Farming Within Limits

摘要

Many still associate farming with bucolic landscapes of attentively tended plants and roaming animals. But modern farms have become carefully designed, high-tech industrial operations, and the consequences are dire. Some consider the adoption of agriculture about 11,000 years ago the soft start of the Anthropocene: the beginning of ecosystem domination and the first step toward planetary domination [2]. Now humans produce food on two-fifths of all ice-free land on earth. Catalyzed by industrialization, agriculture has replaced wildly diverse ecological communities with standardized crops and livestock the world over, contributing to staggering rates of biodiversity loss. Farming introduces more nitrogen and phosphorous into ecosystems than scientists' best guess at critical thresholds of planetary sustainability and directly releases about 15 percent of humanity's carbon emissions [3]. While not all people practice agriculture in destructive ways, agricultural systems use more resources than the environment can supply and generate more waste than ecosystems can integrate. Global agricultural production is alarmingly unsustainable.