If the biofuels, the already-worsening climate, and the spread of pest and crop disease weren't bad enough, we're also starving people out preemptively as we do other things to magnify these problems. Consider that what we're doing right now in Iraq, ending their system of seed saving in favor of forcing them to buy agribusiness' seed that can't be saved either by law or by design, has been done incrementally in many developing nations.
The food distributors that run the world market often only take certain varieties of crop, which means that farmers are forced to abandon crops suited to local growing conditions and buy often unsavable seed that requires a lot of extra water, pesticides, fertilizers and work, as compared to the old varieties.
This runs a lot of farmers out of business, which means even more families that have to buy food instead of growing it, and then when per capita supplies get crunched, they have an even harder time buying it. This also often means that their land gets turned into single-cropped, industrial farm land, which makes that patch of ground rapidly emit carbon stored in the soil as carbon dioxide, store less carbon in biomass (living tissue), and increase demand for greenhouse gas-intensive pesticides and fertilizers. You can see how this can make the climate crisis worse, which makes the other problems worse, which makes the food supply problem worse, which … you get the picture.
And if it weren't so serious, it would be funny. Because tropical kitchen gardens, and traditional farming methods that grow a lot of crops on the same ground, store a lot of carbon in the soil and biomass, while also yielding more total food per acre than industrial agriculture. Funny. Ha, ha.
Right about now, you're probably wondering what you can do. This is about that point, right? I've told you it's happening now. I've told you it's big and scary. I did say there were solutions, which there are.
However, I didn't write this tonight in order to advise you on who to write a letter to, or what sort of appliances to buy, or where to shop for your food. We'll save that for another time, perhaps.
Nor did I write this in order to cause you to despair of your fellow citizens. Because they're waking up all over to our peak habitat problem. They get it, even though the politicians don't.
And that, at last, is what I hope you take away from this. This is a battle of minds and attitudes between that majority of the public who wants to do the right thing and the status quo power brokers who act like money is something people could eat, who act as though we should move from civilization to a war of all against all, as they say.
I want you to remember, when you hear the deniers and the delayers, that they're attempting to make us all commit species suicide. To starve the vast majority of us out. That basically means they're nuts. People who are nuts are also sometimes very good at making arguments and defending their positions. They can communicate with other people just fine, it's only that they've stopped communicating with the facts.
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