Eating Fossil Fuels
Food Shortages, Population, peak oil — by Dale Allen Pfeiffer February 12, 2009
Editor’s Note: The most significant ‘gift’ globalisaton has given to the world is the ‘Green Revolution’, the post-WWII industrialisation of agriculture. It is credited with saving millions from famine. Indeed, Norman Borlaug, the ‘father of the Green Revolution’, was given a Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to increasing food production. However, many people challenge the wisdom behind his work. The article below ably describes why the Green Revolution may have pushed billions of people out onto a rather fragile limb — it may well end up killing many more people that it has saved. This examination is timely, thought-provoking, and just plain scary. After reading it, you may feel the urge to get the gardening gloves out.
by Dale Allen Pfeiffer, originally published on FromTheWilderness.com, October 2003
Human beings (like all other animals) draw their energy from the food they eat. Until the last century, all of the food energy available on this planet was derived from the sun through photosynthesis. Either you ate plants or you ate animals that fed on plants, but the energy in your food was ultimately derived from the sun.
It would have been absurd to think that we would one day run out of sunshine. No, sunshine was an abundant, renewable resource, and the process of photosynthesis fed all life on this planet. It also set a limit on the amount of food that could be generated at any one time, and therefore placed a limit upon population growth. Solar energy has a limited rate of flow into this planet. To increase your food production, you had to increase the acreage under cultivation, and displace your competitors. There was no other way to increase the amount of energy available for food production. Human population grew by displacing everything else and appropriating more and more of the available solar energy.
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