Final Review Session Notes

Final Review Session

• Monday, April 28th: Review at 5:30 PM; bring questions.
• Wednesday, April 30th: Final in-class exam on Unit III.
• A compilation of Learning Outcomes for all lectures in Unit III is available; use them as a study guide.

End of Semester Evaluations

• Anonymous evaluations are available via email.
• Helps to understand the course experience and what can be improved.
• Complete the survey and post a picture to Canvas for 1% extra credit.

Unit III: Protecting and Feeding the Planet

• Focus: Understanding the future of food.
• Two visions presented: Wizards and Prophets.
• Topics: Sustainable Agriculture, Emerging threats, A changing world.

Challenges to Agriculture

• Reflect broader challenges of our shared future:
  1. Climate change
  2. Biodiversity loss
  3. Food security
  4. Unequal distribution of resources
• Problems are large and seem intractable, which can be discouraging.

Dueling Visions

• Wizards: Emphasize technological solutions and innovation.
• Prophets: Advocate for reducing consumption and living within ecological limits.

Responding to Challenges

• How do we respond to the challenges ahead?
• What can we do as individuals and as a society?

Solutions and Cooperation

• Individuals: Education, Choices.
• Society: Regulations, Policies.
• Understanding our potential to change the future of agriculture through cooperation.

Lecture 24 Learning Goals

• Share a well-supported opinion about where individual actions matter most in changing the future of agriculture.
• Explain how government regulations and incentives can influence positive changes in human behavior.
• Identify key elements essential for successful cooperation.

The Paradox of Individual Action

• No individual action by itself can fix major problems.
• Problems will never be solved if no one takes action.
• Is it possible to keep people motivated to take action?

Prioritizing Actions for Positive Change

• We can all spend resources on individual actions:
  1. Time
  2. Money
  3. Votes

Individual Actions - Spending Time

• Meaningful change can be produced.
• Examples:
  • Rachel Carson
  • Norman Borlaug
  • Volunteering
  • Career Choices
  • Founders of Microbiology and hidden figures
• Keep America Beautiful:
  • $77,488$ miles of streets, roads, and highways cleaned, improved, or beautified.
  • $31,163$ pounds of litter and debris collected.
  • $4,819,874$ hours of volunteering in Keep America Beautiful affiliate programs.

Individual Actions - Targeted Spending

• Contributing to causes we care about.
• Aligning consumption with our values (could mean consuming less).

Individual Actions - Spending Votes

• Governments are a way of organizing collective action.
• Governments are powerful tools.
• Making informed choices for your votes.

Importance of Education

• Actions need to be informed to maximize their positive impact.
• Education is a tool that helps inform people.
• Investing in education is the goal of the course.

Course Learning Goals and Outcomes

• Teach core concepts in biology and critical thinking about scientific issues.
• Analyze interactions between plants, microbes, and human society impacting food, environment, and the planet’s sustainability.
• Practice the scientific method, analyze research results, and build science-based discussion skills.
• Discern how scientific knowledge differs from other types of knowledge and can be used for informed decisions.
• Make educated decisions about scientific issues in agriculture, food security, and the environment in social and political contexts.

Minute Paper Activity

• What is one topic you wished we covered in more depth to help you make more educated decisions about issues in agriculture?

Regulations and Policies

• For climate change and other challenges, need national and international policies that create irresistible incentives and subsidies to reduce consumption & reduce carbon emissions.
• This is already being done - for both individuals and corporations.
• *Subsidies are direct and indirect payments; education and arguments are not enough.

Subsidies as Incentives

• Subsidies are already a popular way to incentivize behavior.
• Top industries that receive subsidies globally: energy, agriculture, and transportation.
• Fossil fuels account for the majority of all global subsidies (IMF).
• In the US, corn and soy received about $77\%$ of the direct commodity subsidies in 2016.

Transition to a New Economy

• Subsidies now shifting to support clean energy.
• E.g., In the US, traditional fuels (coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear) received $15\%$ of all subsidies from 2016-2022, while renewables, conservation, and end use received $85\%$.

Subsidies for Agriculture and Climate Change

• Farm Bill programs in the US provide over $6$ billion per year to help mitigate agriculture’s negative impacts.
• Direct (cash payments) and indirect (tax breaks) for farmers to implement environmentally friendly practices.
• What types of subsidies do you think are most helpful?
• *These subsidies represent only $0.1\%$ of overall US budget: lots of room to grow!

Conservation Subsidies

• Include many approaches and techniques we’ve discussed:
  • Cover cropping and crop rotations for soil health
  • Vegetative stream buffers to slow erosion (agroforestry)
  • Letting cropland go fallow to sequester carbon and increase biodiversity

Taxes and Regulation

• Most direct way to change consumer behavior.
• Controversial, especially in US, as people don’t like being told what to do.
• E.g., Numerous bills and initiatives have been introduced in Congress for a carbon tax, but none have been enacted into law.

Incentives, Legislation, and Infrastructure

• Europeans live as well as (or better than) we do, but release only half as much carbon as Americans do.
• Incentives, legislation, and infrastructure play a key role.
• Traveling from downtown Paris to downtown Marseille example:
  • Flying Time (inclusive): 5 h
  • Driving time: 8 h
  • High-speed Train: 3 h 20 min
• Other types of incentives for behavior work too.

Government Policies

• Tie everything together.
• Incentives and regulations are applied to both individuals and corporations.
• Policy coordinates these efforts and aligns them with larger investment, research, and education initiatives.
• This is where your votes come in.

Investments in Research

• Incentives and subsidies are great, but we need to know what works and what doesn’t: this is where investing in science helps.
• Game-changing solutions also come from both applied and basic research.
• E.g., CRISPR for gene editing.

Human Cooperation

• A reason for optimism: Humans are social animals with a strong drive to cooperate.
• We can, and often do, work together in large groups to solve problems.

Nashua River Case Study

• Local communities reversed pollution damage in the Nashua River, NH.
• Marion Stoddart founded the Nashua River Watershed Association to protect the river and educate adults and children.
• Organized her community to work together to:
  • Permanently protect the land adjacent to the river
  • Pass the federal Water Quality Act in 1965 and the Massachusetts Clean Water Act of 1966

The Ozone Hole and CFC Ban

• Chloroflurocarbon gas (CFCs) from refrigerants damage the atmospheric ozone layer.
• By the late 1980s, a “hole” had developed in the Earth’s ozone layer over the South pole.
• UV radiation was damaging ecosystems, increasing cancers in the southern hemisphere.

Montreal Protocol

• An international treaty that phased out, then banned all use of CFCs.
• What made it possible?
  • Governments were united
  • Industry was actively involved
  • Alternative technology was available

The Montreal Protocol Success

• Atmospheric CFCs peaked in 1998, and the ozone hole is steadily shrinking.

Lessons from the Montreal Protocol

• Proves that multinational agreements can reduce global pollution.
• Policies need to draw on the human capacity for cooperation.
• Greenhouse gas emissions are a tougher problem, however.

Challenges and Opportunities Ahead

• Problems confronting humanity lie at the intersection of agriculture, the environment, and our society.
• Citizens and policymakers must be comfortable analyzing and critiquing science research.
• Everyone needs to channel their inner Wizard and Prophet to find a way forward.