Planet Earth is rapidly falling out of balance and urgent action is necessary. The magnitude and complexity of the planetary challenges is daunting. CO2 levels threaten to warm up the planet and to make large portions of Earth uninhabitable for mankind. We have lost a third of the arable land in the past four decades due to destructive farming practices. If we continue to lose soil at present rates we have 60 years of harvest before complete breakdown of our food systems. By the year 2025 two thirds of the world will live in water stressed areas. Earth is facing the 6th mass extinction of biodiversity. Under these circumstances, there is unparalleled social unrest and suffering on the horizon. This is a man-made crisis and perhaps the only silver lining is that humankind may have a chance of solving it as well.
With the industrial revolution we drastically changed our relationship with Earth. We built a society fueled by coal and petroleum and supported by a centralized infrastructure to extract, process and distribute these energy sources. In the mid 20th century, the “Green Revolution” followed the trend and began a shift from small biodiverse farms working with the natural cycles to industrialized farms using a mechanistic approach based on monocrops. We fed the crops with petroleum based fertilizers and then use an adaptation of WW2 nerve gas as pesticides. After decades pests became so resistant to the poison sprayed on our food, that they have grown stronger into megapests. Farmers stopped working with nature and started working against nature. Today, if you stand in the middle of a soy megafarm in Brazil you’re baffled by the silence and monotony of the landscape. No trees, birds, insects, weeds, grass or creeks. Just a lifeless carpet of soy until the horizon. Industry’s efficiency relies on scale, centralization and standardization. Accordingly, we’ve reduced our agricultural biodiversity to the point were today “75% of the world’s food is generated from only 12 plants and 5 animal species”. We have effectively converted nature into a factory.
We overlooked the fact that soil is a living community of microorganisms and creatures vital for healthy crops to thrive. We combined heavy machinery that compacts the soil with poisons that kill most living creatures. The result is dead soil. Plants don’t grow well in dead soil. It makes them more susceptible to disease, droughts and floods, and therefore more dependent on agrochemicals to keep them alive. Dead compacted soil is also incapable of absorbing enough rain water. This prevents recharging aquifers and lets precious topsoil full of minerals and organic matter erode. The runoff ends up in our rivers, lakes and seas creating dangerous dead zones.
The soil can be an important carbon sink and by using sustainable farming practices can sequester around 10% of man-made emissions. Cutting primary forest, poisoning soil and water, using nitrogenated fertilizers, intensive cattle production and industrial farming practices are emitting unacceptable amounts of greenhouse gases. According to a recent report from the IPCC the food system overall produces up to 37% of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. More than any other industry. Yet we waste 30% of all food produced and ship it on average 1200km to reach our plates. If carbon emissions continue as usual we are looking at a catastrophic 3° degrees celsius global warming by 2100. That means life on Earth will look nothing short of apocalyptic.
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