Your Questions About Green Living

The Expert answers:

1) We should rethink allowing the UN through their Agenda 21 programme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21
implementing power over local governments, http://www.jbs.org/news/stop-the-un-s-agenda-21-sustainable-development
and thus strengthening global governance (government). Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_governance
Chapter 14 http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.Print.asp?DocumentID=52&ArticleID=62
deals with what Agenda 21 wants to do to agriculture. As might be expected, the wording is vague, and the implementation is not.
– Programme area (a) seems to be about implementing central planning in order to insure food security. Such government efforts have been disastrous in the past in that they separated the incentive to feed people from the profit motive causing famine. Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
– Programme area (b) is more specifically about bringing agriculture under government control as explained in section 14.14. The implementation in the USA has been the Food Safety and Modernization Act, http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/01/fda-food-safety-modernization-act-out-of-the-box/
which has more to do with eliminating the small farmer (collectivization) than the almost nothing it has to do with food safety. This has also mostly resulted in famine whenever it has been tried before. Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_farming
None of this should be surprising given the wording in section 14.9:
“Implement policies to influence land tenure and property rights positively with due recognition of the minimum size of land-holding required to maintain production and check further fragmentation”
Indeed, property rights are being transferred from land owners to the federal government.

The Expert answers:

I would just like to add that I took a fisheries class last semester, and wow. There really ARE no sustainable fisheries!

Fish caught in the wild are usually over-harvested. If the number of fish caught starts going down, fisheries will use more boats and more nets so they get the same yield each year, until suddenly there are no more fish of that kind. And no matter what method you use to catch fish, you always get by-catch. So, you list a fish as endangered, and then when they’re trawling for flounder, they accidentally catch the endangered fish! Well, they can’t sell it, because its illegal to sell an endangered fish, so they toss it back. Too bad it’s already dead, because its gas bladder ruptured, or they had it out of the water too long!

Farm-raised fisheries don’t impact wild populations, but they pollute the water, and they need to feed the farm-raised fish other fish! So you end up over harvesting bait-fish instead of the target fish, but the wild ones end up suffering anyway because they have no prey!

It was one depressing class, let me tell you what.

I don’t know what is the most sustainable, but the WORST fish is probably shrimp. Shrimp trawlers tear up the bottom of the ocean, destroying habitat, and are 90% by-catch (meaning for every 100 fish they catch, only 10 of them are shrimp. The other 90 fish, which are killed in the process, get tossed back into the sea.) Up until recently shrimp trawlers killed hundreds of endangered sea turtles each year, but they started using “turtle guards” on the trawls, so turtles don’t get caught as often.

The Expert answers:

We need this cuz it is a huge part of our econemy. We get tons of money from people coming to see, the grand canyon, niagara falls, etc etc

The Expert answers:

The main thing to look for is country of origin. If you can get it from Mexico it will be much more sustainable than if it came from Asia. It is very hard to get very large shrimp that are not farmed raised. Wild caught shrimp has more flavor if you can find it. Mexican shrimp does not destroy as much mangroves or coral. I avoid shrimp from Thailand myself.

The Expert answers:

If a ‘forest product’ are trees and you just down more then can grow or are re planted you will have nothing left for the next generations. Clear cutting or logging is a good example for that. Put these two words into a search engine and you get much more than would fit here.
We all have heard of cutting down the jungles of Madagascar, teak and mahogany in the far east and so forth.
Animals that maybe would be hunted for food by the surrounding communities will also become scares or there will be nothing left to hunt, might that be wild deer, wild pigs or whatever there is.

If you are talking about other forest products like berries or mushrooms, pine cones or tree nuts, well there might be a good harvest for 2 or 3 season, and then not much left for the next few years, if anything will re grow that fast. (there should be a story on the net about harvesting pine nuts in Siberia). Or if you tap the maple trees in canada for instance, to much, for maple juice, the trees just will die, there is a story also somewhere.