U.S. libraries become front line in fight against homelessness, By Ian Simpson, July 17, 2014, Chicago Tribune: “George Brown, a homeless man in Washington, has a simple answer when asked how often he uses a public library. ‘Always. I have nowhere else to go,’ Brown, 65, said outside the U.S. capital’s modernist central library after a morning reading sociology books. ‘When it’s hot, you come here to stay out of the heat. When it’s cold, you come here to stay out of the cold.’ Brown is among the hundreds of thousands of homeless people who have put the almost 9,000 U.S. public libraries, the most of any country in the world, in the forefront of the battle against homelessness. Moving beyond their old-fashioned image as book custodians where librarians shush people for talking too loud, libraries have evolved to serve as community centers, staffed with social workers and offering programs from meals to job counseling. . .”
Day: July 18, 2014
Global Food Production
How to feed 3 billion extra people — without trashing the planet, By Ezra Klein, July 18, 2014, Vox: One of the daunting challenges of the coming century will be figuring out how to grow enough food for everyone on the planet. And all without destroying the planet. That’s harder than it sounds. The global population is expected to swell from 7 billion today to 9.6 billion in 2050. On top of that, countries like China and India are getting richer and eating more meat — a particularly resource-intensive type of food. Then there’s the environment to consider. Farms have become a major source of nitrogen pollution. Around the world, freshwater aquifers are dwindling. And, perhaps most crucially, countries like Brazil are trying to cut back on deforestation — which in turn makes it harder to find new cropland. . .”