Slowing biodiversity loss is more than a desire, it is an imperative if we are to feed everyone well. The problem is that the ideas to slow extinction rates often involve a compromise with food production and other land use.
If the trend of the last 100 years continues, by 2050, three, out of four people will live in urban areas. This urban growth might not be a good thing.
Imagine for a moment that you are in the mind and physically fit body of your ancestor somewhere on the African savanna 70,000 years ago. What happens next?
Historians and anyone with half an eye on the past know that the world changed when abundant coal made industrial energy cheap, then natural gas for lighting, and again when oil replaced coal as the primary energy for transportation.
Sustainability is a slippery concept. The conventional definition "use without depletion for future generations" is a fantasy because of one challenge.
Do you eat when you're hungry? And when you're hungry, do you choose what you would like to eat or what you should eat or grab what happens to be in the fridge?
Emissions from global human land use are estimated 214 Gt C compared to 270 Gt C from fossil fuel combustion. A third of these land use emissions are lost from soil—a debt borrowed against our children's futures.
Farming was a circular family affair before the arrival of big agriculture with its input heavy production of mostly monoculture crops on fields the size of suburbs. And before that, everyone was close to nature. Will...
It is many a splendid thing when a future King of England and the world's most famous natural historian come together to launch a prize for innovation.
Growth is what we are sold as the only way to make our lives better. Here we utter blasphemy with two additional letters.
Average daily food consumption is above the 2,500 kilocalorie threshold to maintain human body weight in all regions of the world. A remarkable achievement.
I get knocked down, but I get up again. So goes the song, and so too our food production systems. At least, we hope they do.
Do you know what happens on farms to grow the vast quantities of food needed to feed everyone? No? Start with a massive use of energy.
We know that soil carbon is essential for food production from sifting through the science and from our practical experience working with soils from Nairobi to Narrabri. Here is a summary of that logic.
If the world's farmers grow enough food to feed everyone well, why are 800 million people hungry, a billion obese, and 2 billion people with nutrient deficiency?
Agriculture came about because it generated an energy surplus that allowed humans to do many other things than forage for food, but today agriculture is a huge energy sink.
Back before agriculture was invented, anthropologists suggest that modern humans, Homo sapiens, had a highly varied diet. Not perhaps as individuals who ate what they could get, but in the aggregate.
Mark
