Food production is key to getting our economy going again, and to the survival of our culture. Climate
change directly affects our fragile fossil fuel dependent food
production system. It is not really farming, but rather it is soil and
water mining.
If we switched back to real farming - using our knowledge to significantly improve on what we had been doing for about 10,000 years before we "discovered" nitrogen fertilizer and the internal combustion engine, then here are all the deadly problems we would solve, by putting ourselves back into step with the cycle of life:
* We would stop eating oil and gas, which as you and I know are finite.
* We would let the soil come alive again -- it decomposes the stuff of life and makes it available for growing new life, building and improving the soil making it better and deeper and sequestering carbon rather than mining it, eroding it, and poisoning our waterways.
* We would cut about 25% of our greenhouse gas output from the crappy-water-soluble-nitrogen-to-nitrous-oxide-nightmare, that also includes dead rivers and dead fishing zones along the way.
* Local food production not only means far less oil burned transporting food around the world (the average food item travels 1,500 miles to your mouth!), but it also means far more nutritious, much better tasting food that makes us all much healthier -- we probably would see cancer rates go down, too!
* We would totally solve both our immigration problems and our unemployment problems at the same time. And we would make big dents into our drug problem, our prison problem, our hunger problems, and our decaying civil society would be renewing its way back to health.
Wes Jackson proposes that we move to 80% perennial agriculture within the next 50 years. We need to listen to the wisdom among us if we want to solve our major problems.
We have a sustainable abundance of renewable energy -- up to 16X more energy than the needs of the entire world. Everybody can have as much electricity as they need -- and all that economic activity supports all our local economies.
Since renewable energy is available everywhere, to any and all people -- then the need for a military largely goes away. Since living soils store water much more readily than dead soil, we stop needing to use up our fossil water supply.
We simply must do as nature does -- we must have zero waste. Waste means that we are not doing it right: no disposable plastic, no disposable people, no disposable land, no disposable species.
If we switched back to real farming - using our knowledge to significantly improve on what we had been doing for about 10,000 years before we "discovered" nitrogen fertilizer and the internal combustion engine, then here are all the deadly problems we would solve, by putting ourselves back into step with the cycle of life:
* We would stop eating oil and gas, which as you and I know are finite.
* We would let the soil come alive again -- it decomposes the stuff of life and makes it available for growing new life, building and improving the soil making it better and deeper and sequestering carbon rather than mining it, eroding it, and poisoning our waterways.
* We would cut about 25% of our greenhouse gas output from the crappy-water-soluble-nitrogen-to-nitrous-oxide-nightmare, that also includes dead rivers and dead fishing zones along the way.
* Local food production not only means far less oil burned transporting food around the world (the average food item travels 1,500 miles to your mouth!), but it also means far more nutritious, much better tasting food that makes us all much healthier -- we probably would see cancer rates go down, too!
* We would totally solve both our immigration problems and our unemployment problems at the same time. And we would make big dents into our drug problem, our prison problem, our hunger problems, and our decaying civil society would be renewing its way back to health.
Wes Jackson proposes that we move to 80% perennial agriculture within the next 50 years. We need to listen to the wisdom among us if we want to solve our major problems.
We have a sustainable abundance of renewable energy -- up to 16X more energy than the needs of the entire world. Everybody can have as much electricity as they need -- and all that economic activity supports all our local economies.
Since renewable energy is available everywhere, to any and all people -- then the need for a military largely goes away. Since living soils store water much more readily than dead soil, we stop needing to use up our fossil water supply.
We simply must do as nature does -- we must have zero waste. Waste means that we are not doing it right: no disposable plastic, no disposable people, no disposable land, no disposable species.
