Best of Earth911 Podcast: The Resource Renewal Institute’s Chance Cutrano on Putting Fish Back in the Fields

Best of Earth911 Podcast: The Resource Renewal Institute’s Chance Cutrano on Putting Fish Back in the Fields

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Chance Cutrano is director of packages on the Resource Renewal Institute in Fairfax, California. He and his group are experimenting with mixing two actions, rice and fish farming, to scale back the emissions from rice fields whereas creating extra revenue for farmers. It’s a apply recovered from antiquity that led to the launch of the Fish in the Fields program, which lowers carbon equivalent emissions created by rice farming by as a lot as 66% whereas bettering biodiversity. Fish within the Fields just lately gained the 2023 JMK Innovation Prize from the JM Kaplan Institute.

Chance Cutrano, Director of Programs on the Resource Renewal Institute, is our visitor on Sustainability In Your Ear.

Nature does a tremendous trick: it uses everything. Wherever there’s an untapped supply of vitality, nature facilitates the differentiation of species to evolve a creature, giant or small, that may devour that vitality. Human business went the opposite method, dumping each leftover merchandise of waste as a substitute of discovering a method to make use of it — the consequence is a society that can’t dwell throughout the planet’s capability to supply sufficient assets every year. Farming is a wonderful testing floor for integrating beforehand disconnected industries. For instance, final 12 months, we talked with Lundberg Family Farms’s Bryce Lundberg, who embraced a regenerative strategy to rising rice that helps migratory birds throughout winter when fields are flooded.

Farming, which may be intently tied to nature when it breaks with industrial considering, is a pure incubator of advanced programs that decrease or scale back waste whereas contributing to the restoration of biodiversity. It may be the place the place companies will be taught regenerative practices. The transition to a inexperienced, carbon, and resource-neutral economic system will see many corporations, communities, and nations start to tear down the arbitrary silos by which they function right this moment to create round flows of supplies and vitality at ranges of effectivity we can’t dream of from the confines of the take-make-waste worldview.

You can be taught extra in regards to the Resource Renewal Institute at https://www.rri.org/fish-in-the-fields