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.