Did you know? China is planting a belt of trees to protect land from the expanding Gobi Desert. This Great Green Wall is projected to extend some 4,480 kilometers (2,800 miles), stretching from outer Beijing through Inner Mongolia (Nei Monggol). Unfortunately, recent pressures to expand food production appear to have slowed this tree planting initiative. For more information view the text and data in Chapter 8 of Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.
Food Situation Highlights Presentation for World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse
Download Slideshow in PowerPoint (4.3 MB)
Download Slideshow as PDF (1.2 MB)
When Will the Food Bubble Burst?
Millions of people around the world are fed by "food bubbles," artificially high levels of food production that could drop suddenly at any moment, triggering food price spikes, inciting civil unrest, and swelling the ranks of the world's hungry. Rising food prices in early 2011 are approaching the 2007-08 price spike that led to a dramatic jump in the number of hungry people around the world. As overpumping depletes aquifers and increasingly extreme weather events destroy crops, it becomes ever more likely that food is the weak link that could bring down our global civilization.
Based on Lester Brown's latest book, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, this presentation highlights just a few of the most urgent threats to our global food supply and the trends that created them.
If you find this tool useful, please let us know how you are using it in your community, classroom, or congregation by sending an e-mail to [email protected]. We may add your example to our ever-growing list of the many ways folks around the world are spreading the Plan B vision.
Further instructions:
To view the presentation you will need Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer (click here to download).
To both view and modify slides you will need the full Microsoft PowerPoint program (click here).
To view the PDF version you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader (click here).
To advance slides, press the right arrow key or Enter on your keyboard or click the left mouse button when the cursor is on the screen. To exit the slideshow, press Esc.
Find out more in World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse or see the complete datasets.
Released 12 January 2011