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livingontheland - [Livingontheland] The End of Food, by Paul Roberts

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  • From: Harvey Ussery <boxwood@nelsoncable.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The End of Food, by Paul Roberts
  • Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:27:26 -0400

I *highly* recommend a careful reading of Paul Roberts's new book, The End of Food. (Roberts previously published The End of Oil, so I guess that's why he stuck with his current title, despite the fact that Thomas Pawlick had published in 2006 a book of the same title.)

There is nothing we should be more concerned about than the larger--and Roberts has very much taken on the larger issues, the global food system in its entirety--context in which our concerns about food and health and sustainability play out.

The book is incredibly sobering--downright scary--even for someone like me (and most participants in this list) who is already familiar with many of its analyses. Its main value is in its overall perspective: how all the individual crises of the current food system--the shrinking of energy/fuel supplies, exploding global demand, degradation of soils, climate change's coming impacts on agriculture, issues of food safety and possible emergence of pandemics out of the agricultural sector, etc.--are converging, creating the possibility for the house of cards to collapse, catastrophically, when one of the many teetering cards gives way. How we are coming up more and more against the natural limits of food production for a global population of 6.5 billion, zooming toward 9 billion by 2050. The quandary about agricultural decisions to be made to give us a prayer of feeding that many people (the alternative being, obviously, a dieoff of unprecedented proportions).

Please read the book. Many of our discussions about fundamental food issues are hollow, if we do not put them into the increasingly global context of food production and trade.

~Harvey

--
Harvey in northern Va
www.themodernhomestead.us

I truly believe that as long as we have not found peace with the soil, we
won't find peace above the ground. That as long as we justify the
exploitation of any organism, other exploitations will follow and we will
remain parasites, consuming more than participating, and spiralling into
entropy until we commit mass suicide. ~Emilia Hazelip





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