JASON J. CZARNEZKI

I just arrived in Hong Kong and am very jetlagged (woke up at 4am). Today, I’m meeting with a series of Hong Kong professors as well as American Fulbright Scholars in Hong Kong.

On the plane across the Pacific Ocean, I finished reading Bill McKibbon’s book Eaarth. I think it’s a book very accessible to the general public, and it’s finest tribute is in making two points. First is the importance of scale; that when creating the next food system or energy transmission technology we need to consider smaller and more diffuse models. Second, he defines the biggest challenges and important items going forward as energy, food, and the Internet. I enjoyed the book, but was surprised so much of it was focused on food and Vermont. For the academic who reads about such issues all the time, this books provides little new information, but provides a useful new narrative. Finally of course the book’s overarching theme is that we live on Eaarth because the planet we lived on before, Earth, no longer exists and has already been changed by climate change.

Competition for grants opens on February 1, 2011. Please contact CIES at 202 686-4000 or scholars for more information about awards and the application process. You may also visit their website at www.iie.org/cies for information and specific program deadlines.

I just want to publicly thank the exceptional faculty and staff at The Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the University of Utah’s  S.J. Quinney College of Law for organizing such a fantastic visit for me.

A very interesting and concerning post in Green about the barriers to visiting national parks for minorities.

The 28th Annual Smith-Babcock-Williams Student Writing Competition sponsored by the  Planning & Law Division of the American Planning Association. The deadline for submission of entries is June 6, 2011. The Competition is open to law students and graduate planning students writing on a question of significance in planning, planning law, land use law, local government law or environmental law.   The winning entry will be awarded a prize of $2,500 and will be submitted for publication in /The Urban Lawyer/, the law journal of the American Bar Association’s Section of State & Local Government Law.  In addition to the first prize, the Competition will offer a second place prize of $1,000 and up to two Honorable Mentions of $250.  More info here.

I have just posted an new draft article on SSRN entitled, “The Future of Food Eco-Labeling: Organic, Carbon Footprint, and Environmental Life-Cycle Analysis.”  It can be downloaded at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1645860.

The Abstract:

Food choices contribute to the climate crisis, cause species loss, impair water and air quality, and accelerate land use degradation. The causes of these environmental costs are many—the livestock industry, diet, agricultural practices like pesticides and fertilization, and large-scale food transportation, processing, packaging and distribution systems. This Article describes the environmental consequences of the modern food system, and discusses existing public and private eco-labeling regimes, including carbon footprint labeling, country of origin labeling, and organic labeling under the U.S. Organic Foods Production Act and within the European Union. It also recognizes ambitious efforts like Sweden’s dietary information program that gives equal weight to climate and health and labeling program that requires food to be both produced organically and using low-emission production to meet certification requirements.

This Article considers the role of food eco-labeling in the United States in creating a sustainable food system. This Article discusses the merits of a creating a national eco-labeling program, replacing current federal organic food legislation; considers to what extent an American state could develop an food eco-labeling program that does not run afoul of existing government regulations about organic labeling; identifies the difficulties in developing an eco-label that considers a wider range of environmental assessment than existing organic and climate labeling programs, focusing in particular on the efforts of the European Food Sustainable Consumption and Production Round Table; and addresses the challenges to developing an environmental life-cycle eco-label that considers all phases of food production, processing and distribution.

This Article concludes that a state with a strong reputation for environmental awareness should, within the confines of the national organic certification program, develop a new environmental life-cycle eco-label that embodies and conveys to consumers a wider array of environmental information.