Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Harvey Ussery <harvey@themodernhomestead.us>]

On 11/11/2013 07:52 PM, John D'hondt wrote:

I am not an optimist that we will ever feed 7 or 9 billion people 
sustainably no matter what we do. I think I mentioned that before but as a 
young biologist some few years ago. (It was just the start that computers 
came into use for less than back breaking prices.) A few of us young Turks 
tried to calculate how many people this planet could sustainably feed. The 
figure we arrived at was a lot smaller than the present day population. It 
was oil that allowed our numbers to rise above that.

 
I've just started Alan Weisman's new book Countdown, about how far Homo's population has already outstripped any possibility for sustainability. (Weisman is the author of The World without Us, which I highly recommend as well.) It's unbelievable how much this topic has gotten off our radar, even become somewhat taboo, so I'm glad Weisman is trying to prod us into attention.

~Harvey

--
Harvey in northern Virginia
www.themodernhomestead.us

My book The Small-Scale Poultry Flock (Chelsea Green, 2011) is available at www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/the_smallscale_poultry_flock