That’s an excellent article; thank you. It’s always disheartening to me when people think of farming as something one does with a dozen hens and an acre of leafy vegetables (or else, a heard of...
That’s an excellent article; thank you. It’s always disheartening to me when people think of farming as something one does with a dozen hens and an acre of leafy vegetables (or else, a heard of cattle on unproductive grassland). Civilization has grown strong primarily on a diet of rice, wheat, and potatoes, so romanticized notions of feeding the world alone with nut trees and goats would doom the poorest of us to starvation.
Flip side: although that article only mentions it in passing, just to underline it, we’re burning through non-renewable resources and massively affecting the ecosphere. I only learned this recently, but it shouldn’t have been surprising: by fixing more nitrogen than ever has been before (and dumping it into the ocean) we’re throwing enormous wrenches into the nitrogen cycle. Further, many aquifers that we’ve tapped for agriculture are drying up — that deep water took thousands of years to get where it is (or even longer in the case of confined aquifers), and we’ve pumped it dramatically faster than it can be replenished. Finally, we lean extremely heavily on phosphorus fertilization, which is nearly entirely sourced from mines (ie non-renewably). Problematically, we then dump all that phosphorus into the ocean (either via agricultural runoff, or by not capturing it from out sewage streams) where we’ll never get it back.
(the above is basically a digression on planetary boundaries; that Wikipedia article does a better job of motivating them than my paragraph, for anyone interested)
I suppose my thesis is that I’m concerned that there isn’t much education on this topic. Consequently, people aren’t concerned about known, extremely dangerous factors, and instead fixate on issues that can safely be deferred or ignored until we’re done addressing the immediate problems. To analogize, it often feels like people are worried about what colour they’ll paint the dressing room while the house is burning down, which as a resident of the house is concerning.
From the article: ... ... ... ... ... (More recently, solar-powered wells have become popular, allowing the same thing to be done without fossil fuels. See: How a solar revolution in farming is...
From the article:
Even wealthy places like Europe were not protected from hunger. France today is famed for its great cuisine and splendid restaurants. But its people did not reach the level of 2,000 to 2,500 calories per day until the mid-1800s. And even as the French left famine in the rear-view mirror, starvation was still claiming hundreds of thousands of Irish, Scots, and Belgians. As late as the winter of 1944–45, the Netherlands suffered a crippling famine — the Hongerwinter. More than 20,000 people perished in just a few months. Food shortages plagued rural Spain and Italy until at least the 1950s.
In poorer regions the situation was bleaker still. The United Nations created the Food and Agriculture Organization in 1945. One year later, the FAO issued the World Food Survey, a forty-page report that was the first-ever comprehensive attempt to measure what the world ate. Half the Earth’s inhabitants, it reported, subsisted on fewer than 2,250 calories per day. Globally, just one out of three people had clearly adequate diets.
...
By the 1980s, farmers were producing so much food that the global average food consumption had reached 2,000 to 2,500 calories per day, a landmark in history. Today the average is closer to 3,000 calories per day, and the emerging problem is obesity — too much food, rather than too little.
The picture is not wholly rosy — almost one out of ten people still do not get enough to eat. But hunger today is generally due to low incomes and poor food distribution, rather than failing to grow enough food. Farmers produce enough for everyone, but not all get what they need. Still, our daily lives are nothing like those of previous generations.
What happened? Modern agriculture.
...
Some 40 percent of our planet’s land is covered by cropland and pasture, the overwhelming majority of which is devoted to [modern] agriculture. Increasingly, the farms themselves are huge — one in China covers 22 million acres. And they are supplied and their products processed and shuttled about the world by a web of gigantic multinational companies — Cargill, BASF, Wilmar, Archer Daniels Midland, and others. Supervising this enormous network of production and exchange are agricultural agencies in every world government that set rules for and inspect what farmers produce and sell.
...
All of this was brought into being by the Green Revolution. In its simplest form, the Green Revolution was a mix of two ancient technologies — or, rather, modernized versions of them — and one brand-new science. The old-but-updated technologies were fertilization and irrigation; the new science was genetics. Combining these three into Farming 2.0 was, arguably, the most important event in the twentieth century — it literally reshaped the face of the Earth.
...
The first leg of the Green Revolution — the first part of the rise of Farming 2.0 — was for countries across the world to build fertilizer factories.
Today more than 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy is devoted to making ammonia fertilizer. “That 1 percent,” the futurist Ramez Naam says, “roughly doubles the amount of food the world can grow.”
Increasing the food supply fostered an increase in human numbers. The energy scientist Vaclav Smil has calculated that fertilizer from the Haber–Bosch process is responsible for about 40 percent of the world’s dietary protein. Roughly speaking, this is equivalent to feeding 40 percent of the world: about 3.2 billion people.
...
In the late nineteenth century, farmers on the Great Plains of North America erected thousands of windmills to pump groundwater from wells into their fields. But those windmills could typically draw water from no deeper than 30 to 60 feet, and digging wells was expensive. In the mid–twentieth century, pumps powered by fossil fuels let farmers reach 300 feet below the surface to the great Ogallala Aquifer, an underground region of water the size of Lake Huron that stretches from South Dakota to Texas. Plains agriculture exploded. By the late 1970s, water from the Ogallala was responsible for much of the wheat, corn, alfalfa, and cotton grown in the United States. Forty percent of the nation’s cattle drank it.
Today, a quarter of the world’s cropland is irrigated — but it provides roughly 40 percent of all the food humans consume.
...
Borlaug’s varieties doubled, tripled, even quadrupled yields — but only if the plants were massively fertilized and given plenty of water, which usually required irrigation systems. Within a decade, Mexico changed from a country that had to import much of its wheat to a wheat exporter. Borlaug’s wheat then went to India, Pakistan, Egypt, and other nations, raising their yields, too.
...
Like Borlaug’s wheat, the IRRI rice was part of a package that included increased irrigation and fertilizer use. Between 1961 and 2003, Asian irrigation more than doubled, from 182 million acres to 417 million acres, and fertilizer use went up by a factor of more than twenty, from 4 to 87 million tons. Combined with the new rice strains, the consequence was a near-tripling of Asian rice production.
The effects were staggering. In the 1970s, much of South and East Asia were plagued by hunger. By the twenty-first century, Asians had an average of 30 percent more calories in their diet.
This essay and the introductory article capture and inspire a sentiment I’ve been wanting to write about for quite some time. I believe that possibly the greatest tragedy of the human condition is...
This essay and the introductory article capture and inspire a sentiment I’ve been wanting to write about for quite some time.
I believe that possibly the greatest tragedy of the human condition is our inability to conceive of the tragedies of the past.
Warning: US Politics with a Heavy Dose of Cynicism and Foreboding
The last century has been an unprecedented technological revolution and with it, an increase in human quality of life across the world of incredible scale. The author writes about how compared to generations past, we live with access to food, water, and temperature-controlled shelter that the wealthiest people of the past couldn’t imagine.
The election of a leader like Trump, who promises and is delivering radical change, represents a deep sense of entitlement that the American people deserve better than the status quo. That people do deserve better is not at all obvious to me; people lived in far worse times throughout most of history.
Such an election also represents a stark egotistic belief, especially from Musk and his libertarian SV allies, that they can actually build something similarly functional to what currently exists. My biggest fear is not that they secure dictatorial power and increase global explotation to the capitalist class.
My biggest fear is that their attacks on existing structures will, at some point, break something. Right now, we have local grocery stores and shelves stocked with food that won’t kill you. I think this is a privilege and luxury that can be easily taken away from us. Living “paycheck to paycheck” would be a heavenly dream to any laborer who lived through the Great Depression.
Most people in America have not known real suffering for quite some time, probably their entire life, and I think we’re far more lucky for that than we realize. I hope more than anything else that we don’t have to know that reality again.
In some sense I agree. We shouldn’t demand endless exponential growth and use dictators when we don’t get it. But what we do have isn’t going to those that deserve it. People working hard often...
That people do deserve better is not at all obvious to me
In some sense I agree. We shouldn’t demand endless exponential growth and use dictators when we don’t get it. But what we do have isn’t going to those that deserve it. People working hard often get nowhere because all of the profits go to a few people at the top.
Absolutely. I should make sure to say that I do believe in advocating for change. In my view, even the most left-wing politicians are not really “burn it all down” advocates until you get to...
Absolutely. I should make sure to say that I do believe in advocating for change.
In my view, even the most left-wing politicians are not really “burn it all down” advocates until you get to anarchy or communism. Taxing the rich is a fairly safe intervention; it’s not like people won’t still want to be rich.
On the other hand, the policies implemented by the current admin, like firing huge numbers of federal workers and cutting off funding, reek of the mentality: “the entire current system is awful and corrupt, and we need to get rid of it, consequences be damned.” And I think many supporters of the admin would actually endorse most of that perspective. I’m sure there is corruption, irresponsible grants, fraud, etc. However, getting rid of the cancer should not also destroy the vital organs.
Another essay from this same publication is We Live Like Royalty and Don't Know It. Thomas Jefferson was one of the wealthiest Americans, yet four of his six children died young, and his wife...
I believe that possibly the greatest tragedy of the human condition is our inability to conceive of the tragedies of the past.
Thomas Jefferson was one of the wealthiest Americans, yet four of his six children died young, and his wife Martha died at the young age of 33.
Past eras were extremely cruel. There is a certain romanticism about the past that both the left and the right experience. Many people feel entitled to a vision of a past that never existed. Even dreams of affordable postwar home ownership forget how small and basic homes were and how little our grandparents owned.
That’s an excellent article; thank you. It’s always disheartening to me when people think of farming as something one does with a dozen hens and an acre of leafy vegetables (or else, a heard of cattle on unproductive grassland). Civilization has grown strong primarily on a diet of rice, wheat, and potatoes, so romanticized notions of feeding the world alone with nut trees and goats would doom the poorest of us to starvation.
Flip side: although that article only mentions it in passing, just to underline it, we’re burning through non-renewable resources and massively affecting the ecosphere. I only learned this recently, but it shouldn’t have been surprising: by fixing more nitrogen than ever has been before (and dumping it into the ocean) we’re throwing enormous wrenches into the nitrogen cycle. Further, many aquifers that we’ve tapped for agriculture are drying up — that deep water took thousands of years to get where it is (or even longer in the case of confined aquifers), and we’ve pumped it dramatically faster than it can be replenished. Finally, we lean extremely heavily on phosphorus fertilization, which is nearly entirely sourced from mines (ie non-renewably). Problematically, we then dump all that phosphorus into the ocean (either via agricultural runoff, or by not capturing it from out sewage streams) where we’ll never get it back.
(the above is basically a digression on planetary boundaries; that Wikipedia article does a better job of motivating them than my paragraph, for anyone interested)
I suppose my thesis is that I’m concerned that there isn’t much education on this topic. Consequently, people aren’t concerned about known, extremely dangerous factors, and instead fixate on issues that can safely be deferred or ignored until we’re done addressing the immediate problems. To analogize, it often feels like people are worried about what colour they’ll paint the dressing room while the house is burning down, which as a resident of the house is concerning.
From the article:
...
...
...
...
...
(More recently, solar-powered wells have become popular, allowing the same thing to be done without fossil fuels. See: How a solar revolution in farming is depleting world’s groundwater.)
...
...
This essay and the introductory article capture and inspire a sentiment I’ve been wanting to write about for quite some time.
I believe that possibly the greatest tragedy of the human condition is our inability to conceive of the tragedies of the past.
Warning: US Politics with a Heavy Dose of Cynicism and Foreboding
The last century has been an unprecedented technological revolution and with it, an increase in human quality of life across the world of incredible scale. The author writes about how compared to generations past, we live with access to food, water, and temperature-controlled shelter that the wealthiest people of the past couldn’t imagine.The election of a leader like Trump, who promises and is delivering radical change, represents a deep sense of entitlement that the American people deserve better than the status quo. That people do deserve better is not at all obvious to me; people lived in far worse times throughout most of history.
Such an election also represents a stark egotistic belief, especially from Musk and his libertarian SV allies, that they can actually build something similarly functional to what currently exists. My biggest fear is not that they secure dictatorial power and increase global explotation to the capitalist class.
My biggest fear is that their attacks on existing structures will, at some point, break something. Right now, we have local grocery stores and shelves stocked with food that won’t kill you. I think this is a privilege and luxury that can be easily taken away from us. Living “paycheck to paycheck” would be a heavenly dream to any laborer who lived through the Great Depression.
Most people in America have not known real suffering for quite some time, probably their entire life, and I think we’re far more lucky for that than we realize. I hope more than anything else that we don’t have to know that reality again.
In some sense I agree. We shouldn’t demand endless exponential growth and use dictators when we don’t get it. But what we do have isn’t going to those that deserve it. People working hard often get nowhere because all of the profits go to a few people at the top.
Absolutely. I should make sure to say that I do believe in advocating for change.
In my view, even the most left-wing politicians are not really “burn it all down” advocates until you get to anarchy or communism. Taxing the rich is a fairly safe intervention; it’s not like people won’t still want to be rich.
On the other hand, the policies implemented by the current admin, like firing huge numbers of federal workers and cutting off funding, reek of the mentality: “the entire current system is awful and corrupt, and we need to get rid of it, consequences be damned.” And I think many supporters of the admin would actually endorse most of that perspective. I’m sure there is corruption, irresponsible grants, fraud, etc. However, getting rid of the cancer should not also destroy the vital organs.
Another essay from this same publication is We Live Like Royalty and Don't Know It.
Thomas Jefferson was one of the wealthiest Americans, yet four of his six children died young, and his wife Martha died at the young age of 33.
Past eras were extremely cruel. There is a certain romanticism about the past that both the left and the right experience. Many people feel entitled to a vision of a past that never existed. Even dreams of affordable postwar home ownership forget how small and basic homes were and how little our grandparents owned.