Bert Hyman wrote:
In

Billy wrote:

I'm not arguing for local food because it tastes better or because
it's better for you. I'm arguing that we have no choice. In a world
more prone to drought and flood, we need the resilience that comes
with three dozen different crops in one field, not a vast ocean of
corn or soybeans. In a world where warmth spreads pests more
efficiently, we need the resilience of many local varieties and
breeds. And in a world with less oil, we need the kind of small,
mixed farms that can provide their own fertilizer and build their own
soil.

Who's going to be the person to tell 2/3 of the earth's population
that they're going to have to starve?

Will that be when oil becomes so expensive that it cannot be used to make
fertiliser and the broadacre crops' yields drop to pitiful?

You are right (if I understand you correctly) that we don't know how to feed
the world sustainably yet. Altering how we do agriculture is only part of
the solution. Unless we also deal with over-population all other resource
problems will be exacerbated to breaking point.

We will only go back to an agrarian economy if the present system has a
catastrophic collapse, followed by a population collapse, and nobody wants
to see that. The alternative is to work out how to do sustainable
agriculture and reduce our population. We have to make that choice or
nature will make it for us - and then the results won't be pretty.

Whether McKibben has it right and this requires breaking production up into
local units remains to be seen. I suspect that some degree of localisation
will have to be part of the plan in order to reduce transport costs and that
implies eliminating huge monocultures too. There are of course other
reasons for doing that besides the transport difficulty.

We need more people to work on making the conversion to a sustainable way of
life a soft landing instead of a crash. Saying "we will all be ruined" and
using that as an excuse to keep the present system will become
self-fulfilling.

David