Clean fuel from Carbon Engineering, Calgary is ready for sale at the pump. Any blocks you might think of which would prevent that becoming ubiquitous throughout at least the US, are being negotiated at this time.

The current world food system is haemorrhaging soil, water, nutrients, people and wildlife and has already lost the climate in which it arose. It is not sustainable and will certainly not feed 10 billion people in the hot, stressed world of the mid-century. The result will be war – unless there is a profound rethink of how we produce food.

In ‘Food or War’ (Cambridge University Press, 2019) I describe a new global food system that:
– feeds everybody adequately, safely and healthily in all continents
– is largely climate proof
– uses half the present land area, allowing rewilding (by farmers) of 25m sq kms of the Earth’s surface, to end the 6th Extinction
– dramatically reduces the likelihood of conflict and war
– recycles most of the water and nutrients used to produce it, and is therefore sustainable
– minimises its use of poisons, carbon emissions and other negative impacts.

The transition from our present unsustainable system to the one described is the most important single revolution in human history. Since food is indispensable to all life, it is far more important even than the global clean energy revolution.

I will describe this system in a future MAHB Dialogue. Those interested will find more detail at https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/food-or-war/2D6F728A71C0BFEA0CEC85897066DCAF

Julian Cribb
Canberra, Australia
July 15, 2019

Dear Julian Cribb,

We possess unfalsified scientific research (Hopfenberg and Pimentel 2001; Hopfenberg 2003) that indicates with remarkable simplicity and clarity that humans need to begin immediately to limit increases only in production of the total food supply for human consumption. Increasing food production to meet the needs of a growing is causing the human population explosion. Annual increases in the amount of food must be thoughtfully and systematically limited as the available food supply is redistributed. That every one receives adequate subsistence is the goal.

Somehow I hope we can find a way to discuss openly what looks to me like “the last of the last taboos” regarding the human population. My abiding concern grows out of the realization that some humans could emerge out of “the bottleneck” which E.O. Wilson forecasts in the Future of Life, only to begin once again doing the very same things we are doing now, the things that have evidently precipitated the Global Predicament.

There is a choice. Our descendants could choose either to grow food to meet the needs of a growing population or limit the unrestricted annual growth of the food supply for human consumption, thereby setting in place a regime for stabilizing the growth of absolute human population numbers. If we cannot accurately discern what is causing the recent human population explosion and act accordingly, I cannot see how our descendants are to avoid the same fate — extinction — that the general biological evolutionary process appears to hold in store for all species in the web of life. Can we find and then choose to follow a path forward that makes possible a viable and foreseeable, open ended future for H. sapiens?

Most comments are the babbling of wishful thinkers.
Occasionally even the well off of the West have to accept reality.
You obviously can not both reduce fossil fuel use and feed more people. The idea that we can feed everyone if we just try is unfounded in the data, because growing, processing, storing and distributing food are all very high energy endeavors, and because food spoils.

I will propose this as the likely outcome: the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse, climate change, environmental degradation, global societal collapse and energy shortages will swiftly reduce population. The food supply lines will break, and those in cities will eat the dead, as has happened before in human history.
Instead of playing pretend, or believing that technology, the wicked step mother, will save us (after getting us in this mess), take positive action. Assume the crash position. Prepare for the worst.

My wife and I just watched a new movie called “Game Changer”. OMG! It will change the behavior of most men if they watch it (hint…it talks about improving erections). This combined with the multiple other benefits to health, fitness, job performance, combat readiness, wise economic investing, protection of endangered species, and combating global warming… it’s a movie everyone should watch.

Home

This movie is one of the best examples of how our culture has led us to believe (and our political system to legislate) false hoods based on alternative (but rational sounding) principles that are entirely inconsistent with fundamental principles (the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God).

If you chose to watch the movie the last profound point it makes is the profound waste the ‘meat makes you healthy’ myth creates. Given the part of the movie that relates a vegan diet to healthy erections I’m betting anyone who has a penis or likes a stiff one, will change their diet and make the biggest impact on reducing environmental destruction, improving the health of people, which will have the greatest impact on reducing unwanted and too often excessive births.