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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] How to Feed 9 Billion - cont.

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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] How to Feed 9 Billion - cont.
  • Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2012 08:55:55 -0800


On Nov 23, 2012, at 7:36 AM, David Fortson wrote:

> Good day,
>
> Yes, the whole premise of feeding 9 billion in and of itself is full of
> loaded questions. Regardless, 9 Billion (and more) are coming, we must
> feed them


They are not necessarily coming. They are not here. They don't have to be
here. That's just an eternal growth mindset, which is the heart of the
problem. It's a terrible kind of circular logic: More people are coming, so
we need more food. But it is "more food" that creates those births!

Our footprint is hugely larger than food, which is the issue the "increase
yields" people are not getting. Answering every problem by Increasing yields
is the mindset that is causing the problem.

I would argue that "we" must not grow the food that will create these unborn.
It is colossally immoral to do that. 9 billion well-fed people will have more
billions of children, and then those 12 billion will arrive with all their
demands, and then the 18 billion. When does it stop? Do we go off the cliff
with only the 4 or 5 billion beyond carrying capacity that we have now, or do
we keep the illusion of eternal growth going so we have 12 billion starving
people and a desert planet? We need to take responsibility for ourselves and
stop breeding. Food is the biological trigger for fertility; adequate food
triggers hormones that increase fertility. If we "increase yields" we will
create the conditions for billions more people.

Instead of a crash campaign to increase yields for the "inevitable" billions,
let's have a crash campaign to educate women all over the world--the biggest
factor in reducing birth rate--and find some Gates-like billionaire to hand
out birth control for the whole planet.

We could have faced our fate 30 years ago and stopped at 5 billion, and then
hundreds of species, and millions of habitats would still be intact. But we
did a technological fix via Norman Borlaug's horrific Green
Revolution--billed as the modern way to solve the food problem, which should
sound familiar: Just replace "modern" with "sustainable." And it had hideous,
shameful ecological consequences on a planetary scale. And now the
pro-growthers, some of them very well meaning like Borlaug was, want to do
another techno fix. Do we not see the predictable pattern here? So let's not
continue with "humanity must grow--it's inevitable!" any more. It's not
inevitable. I pray we are smarter than that.

Here's the crux: Food is not the limit to our carrying capacity. Food is not
the problem, and to treat it like it is, is blindness. Because the ecological
footprint of a human is vastly larger than the crop land to feed them. Those
billions will want water, and we already divert 70% of all the freshwater
flow on the planet. Do the math--it doesn't work. So we will divert more, and
kill the last of the salmon, and hundreds of other species.

Those billions will need fuel for heating and cooking, and they'll need
billions of houses--get that, billions of new houses sprawling into the
forests, and a thousand new megacities like Mumbai and Kinshasha filled with
mega-slums. We already convert 40% of the the Earth's total annual biomass
production into fuel, lumber, and other goods. Do the math. We'll strip the
forests of trees, and we'll strip-mine the planet for coal. And we'll burn a
lot more fuel, with vastly more carbon into the air. How much more can the
Earth stand?

Those billions will want metal, with vastly more mining, and beyond that, the
massive amounts of fuel required to smelt metal. So after the oil is too
scarce, we'll use all the coal, and then build hundreds of nukes--because we
think that population is inevitable, and they'll want power, too--and build
billions of rare-earth containing solar panels, and millions of metal wind
turbines and millions of miles of new power lines to all the billions of new
houses, all causing untold ecological damage.

I could go on with a dozen more things that those new billions will
demand--cars, roads, health care, lighting, rubber, plastic--but I hope you
see that food is just the beginning, the technological obstacle to be gotten
out of the way so that we can keep on with growth, growth, growth. At some
point, growth ends, and we can choose to end it consciously, or, like
countless other species, nature will end it for us, with misery for
billions.. As Wes Jackson says, at some point we need to grow up.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com



> The good news after three days of inspiring speakers is that it can be done
> in a sustainable fashion without out a doubt. Simply eliminating
> inefficiencies and waste in the current system can feed 9 billion now.
>
> Other major takeaways from the conference were removing from the current
> food system the multinational 'food' and drug companies who play a
> nefarious role in bottle necking food supply, controlling seeds, dangerous
> GMO's etc.
>
> Finally, bring people and agricultural back to our land to grow small,
> human scale agricultural operations patterned after nature's own processes.
>
> Speaker after speaker showed easily replicable practices that increased
> yields, built soils, and built community. It was both exciting and
> inspiring.
>
> As soon as we have videos, we'll post them here. For those of you running
> into this thread for the first time, here's the link to our story on this
> conference: http://bit.ly/RRgIgz
>
> Cheers,
>
> David
>
>
> David Fortson
>
> LoaTree
> ...Live for a Better World
> 805.450.2357
> LoaLiving Magazine
>
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