So, closing loops... Is it possible to feed 7.5 billion people with a permaculture based horticultural revolution in the wake of our ecocidal industrial food system, or are the energy inputs required feed us already too great to scale up using the principles of permaculture? If we were to revert to horticultural principles, rather than carry on with industrial-ag, would we be able to maintain any level of civilised society without slave labour or serfdom?
At what cost would feeding, clothing and providing biomass energy for 7.5 billion people have on the wild? Would it mean wreaking havoc with the remaining wild ecosystems, and could it ever be sustainable? What would that life look like? A certain amount of acreage is required to provide all the resources necessary for one human, obviously not all locations are rich in the necessities of life, some colder, some less productive, so trade and sharing of resources will be necessary, or law and order or some alternative system required to ensure fair (hah! not sure that's possible ) distribution of land, some semblance of trade and distribution will still be necessary (and a very basic level of society is then mandatory).
Maybe I'm just reinventing wheel with the carrying capacity of the planet question, but has anyone done the legwork using the principles of permaculture to come up with these kinds of numbers? I haven't been able to find deep thinking on this out there in the wild, just an insistence that permaculture is a possible answer to the world's greatest problems, but no hard evidence or real numbers to back it up. Intituately it makes sense to some degree, but seems to good to be true, and sounds too much like a green utopia! Also, before someone asks, I post this here, and not in a permie forum because I like the discussion that comes out of it.
Last edited by vexed87 on Wed Jun 20, 2018 9:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
It doesn't make me happy, but we are over populated. More aggressive actions such as genetic engineering may be the only way to support civilization going forward.
I don't know much about permaculture, each time i look at it, I find silliness like rocket stoves that defy physics. i would like to think their estimates about productivity were based on something more than wishful thinking and BS, but my BS meter just reads in the red everytime I look into it. I'm not a farmer, barely a gardener, so all of this could be in my head.
But when it comes to food production, look to Dutch greenhouses for answers. by enclosing the space, climate control is easier, and the environmental impact is reduced. Food per acre is off the charts. Now, they still use unsustainable practices, like burning natural gas to add heat and co2, but this is the way I expect things to go.
Closing loops, yeah ... so the current reason we even have 7.5 billion is because we have broken [through] both the nitrogen-cycle, the water-cycle, the potassium cycle, and the phosphorus cycle. That is all of the major ones. None of them are currently sustainable.
All of these, except nitrogen, are currently mined from using fossil fuels including fresh water from aquifers. Humans have developed shorter stalked crops with more seeds/corn that can absorb all these nutrients. Nitrogen is pulled out of the atmosphere and this will be possible as long as there's energy. Currently natural gas is being used (it's a cheaper process, but it's not sustainable), but nitrogen can be extracted using whatever energy source (solar, wind, nuclear, ...).
One can calculate a carrying capacity for all of these. Since NONE of them have substitutes (you can't water plants with Brawndo), the effective carrying capacity is then simply the minval of those numbers.
The two main contestants for the min are fresh water and phosphorous with the lowest being water at IIRC 600 million people on a sustainable basis(*). Water can in principle be extracted from sea-water but this is energy-expensive. You need to be rich to run a desalination plant. Where does the energy come from? If it's fossil fuels, we have a problem.
(*) Of course this number means nothing without context. What standard of living is this? I'll see if I can find the number.
Phosphorous is geographically restricted. 3/4 of world reserves are found in Morocco. Like with oil, countries get to make up reserve numbers for financial reasons. So we don't really know. However, the claim is that there are enough reserves to last another 5-8 generations of humans. In terms of actual production, the US, China, and Morocco each maintain about the same output. US production peaked in the 1970s or about a generation ago.
Now, looking at land mammals, I think everybody knows at this point that humans comprise 30% by mass, livestock comprises 56% by mass, and wildlife is down to 14%. Livestock is rather wasteful in terms of processing protein with conversation losses for 80-95% compared to eating soybeans directly instead of running them through a pig or a cow first. Livestock also requires a lot of water. If the entire planet went vegetarian, that would go a long way. Currently, we're heading the other way with meat eating increasing.
However, since all the cycles above are currently being run in an unsustainable manner---it's unsustainable because it involves drilling holes and pumping/digging it out of finite reservoirs faster than those reservoirs are being replenished---being less wasteful is just going to postpone the problem.
A bigger problem is that the machinery is energized by fossil fuels which cause climate change. Those crops I mentioned above have spent the last 10000 years (since the ice age) being cultivated in a very narrow and stable temperature band---which we're now leaving. Sure, climate has always changed, but not during the agricultural phase of humanity it hasn't. All of humanity basically feed themselves and their livestock using only seven (SEVEN!) different crop staples which have been with us since humanity came out of the ice age. They are quinoa, barley, wheat, squash, rice, potatoes, and corn. We don't have something like a supercaloric carrot to replace them with.
Crop yields go down about 7% for each 1C the temperature goes up. (That's half a billion people taken out of the equation.) However, again, getting rid of livestock would go a long way towards reducing emissions (methane---is a much stronger GH gas). In any case, ongoing mining emits CO2 which reduces yields. Unfortunately, even if we went to zero-emission overnight, temperatures would still keep going up because of latency effects. Those temperature graphs you see with Paris (1.5C and 2C goals) involves carbon capture which does not exist on an industrial/planetary scale yet (lately there's been some progress in that area though). Of course, unicorns and hope aside, in terms of actual policies, we're heading for 3C reaching it around 2075. (That's a 14%+ yield loss or a billion people then.)
So what can permaculture do? Closing the nutrient loops is a biggie. Not flushing nutrients out via the toilet in particular---these are what causes all the ocean dead zones outside the river deltas around the world. As for whether a self-contained permaculture garden creates more calories per area, period, than a similar sized soybean field that has the benefit of mined nutrients, you tell me? How much ends up on the plate in both cases? I'm sure the former tastes better, but the latter is what currently keeps people alive. If that's not the case, we're talking a reduction of either humans or livestock. The ratio probably being determined by either economic war(*) or direct war. The number of humans (total human bodymass) is very strongly correlated with how much food was produced over the past 30 days ... because as you know, humans have decided to no longer keep more stock than what's sitting in the transportation system. Thanks just-in-time! That's about 60-90 days of global reserves for staple crops.
While this is going on people are working fervently on GM to make crops more heat and drought tolerant. Hopefully, that'll work out.
(*) Fun fact: Many countries with more people than land are currently trying to buy land elsewhere to feed their own masses. South Korea tried to lease 3 million acres (about 2% of the island) in Madagascar some years ago. China is buying up Africa. SA is buying water rights in the US, probably competing with Los Angeles there.
Short answer, no. The global rise in population has been paced by agricultural technology. One of the most important technologies was the Haber Bosch process, which uses fossil fuel energy to convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia for fertilizer. Before this reaction was discovered, the bottleneck of the nitrogen cycle was soil bacteria like Rhizobium. Nitrogen gas makes up 78% of our atmosphere, so with abundant fossil fuels we have a new upper limit of plant productivity.
Some obvious problems with this are the obvious ones like finite fossil fuels and increased atmospheric CO2. Some less obvious problems are soil depletion. Since fixed nitrogen is no longer the Liebig limiting element, soil minerals like potassium and phosphorus get depleted easier. I even saw an article recently linking the obesity epidemic to climate change. The mechanism was basically, our food chain is so efficient that it dilutes out trace minerals and micronutrients. This results in us needing to eat more food (calories) to get the same amount of nutrition. Testing crop samples from 100 years ago compared to today shows a big drop in trace element : calorie ratio.
Rocket Stoves is to Permaculture as Lentil Soup is to ERE. Here are the 12 Principles of Permaculture. Even these are subject to some debate. For instance, I prefer something like 6) Close as many loops as possible.
The true situation is more complex than is revealed by current estimates of limiting factors. For instance, the many mechanisms through which soil phosphorus can be made more available for uptake by plants have not been fully explored.
My take on the matter is that it is possible in theory, but it is unlikely to happen. Probably the best we can do is make some attempts and leave notes for next "intelligent" species.
Can you explain how higher CO2 reduces yields? My understanding is the exact opposite for a large number of plants.
Wastewater nutrient recovery regulations are being discussed in various states right now. The technology will hopefully be a game changer for the problems listed above.
@ajcoleman22 - Higher CO2 does enhance yields when all other variables (heat, water, nutrients) are held constant. That's why CO2 is pumped into greenhouses (as a nutrient). However, in the atmosphere, higher CO2 causes an increase in temperature which hurts plant yields at the aforementioned ~-7%/C for the staple crops.
It would be nice if we could slowly have fewer people on this earth. Simply by reproducing slightly below the replacement fertility number (which is roughly 2.1 children per woman).
But I'm guessing I'm just daydreaming here.
If you could at some point reduce the amount of people on this planet, then you could also have more sustainable agriculture, industry, mining, etc.
Yeah, permaculture does have the ability to decrease close loop technology for people.
However is it possible on the massive scale? I am not sure about that.
A more realistic mass scale farming would be a greener Dutch style of agriculture, as monitoring is easier, and easier to count resources. Not only but more localized food production can also be better, depending on the crops (growing tomatoes in Northern countries a terrible allocation of resources and energy).
I am honestly interested in investigating in re purposing parts of NE Estonian former industrial areas for the purpose. Easy connection to energy source, cheaper than usual land, cheaper than usual labor, and in general connections to Tallinn a major port in the area.
From someone who has been trying to grow as much food as possible by himself, I can tell you it's not easy to do. It's probably possible to grow enough food to get all the nutrients you need if you compost as much as you can, but calories are another. You need a lot of land and time to grow high caloric foods and many of them are prone to pests and diseases. Most importantly you need a lot of experience before you can get a lot of yield, which isn't happening on any scale at all right now in the general population. We are more dependent on industrial ag now than ever before. It would be a lot easier if more than 1% of the population even cared about growing food, but trying to find anyone who does is like trying to find water in the desert. All they want to grow is grass.
I would say a problem with voluntary population reduction is going to be the question of who is likely to act on this in their personal life?
It would be the people that are interested and intelligent enough to understand the dynamics if overpopulation. So long as it was a voluntary push for this I can only see this leading to less intelligent people continuing with procreating at or above replacement levels while the smartest among us cease procreating at replacement levels leading to a severe dysgenic effect on the human population at least in relation to the intelligence of our species which I would think in the long run would have some negative consequences of it's own.
Last edited by prognastat on Thu Jun 21, 2018 12:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Agree. The only way to grow enough calories in our Midwestern climate (if it would hold stable!) on less than 2 acres/human, would require some combination of slow-to-grow nut trees, maintenance-requiring small livestock to convert non-human digestible plants to fat (maybe even a hog or two), and beaucoup pommes de terre. That's one of the reasons I have lapsed into allowing my project to become more community-based than self-sufficient.
A possible solution is also to convert from meat diets to insects. Insects have much better conversion factors (~50%) and will eat waste from other processes (just like the pigs, cows, and chicken we eat now). About 1/3 of humanity already eats insects. Also, insects are much higher in protein than mammals.
With the oceans heating, they become more friendly to squid and jellyfish. That's also an untapped resource.
You're right, but I have trouble imagining a way to convince the vast majority of first world western citizens to eat insects. The only way I can really see this being affected on a large scale would be experiencing a massive famine that would make it practically required to survive.
Most would sooner eat dog food than insects and they wouldn't ever think of eating dog food.
I'm not particularly keen on the idea myself and I'm much more adventurous culinarily than most people I know.
But permaculture is, if I'm not mistaken, a set of principles that aim to balance elements and connect flows, including humans. It doesn't really help to have the "right amount of ducks" in relationship to your snails if you have 50 humans for every 2 ducks. Population control through soft, hopefully ethical means could be seen as being a permie thing. (There could be a potential "dark side" to pop control)
Since educated/middle class people all around the world seem to naturally adjust towards 1 or 2 children per couple (according to Rosling's studies), I think we could, theoretically, stabilize and even decrease the population. There seems to be nothing in our individual psychologies that would prevent that. We're currently doing that to ourselves in Europe (and that's why everyone here just has to learn to actively think about saving and investing for their retirement)
Now, creating the conditions in which most people in the world can *become* educated/middle class (and without burning up enormous amounts of FFs and other natural resources in the process)... That's the real problem. That's international politics.
Despite a stabilized population, new food sources might be needed anyway as CC progresses. Culturally, we can adapt over a couple of generations. Insects are something of a fad thing here now. I'm not sure many people buy them though. I saw a new bread made of grasshoppers and wheat at my local supermarket the other day, but I didn't buy. I just couldn't. Maybe I'll learn, maybe it'll have to be the next generation.
Co-sign on the insects. Very interesting chapter on this topic in "100 Million Years of Food" by Le. There is also a very interesting chapter on the topic of how impoverished humans developed such culinary items as fish sauce in order to make other food taste, and provide a bit more of the nutritional profile, of meat. Unfortunately, in addition to trained revulsion, food regulations would also have to adjust. Anybody who thinks they can currently dwell in an off-grid camper on a vacant lot in a 1st World city and raise snails for profit, will soon suffer disillusion.
@Finn:
I just cross-posted in total agreement with you on other thread on similar topic. OTOH, I would have no trouble with eating grasshoppers AKA shrimp of the fields.
) distribution of land, some semblance of trade and distribution will still be necessary (and a very basic level of society is then mandatory).
