Danielle Levy

In another 40 years, demographers tell us, there will be 2.5 billion more people. A new UN report says that by then we shall need to double food production in order to feed the planet. When a similar issue arose some fifty years ago, the Green Revolution increased food production. But it came at the expense of the environment, utilizing too much land, water and other natural resources. Now, experts say we need to totally rethink how to use land and water. The use of algae is at the top of the list. Algae is many times more ecologically efficient than ethanol, cheaper to produce, can be used as fuel and also to feed animals and in some cases humans. Another idea is artificial meat, although how to make it taste the same as its animal counterpart is still a challenge. Seawater greenhouses could be a way to utilize seawater to water plants, and insect farms could provide protein that is low in fat and cholesterol. While the West doesn’t seem to relish the idea, many in Africa, Asia and South America already consume many kinds of insects.
Daily news give us a negative view of human nature , but there is another aspect to who we are, and the many who are involved in addressing and solving the food crisis of the future illustrate its presence and its power.

Florida, Colorado and Arizona are proposing an online registry for animal abusers and the director of legislative affairs for The Animal Legal Defense Fund expect similar proposals in several other states. Suffolk County on Long Island created a registry in 2010 which is only now about to go up and other New York counties have followed. In the Suffolk registry abusers will appear for five years, and failure to register may lead to up to a year in jail. The issue in many of the proposals is not whether or not there ought to be a registry, but the terms and conditions under which it would operate. In Florida the proposal includes a $50 yearly fee to fund it and to be paid by the abuser. As is the case for sex offenders registries, names, pictures and addresses would be posted.
I have strong reservations about such public registries and their unintended consequences leading to offenders disappearing or being unable to find housing and employment. While my reservations extend to animal abusers, the idea of registries elevates the crime of abusing animals and that’s definitely to the good of all.

The Auschwitz Memorial Museum has just published sketches which were done by a prisoner at the Birkenau extermination camp somewhere around 1943-44. The sketches are very precise including the badge number of guards or numbered plates of trucks. The scenes they depict are heart wrenching like children being separated from their parents, guards smoking near the crematoria or bodies being loaded onto a truck.
The 22 pages of drawings had been hidden in a bottle and are part of a Polish-English publication launched by the Auschwitz Archives, and are part of a commemorative project being undertaken by the museum. What is poignant is not the scenes or the details which by now are known, but that out of the daily horrors of an extermination camp someone with the initials MM used art as a language. He or she clearly wanted to communicate the details of everyday life in the camp, but perhaps more importantly let us know that life can rise from ashes, hope from despair, beauty from horror.