Yes and no.
On the one hand, we destruct rain forests to have agricultural space. Bad of course.
On the other hand, we destroy the remaining nature by using pesticides to increase short term production.
Nevertheless, this wouldn't be necessary if the world would switch to plant based diets as much as possible
> If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area the size of Africa).
No we wouldn't. Everybody gets cause and effect backwards on this one. They see that we're using essentially all of our arable land for food production and draw the conclusion that's how much is needed to produce the amount of food we currently produce.
But it's actually the other way around. We use all the land available because that's the cheapest way to produce the amount of food we need. If we had more land, we'd use it and food would be cheaper. If we had less land we'd produce the same amount of food, but it would be more expensive.
For an extreme example, we could probably feed 8 trillion people on the same amount of land by covering all of our arable land with greenhouses.
> my main gripe with the organic anti-chemical food craze is that we simply don't have enough arable land to feed everyone
I think the same people who prefer organic food might also be wise enough not to eat three large servings of beef every day, which is what is killing the rain forests right now. And how many % of good food are being thrown away nowadays? Something like 30%? Simply because supermarkets want to have everything on the shelves all the time, and people buy without planning. There is still a lot of room for experimentation before we starve.
Current enourmous land use by meat industries has many negative effects. We should individually switch to plant based (if you haven't already) and in public policy rapidly remove all subsidies from meat and animal industries and fully price in all negative externalities (GHG, antibiotics risks, pandemic risks, air and water pollution). At the same time subsidize plant based alternatives. As a result plant based alternatives would be several times lower in cost than the meat versions, which in turn would drive consumption changes.
> But urban land is in short supply, expensive, often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture.
We should stop focusing on the plants and focus more on the soil. Better soil = better water retention = less work with irrigation = healthy plants = healthy planet.
> The belief that only small-scale, non-mechanised agriculture without the use of chemicals respects biodiversity, and that tradition is key to the future, is illusory. In reality, small-scale unfertilised farming of annual crops or unregulated grazing in the tropics are major causes of destruction of soils and forests.
The only problem here is the "annual crops or unregulated grazing" because on a diverse agroforestry the trend is the opposite, the soil gets better and better as years goes on. More organic matter falling on the soil = better soil, as long as you don't remove the organic matter you're good to go! The main problem lives here, a lot of people clean the grass and burn it, the soil should never be uncovered, you can cut the grass no problem but leave it there to compost and improve your soil, just like happens in a forest.
> Chemical use is still, for the most part, equated with environmental destruction. This is a false image, one that leads people to turn away from science and technology. We cannot go back to the ill-designed agricultural systems of past centuries with their famines and harvest failures.
Sure, this so called "science and technology" is what made the land "often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture" in the first place.
Grow food forests, build forest soil! The forest never needs any chemical added by humans, it doesn't have pest problems, why? It's diverse. Diversification guarantees your surviving, when you have only one source of food (or money, or anything) and it dries out you starve, but if you have multiple sources you can not only survive but have more colorful plate too.
Sure it's more laboring to do forest, but we can change our machines to work with forests instead of mono-cultures, that's the way to go, the more mature a forest gets the less human intervention it needs. Here in Brasil I'm seeing a few people starting to develop machines to work with agroforestry, that's the future of food IMHO: forests!
Well, maybe I'm biased, since I found out permaculture and agroforestry I'm in love, couldn't be happier :)
> Probably like half of human population would die from starvation due to failed crops if we didn't use pesticides.
Half the food that is produced ends up wasted, and a serious amount of crops isn't even counted in that total figure because it's destined from the start for fucking biofuel.
Get rid of that waste, get rid of fossil fuels, and you can feed the world comfortably without having to turn farms into chemical weapon dispensers against all kinds of wildlife.
> We only have so much land to plant trees on. (Which is very quickly shrinking due to urban and agricultural pressure.)
The obvious solution being to increase carbon/biomass per hectare in our urban and agricultural land.
>Losing that much agricultural land is unrealistic
Losing it, yes. But replacing it with agroforestry and soil building no-tillage agriculture would increase the food supply (mainly since bare dirt monoculture fields are so abysmal at utilizing sunlight compared to healthy engineered ecosystems). Similar story with replacing corn-fed CAFOs and compacted ranch land with sylvopasture and MIRG (managed intensive rotational grazing).
If it sounds unrealistic to replace our whole food system with something else, remember that there is no alternative. The modern industrial food system isn't a viable replacement for itself. That's all the word "unsustainable" means: it's not an ethical judgement, but a logistic certainty.
> Also, from what I've seen the problems with food scarcity don't stem from low crop yields but rather from distribution. I don't think seeing it as a crop yield problem is the right way to approach it.
Absolutely agree on this one. The world produces enough food (well, cereal grains) to feed everyone. However, I would still argue that increasing crop yields is incredibly important for the species as a whole. Better yields means lesser land required for cultivation. You basically reduce the environmental footprint of agriculture and I think this would be incredibly important e.g. in Africa where you either may not have a lot of Arable land OR might not want to cut down virgin forests just to feed your people.
> Some studies also show that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by over 75%
But reducing farmland by over 75% is not enough by itself to counter climate change. And, if we can plant enough trees outside of farmland the reduction of farmland is not even neccessary.
It seems, we agree that we need more trees. But you want to get there by eating less meat. Yes, there is a connection between meat and trees, but why not just plant trees?
> If farmers switch to other exploitative crops, it should drive up the supply and down the price of those crops, reducing the drive to clear more rain forest.
I'd rather not gamble away the rainforest to optimism about humans acting rational. It's already irrational: humans will optimize towards short term gains.
>Mostly doing the very agricultural practices you decry, the ones that are "destroying the planet".
What are you talking about? We're doing it using the increased atmospheric CO2. Slash and burn is what is destroying the planet, and it has terrible long term productivity. That's why they have to keep slashing and burning.
>There's still a lot of wilderness left, and I think we're approaching maximum land under cultivation.
The acres currently under cultivation is entirely irrelevant. If I burn down 100 acres of rainforest every year and cultivate it, its always 100 acres of cultivated land. But I am destroying 100 acres of wilderness every year. The land that is now a barren wasteland still matters, even though I am no longer cultivating it.
>What they're breathlessly recommending is exactly what we've been doing for over half a century now (really, about two centuries) - improving yield.
Except we're not doing that, which is the point. We accidentally did that with CO2 emissions, but we're reaching the limits of what increased atmospheric CO2 can do. Once CO2 is no longer the limiting factor for growth, no amount of extra CO2 will help. Agricultural science is not interested in producing more food with less, it is interested in producing more profit.
> The environmental concerns, I only buy half-heartedly. I don't really believe that land-owners will transform their pastures or soy cultures into rain forest instead of another profitable exploitation, I'd rather have states force responsible production and norms.
If farmers switch to other exploitative crops, it should drive up the supply and down the price of those crops, reducing the drive to clear more rain forest.
> Being able to reduce land area used by farming would be a major win for humanity.
We do know already how do do that though and the answer is to reduce meat usage which is by far what's taking the majority of the agricultural land use. The crop production is as almost as efficient as it can get after multiple agricultural revolutions.
This could easily be solved by removing animal ag subsidies and with taxing of negative externalities.
That's one law, the market (= higher prices) will take care of the rest.
> people in the developing world are consuming more meat as their incomes rise
I'm aware :) However, that made sense when there were 1 B of humans, not when our needs overshoot the environmental capacity of our environment. If everyone ate like we westerners do (and they will want to, when we still do) then we'd need something like 4-5 earths to sustain everyone.
> mass-deployment of nuclear power plants and vertical farms requires only that
Sure, but that means a lot of resources (oil, for example) and further destruction of the environment (mining, built-up areas), and a large timescale.
Abolishment of animal ag subsidies is a piece of paper and few signatures.
> It is imperative we figure out a way to get it right, and the discussions of GMO or pesticides are frankly a distraction from this problem
They contribute to our contemporary vision of agriculture, which is intensive, mono specific, high yield, mechanized, subsidized, etc. Short term.
GMO and pesticides optimize our current way of growing stuff but won't change it.
I don't know about scaling progressively the permaculture ideal to world scale but it feels like a good ideal. I would not be shocked if a sustainable system would require us quadruple our effort (which is pretty much what third world is up to).
> Ripping up these ecosystems to grow nuts and beans would be "worse" for the environment.
No, you could reforest/rewild those lands and stop droughts and and biodiversity loss and repair microclima and soil health etc. etc.
And by growing nuts it would be worse for the environment? Growing nut trees is co2 positive. How could forests with nut trees be worse than pastures with dried out grass?
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area as big as Africa for rewilding / reforesting)
> I find your take on alternative forms of agriculture a little too optimistic.
I've read a lot about alternative agriculture systems and methods. Maybe that's where my optimism comes from.
> the figure of 75% it is not that simple
I know that 75% is not so simple. But meat industry needs cca 75% of the agriculture land and meat is produced mostly by feeding the animals seeds and vegetable oils, so ... yes, it's a guess, but if we'll account for other stuff, like antibiotics ...
> conformed by not edible material that would have to be produced anyway
The ruminants supply a fraction of our nutritional needs, so I would argue, that we don't need them and that we can switch to more sustainable (less land expensive) sources of food. I would return that "non-edible" areas into forests for wildlife/biodiversity, which they were previously and which could even reverse our climate/extinction events currently happening.
Other non-consumable material could be composted and/or left in the fields as a mulch. Exposed soil kills microbes/fungi in the soil.
> Would you pass a law banning having children
No, I would not, because I now know that there is better way.
That population is still growing is a result of our exploitation of poor countries, poverty, a lack of education, and our religious and governmental practices. As we see in western countries, the developed and educated countries have a tendency to stabilize their population.
So the current growth will stop on its own, in time. But we have to make sure that we set the correct example for the new billions, or we'll together eat the Earth dry, till nothing than deserts will remain.
Yes and no. On the one hand, we destruct rain forests to have agricultural space. Bad of course. On the other hand, we destroy the remaining nature by using pesticides to increase short term production.
Nevertheless, this wouldn't be necessary if the world would switch to plant based diets as much as possible
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