Food Needs A Stable Climate

"No society can become a post-food society." - Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil

Human beings can easily fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing, assigning human traits to elements of the natural world and impersonal forces. It can be a conversational lubricant that makes it easier to frame abstract concepts, though taken to extremes it can actively hinder understanding. Especially when we don't realize we're doing it.

As a highly adaptable species, one intelligent enough to proactively transform our environment for our own comfort and survival, it's easy to forget that this is an unusual and exceptional capacity and act in a way that assumes it's common. It's not even an evenly distributed trait among ourselves; without modern transportation options, people tend not to make it more than a few miles from where they were raised.

This adaptability, by way of an important example, is not shared by many of the plants and animals we depend on for food and ecosystem services. It's more akin to the adaptability of weeds and other opportunistic pest organisms with minimally specialized needs. So human beings can talk about mitigating the effects of extreme weather events for ourselves and our man-made effects, but our food sources need the 'just right' water and climate conditions in which they evolved.

Consider that fish are likely to move 125 miles poleward in coming decades because of their sensitivity to water temperature, which affects things like how much oxygen is dissolved in water. Or that crop production can't move poleward to any large degree because it relies on soil types that aren't available in quantity at the latitudes where temperatures will be more suitable for it.

The direct effects of CO2 increases on agriculture will be mixed and, where they are positive, they may not make up for increases in heat and pests, and decreases in water availability (known in practice as extreme droughts.) Remember that where winter is beaten back, the greatest enemy of rapid insect proliferation is beaten back and plants may have to compete with new weed species that have been able to expand their range.

You get the idea.

One Basket

This also has serious implications for grain production. Grains are the foundations of most human diets, and recent drought conditions have hit wheat and rice. We're especially vulnerable to threats to these crops because we've abandoned one of our own advantages and rely too heavily on a limited range of foods that mainly depend on temperate climate conditions:

Professor Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in London, [said,] ... “The world is currently fed primarily from just a dozen species – around 80 per cent of the world’s food comes from those few plants used in commercial agriculture. Yet there are more than 30,000 edible plants known on the planet, so it is baffling we are so reliant on so few species.

“Diversifying the range of crop species is a sensible approach and could ensure food is available from alternative crops should staples fail in any given season.” ...

But expecting that masses of humans will get off our addiction to wheat, rice, corn and friends anytime soon is tilting at windmills, for all that it's to be devoutly encouraged. The centralization and uniformity of the world food system means that a failure of a major staple crop inevitably results in hunger and starvation.

There's a term scientists have begun to use for this geologic era: the Anthropocene. Anthropo- is the term for human, and the point of it is that we have become the most significant drivers of environmental change in operation. We are already, as many have said, geoengineering this world, terraforming it. Without having thought about it, or previously known we were doing it, we are remaking the planet entirely.

What we're turning it into is a hotter, dryer world with a more violent climate and less arable land per person. Which is to say, a world that can't feed us very well.

No economy will survive that intact. It's not certain that civilization as we know it can survive that.

We need to take responsibility for the power we've acquired to shape the world. It needs to be used intelligently, with an eye towards preserving the insulating biodiversity and abundance of life that has fed and shielded our species for as long as we've existed. The life we share the planet with needs to be recognized as the foundation of our prosperity and since we are already managing it, let's do it right.

Eating Our Seed Corn

Before there were hybrids and seed patents, farmers saved their own seed. They kept alive many varieties because you never knew when you might need that type of potato that the bugs avoided, the corn that a delicious mushroom grew on, or the bean that produced well even when the rains were poor. Between growing seasons, even when their families were very hungry, they kept as much of that seed as they could.

They may not have been great economists, but they were often smarter ecologists. We're not still around because they had idyllic circumstances, rather, because they managed to stay alive without all of our advantages. Eating their seed today meant starvation tomorrow and so they didn't do it unless there was no other choice.

This isn't only applicable in the literal sense of the crop extinctions caused by monocrop agriculture, but in the sense that destroying your future resource base can only produce an illusion of well-being in the short run and tragedy at the end. Which is what's going on every time 'the environment' is politically pitted against 'the economy', we're being asked whether we would like to be able to have food or to be able to buy food, to which the only sensible response is, "Huh?"

Thinking that the health of the stock market can be perpetually maintained at the expense of the living ecosystems that keep the Earth hospitable and productive is a plan to fail. And I don't want us to fail.

(Photo credit: Larsz on Flickr.)