4 ms·
A very large fraction of land (~50%) is currently used to grow biomass to feed 8 billion humans. Nothing about that land is 'natural' - it's a carefully enginee
by vkou 7mo ago
A very large fraction of land (~50%) is currently used to grow biomass to feed 8 billion humans. Nothing about that land is 'natural' - it's a carefully engineered environment that's quite hostile to animal life.
The land that people live on, whether it's in a city, a suburb, or in a rural manner is a rounding error compared to those demands.
- Terr_ 7mo agoThis only looks at land mammals rather than plant crops, but... https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/
- oblio 7mo agoWe could probably reduced cultivated land by 50% if we would stop wanting to eat mid-sized or large animals (cows and pigs).
- t-3 7mo agoIt's not that simple. Large herbivores are necessary for many environments and useful agriculturally even if we didn't eat them. Desertification caused by removing trees and grazing without replenishing, nutrients lost because sunlight and wind are scraping the bare soil, monoculture deserts and insecticides killing off pollinators and destroying ecologies... It's the factory farming and profit-motivated short-termist resource extraction that's a problem, not the cows and pigs. We can transition to sustainable methods without decreasing food variety.
- oblio 7mo agoI'm fairly sure there weren't 1.5 billion cows in the world before humans.
- t-3 7mo agoThere were many other large mammals, but we've destroyed a lot of biodiversity already.
- oblio 7mo agoYes, but there weren't that many large grazing animals because most of the world was covered in woods, not pastures. Trees are the most successful large creatures and we've probably reduced their habitat by 50%. That's the actual tragedy. Forests contain a lot more like per cubic km than pastures do.
- adrianN 7mo agosome ruminants are good because they can turn inedible biomass into calories. However the scale at which we farm them is orders of magnitude beyond those levels.