Beware the green peril

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I saw this on the GICC forum and thought it should be posted here, too. Pretty depressing stuff...

http://www.nationalpost.com/tech/discovery/story.html?f=/stories/20010424/542189.html

April 24, 2001

Beware the green peril
The dark side of a successful revolution: Which one is more dangerous: global farming or global warming?

Margaret Munro
National Post

A hundred years ago there were fewer than two billion people on Earth.

Today there are more than six billion and ominous signs the planet cannot accommodate many more. Especially if the next generation -- not to mention the millions of folks subsisting or starving in Africa and Asia -- eat the way North Americans do today.

A new study, in last week's issue of the journal Science, says the environmental change and degradation generated by world agriculture rival the ill effects of global warming. In many respects, say the authors, the impacts are more tangible and worrying.

Vast tracks of forests and natural grasslands have been felled to make way for crops. Drinking water is being fouled from Ontario to Nairobi by agricultural runoff. Fertilizers and manure washing into coastal waters are creating "dead" zones such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico. Pesticides have wafted to the top of Canadian Rockies and worked their way into mothers' milk.

Such trends and effects are undeniable, according to the study, which stresses the need for a concerted, international effort to curb the damage.

Left unchecked, it warns of "massive, irreversible environmental impacts" by 2050.

"We're to the point now where, whether we want to or not, we control the fate of the world's ecosystems," says the lead author, David Tilman of the University of Minnesota. "And we have to act accordingly."

Of the 12 billion hectares of land on the planet, five billion have been cleared and ploughed for use in agriculture, a transformation that scientists warn is having profound impacts on everything from the quality of water to the chemistry of the air.

"It is a human-dominated world now in ways that it never was before," says Tilman, who asked a team of leading ecologists and biologists from North American universities to look at agriculture's impact and extrapolate the current trends into the future.

Their conclusion: Earthlings will likely face a major environmental crisis in 50 years if they keep farming -- and eating -- the way they do now.

The so-called "Green Revolution" has vastly increased food production over the past 35 years largely through the use of pesticides and fertilizers. The revolution reduced world hunger. But it also had a "dark side" that has markedly changed and fouled the planet, says David Schindler, a co-author of the study and noted ecologist at the University of Alberta.

What is needed now, the scientists conclude, is a "greener" revolution to make agriculture a more sustainable, efficient business.

If current agricultural trends continue unchecked, the scientists say, an area larger than the United States would need to be converted to farmland to produce enough food to feed the nine billion people expected to be on the planet in 2050. Pesticide use would increase almost threefold, and twice as much fertilizer would be polluting the planet's water.

The consequences -- a combination of oxygen-starved waters, habitat destruction, species extinction and loss of clean drinking water -- pose "an environmental challenge that may rival, and significantly interact with, climatic change," say the study's authors.

One of the most daunting problems is the way nitrogen and phosphorus -- common and potent ingredients in fertilizers -- are altering the chemistry of air and water.

Nitrogen is particularly worrying. Over the course of evolution, it has helped shape which species thrived, because it always has been a scarce and "limiting" nutrient, says Tilman. Farmers, he observes, are using more than 140 billion megatonnes of nitrogen a year, much of which ends up in the environment. That is as much as from all natural processes combined.

"We have doubled the nitrogen economy in nature,' " says Tilman, a specialist in nitrogen's role in natural systems. His team has documented, in grassland experiments in Minnesota, how adding even a tiny bit of nitrogen can alter which species grow and thrive.

There is concern the same could be true in forests, where species composition could shift as more and more nitrogen falls with the rain, and more calcium is leached from soils by the nitrogen compounds that drop on forests in rainwater, says Tilman, noting that the amount of nitrogen used by farmers will double by 2050 if current trends continue.

More obvious -- and offensive -- to many is the animal manure fouling lakes and streams and coastal waters. More than a third of the nitrogen in fertilizers used in developed countries ends up in animal manure, which receives little if any treatment, says the study, which recommends manure be treated to remove the pollutants.

Pesticide production is also rising at worrying rates. "Should trends continue, by 2050, humans and other organisms in natural and managed ecosystems would be exposed to markedly elevated levels of pesticides," the report says.

There are obvious ways to reduce some of the negative impacts of agriculture, the scientists say: more judicious and appropriate use of fertilizers and pesticides; better land management to protect waterways and natural ecosystems.

But they conclude, "Even the best available technologies, fully deployed, cannot prevent many of the forecasted problems.

"Major international programs are needed to develop new technologies and policies for ecologically sustainable agriculture," says the report, pointing to the need for advances in "precision" agriculture to boost food production while minimizing environmental impacts.

The authors are well aware that forecasting the future is a notoriously difficult business. They say they have used conservative numbers to arrive at their conclusions and warn things could be much worse than they are predicting.

While their report is gloomy -- and sure to get plenty of people questioning their numbers and assumptions -- they hope it will get people and policy-makers thinking and acting before humans foul the planet beyond repair.

"Most of the problems are reversible, but they are not going to be reversible if they go on for another 50 to 100 years," says Tilman.

"I would love to have humans around 10,000 or 100,000 years from now living the same quality of life at least that we are living today," he says. "But I don't think we are living in a way that is going to prove to be sustainable."

Schindler says he is so depressed at the way forests, grasslands and wild animals are being eliminated to make room for more humans that he is glad he will not be around to see what the planet is like in 50 years.

"Even at best it's not going to be acceptable to me, so I might as well be gone," says Schindler, noting that "military peacekeepers are not the only people who suffer traumatic stress syndrome for the things they see.

"I think most ecologists on the planet are suffering from the same thing," he says. "They know what the inevitable is. They see it happening all around them and they see very little being done to prevent it."

But Schindler, who was one of three finalists for the federal government's $1-million Gerhard Herzberg science award for outstanding researchers, says he would like nothing more than to be proven wrong.

"The best thing that could possibly happen is that in 50 years people said look at how insane these guys were. That they were all wet."

-- Anonymous, April 24, 2001

Answers

Yep Jim,been there.This planet's toast,IMHO.I've seen too much,too.

Chemical farming is like salting the earth.When chem. fert. is used, nothing good can stay,like earthworms and soil microbes.

Rather than walk around making myself and everyone else miserable ,too, and letting this defeat me,I've instead taken the approach of doing what I can,particularly locally,just in case it is fixable and I'm wrong.

Not likely.I never am.I'm a wife. Wives are always right.Right?

And,as for the rest? I let go,let God.

-- Anonymous, April 25, 2001


Glad I'll be dead by 2050 or at least I should be. But maybe by then we'll have a global organic homesteading society and people will have decided to have 0 to 1 child. Yah, I know probably not but I can dream.........

-- Anonymous, April 25, 2001

Ever raed "Farmer in the Sky" by Heinlein? Good book, its actually what interested me in vermiculture. Now I can only hope I live long enough to board my own "Mayflower" off this rock. Until then, I will continue to try to maintain my own small part of the ecosystem here. A few crops, a few trees, a few rabbits and lots of worms. The answer is agrobiology and agronomy, not just agriculture.

-- Anonymous, April 26, 2001

Jay: I think I read *Farmer* but it was a loooong time ago. I may have to make a trip to the library again and check it out. The first Heinlein book I read as a kid was "Tunnel in the Sky". I was about 9 or 10 and it was my first science fiction book ever - After reading it I was forever hooked on science fiction...

And yes, I would also like to go "out there". It's been a life-long dream of mine to live a much extended lifespan (maybe as an uploaded virtual entity) in order to explore the universe. Don't know if it will ever happen but I still dream about it anyway.

-- Anonymous, April 26, 2001


Notice there was no mention of the "homeowner" in this. Think about all the "stuff" (tons) on the shelves at every Wally World in every town. How much of it gets poured on every Saturday to maintain the vast Monoculture of lawn in this country? A waste of resources, land and water. I don't even like to think about the "if a little's good, a lotta this stuff should really work" application mindset either. We're all downstream from somewhere.

-- Anonymous, April 26, 2001


Wow John, you are here!! Glad to hear from you. I was wondering if I read Heinlein clean and sober if it would still have such an impact as it did back then. Guess I need a trip to the library!!!

-- Anonymous, April 26, 2001

Why, hello, John! Hope you didn't post somewhere else here and I missed it. Welcome to the forum.

You are absolutely right -- either downstream or upwind. Pollution is blowing over from China. Business people talk about relocating in Mexico to get away with polluting more. But it blows back across to the USA. How short sighted can you be.

Interesting to see other Heinlein fans here. Tunnel in the Sky was a favorite of mine (look out for the stobor!), and Farmer in the Sky close behind. Anyone read "The Glory Road"? I want one of those fold-boxes! I have encountered a few people who've never read sci- fi. They ask me where to start. I recommend Robert Heinlein (well, and Anne McCaffrey too).

-- Anonymous, April 26, 2001


I think I'm mostly in accord with Sharon...

-- Anonymous, April 27, 2001

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