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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] So what do you really think about long term climate change due to pollution

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  • From: Stephen Figgins <stephen@plainscraft.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] So what do you really think about long term climate change due to pollution
  • Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:04:38 -0500


On Mar 30, 2007, at 10:23 AM, Toby Hemenway wrote:

On 3/27/07 1:49 PM, "Charles de Matas" wrote:

It takes less land to grow a person's food requirements for a vegetarian
diet than for a diet that includes meat.

Ah, but let's think permaculturally here.

It might also help to think systemically in general. Populations grow when there are resources available for them to grow, by resources here, we primarily mean food. The lower on the food chain a species eats, the more numerous their population can and will grow. Rising population will offset the land required to grow an individual's food.

Some believe humans are some kind of special exception to all other living species because of our ability to choose - but those choices are based on real world economics. Our population has grown steadily as the land required to support our way of life has decreased, from hunter/gatherers to farmers to industrialists. Population size, resources required by a lifestyle and resources available are all tied together. You can't monkey with one part of this equation without affecting the others.

There may be good reasons to eat vegetarian or to consume less, but in the end it's how our living affects the environment that really matters. Do we enrich or do we degrade the environment? What kind of world does our lifestyle create? Rather than looking for ways to live on less, we should look for ways to enrich and diversify the land on which we depend, to increase its yield for more than just our food consumption. In doing so we enrich the world and we enrich our lives.

-Stephen




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