4 ms·

Presumably those humans are going to have to eat food whether they live in a skyscraper or not though?

ajmurmann 4y ago
I think because you can easily photograph a meadow that's now a metropolis, but you cannot photograph an area that hundreds of square miles of meadows and forest and now covered in sprawl, humans instinctively think city = bad, sprawl with two trees = good. It's hard to understand somehow that the trade-off is between ruin a giant area or totally ruin (even that's subjective) a much, much smaller area.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  Agricultural production is pretty ruinous to the native biota, although this can be mitigated by introducing patchiness. Farms are kill zones, in other words - you have to kill the insects and rodents which would otherwise devour the crops intended for the humans in the skyscrapers. A lot of people (vegans ahem) seem to not understand this (although it is true that if you're eating the crops directly, and avoiding the losses involved in feeding the crops to animals and then eating the animals, you can subsist on a smaller agricultural footprint).
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    Short of suicide, is there a way to reduce the footprint caused by food consumption lower than from a vegan diet? It seems to me that eating meet always will consume more land and other resources, no?
    - photochemsyn 4y ago
      Well, 'vegan' is a broad concept. Clearly there are certain plants which are hard to grow and which produce minimal foodstuffs per acre, strawberries and almonds probably fall into that category (comparable to dairy, certainly) and in grassland ecosystems, it might be less of a footprint to live off meat and milk from herded animals rather than trying to implement crop agriculture. Reindeer herders in Siberia, for example, are probably more in tune with their environment than any vegan cultivator in that zone could be.
      - ajmurmann 4y ago
        I'm not sure what to make of the grassland angle. It works well for the reindeer scenario, given the reindeer have always been with that ecosystem. However, how well does that scale to production levels we need to support 8 billion people? I also wonder how well that translates to other areas. I understand we've pretty much destroyed the American prairies. Not sure about the details of that though.

I think because you can easily photograph a meadow that's now a metropolis, but you cannot photograph an area that hundreds of square miles of meadows and forest and now covered in sprawl, humans instinctively think city = bad, sprawl with two trees = good. It's hard to understand somehow that the trade-off is between ruin a giant area or totally ruin (even that's subjective) a much, much smaller area.

photochemsyn 4y ago
Agricultural production is pretty ruinous to the native biota, although this can be mitigated by introducing patchiness. Farms are kill zones, in other words - you have to kill the insects and rodents which would otherwise devour the crops intended for the humans in the skyscrapers. A lot of people (vegans ahem) seem to not understand this (although it is true that if you're eating the crops directly, and avoiding the losses involved in feeding the crops to animals and then eating the animals, you can subsist on a smaller agricultural footprint).
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  Short of suicide, is there a way to reduce the footprint caused by food consumption lower than from a vegan diet? It seems to me that eating meet always will consume more land and other resources, no?
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    Well, 'vegan' is a broad concept. Clearly there are certain plants which are hard to grow and which produce minimal foodstuffs per acre, strawberries and almonds probably fall into that category (comparable to dairy, certainly) and in grassland ecosystems, it might be less of a footprint to live off meat and milk from herded animals rather than trying to implement crop agriculture. Reindeer herders in Siberia, for example, are probably more in tune with their environment than any vegan cultivator in that zone could be.
    - ajmurmann 4y ago
      I'm not sure what to make of the grassland angle. It works well for the reindeer scenario, given the reindeer have always been with that ecosystem. However, how well does that scale to production levels we need to support 8 billion people? I also wonder how well that translates to other areas. I understand we've pretty much destroyed the American prairies. Not sure about the details of that though.