Original Message: ----------------- From: Kevin B. O'Brien [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:56:38 -0400 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: culling the species
> > If not, why do you think that the present level of population is > unsustainable? In the US, at least, farms are much more productive and are > farmed in a far more sustainable manner than they were 50-100 years ago. > Indeed, my father-in-law's old farm has been gaining topsoil over the last > decade or so as a result of improvements in soil management. > >That is good, but you yourself have made very persuasive arguments with >respect to global warming that there is no feasible way to cut back on >carbon emissions per capita. What I said was that, with present technologies, we shouldn't expect China to do that. So the world warms, and the best farming zones shift north. Canada and Siberia will gain, others will lose. On the whole, higher rainfall is exspected. >With a large population, that means climate >change is pretty much unavoidable. When I look at other indicators, such >as the collapse of fisheries due to overfishing, and shortages of fresh >water pretty much every place we look, to name just a couple, it seems >to me that the common factor in all of these is a population that is >above sustainability. Fishing suffers from the tragedy of the commons. Whale's were overhunted a century ago, yet the green revolution of the '60s massively cut into world hunger. I recall when India needed massive imports of US food just to keep its people alive. Until the latest stupidity with regard to biofuels, food shortages were almost always caused by men with guns who kept food away from starving people and by real studid government policies. >For example, the so-called bread basket of the U.S. used to be called >the great desert. The Great Desert was in the SW. >What changed that was to drilling of wells to tap the >Oglala aquifer, turning places like Kansas and Nebraska into prime farm >land. My experience with farming is that corn and soybean farming relies little on irrigation. Those problems do exist, but more in the arid SW regions. If you look at places like Iowa and Illinois and Minn., 3 out of the 4 big corn producers, you see little irrigation. The environmentalists keep yelling non-sustainable, but these areas are not depleting reservoirs in order to farm. Places like OK and the TX panhandle may have problems, but that's more ranching country. >The problem is that we are essentially mining this resource in a >non-renewable manner. The water in this aquifer was collected over >millions of years, and we are using it up in decades. When it is gone, >Kansas and Nebraska will return to being desert, and what happens to >food supplies then? If you look at these rainfall maps, you will see that Kansas and Nebraska get far too much rain to be remotely consistent with being deserts. Far West Kansas is a bit dry, under 20 inches/year, but east Kansas is in the 36 to 40+ range. Eyeball averages give about 25 inches rain/year. That should be plenty for sustaining crops. Nebraska's a bit dryer, averaging about 22 inches/year. That's not a desert. http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/precip.html >If you look globally, water supplies are strained just about everywhere. Clean, safe water supplies are. But water is usually available, we just don't spend the modest amount of money to make it safe for undeveloped countries. It is possible that we will have to improve our use of water, and the cost thereof to handle farming. But, we now have or are on the edge of having design capacities for better drought resistent crops. If we don't do stupid things like divert 40% of corn production to ethanol, then food shouldn't be a problem. >This is one example of a bottleneck factor. To me it seems obvious that >the present level of population is higher than the environment can >support sustainably in the long-term. OK, let's look at an area with >2x the average population density of the world: Western Europe. Where's the environmental catastrophy there? Indeed, Europe can afford to supplement very inefficient agriculture policies (with about half of the EU's budget) and still produce enough food. Dan M. -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://link.mail2web.com/mail2web _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
