Great encapsulation, clear and concise. It could use a third part--what to do about it. I realize that's not a simple matter, but parts one and two kind of lead in that direction. And given your particular expertise, it would be interesting to hear your take.
It’s coming! Next we have to show where the land sharers are right and wrong. It’s shaping up to be at least a 7-part series, and I could expound a lot more but trying to keep it bite-size as much as possible
I'm late to these but really enjoying working through the series. I'm wondering if you've followed any of the new research that questions the Maya "collapse" narrative? At least some folks who study that part of the world argue that we can avoid the self-destructive path through the shifting cultivation historically practiced there (clearing forests, moving to new fields, and allowing forests to regenerate...)
In theory it would work but it can take decades for land to recover--and that's going to go in a temporary state of conservation while it does that. Imagine taking 20% of all ag land now and just shutting it down for 50 years and saying "when this other 20 gets bad we're going to come back and cultivate this"--might allow for soil to recover, but biodiversity would still suffer pretty significantly.
But beyond that theory, the patchwork of ownership kind of prevents it unless every farmer is going to follow that pattern, and how would you enforce / incentivize that?
Yeah, I don't mean to suggest we should try to replicate systems those directly. For one thing, I suspect the lower populations they sustained were key to being able to have so much land out of production. But wanted to ask whether there might be at least some historical examples of "non-suicidal" ag that we might be able to learn from.
Obvious, nature-positive solutions to food insecurity are overlooked and underfunded. Tech bros with their magical, carbon-sucking machines and gadgets will continue to receive the subsidies. A Thank you for this excellent history/summary--you cover a lot of ground and you break it down so well, I can send it to my non-science friends. I look forward to reading more parts.
A recent report conducted by Climate Focus states, "Despite family farmers producing a third of the world's food, only a mere 0.3% of the international climate finance has been directed to them."
Eric Jackson writes--"The seed industry has consolidated magnificently over the last 30 years. The top four firms now control over 60 percent of global seed sales, and three of them are foreign owned. By 2008, Monsanto’s (now part of the Bayer portfolio) patented genetics alone were planted on 80 percent of U.S. corn acres, 86 percent of cotton acres and 92 percent of soybean acres. Today, these percentages are even higher. As with the meat industry, this means that they get to dictate the terms of trade, set prices, hammer farmers with lawsuits and generally decide what American (and global) farmers can plant. This single industry — along with their co-owned ag chemical businesses — are mostly responsible for the biodiversity collapse across global ecosystems.
Those who want to try something new have to navigate the reality that those in power may not like it, certainly don’t want it, won’t pay you for your good work and will fight you at every chance to preserve their market power. " (This statement hits home for me as I volunteer with the Inga Foundation that implements resilient Inga tree alleys that regenerates degraded land AND provide 100% food security for farmers--but only the farmer makes money as there are no loans or debt for them so it underfunded).
"The absence of practices like agroecology from the agenda of the last UN food summit shows how deeply the private sector has consolidated power — these methods are highly promising, low-input and low-cost solutions for farmers to increase their yields while farming more sustainably. But they are mentioned only in passing. If you ever look at a situation and see something that looks like the most obvious, sensible solution and it’s not happening, ask who’s making money from it not happening,” explains Timothy Wise, senior IATP advisor. The answer here is clear: high-input agriculture makes many people extraordinarily wealthy. This power allows them to set the agenda for food systems change, at the expense of farmers, and at the expense of the environment.
Reforest and restore the ecosystem at the headwaters would greatly reduce the amount of erosion, addressing the primary cause of the problem instead of trying to ameliorate the effects of the problem
The crazy thing is that what you write has been known (and taught) for a very long time. Maybe not the specifics, but certainly the vibe. As a student of environmental engineering in the 1990s, specialising in catchment hydrology, we learned it. Soil conservation programs have been running for decades, landcare etc etc. And yet there's no real sense of it sinking in, and especially the importance of the water cycle and the role of trees in that cycle. And that's just the physical elements, there are all sorts of energetic and spiritual factors from a vegetated landscape (Simard et al) that you can't really talk about in polite company.
Somehow, it's all going to be fine as we clear thousands of hectares of forest every year, somehow believing that the failing rains are unrelated and, even so, we need the space for houses/mines/farms. As you say, it's building to a big failure - our metaphorical river is hundreds of meters above the surrounding floodplain now...
Lots of reasons why we’ve failed to address this in the past, but you read Plato talking about how the hills of Greece are now like bare bones stripped of flesh—and you see how old this problem is
Great encapsulation, clear and concise. It could use a third part--what to do about it. I realize that's not a simple matter, but parts one and two kind of lead in that direction. And given your particular expertise, it would be interesting to hear your take.
It’s coming! Next we have to show where the land sharers are right and wrong. It’s shaping up to be at least a 7-part series, and I could expound a lot more but trying to keep it bite-size as much as possible
I'm late to these but really enjoying working through the series. I'm wondering if you've followed any of the new research that questions the Maya "collapse" narrative? At least some folks who study that part of the world argue that we can avoid the self-destructive path through the shifting cultivation historically practiced there (clearing forests, moving to new fields, and allowing forests to regenerate...)
In theory it would work but it can take decades for land to recover--and that's going to go in a temporary state of conservation while it does that. Imagine taking 20% of all ag land now and just shutting it down for 50 years and saying "when this other 20 gets bad we're going to come back and cultivate this"--might allow for soil to recover, but biodiversity would still suffer pretty significantly.
But beyond that theory, the patchwork of ownership kind of prevents it unless every farmer is going to follow that pattern, and how would you enforce / incentivize that?
Yeah, I don't mean to suggest we should try to replicate systems those directly. For one thing, I suspect the lower populations they sustained were key to being able to have so much land out of production. But wanted to ask whether there might be at least some historical examples of "non-suicidal" ag that we might be able to learn from.
Amazing again!
Obvious, nature-positive solutions to food insecurity are overlooked and underfunded. Tech bros with their magical, carbon-sucking machines and gadgets will continue to receive the subsidies. A Thank you for this excellent history/summary--you cover a lot of ground and you break it down so well, I can send it to my non-science friends. I look forward to reading more parts.
A recent report conducted by Climate Focus states, "Despite family farmers producing a third of the world's food, only a mere 0.3% of the international climate finance has been directed to them."
Eric Jackson writes--"The seed industry has consolidated magnificently over the last 30 years. The top four firms now control over 60 percent of global seed sales, and three of them are foreign owned. By 2008, Monsanto’s (now part of the Bayer portfolio) patented genetics alone were planted on 80 percent of U.S. corn acres, 86 percent of cotton acres and 92 percent of soybean acres. Today, these percentages are even higher. As with the meat industry, this means that they get to dictate the terms of trade, set prices, hammer farmers with lawsuits and generally decide what American (and global) farmers can plant. This single industry — along with their co-owned ag chemical businesses — are mostly responsible for the biodiversity collapse across global ecosystems.
Those who want to try something new have to navigate the reality that those in power may not like it, certainly don’t want it, won’t pay you for your good work and will fight you at every chance to preserve their market power. " (This statement hits home for me as I volunteer with the Inga Foundation that implements resilient Inga tree alleys that regenerates degraded land AND provide 100% food security for farmers--but only the farmer makes money as there are no loans or debt for them so it underfunded).
"The absence of practices like agroecology from the agenda of the last UN food summit shows how deeply the private sector has consolidated power — these methods are highly promising, low-input and low-cost solutions for farmers to increase their yields while farming more sustainably. But they are mentioned only in passing. If you ever look at a situation and see something that looks like the most obvious, sensible solution and it’s not happening, ask who’s making money from it not happening,” explains Timothy Wise, senior IATP advisor. The answer here is clear: high-input agriculture makes many people extraordinarily wealthy. This power allows them to set the agenda for food systems change, at the expense of farmers, and at the expense of the environment.
So Neal… what would you do about the yellow river? I understand the problem , but is there a credible solution in our generation?
Reforest and restore the ecosystem at the headwaters would greatly reduce the amount of erosion, addressing the primary cause of the problem instead of trying to ameliorate the effects of the problem
Thank you Neal.
The crazy thing is that what you write has been known (and taught) for a very long time. Maybe not the specifics, but certainly the vibe. As a student of environmental engineering in the 1990s, specialising in catchment hydrology, we learned it. Soil conservation programs have been running for decades, landcare etc etc. And yet there's no real sense of it sinking in, and especially the importance of the water cycle and the role of trees in that cycle. And that's just the physical elements, there are all sorts of energetic and spiritual factors from a vegetated landscape (Simard et al) that you can't really talk about in polite company.
Somehow, it's all going to be fine as we clear thousands of hectares of forest every year, somehow believing that the failing rains are unrelated and, even so, we need the space for houses/mines/farms. As you say, it's building to a big failure - our metaphorical river is hundreds of meters above the surrounding floodplain now...
Lots of reasons why we’ve failed to address this in the past, but you read Plato talking about how the hills of Greece are now like bare bones stripped of flesh—and you see how old this problem is