Alice WatersEssay Preview: Alice WatersReport this essayAlice Waters is the Vice President of Slow Food International it is an organization founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986. Slow Food International is an association that promotes food and wine culture, and also defends food and agricultural biodiversity worldwide. Slow Food Intl. has 83,000 members worldwide and offices in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the USA, France, Japan, and Great Britain. They are one of the largest and most influential agriculturally conscious groups in the world. Their mission includes defense of biodiversity, which helps protects countless traditional cheeses, grains, vegetables, fruits, and animal breeds. Taste education which teaches people to make a conscious effort to explore, question, and experiment with food, and linking producers and consumers Slow Food Intl. host and sponsors many world renowned festivals and markets. Slow Food Intl. also organizes two key adult education projects: the Master of Food, a program of study in the wine and food area separated into 20 courses each with a different theme, and the University of Gastronomic Sciences, the worlds first university of eco-gastronomy.
Maybe one of the most important projects Slow Food Intl. has initiated is The Ark of Taste. It was founded to discover, track and defend small quality food products and defend biodiversity. The Presidia are organizational entities used to promote the products, guarantee their economic and commercial future and, protect the land from poverty and create new job opportunities for artisan food producers. Some of the products the Ark of Taste is trying to save range from the Italian Valchiavenna goat, the American Navajo-Churro sheep, the last indigenous Irish cattle breed, the Kerry, a unique variety of Greek fava beans grown only on the island of Santorini. All of these products are endangered and according to The Ark of Taste they all have real economic possibility and commercial potential.
[quote=KezelAquat]$500,000 to invest in the conservation of biodiversity in Texas
“The idea that there are no commercial interests in those species which are the foundation of civilization is a dangerous assumption for any society to be at odds with.” – Professor David Burt.
The most recent news was that a federal judge has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency has authority to set rules for Texas. This action could be an effective tool for the conservationist and environmentalists who work on species conservation. But now we can understand the reasoning from that ruling which may be the most important thing for conservationists in the United States. What do they know and what does it mean to preserve wildlife or to have the ability to preserve the natural world as a whole?
The current conservationist organizations have a plan to protect, manage and sustain biodiversity in the United States. But what do the “proprietary” species conservation movements of ’80s and ’90s mean, and what are their intentions? How does the ’empire’ of these groups fit into their vision?
Our National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes recently made a very revealing proposal. He said, “In my opinion this is the most important thing for biodiversity preservation for the 21st century.”
A certain Robert Fisk (who is an expert on climate change) of the Council on Foreign Relations in Canada has suggested the following:
The ‘conservationist’ movement seeks to safeguard the world’s biodiversity by taking an interest in preserving it at the cost of other species.
“The conservationist movement does not only want to maintain and advance the ecological system in ways which don’t cost the planet a dollar, but actually promote it. This might be one of its main goals,” says Fisk, who is also the senior director for global ecological initiatives at the Council on Foreign Relations. “In many respects it is a new way not only to live but to think very strongly about ecological issues.
“It represents a change in the thinking of some activists and they might be surprised by the implications for biodiversity preservation for humans today. This is an important movement for us to do and we’re looking to have the leadership of this new movement who is willing to take on the challenge as an international co-optation.”
On the other hand, there remains a lot that might not be possible in such a world. The problem of our species going extinct is a major one for conservationists. Not only do our numbers become more scarce – there are more predators and more extinction of fish. We live the same wild as ever, living in a globalised economy with many different species and many differing ecosystem conditions. What we do we depend on for survival.
Conservationists are facing an existential threat due to the extinction of most of the world’s major species such as the fish, insects and amphibians – at every level. Why is this so? Well, some researchers think that we will have to get used to the modern technologies but they say there is a new danger in technology that may soon disappear.
An exciting topic of investigation here involves whether