Population Externalities and Optimal Social Policy

If fertility is not chosen in a socially optimal way, and if policies to directly target fertility are ineffective or politically infeasible, then public policies that affect fertility could have important welfare consequences through the fertility channel. We refer to these effects as population externalities, and in this paper we focus on one important variable that may have a causal impact on fertility: the education of potential parents. If increased education causes families to have fewer children, then a government would want to increase college tuition subsidies in the presence of environmental externalities such as climate change, to indirectly discourage families from having children who will generate future environmental costs. Alternatively, if fertility is inefficiently low, due to imperfect parental altruism for example, governments will want to lower tuition subsidies to encourage child-bearing. We present a simple model of the college enrollment decision and its fertility impacts, and show that such population externalities are quantitatively important: the optimal subsidy increases by about $5000 per year with climate change, and decreases by over $7000 per year with imperfect parental altruism. Our paper demonstrates how public economics can incorporate population externalities, and that such externalities can have significant impacts on optimal policy.

Centering Equity in Sustainable Food Systems Education

Sustainable food systems education (SFSE) is rapidly advancing to meet the need for developing future professionals who are capable of effective decision-making regarding agriculture, food, nutrition, consumption, and waste in a complex world. Equity, particularly racial equity and its intersectional links with other inequities, should play a central role in efforts to advance SFSE given the harmful social and environmental externalities of food systems and ongoing oppression and systemic inequities such as lack of food access faced by racialized and/or marginalized populations. However, few institutional and intra-disciplinary resources exist on how to engage students in discussion about equity and related topics in SFSE. We present perspectives based on our multi-institutional collaborations to develop and apply pedagogical materials that center equity while building students' skills in systems thinking, critical reflection, and affective engagement. Examples are provided of how to develop undergraduate and graduate sustainable food systems curricula that embrace complexity and recognize the affective layers, or underlying experiences of feelings and emotions, when engaging with topics of equity, justice, oppression, and privilege.

Re-Feminizing Death: Gender, Spirituality and Death Care in the Anthropocene

Critiques of ecologically harmful human activity in the Anthropocene extend beyond life and livelihoods to practices of dying, death, and the disposal of bodies. For members of the diffuse ‘New Death Movement’ operating in the post-secular West today, such environmental externalities are symptomatic of a broader failure of modern death care, what we refer to here as the ‘Death Industrial Complex’. According to New Death advocates, in its profit-driven, medicalised, de-ritualized and patriarchal form, modern death care fundamentally distorts humans’ relationship to mortality, and through it, nature. In response, the Movement promotes a (re)new(ed) way of ‘doing death’, one coded as spiritual and feminine, and based on the acceptance of natural cycles of decay and rebirth. In this article, we examine two examples from this Movement that demonstrate how the relationship between death, religion, and gender is re-configured in the Anthropocene: the rise of death doulas as alternates to funeral directors and the invention of new necro-technologies designed to transform the dead into trees. We ask how gender is positioned within the attempt to remake death care, and show how, for adherents of the New Death Movement, gender is fundamental both to a critique of the Death Industrial Complex and to mending our distorted relationship to death. By weaving together women, nature, and spirituality, the caring labours of death doulas and the fertility symbolism of new arboreal necro-technologies build an alternative model of a good death in the Anthropocene, one premised on its (re)feminization.

Towards Sustainable Farm Production System: A Case Study of Corn Farming

Many recent studies show that most of the crop production systems in developing countries are not environmentally sustainable. This study uses the life cycle assessment (LCA) to investigate the potential impacts of corn production in Pakistan on global warming and human health damages and also suggests mitigation strategies to reduce environmental impacts towards sustainable crop production based on the results. Land-based, mass-based, and energy-based functional units were used. IMPACT 2002+ methodology—a combination of IMPACT 2002, Eco-Indicator 99, CML, and intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC)—is used for the impact assessment. The results demonstrated that the global warming potential of one-ton production of corn, one-hectare corn farm, and production of 1000 MJ energy were 354.18, 34,569.90, and 1275.13 kg CO2 equivalents, respectively. The off-farm and on-farm emissions of nitrogen-based chemical fertilizers were the hotspots in the most impact categories. Moreover, human health damages followed by global warming as environmental externalities were also associated with corn production. We also highlighted the production areas with light, medium and extreme environmental externalities with Toba Tek Singh and Okara districts in the Punjab province of Pakistan being the most and least contributing districts towards global warming, respectively. Results further indicated that a 5 to 100% reduction of chemical fertilizers would mitigate the environmental impacts of corn production by 4.38 to 87.58% and 2.16 to 43.30% in terms of aquatic acidification and global warming, respectively. Modern farming systems and conservation technologies were suggested to reduce emissions and improve the environmental performance of corn production. Furthermore, agricultural extension and the ministry of agriculture should pay more attention to farmers’ education on emissions from farming inputs and their impact on climate.