Earth is in the midst of its worst mass extinction since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago — and this time, we’re the asteroid. Humans are displacing the planet’s other species at an unprecedented rate, a catastrophe targeted by the historic UN biodiversity conference known as COP15 this week in Montreal. We are a unique threat, but at least we have a unique ability to recognize it and do something about it.
Of course, the first step toward recovery is admitting your problem, and the conference’s draft plan pre-warns that a million species face extinction if we don’t clean up our act. But while Montreal delegates are pointing fingers at everything from plastics to pesticides to invasive species, biodiversity loss isn’t much of a complicated mystery.
The fundamental problem is that we have converted half of the Earth’s habitable land into farmland. We destroy and degrade the habitats of other species to grow food for our own.
This means that the fate of the world’s insects, bunnies and other creatures and critters – and what’s left of the forests, wetlands and other habitats they call home – depends more than anything on what we put in our mouths and how it is made. Unfortunately, telling people what to eat and farm how to farm are politically unpalatable tasks, which helps explain why yakfests like COP15 tend to gloss over the word salad problem.
Environmentalists hope to leave Montreal with commitments from governments to conserve 30 percent of the Earth by 2030 and meet 21 other goals. But governments have already failed to meet the less ambitious conservation targets for 2010 and 2020. There’s also buzz about capturing corporate commitments to greener supply chains, but COP15 mostly dances around the core of the biodiversity crisis.
The crux is that if current food and farming trends continue, the world will clear land equivalent to at least one and a quarter of India by 2050. and Congo rainforests.
So those food and farming trends had better not continue. Humanity needs to start shrinking our agricultural footprint and increasing our natural footprint, after thousands of years of the reverse.
This is going to be an extraordinary challenge, as we also need to produce more than 7.4 quadrillion extra calories each year to feed our growing population, at a time when climate-related droughts, heat waves, floods and mildew can make it more difficult to grow food.
You can understand why word salad can seem tastier.
You can also see why promises to conserve land or promote deforestation-free products can sound hollow. Governments can promise to ban land clearing, but if their people go hungry, the land will be cleared. Some companies can make agreements to avoid soy or beef from newly deforested land, but it won’t help much if other companies continue to buy soy or beef from newly deforested land.
If we’re serious about cleaning up the mess we’re making for less influential species, there are four things that individuals as well as nations and corporations can do.
The first is to eat less meat, which would be a lot easier if meat wasn’t so loved and delicious. Restricting access to cheeseburgers can turn politicians into ex-politicians, so it’s no coincidence that the Montreal draft only casually mentions changing diets in the 16th goal. But the inconvenient truth is that if we’re eating cows, chickens, and other livestock, we might as well be eating macaws, jaguars, and other endangered species.
That’s because cattle consume much more land per calorie than crops. Producing beef is 100 times more land intensive than growing potatoes and 55 times more land intensive than growing peas or nuts. Livestock now uses nearly 80 percent of agricultural land while producing less than 20 percent of calories. Livestock is the main driver of deforestation in the Amazon, followed by soybeans, another product fed to pigs and chickens.
Meat consumption is expected to increase dramatically as billions of the world’s poor escape poverty. If Americans continue to eat an average of three burgers a week as the developing world begins to follow our path, it’s hard to understand how the Amazon survives.
But it is at least possible that we can reduce our agricultural footprint by shifting our diet to meats made without livestock, such as the plant-based substitutes offered by companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat or perhaps one day cultured meat that is cultured from animal cells.
The next thing we need to do is waste less food. About a third of the food grown on Earth is lost or thrown away before it reaches our mouths, meaning that a third of the land (as well as the water, fertilizer and other resources) used to grow that food, is also wasted. But the Montreal text contains only a single mention of the need to “cut global food waste per capita in half,” with no suggestions as to what technological, behavioral and policy changes might help achieve such an ambitious goal.
Every acre of land on Earth matters as we urgently need to grow more food, provide habitats for more native wildlife, and store more carbon to mitigate climate change. And that’s why it’s particularly crazy to use Earth’s limited land to grow fuel. The third way to ease global land scarcity would be to stop using productive farmland for biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel — and to stop burning trees for energy — but Montreal’s plan isn’t going to agree on the subject.
In fact, there is global momentum to extend bioenergy’s reign over the country. A new paper in the journal Nature estimates that new European Union policies could wipe out half of the continent’s most biodiverse grasslands and divert one-fifth of arable land to energy crops, leading to land clearing abroad to boost the economy. replace lost food. The EU is also promoting wood-fired power stations, a recipe for massive forest clearing around the world.
Agricultural and forestry interests have so much political power that government efforts to increase demand for crops and timber are often seen as unassailable. But if biodiversity is a real priority, they can’t be.
Finally, if we are to reduce our agricultural footprint enough to halt deforestation and hopefully restore some degraded ecosystems so that they can once again serve as wildlife habitats and carbon sinks, farmers will need to increase their yields enough to produce many more make food out of much less land. And while the 20th century’s Green Revolution boosted yields by using fossil fuel-derived fertilizers, toxic pesticides and other environmentally damaging innovations, the 21st century will require some greener innovations that can increase productivity without screwing up the planet .
Again, this doesn’t seem like a priority in Montreal. Much more attention has been paid to regenerative agriculture, agroforestry and other softer, lower yield alternatives to intensive industrial farming that can improve farmland biodiversity. The problem is that they may need more farmland to produce the same amount of food, accelerating the destruction of the natural soils that support much more biodiversity than ever possible – and sucking much more heat-trapping carbon from our overburdened atmosphere.
The Earth now has more than 12 billion hectares of farmland, an area twice the size of North America. Adding more is the surest way to wipe out more species – and maybe one day our own.
Michael Grunwald, host of the “Climavores” podcast, is working on a book on how to feed the world without frying.
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