Carbon in itself is not our enemy. Carbon is the basis of life itself. All living things are carbon-based beings. The problem is the imbalance we have created through our ongoing, ever-increasing industrial activity. We must reduce the excess carbon we have already released into the atmosphere, as quickly as we can.
How do we remove CO2 from the atmosphere in large quantities? One of the best ways to accomplish this would be to engineer a coordinated global transition from industrial agriculture back to ecological or organic farming. To do this, we have to reconnect people with an ecologically advanced, locally based, food system. In the US, this means accelerating the ongoing movement away from supermarkets, back to farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture projects, where people buy directly from local farms. In some respects we need to return to older ways and traditions. More of us need to start growing our own food.
As the authors of ‘Climate Change or System Change?’, a paper produced by the Local Futures Institute, directed by Helena Norbert Hodge, notes, a lot of trade today is redundant, with goods ‘sourced from thousands of miles away when an identical product is available next door’. Huge supermarket chains contract with massive industrial farms to stock their stores, ignoring local sources. Britain, for example, ‘imports and exports 15,000 tons of waffles annually, and exchanges 20 tons of bottled water with Australia’, while ‘supermarkets on the Citrus Coast of Spain carry imported lemons while local lemons rot on the ground’. To save on labour costs, companies will transport produce across the world to be processed. For instance, the US company Trident ‘ships about 30 million pounds of fish annually to China for filleting, and then ships the fish back to the US for sale’.
I admit I am one of the billions of alienated city people; I didn’t grow up near a farm and rarely visited one. As a kid, I had no connection to where my food came from. I have barely managed to grow a few house-plants, in fifty years of life.
I feel deeply unqualified, therefore, to make proposals when it comes to farming. I admit my information is based on various reports and second-hand sources. I do know how different it feels to eat food grown organically rather than commercial produce. I can sense – as everyone can – that the food system has become more compromised, and more dangerous, as the Earth’s population has swelled over the last halfcentury. Allergies, environmental sensitivities and food intolerances are a growing epidemic.
The growth of the organic sector – seen in the rising popularity of Whole Foods and farmers’ markets – is problematic. Food has become another area where the divide between ‘Haves’ and ‘Have Nots’ keeps widening. Organic food is generally much higher priced, targeting a well-heeled clientele, while ghettos and poorer suburbs remain ‘food deserts’ where the only available food is cheap and low quality. Worldwide, food is a battleground in the struggle between the developed and developing worlds. Advancing corporate globalization, the World Bank, under US control, has used subsidies and unfair trade policies that force poor countries to accept subsidized produce from industrial farms, decimating healthy local industries.
According to estimates, commercial agriculture is one of the main contributors to climate change. The food industry as a whole generates an estimated 30 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, while the agricultural sector accounts for 14 per cent of total global emissions, most of which stem from the meat production industry alone. Livestock cultivation is also responsible for deforestation, nitrogen runoff and other ills.
Much evidence suggests that, if we return to earlier ways of farming, like no-till agriculture, this will substantially reduce CO2 emissions. Traditionally, farmers will plough, disc or harrow land to form a seedbed for rows of crops, then use a mechanical cultivator to cull weeds. Turning the soil over and over in this way releases carbon dioxide. With no-till agriculture, farmers plant seeds into undisturbed soil. This kind of farming minimizes soil erosion and energy use while retaining water and carbon.
According to a 30-year study by the Rodale Institute, ‘Organic farming is far superior to conventional systems when it comes to building, maintaining and replenishing the health of the soil.’ The study estimates that conventional agriculture produces 40 per cent more greenhouse gases than its organic equivalent. One 2007 study, commissioned by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, concluded that organic agriculture had the potential to sequester 11 per cent of the emissions for that year if put into practice globally.
If it is true that organic, ecological and no-till farming, where appropriate, can be more productive than industrial farming, requiring less artificial fertilizer and polluting pesticides, while sequestering carbon and having benefits for human health, then society should make a systemic return to these practices. Returning to older, more human-scaled systems will require a great deal of retraining, but it can be done. We have the tool we need for it – a planetary nervous system, in the Internet, that allows for immediate transmission of new ideas and traditional techniques. As a basic principle of the new planetary culture, we will reconnect people to their local ecosystems. We will support them to become gardeners, stewards of the commons (our land and watersheds), caring for biodiversity and for one another.
There is no doubt that we need a steep reduction of meat consumption to reduce CO2 pollution. Humans kill, process and consume 100 billion creatures per year. Animal farming on this scale depends upon a vast global infrastructure of factory farms and soybean plantations. The amount of grain grown for animal feed is one of the largest contributors to the deforestation that erodes biodiversity and accelerates climate change. Consumption of meat is highly inefficient in terms of energy and water use. It requires an estimated 28 calories of energy to produce one calorie of meat. The meat-based diet of the average person in the United States requires an estimated 4,200 gallons of water per day, compared to 300 gallons a day for a vegan diet. Thirty per cent of the Earth’s land surface is used for animal grazing. A great proportion of this land should be converted back into carbon-sequestering forests and wetlands.
A 2006 report prepared by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization found that our meat-based diets are responsible for emissions of more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than either transportation or industry. According to estimates, the meat produced in factory farms around the world contributes between 14 and 22 per cent of the 36 billion tons of CO2, or its equivalent, that is emitted every year by our industrial and agricultural systems.
According to the Worldwatch Institute, ‘Serious action on climate change will almost certainly require reductions in the global consumption of meat and dairy by today’s major consumers in industrial countries, as well as slowing the growth of demand in developing countries.’ One way to bring about this reduction, they propose, is to put ‘a price on livestock-related greenhouse gases, so that producers treat them as a business cost and thus have a direct incentive to reduce them’. Beyond enforcement through financial or legal means, an engineered shift in mass consciousness will be necessary to reduce or temporarily eliminate meat consumption.
Would it really be so bad if humanity put a moratorium on the consumption of meat as well as wild fish for a period of time, in order to allow the Earth to replenish and restore itself? A ‘global meat fast’ would be one of the fastest ways for us to make a significant dent in emissions, quickly.
While I know that some of you reading this are already vegetarian, I also know that many of you have contemplated it, perhaps attempted it, and decided it ‘wasn’t worth it’. Personally, I have been largely vegetarian for the last years, although I admit I fall off the wagon at times, depending on who I am dining with as well as other factors, including laziness and boredom. In many areas, I find myself a helpful test case, because I am typically slothful, slow to change, and not particularly good at maintaining habits. In all this, I am probably representative of many well-intentioned people.
My friends Sharon Gannon and David Life are ardent and exemplary vegans for moral reasons. For Sharon, animals are actually ‘people’ who deserve all the same rights as us. She has even written a book on how to prepare vegetarian pet food. I admit that I can’t feel as passionate about this as she does. I tend to think that humans were designed to be omnivores; hunting beasts in the wild was a basic and essential part of life for a very long time. In the end, everything lives, eats and dies, and gets recycled by nature.
Having said that, however, I do find factory farming to be morally reprehensible. Like many of us, I consider the conditions so many animals face to be horrible. They are sentient beings that suffer misery and torture, a hellish existence.
Traditional people felt a deep relatedness to animals and all of nature. As Jack Forbes writes of Native American culture, in Columbus and the Cannibals:
When a plant, tree or animal is to be killed, first, the need must be great; second, permission is asked for, if time allows; third, the creature is thanked; and, fourth, dances, prayers and ceremonies are used to further thank the creatures so killed and to help those that are alive to grow and prosper.
Indigenous people ask for permission to take an animal’s life, and express gratitude for its sacrifice. Our meat comes from mass, mindless slaughter. I admit I also find something off-putting about our potential for creating bio-engineered vat-grown meat, although I can see why people would consider it an ethical advance over this endless global genocide.
We can all agree that animal farming is a multi-dimensional ecological nightmare. It causes deforestation, nitrogen runoff, CO2 pollution and the overuse of antibiotics and so on. It is mass torture and degradation. If we have a spiritual viewpoint, we may believe this mass suffering has karmic repercussions – not only for those directly involved with it, and those who consume its products, but also for our society as a whole. Considering all the factors, a global transition towards a primarily vegetarian diet seems the only answer for humanity. If we want to be stewards and midwives of the global transition, then we should lead the way by making this shift, personally.
Beyond any personal commitments, we need a broad-based social movement promoting vegetarianism and veganism. A global campaign, using cutting-edge techniques of advertising and marketing, could educate people, asking them to give up meat for our children’s future. Can we imagine the world’s advertising, marketing and branding agencies joining forces for this project? I don’t see why not: our future depends on it. We then must consider how such a project could be funded and supported.
Even in the best scenario we can envision, humanity is going to be dealing with a drastically destabilized climate over the next century. This will cause more floods, super-storms, droughts and so on. Growing food locally, using organic methods, is one of the best ways to make our society more resilient, helping to insulate communities from possible disaster in case supply chains get disrupted. It will also reduce transport, plastic packaging and CO2 pollution.
In agriculture, as in many areas, the best solutions can be implemented fast if we make use of mass media and social networks to spread good ideas globally. This is already happening on a small scale. People learn how to sprout, pickle or can vegetables from YouTube videos or online courses. Progressive organizations like Bioneers – which has an annual conference in the Bay Area – have been promoting best practices for decades. Permaculture and gardening techniques can be taught through the Internet and even on mainstream TV shows, telling people what’s happening while giving them the tools to help the world as well as themselves.
Sustainable technologies could be deployed on a global scale to accelerate soil regeneration and carbon sequestration. One of these technologies is biochar, which scientists learned about when they studied the ecological practices of tribal people in the Amazon jungle. Natives would burn organic waste slowly, in an oxygen-weak environment, and then use the residue to replenish local soil, adding carbon back to the Earth. Biochar is the industrialized version of this ancient practice. According to Mark Hertsgaard, ‘If Biochar were added to 10 percent of global cropland . . . it would store 20 billion tons of CO2 equivalent’ – that is more than 50 per cent of humanity’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t know why we are not doing this already.
To break through current obstacles to changes in farming, a movement of civil society must build global alliances. The progressive and environmental community must partner with global institutions – for example, with the Catholic Church. Considering Pope Francis’s environmental outlook in his encyclical, Care for the Earth, there should be a way to follow through on his principles and use the global network of Catholic churches as a ready-made social infrastructure for the transformation of farming. The community of the faithful could be trained in ecologically restorative and permaculture techniques, rooted in local conditions. Tangible ways to ‘Care for the Earth’ could be taught after the Sunday sermon, and in Catholic schools.
Over the last century, farm work became devalued as rural populations were forced to relocate to urban areas and find jobs in industrial manufacturing or the growing service sector. Where most people in the US were farmers a century ago, now only a small fraction of people work on farms. A great deal of our food is produced through industrialized agriculture, by big companies. We need to restore social prestige to farming and gardening and support people in growing on urban rooftops and in suburban yards at least some of the food they eat.
Designing agricultural systems that are decentralized and specialized would help to maintain and enhance the ecological and genetic diversity that is essential to the health of an ecosystem. Current megafarms could, in theory, be divided into smaller, specially designed ecological, permaculture and agroforestry projects built around the contours, water availability and environmental quality of their sites. Smaller farms could be integrated into larger cooperatives, where social support, hardware and labour could be shared by the farmers.
Cuba’s forced transition, in the 1990s, to a regenerative agricultural system in the face of crisis offers an encouraging model. After 1989, the country was forced to produce its own food due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which cut off Cuba’s main subsidies and supplies. Under great pressure to innovate, the Cubans developed a local food system that incorporated urban gardening and made it mandatory for most of the population to grow some of their own produce. Inadvertently, they created a model for self-sufficiency that could be replicated, particularly in the global South.
Hopefully, we will see a growing movement away from industrial agriculture and the destructive aspects of the ‘Green Revolution’ towards ecological practices that will democratize food production and make organic food the normal standard again, eventually. Many different techniques can be applied, depending on particular circumstances.
These include permaculture, agroforestry, poly-cropping and so on. There are many ways we can assist nature in regenerating damaged and despoiled lands. The mycologist Paul Stamets uses mushrooms – fungus – to leach toxins out of the soil. Allan Savory’s method of cattle grazing reverses desertification on grasslands. Many other techniques of bioremediation can be applied, depending on circumstances.
Permaculture was developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the late 1970s. The name stands for ‘permanent agriculture’ or ‘permanent culture’ – I have to admit, I’m not crazy about the term because nothing in nature is permanent. The term ‘permaculture’ has a built-in ideological bias, suggesting a kind of hippie Fundamentalism. However, as a design science applied to agriculture, permaculture offers many crucial ideas and insights.
One central principle of permaculture is to observe the land before interacting with it. Studying the local ecology and water sources, permaculturists seek to understand what kind of development meshes with a site’s innate contours and requirements, rather than making it conform to an abstract model. Instead of immediate profit, the objective is longterm resilience. A permaculture designer will ideally observe an area of land for a year before making any interventions or changes to it.
Permaculture is based on a number of beautiful and sensible principles. These include: ‘Observe and interact’; ‘use and value diversity’; ‘creatively use and respond to change’; and ‘use edges and value the marginal’. Implementing permaculture requires a long-range investment of attention, effort and care, along with significant training. Permaculture advocates say that, given time, they can produce a much greater yield of food – several times as much – than commercial farms, while building topsoil; they can accomplish all this without using chemical poisons. Once again, it is important to realize that this approach – which seeks to build enduring reciprocity between human beings and their environment – requires a good deal of education, patience and careful attention. Even so, it is entirely feasible for our society to shift its focus in this direction; our future survival depends on supporting and enabling people to replenish the health of the Earth’s ecosystems.
Some version of agroforestry has been practised by traditional societies for thousands of years. These cultures grow crops in a manner that mimics the interacting layers of a diverse, healthy forest. Examples can still be seen in the Western Ghats of rural India, on small-scale farms in Indonesia, and throughout the tropics. While agroforestry does not sequester as much carbon as old-growth forests, it helps to preserve forests by creating a buffer around them. Like permaculture, agroforestry is based on deep local knowledge and artisanal attention, rather than chemicals or machines.
Some developing countries with scarce resources are already being forced to adapt to climate change. They are innovating and creating new models. Mark Hertsgaard visited one of these farming communities in the western Sahel of Africa. The Sahel is a strip of savanna south of the Sahara desert which ‘stretches like a belt across the width of the African landmass’, marked by relentless heat. Hertsgaard learned that farmers in the region had begun to adapt their practices to deal with climate change. He was amazed by what he discovered:
Using simple techniques that cost them nothing, millions of small farmers throughout the region have begun protecting themselves against the scorching heat and withering drought of climate change. Their methods amount to a poor man’s version of organic farming: fortifying soil with manure rather than chemical fertilizer, growing different crops on the same piece of land (known as intercropping), relying on natural predators to counter pests rather than applying pesticides. In the process, farmers in the western Sahel have rehabilitated millions of acres of degraded savanna that was on the verge of becoming desert, thus increasing the amount of land available to grow food.
The success of this enterprise depends on the straightforward solution of planting and growing more trees in the fields. The practice of mixing trees and crops is called farmer-managed natural regeneration. ‘The trees’ shade and bulk offer crops relief from the overwhelming heat and gusting winds . . . Leaves serve other purposes. After they fall to the ground, they act as mulch, boosting soil fertility; they also provide fodder for livestock in a season when little other food is available.’ In emergency famine conditions, people can also eat the leaves to stave off starvation.
Due to tree-planting initiatives in the region, water reserves have increased locally, to the surprise of scientists. According to one agriculture scientist, with the propagation of these simple techniques since the late 1980s, ‘water tables in many villages have risen by at least five meters, despite a growing population’. If this is possible in the extreme conditions of sub-Saharan Africa, similar initiatives might have tremendous benefits in other water-scarce regions, such as, for example, California.
These are low-tech methods that could help us greatly, but there are also high-tech methods that could be crucial. For instance, let’s consider vertical farms. Inventor Dickson Despommier has developed the concept of vertical farms for cities. He envisions the construction of 30-storey towers able to feed 50,000 people, in climate-controlled, pest-free environments requiring minimal use of water. One acre of a vertical farm could yield as much produce as 10 or 20 acres of land, he believes, through optimizing conditions and careful monitoring. Benefits of vertical farming would include year-round crop production, elimination of agricultural runoff from fertilizers, promotion of urban sustainability, and returning farmland to nature. Why don’t we try this?
We can also reduce food waste significantly. According to Anna Lappe, of the Small Planet Institute, we waste as much as 30 per cent of all food that we process, because the current system is inefficient. When food waste is not composted, it releases methane as it decays. ‘We know how to grow food in ways that cut emissions, create more resilient landscapes and ensure ample yields, all while reducing the use of non-renewable resources, fossil fuels, and land,’ Lappe writes.
To make a systemic transition in farming practices worldwide, we would have to search out the most successful local initiatives, isolate the principles and techniques that make them work, then turn them into design templates that other localities can use and duplicate, in ways appropriate for their particular conditions. The Internet project Open Source Ecology provides one example. The project is ‘developing a set of open source blueprints for the Global Village Construction Set – a set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist – everything from a tractor, to an oven, to a circuit maker’. Conceived by Marcin Jakubowski, a fusion physicist turned farmer, Open Source Ecology offers detailed blueprints and plans for building farm machinery such as tractors and mechanical ploughs. The designs of these machines are available, copyright free, to anybody who wants to build their own versions in their workshop.
I love projects like this one, where knowledge and expertise is freely shared. Another one is Windowfarm. Windowfarm’s website defines it as ‘An Open Source Community Developing Hydroponic Edible Gardens for Urban Windows’. Windowfarm builds systems for growing plants and vegetables out of plastic water bottles and other household objects. They share the blueprints for their systems on the website, so that other people can copy and improve on their designs.
Another model that can be copied is the ‘polyface’ agriculture system, designed by Virginia farmer Joel Salatin. Salatin developed ‘a symbiotic, multi-speciated synergistic relationship-dense production model that yields far more per acre than industrial models’, while ‘being aromatically and aesthetically romantic’. According to Salatin, ‘We haven’t bought a bag of chemical fertilizer in half a century, never planted a seed, own no plow or disk or silo – we call those bankruptcy tubes.’ Salatin’s farm proves it is possible to develop closed-loop farming methods that are innately regenerative and resilient. Such methods could become widely distributed.
Even though we must reduce our consumption of animals globally, there are ways that farms benefit from integrating livestock, on a small scale. This includes making use of animal waste. Manure can be transformed into compost, on-site. Methane can be harvested from cow manure and turned into electricity, fuel and heat. Compost from manure can also be spread on grazing land to sequester carbon and enhance soil fertility. According to the Marin Carbon Project (2013), adding a half-inch-thick layer of compost to half of the current cattlegrazing land in California would mitigate an amount of carbon equal to the region’s entire emissions of greenhouse gases.
And then there is the genetic engineering (GE) in agriculture debate. The manipulation of the DNA of crops and other organisms to enhance their utility for human purposes remains a highly controversial, polarizing subject. While the United States leads the world in pushing for mass adaptation of GE crops, more than sixty countries, including those of the European Union, continue to prohibit or severely restrict the production and sale of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
According to its proponents, which include neo-environmentalists and technocrats like Bill Gates, GE is necessary to feed the world’s growing population. Genetic manipulation, they argue, can accomplish a number of crucial goals. By integrating insect-resilient and pesticideresistant genes with plant DNA, it can reduce use of pesticides. Plants can also be engineered to be resistant to drought. Fertilizer is used to supply nitrogen to the soil, a nutrient that plants need to grow but one that is scarce in nature. Only a few beans and legumes create their own nitrogen – ‘fixing’ nitrogen in the soil. Potentially, through GE, many other crops may be able to produce nitrogen. Nitrogen runoff is also a major ecological problem, one of the nine planetary boundaries defined by the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
One major problem with GE, under the current system, is that its commercial development and application is controlled by a few forprofit corporations, who gain by increasing the sales of chemicals and ‘terminator seeds’ (seeds that must be bought anew each season, because they don’t germinate), making farmers dependent on biotechnology. These companies also profit by being able to copyright genetic material and gain monopoly control over seed stocks.
At the same time, biotechnology and synthetic biology – the ability to create entirely new organisms – has become a technology available even to hobbyists and garage start-ups. The global community of biotechnology entrepreneurs recently launched a Kickstarter campaign ‘to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric street lamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read by’, noted the New York Times. GE seems to be a genie that has got out of the bottle. When I consider the unforeseen consequences of previous technological advances, I find this truly frightening.
There are many unknowns involved in transgenic crops. They may degrade biodiversity. They may have other negative impacts on human and ecosystem health, over generations. We simply don’t know.
Paul Kingsnorth, founder of the Dark Ecology movement in the UK, believes our dependence on increasingly advanced technologies has created what he calls a progress trap: ‘Each improvement in our knowledge or in our technology will create new problems, which require new improvements. Each of these improvements tends to make society bigger, more complex, less human-scale, more destructive of nonhuman life, and more likely to collapse under its own weight.’ More troubling than the foreseeable problems are the unforeseeable ones.
We have already seen examples of this with GMOs. Some GE crops produce higher yields at first, but this leads the insect population to mutate as well, and within less than a decade, those gains can be eliminated or even reversed. This is similar to what the medical field has experienced with antibiotics, which are becoming less and less effective over time. If we keep trying to wage an arms race against nature, we will lose, because nature has been at this for billions of years longer than us.
We currently have an irrational system driven by market imperatives. The world overproduces food but wastes a great deal of it, while some countries face malnutrition and famine. It would be far more sensible to address the inefficiencies of the current system, which causes so much unnecessary suffering, before we seek to engineer new life forms which may degrade ecosystems – and have negative consequences that we can’t even foresee – generations into the future.
GE may be contributing to the increase of allergies, food intolerances and drug resistances, which seem epidemic. Is there a correlation between these syndromes, as well as proliferating cancers and other maladies, with GMOs, as well as herbicides such as glyphosate that saturate genetically engineered plants? It may be so – but it might take decades, or more, to establish a scientific consensus. Millions of people may suffer and die in the interim, as we continue to degrade the health of our ecosystems. It took decades to link cancer to tobacco use. During that time, millions of people died from lung cancer and emphysema. The same difficulty makes it impossible to link any particular ‘superstorm’ or natural disaster to CO2 emissions and climate destabilization. Our scientific method is failing us here.
To consider one of many examples of how GE could negatively impact on natural systems, geneticists are now developing new strains of a tobacco plant that are able to photosynthesize with much greater efficiency than normal varieties. Plants capable of ‘turbocharged photosynthesis’ would have a tremendous advantage over other plant species. They could proliferate in the wild, wiping out native species.
We are falling prey to the blind hubris of scientists and profit-seeking corporations.
In its fixation on linear growth, our industrial techno-culture – the technological society – makes the mistake of separating the world into separate, atomized parts, rather than seeking to understand, and enhance, the hidden connections between them. By altering the basic material of life, biotechnology has the potential to damage the complex ecosystems upon which we rely. Ecosystems developed over millions of years. Profit-seeking corporations think in terms of decades at the most.
On the other hand, we are facing a global ecological emergency, and if temperatures rise quickly, we may need rapid innovations in agriculture. If geneticists could engineer new heat- and droughtresistant crops, as well as vegetables able to store nitrogen in their roots (something that only a handful of legumes and beans do naturally), we might need these breakthroughs, as climate change intensifies.
Ideally, civil society as a whole should take control of genetic research out of the hands of publicly traded corporations. This research should be conducted transparently, as a public trust, based on an ongoing exchange. This would require a systemic change in the relationship of public policy and science. A people’s movement is needed to take the initiative to learn about subjects impacting on all of our lives that we have mistakenly left to the ‘experts’.
Biologists now recognize that life is characterized, at all levels, by web-like networks of organization. An organism cannot exist in a vacuum, but depends upon its environment. Any living being is, essentially, the organism plus the environment which sustains it. Stewart Brand is promoting the idea of ‘deextinction’, taking the genetic material from long-dead species like the woolly mammoth – as well as the millions of species we are currently driving out of existence – and using it to recreate these organisms in the laboratory. But, unless we also rebuild the ecosystems that mesh with these organisms, this seems little more than an eerie museum exercise. The better plan is to focus on conserving the species we have now.
Just as we must build a decentralized system for producing energy from renewable sources that will make local communities more selfsufficient and less wasteful, we should establish a new global model for agriculture which is locally based, distributed, cooperative, and healthier for people and the planet.
While farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture programmes take root and flourish, urban gardens could, theoretically, be established in every city, using vacant lots, suitable rooftops, parks and greenways. I have interviewed experts who believe that 80 per cent of the food needed by New York City could be grown on the rooftops using aquaponic methods.
Multinational corporations like Monsanto, as well as ‘philanthrocapitalist’ organizations like the Gates Foundation, promote the rapid scaling up of the Green Revolution. They believe the answer to feeding the world’s still-growing global populace is to amp up industrial agriculture while we double down our bets on still-experimental technologies like GE. What we can do, instead, is make an intentional shift to local, ecological farming, using organic, no-till and permaculture techniques, as appropriate. A drastic curtailing of meat eating will reduce emissions, and return grazing lands to forests. A global campaign could educate and inspire people to change their behaviour for future generations.
We can change our approach to agriculture by subsidizing farmers to embrace methods such as permaculture; we can retrain the public to become part-time gardeners, to see themselves as stewards of their local bioregions. While it may sound difficult to bring about an evolution of cultural values, as well as a paradigm shift in how society operates, the result would be incredibly beneficial for humanity, on all levels.