels but still expensive. Hydrogen from a solar panel and electrolysis unit can currently be made for about $7 per kilogram; the artificial leaf would come in at $6.50.

Nocera is looking for ways to drive down the costs make these devices more widely available. He recently replaced the platinum catalyst that produces hydrogen gas with a less-expensive nickel-molybdenum-zinc compound. He's also looking for ways to reduce the amount of silicon needed.

In 2009, Nocera's artificial leaf was selected as a recipient of funding by the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E), which supports energy technologies that could create a more secure and affordable American future.

Nyks and Scott said they hope "The Artificial Leaf" will bring awareness to the public that sustainable energy solutions do exist.

"We make films for social action," Scott, also a partner at PF Pictures, told ABC News. "We see films as a tool for social change. And what I think Dan sketches out is that we start with energy. And if we solve the energy crisis, we'll solve the climate crisis, and then we'll solve the water crisis, and then we'll solve the food crisis. But it starts with energy."

The directors were one of 30 filmmaking teams asked to make a movie that could highlight an innovation that could change the world as part of GE Focus Forward, a series of three-minute films created by award-winning documentary makers including Alex Gibney, Lucy Walker, Albert Maysles and Morgan Spurlock.

Anyone with an Internet connection has access to the videos online. The winning entries are featured at focusforwardfilms.com.

So far, total media impressions for GE Focus Forward have exceeded 1.5 billion. In addition, the films are screening at all the major film festivals around the world and have played on every continent, including Antarctica.

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Cancer has touched many of us in some way. Whether we know of or have overcome cancer ourselves, or know someone who has passed from it, we can all draw some form of intimate connection to the disease. The subject of cures and treatment has been of great debate within the industry as the generally accepted methods of chemotherapy and radiation come with moderately effective results and incredibly tough side effects. The search for alternative cures and treatments  has been ongoing for many years. While many claim they have come up with effective ways to treat the disease, very little seriousness is put towards these claims by mainstream medicine. While we can argue the obvious financial implications to dominant pharmaceutical companies should a more natural and alternative cure be brought forth, it is still important to realize that many claims are made about alternative cures that may not truly work or work in every case. Since many cases of cancer are unique, it’s important to not generalize treatment methods. While mainstream medicine would like to have us believe that alternative cures never work and often lead to death, the truth is current mainstream methods of treatment for cancer often kill a patient faster than if they were not used. While this article isn’t geared towards explaining why, this information can be found quite easily using some credible sources around the internet or medical publications. You can also refer to this article about research fraud.

One alternative treatment of cancer that has been used in the past, especially in countries where it grows well, is Soursop. A flowering evergreen tree native to tropical regions, this fruit is said to kill cancer more effectively than chemotherapy drugs and does not produce the same undesirable side effects, but may not be fully clear of any adverse effects.

The active ingredient in Soursop that is proving to be effective is called Annona muricata or Graviola. Currently it exists on the market under the brand name of Triamazon but licensing of the product is not generally accepted in all countries due to the potential profit loss for pharmaceutical companies. Graviola is not just a cancer treatment, it has also displayed anti-parasitic, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antirheumatic and cytotoxic properties, according to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In some cases, Graviola has also been used as a pain killer and the results were positive.

In an assessment of Graviola, published in the December 2008 issue of the “Journal of Dietary Supplements”  by U.S. researchers Lana Dvorkin-Camiel and Julia S. Whelan, multiple in-vitro studies determined that Graviola is effective against various microbial and parasitic agents. Graviola displayed specific effectiveness on parasites Leishmania braziliensis, Leishmania panamensis, Nippostrongylus braziliensis, Artemia salina and Trichomonas vaginalis, as well as against the Herpes simplex virus.

As it relates directly to cancer, test-tube and animal research demonstrates that Graviola may be an anti-cancer agent. However, no human clinical trials have been performed as of yet. According to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, MSKCC, Graviola extract proved to be effective against liver cancer and breast cancer cells. Naturopath Leslie Taylor, author of “The Healing Power of Rainforest Herbs,” notes that studies show Graviola has an inhibitory effect on enzyme processes in some cancer cell membranes. Graviola only affected cancer cell membranes and not those of healthy cells. This research may lend support to the herb’s traditional use against cancer.

Research done over 20 laboratory tests by one of America’s largest drug manufacturers suggests that the extracts were able to demonstrate the following:

• Effectively target and kill malignant cells in 12 types of cancer, including colon, breast, prostate, lung and pancreatic cancer.
• The tree compounds proved to be up to 10,000 times stronger in slowing the growth of cancer cells than Adriamycin, a commonly used chemotherapeutic drug
• What’s more, unlike chemotherapy, the compound extracted from the Graviola tree selectively hunts down and kills only cancer cells. It does not harm healthy cells

Potential Side Effects

With any product, whether it be natural or chemically derived, we must always look at the side effects. A study published January 2002 in the journal “Movement Disorders” suggests that the high incidence of West Indians with Parkinson’s-type motor problems could be related to a high consumption of Graviola fruit. Researchers performed experiments using neurons in culture, not human subjects, to perform their investigation. While the results are not conclusive, it certainly is something we must take into consideration. More extensive testing has not been done involving humans at this time and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center further cautions that more human research is necessary for the medical community to inform the public on Graviola’s risks as well as its benefits.

While some side effects may exist, eating the fruit and taking supplements is not considered to be unsafe if you are within the limits of the recommended dosages. We are not doctors so please remember to consult a physician if you decide to take Graviola supplements. Although research is lacking and no conclusions have yet to be drawn, you may want to avoid the supplement if you have Parkinson’s disease or another disorder that affects your movements. The same goes if you are pregnant or nursing. While doctors and scientists have not issued a standard dose for Graviola, one manufacturer recommends one 500 mg capsule “a few times a week” with dinner.

At the end of the day the verdict is still out as to whether or not Soursop is in fact effective for human use. While initial studies show it’s effectiveness, including some personal experiences of others who are not featured in this article, there simply has not been enough medical testing done to definitively suggest anything at this point. Strictly in my opinion, I still would rather try out alternative cures like this vs chemotherapy. My number one choice at this point would be a hemp treatment.

Sources:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf9018239?prevSearch=Soursop%2BCancer&searchHistoryKey

http://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/herb/graviola

“Journal of Dietary Supplements”; Tropical American Plants in the Treatment of Infectious Diseases; Lana Dvorkin-Camiel and Julia S. Whelan; December 2008

“African Journal of Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicines”; Anti-hyperglycemic Activities of Annona Muricata (Linn); D.O. Adeyemi, et al.; October 2008

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May 23, 2013 — More than 13,000 ships per year, carrying more than 284 million tons of cargo, transit the Panama Canal each year, generating roughly $1.8 billion dollars in toll fees for the Panama Canal Authority. Each time a ship passes through, more than 55 million gallons of water are used from Gatun Lake, which is also a source of water for the 2 million people living in the isthmus.

May 27, 2013 — Surprisingly the answer is yes. With the technology of today it is possible to use environmental friendly formic acid in fuel cell powering your mobile phone or laptop. Physicist Florian Nitze, Umeå University in Sweden, has in his thesis developed new catalysts to improve the capacity of these fuel cells.


Fuel cells are different from batteries in that they require a constant source of fuel and oxygen to run. The technology is already commercially available but formic acid fuel cells still suffer from low power and lifetime.

The effect of a catalyst is to reduce the energy loss and to increase the rate of the chemical reactions, which leads to a higher efficiency in the fuel cell. In his thesis, Florian Nitze has developed new catalysts based on a combination of material science and nanotechnology -- engineering close to the atom level.

"Especially catalysts of palladium-nanoparticles attached to a unique helical formed carbon nanofibre proved to have a long lifetime and a very high potential to be used in formic acid fuel cells. The helical formed carbon nanofibre has a high electrical conductivity and a surface that is very easy to decorate with nanoparticles, "says Florian Nitze.

Several of the new catalysts that Florian Nitze have developed are based on palladium. It is a noble metal such as gold or platinum, but it is half as expensive.

Formic acid can be produced from renewable sources, i.e. wood, and is therefore a highly environmentally friendly alternative.

"One of the major advantages over Li-ion batteries, which are dominating the battery market, is that the charging only takes seconds by simple refueling with formic acid," says Florian Nitze.

Florian Nitze comes originally from Baden-Baden in Germany.

The working principle of a fuel cell: If for example hydrogen and oxygen (but equally valid for formic acid and oxygen) get in contact, they can burn and release a lot of energy. In this process hydrogen gives electrons to oxygen, it is oxidized whereas oxygen takes electrons from hydrogen, it is reduced.

The concept of a fuel cells is now to separate these two reaction spatially into two separate reactions, namely oxidation and reduction. The energy that would be released by burning can now be used as electric power if the two separated reactions are connected electrically. However, not all energy can be used; some energy is needed to keep the reaction running. Catalysts can lower this energy loss and speed up the reactions resulting in a higher efficiency of the fuel cell.


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May 31, 2013 — Scientists have long suspected that a flourishing of green foliage around the globe, observed since the early 1980s in satellite data, springs at least in part from the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere. Now, a study of arid regions around the globe finds that a carbon dioxide "fertilization effect" has, indeed, caused a gradual greening from 1982 to 2010.


Focusing on the southwestern corner of North America, Australia's outback, the Middle East, and some parts of Africa, Randall Donohue of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Canberra, Australia and his colleagues developed and applied a mathematical model to predict the extent of the carbon-dioxide (CO2) fertilization effect. They then tested this prediction by studying satellite imagery and teasing out the influence of carbon dioxide on greening from other factors such as precipitation, air temperature, the amount of light, and land-use changes.

The team's model predicted that foliage would increase by some 5 to 10 percent given the 14 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration during the study period. The satellite data agreed, showing an 11 percent increase in foliage after adjusting the data for precipitation, yielding "strong support for our hypothesis," the team reports.

"Lots of papers have shown an average increase in vegetation across the globe, and there is a lot of speculation about what's causing that," said Donohue of CSIRO's Land and Water research division, who is lead author of the new study. "Up until this point, they've linked the greening to fairly obvious climatic variables, such as a rise in temperature where it is normally cold or a rise in rainfall where it is normally dry. Lots of those papers speculated about the CO2 effect, but it has been very difficult to prove."

He and his colleagues present their findings in an article that has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The team looked for signs of CO2 fertilization in arid areas, Donohue said, because "satellites are very good at detecting changes in total leaf cover, and it is in warm, dry environments that the CO2 effect is expected to most influence leaf cover." Leaf cover is the clue, he added, because "a leaf can extract more carbon from the air during photosynthesis, or lose less water to the air during photosynthesis, or both, due to elevated CO2." That is the CO2 fertilization effect.

But leaf cover in warm, wet places like tropical rainforests is already about as extensive as it can get and is unlikely to increase with higher CO2 concentrations. In warm, dry places, on the other hand, leaf cover is less complete, so plants there will make more leaves if they have enough water to do so. "If elevated CO2 causes the water use of individual leaves to drop, plants will respond by increasing their total numbers of leaves, and this should be measurable from satellite," Donohue explained.

To tease out the actual CO2 fertilization effect from other environmental factors in these regions, the researchers first averaged the greenness of each location across 3-year periods to account for changes in soil wetness and then grouped that greenness data from the different locations according to their amounts of precipitation. The team then identified the maximum amount of foliage each group could attain for a given precipitation, and tracked variations in maximum foliage over the course of 20 years. This allowed the scientists to remove the influence of precipitation and other climatic variations and recognize the long-term greening trend.

In addition to greening dry regions, the CO2 fertilization effect could switch the types of vegetation that dominate in those regions. "Trees are re-invading grass lands, and this could quite possibly be related to the CO2 effect," Donohue said. "Long lived woody plants are deep rooted and are likely to benefit more than grasses from an increase in CO2."

"The effect of higher carbon dioxide levels on plant function is an important process that needs greater consideration," said Donohue. "Even if nothing else in the climate changes as global CO2 levels rise, we will still see significant environmental changes because of the CO2 fertilization effect."

This study was funded by CSIRO's Sustainable Agriculture Flagship, Water for a Healthy Country Flagship, the Australian Research Council and Land & Water Australia.


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May 3, 2013 — A research group at the University of Alicante (Spain) has invented an algae removal and treatment system that turns this underused residue into a renewable source of energy: biomass. The process involves several stages of washing, drying and compacting without leaving the beach. Therefore, according to the team led by Professor Irene Sentana Gadea, the system is cheaper, more efficient and more environmentally friendly than the procedure commonly followed now.

With the invention, protected with a national patent, up to an 80 percent of the weight and volume currently removed would stay on the beaches, as now with the seaweed water and sand are also sent to rubbish tips or treatment plants. Professor Eloy Sentana Cremades says that as well as considerable savings on transportation, the new procedure would allow to give more uses to the dried seaweed.

The system is based on a moving platform with wheels where three hoppers are installed. The first receives shovelfuls of wet seaweed with sand attached. Seawater is pumped in and poured back into the sea dragging the sand with it. In the next hopper, water purified with a solar-powered device would wash most of the residual salt from the algae, and in the third hopper it would be dried with air heated also by solar energy. The clean and dry seaweed could be then pressed by a system similar to the one used by rubbish trucks or converted into bales or pellets, ready to be commercialized. No chemical products would be used in the process.

The method currently used has drawbacks such as the deterioration of beaches due to the extraction of sand that then has to be replaced, the weight of the waste, and the saturation of certain landfills to which it is taken. Also, as the material is impregnated with sand and salt and mixed with other wastes, the use of the dead seaweed is limited to rudimentary applications, such as aerating the ground for agricultural purposes.

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Apr. 29, 2013 — A smart combination of different crops, such as beans and maize, can significantly cut the use of crop protection agents and at the same time reduce the need for fertilizers. Integrating ecological knowledge from nature with knowledge of crops opens up the prospect of a sustainable strategy that will increase yield per hectare at reduced environmental costs. This was the assertion of Prof Niels Anten in his inaugural speech upon accepting the post of Professor of Crop and Weed Ecology at Wageningen University on Monday 22 April.

Prof Anten sees great similarities between nature and a field full of crops. In both cases, plants are surrounded by numerous organisms such as weeds, pollinating insects, fungi, blights and diseases and their natural enemies, all engaged in the struggle for existence.

In order to meet the food demand of nine billion people in 2050 and at the same time reduce our impact on the environment, such as the use of crop protection agents and developments leading to deforestation or desertification, we can no longer rely on synthetic pesticides and fertilizers alone. 'We need to conduct much more research to better understand how to utilize the potential provided by natural ecological processes,' said Professor Anten.

He points to recent research data showing that mixed crops require 20-40% less land to obtain the same total yields as mono-crops. There are several reasons for this. Different plant varieties make use of different growing times and different nutrients in the soil. They can also facilitate each other, for example by providing shade or making the soil more acidic, so that more phosphate is released. Also striking is the fact that mixed cultures are on average 40% less affected by diseases on average than single crops. In China there are even examples of a 90% reduction in diseases caused by fungi, leading to increased overall production.

'Mixed crops like these have a range of benefits. This makes it all the more surprising that so little research has been done into them,' observes Professor Anten. 'Our knowledge of plant breeding and crop physiology has resulted in crops which deliver maximum yield in monocultures. But there has been virtually no equivalent research conducted in mixed crops.'

In his inaugural address entitled 'Crop ecosystems as diverse playing fields,' Professor Niels Anten discusses the parallel development of two fields, the ecology of natural systems such as forests and the ecology of agriculture. Within his teaching and research remit of Crop and Weed Ecology, he will be looking at the connections between these areas of study for the benefit of sustainable crops with high yields.

Neighbours

In his speech, Anten talked at length about the way in which plants can detect each other's presence. Plants responses to neighbour plants can differ depending in whether these neighbours are: friends or a foes, a plant of the same species, a family member or a genetically identical clone, as in many monocultures in the West. A plant uses shade and filtering of sunlight by a neighbouring plant to detect its vicinity and size. It may respond with a growth spurt, towards the light. But the plant also differentiates between species. Maize growing beside wheat will produce deep roots to avoid those of the wheat, whereas if there are roots of beans close by, the maize roots will grow towards them. Plants from the same mother can also react differently to each other than plants from different mothers. So it appears that they recognise each other at the family level too.

Alien neighbouring plants include weeds, which pose an important threat to crop production. The use of herbicides is an important element of weed control, but also harmful to the environment, while more and more weeds are becoming resistant to these agents. 'We will therefore also need to look at other, more ecological solutions,' says Professor Anten. 'In short, in order to achieve a sustainable increase in food production, we will need to deploy all the weapons in our arsenal; among these, the opportunities produced by ecological interactions have to date been largely neglected.'

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May 8, 2013 — UNSW scientists have led the development of a new Red List system for identifying ecosystems at high risk of degradation, similar to the influential Red List for the world's threatened species.

The team carrying out the research was convened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and led by Professor David Keith, of the University of New South Wales and the NSW Office of Environment.

The study, which illustrates how the framework for risk assessment applies to 20 ecosystems around the world, including eight in Australia, is published today in the Public Library of Science journal, PLoS ONE.

Professor Keith, of UNSW's Australian Wetlands, Rivers and Landscapes Centre, AWRLC, said that ecosystems around the globe are facing unprecedented threats. This affects biodiversity and -- increasingly -- the services that living organisms provide to people, including clean water, and agricultural and fisheries production.

"This is one of the world's most significant conservation challenges and we really need a better system for understanding the risks to the world's ecosystems, so that we can make more informed decisions about sustainable environmental management. "Now, for the first time, we have a consistent method for identifying the most threatened ecosystems across land, freshwater and ocean environments," said Professor Keith.

One of the authors, Professor Richard Kingsford, Director of the AWRLC said: "The most encouraging thing about this initiative is that it focuses attention on the habitats of our biodiversity. We can see it applying to the hundreds, or even thousands, of species that might live in an ecosystem."

The method evaluates multiple symptoms of risk produced by different processes of ecosystem degradation.

"Changes in the distribution of an ecosystem, its physical environment and its component species can each tell us something different about the severity of risks, and these symptoms can now be assessed in standard ways across different types of ecosystems," said Professor Keith.

The new system is flexible, enabling it to handle a range of different sources of information, depending on the specific processes driving degradation of each ecosystem.

The PLoS study illustrates the implementation of the framework using 20 case studies encompassing rainforests, wetlands, coral reefs and other major global ecosystems.

"This is a major breakthrough for the challenge of managing ecosystems more sustainably. We will be able to apply it across global, national and state boundaries for consistent state of environment reporting," said Dr Emily Nicholson, of the Centre of Excellence in Environmental Decisions at the University of Melbourne, a co-author of the study.

Dr Jon Paul Rodriguez, at Centro de Ecología, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas, Venezuela, joint leader of the project for IUCN, organised an extensive international consultation process to build a strong conceptual framework for risk assessment that is well grounded in the practicalities of different ecosystems around the world.

He said the framework was a critical step towards the development of a world view of our environment and all its ecosystems, which IUCN is aiming to complete by 2025.

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May 8, 2013 — Bioenergy crops, such as Miscanthus and switchgrass, appear to be promising resources for renewable energy, but these new crops did not come with a manual on how to measure details on their sustainability impacts. Jody Endres, University of Illinois professor of energy and environmental law and chair of the Council on Sustainable Biomass Production (CSBP) says standards are needed so farmers, ethanol producers, and others in the biofuels industry will all be on the same page here in the United States as well as in Europe and Brazil.

Endres believes that three conditions must be met before the benefits of standards can be fully realized.

"First, to achieve public acceptance, standards must be built upon foundations of good governance," Endres said. "Environmental and social advocacy groups should be included at some level in the process. For example, we're discussing what standards the aviation sector should recognize to meet their sustainability expectations. Instead of the substantive innerworkings of standards' principles, such as protections for air, water, soil, biodiversity, and community values, debate has centered on the level of participation and transparency standards development observes, and particularly whether a standard meets environmental groups' governance demands."

The second precondition Endres defines is to fortify the producer's sustainability toolbox, including a determination as to whether or not existing tools are effective. "If they're not, how can we build these socio-technical systems to help farmers rethink their actions in the landscape and how it relates to the environment?" Endres asked. "For example, environmentalists would like to see improvements at the watershed scale. If only isolated farmers need to be certified, and they have to figure out what their contributions to that watershed are, it can be very difficult, particularly when states have not fully assessed baseline water quality and all parties responsible for its degradation."

The third precondition for successful standard implementation is international harmonization. "Even if the biomass goes to the biorefinery with the right lignin-to-sugar content and the right amount of water, if you had to add nitrogen to produce it, or lost habitat or soil when harvesting it, it may not comply with European regulations.

"Environmental groups don't want to see a race to the bottom -- adopting requirements that are bare minimum," Endres said. "But the European standards contain requirements that are difficult to achieve, particularly for small growers. A biomass farmer doesn't know where to begin to apply it to their farming practices."

The European Renewable Energy Directive provides a baseline framework for sustainability reporting and requirements. "They're primarily concerned with land conversion -- high carbon stock land or lands that are high in biodiversity values," Endres said. "They also require a cross-compliance with agro- environmental laws, which is something required in return for receipt of agricultural payments under the Common Agricultural Program. In large part, we don't have a similar system in the United States. We have requirements for highly erodible land and protection of endangered species, but in Europe there's a broader program specifically designed for agricultural contexts to comply with environmental law and to improve the environment."

Adopting European standards is not a simple task for U.S. growers, Endres said. "For the past three years, the Council for Sustainable Biomass Production has been developing a standard that the European Commission will recognize, but one that is at the same time one designed for American growers to implement practically on the ground and that deploys tools such as those developed by USDA and Extension. Until we have a standard uniquely developed for the American market, producers' access to European markets could be inhibited. Harmonization questions between Europe, the U.S. and Brazil likely will arise, particularly when stakeholders disagree on substantive and governance questions associated with the many standards emerging in the international marketplace."

Endres said that other than certification for organic food, the United States does not have widespread experience with certifying commodities. "European calls for biofuels certification are pushing efforts in the U.S. to figure out how to certify an agricultural supply chain. It's something we've never done here at a large scale," she said.

She stressed that international harmonization is vital for the aviation industry because of looming compliance mandates for carbon reductions in Europe. "To land a plane in Europe, U.S. carriers will have to prove that they have reduced their carbon footprint below a certain level. If not, they will have to buy credits within the European Emissions Trading System. Although the requirement has been postponed until January 2014, the aviation sector is actively seeking ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through biofuels. The challenge is not only how to convert cellulosics into jet fuel, but also how to certify that they are grown, refined, and distributed in a sustainable manner," Endres said.

Endres said that there are still a lot of questions about how to implement standards for biomass. "It's important to match the goal of regulation with what actually can and does occur on the ground. We can put any requirement into writing, but will it really work on the ground or is it just 'green washing?'

"In the war of words and in the public media, biofuels have had to face more accusations than any other renewable energy source, such as solar power and wind," Endres said. "So, even though we think we're achieving rural development, receiving carbon reductions or climate mitigation benefits, or that we're having increased energy security, people may still be suspicious of biomass fuels unless there is a certification that we can operationalize."

Funding was provided by the Energy Biosciences Institute.

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