In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:
Billy wrote:
Sci Am, April 2010
Breaking the Growth Habit
by Bill McKibben
For the past quarter of a century, despite the rapid spread of
massive-scale agribusiness farming, pesticides and genetically
engineered crops, the amount of grain per person has been dropping.
I assume this means the amount of grain per farm worker working to produce
it, is that right?
I'm speculating that number of consumers are outstripping production.
"the observed figures for 2007 show an actual increase in absolute
numbers of undernourished people in the world, 923 million in 2007
versus 832 million in 1995.[88]; the more recent FAO estimates point out
to an even more dramatic increase, to 1.02 billion in 2009."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation
I had imagined that the productivity by this measure climbed very rapidly in
the early 20th century and then the rate slowed down with little surges as
bigger and more automated combine harvesters, irrigation gear, better
strains of grain etc were introduced. So I expected that in the last
quarter century it would have levelled off like a diminishing returns curve,
I didn't expect it to start going down.
The other problem is that production levels are proportional to optimum
humus levels in the soil. Falling humus levels require more and more
chemical fertilizers to reach the same production levels. (I'll need to
go through my books to come up with the citation, but I think I know
where it is.)
This is running a bit afield of my purpose in posting the various
systems to maximize production. One reference I read said that Salatin
grew an inch of top soil per year. A typical pine forest grows an eighth
of an inch of top soil per 50 years.
"in 2007, we used 13 million tons of synthetic fertilizer, five times
the amount used in 1960. Crop yields, by comparison, grew only half that
fast. And it's hardly a harmless increase: Nitrogen fertilizers are the
single biggest cause of global-warming gases from U.S. agriculture and a
major cause of air and water pollution -- including the creation of dead
zones in coastal waters that are devoid of fish. And despite the massive
pesticide increase, the United States loses more crops to pests today
than it did before the chemical agriculture revolution six decades ago."
"Another cause for concern is that industrial agriculture and
genetically modified crops dangerously reduce biodiversity, especially
on the farm. In the United States, 90 percent of soy, 70 percent of
corn, and 95 percent of sugarbeets are genetically modified. Industrial
farms are by their very nature monocultures, but diverse crops on a
farm, even weeds, serve multiple functions: Bees feast on their nectar
and pollen, birds munch on weed seeds, worms and other soil
invertebrates that help control pests live among them -- the list goes
on."
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/29/dont_panic_go_organic
Does the author provide any references to where and how this statistic is
measured? Does this just relate to the absurdity of the USA corn belt or is
it global? What are his reasons for the decline?
Look for the book at the usual places.
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/
was recommended for further reading by SciAm.
Part of a Q & A with the author.
SA: Is sheer size the culprit, or is it the complexity that size brings?
You say that not just banks but more basic industries are "too big to
fail." Should such institutions be broken up or disentangled somehow?
McKIBBEN: The financial system, the energy system and the agricultural
system share great similarities: a very small number of players,
incredibly interwoven. In each case, cascading effects occur when
something goes wrong; a chicken pot pie spreads botulism to 48 states.
My house runs on solar panels. If it fails, I have a problem, but it
doesn't shut down the eastern U.S. power grid.
SA: So you're advocating a return to local reliance. But since E. F.
Schumacher's 1973 book, Small Is Beautiful, dedicated people have been
trying to implement local food and energy systems around the world, yet
many regions are still struggling. How small is "local"?
McKIBBEN: We'll figure out the size. It could be a town, a region, a
state. But to find the answer, we have to get the incredibly distorting
subsidies out of our current systems. They send all kinds of bad signals
about what we should be doing. In energy we've underwritten fossil fuel
for a long time. It's even more egregious in agriculture. Once subsidies
wither, we can figure out what scale of industry makes sense.
SA: Don't local products cost more?
McKIBBEN: We would have more farms, and they might be more
labor-intensive, but that would also create more jobs, and the farmier
would reap more of the revenue. Economically, local farms cut out many
middlemen. Buying vegetables from CSA [community-supported agriculture]
farms is the cheapest way to get food. Meat might still be more
expensive, but frankly, eating less meat isn't the end of rhe world. The
best news in my book is the spread, in the past few years, of all kinds
of smart, technologically adept, small-scale agricultural techniques
around the developing world.
SA: It sounds like the key to local agriculture, at least, is to teach
people how to raise yields, without more fertilizer.
McKIBBEN: Yes, and it depends on where you are. There will not be one
system that spreads across rhe entire world, the way we've tried to
spread industrial, synthetic fertilizer-based agriculture. The solutions
are much smarter than that. Instead of spreading chemicals, which causes
all kinds of problems, we are figuring out alternative methods and how
to spread them.
SA: Okay, even if local agriculture works, how does that support
durability instead of growth?
McKIBBEN: Probably the most important assets we can have for long-term
stability, especially in an era of ecological upheaval, are good
soils‹soils that allow you to grow a good amount of food, that can
absorb a lot of water becausc rainfalls are steadily increasing, soils
that hold that rainfall through the kinds of extended droughts that are
becoming more common. Good soil is precisely what low-impact, low-input,
local agriculture builds, and, precisely what industrial agriculture
destroys.
SA: Local reliance sounds attractive, but how do countries like the U.S.
get out of huge debt without growing? The U.S. Treasury Department says
the only painless solution is growth. Do we need a transition period
where growth eliminates debt, and then we embrace durability?
McKIBBEN: Well, "painless" is just delay. You know: "Pay me now, or pay
me later." The primary political question is: Can we make change happen
fast enough to avoid all-out collapses that are plausible, even likely?
How do we move these transitions more quickly than they want to move?
www.ScientificAmerican.com April 2010
Have you got the book?
David
Later
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/2/maude
http://english.aljazeera.net/video/m...515308172.html