International Conservation & Development

Last week, yet another high-level report on a topic of global concern was published by yet another group of eminent experts – this one on food security and climate change. The eminent experts – the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change – were assembled by a group of donor countries and the World Bank for the one-year task of producing the report and its recommendations. Read her full analysis

A new audio slideshow explores the work of UNH Professor Drew Conroy during the year he spent in Namibia, Africa. Conroy, a professor of applied animal science at the Thompson School of Applied Science, has traveled the world teaching about and researching techniques that are helping people to sustainably feed themselves. Watch the slideshow

They could hardly have been more different, the nomadic Masai tribesmen from East Africa and the college professor from New Hampshire. Yet, as they sat around a campfire on a remote African savanna, it soon became clear that they all spoke the same timeless language: cattle.

For 2011 Switzer Fellow Jeannette Laramee, it all started with designing a school in Zambia, Africa. That led to building systems that make biogas, which can save up to 10,000 pounds of firewood a year for a family in Africa.

"Some coralline algae produce a chemical that induces coral settlement, in which the larval stage in the water settles on the ocean floor to grow into an adult. This settlement must happen for reefs to recover after disturbance," said lead author Jennifer O'Leary, a research associate with the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.

LITZINGER12:34:22 Okay. Are we causing a problem? For example, here in the United States, we are a consumer society. Sometimes we don't think about where things come from. What's the connection between what we buy and the Sumatran Tiger? KRAMME12:34:34

Emily Eliza Scott is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist whose work focuses on the creative-critical interpretation of contemporary landscapes. In 2010, she completed a PhD in art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, “Wasteland: American Landscapes in/and 1960s Art,” examines early land-based art in relation to the actual spaces and spatial politics it engaged, pursuing how and why degraded environments served as fertile grounds for artistic experimentation in this period.

On this Switzer Network News report, we learn about the intersection between global climate change and agriculture, why current "solutions" are inadequate and where we need to go next globally.

As a college student in the mid-1980s, Maria Fernandez-Gimenez worked as a seasonal interpreter for the National Park Service. That’s when she was first exposed to the great Western debate over public-lands ranching. She soon became familiar with environmentalists’ gripes about grazing impacts, but realized she knew nothing about the ranchers’ point of view. So she went to work on a distant cousin’s ranch in northwestern Colorado, where she spent the summer sleeping in a hayloft.