With there being a lot of starvation in the world, chapter 9 talks about what is need to be done in order to feed the 8 billion people that Plan B wants to stabilize the planets population at. The first thing that the book talks about is raising land productivity, raising water productivity, localizing agriculture, and strategic reductions in demand. Before the 1950s, farmers were everywhere. In countries all over the world, farmers made up a good percentage of the population. This trend started to die as there became less and less farmers and more people working in the corporate world. As the number of farmers fell, so did the amount of food being produced, and the amount of local agriculture fell with those. The one important variable that didn't change with that is the population growth. There has been a huge increase in fertilizer uses from 1950 to 2008. Fertilizer use grew from 14 million tons to 175 million tons within that time. In order to grow the grains that we require, we need an abundance of soil moisture from irrigation and rainfall. It takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain. 70% of the worlds water use is dedicated to irrigation. In order to raise irrigation efficiency, we need to switch less effective methods of irrigation and adopt more efficient methods of irrigation to increase the yield. We need to switch from flood and furrow systems into drip irrigation and overhead sprinkler irrigation systems. This will reduce water usage by 30% and reduce the amount of water lost by evaporation. The next thing is that we need to localize agriculture. Farming has recently been increasing over the last 5 years or so. As local food markets and movements are rising, so are the local diets. Diets are becoming more seasonal and local based on your location because there are so many different types of climate conditions that can grow certain crops better, faster, and more abundantly, in certain seasons as well. The last thing in this chapter was strategic reduction. The first thing that would need to be done in order for Plan B's method to work would be an all out educational effort to educate people of the plan. Plan B would halt the population growth at 8 billion people, and everyone would need to be educated in their efforts and follow the methods for it to work. We need to shift from more grain intensive use to less. Reducing the amount of grain use would also put less pressure on earths land and water resources. We should be eating less beef and more vegetables. When we do eat beef, we should be paying the full price of it and eat the higher quality beef that would come from grass-fed livestock, as opposed to grain fed livestock. This would greatly reduce the mass number of grain usage and waste to make livestock bigger to produce more beefs.
Chapter 10 talks about the actual movement itself and if we can mobilize fast enough. If there is one thing that history has shown in the past, it is that massive change is inevitable. Humans have an amazing ability to adapt to new things and lifestyles. It is a survival instinct that we have as the human species. We are heading toward death to our civilization and that massive change is needed if we are to get off that road. First we need to get rid of the corruption in government so government representatives won't be held up by businesses so they can make true decisions that can benefit the people and save the planet, like shifting taxes and subsidies. We need to stop lower taxes on income while raising those on environmentally destructive things. For example, a tax on coal incorporates increasing health care costs that come with the people mining the coal who breathe in that mined coal. We could just invest in clean energy sources such as wind and solar methods to create energy. The next big problem with mobilizing and making changes is changing our use of coal. Coal is the beginning of the end. Our coal consumption is a massive producer in air pollution. Coal plants have produced so much air pollution that 23,600 people die in the United States alone from power plant pollution. There are three main aspects to the mobilization effort; wartime mobilization, mobilizing to save civilization, and what we can do on the individual front. Wartime mobilization is the idea that drastic change will not occur until a big event occurs and really changes the human mindset. Like world war 2 changed from industrial to war mode to help war efforts instantly. If we waited too long to make a change, then something like that would need to happen. The next thing is we need to want to change. We need to want the change so we can adapt our lifestyles, make the proper movements to change things in the government and in legislation and restructure the economy to stabilize the climate, eradicate poverty, stabilize the population, and restore/preserve environmental support systems.
No comments:
Post a Comment