Securing world food security while maintaining operable forests, global climate, water, ocean and terrestrial ecosystems – and human rights, justice and equity – is the biggest challenge facing humanity. Water and food are the next bubbles to burst -- expect severe shortages of both in the 2010s. It is long past time to get back to the land through protecting and restoring old forests and organic permaculture farming. Our survival depends upon being with land, collecting water, letting forests age and growing food.
]]> Today industrial-style agriculture uses huge amounts of water, energy, and chemicals – replacing natural terrestrial ecosystems with toxic monocultures; while poisoning and displacing local peoples. Farms are large, highly specialized, and run like factories with large inputs of fossil fuels from pesticides, other synthetic chemicals and transportation fuels. Land degradation — the decline in the quality of soil, water and vegetation — is of profound importance for any serious negotiations upon climate change. A new study finds that 24% of the Earth‘s land is degrading, some of it formerly quite productive.Large scale biofuel/biomass production – particularly promoting monoculture tree plantations within the context of Copenhagen “solutions” – runs counter to urgently addressing climate change and threatens to cause more deforestation, human rights abuses, and degradation of soil, water and biodiversity. All biofuels based upon industrial agricultural practices worsen climate change and ecologically diminish soils and ecosystems, drive food prices up, and force more people worldwide into hunger and malnutrition.
It is time to transform agriculture into an ecologically sustainable enterprise, based on systems which can be employed for centuries. To reduce the pressures upon the land and allow forests to undergo succession, we must promote organic, permaculture, low impact agriculture, agro-forest and other agro-ecological systems to meet human food needs, including major reduction in meat consumption. And protecting and restoring old forests where they historically occurred is vital as well. TAKE ACTION HERE NOW!
TAKE ACTION HERE NOW! 
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu's speech last week advocating painting rooftops and roadways white to reflect sunlight may be yet another attempt to test the international waters on the controversial subject of 
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology forecast that global warming's effects [search] this century could be twice as extreme as estimated [ark] just six years ago. They found that Earth's median surface temperature could rise 9.3 degrees F (5.2 degrees C) by 2100 compared to a 2003 study that projected a median temperature increase of 4.3 degrees F (2.4 degrees C). The new study, published in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate, said the difference was due to improved economic modeling and data. The paper calls for "rapid and massive action".
California is setting the precedent of regulating greenhouse gas emissions from transport fuels [ark]. The regulation requires producers, refiners and importers of gasoline and diesel to reduce the carbon footprint of their fuel by 10% over the next decade. And it launches the state on an ambitious path toward cutting its overall heat-trapping emissions by 80% by mid-century.
TAKE ACTION! Let California Air Resources Board know all industrially produced biofuel crops from live biomass [search], edible or not, still require land, soil, water, fertilizer and other finite inputs. It is clear that industrial biofuels are not "renewable energy" given that these inputs are all in limited supply, and indirect land uses lead to destruction of soil and forest carbon sinks elsewhere.
(Earth) -- Ecological Internet (EI) welcomes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ruling today that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases "may endanger public health or welfare", a finding that opens the door to future regulation of such emissions under the Clean Air Act. EI continues to demand that emission cuts be fast and large, that Congress not weaken planned E.P.A. carbon regulation, and that Congress abandon cap and trade legislation for a simple, highly effective, carbon tax. And that the U.S. leads at Copenhagen or feel the consequences.
Human political and economic system failures mean world will not meet 2C warming target [ark]. Most climate scientists now agree that given soaring emissions and political constraints, an average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century is more likely. This will disrupt food and water supplies, exterminate innumerable species of plants and animals, trigger massive sea level rises, and otherwise lead to ecological and social collapse [search].
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