Although I’m a climate scientist by training, I worry about this collective fixation on global warming as the mother of all environmental problems. Learning from the research my colleagues and I have done over the past decade, I fear we are neglecting another, equally inconvenient truth: that we now face a global crisis in land use and agriculture that could undermine the health, security, and sustainability of our civilization. Our use of land, particularly for agriculture, is absolutely essential to the success of the human race. We depend on agriculture to supply us with food, feed, fiber, and, increasingly, biofuels. Without a highly efficient, productive, and resilient agricultural system, our society would collapse almost overnight. But we are demanding more and more from our global agricultural systems, pushing them to their very limits. Continued population growth (adding more than 70 million people to the world every year), changing dietary preferences (including more meat and dairy consumption), rising energy prices, and increasing needs for bioenergy sources are putting tremendous pressure on the world’s resources. And, if we want any hope of keeping up with these demands, we’ll need to double, perhaps triple, the agricultural production of the planet in the next 30 to 40 years. Meeting these huge new agricultural demands will be one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. At present, it is completely unclear how (and if) we can do it...read more
Here they come directly after ag with a new "crisis". Guess global warming wasn't getting the job done.
3 comments:
Well Frank, everything Foley says is absolutely rock solid true. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it false. Every civilization known to man, before it collapsed, suffered ecosystem degradation and collapse from agricultural mismanagement. That's the history of civilization. What's now different is that it's happening on the global scale. After that, there's no new world to escape to. Best to wake up and pay attention, rather than take some reactionary stance as you have here.
RH
Perhaps you should read my comments more carefully. I didn't address any of the facts presented. My comments were about governance by crisis. See Crisis and Leviathan by Higgs.
I don't claim to speak for Frank, but I don't think there's any question that the resources are being mismanaged. The point of discontent deals with the best way to try and solve the problem. The debate is whether we try and resolve the issues via central planning or delegate the solution to the free market and private sector innovation. I am squarely in the latter camp. Much of our present land and water issues are the result of central planning and the rationing that has gone with it.
I do not consider taking such a stance reactionary. While we're on the subject, though, I do not think being reactionary is necessarily a bad thing. It depends what we are talking about, and what the situation is. Someone has to balance the wings on the bird, or it cannot get off the ground.
Regarding the "rock soild true" statements in the article, I am not to proud to question a few of them. We are in agreement that the present configuration of cropland cannot feed both the world's people and the world's internal combustion engines. We agree that one cannot pump the farmers' water to the cities and expect the same yields. There are several problems, though. One deals with this supposed surge in demand for dairy products. Milk prices collapsed a while back. If demand growth is strong, and supply can only adjust so quickly as it involves breeding animals to do so, what gives? That is before we even get into the fact that at least in the United States, Milk is subsidized to begin with if memory serves. Beef, too, is off its highs. Frankly, the same can be said of many non-agrarian commodities, all of which also had their cheering sections that were once boldly proclaiming that demand would never fall and supply would never be able to keep pace.
We're all in the same page on the last matter, though. People's lives hang in the balance with all of this stuff. The Culture of Crisis, and all of those folks with big ideas and itchy trigger fingers that go with it, bothers me. Let's make sure the path is clear, or at least understood, and do a nice, quiet drive. There's too much stampeding going on these days, and the only thing that's sure to come of that is a lot of pain and suffering.
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