The Malthus Insight and the Global Limits of “Green Revolution” Food Production

We live in an ecosystem we did not create, cannot control and must not destroy.  The trouble is that all of our economic, political and social institutions have become organized in their “default mode” so as to promote the myth of perpetual growth and thereby destroy our chances of living sustainably within the ecosystem’s limits.

Unless we can collectively change the direction of our institutions and behavior our prospects for survival are not promising in the complex and hyper-coherent ecosystem we now inhabit.

See:

• U.N. Warns of Water Wars as 2 Billion People Lack Clean Water with Africa & Middle East Hardest Hit
• “Malthus and the Anthropocene: The Agricultural Collapse of Complex Civilizations”
• “If you do not change direction, you will most likely end up where you are headed.”
• The Fatal Consequences of a Misplaced Metaphor: Agriculture Industry and Infinite Growth
• Killing the Soil that Feeds Us: Food, Profit & the Fatal Impact of Petro-Dependent Agriculture
• The mistake of petro-intensive agriculture – the UNA “Global Engagement Summit”
• Sustainable Water Management (SWM) Program – Tufts University

and

• Dr. Albert Bartlett The Exponential Function 
• ClimateMatters – Population 
• As World Population Tops 8 Billion, Africa’s Most Populated City Keeps Growing
• Types of Population Pyramids
• Global population hits 8 billion people prompting overcrowding concerns

as well as:

• Setting the Record Straight: The Depth, Severity and History of the Scientific Evidence….:
• The Greenhouse Gas No One’s Talking About: Nitrous Oxide on Farms, Explained | Civil Eats
• BBC World Service – The Climate Question, Can we feed the world without using chemical fertilisers?
  and
• “The “Green Revolution:” Its Essence, Achievements & Aftermath”

A viable alternative strategy is that known increasingly as Regenerative or Restorative Agriculture — as opposed to “Degenerative” (“conventional”) Agriculture, based on fossil fuel dependence.  See, for example:

• Training Program Pathways | Soil Food Web School
• and the broadly based international “Soil Not Oil” movement with scientists, visionaries and climate/soil activists including
  • Thomas Goreau
  • Elaine Ingham
  • Vandana Shiva
    and
  • David Montgomery
    …etc.

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“Just take the case of agriculture….”

“Just take the case of agriculture…”

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(See related work by Tim Weiskel).

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