Land use, climate change and our future.

As a species, aside from the few remaining hunter gatherer tribes lucky enough to have been allowed to continue their ancestral ways, humans are completely dependent on agriculture.We rely on our inheritance of rich productive soil to produce not only food but also clothing, animal feed, turf, timber, and transport fuel. In the process we have mined and depleted our soils, depleted and polluted our precious aquifers and surface waters, created dead zones in our oceans. Additionally, we have seriously compromised biodiversity, upon which we depend for our very survival, through monocrop agriculture and deforestation to bring more land into agricultural production. In so doing we have created a industry that feeds poisons into the land destroying the delicate balance of healthy soil while simultaneously removing the animals from the land, thus depriving it of natural fertilisers and creating a massive waste problem from feedlot meat production.

It is clear that the system of industrial agriculture upon which we depend is itself dependent upon cheap, climate destroying, fossil fuels. As reported over at Worldchanging by Jonathan Foley, agriculture when taken as a whole, including deforestation, is responsible for at least 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, Mr. Foley reports that;

"The list of environmental impacts from agricultural land use goes on and on — and clearly threatens human well-being and the health of the biosphere as much as global warming. In fact, in a recent paper in Nature, a number of us documented “planetary boundaries" where large-scale environmental changes could result in catastrophic tipping points. Of those changes, an equal number were tied to climate change and CO2 emissions as were connected to land-use and agriculture.

From these newly revealed facts, it’s clear that we must consider multiple inconvenient truths. The future of our civilization and our planet requires that we simultaneously address the grand challenges of climate change and land use, ultimately finding new ways to meet the needs of our economy, our security and the environment. Anything less will be a complete catastrophe."

Vandana Shiva offers a solution. Excerpted from an article at the Organic Consumers Association website:

"The $1.2 billion the World Bank says will solve the food crisis in Africa is a $1.2 billion subsidy to the chemical industry," said Vandana Shiva, an Indian physics professor and environmental activist speaking at the forum in Modena.

"Countries are made dependent on chemical fertilizers when their prices have tripled in the last year due to rising oil prices," she said. "I say to governments: spend a quarter of that on organic farming and you've solved your problems."

She said industrial farming was based on planting a single crop on vast surfaces and heavy use of chemical fertilizers, a process that used 10 times more energy than it produced.

"The rest turns into waste as greenhouse gases, chemical runoffs and pesticide residues in our food," she said.

In contrast, organic farms could increase output by 10 times by growing many different species of plants at the same time, which helped retain soil and water, she said. "In a one-acre farm in India they can grow 250 species of plants," she said."

As we face the challenges of climate change with it's expected impacts on agriculture we are doing so with a weakened toobox. Couple this with the expected increases in human population and it is clear that the demands on agriculture will increase as we try to feed more people with a dwindling resource base. Here is Mr. Foley's take on that;

"Bridge the artificial divide between production agriculture and environmental conservation. We cannot solve these problems by boosting agricultural production at the expense of the environment, nor can we ignore the growing need for food in the name of preserving natural ecosystems. Instead, we must find ways to simultaneously increase production of our agricultural systems while greatly reducing their environmental impacts. This is not going to be easy. Yet, drawing on the lessons from recent research, including the successes and failures of local organic practice, combined with the efficiency and scalability of commercial agriculture, will be crucial. In recent years, for example, U.S. farmers — working with agricultural experts — have dramatically improved practices in the corn and soybean belt, cutting down on erosion, nutrient loss, and groundwater pollution, even as yields have continued to increase. As a first step, advocates of environmental conservation, organic farming and commercial agriculture all need to put down their guns and work toward solving the problems of food security and the environment — with everyone at the table.

Providing for the basic needs of 9 billion-plus people, without ruining the biosphere in the process, will be one of the greatest challenges our species has ever faced. It will require the imagination, determination and hard work of countless people from all over the world, embarked on one of the noblest causes in history."

Hubris - by Robb

I've been thinking recently about hubris. I don't mean the the petty everyday hubris we experience in our relationships and human contacts. I'm thinking about the hubris we have developed along with our big brains through the millenia of evolution. As we have refined our ability to change our environment, through fire, then agriculture and latterly industry, we seem to have become convinced that whatever we can imagine we have the right to do. So convinced are we that our ostensibly massive human intellect will solve all problems, even the ones we ourselves create, that we have completely lost touch with the intelligence that precedes and informs our own. We have forgotten the innate intelligence of nature.

This form of hubris is particularly dangerous in it's manifestation in reductionist western culture and value systems. It has led to what university of Texas professor Robert Jensen has called "the Delusion Revolution".

"It takes the hubris of folks such as biologist Richard Dawkins, who once wrote that “our brains … are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences.” Such a statement is a reminder that human egos are typically larger than brains, which emphasizes the dramatic need for a drastic humility. I read that essay by Dawkins after hearing the sentence quoted by Wes Jackson, an important contemporary scientist and philosopher working at The Land Institute. Jackson’s work has most helped me recognize an obvious and important truth that is too often ignored: For all our cleverness, we human beings are far more ignorant than knowledgeable. Human accomplishments -- skyscrapers, the internet, the mapping of the human genome -- seduce us into believing the illusion that we can control a world that is complex beyond our ability to understand. Jackson suggests that we would be wise to recognize this and commit to “an ignorance-based worldview” that would anchor us in the intellectual humility we will need if we are to survive the often toxic effects of our own cleverness."

I'm not quite as hard on professor Dawkins as Jensen who believes Dawkins should be denounced for such views. I do however agree completely with Wes Jackson's assertion that we are tinkering with the systems of life we do not have the capacity to understand. Dawkins writes and speaks eloquently of the ability of evolution to bring into being the unimaginable complexities of this world while at the same time denouncing creator myths that deny evolution as scientific fact. I believe in the fact of evolution but am not willing to deny people faith in a creator, I don't see them as mutually exclusive. Indeed, the hubris I decry is even worse when compared to the hand of god. How can someone who believes in god the creator believes that it is OK to trash his/her creation.

The complexities of the natural world are the brain of the planet. As we seem intent on doing to our own brains, with toxic chemicals in our food, alcohol, drugs, pharmaceuticals, and polluted water and air, so we are doing to the planetary brain.

Rather than trust to the intelligence of evolution, or god, in our hubris we are killing it.

Tar Sands oil crimes video part 1

As oil companies ride rough shod over the environment of Alberta in a rush to extract profit from the earth they are destroying carbon sequestering arboreal forest ecosystems, creating huge toxic tailing ponds, leaving a legacy of cancer in the local communities through the toxification of the Athabasca river, and burning enough natural gas/day to heat 3 million Canadian homes. And who are they doing this for? American drivers, who else.

Tar Sands oil crimes video part 2

Tar Sands oil crimes video part 3

Food part 2 - Meat - by Robb

I was vegetarian for over 20 years. Getting enough protein in your diet without meat is possible if careful attention is paid to proper food combining. I personally found that I was not focused and disciplined enough and began to suffer from problems related to deficits of protein in my diet. I could probably do better now but have grown used to eating meat again. We are very careful in our household to purchase free range chickens, from a farm just a pleasant 2 mile walk away, and sausage, from the local butchers shop. We would prefer organic chickens but have chosen local free range instead because of the food miles and packaging involved. We have meat as an entree 2 or 3 times a week. I cook two chickens together on the weekend and we eat from it till it’s gone and make soup and stock from the bones. On weeks we don’t have chickens we have sausages. We could increase our sustainability by making reductions.

My plan is to reduce our chicken consumption down to one per week for the 3 of us thus halving the impact from our chicken consumption, aside from the energy to cook it as it will take nearly as much time to cook one as two. We also eat 1 or 2 dozen eggs/week, free range, as well as organic cheese and milk for myself and my mother in law. My wife eats very few diary products. Dairy products have less of an impact than livestock raised for meat. Free range animals live a healthier and more natural life whereas organically raised livestock are also fed a much healthier diet with no chemicals involved.

Livestock husbandry requires tremendous input of energy, water, feed, and land. Livestock contributes to soil erosion, water pollution, and are themselves emitters of greenhouse gases. Zero Carbon Britain calls for a 66% reduction in British meat consumption as part of a sweeping plan to bring Britain to a zero carbon future. ZCB recommends that meat become a special occasion food as it once was as well as a flavoring agent for other meals rather than as a main course. Those who support a vegan diet claim that seriously addressing climate change is impossible without a large scale shift to veganism.

‘A report commissioned by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank concluded that factory farming, "acts directly on land, water, air and biodiversity through the emission of animal waste, use of fossil fuels and substitution of animal genetic resources. In addition, it affects the global land base indirectly through its effect on the arable land needed to satisfy its feed concentrate requirements. Ammonia emissions from manure storage and application lead to localized acid rain and ailing forests.’” (Vegan Society)

While 25,000 people die every die from hunger related conditions the US feeds it’s livestock 60% of the grain harvest. A recent study in Canada suggests that beef raised on feedlots convert 2.5% of the gross feed energy, human edible grains, into usable food for human consumption while in the most efficient operations dairy cattle convert between 55 and 67% of their gross feed energy to human food. Meat heavy diets are especially damaging as they often rely on developing nations to devote land directly to livestock production or feed for export rather to feeding their own populations. With more and more arable land being lost to soil erosion how we use the remaining bit becomes increasingly important.

Land use per kg of food:
beef requires 20.9 m2/kg
pork requires 8.9 m2/kg
eggs require 3.5 m2/kg
milk requires 1.2 m2/kg
fruit requires 0.5 m2/kg
vegetables require 0.3 m2/kg
potatoes require 0.2 m2/kg

Additionally, growth hormones used in the meat industry are having dire consequences on the ecosystem as well as the health of consumers. Non organic livestock are typically fed with GM feed stock, with all the implications that brings, not the least of which is corporate control of food and loss of diversity in seed stock.

So can a sustainable lifestyle include consumption of meat? Surely if you produce your own meat or eggs, or even source them locally, provided they are organic and do not involve the importation of foreign grain for feed stocks then I’d say yes. But even then one has to consider the resources devoted to that production and do ones best to minimize consumption and impacts. I still have a ways to go on this one.

Thanks to the Vegan Society website http://www.vegansociety.com/html/environment/ for content.