4 ms·

The issue really isn't the amount of buildings we have, buildings and most city infrastructure only makes up 1% of all the land. The issue is agriculture which

The issue really isn't the amount of buildings we have, buildings and most city infrastructure only makes up 1% of all the land. The issue is agriculture which takes up 50% of all habitable land. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://ourworldindata.org/land-use We have a really strong bias towards what we see around us, and for an overwhelming amount of us we see the cities, we see buildings, we see roads.

wazoox 5y ago
We can go further: the issue is industrial, mechanical, chemical laden agriculture. Agroforestry or simply traditional agriculture with lots of hedges, trees, small plots, etc maintained living ecosystems for millenia in our countryside.
- nine_k 5y ago
  How much lower the crop yields are without all this chemistry? Hunger has mostly left humankind (any famines are first of all political troubles, not lack of food), but this was made possible by improving yields several fold. It's hardly possible without pretty heavy augmentation like fertilizers and pest control.
  - moooo99 5y ago
    Hunger has left the developed world, but is still an issue in poor countries. Our society is so incredibly wasteful with food, there are massive amounts of perfectly edible food send to trash every year. This leads me to believe that even with a massive reduction in the use of fertilizers and pest control exactly nothing would change in the developed world in terms of food supply. However, to enable that we'd probably have to get away from monocultural agriculture which is not only an issue for agriculture, but for instects and other wildlife as well.
- space_fountain 5y ago
  True, but I want to caution people. It doesn't seem possible to me that sustainable agriculture of any form can feed the number of humans alive today. Aside from trying to do something about the number of alive humans, the only shot at reducing agriculture's destructive influence is going more technological not less and I for one want to see bespoke space colonies constructed by automated factories on the moon not genocides. Compare the livestock vs all other mammal biomass from the first chart in this paper https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 edit: or just look at google earth and look at the amount of land used for agriculture
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - space_fountain 5y ago
    This was originally in reply to a now deleted reply, but it is worth calling out an alternative interpretation, we could move away from meat and make more effective usage of land. I think this is true, but still won't get us all the way. I think even imagining people were willing to give up meat humans still use way too many raw calories for anything like sustainable organic agriculture to be workable. Maybe it would be interesting to know what percentage of the land dedicated to raising meat is for feed vs grazing. Grazing land is usually more marginal than farmland so while overall good to let it go back to nature it won't replace the sort of biodiversity that turning Kansas back to grasslands would Also I don't trust it as much, but if it's true that humans right now make up more biomass than all land animals before we exploded it seems difficult to imagine us keeping up without continuing to have huge impacts on the planet, better to keep those impacts dense and controlled than everywhere https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-international-stateless/2018/07/Screen-Shot-2018-07-17-at-5.35.05-PM.png https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-international-stat...
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >I for one want to see bespoke space colonies constructed by automated factories on the moon not genocides. This is why I come to HN. Beautiful!
  - hunter-gatherer 5y ago
    > edit: or just look at google earth and look at the amount of land used for agriculture I also encourage those interested in this topic to do this. Exact percentages are interesting, but it is still abstract. Give yourself and hour and just go look for wilderness using google earth. Our stewardship over the planet, if such a thing ever was, has had a sad outcome.
  - curtainsforus 5y ago
    There's lots of labor-intensive ways to boost yields without monocultures, fertilizers, and pesticides, right? Planting complementary crops together, planting trap crops at the edges of fields to catch pests, things like that. How long till robots can do that sort of work? At that point, you can have super-green-bio gardens (fields) worked and pruned 24/7 at the cost-over-time of the robots (and whoever/whatever oversees them, plus manure I guess). We already have a version of this- called a combine harvester- but the more sophisticated farming tech gets, the more it can reduce reliance on e.g. pesticides without reducing yields.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  Going to traditional agriculture or agroforestry would involve a lot more people being involved with food production. Not necessarily a bad thing, but that would inherently raise costs (although it may be paid for some by time not money). Another alternative is to stop subsidizing absurdly inefficient things like factory farming. If someone is selling beef produced by grazing semi-wild land, great! But intesively cultivating land to harvest it to fed it to cows locked in a pen sucks. It's obviously not simple to redirect some of that to human food (e.g. wheat with low protein is fed to livestock, high protein is used for bread) but still, worth having the conversation.
  - b0rsuk 5y ago
    > Going to traditional agriculture or agroforestry would involve a lot more people being involved with food production. Not necessarily a bad thing, but that would inherently raise costs (although it may be paid for some by time not money) But it would also reduce unemployment. I know pre-industrial food production was a massive undertaking, but we don't need to go all the way.

wazoox 5y ago

We can go further: the issue is industrial, mechanical, chemical laden agriculture. Agroforestry or simply traditional agriculture with lots of hedges, trees, small plots, etc maintained living ecosystems for millenia in our countryside.

nine_k 5y ago
How much lower the crop yields are without all this chemistry? Hunger has mostly left humankind (any famines are first of all political troubles, not lack of food), but this was made possible by improving yields several fold. It's hardly possible without pretty heavy augmentation like fertilizers and pest control.
- moooo99 5y ago
  Hunger has left the developed world, but is still an issue in poor countries. Our society is so incredibly wasteful with food, there are massive amounts of perfectly edible food send to trash every year. This leads me to believe that even with a massive reduction in the use of fertilizers and pest control exactly nothing would change in the developed world in terms of food supply. However, to enable that we'd probably have to get away from monocultural agriculture which is not only an issue for agriculture, but for instects and other wildlife as well.
space_fountain 5y ago
True, but I want to caution people. It doesn't seem possible to me that sustainable agriculture of any form can feed the number of humans alive today. Aside from trying to do something about the number of alive humans, the only shot at reducing agriculture's destructive influence is going more technological not less and I for one want to see bespoke space colonies constructed by automated factories on the moon not genocides. Compare the livestock vs all other mammal biomass from the first chart in this paper https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 edit: or just look at google earth and look at the amount of land used for agriculture
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- space_fountain 5y ago
  This was originally in reply to a now deleted reply, but it is worth calling out an alternative interpretation, we could move away from meat and make more effective usage of land. I think this is true, but still won't get us all the way. I think even imagining people were willing to give up meat humans still use way too many raw calories for anything like sustainable organic agriculture to be workable. Maybe it would be interesting to know what percentage of the land dedicated to raising meat is for feed vs grazing. Grazing land is usually more marginal than farmland so while overall good to let it go back to nature it won't replace the sort of biodiversity that turning Kansas back to grasslands would Also I don't trust it as much, but if it's true that humans right now make up more biomass than all land animals before we exploded it seems difficult to imagine us keeping up without continuing to have huge impacts on the planet, better to keep those impacts dense and controlled than everywhere https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-international-stateless/2018/07/Screen-Shot-2018-07-17-at-5.35.05-PM.png https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-international-stat...
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >I for one want to see bespoke space colonies constructed by automated factories on the moon not genocides. This is why I come to HN. Beautiful!
- hunter-gatherer 5y ago
  > edit: or just look at google earth and look at the amount of land used for agriculture I also encourage those interested in this topic to do this. Exact percentages are interesting, but it is still abstract. Give yourself and hour and just go look for wilderness using google earth. Our stewardship over the planet, if such a thing ever was, has had a sad outcome.
- curtainsforus 5y ago
  There's lots of labor-intensive ways to boost yields without monocultures, fertilizers, and pesticides, right? Planting complementary crops together, planting trap crops at the edges of fields to catch pests, things like that. How long till robots can do that sort of work? At that point, you can have super-green-bio gardens (fields) worked and pruned 24/7 at the cost-over-time of the robots (and whoever/whatever oversees them, plus manure I guess). We already have a version of this- called a combine harvester- but the more sophisticated farming tech gets, the more it can reduce reliance on e.g. pesticides without reducing yields.
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
Going to traditional agriculture or agroforestry would involve a lot more people being involved with food production. Not necessarily a bad thing, but that would inherently raise costs (although it may be paid for some by time not money). Another alternative is to stop subsidizing absurdly inefficient things like factory farming. If someone is selling beef produced by grazing semi-wild land, great! But intesively cultivating land to harvest it to fed it to cows locked in a pen sucks. It's obviously not simple to redirect some of that to human food (e.g. wheat with low protein is fed to livestock, high protein is used for bread) but still, worth having the conversation.
- b0rsuk 5y ago
  > Going to traditional agriculture or agroforestry would involve a lot more people being involved with food production. Not necessarily a bad thing, but that would inherently raise costs (although it may be paid for some by time not money) But it would also reduce unemployment. I know pre-industrial food production was a massive undertaking, but we don't need to go all the way.