Ecological Intensification, Biofuels and Bioproducts

Food Security and Conservation of Natural Resources in a Biofuel World

Prof. Kenneth G. Cassman, University of Nebraska 

Agriculture is undergoing a biofuel revolution due to a massive global expansion of biofuel production from food crops that no one predicted three years ago. Avoiding food shortages and an excessive rise in consumer food prices, protection of soil and water quality, and ensuring that biofuel systems deliver the expected environmental and political benefits of GHG mitigation and replacement of petroleum-based transport fuels are critical to sustaining this new era without provoking negative public sentiment and a rescission of favorable government policies that could abort this revolution before it takes off. What is required to sustain the biofuel revolution?

Prof. Cassman is Heuermann Professor of Agronomy and former Head of the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. He also serves as Director of the Nebraska Center for Energy Sciences Research. Previously, at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines he served as Head of the Division of Agronomy, Plant Physiology, and Agroecology.

Plants and Soils in Biospheric Context: Bioenergetic Challenges to Planet Stewardship

Prof. Calvin B. DeWitt, University of Wisconsin

As green plants and soils are fundamental for agriculture, so also for the biosphere.  Processing solar income and producing molecular carbon skeletons for all life agricultural and biospheric, plants hold, process, and produce soil, carbon, and oxygen.  Cultured, they serve human life via gardens, fields, and markets.  Biospherically they sustain the only known life of the universe.  Plant and soil scientists, together with farmers, gardeners, and every person on earth are in a continual, sustained, and interactive relationship with plants and soils—a mutual interaction between land and people that is a kind of negotiation between “garden” and “gardener”—a “con-service” between people and biosphere in which biospheric service to human and other life is returned reciprocally with service of our own.  Con-service, however is being increasingly stressed.  The global human economy extracts and releases to the atmosphere energy-rich carbon savings sequestered ages earlier by biotic predecessors even as this economy is extending itself to extraction of energy-rich carbon for fuels from plants and soils.  A major consequence of this economy is a warming of the planet from transformation of “fossil fuels” that returns sequestered carbon to the atmosphere, including recent additions from thawing Quaternary plants and soils formerly  frozen in permafrost.   The expanding human economy  necessarily broadens the scope of our stewardship to include solar income, solar savings, geofuels, biofuels, food production, and sustaining the living fabric of the biosphere.  Among the challenges for the practical scientist and other “earth gardeners” is meeting both human and biospheric needs.  Three questions are basic to meeting this challenge: (1) How does the biosphere work (including plant and soil science), (2) What ought to be (including land and biospheric ethics), and (3) Then what must we do? (including plants and soils praxis).  Practical plants and soils scientists now find themselves in global bioethical context.

Calvin B. “Cal” DeWitt is professor of environmental studies with the Nelson Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he serves as a member of the graduate faculties of Land Resources, Water Resources Management, Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development, and Limnology and Marine Science.  His assignment since 1972 has been “to address the fragmentation of the disciplines” through development of an integrative program of teaching, research, and service directed at ecological integrity and sustainability. 

Biofuels: Sustainable Energy as the Oil Runs Out
Prof. Donald L. Smith, McGill University

Two of the great challenges for humanity in the 21st century are energy resources and climate change.  These are linked through biofuels.  Biofuels can range from simple firewood to replacements for gasoline and diesel fuel; the latter can be manufactured in a number of ways.  Energy balance is a major concern in biofuel production; both the way the biofuel crops are produced and utilized affects this.  Large scale production of biofuels will lead to social issues such as deciding between production of food and fuel.  This talk will provide a broad overview of the potential for biofuels and associated issues. 

Prof. Smith is James McGill Professor and Chair of the Plant Science Department at McGill University in Montreal, QC. He currently leads the Green Crop Network on crops and climate change, including work on biofuels, and also heads the McGill Network for Innovation in Biofuels and Bioproducts (McNIBB).  His research program has focused on production and physiology of crop plants, plant-microbe interactions, nitrogen fixation and responses to changes in the atmosphere and the climate. 

The Ethics of Biofuels: Starving Peter to Drive Paul?

Prof. Thomas M. Powers, University of Delaware 

Programs to produce biofuels are facing increasing scrutiny from natural scientists, agronomists, economists, and now even ethicists. The initial goals of many such programs seemed unobjectionable: to reduce greenhouse gases while providing for energy security, especially in the transportation sector.  Now it appears that those goals are in doubt.  Some types of biofuels production, on the whole, may increase greenhouse gases, and the expected benefits to many nations in terms of energy security may be swamped by economic and geopolitical insecurity due to rising food prices.  Recent increases in many food prices have been tied to biofuels production, and whether or not the causal connection can be made out, the insecurity is not in doubt.
There may be partial technological solutions to both of these setbacks.  If scientists and engineers hit upon (or genetically engineer) optimal biofuels feedstocks and conversion processes for a variety of regions and uses, the expected overall marginal decrease in greenhouse gases may yet obtain.  In the same way, new technology may turn away from feedstocks that also feed human beings, and thus alleviate demand pressures on basic staple markets.  New technology almost always brings new hope. In general, though, we lack a framework for addressing problems like this one where existing markets and technologies create temporary (and massive) zero-sum games.  In the competitive game at hand, eaters lose out to drivers.  I will argue that scientists and engineers have obligations to eaters as well as drivers (and hence have obligations to avoid contributing to the creation of such zero-sum games), and will suggest an ethical framework for addressing such social choice problems.  

Dr. Powers is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Delaware and a faculty research fellow at Delaware Biotechnology Institute.  His research concerns ethics and technology, with a focus on information ethics, values and design, genetic enhancement, and nanotechnology. Dr. Powers received his undergraduate degree from the College of William & Mary and his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin (1994) which included research at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany as a DAAD-Fulbright graduate fellow.