Harsh Facts, Ecofriendly Economics & July's Animal

Harsh Facts of the Week

 As I write this post, massive wildfires are raging in Arizona. Nineteen firefighters lost their lives yesterday fighting a wildfire in Yarnell, AZ, which earlier this morning had spread across 6,000 acres. In their honor, this week’s “Harsh Facts” will be based around wildfires.

In 2012, there were a total of 67,774 recorded wildfires, which collectively burned 9,326,238 acres of land. To see the totals from other years, click here.

The total cost to suppress 2012’s wildfires came to $1,902,446,000, almost 2 billion dollars. In comparison, $239,943,000 was spent in 1985 on wildfire suppression.

In 2011, one outside fire was reported every forty-six seconds in the United States.

In the United States and Australia, the two most common causes of wildfires are lightning and human activities. On average in the U.S., humans cause six times as many wildfires as natural causes do.  

Wildfires thrive best in hot, dry, and windy conditions. 2012 was the hottest year recorded in the U.S. since records began in 1895. The summer of 2012 was the third warmest summer on record.

On January 17th, 2013, Australia experienced its hottest day in 103 years with a 105˚F average and with the hottest temperature being 118˚F.

Ecofriendly Economics & Harsh Facts: Food Waste

Thank you for your understanding and patience about Monday's postponement. Again, please excuse the inconsistent formatting... I have sent a complaint to Blogger about that. 

Harsh Facts of the Week

These harsh facts will be part of a theme I have decided to focus on this week: food waste. I thought the topic of food waste would go along nicely with this week's Green Challenge, which takes some of your food waste and recycles it into rich, healthy soil. I pulled some of the facts from a web page entitled: "Americans go hungry in a land of massive food waste," which is starkly and sadly true. Stay tuned for Friday's "Suggested Reading" post, which will actually feature a video instead of a book: a TED Talk by Tristram Stuart on the topic of food waste. Stuart is mentioned in today's Harsh Facts.

Roughly one-third of the edible parts of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally, which amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year.

  

The average American wastes 209-254 pounds of edible food each year, while 17.2 million American households in 2010 were deemed “food insecure,” meaning it was difficult to provide food for everyone in the family. About 46 million Americans, or one in every seven people, relied on food stamps that same year. 

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that the consumer level food waste in industrialized countries is almost as high as the total net food production of Sub-Saharan Africa (222 million tons of food waste as compared to 230 million tons of net food production, respectively).

Tristram Stuart visited British farms to understand how quality standards affect food waste, including M.H. Poskitt Carrots. In total, 25-30% of all carrots handled by M.H. Poskitt Carrots were out-graded. About half of these were rejected due to aesthetic defects (i.e., wrong shape or size, not orange enough, broken, having a cleft or blemish).