Word: soils
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...belong: not up on pedestals but down among us, where the action is. The Kennedys of reality were as much a part of the tempestuous truth and hard action of the 20th century as any single family. It was an immigrant century, and Joseph P. Kennedy sprang from that soil. His father P.J. Kennedy was a prosperous saloon owner and ward boss in the hurly-burly of the Boston Irish. It was the urban century, long dominated by men like John (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, the machine mayor of Boston whose daughter Rose married Joe and became the Kennedy matriarch...
Khat fields are typically flooded twice a month, consuming about 30% of the country's water - most of which is pumped from underground aquifers filled thousands of years ago, and replenished only very slowly by the occasional rainfall that seeps through the layers of soil and rock. A recent explosion of khat cultivation has drawn water levels down to the point where they are no longer being replenished. The option of pumping desalinated water over long pipelines from coastal plants is too expensive for such a poor country. Yemen is in real danger of becoming the world's first country...
...expense of healthier produce is also a principal cause of America's obesity epidemic. At a time when the nation is close to a civil war over health-care reform, obesity adds $147 billion a year to our doctor bills. "The way we farm now is destructive of the soil, the environment and us," says Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). (See pictures of what the world eats...
...have the luxury of philosophizing about food. With the exhaustion of the soil, the impact of global warming and the inevitably rising price of oil - which will affect everything from fertilizer to supermarket electricity bills - our industrial style of food production will end sooner or later. As the developing world grows richer, hundreds of millions of people will want to shift to the same calorie-heavy, protein-rich diet that has made Americans so unhealthy - demand for meat and poultry worldwide is set to rise 25% by 2015 - but the earth can no longer deliver. Unless Americans radically rethink...
...with the Land To prevent his ranch from becoming overgrazed, Niman shifts his cattle around the land, ensuring that the grass has time to recover between feedings. The result is a surprisingly low-impact hamburger, since grass doesn't need chemical fertilizer to grow and its presence helps prevent soil erosion. There's no need to clean up manure - with Niman's low cattle density, the waste just fertilizes the land...