3 ms·

Since No one ever talks about the elephant in the room that is the Human Population Growth problem, let's just bury our heads in the sand and pretend we aren't

• culi 4y ago
  Eh humans have managed to grow large amount of foods on the same soil for many years and be very productive. There's a myth that modern agriculture has made us produce more. The reality is that it's just made us need less labor. Agriculture, even intensive agriculture, isn't new. What's new is our obsession with monocultures and the empire of destruction needed to uphold that: vast amounts of pesticides, sterilized soils, etc. Soils inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi can hold 50x more water. Over 90% of plants make mycorrhizal associations and studies comparing plants that have made these associations with those grown in sterilized soils have shown mycorrhizae improves resistance to drought, frost, soil pathogens, etc and grow larger and produce more fruit. I haven't seen the nutritional content analyzed but I'd be surprised if there isn't a big difference there as well There's a fundamental difference between, for example, the agriculture that fueled the aztec empire and the agriculture that fueled the West's "Green Revolution", China's "Great Leap Forward", Stolypin (as well as Soviet) agrarian reforms, etc. It's easy to forget that European peasants were basically bouncing from one massive famine to the next until the Andean people gave them the potato. Possibly the single crop most responsible for ending the state of constant famines. I think the limited resources are caused much more so by our own arrogance than by any fundamental carrying capacity of the environments we inhabit