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whitey delenda est posted:If only there was a decentralized attention based food source. Maybe those sun worshipers have it figured out after all. Maybe food already is attention based. You ever seen a pot boil?
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Mar 18, 2015 03:57
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Maybe food already is attention based. You ever seen a pot boil? 
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Mar 18, 2015 09:17
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so there are no systemic problems with the resilient global food system, we just need to sprinkle a some reforms and the power of good intentions will ensure billions get sovereign access to food without destroying the planet?
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Mar 18, 2015 17:31
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Xipe Totec posted:so there are no systemic problems with the resilient global food system, we just need to sprinkle a some reforms and the power of good intentions will ensure billions get sovereign access to food without destroying the planet? How would you like me to cite your post when I teach my students about false dichotomy on Friday?
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Mar 18, 2015 17:35
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I much prefer the Swiftian solution to this problem
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Mar 18, 2015 19:25
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Not a Children posted:I much prefer the Swiftian solution to this problem  ?(I know what you actually meant)
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Mar 18, 2015 23:37
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Xipe Totec posted:so there are no systemic problems with the resilient global food system, we just need to sprinkle a some reforms and the power of good intentions will ensure billions get sovereign access to food without destroying the planet? If you've got an idea, spit it out.
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Mar 19, 2015 01:57
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Not Xipe Totec but I think I can see where he's coming from. Here's some random, incomplete proposals: On the supply side: greater reliance on traditional, low-intensity, ecosystem-based forms of agriculture, e.g. the Bolivian camellones. Using better water management to make do with precipitation and glacial runoff instead of relying on more and more extraction from underground acquifers and rivers. Using better farming techniques to keep the soil fertile instead of imported fertilizer. Lots of poor countries farm cash crops on a huge industrial scale, sell them to developed countries, and use the proceeds to buy food from the developed countries. This is stupid; they should be farming for local consumption instead of propping up our addiction to coffee and chocolate. Ending EU and American subsidies to agriculture and dairy would be a good start. It doesn't help if the developing countries are doing their farming using fertilizer, seeds, and machinery purchased from the developed world. Low-intensity "primitive" farming techniques (which often make highly sophisticated use of the land and local plant and animal life) are better for the local environment, produce fewer GHG emissions, and don't give a huge cut of the profits to developed countries. Improve rural livelihoods, because rural people, particularly women, are generally more vulnerable to changes in the environment and food availability than city-dwellers. Safeguard local water supplies instead of selling them to Coke. On the demand side: Shift away from the perpetual growth of capitalism to a low/zero-growth model of sustainable consumption. This is a pretty radical idea obviously and entails giant systemic changes that will probably never happen, but it's got a surprisingly large amount of support and it's got a lot more concrete aspects than just the "full global communism overnight" strawman that you see here. It's hard to see how we're going to address climate change when maintaining growth is still an implicitly higher priority for every government and maintaining profit is a higher priority for every company. 2% global growth per year probably means we're using more physical resource throughput every year and emitting more carbon every year (this is debatable). Maybe more importantly, it represents a skewed set of priorities that treats climate change as a secondary issue to coming out with a new iPhone every year (despite rhetoric to the contrary). This turned into a rant on climate change instead of food security but they're obviously linked pretty closely, and scaling back food consumption in the developed world is a good idea for a whole lot of reasons. It's not always as simple as "take food from rich/give to poor" but the fact that we have an obesity crisis in the global North and a food security crisis in the global South points to some serious systemic issues. IMO all these suggestions are more realistic and better for the environment than massively investment in nuclear power, vertical farming and arcologies. Reading this thread I feel like some goons have taken Sim City way too seriously and think all we need to solve the world's problems is more gigantic concrete structures. Maybe the first world could achieve your techno-futurist paradise (eventually) but if you seriously think sub-Saharan Africa is going to be dotted with nuclear power plants and vertical farms within the next 50 years you're seriously misinformed. Guy DeBorgore fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 02:26
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Guy DeBorgore posted:Low-intensity "primitive" farming techniques (which often make highly sophisticated use of the land and local plant and animal life) are better for the local environment, produce fewer GHG emissions, and don't give a huge cut of the profits to developed countries.
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Mar 19, 2015 02:50
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Xipe Totec posted:reading the last few pages, the only solutions put forward are PR campaigns within The Free Market. No, the solution is corrective taxes and regulations to push industry and agriculture towards sustainable practices which are still profitable, but less profitable enough that they won't do it on their own
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Mar 19, 2015 03:11
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Guy DeBorgore posted:IMO all these suggestions are more realistic and better for the environment than massively investment in nuclear power, vertical farming and arcologies. Reading this thread I feel like some goons have taken Sim City way too seriously and think all we need to solve the world's problems is more gigantic concrete structures. Maybe the first world could achieve your techno-futurist paradise (eventually) but if you seriously think sub-Saharan Africa is going to be dotted with nuclear power plants and vertical farms within the next 50 years you're seriously misinformed. Subsaharan Africa and Bolivian peasants aren't the driving forces behind climate change and resource depletion though? It's developed countries. Unless you're arguing we should have everyone return to premodern living and become Bolivian peasants, stuff like nuclear power is the only way to sustain a modern way of life
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Mar 19, 2015 03:15
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They are, really. Every single idiot I've ever seen tote the back to primitive agriculture is a nut job that'd have us return to the feudal era. They also don't give a drat about land use at all, and would cover the world in their labor intensive shity farms just to stop the evils of global food transportation. They are quite happy with the third world slaving in poor farm land to try and feed themselves, forever locking them into poverty and long arduous manual labor simply because they feel it's the more green solution.
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Mar 19, 2015 07:55
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:They are quite happy with the third world slaving in poor farm land to try and feed themselves, forever locking them into poverty and long arduous manual labor simply because they feel it's the more green solution. And if you ever point out that primitive farming is either low-yield or also destructive, the response is a chorus of "You must be a filthy Republican!!" I am extremely grateful that we live in the most food-stable period in history, and we should be bringing that stability worldwide while minimizing impacts, not burning it all down because of the new luddites.
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Mar 19, 2015 08:20
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Modern agriculture has a lot of problems. Deadzones in the Gulf of Mexico. Waste. Diversion of rivers to feed thirsty desert cropland. However, ancient agriculture has ruined entire swathes of china from erosion, causing rampant flooding by removing the topsoil on mountains to grow rice. The forests of Europe were burned down to make crop land before we were out of the stone age. There's a mental fallicy, that nature knows best, that the ancestors know best. It's easy for people to consume, and it spreads like wildfire among people who've never been on a farm a day in their life. Growth isn't sustainable they cry, ignoring the fact that cities are far more efficient in terms of resource use than rural land they idealize. They cry about nestle bottling water, ignoring the right of the native american's that own the water to use their resources to better themselves with out interference by white middle class Californians who gleefully pour entire rivers into desert to grow avocados on the rest of the nations dime. A strong agriculture industry with heavy influence and involvement from the government to aid in production and provide incentives for efficiency that wouldn't exist is vital to us going forward. It's pure insanity that in the same post they can rile against the evils of government subsidy and the USDA while pretending to espouse a non capitalist agenda. edit: How about some numbers?! Everyone loves numbers. The coke system uses 77,481,700,000 gallons of water a year to make it's products. The US withdraws 306,000,000,000 gallons a day. Every day. Over a third of that goes to watering fields. You want to play coke up as a drain on water resources? C'mon, pull the other leg. Idiots love to rail against bottled water and soda, but they're such a small impact compared to the water that goes into growing their organic kale daily! The third world is suffering from a lack of sanitation and poor regulation. The ironic thing is that large corporations moving in to bottle the water brings some modicum of investment in treatment, which is more than can be said for the local municipalities in many parts of the world. And yet Americans, who've never felt thirst in their life have the gall to go around telling poor people the world over that their loving factory jobs at the local soda plant is endangering the world. It's pure unadulterated hypocrisy. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 10:09
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Bottled water is dumb for reasons entirely separate from water but yes that's a good way of putting it. I kind of wonder how much of it is ultimately lobbying from agribusiness that we should focus entirely on the things that don't actually use that much water. Like we always hear about "TAKE SHORTER SHOWERS OR YOU'LL DESTROY THE WORLD!!!!" when if literally every person in America took an hour long shower every day it wouldn't come anywhere near what agribusiness uses. Criticisms of modern agriculture however are generally pretty legit. No we should not be going back to ancient farming techniques but we should also not be relying so heavily on monoculture farming that relies so heavily on chemicals and heavy irrigation. There's actually things to be said for crop rotation and the like though that is also a fairly recent thing if you look at history. The major issue is that our agriculture, as we do it now, is not sustainable. It will collapse. There's no way around it. Certain chemicals are just flat out running out, ammonia production for corn farming relies very heavily on natural gas, and the aquifers are running dry. Climate change is altering the landscape while certain crops are getting just outright hosed up. Plus you have companies like Monsanto that would like nothing more than total, complete control over the food supply. This won't last much longer. We're relying very heavily on finite resources but not doing a lot to answer the question of "OK, what next?" Of course other snags with the cash crop criticism comes from the fact that there are places where food crops grow pretty badly. Coffee is a very good cash crop because demand for it is very high worldwide. Humans loving love coffee and you can grow crap loads of it on pretty marginal land. It grows best on freaking mountains. From a purely economic standpoint it's far better for land that's ideal for coffee to have coffee grown on it than staple foods that will grow badly there. Certain crops strongly prefer certain conditions and altering the area to fit crops that don't grow there can cause massive problems so freaking yes let's grow things and trade. Part of the problems that come about from modern agriculture is specifically because we keep trying to do things like grow rice on top of mountains. That's part of why food transportation happens. Yes it's good to try to buy local but like...I live in a place that's incredibly bad for growing citrus fruits. Why the hell would we try to grow oranges here? They'd freeze and die every year. Better to grow the things that do well here (apples, cows, cabbage, berries, etc.) and trade it for the stuff that does not grow well here. Some of the stuff that does well here grows like complete rear end where citrus grows. That's the whole point of trade and why it isn't really all that dumb for people to grow whatever grows best locally, even if it's only cash crops.
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Mar 19, 2015 17:30
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There is obviously some nuance to the position of "eat local." It should actually be something like "grow local, with minimal external inputs." A good example is my 'favorite' crop and darling of middle America, Corn. Corn has some of the highest subsidies and is an incredibly thirsty crop, and yet it's grown in the great plains, which are pretty arid all things considered. Why are we growing corn instead of any other crop? If that problem is ever addressed by government food policy, many of the other inefficiencies in the global food supply will be addressed as well. But basically grow the crops that grow best in the region you are in, trade for crops that don't grow there.
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Mar 19, 2015 17:49
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Powercrazy posted:There is obviously some nuance to the position of "eat local." It should actually be something like "grow local, with minimal external inputs." A good example is my 'favorite' crop and darling of middle America, Corn. Corn has some of the highest subsidies and is an incredibly thirsty crop, and yet it's grown in the great plains, which are pretty arid all things considered. Why are we growing corn instead of any other crop? That policy goes back to the Cold War. The plan was "grow as much goddamned grain as possible in any way possible." Environmental science was still somewhat nascent and not all that influential at the time so it wasn't entirely obvious that growing a poo poo load of corn in an arid area was a bad idea. The plan was to basically become the primary grain producer so everybody would like the U.S. instead of Russia while demonstrating how much better capitalism was by just having so goddamned much food there was no way we could even hope to eat it all.
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Mar 19, 2015 17:56
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Corn isn't always irrigated, so how thirsty it is doesn't always factor into the picture. The yields are lower, but not that much lower. That said, it's better for the environment to grow less acres of corn if you can do so with a responsible and efficient method of irrigation. Also, we do rotate our crops, or at least, the farms that are actually listening to the USDA do. This monoculture is usualy a gross overstatement. Like when people talk about factory farming cattle. (Since the average lay man doesn't have a clue what the difference between a finishing lot and a ranch is.) Powercrazy posted:There is obviously some nuance to the position of "eat local." It should actually be something like "grow local, with minimal external inputs." A good example is my 'favorite' crop and darling of middle America, Corn. Corn has some of the highest subsidies and is an incredibly thirsty crop, and yet it's grown in the great plains, which are pretty arid all things considered. Why are we growing corn instead of any other crop? No. Grow crops where it's the most efficient and leave the less efficient farmland as fallow fields or ranch land. edit: http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/884158/eib99.pdf This is a good report on irrigation. Where it goes, what it comes from, it's economic costs and efficiency. It's a good jumping off point. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 18:11
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Thing is, to an extent, nature DOES know best, it's just crunchy types don't seem to put 2 and 2 together when they gush platitudes about it. Ecosystems have evolved to an equilibrium over time pretty much everywhere because that's how competition and natural selection and energy flow work. We have the knowledge and capability, in TYOOL 2015, to incorporate this fact into how we define our agricultural processes. The "eating locally" phenomenon should be generalized to "growing locally" as much as possible. The difference between "strip mine soil resources via corn and cotton" and "determine an optimal rotation based on soil series and climate" is some pretty simple and straightforward land survey methods. Easy targeting analysis is available and pretty cheap monitoring solutions are out there to help track your soil health and yield based on fertility treatments. The rest is up to the weather, but systems are sort of in place to shield farmers from that portion of their economic risk. Things like checkerboarding, eliminating tillage, rotation diversification, detritification and cover-cropping all work to reduce or actually eliminate external inputs, pretty spectacularly in some cases. A lot of the sustainable farming methods work especially well in places with long growing seasons. Cover cropping has been shown to be an amazing tool for soils that have been traditionally farmed for decades, because we've saturated these places with excess N/P/K and it's just waiting 6+" down to be brought up for crop consumption. There's an economic shift that will happen with broader adoption of conservation tillage: crop advisors won't be selling as much chemical fertilizer. We saved one (just one) of our dudes $420k last year by cutting 20 pounds/acre of nitrogen from his fertilizer rotation. The other really strong argument in favor of cover cropping and not tilling is encouraging resistance to water shocks. The soil holds water infinitely better as organic matter content increases. Get them roots in the ground, it'll act as a natural water reserve after a few seasons of growth and termination. Gunshow Poophole fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 18:51
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I don't disagree with nature knows best, it's just the crunchy types tend to be anti nature. They'll go on about food forests (Cause growing a forest in the plains is totally what nature intended.) or talk about how ancient farmers didn't screw things up. Just look at Toxic slurpy talking about modern farming trying to grow rice on mountain tops, which is what was happening in china over a century ago. Modern agriculture, with the support of the USDA and it's vast resources are what's going to get us to a better state with nature. The problem is a 60 page report on water use isn't an easy soundbite like 'Monsanto is suing farmers and wants to control what you eat'. Hell, tillage is one of those things that organic farms can be really bad about. They lack a good way of controlling weeds, so they till the soil, rather than using herbicides and performing a large burn down instead. I suppose I shouldn't rail so hard on the eating local thing, it's just that some places just aren't meant for growing much of anything, and you can do a lot of ecological damage by trying to grow things there. I also get really frustrated at the constant cries of ammonia running out. Because the planet is in short supply of hydrogen and nitrogen.  So does nature have a place in our food supply? Sure. The issue is that all of those natural practices are already being pushed by the USDA. The US, for all it's faults, and it's over subsidization of corn, has a fantastically managed agricultural support system in place, and spends a lot of money on projects to keep things improving, from replacing old tractors to insuring crops. I get prickly about defending it. Food Security is a complex problem. There's no one size solutions. Growing grasshoppers won't fix the world. Doing that one farming method you saw on Youtube won't fix the world. You could eliminate irrigation all together (Goodbye rice.) and it might even make things worse. In some areas it isn't a bad idea to irrigate, there's a giant river near by, after all. It's a complex issue, and that's what governments are for. No one likes to hear it, but it's true. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 19:06
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Like we always hear about "TAKE SHORTER SHOWERS OR YOU'LL DESTROY THE WORLD!!!!" when if literally every person in America took an hour long shower every day it wouldn't come anywhere near what agribusiness uses. Yep. I think this is a trap that environmentalists fall into pretty badly. "We can't immediately alter policy in a big way because we have to do the hard work of actually convincing the people that this is the correct course of action and that takes time, especially when fighting moneyed interests? Sigh, well, I guess we can tell people to make meaningless self-sacrifices right now to feel better about themselves." ...which is totally self-defeating, because then the people you're trying to convince see you going on about shorter showers, and don't want to take shorter showers, and climate change means I need to take shorter showers? Well, gently caress, that's probably all bullshit anyway right? I'm keeping my showers! gently caress you hippies! It's totally off-message. I think I need to add this point next to nuclear and gmos on my list of "poo poo I wish environmentalists organizations did right." edit: ugh, the climate change thread is currently going on about how you shouldn't have children because that just leads to more climate change! I can't think of a better example of this kind of thing. crazypenguin fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 19:08
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:
I mean, get prickly all you want, but sustainable practices certainly aren't being pushed hard enough. Or... I actually can't comment on the "push" but the adoption / mandate of adoption certainly isn't. DAT drat GUBMINT is also fighting an incredible institutional inertia that spans the industry: the chemical fertilizer producers, the seed distributors, the failure of the land grant university system, and the farmers themselves. Four of the five guys (the ones older than 35) I work with all related the same anecdote to me about starting our project: "When I went to plant last year and I consciously did not till my soil up, I was afraid my daddy was gonna dig himself out the grave and slap some sense into me." People have been told for a hundred years: till that poo poo, add chemicals, harvest. It isn't just a practical or economical concern, it is a moral issue, that you need to care for your land, specifically via conventional, Borlaug-era ag practices. Without some serious regulation and education put in place it will take that long (so... between 2 and 10 times the amount of time we realistically have available) even to preserve the arable soils we work right now.
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Mar 19, 2015 19:21
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Modern agriculture has a lot of problems. Deadzones in the Gulf of Mexico. Waste. Diversion of rivers to feed thirsty desert cropland. We've learned kind of a lot about agriculture and ecology in the last few thousands years. Modern science has contributed a lot to the revitalization of "low-tech" farming techniques (I don't really know a better word). There's a very sound ecological basis for practices like intercropping with witchweed instead of using pesticides. The reason to look at primitive practices is because they had some pretty ingenious elements to them. They were developed and improved iteratively over thousands of years after all. The camellones I linked to above are based on ancient Mayan techniques- Bolivia has lots of floods which will destroy crops and wash away topsoil, but the Mayans had ways of protecting the crops from floods and preserving soil quality and even using the floodwater to irrigate during dry spells. Today floods are becoming more common thanks to deforestation and climate change, so those practices are more relevant, and much much more feasible than industrial-scale solutions because they can be implemented by poor rural farmers. Point being, we can take the good things from primitive practices without making the same mistakes they did. quote:Growth isn't sustainable they cry, ignoring the fact that cities are far more efficient in terms of resource use than rural land they idealize. You say this like you can have cities without countryside. quote:edit: How about some numbers?! Everyone loves numbers. I don't want to get too bogged down in the weeds here but comparing big numbers is not a particularly instructive way to learn about water management. It ignores little things like where the water is coming from, for example. To the indigenous community who suddenly has to share their water supply with a Coke plant it's no comfort to know that there's still vast amounts of water somewhere else in the world. But the agriculture sector also uses a shitload of water and also needs to improve water management, it's not a competition.
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Mar 19, 2015 19:21
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whitey delenda est posted:I mean, get prickly all you want, but sustainable practices certainly aren't being pushed hard enough. Or... I actually can't comment on the "push" but the adoption / mandate of adoption certainly isn't. DAT drat GUBMINT is also fighting an incredible institutional inertia that spans the industry: the chemical fertilizer producers, the seed distributors, the failure of the land grant university system, and the farmers themselves. Yeah, I hear you. It's far from perfect what we have now, but keep in mind I'm talking to people who would have the USDA removed because subsidies are baaaaad and the root of all our problems. It's like libertarians in socialists clothing. If we're going to see an improvement, we're probably going to see more monetary incentives out of the government to make the changes needed. Guy DeBorgore posted:We've learned kind of a lot about agriculture and ecology in the last few thousands years. Modern science has contributed a lot to the revitalization of "low-tech" farming techniques (I don't really know a better word). There's a very sound ecological basis for practices like intercropping with witchweed instead of using pesticides. A. Modern agriculture is an evolution of ancient agriculture, and didn't just throw away everything we learned. It's a system put forth by university academics and founded on more real data than we've had in the past. B. Maybe we shouldn't be farming in areas that have erosion problems, instead of trying to get everyone to be a poor rural farmer like you want them to be. C. You can have urban areas with far less people in the countryside than we have now. We don't need that many people farming. D. Got any examples of coke plants in areas with limited water where their inclusion is leading to people going thirsty? Because if they're moving into farm land, then there's already a lot of water to go around. If they're moving into a urban area or a town, then they're bringing an actual decent sanitation system, which in places like India are sorely needed. Lastly, they're bringing jobs that are probably an improvement over poking at the ground with a stick all day to barely make enough food to feed yourself. The only reason you don't want to get bogged down in numbers is because you don't want your dogmatic beliefs challenged, because that would mean you'd have to think about the world in a manner other than 'ugg, corporation must be bad. Subsidies bad.'
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Mar 19, 2015 19:33
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:A. Modern agriculture is an evolution of ancient agriculture, and didn't just throw away everything we learned. It's a system put forth by university academics and founded on more real data than we've had in the past. Dude, nobody is arguing against modern agriculture. quote:B. Maybe we shouldn't be farming in areas that have erosion problems, instead of trying to get everyone to be a poor rural farmer like you want them to be. It's not that I want people to be poor rural farmers, it's that they are. Literal billions of them. The agro-industrial system you love to much has had decades to do its work and, guess what? It hasn't solved poverty or food security yet. What's your plan, move them all into vertical farms in the city? What do you want to do in the intervening millenia? quote:D. Got any examples of coke plants in areas with limited water where their inclusion is leading to people going thirsty? Because if they're moving into farm land, then there's already a lot of water to go around. If they're moving into a urban area or a town, then they're bringing an actual decent sanitation system, which in places like India are sorely needed. Lastly, they're bringing jobs that are probably an improvement over poking at the ground with a stick all day to barely make enough food to feed yourself. The only reason you don't want to get bogged down in numbers is because you don't want your dogmatic beliefs challenged, because that would mean you'd have to think about the world in a manner other than 'ugg, corporation must be bad. Subsidies bad.' I seriously could not care less about finding a news story about a Coke plant somewhere so we can debate that instead.
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Mar 19, 2015 19:48
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Guy DeBorgore posted:Dude, nobody is arguing against modern agriculture. Then we move them off the farm. We should focus on developing the third world, not coming up with a stupid list of best practices for subsistence farmers. My plan is to increase production in the parts of the world where it makes sense, grow grain there, and drop it out the back of c-130's for the hungry. That's how you solve food crises. Incidentally, we're pretty food secure in the developed world, so it stands to reason that making the entire world modern and developed would do a lot for food security. Since, as we've already established, there is more than enough food being made for everyone. We just need to get it to them, and it'll be a hell of a lot easier if they're living in urban areas than if they're spread across hell and back. So you brought coke up, and found your statement indefensible. Fantastic, we're making headway.
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Mar 19, 2015 19:53
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Then we move them off the farm. We should focus on developing the third world, not coming up with a stupid list of best practices for subsistence farmers. My plan is to increase production in the parts of the world where it makes sense, grow grain there, and drop it out the back of c-130's for the hungry. That's how you solve food crises. Incidentally, we're pretty food secure in the developed world, so it stands to reason that making the entire world modern and developed would do a lot for food security. Since, as we've already established, there is more than enough food being made for everyone. We just need to get it to them, and it'll be a hell of a lot easier if they're living in urban areas than if they're spread across hell and back. How do you, and I apologize if this is buried somewhere in the rest of the thread, plan to deal with the issue of lack of genetic diversity and the vulnerability this brings to pathogens?
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Mar 19, 2015 19:55
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Then we move them off the farm. We should focus on developing the third world, not coming up with a stupid list of best practices for subsistence farmers. My plan is to increase production in the parts of the world where it makes sense, grow grain there, and drop it out the back of c-130's for the hungry. That's how you solve food crises. Incidentally, we're pretty food secure in the developed world, so it stands to reason that making the entire world modern and developed would do a lot for food security. Since, as we've already established, there is more than enough food being made for everyone. We just need to get it to them, and it'll be a hell of a lot easier if they're living in urban areas than if they're spread across hell and back. One of the biggest issues is in food waste. Yeah we produce enough to feed everybody but the first world has major issues with food just being thrown out because whatever gently caress it who cares I can afford more. Work in a restaurant for a while and you'll see just how uncaring western society is to food waste. The fact that that increases food scarcity for others is met with "meh, not my problem. I'm not them."
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Mar 19, 2015 20:02
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You mean the issue of everyone in one particular region growing on particular strain of a crop? I'd probably deal with it by offering subsidies to people who want to grow a few acres of less productive seed, promoting seed banks, and so on and so forth. If we're talking about the risk of a disease causing a catastrophic crop failure in an entire region, then I'd find that it'd be hard to happen across all productive regions of the world, and happen to every single staple crop during the same year, so I'd find that the basics of keeping various strains around to be sufficient, as long as we were growing enough that a drop in one crop won't effect supply. As it stands we're already growing an abundance of calories, so it shouldn't be too hard. Needless to say, the whole pushing things out the back of c-130's is an unrealistic exaggeration, but the basic idea of grow food where it makes the most sense and reducing the human foot print via urbanization as much as possible is a good solution to the problem as long as you make headway against the distribution issues we face in the third world. I'm inclined to believe that the issues will go away as the third world develops. ToxicSlurpee posted:One of the biggest issues is in food waste. Yeah we produce enough to feed everybody but the first world has major issues with food just being thrown out because whatever gently caress it who cares I can afford more. Work in a restaurant for a while and you'll see just how uncaring western society is to food waste. The fact that that increases food scarcity for others is met with "meh, not my problem. I'm not them." I've mentioned waste before, and yes, it's a problem, but it doesn't change the fact that right now we have an issue with getting food to poor people, not with making enough food for poor people. The waste is just an example of having more capacity to feed than demand where the foods going anyways. Ideally I'd like to see all that food waste end up on pig farms, while were working on global infrastructure anyways. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 20:02
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icantfindaname posted:Subsaharan Africa and Bolivian peasants aren't the driving forces behind climate change and resource depletion though? It's developed countries. Unless you're arguing we should have everyone return to premodern living and become Bolivian peasants, stuff like nuclear power is the only way to sustain a modern way of life I do think nuclear power will be part of the solution, just not as big a part as some people on the internet seem to think. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars (trillions?) and decades of construction time to build enough nuclear power plants to shoulder a significant portion of the first world's energy burden. And what about developing countries? It's difficult to imagine the US making the switch to nuclear power in the next decade, but what about Russia? Indonesia? Mali? Even if developing countries could afford the huge upfront cost of building new plants and updating their energy infrastructure, do they have the technical and governance capacity to keep them safe and well-regulated for decades to come? If an enormous immediate investment in nuclear power plants was all it took to prevent climate change I'd be all for it, but it wouldn't even come close. For one thing we need ways to cut emissions today, not twenty years from now when our hypothetical wave of nuclear plants comes online. For another, power generation isn't the only source of emissions, or even the largest. And GHG emissions aren't the only aspect of climate change we need to be worried about. Nuclear energy, by itself, doesn't do anything for deforestation or fuel consumption or biodiversity loss or nitrification or ocean acidification. Nuclear power will not save us from having to make major lifestyle changes in the developing world, or from making major systemic changes like moving to a "zero-growth" society (scare quotes because that term can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people).
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Mar 19, 2015 20:07
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A steady state economy is a dumb idea. Sorry. It's never going to happen. You might as well focus on mitigating the environmental impact of modern society than pushing for a ridiculous pipe dream.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:09
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:You mean the issue of everyone in one particular region growing on particular strain of a crop? I'd probably deal with it by offering subsidies to people who want to grow a few acres of less productive seed, promoting seed banks, and so on and so forth. I mean the issue of the entire world growing a few strains per crop, and opening the door for a catastrophic situation where you have epidemics leaping from region to region and multiple simultaneous outbreaks. This is going to be a regular strain on the system, bluntly. Killer-of-Lawyers posted:A steady state economy is a dumb idea. Sorry. It's never going to happen. You might as well focus on mitigating the environmental impact of modern society than pushing for a ridiculous pipe dream. Lot of pessimism here.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:13
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Effectronica posted:I mean the issue of the entire world growing a few strains per crop, and opening the door for a catastrophic situation where you have epidemics leaping from region to region and multiple simultaneous outbreaks. This is going to be a regular strain on the system, bluntly. I don't think that I ever advocated the world only growing a few strains of crops. I advocated growing food where it's efficient to do so, and letting the rest of the world remain fallow. That doesn't mean everyone's growing the same thing, at all. As for steady state economies? No. Optimism. Anyone who wants the world to stop growing is pretty drat selfish and evil. We've got mouths to feed, technology to expand, and factories to build. We can decouple the modernization of the third world from our environmental impact.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:16
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:I don't think that I ever advocated the world only growing a few strains of crops. I advocated growing food where it's efficient to do so, and letting the rest of the world remain fallow. That doesn't mean everyone's growing the same thing, at all. Okay, that's part and parcel of modern agriculture though. You need a standardized strain to efficiently harvest. Reality dictates that we will eventually stop growing, but optimism would suggest that we would do it on our own terms rather than charging thermodynamics head-on and dying.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:19
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Effectronica posted:Okay, that's part and parcel of modern agriculture though. You need a standardized strain to efficiently harvest. Except we don't. Modern agriculture grows a lot of different strains. In one state alone a number of different wheat crops are grown: http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Montana/Publications/crops/variety/whtvar.pdf The idea that modern farming is done with only one strain is just crunchy type idiocy. We've got a lot of wiggle room with thermodynamics on our own planet, and a sun that will continue to pour power into the system for 5 billion more years. Reality only dictates an end to growth a far way away from where we currently are.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:22
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Except we don't. Modern agriculture grows a lot of different strains. In one state alone a number of different wheat crops are grown: How genetically diverse are these cultivars? Because there are thousands of different types of potatoes, but the ones eaten outside of the Andes come down to two genetically distinct varieties, purple potatoes and the rest. Which is why potato blight regularly devastates potato crops. We have much less wiggle room than you'd think, and focusing on becoming perfect von Neumann machines is something that would destroy most of it.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:27
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Good question. I'd have to do more research to say for certain, but they're diverse enough that hey're immune to and susceptible to different diseases. Also, rural poor farming is just as likely to breed itself into a hole, if not more so because farmers in poor countries don't have rich governments to insure their crops, subsidize them when they grow strains no one else is growing, or to do the research on diseases. If anything, a strong national entity trying to push efficient farming would be less likely to do something that'd destroy all agriculture, as it'd be headed by researchers and scientists who spend their lives studying diseases. The sort of jobs that you get when your entire population isn't poking the ground with sticks. I think you're just reading the desire to find the most efficient crop into my posts because it's what you expect rather than I ever saying anything of the sort. edit: Oh, right, you were talking about wiggle room in relation to thermodynamics, not crops. In that case, no, we've got energy reserves for centuries. We'd be more concerned with roasting ourselves with climate change before we run out of things to burn.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:33
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Good question. I'd have to do more research to say for certain, but they're diverse enough that hey're immune to and susceptible to different diseases. This second paragraph is bizarre and based on a false dichotomy.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:33
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How do you figure? How is modern agriculture any more likely to only grow one thing and suffer a catastrophic collapse as opposed to primitive farming? Blights were a thing in the past, after all. Entire nations starved from them. That hasn't happened to the developed world in a long time, even though you claim that modern practices should make it more likely to happen.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:35
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Powercrazy posted:A good example is my 'favorite' crop and darling of middle America, Corn. Corn has some of the highest subsidies and is an incredibly thirsty crop, and yet it's grown in the great plains, which are pretty arid all things considered. Why are we growing corn instead of any other crop? uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, corn grows really well when it's not irrigated, that's why we grow it on the great plains. It just happens to yield 2-3 times as much when you irrigate it. Like it's literally just a big grass plant and that's pretty much what's known for growing on the great plains, what are the crops we're not growing on the great plains that we totally should? I'm convinced half the posters in this thread haven't even seen a plant in their lives.
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Mar 19, 2015 21:15
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