If you're a Westerner - and what American isn't, really? -- Colorado College's State of the Rockies Project is a must-read, must-bookmark web destination.

The project's mission -- to conduct "state-of-the-art research to help Rockies residents clearly see their communities, environment and economy, so they can better shape their own future" -- is strikingly like Environmental Working Group's detailed, hyper-local data and analysis.

This year: Food & Ag
This year's topic, food and agriculture, is a natural fit with EWG's work. CC students, guided by economics professor Walter E. Hecox, an economics professor, are using EWG's farm subsidy database to help document how the economics and demography of farming are changing the physical and cultural landscape -- and how its traditions and economic and demographic pressures are shaping agriculture and ranching.

Last week, I traveled to the CC campus to preview EWG's new AgMag for a State of the Rockies symposium on the politics of agriculture. (Full disclosure: my son Shannon Morgan, a CC sophomore contemplating a major in an environmental field, was in the audience. It was great to see him and enjoy a few moments at an historic campus where Katherine Lee Bates, a visiting teacher, was inspired to compose America the Beautiful. But he's not one of the privileged few upperclassmen tapped each year for the project team.)

Students find complicated agricultural picture
The student researchers have already dug up some facts that make for a complicated picture. On one hand, farmland acreage is shrinking and the number of farming and ranching operations is growing. That could suggest more family and small-business farms profiting from rapidly expanding demand for locally-grown food. On the other hand, "mega-agricultural enterprises" are major factors in the regional agricultural economy.

Upcoming speakers: Stanford professor Rosamond Naylor, an expert on trade-offs between grass-fed and industrial livestock, journalist and author Richard Manning, author of Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape,"and Dr. Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, associate professor of history at Kansas State University and author of Red Earth: Race and Agriculture in Oklahoma Territory.

If you can't make the lectures, no worries - you can download past report cards and sign up for the agriculture edition, due in March.

Meanwhile, there's a wealth of information in previous years' report cards.

The most recent, published last spring, focuses on incarceration, historic preservation and protection of wildlife in a region whose population is increasing 2.6 times faster than that of the U.S. The CC Rockies project is aimed at helping the West's people manage that tumultuous change.

You can still see the wilderness as it was, and still is, and should remain, in the State of the Rockies photo gallery.

If you live in Washington DC, as I do, there are two things that you hear about everywhere you turn- the U.S. presidential election and the economic crisis. The first topic will be resolved quickly enough. The second one will be around for a while to come, I'm afraid.

The financial crisis is here to stay for at least some time. However, the economic situation can have an interesting role in putting the price tab on the nature and the nature resources considered free until now.

According to the recent Reuters article:

"Advocates of "eco-nomics" say that valuing "natural capital" could help protect nature from rising human populations, pollution and climate change that do not figure in conventional measures of wealth such as gross domestic product (GDP) or gross national product (GNP)."

The approach of eco-nomics is that sustainability is an essential driver of economic prosperity and that companies should generate business value trough sustainable practices.

Reuters article continues with:

"Under standard economics, nations can boost their GDP -- briefly -- by chopping down all their forests and selling the timber, or by dynamiting coral reefs to catch all the fish. A rethink would stress the value of keeping nature intact."

Rethinking is definitely much needed on the economics of the world. The new approach sounds like an promising start.

Photo by pete4ducks

Last couple of days, it's been all about the bottled water here at EWG. The same day we released our investigation, was the day the United Nations declared the Global Hand-Washing Day

The day, and the initiative to call 2008 International Year of Sanitation comes after the founding that over 80 per cent of all diseases in developing countries are attributable to unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.

The action for the Global Hand-Washing Day spread across five continents in 70 countries and had affected over 120 million children.

The message about the importance of pure water and the access to it is clear. But the message about the importance of using that clear water, with soap, when washing hands is what this day wants to promote. According to the promotional web site for the day:

"Handwashing with soap is the most effective and inexpensive way to prevent diarrheal and acute respiratory infections, which take the lives of millions of children in developing countries every year. Together, they are responsible for the majority of all child deaths. Yet, despite its lifesaving potential, handwashing with soap is seldom practiced and difficult to promote.

Of the approximately 120 million children born in the developing world each year, half will live in households without access to improved sanitation, at grave risk to their survival and development. Poor hygiene and lack of access to sanitation together contribute to about 88% of deaths from diarrhoeal diseases, accounting for 1.5 million diarrhoea-related under-five deaths each year. Children suffer disproportionately from diarrheal and respiratory diseases and deaths. But research shows that children - the segment of society so often the most energetic, enthusiastic, and open to new ideas - can also be powerful agents of behavioral change."

Nice action UN!

I don't believe that it's the rising worldwide population that is leading to the environmental problems we are facing today. While I have to acknowledge that population growth plays a small role in it, I believe that most environmental degradation comes from the behavior of that population. Especially concerning is the behavior of the few developed countries that contribute much more to global degradation than the less developed ones.

Having that in mind, I can appreciate the United Nations- sponsored World Population Day coming up tomorrow, July 11. According to the UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund:

"This year's World Population Day reaffirms the right of people to plan their families. It encourages activities, events and information that will help make this right real - especially for those who often have the hardest time getting the information and services they need to plan their families, such as marginalized populations and young people.

When people can plan their families, they can plan their lives. They can plan to beat poverty. They can plan on healthier mothers and children. They can plan to gain equality for women. "

There are many reasons why family planning is important: It could save women's lives and help them participate in the labor force, as well as give them the opportunity to choose when and how they want to establish their family.

To read some of the environmental implications of the lack of family planning, read this. If you are interested in doing something in your community, the UN web site offers some good suggestions.

Some countries are finding an alternative solution for the lack of farms to fulfill their agricultural needs: they are renting the land from other countries!

The new idea has many benefits. It helps the country in need of food and it also helps the "host" country that often lacks resources for their own land production, as well as the infrastructure.

Persian Gulf countries are the main users of this rent-a-farm system. Many of them are very oil rich and can afford this arrangement. According to the recent U.S. News and World Report article:

"Many of the richest countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia, are handicapped by a dry, unforgiving climate and a shortage of farmland; thus they must import more than 60 percent of their annual food supply. Existing water stores are expected to be exhausted in 30 years, and yet, food demand is growing. Population growth in the region is more than double the world average, the prices of some staples are up more than 30 percent this year, and civil unrest is mounting."

Gulf states are not alone in these pursuits, and have been joined by some Asian countries, as well as individual farmers from the United States and Australia.

Since farmland is disappearing globally due to things like urbanization, population growth and development, this trend will continue. One can only hope that the agreements will continue to be beneficial for both parties involved, and that all countries will have an equal chance to participate, while they maintain their sovereignty.

The number 32 didn't mean much to me until today, when I read an op-ed by the amazing Jared Diamond in The New York Times. According to him:

"To mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it's 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences."

We all know that many are concerned about the world population, but Diamond argues that we should be concerned with consumption and who consumes what and how much. He argues that growing population is not the problem because the part of the world where population is growing fastest is where there is least consumption. To read more, check out the article.

Jared Diamond is also the author of Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, a study of environmental degradation and its role in the breakdown of historical societies.

The European Happy Planet Index ranked Iceland as the best in Europe today, according to the new report released today by the New Economics Foundation.
According to the Telegraph article.

“The Happy Planet Index is a break from traditional economic analysis because it attempts to combine objective and subjective criteria to understand the relationship between "experienced wellbeing" and a country's material circumstances. It contrasts with measures such as the UN's Human Development Index, which uses life expectancy, education and gross domestic product (GDP) to predict wellbeing.”

According to Nic Marks, founder of the foundation's Centre for Well-being, "Iceland's combination of strong social policies and extensive use of renewable energy demonstrates that living within our environmental means doesn't mean sacrificing human well-being."

The Scandinavian countries ranked the best, while often compared to U.S., the UK scores 21 out of 30. Europe as a continent has almost 3 times too much of global share of carbon emissions.