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posted by janrinok on Friday December 16 2016, @06:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-thought-it-tasted-funny dept.

Every meal you eat now costs the planet 10 kilos in lost topsoil.

That's the warning of "Surviving the 21st Century" author Julian Cribb to an international soil science conference in Queenstown, New Zealand on Dec 15, 2016.

"10 kilos of topsoil, 800 litres of water, 1.3 litres of diesel, 0.3g of pesticide and 3.5 kilos of carbon dioxide – that's what it takes to deliver one meal, for just one person," Cribb says.

"When you multiply it by 7 to 10 billion people each eating around a thousand meals a year, you can see why food is fast becoming the challenge of our age."

"The human jawbone is now by far the most destructive implement on the planet. It's wrecking soil and water, clearing forests, emptying oceans of fish and destroying wildlife as never before – but few people realise it because of long industrial food-chains that hide the damage from them," he says.

Do the 10 kg of lost topsoil result in 10 kg of night soil?


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Friday December 16 2016, @07:36AM

    by tftp (806) on Friday December 16 2016, @07:36AM (#441986) Homepage

    "The human jawbone is now by far the most destructive implement on the planet. It's wrecking soil and water, clearing forests, emptying oceans of fish and destroying wildlife as never before – but few people realise it because of long industrial food-chains that hide the damage from them," he says.

    He is welcome to go and kill himself if he thinks that helps. However humanity is also growing whole fields of highly producing crops that in nature would be probably extinct; it breeds and grows domestic fowl and cattle by the millions. It is rich enough to care for the wildlife and to plant new forests. In the moderately near future humankind will learn the basics of terraforming. New technology will allow us to manufacture food if not in matter replicators, but at least in cellular bioreactors; to live and work under water, deep underground, in space and on other planets. I do not see Earth as being terribly stressed by our presence even now; soon the load on the biosphere will be reduced. It is being reduced already by using more efficient agriculture methods, by urbanization, by construction of efficient and clean transportation systems, by eventual move to arcologies [wikipedia.org]. Of course, none of that is a good argument if the opponent is willing to accept only his solution [occupycorporatism.com], Chinese style. For some reason in every book it ends up with a "license to breed" that only the rich happen to get. Let's hope he is not proposing to kill anyone.

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