Countries are gathering in an effort to stop a biodiversity collapse
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Background: India went from colonialism-induced massive serial famines to self-sufficiency and then some, while entirely eschewing GM foods. (NB: this doesn't mean there is no malnutrition in India, where inequalities are rife, but it means that the country as a whole is able to produce more than needed. The causes of hunger are non-intuitive; for e.g. the dumping of cheap foods is more likely to cause hunger than solve it, as hunger stems from poverty which stems from economic disablement - which is caused by dumping cheap foods.)
Now, the Green Revolution did result in a loss of biodiversity (among other problems) but without creating the kind of monocultures you see in the US. For example, there are still numerous varieties of rice in India, especially locally variated.
Despite this, the Indian government has been increasingly warming over recent years to introducing GM foods (which is largely a solution in search of a problem, in the Indian context). The threat from GM foods is almost always misunderstood. It is not about the individual health effects of eating GM foods; it is about the largescale replacement of a system where farmers own their biodiverse seed, with a top down monocultural approach that essentially makes farmers franchisees of a massive corporate behemoth and eliminates biodiversity, putting all eggs in one basket.
No one is out there forcing people to switch to GM crops when those seeds become available. Now the business model of large agriculture in the US isn't necessarily the one you would want to import, but GM crops could happily coexist in a country's agricultural mix along side traditional crops. You could probably even tweak some of your traditional seeds domestically to be more pest/drought resistant, give those seeds out, and call it a win.
It could be a really useful tech if people deployed it responsibly.
As to using GM to add blight resistance, that’s not always an option. Cavendish bananas for example are at massive risk from Panama disease TR4 and have been for years.
You can develop GM crops that harbor genetic diversity. You can mutagenize them to introduce random variation and yield a variety of novel phenotypes that can adapt to any sort of conditions. You can conduct analysis using statistical models to identify the genes and regulatory mechanisms involved with these phenotypes. You can introduce these phenotypes into your cultivar. You can cross your cultivar with wild landraces to introduce more diversity, and cross these with geographically distant populations to introduce more divergent and diverse genetic compositions than what would even be possible among the landraces. To put it simply, the box has been opened, and you can do pretty much anything to shape and alter the plant with genetic tooling.
1. https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/World-first-Panama-disease...
Which was my point they tried GM and failed, maybe the next attempt works but at this point it’s not a fast process.
The Cavendish is an excellent counterpoint actually - monocropping is not at all en exclusive GMO phenomenon. Naturally selected cultivars like the Cavendish are all identical clones.
This is very common across many different types of produce, and all without GE.
The same solutions for diversity work for cultivars as well as GMO seed.
Currently the Cavendish has some genetic diversity through random mutations. That’s going to drop to ~zero with the first GMO Cavendish that’s cloned.
It might not seem that important for seedless varieties, but GMO is inherently a genetic bottleneck.
Nope, this is not true of cultivars - they are all genetically identical clones.
GMO seeds can be radiated for increased genetic diversity. I actually don't think cultivars can, however.
That price also does not include externalities (eg. the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by Iowa fertilizer runoff is not accounted for in the price of the food produced).
Just like if steroids became legal in sports, no-one would be forcing top athletes to take them. If you want to maintain food sovereignty, you can't ignore market forces.
This always seems like a really squishy concept. What does culturally appropriate food mean? It seems like an ultra-conservative and condescending concept. Why should people in the global south let a Quixote Belgian farming movement trap them in agrarian poverty?
A nation state a large, and well educated as India could surely develop its own domestic GMO tech and deploy it in a way that their citizens approve of via their democratic system of government. They developed their own pharmaceutical manufacturing industry which is the largest in any developing nation, so why not this? Are GMO seeds any more unnatural than statins or artificial insulin?
As for banning (foreign-made) GMOs trapping people in poverty, that's debatable at best. There's considerable evidence that unrestricted free trade hinders economic development [1], by keeping countries from developing their own industries. Every country that has climbed out of poverty so far, has done so without GMOs (granted because they were not widespread at the time, but the same should still be possible today) - and without unrestricted free trade [2].
The comparison with pharmaceuticals is apt. For one, pharmaceuticals don't displace anything, so there is no existing local industry harmed by their import (prior to developing local pharma industry). And if India developed their own GMO industry, you are correct, using those GMOs would not harm their food sovereignty. Of course issues with loss of crop biodiversity and farmers becoming dependent on a single giant (albeit Indian) corporation would remain, but at least viewed on a national level, sovereignty would not be harmed, even if individual farmers would still lose some independence. But at least the entities they became dependent on would be within their democratic reach.
And regarding how natural GMOs vs. pharmaceuticals are - I was not making an appeal to nature, so that is irrelevant. For the sake of argument, lets say they are equally unnatural.
[1] https://fpif.org/kicking_away_the_ladder_the_real_history_of...
[2] "... none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules." - James K. Galbraith, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
It's literally part of the initial declaration from the first global forum on food sovereignty. It's their thing, not something I made up.
> As for banning (foreign-made) GMOs trapping people in poverty, that's debatable at best.
That's not what I meant, I was criticizing the food sovereignty movements assumptions about small scale agriculture. Small scale agriculture basically always means poverty, and people rarely choose it freely. India's agricultural policies absolutely trap people in poverty now.
> For one, pharmaceuticals don't displace anything
There's a very large industry of traditional medicine in India that would probably beg to differ. Not that this quibble matters.
> Of course issues with loss of crop biodiversity and farmers becoming dependent on a single giant (albeit Indian) corporation would remain,
There's no reason you could produce a wide variety of slightly modified seeds that are 1 to 1 replacements for what people are growing. You could even spin this out of universities and establish regional seed banks.
> none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules.
That has nothing to do with banning a technology.
Genetic sequences are patented. There was a case where GM seeds spread to neighbours, and Monsato sued neighbour...
It is horror show similar to software patents.
That's not what happened at all. Even NPR calls that claim bogus[1]. That said, they do some other things that are a bit unsavory.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/to...
What happens after with licensing and other legal issues is a fault of policymakers rather than any fault of this inherent lifesaving technology.
Even if it means doing highly amoral stuff and tightly coupling crops enhanced for mass, immunity to pests and diseases with things like inability to breed, so farmers have to keep buying their seeds.
Its not hard to see why everybody has issues with this - not many want to be slaves with the very thing that our lives depend on to company thats extremely greedy from the start. GMs without those traits, having just weaknesses adressed might be much better sell for poor countries.
Rich countries like Europe will react when its time to react, no need to freak out now when as you describe serious issues will be present in next century. Crops can be changed pretty fast if there is strong enough motivation and one has enough cash.
However, I don't think India has many FTAs, and probably few of them include agricultural products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bilateral_free-trade_a...
I also don’t think we have pushed the limits of breeding yet. It is only in the last decade that genotyping tech has become cheap enough to employ it for a breeding program. Combine that big data analysis with breeding and I bet you can produce some spectacular results within 1 or 2 generations.
I think the massive advantages of shuffling a million variants 1000 times is why GMOs are transgenics and not modifications of the existing genome. Traditional breeding is just so much better at this.
Even if we were to agree that GM crops help with that (which is debatable), I don't see how there'd be any "famine" seeing that they can change policy anytime in the future if they see problematic trends, and do the same thing they do with drugs - ignore US patents and start making their own GM seeds.
Note as well that I'm not against genetic engineering per se, and I do not believe the consumption of most GM foods is harmful to one's health. But the way GE is currently done, the problems of monoculture and security of the food supply are very, very real, for the same reason why we only have the shitty varieties of bananas now - the better kind got wiped out by disease.
It doesn't have to be this way. There's nothing preventing Big Agriculture from introducing more diverse seed varieties. It's just less profitable than making monocultures that can be wiped out by a single strain of a single disease.
It’s not popular to say but we need to stabilize population growth and stop encroaching on natural habitats and put a brake on consumerism.
The developed world has in many parts allowed previously used areas to revert to a natural state. However in high pop growth countries the opposite is happening as both thd developed world and developing world both need as well as demand more resource extraction. We're depleting ocean fisheries, contributing to soil erosion, having water shortages, etc.
Stabilize populations to 1960s or whatever, but we need to do the same as we’re doing for pollution set a benchmark and aim for it. Get those people educated, provide them with prophylactics and get them out of a pop explosion curve and get to ZPG like Italy and Japan (US as well if we didn’t import pop growth).
Second, agricultural products are already produced to meet needs
Third, the "reduce people" argument is almost always a losing one
Japan, Italy and the US are "reducing the people" naturally. We're there already. Yes our pop happens to be "growing" but that's due to others exporting their excess to us.
How do you figure? Certainly we can't afford to keep emitting at the rate we're emitting, but if we transition to entirely clean energy and use our existing farmland more efficiently (rather than encroaching on important ecosystems) then I'm not sure what the remaining bottlenecks are. Lumber?
The big issue with the future is that China and India was to be first world countries with first world luxuries.
India is currently 1.3 billion people and still growing 1-2% per year.
China is currently 1.4 billion people. Still growing .3% per year (US is .4%)
Dismissing first world population growth as "just being overflow" / immigration ignores the fact that people that immigrate to the US will quickly start consuming resources like an American.
Population growth doesn't matter that much. What really matters is the resource consumption rates of the population.
The environmental future is basically a conflict between India and China aspiring to Western resource consumption rates and luxury, and us praying they figure out how to do it sustainably.
Otherwise: WAR.
So about 3 billion people is stable? You're saying we need a reduction of about 5 billion? How do we do that? Which countries need massive depopulation?
When it comes to population regulation it's via reproduction policies that educate women and offer them job opportunities and incentivize them to have sustainable family sizes.
You will be frightened how we did that. Canada for example is net-positive and effectively doesn't have to do anything. Not surprising given we have a gigantic boreal forest that stretches across the country. We have almost 10,000 trees per person. So then why do we show up in top 10 worst countries? Our trees don't count, they are considered against us.
>When it comes to population regulation it's via reproduction policies that educate women and offer them job opportunities and incentivize them to have sustainable family sizes.
Well, the 'climate clock' has only 8 years left before DEADline. Education and reproductive policies like only allowing 1 child won't work. We have to obviously do far more to reduce the world population by more than half. What do you think we should do?
What DEADline? You mean to keep warming below 1.5°C? Do you suppose if we go ver by .1°, we all die? That's not how it works. It's better to limit warming, but there's no magic cutoff in which we all die. It's on a continuum, with more warming meaning the increase in the likelihood of extreme events and disruption. Also at some point, increase in the possibility of positive feedback, but that's likely above or near the maximum projected warming range 2.7°-4°C, and it's still a matter of degree.
The IPCC report does not say we all die in the current projected warming range, or that civilization collapses.
I will admit, I looked through the site to find if they are doomsaying like AOC.
>It's better to limit warming, but there's no magic cutoff in which we all die.
In the last 20,000 years or so the world warmed up 6 celcius without human input. This has been a great thing for our species, basically enabling us to create civilization. Another 1.5c will be good for us. It will unlock tons of landmass.
>It's on a continuum, with more warming meaning the increase in the likelihood of extreme events and disruption.
The hypothesis that say atlantic hurricanes are worse because of climate change does not match the data. It's a good guess because more energy can theoretically be put into the hurricane but that's kind of debunked now. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/could-clima... Little bit of a backpedal. Sure, rising seas might cause some problems for rich folks who built too close to the coast. I have no pity for them.
>Also at some point, increase in the possibility of positive feedback, but that's likely above or near the maximum projected warming range 2.7°-4°C, and it's still a matter of degree.
Also great news. There are a number of projections 1.9, 2.6, 3.4, 4.5, 6,7,and 8.5.
All the predictions of doom is as if we are following the 8.5 path.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...
Note how this biased graph only shows IPCC 8.5. Here's a copy and paste. RCP8.5, generally taken as the basis for worst-case climate change scenarios, was based on what proved to be overestimation of projected coal outputs.
8.5 is not happening. It's looking like all the efforts humanity is making is placing us somewhere around 3. Afterall, above 4.5 is that we basically do nothing. CO2 peaks in around 2045 and life goes on.
Even more interestingly, the climate clock is RCP 1.9. The only way we achieve the climate clock goal is that all fossil fuels end worldwide in the next ~7 years. That's not going to happen.
There's a class conflict in the backdrop and I see this as the reason media is planting the idea that consumers ought to be content with less, not because of the environment. They still want and expect you to consume, but will spin lower quality of life (owing to unaffordability of housing and certain lifestyles) as a virtue. Realistically your carbon footprint +/- on an individual level stays in the same rough ballpark if you live in the West since a lot of it is due to city infrastructure, electricity, gas. It's just compounded by sheer population. In my view everyone ought be able to live and pursue a life of high quality; reducing quality of life is not the solution, it's a problem. The solution will lie in innovation, population stagnation, growing economy for developing nations, etc.
I doubt it even needs to be a policy in many countries - I don't know many people with more than two kids.
In 1st world countries the fertility rates are already stagnant. The growth rate is targeted and achieved through immigration, from countries with lower quality of life and higher child mortality.
More walkable neighborhoods mean you need cars for less errands, which means less money spent on road infrastructure and more money being invested in more efficient solutions.
Also those 10 billion people in the future will be consuming far more per capita as developing nations continue to industrialise.
This is a good thing as everyone deserves a decent life. But if we are all going to have a decent life without destroying the planet then we need to be mindful of how many of us we can sustainably support.
What exactly does this mean? People were pretty upset with China's one child policy (all the unintended side-effects ignored); this sounds even more nefarious? .
We can only incentivize via education, opportunity and availability of contraceptives.
India for example offers sterilization for men who want to avoid unintended impregnation of partners. They could even incentivize such a thing.
The enemy you are fighting is natural selection, in this case.
"It’s also indoors, can be placed anywhere on the planet, is heavily integrated with robots and AI, and produces better fruits and vegetables while using 95% less water and 99% less land."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/20/this-2-...
> Johnson says the system will grow 700 plants, using 15 towers, in a space of just 2 by 18 feet. Today, he sells kits ranging from single tower patio gardens to 10-tower deck gardens to commercial-sized set-ups like those being used by a Miami football stadium for concession meals, by a Whole Foods Market in New Jersey, and by rooftop farmers in Lagos, Nigeria. ... This closed-loop system uses less than 10% of the water of a traditional garden. ... To create a system robust enough for even off-grid farmers, Johnson has spent the last 2 decades developing his trihelix solar windmill.
"Mad scientist's homestead is parking size, off-grid system" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSnHShly5R0
The yields/unit area go up and to the right, which means two things. One is that we need less land for agriculture, which frees it up for other purposes, including allowing biodiversity/forestland.
It's cheaper to buy unused land and build on it. Well, cheaper to the homeowner anyways. The costs of maintaining ambulance/fire/police/sewage/electricity infrastructure are huge, but born by the whole city usually.
If you want to stop sprawl, have city/state taxes be based on the cost to provide service to your address. Taxes in the cities will likely go down (there's probably a customer per few feet of sewage pipe), and taxes in the suburbs will be astronomical (where there's probably a hundred feet of piping per customer).
The amount of resources allocated per-consumer in the suburbs is bad, and in rural areas is crazy. I'm in the suburbs and there's probably 50 feet of clearance between houses on all sides. That's 100 feet of piping to connect our houses, 100 feet of electrical wiring, etc.
And yet I pay the same taxes as I did when I lived downtown in an apartment complex, where each resident probably had 1/2" of city-owned piping connected to it.
This is not popular because it assumes that everyone has an excessive footprint. I'm vegetarian, I get most of my food from a local, organic farm. My footprint is minimal (no car, zero commute, no flight, etc). We could be billions more if we chose to live this way. Why ask/force people not to have a family where we could have happy family living responsibly? Asking others to die / not reproduce is a great way not to challenge our way of life.
For some reasons, all the people I know who campaign for population stabilization/reduction are among those with the worst footprint.
I don't have kids and don't plan to have. Nobody is forcing me not to have kids, in fact the opposite. I am the black sheep of my family and social circle, people look at me weird for not having kids (not that I care).
The problem with asking people to live responsibly is that it hasn't worked so far. Ever tried asking a meat eater to reduce a tiny bit of their meat consumption? Another issue is that even if it worked, it will take a long time for people to change their habits. We should of course educate people about responsible living, but we should also remember that it is a long, hard process.
I don't know what the solution is, but we are at a point that we should try everything we can think of, including asking people to have less kids, live responsibly etc etc
Turns out I also quite like tofu, falafels and soy crumble.
Environmentalism is unfortunately a liberal issue, not a conservative one (or an all-people one which is fundamentally is), population controls is basically a war on the poor, especially in the modern world, and that policy can't coexist in the liberal sphere right now.
Environmentalism historically is basically conflict with corporations, and was really about localized environmentalism (pollution of a lake, etc), or it was a small number of corporations (CFCs for ozone).
Global warming and species destruction is a totally different ballgame politically.
This trifecta has brought reproduction below the replacement rate in large parts of the globe. US population goes up only via immigration.
Open borders to move people more quickly into more-developed countries, and increase funding and pressure for initiatives to raise standards in other countries.
Margaret Thatcher, a Conservative to her core, raised environmental issues on the world stage and worked for action well before it was a politically fashionable cause.
Not even close.
Only the "performative" kind. Conservatives are quite in favor of nuclear power for example, which is arguably the most "environmental" thing one can be in favor of. What they are against are reductions in business caused by higher energy prices, and worse quality of life. Both are a hard sell in the long term unless you're just virtue signaling and lower QOL and higher cost of living won't affect you (that is if you're Leo DiCaprio, Al Gore, or John Kerry for example).
I'm sorry, but you know that people can still have families (up to 2.1 children/woman on average) while staying below the replacement reproduction rate (so resulting in population reduction). So why pretend that they're being asked to give up families entirely?
I personnally believe population control is just a way not to challenge our way of life. Because if you get them to actually care about the environment (our future), then people will ajust their family's dream (why have another child if it makes life worst for the first one?).
Can you explain this? Why should we be billions more?
More so, I am genuinely curious what the same people propose we do when we reach whatever they consider to be the maximum sustainable population. Clearly, we can't grow infinitely in a limited space.
I'm not hoping for a failure, I'm just intimately convinced that we won't manage to survive on other rocks without really trying here first.
The first reason is that it takes more energy to fight the desire to reproduce than to get people to live responsibly (at least not more than our environment can bear). Moreover, if you somehow get people to reproduce less than they desire (without causing to much frustration), you'll still have to educate them about the sustainability issues (aka our way of life). Why not directly address the way of life challenge, then?
People don't want many children when they know what's coming (your first child's future is in jeopardy, let's have more!). It's no coincidence that those who have/want the most children are the least aware of the biodiversity/climate problem.
This line of reasoning is problematic as it just delays the stabilization. Maybe we could have a few billion more people now but surely there must be a limit somewhere. 10B, 50, 100? Sooner or later we'll have to stabilize.
> For some reasons, all the people I know who campaign for population stabilization/reduction are among those with the worst footprint.
To be clear, I personally believe we have to both stabilize the population AND dramatically reduce footprint per capita.
The thing is, people will only reproduce less if they adhere to the cause. So if we get people to realize we all must care for our environment in order to live well, then you don't have to limit population growth. Limiting population growth will always be less effective than changing a way of life (which makes people not want too many children).
If you restrict reproduction, expect people to want more consumption (at least to compensate).
If you get a heart attack, where do you think the medical supplies come from?
By air from China!
Even if you personally manage to abstain from taking planes, you consume products and services by people who fly and drive cars.
You can't guarantee the lifestyles of your children. For all you know, your family of 6 kids will rebel against your (extremely worthy and admirable) lifestyle and start flying around to see the world. That's what kids often do.
I bet I can have more influence on my childrens being environmentalist, than on others' people desire to reproduce.
By the way, I'm not advocating for people to have more children but against policy to limit population. Only because it so less effective than accepting to have a sustainable footprint.
Is it not? Where, and why?
> provide them with prophylactics
Kinda problematic for orgs that rely on US foreign aid.[1]
"The policy originally enacted from 1984 to 1993 spoke to abortion only, not family planning in general. However, in 2001, the policy was re-implemented and expanded to cover all voluntary family planning activities, and critics began to refer to it as the "global gag rule." These critics argue that the policy not only reduces the overall funding provided to particular NGOs, it closes off their access to USAID-supplied condoms and other forms of contraception. This, they argue, negatively impacts the ability of these NGOs to distribute birth control, leading to a downturn in contraceptive use and from there to an increase in the rates of unintended pregnancies and abortion. A study of nations in sub-Saharan Africa suggests that unintended pregnancies increased and abortions approximately doubled while the policy was in effect. Critics also argue that the ban promotes restrictions on free speech as well as restrictions on accurate medical information. The European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development presented a petition to the United States Congress signed by 233 members condemning the policy. The forum has stated that the policy "undermines internationally agreed consensus and goals"."
The global gag rule is enforced by Republican administrations and rescinded by Democratic ones. Infer from that what you will.
Is population an issue? Yes, probably. But it's (Western) (over) consumption that got us here, and continues to escalate the crisis.
The less distractions for that, the better.
1. Countries with high population growth numbers do, in fact, focus on bringing those numbers down. China and India have had widespread family planning programs for decades and those have borne fruit.
2. The country with the highest per-capita consumption in the world conditions a lot of its foreign aid on recipients not promoting family planning. Meanwhile, Internet commenters from that country grumble about poor countries' population numbers.
Whether global population ever reaches 10 billion people is in doubt. Fertility rates are falling faster than the most aggressive UN estimates in all but a few places. [1][2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/global-population-s...
[2] Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson
It's really more of a matter of how we make it through the next 100 years.
How do you feel about external countries dictating your government policy? Often this won't go the way you want.
Is Mercosur unpopular in Brazil? Eliminating it would be quite costly to the world.
I believe it's a fair statement. If you come in with economic sanctions with policy in mind. You have dictated what that policy is. There's no beating around the bush.
I don't see any chance of this not going bad. It would set the climate to somebody much worse than Bolsonaro to get into power. I don't see how the GP could ever want it, but there is a small and loud political movement that does ask for it.
(By the way, Mercosul is popular in Brazil. Preserving forests is too. Preserving non-forest biodiversity is less popular, but as soon as people see the choice, they like it. All of those have strong opposition from small groups.)
Climate change and biodiversity loss are aspects of one problem: we don't see the world. Ours is fundamentally a psychological or spiritual crisis.
Civilization as we know it is a kind of hypnotic trance.
The real world is fantastically beautiful.
Nature supplies all our needs though a self-regulating autonomic system made of self-improving four-billion-year-old nanotechnology that's driven by a zero-maintenance fusion reactor so powerful that it can burn out your retinas from 150 gigameters away.
"All the world's problems can be solved in a garden" - Geoff Lawton
Food, medicine, clothing, structural materials all grow naturally.
It's also very fun and fulfilling to live in harmony with nature.
So the question is, what's preventing us from seeing that and changing our ways?
Why doesn't e.g. Gabe Brown's neighbor adopt his methods?
(Gabe Brown is a farmer in North Dakota who practices regenerative agriculture. He make more money, increases soil fertility and biodiversity, does less work, and his farm is more resilient than conventional farms, so why don't more people pick up on this faster? "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A )
We have all the technology we need already, so that's not the limiting factor.
It seems to me to be, as I said above, a perceptual/psychological problem.
> the problem is that humans are destroying natural habitat.
Right, but why?
Fact is people actually like civilization. Modern civilization has led to an unprecedented quality of life for a larger portion of the human population than ever before in recorded history. People are hard pressed to give that up. Put another way, humans prefer to reduce their current misery than ensure all the future's climate issues are solved.
Stepping away from modern civilization and our systems would result in unimaginable suffering.
> It seems like you're suggesting we all revert to subsistence living by growing our own food on little family farms or something.
Ah, no, not at all. I do think we should integrate natural systems into our homes and cities to a much greater degree. E.g. Village Homes, urban Permaculture, Integral Urban House, food forests, etc.
> Village Homes is a planned community in Davis, Yolo County, California. It is designed to be ecologically sustainable by harnessing the energies and natural resources that exist in the landscape, especially stormwater and solar energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes
"Urban Permaculture with Geoff Lawton" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qXgbrIYcFE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Urban_House
"Amazing 23-Year-Old Permaculture Food Forest - An Invitation for Wildness" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GJFL0MD9fc
I also think we should try to live within our "solar budget", the incoming solar energy per m², rather than burning fossil fuels. However, I hope clean atomic power becomes available too. (And rockets.)
> Modern civilization has led to an unprecedented quality of life for a larger portion of the human population than ever before in recorded history.
I agree, but it's not without its discontents, eh? When I said "Civilization as we know it is a kind of hypnotic trance." I wasn't referring to the technology, rather to the cultural influences that keep us from applying science and technology to make our civilization work in harmony with Nature instead of against it.
> Put another way, humans prefer to reduce their current misery than ensure all the future's climate issues are solved.
That's my point: we can reduce misery and solve our climate issues. It's the same solution, eh? Living in harmony with nature feels great! It's fun and fulfilling. I don't want to go backwards to some previous harsh lifestyle, I want to go forwards to a better (technological) civilization. (For example, the folks in the "Amazing 23-Year-Old Permaculture Food Forest" video above seem pretty happy and fulfilled and they haven't turned their backs on the benefits of modern civilization, eh?)
Ecology is a science, after all. We can apply what we've learned about how natural systems work to improve our civilization. We can reduce misery, increase happiness, protect and even increase biodiversity, solve our climate problems, all by application of ecology.
My puzzle is why don't we? What's preventing the rapid and widespread application of ecological knowledge and practice?
What are you talking about?
> Feel free to come up with better eco-tech, but what you've mentioned so far sucks.
Did you watch this video? "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
He's more productive than conventional agriculture with fewer inputs.
> I don't want to live within a solar budget
So where do you want to get power w/o burning fossil fuels? The only other source of energy is nuclear, which would be fine but it won't help in time to tackle climate change.
> and I don't want to pay high food prices for ridiculously inefficient eco-farms.
Well fortunately that's not the trade off. Seriously, go check out what Gabe Brown is doing.
I doubt that a 2h30m video giving situational advice on soil health is an answer to the declining biodiversity this article is talking about. Even if his techniques are more "productive" (which means little on its own anyway, it's not efficient if productivity gains don't match time/labor/financial/scale cost increases), as long as his farm is still very much a farm it will largely exclude the kind of "wild" biodiversity that is declining which includes a lot of destructive, nasty or totally pointless flora & fauna. It's not a problem with solutions like "using less fertilizer" or "don't till the soil as much so some fungi can grow".
"Real" biodiversity and utilitarian farmland have very little overlap, natural "wild" ecosystems generally suck at meeting modern consumer demand. The most relevant and compelling solutions that I see focus on increasing yield and space/land efficiency so we can meet modern demand with less space, leaving more space for low-utility wild ecosystems scientists care about.
Ultimately, I'm not going to pretend like I'm an expert in the field who can competently analyze two hour technical farming videos. If Gabe and co can solve this problem more efficiently, I'd encourage them to prove that in the market by providing more and better produce. The market cuts through the bullshit and nonsense we tell ourselves about how much better something is. Show me something better and I'll vote with my wallet.
> So where do you want to get power w/o burning fossil fuels?
Perhaps a mix of centralized renewable techs and nuclear. Good solutions don't necessarily exist yet, that's why the world is working hard on energy tech, the world isn't giving up.
FWIW, I'm actually kind of unimpressed by solar panels. (Although it's clear that the trends favor them.) I'd prefer passive solar design and direct utilization (solar hot water collectors, etc.) instead.
> I'm talking about "village homes" being incredibly space & land inefficient.
Compared to what? Other suburbs?
FWIW, I like the idea of "arcologies": ecologically integrated whole cities built at once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology I don't know if they are truly possible, but it seems obvious to me that constructing a city as a unit would permit massive economies of scale (e.g. no need for individual AC units if the whole city is temperature controlled with passive solar/wind design, etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project
> I'm talking about permaculture-style forests wasting large amounts of land and resources hosting plants and herbs few people actually want
To me that seems like a bizarre take on the concept of food forests. These systems produce more food than conventional mono-crops without the ecological destruction. Long-term what does it matter if a conventional farm can grow more of a single crop if the land it's on is eventually destroyed? That's the fundamental trade-off: if a system of agriculture destroys the basis for life it is doomed sooner or later. In other words, the "waste" of land you're talking about (to the extent that it's actually true) is really maintenance cost that has to be paid one way or another, sooner or later.
> I doubt that a 2h30m video giving situational advice on soil health is an answer to the declining biodiversity this article is talking about. Even if his techniques are more "productive" (which means little on its own anyway, it's not efficient if productivity gains don't match time/labor/financial/scale cost increases), as long as his farm is still very much a farm it will largely exclude the kind of "wild" biodiversity that is declining which includes a lot of destructive, nasty or totally pointless flora & fauna. It's not a problem with solutions like "using less fertilizer" or "don't till the soil as much so some fungi can grow".
Well I don't know what to tell you other than that is exactly what is addressed in the video. I'm sure there are other, shorter videos if you really want to check it out. His farm is more productive, has fewer inputs, has more biodiversity, etc. than conventional farming.
Maybe check out these folks? "Homestead Paradise: got barren land, boosted it at a profit" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRPP4Ilpxso it's still an hour, and they're doing something much different than Gabe Brown is, but it's another example of having one's cake and eating it too: more "wild" biodiversity and fertility, fewer inputs, economically productive, etc.
> "Real" biodiversity and utilitarian farmland have very little overlap, natural "wild" ecosystems generally suck at meeting modern consumer demand. The most relevant and compelling solutions that I see focus on increasing yield and space/land efficiency so we can meet modern demand with less space, leaving more space for low-utility wild ecosystems scientists care about.
Setting aside the point that Permaculture et. al. is all about "increasing yield and space/land efficiency", you're right (IMO) that we should be setting aside, say, half the Earth for non-human use. See E.O. Wilson's "Half Earth" proposal. https://www.half-earthproject.org/
My original question is how do you get buy-in on such a goal if only a few scientists care about it? I see the root of the problem as humankind's divorce from Nature. What prevents us from seeing the intrinsic value of "low-utility wild ecosystems"?
> If Gabe and co can solve this problem more efficiently, I'd encourage them to prove that in the market by providing more and better produce.
That's exactly what they're doing.
> The market cuts through the bullshit and nonsense we tell ourselves about how much better something is.
Except when we ignore externalities like degraded soil and overheated atmosphere, eh? I mean that's the whole problem we're facing now, isn't it? No oil company put aside profit to pay for mitigation of CO₂ emissions? No farming conglomerate put aside funds to pay for new topsoil to replace what's getting blown away, or to regenerate oceanic deadzones caused by over-fertilization with and runoff of artificial fertilizer, eh?
> > So where do you want to get power w/o burning fossil fuels?
> Perhaps a mix of centralized renewable techs...
So solar? Renewable energy comes from the sun. Wind is powered by thermal differences that are driven by solar flux. (Although wave power technically comes from the Moon.)
> ...and nuclear.
Which is fine with me, but it won't help in time to alleviate climate change.
> Good solutions don't necessarily exist yet, that's why the world is working hard on energy tech, the world isn't giving up.
Again, my point isn't that nobody is working on it, my question is what prevents us from taking up the tools and technology (and eco-farming is a technology based on the science of ecology) we already have faster and more eagerly?
> Permaculture et. al. is all about "increasing yield and space/land efficiency"
Not exactly, that's one aspect of it but a core part of permaculture is some principle of conservative consumption and changing demand to fit supply instead of the other way round. Meat is a pretty classic example, most people love and consume a lot of meat. Permaculture ignores that, it focuses on sustainably cultivating stuff that is suitable for sustainable cultivation and limiting consumption of stuff that isn't. I don't want permaculture, I want all the meat that I want to eat. Now make that efficient too.
> My original question is how do you get buy-in on such a goal if only a few scientists care about it? I see the root of the problem as humankind's divorce from Nature. What prevents us from seeing the intrinsic value of "low-utility wild ecosystems"?
You get buy-in on such a goal by acknowledging that no one cares about the supposedly intrinsic value of these wild ecosystems, you get buy-in by giving people what they actually want. As far as I'm concerned, there is no intrinsic value to these natural habitats. If you invent a cheaper way to cultivate popular produce like meat and dairy, I don't need to be a scientist to see the value of that and buy it. If scientists give consumers what they want (cheap produce I actually like) then consumers will give scientists what they want (money to pay for sustainable technology). It was ever thus. What won't fly is telling people how cool Nature is if you just change your entire lifestyle around it.
> Except when we ignore externalities like degraded soil and overheated atmosphere, eh? I mean that's the whole problem we're facing now, isn't it?
We don't ignore these externalities, every government and corporation is talking about it (the topic of this very article). There are new laws and initiatives filling the gaps. Renewable energy has a lot of funding. Farming conglomerates look out for their own corporate survival and factor land degradation costs into their calculations, degraded land impacts their bottom line, short and long term.
But proposed alternatives have other externalities: they're more expensive, time-consuming, hard-to-scale or simply don't produce what consumers demand. That won't cut it. It turns out that it's a hard problem to solve. I don't really care who pays for it, the obsession with who pays for it is stupid and unproductive. Ultimately, the cost is passed down to the consumer. The problem is that the cost is too high and we solve that by making more efficient eco-tech, not by complaining that Big Co isn't signing the check.
> it's another example of having one's cake and eating it too: more "wild" biodiversity and fertility, fewer inputs, economically productive, etc.
Ok, what about cost? What about scale? Can you scale Homestead paradise into a system that feeds a country of 300 million people all the milk, eggs, leather and beef they want for a dollar? How about a billion? If it really can, then I've got good news: anyone can watch YouTube so anyone, including Big Farm Co, can profit from such improvements.
If it can't, then I don't want your eco cake.
> In other words, the "waste" of land you're talking about (to the extent that it's actually true) is really maintenance cost that has to be paid one way or another, sooner or later.
You could say this about anything, innovation and new technology is all about not accepting current limitations.
Sure, but VH is better (ecologically) than existing suburbs.
> Our current green city tech sucks and cool arcology solutions haven't been invented yet.
We might not be able to make arcologies but we can make our cities more ecological than we currently do (e.g. the Urban Permaculture video is about this.)
> I don't want permaculture, I want all the meat that I want to eat. Now make that efficient too.
In re: permaculture and meat production, most systems include meat animals (cattle, pigs, chickens, etc.) as integral parts of the designed ecosystem, and it's efficient (in terms of reduced inputs and improved quality of meat.)
> As far as I'm concerned, there is no intrinsic value to these natural habitats.
Really? Have you never experienced the value of being in a forest?
> If you invent a cheaper way to cultivate popular produce like meat and dairy, I don't need to be a scientist to see the value of that and buy it.
Right, that's Permaculture. It's cheaper. (Most modern agriculture gets huge subsidies to make it "economical".)
> What won't fly is telling people how cool Nature is if you just change your entire lifestyle around it.
Why not? It's true. Nature is cool and living in harmony with it is fun and fulfilling. It seems to me to be a fundamental issue with humanity that we deny this and try to find fulfillment in e.g. smart phones and video games and media.
> We don't ignore these externalities, every government and corporation is talking about it (the topic of this very article). There are new laws and initiatives filling the gaps. Renewable energy has a lot of funding.
Yeah, now, when the handwriting is on the wall. It's been an uphill slog against climate deniers the whole way until very recently.
> Farming conglomerates look out for their own corporate survival and factor land degradation costs into their calculations, degraded land impacts their bottom line, short and long term.
I just don't believe that. If that were true then why are we facing these problems today?
> But proposed alternatives have other externalities: they're more expensive, time-consuming, hard-to-scale or simply don't produce what consumers demand.
You say that but alternatives like Permaculture, Syntropic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, food forests, and so on, are cheaper, require less labor, scalable, and they produce higher quality products. For example Ernst Götsch (developer of Syntropic agriculture) produces the highest quality cacao in the world with yields as much as three times higher than conventional plantations.
> Can you scale Homestead paradise into a system that feeds a country of 300 million people all the milk, eggs, leather and beef they want for a dollar?
Sure.
> How about a billion?
I don't see why not.
> anyone, including Big Farm Co, can profit from such improvements.
Right. My question is why is that taking so long to set in?
> innovation and new technology is all about not accepting current limitations.
Again, that's Permaculture (et. al.) The knowledge and ability to design agriculturally productive ecologies is the innovative new technology that overcomes the current limitations of previous methods. Ecology is a science.
The reason for my irritation is that I find your view complacent. A few affluent people being more hippyish mainly helps those people feel better. It doesn't prevent habitat loss on a global scale. Even if they plant a nature-friendly back garden!
Well, the obvious way would be that they are no longer consuming the beef or other products of destructive south-eastern Amazonia farming, eh?
My question is how do eco-friendly lifestyles go mainstream to the point where the pressure to destroy the environment begins to ease up?
> The reason for my irritation is that I find your view complacent.
Let me reassure you that I'm anything but complacent.
> A few affluent people being more hippyish mainly helps those people feel better.
That's not what I'm advocating here.
The problem I'm pointing out is exactly that ecology is thought of as "hippyish". Gabe Brown isn't a hippie, nor are these folks:
"Homestead Paradise: got barren land, boosted it at a profit"
> Mark and Jen Shepard bought a degraded corn farm in Viola, Wisconsin, and began to slowly convert it from row-crops back to a native oak savanna that would become one of the most productive perennial farms in the country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRPP4Ilpxso
> It doesn't prevent habitat loss on a global scale. Even if they plant a nature-friendly back garden!
Okay, but a mass movement towards ecologically harmonious living would, so what's the hold up?
> Okay, but a mass movement towards ecologically harmonious living would, so what's the hold up?
I think my hesitation is this: don't you worry that the only people that have the life circumstances to contemplate anything like ecologically harmonious living are the affluent, educated, middle (UK terminology) or upper-middle (US terminology) classes? In other words, I think perhaps you're being much too optimistic about what individual humans can achieve, or even care to achieve. Huge numbers of people live near the poverty line; there's no way they are ever going to even think about changing their lives in the direction you suggest with the motivations you suggest. If you accept that claim, doesn't that suggest that habitat-preserving changes have to be mainly driven by institutions and policy/law/regulation, rather than by the actions of individuals?
No worries mate, I've got a thick skin and you sparked a pretty good thread, eh?
> > Okay, but a mass movement towards ecologically harmonious living would, so what's the hold up?
> I think my hesitation is this: don't you worry that the only people that have the life circumstances to contemplate anything like ecologically harmonious living are the affluent, educated, middle (UK terminology) or upper-middle (US terminology) classes?
Well, people of the "First World" are doing the most harm per capita so it seems to me that we're the ones with the most responsibility (and means) to change, and that that would have the greatest immediate effect.
> In other words, I think perhaps you're being much too optimistic about what individual humans can achieve, or even care to achieve. Huge numbers of people live near the poverty line; there's no way they are ever going to even think about changing their lives in the direction you suggest with the motivations you suggest.
Actually, a lot of these "technologies" (like Permaculture and Syntropic agriculture) are pretty cheap to implement. And many folks in impoverished areas are already doing it:
"India's Water Revolution #2: The Biggest Permaculture Project on Earth! with the Paani Foundation" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDMnbeW3F8A
"This man changed the fortunes of a barren land using traditional water wisdom. The story of Dhun" (also India) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=415an1V0FxQ
"Two Years of Permaculture Application" (Jordan) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFFFt6G6YNU
The cool thing about regenerative agriculture is that it's, uh, regenerative, meaning that it creates the materials that you need to make more of it (seeds mostly but also biomass for mulch, etc.) By working with life (instead of against it) you are part of a system that has evolved to make more of itself! :)
> ... habitat-preserving changes have to be mainly driven by institutions and policy/law/regulation, rather than by the actions of individuals?
I'm generally wary of top-down impositions but even if we are going to mandate eco-friendly lifestyles where do you get that mandate if not from (masses of) individuals?
My original question is why, if these lifestyles are more fun and more economical, is it taking so long for folks to catch on? More to the point, what can we do to help them catch on?
We are.
>What's preventing the rapid and widespread application of ecological knowledge and practice?
Nothing. It's happening. In so many ways. It's just that it looks different than you think it should. Half of the links you put up there are failed experiments. And it's not hard to imagine why, an Integral Urban House in Amazonian Brazil? These people are poor and just trying to feed their families. In fact I have a hard time envisioning any of these approaches working outside of relatively lush geographies nestled in wealthy countries with a deep store of knowledge and the culture to support adroit changes in near and long term policy. How many places in the world does such an intersection of circumstance occur? Very few.
> Nothing. It's happening. In so many ways. It's just that it looks different than you think it should.
So what does it look like? Seriously, lay it on me friend, I'd love to discover that I'm just out of the loop.
> Half of the links you put up there are failed experiments.
I beg to differ. Gabe Brown's farm isn't a "failed experiment"; Village Homes was sold out before it was finished being built, it still exists, and there's a waiting list to get in; Geoff Lawton is very successful, he has projects all over the world and hundreds of students (e.g. "Greening the Desert" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VGHoxpYlWQ ); Robert and Robyn Guyton’s "amazing 23-year-old food forest" isn't a "failed experiment"; so what are you on about?
> And it's not hard to imagine why, an Integral Urban House in Amazonian Brazil?
I'm not sure what the eventual fate of the Integral Urban House was (for all I know it's still there) but it was certainly not a "failed experiment" either. It showcased working patterns.
As for transplanting it to Amazonian Brazil as-is, that doesn't even make sense, it's an urban house, eh?
> These people are poor and just trying to feed their families. In fact I have a hard time envisioning any of these approaches working outside of relatively lush geographies nestled in wealthy countries with a deep store of knowledge and the culture to support adroit changes in near and long term policy.
Actually, folks in Brazil are all over it:
Ernst Götsch's Syntropic agriculture (he's originally from Switzerland but he's living and working in Brazil now.) https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ST9NyHf09M
Here's a place called Epicentro Dalva in Brazil https://epicentrodalva.com.br/ "Successionnal Agroforestry at Epicentro Dalva - Karin, Brazil"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPR7wyhdPkI
Here's a DDG search link for "brazil permaculture" if you want to find out more: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=brazil+permaculture&atb=v60-1&ia=w...
And if you're talking about the indigenous peoples of Brazil there's a lot of evidence that they were already practicing what we now call "food forests". In other words, they were (and some still are) already living in environmentally harmonious ways. If they hadn't been then there wouldn't have been forest there to destroy, eh?
Anyway, my point isn't that this ecological revolution isn't happening, my question is why isn't it happening faster, since living in harmony with Nature is both fulfilling and more economical?
Yes, but the real problem is that the people in power have actually just realised that there is a problem, and they can't buy it off.
The "plan" right now is to extend the needed extreme measures to 10 or 20 years time when the current generation of clued-up kids will be in power: I hate to think what they'll have to work with though.
The real problem is that the response is to create the plan.
Politicians know that we don't want to change our lifestyles at all, but we also want to feel virtuous. They're doing what we want.
We all need to do much more in addition to just not eating animals. Endless production, consumption and growth the way we’re currently doing it is just completely unsustainable.
Cutting your income is the easiest way to cut consumption.
It's only a principle if it hurts you to hold to it.
For nearly all of us, this can't compete with having a comfortable, secure life.
The cracks are showing. We spent the accumulated natural resources and charged the rest on credit to the future of the Earth.
> to a stability and sustainability model over a growth and efficiency mode
Second, we need to make artificial breeders, to help nature to regenerate.
Third, we need to make a continuous web of wild nature, to allow migrations, because isolated ecosystem will die with time no matter what, e.g. because of climate change alone.
> Half-Earth is a call to protect half the land and sea in order to manage sufficient habitat to reverse the species extinction crisis and ensure the long-term health of our planet.
They have a big "virtual summit coming up on the 22nd: Half-Earth Day 2021 https://www.half-earthproject.org/hed2021/
Nature always thrive better when we just them Her do her thing. Leave Nature alone!
People are addressing climate change with afforestation projects using non-native trees and all sorts of other stuff that doesn’t help save natural ecosystems. If the subset of people who think they “care about the environment” spends the next couple of decades supporting projects like that, and taking their eyes off the crisis of habitat destruction, then a terrible tragedy will result the shame of which humanity will never escape and which will make the world inherited by our children a pathetic memory of what it should have been, for ever.
Now of course global ecosystem degradation will hit the poor in developing countries very hard. But it's not like anybody who can take meaningful action cares about them either. And as opposed to climate change, the rich are isolated of the effects, so they have no incentive to push here either.
How? The bees and birds will migrate to rich countries? Corals will pop up in front of premium resorts so the fish can reproduce in their nets? Pandemics only travel in business class?
Gee, why is that? It only takes "paper of record" NYT 11 paragraphs to first mention what the meeting is and its mighty inconvenient host country--and the fact that the US is the only major country not party to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
Politics over life.