On January 21st, TEDxManhattan featured a series of speakers with backgrounds in food and farming who shared their knowledge and expertise with thousands of audience members watching either in-person from seats at the event or virtually from around the world.
Today, Nourishing the Planet highlights a TEDxManhattan talk by Fred Kirschenmann, who discusses the importance of soil in our food production system.
In his talk, “Soil: From Dirt to Lifeline,” Kirschenmann notes that while we tend to think of soil simply as “dirt,” it is in fact a “vibrant living community” that we should instead learn to value as a precious resource. Our large-scale food production system currently uses many techniques that diminish soil quality and quantity, but Kirschenmann discusses several alternatives that are both more productive and better for the soil and the environment.
Click here to watch Kirschenmann and other TEDxManhattan 2012 speakers.
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
