Global Opportunities to Increase Agricultural Independence Through Phosphorus Recycling

Food production hinges largely upon access to phosphorus (P) fertilizer. Most fertilizer P used in the global agricultural system comes from mining of nonrenewable phosphate rock deposits located within few countries. However, P contained in livestock manure or urban wastes represents a recyclable source of P. To inform development of P recycling technologies and policies, we examined subnational, national, and global spatial patterns for two intersections of land use affording high P recycling potential: (a) manure‐rich cultivated areas and (b) populous cultivated areas. In turn, we examined overlap between P recycling potential and nation‐level P fertilizer import dependency. Populous cultivated areas were less abundant globally than manure‐rich cultivated areas, reflecting greater segregation between crops and people compared to crops and livestock, especially in the Americas. Based on a global hexagonal grid (290‐km2 grid cell area), disproportionately large shares of subnational “hot spots” for P recycling potential occurred in India, China, Southeast Asia, Europe, and parts of Africa. Outside of China, most of the remaining manure‐rich or populous cultivated areas occurred within nations that had relatively high imports of P fertilizer (net P import:consumption ratios ≥0.4) or substantial increases in fertilizer demand between the 2000s (2002–2006) and 2010s (2010–2014). Manure‐rich cultivated grid cells (those above the 75th percentiles for both manure and cropland extent) represented 12% of the global grid after excluding cropless cells. Annually, the global sum of animal manure P was at least 5 times that contained in human excreta, and among cultivated cells the ratio was frequently higher (median = 8.9). The abundance of potential P recycling hot spots within nations that have depended on fertilizer imports or experienced rising fertilizer demand could prove useful for developing local P sources and maintaining agricultural independence

Reversing the Gaze: Using Indigenous and Western Worldviews to Compare Coverage of Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples in the News Media

The news media acts as an important conduit for shaping societal views of the sociopolitics of climate change. While climate change will indeed affect everyone, it will not affect everyone equally. Indigenous peoples are among the populations whose well-being is threatened the most by climate change. International scholarship finds it is not uncommon for Indigenous cultures, communities, and perspectives to be underrepresented and misrepresented in Western climate change media. Research also indicates that fair Indigenous representation occurs when Indigenous peoples are the authors of news articles themselves. We evaluated the differences in discussions of climate change and environmental issues in news articles from two Indigenous news publications, Indian Country Today and Navajo Times, and two Western news publications, The New York Times and The Salt Lake Tribune. We performed a comparative media analysis of news coverage of climate change, environmental issues, and Indigenous peoples during 2020 and 2021 using novel Indigenous and Western worldviews coding frameworks informed by Tribal Critical Race Theory and other literature and theory in these respective areas. Our findings indicate that Indigenous news outlets employed our Tribal Critical Race Theory media frames more often than Western news outlets did. Additionally, Indigenous and Western news outlets engage their respective cultural environmental worldviews often and holistically throughout articles. Indigenous news outlets commonly engage Western environmental worldviews, but primarily in the context of problematizing Western environmental practices, and by necessity of Western worldviews’ dominance in the United States. Conversely, Western publications engage Indigenous environmental worldviews, when they do, to highlight the urgency of environmental problems and elucidate the Indigenous perspective of a problem, but negligibly in the context of positioning solutions to environmental problems. This content analysis contributes to a better understanding of Indigenous and Western worldviews and the media, settler colonialism, and climate change from Indigenous and Western perspectives. Utilizing theory-informed Indigenous worldviews media frames challenges the recurrent Western gaze on Indigenous peoples within academia. Overall, this research responds to a critical call for sociologists to engage more deeply with settler colonialism, Indigenous issues, and intersectional environmental justice

Anthropogenic ecosystem disturbance and the recovery debt

Ecosystem recovery from anthropogenic disturbances, either without human intervention or assisted by ecological restoration, is increasingly occurring worldwide. As ecosystems progress through recovery, it is important to estimate any resulting deficit in biodiversity and functions. Here we use data from 3,035 sampling plots worldwide, to quantify the interim reduction of biodiversity and functions occurring during the recovery process (that is, the 'recovery debt'). Compared with reference levels, recovering ecosystems run annual deficits of 46-51% for organism abundance, 27-33% for species diversity, 32-42% for carbon cycling and 31-41% for nitrogen cycling. Our results are consistent across biomes but not across degrading factors. Our results suggest that recovering and restored ecosystems have less abundance, diversity and cycling of carbon and nitrogen than 'undisturbed' ecosystems, and that even if complete recovery is reached, an interim recovery debt will accumulate. Under such circumstances, increasing the quantity of less-functional ecosystems through ecological restoration and offsetting are inadequate alternatives to ecosystem protection

Interview with Johann M. McCrackin

https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/scmotheroftheyear/1020/thumbnail.jp