What Sustainability Means

As Michael Pollan and many other people have repeatedly said, sustainability refers to things that can go on for a very long time. (The temptation to say forever is strong, but look, even the sun is going to burn out eventually.)

Sustainable practices are ones that can continue for the forseeable future without diminshment, at the least.

The official definition is more of an economic argument about not disadvantaging the future for the sake of the present, nor disadvantaging those in the present for the future. Yet the economy exists within the context of the environment and its capacity to support life; which should be obvious, but apparently isn't to everyone.

So sustainability in food has to mean feeding people now, but not doing so in ways that will prevent people from feeding themselves in the future.

Our entire global industrial system has two serious challenges on this front. The first is that even if the Luddites (and do such people really exist?) got their wish and we completely abandoned all technology (which not even the Amish would advocate), it would be impossible to support current global populations, especially urban populations, with the way things were done, say, 200 years ago. We can't go back to exactly the way things were without inhumane, probably genocidal, population controls; a flat-out dealbreaker for anyone with a shred of conscience. The second is that if we continue doing what we're doing, we will end up by default, eventually, going through a forced retrogression and coming up against hard curbs on population that we won't have the resources anymore to combat.

First consider that fossil fuels were what ramped up our expansion into an industrial society, but that followed a long period of mineral resource exploitation. While it's reasonable to be concerned about peak oil, many of our critical mineral resources are going to become unavailable some time in the next 50 years, in part because of the increasing expense of the energy required to extract them now that the easily accessible veins have been tapped out:

... Many warnings in the past of impending metal minerals shortages have been proven wrong because of the availability of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Every time the ratio of reserves to production of a certain metal mineral became uncomfortably small, the reserves of that mineral were being revised upwards because it became economically feasible to extract metals from the so-called reserve base or resource base. Reserves are defined as those ores that can be economically extracted at the time of determination and the term reserves need not signify that extraction facilities are in place and operative.

The decades-old paradigm which states that reserves will be revised upwards (to include lower ore grades) as soon as supply gaps are looming, is no longer valid without cheap and abundant energy. Mining and extraction (concentration) consume huge amounts of energy. The energy required for extraction grows exponentially with lower ore grades. ...

The industrial society supported by all those other minerals is necessary to the practice of industrial agriculture, to the manufacture of the chemicals and machinery it uses, as well as to the transport and extraction of the mineral and fossil energy resources it's dependent on. That includes phosphorus, a key member of the agricultural N-P-K trinity of limiting nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (K). Phosphorus supplies are not running dangerously low:

... The research estimates that without phosphorus, non-organic wheat yields could fall from an average of eight to just 2.5 tonnes per hectare, while organic yields would not go unscathed. Even so, organic yields without added phosphate would be only marginally lower than their current level of six tonnes a hectare.

Professor Carlo Leifert, one of the scientists at the University of Newcastle working on the project, told BakeryandSnacks.com: “If you look at textbooks from 30 years ago, they estimate that we had about 500 years of phosphorus left. Now we are using about 125 million tonnes each year. Even optimists – and we are optimists – estimate that there is no more than about 60 years of phosphorus left now. And you can’t substitute one mineral fertiliser with another.” ...

The cost of phosphate fertilizer has increased, according to the report that came out in late 2008, by 500 percent since 2006 to reflect growing demands on diminishing reserves. The article goes on to recommend using sewage waste that's been sanitized and cleaned of heavy metals as fertilizer to close the loop on phosphate, which is steadily lost to the sea from terrestrial ecosystems.

As they note, industrial agriculture is going to be hit much harder than agriculture that's less reliant on external inputs. Scientists have been worrying about this for a while, with production possibly peaking in 2040.

That's really not very long from now.

Green Revolution hybrids and genetically engineered crops are highly dependent on being well fertilized, and heavily irrigated, to get the yields they can promise. So a discussion of their sustainability needs to include that not only is the natural gas that we depend on for nitrogen fertilizer and the phosphate rock we depend on for phosphorus enrichment projected to peak in our lifetimes, but our water supplies are likely past peak.

Water levels are dropping in major rivers because of both diversion from human use and global warming. If you click over to see the graphic, water supplies are going negative in high density population centers and areas where there's a lot of irrigated agriculture, even if they're increasing or neutral towards northern latitudes, which may be reflective of increased runoff from meltwater in previous permafrost areas.

I've written before about the mining of water reserves at above replacement levels from fossil water aquifers. From the US Midwest to rural India, agriculturalists who depend on well water have been having to pay through the nose to dig them steadily deeper.

Not only can this not go on forever, it can't go on past mid-century, if that.

In order for industrial society and the farming it depends on to continue supporting life, we must radically change course. We need to get more use out of what we have. We need to use, and reuse, our finite resources in such a way that we can continue getting the societal and ecosystem services we've become accustomed to.

I understand that the organic certification process isn't popular in all quarters, but let's take it down to basics: organic farming is food production that generates abundant, healthy food with minimal use of resources that we know right now we're running out of. Also, it used to just be known as "farming," while organic food used to just be known as "food."

Everyone was an organic farmer 150 years ago.

Though bringing this back around to the beginning, farming without chemicals that are in short supply doesn't need to be our great-great-grandparents' kind of farming. It doesn't mean everyone has to grow all their own food in all cases.

Farmers who don't want to use poisonous chemicals, fossil fuels and scarce minerals in farming today have a wealth of research and traditional plant breeding experimentation to back them up. They have a worldwide knowledge base of complementary organisms to use in building an agricultural ecosystem that's diverse, vibrant and infestation-resistant. They have modern telecommunications technology to put them in touch with knowledgeable peers and extension agents. They have, or can usually be in touch with, the know-how to be highly productive and run a sound business. They are, in short, fully capable of feeding the world.

Unfortunately, farming that doesn't tax the world's resource base and poison our unborn children isn't subsidized, so it has to compete with artificially cheap crops in a system that makes it difficult for even farmers receiving government payouts to stay in business.

And what's sustainable about that? In my view, nothing.