Describe the impact of agriculture in the I=PAT framework. Give an example of each.

What % of the total Earth's land is available for crops or pastures? Notice that there is a larger area of pastures that can be used for animal grazing but not (effectively) directly growing crops.

What is the energy, water, CO2 and economic output footprints of agriculture? (in different units or percentages of total)

List and describe the four main society types that relate to average energy use per person per day. Compare this to the list of agriculture types. What categories do and don't match up. Why is there a mismatch?

What is the difference between counting your individual use of energy (with a footpring analysis) and dividing the total energy use for a society by the number of citizens? What do you learn by comparing these calculations?

What were the components of resources and capital that were brought together to increase food production in the "green revolution"? Name several benefits and several costs. What can we learn from the "green revolution" that could be pertinant to our current food production problems?

Why should you take embedded energy and water into account when purchasing food?

Give example comparisons of foods with high and low embedded water and with high and low embedded energy.

Do you think you should always choose the food that has the lowest embedded energy? Explain why?

Define food security. What do you think are the crucial aspects of food security in a large industrial nation (such as the USA) , an island nation (like Bermuda) or a small agricultural nation (like Costa Rica)?

How do biofuels change general agricultural decisisons? How do biofuels change the important aspects of food security? Why are biofuels so important to our economy (why can't we just go to solar?)

What is a "world view" as we are using that term in this course?

List four world views that relate to weak through strong sustainability. What is one of the major differences between cornucopians and industrial ecologists? What is one of the main differences between an industrial ecologist and a commited environmentalist?

In the other categorization (individualistic,hierarchical, egalitarian), how do their underlying myth of nature beliefs relate to taking risks on environmental (ecological) projects?

Define "intensive farming" and give several examples.

The wiki article lumps some aspects of intensive and industrial together. How is this different than the definitions we used in class?

Give an example of a modern intensive (and ecologically sustainable) farming technique.

What are the goals of "sustainable farming"? How do water use and soil conservation relate to these goals?

What are some of the objections to large farms of the same crop (mono-culture)?

What are food miles? Why are they sometimes given in CO2 units?

What are the advantages of decreasing "food miles" and what are the tradeoffs for keeping the status quo?

What is the relative cost (in terms of fuel and CO2) for air, boat, train and truck transport of food?

In an energy life cycle analysis of food, what are some of the general categories of energy costs that could be counted? What costs were counted in the Swedish study? Do you think it would make any difference in the study if they included more of the costs within the home (such as cooking)?

How does competition between food and fuel production in agriculture impact the environment? How can higher fossil fuel prices help local economies?

What are some ideas for changing agriculture to help promote environmental sustainability?

Analysis and Synthesis questions:
These are the type of manipulations you should be able to perform; parse out the parts of the question, remember or find concepts that are useful, and then put those together into a coherent answer.

This is a 3 point question on the quiz, so it's worth thinking about.

From what you know, give several examples of foods that have high water and energy costs. Do you think those costs are well known or fully reflected in the price of those food items at the retail store? Would you pay more for low impact foods? What argument might you make to someone who believes in a free market for paying more for foods with less of an environmental impact (i.e. paying more for certain foods than they have to)?

We saw LCA for energy and water. Make up several indicators for soil impact that you'd want to apply to a soil life cycle analysis of different crops.