"Food Crisis Feared as Fertile Land Runs Out"

[GreenPartyVoter]

New maps show that the Earth is rapidly running out of fertile land and that food production will soon be unable to keep up with the world's burgeoning population. The maps reveal that more than one third of the world's land is being used to grow crops or graze cattle.

Dr. Navin Ramankutty, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison combined satellite land cover images with agricultural census data from every country in the world to create detailed maps of global land use. Each grid square was 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) across and showed the most prevalent land use in that square, such as forest, grassland or ice.

"In the act of making these maps we are asking: where is the human footprint on the Earth?" said Amato Evan, a member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison research team presenting its results this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

The current map shows a snapshot of global land use for the year 2000, but the scientists also have land use data going back to 1700, showing how things have changed.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1206-01.htm

[Deja Q]

1. Peak oil, bird flu, glaciers melting, oil leaks, arsenic... fuck the fear

Maybe people need a news article saying "Each of us is mortal; live and love and fuck yourselves raw while you can" instead of this fearmongering, which does nobody any good.

Sorry to break my no-GD promise.

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. We can't do much about bird flu but we can use better farming

practices. I don't find this article scary so much as it just underscores that people aren't being very efficient and effective at how they work with the environment.

I am sure that at least some countries will take note and do something about improving their practices. Not the USA, of course. We don't do useful things like that.

[Deja Q]

3. Naturally. Thanks to money, people only give a frig about instant profit.

Money kills us all in the end.

Well, in America- other Western countries seem civilized by comparison.

[greyl]

7. Better farming = less farming

as well as abandoning our 'totalitarian' brand of agriculture.

At the locus of the problem is that our style of agriculture is so successful (at making food), that food surpluses have turned into over-population - just like Bio 101 teaches.

I agree with you that "it just underscores that people aren't being very efficient and effective at how they work with the environment" and want to add that underlying that is the destructive way that our culture (not only the USA, but not all humans either) views our place in the world ie "we are fulfilling our god-given destiny by consuming the earth".

[GreenPartyVoter]

10. Yes, but that is where the bird flu comes in....

Not sure what we can do about overpopulation unless we do what China did and forbid families from having multiple kids.

[greyl]

12. We need to stop increasing food production. It's simple.

Is China's solution working to reduce the millions who are dying of starvation in Africa?

[SpiralHawk]

11. The next 5 months, and the next 500 years

"...Hosteen Leon Secatero, an elder from the Canoncito Band of the Navajo, talked with me about the next 500 years, and also about the next five months.

"Our conversation was sparked by the recent pronouncements of Sydney Has No Horses, a respected Lakota Medicine Man. Mr. Has No Horses spoke on October 17, 2005 to a tribal council meeting on the Cheyenne River Reservation in Eagle Butte, South Dakota.

"According to widely disseminated internet postings, at that meeting Mr. Has No Horses declared “within six months, we are going to be living in a hell of a world.” He told of visions that warned about a tsunami hitting the West Coast, about Yellowstone’s Super Volcano erupting, about mammoth storms and earthquakes that would strike, about a meteor that would smash into the earth, and more..."

(snip)

http://www.chiron-communications.com/communique%209-7.html

[tanyev]

4. When farmland becomes more valuable than McMansions,

will they tear the wretched things down again?

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

5. ...and can I help?

[The2ndWheel]

6. Monsanto will be God eventually, nt

[greyl]

8. This would be better described as an over-population crisis.

Being framed as "in the future we won't be able to produce enough food for our growing population" misses the point that our rate of population growth is unsustainable.

[kenny blankenship]

9. two words that fix everything: Soylent Green

As Malthus once said, it's really a problem that solves itself--and makes its own sauce.