BioCycle March 2011, Vol. 52, No. 3, p. 4
Nora Goldstein

THE latest crisis in Libya should put to rest anyone’s doubt that we are indeed a global economy (albeit in this case one connected by petroleum). But when it comes to inspiration and information sharing, we sometimes don’t travel outside our borders. Since last October, each issue of BioCycle has taken our readers on a journey around the world, reaching every continent, excepting for Antarctica. While the trip around the world was launched last fall as part of BioCycle Global 2011, our International Conference in San Diego next month, it will continue well beyond then.
Why? Because sharing information and the energy and excitement (i.e., inspiration) we get from the work everyone in the “BioCycle Community” is doing is the fuel we need to sustain healthy soils, communities and the planet. This is a global team effort, and every action that everyone is taking – from the rural villages of East Africa to the densely packed cities in China and Brazil, to the ivory towers and open dumps, from downtown Detroit to Delhi – puts us one step closer to global sustainability.
As we have mentioned many times on this Editorial page, BioCycle was founded in 1960 around the core tenet of natural resources conservation. At the time, given the magazine’s origins (founder Jerome Goldstein was Executive Editor of Organic Gardening & Farming), the health of the planet’s soils was the primary focus. That alone should have been plenty upon which to base the need to recover and reuse organics in the waste stream. Alas, it wasn’t quite enough, and over the decades we made the case for maximum organics recycling based on diminishing landfill capacity (how 1989 of us!) and now climate change. We hung our hat on the world’s leaders truly comprehending the hard facts that burning fossil fuels, clear cutting forests, landfilling food waste (etc.) were leading causes of extreme weather events, including droughts, heat waves, intense rain storms and flooding, and more. How we looked forward to progressive public policies and private sector investments that would begin to shift how the world’s natural resources are managed.
While some European countries have made progress on taking the necessary steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (and the downturn in the global economy likely helped overall emissions reductions), the cold hard facts are that we need to take matters into our own hands. We know what we need to do. We just need more hands. And to find those hands, we must continually reach into other communities – our own and those around the world – to connect with people who can connect with our information and tools, and we back with theirs.
BioCycle tries to do this in the ways we know how – our magazine, conferences, journal and website. We have an unquenchable thirst for information and inspiration, the fuel that enables us to fill the pages and sessions that these products and services require. Next month’s BioCycle Global Conference is packed to the gills with that fuel, as well as new hands to connect with and old ones to grasp. We look forward to this Global Forum, not just for those few days in April, but in the months and years to come.