COSMOS magazine has an interesting article sure to stir up trouble by suggesting that, among other things, global organic farming would necessitate clearing all remaining forests and even then a substantial portion of the earth's population would starve.
I don't know enough about this topic to speak sensibly, but I will anyway. What with the current, and it now looks like permanent, drought in Australia, the carrying capacity of the land, not only in Australia, is stressed to the max. Fisheries are declining. Amazonian and Malaysian forests are being cleared. Biodiversity is dropping rapidly (which, let it be said, does not mean extinction of species so much as the depauperation of regions). Popular calculations of the "ecological footprint" of families and industries indicates a major problem - one that dare not speak its name:
Population size.
Can we support 6+ billion people at reasonable standards of living? I suspect not. How do we get populations down to a reasonable size without famines, diseases or major wars? Buggered if I know. But populations will decline one way or the other - Malthus is not mocked. In any case, organic farming won't solve the problems.
It is also interesting in that article, and I'd love to hear from those who know the facts rather than the rhetoric either direction, that chemicals do not presently seem to cause major ecological impacts on the human populations. I think they probably do for non-domesticated ecologies, though. Chris Mooney's book The Republican War on Science documents a few cases where major corporations and farming lobbies have blocked research on the effects of some widespread chemicals, although if memory serves, they weren't used in farming so much as released from medical and other processes.
Off you go then. Have at it.
Environment
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Comments
AFAIK, the ecological footprint of a person or family is partly related to their energy use, and you could probably ditch a lot of it without really lowering standard of living. I'm thinking of air conditioning, Evian, obscenely large 4WDs, a new plasma every other year, meat grown where crops make more sense... that kind of stuff. Can we support 6 billion people with that standard of living? Probably not. Could we all get along OK with the standard of living that we can support for 6 billion people? I don't know the answer to that, but I'm tempted to try and figure it out.
Chemicals in Teh Enivrunments is a strange and tangled topic, to be sure. It's possible we're sitting on a few time bombs, human-impact wise. Longterm impacts on fisheries comes to mind. So does groundwater contamination.
Posted by: Chris | September 7, 2007 3:27 AM
Well, the organic farming movement originated with people who distrusted science generally. The sensible issue is sustainable farming, meaning food with acceptable environmental impact, including growing, transportation, consumption. "Organic" sounds nice but won't get us there. (However, I personally still buy organic stuff because today its often higher quality not as tainted by corporate excesses -- but I wish there were a stronger sustainable food movement.) The question you ask about how many people the earth could sustain obviously depends on level of consumption and efficiency of production, as well as consciousness of living with nature. Moliere summarized the issue several centuries ago in L'Avare -- "Does man eat to live or live to eat?" Of course, looking back over history, one might also ask, "Does man live to eat other men?"
Posted by: Albion Tourgee | September 7, 2007 4:23 AM
"How do we get populations down to a reasonable size without famines, diseases or major wars? Buggered if I know."
Well, that might work, given widespread implementation . . .
Posted by: Dan S. | September 7, 2007 7:25 AM
Albion makes a statement that is emphatically not valid and, as such, quite dangerous: "Well, the organic farming movement originated with people who distrusted science generally."
The statement allows one to -- here, I'll say it -- "frame" the debate as if organic is anti-science and thus that is the basis on which to proceed with the discussion. I write here only to stave off such a direction, as it would be based on a false premise.
We would need to define "organic farming," "science," and "distrust," come to agree that we all have common definitions, and then start talking about it. The history of organic farming, if I may follow Albion just this once and treat it as a stable thing, has been as a response to industrial agriculture and, in that way, has sought to base it's validity on ecological principles that are of course thoroughly scientific.
Posted by: BRC | September 7, 2007 8:16 AM
While I agree that the real solution is trying to slowly cause a major decline in the population over the coming generations, I wonder how the consumption-per-person number was calculated. Because if it's calculated with everyone consuming like Americans, it means we're eating too much and too much meat. I'm sure you could easily offset the land requirements from organic framing by a reduction in meat consumption, although it would be interesting to look at the numbers and see if I'm right.
Also, it may be something of a straw man, since it may not be practical for the entire world to use organic framing practices, but it may be better for one country, like just the United States, which has a fairly high ratio of land to people.
Posted by: jeffk | September 7, 2007 10:02 AM
According to Wikipedia, organic yields have been shown to be between 0-20% lower, and here in the U.S. we "70% of all the wheat, corn and other grain produced is fed to farmed animals". That's not the whole picture but I think it does imply that you could offset the land-use difference.
Posted by: jeffk | September 7, 2007 10:05 AM
You're kidding, right?
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2004/2004-02-27-10.asp
and this page giving links to CA Government pages relating to water quality and impact in various regions:
http://www.waterlessons.org/issues.html
actually, there's a ton of stuff out there, many government sites and study results, just google "california water quality ocean farm runoff"
It seems that the assumption in your post is that the only human impact of farming is the actual question of whether the pesticides or fertalizers impact food quality or safety. I'd say with the recent spate of recalls of vegitables (espeically in CA) we know that what we put on our food or grow our food in impacts food safety and quality. I also have to point out that this doesn't always mean organic is better than inorganic, since some of the products recalled were organically grown.
My point is that the human impact goes beyond the immediate of "when we put the product in our mouths, is the product, in itself, a better or worse product as a result of farming techniques?"
Posted by: dorid | September 7, 2007 10:15 AM
A bigger problem is how farms are organized. Smaller farms with greater diversity produce more food. Large agribusiness drive small farmers off of the land, ruin soil, and promote the over production of commodity foods.
http://www.energybulletin.net/25315.html
What, really do we have to lose? Twinkies, HFCS, cheap sweeteners, low nutrition packaged meals, pesticide and fertilizer run off, dead zones in our oceans, grain feed live stock, and obesity epidemics; all direct by products of modern industrial agriculture.
Posted by: bob | September 7, 2007 10:37 AM
A bigger problem even than the number of mouths to be fed is the way we are still spreading our agriculture across the surface of the planet. If we learn to think "vertically" rather than "horizontally," about farming methods, the sky's the limit -- and we can even return huge swaths of land to forest and savanah...
Posted by: bob koepp | September 7, 2007 11:14 AM
"organic" means different things in different jurisdictions. In Australia, it means higher animal welfare standards, among other things.
Posted by: Jason | September 7, 2007 12:18 PM
Mathematical models suggest that the maximum human population the earth can sustain is around 10 or 11 billion. As a mathematician, I will vouch for the models, but I'll leave the proof as an exercise to the reader. :-)
These models do not, however, say anything about the quality of life at or near these conditions.
The UN uses something called the Population-Affluence-Technology (or PAT) level to calculate, by country, just how many acres of earth are used by an average person in that country. For example, someone in the US uses about 4.5 acres of earth just to sustain their lifestyle. In most Western European countries the number is closer to 3.7. In particularly poor countries, that number can be less than 1.0.
In order for everyone on the planet to live as well off as an American, we would need 6.5 billion times 4.5 or approximately 30 billion acres planet. My understanding is that the earth has around 8 billion acres of "usable" area (I'm not exactly sure how oceans fit into this, since fishing etc. allows oceans to be utilized). (This number should be checked).
The short story here is Population * PAT = total earth acres ... those mathematically inclined will note that this is a dot product and probably should be written Sum (P_i * PAT_i) where the sum is over all nations. We cannot change the size of the earth, so as population goes up, some of the PAT_i (the standard of living in some country) must go down to maintain equality.
The earth's population would have to drop dramatically for everyone on the planet to live as well off as an American, or even a Western European. Alternatively, we could turn all of the moon and mars into giant farms to make current levels sustainable, but that is fairly unlikely.
In particular, the "dream" of ending poverty in Africa is just that: a dream - unless massive numbers of Americans and Europeans are willing to reduce their lifestyles dramatically.
Posted by: paul | September 7, 2007 1:33 PM
Who here has researched Amish and Mennonite farming practices?
Posted by: Alan Kellogg | September 9, 2007 12:12 AM
Just to get your blood boiling, Frank Furedi (don't know who he is, but he seems to have a soapbox) has recently written an article decrying overpopulation as a myth. I think a lot of people believe that, and think that the more the better when it comes to population. That makes fighting overpopulation an almost hopeless task. Sad to say, but I think that disaster on a scale never seen in human history is the only way that the population will get down to a sustainable level.
Posted by: Daryl McCullough | September 9, 2007 8:18 AM
You really must have a look at John Feeney's blog _Growth is Madness!_ which is about population and overconsumption. He recently posted a great essay by Herman Daly, who "was a Senior Economist in the Environment Department at the World Bank where he helped develop policy guidelines pertaining to sustainable development."
I address similar topics on my blog as well. ;-)
Posted by: Trinifar | September 10, 2007 1:38 AM
"Mathematical models suggest that the maximum human population the earth can sustain is around 10 or 11 billion."
Perhaps, IF you assume that agriculture must be a "horizontally" structured activity. Of course, if we built vertical farms...
Posted by: bob koepp | September 10, 2007 4:38 PM