Ente transparente

Starbucks generates 4 billion paper cups a year. That’s about 12 cups for every man, woman and child in America.

Starbucks now offers its customers 10 cents off the price of any beverage if they bring their own mug. Which sounds great. Except that if Starbucks really wanted to save trees, it wouldn’t offer discounts to people who bring mugs. It would charge a dime to everyone who does not.

Because people tend to work harder to avoid losses (the 10-cent charge for a paper cup) than they do to pursue gains.

This approach works, as we know, with taxes on plastic bags. So the question is, why won’t Starbucks do this? I’m afraid the answer is that because the company knows it will work.

“No hay un ecosistema más genuino y representativo. Y está en peligro de extinción”. Así habla de la dehesa Clemente Mata, doctor y catedrático de Producción Animal de Córdoba. La complejidad de la dehesa hace que tampoco exista una sola amenaza ni una única solución. El sector se enfrenta a una crisis con tres frentes: la falta de rentabilidad de sus producciones comerciales y ambientales, agravada por la desfavorable coyuntura económica general y el fraude; el envejecimiento y la falta de renovación generacional y formativa de los gestores de las dehesas; y la seca, una enfermedad compleja, como todo lo relacionado con la dehesa, provocada por factores bióticos y abióticos que causan un deterioro gradual hasta la muerte de los árboles.

Se empiezan a vislumbrar algunas soluciones a la seca con la combinación de pájaros insectívoros, eliminación de hongos y selección de ejemplares resistentes. Pero coincide con Mata en que la clave es el cerdo ibérico, ya que la presencia de otros ganados es complementaria. Por esta razón advierte de la comercialización de cerdos ibéricos “que no han pisado nunca el campo”, que se crían de forma industrial y que, en algunos casos, vienen de otros países.

But the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel. The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus.

For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley. But, overall, transportation accounts for about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by the American food system. The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.

A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy. That assumes it’s one of the latest high-efficiency models; otherwise, you can double that figure. Cooking and running dishwashers, freezers and second or third refrigerators (more than 25 percent of American households have more than one) all add major hits. Indeed, households make up for 22 percent of all the energy expenditures in the United States.

Agriculture, on the other hand, accounts for just 2 percent of our nation’s energy usage; that energy is mainly devoted to running farm machinery and manufacture fertilizer.

Don’t forget the astonishing fact that the total land area of American farms remains almost unchanged from a century ago, at a little under a billion acres, even though those farms now feed three times as many Americans and export more than 10 times as much as they did in 1910.

The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies — and then pay the relatively tiny energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity in the economy. Sometimes that means growing vegetables in your backyard. Sometimes that means buying vegetables grown in California or Costa Rica.

Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself.

Igual que las banderas azules en las playas, la accesibilidad al cielo nocturno empieza a ser un reclamo turístico, con el consiguiente valor económico, señalan los promotores de la certificación turística Starlight.

Los destinos Starlight quedan definidos como lugares visitables que poseen excelentes cualidades para la contemplación de los cielos estrellados y para conocer los valores científicos, culturales, naturales y paisajísticos asociados.

Ya hay varios lugares españoles que optan a esta certificación, entre ellos los 14 municipios del entorno de la Reserva de la Biosfera de Monfragüe (Cáceres).