How not to be the next North Koreaby Sharon Astyk
John Feffer has a
really, really good article over at Asia Times Online. It points out the deep danger we’re in - how teetery both the world and America’s food and energy systems are. It is well worth a read, particularly because of its clear articulation of the bind we’re in - the strategies we’ve used in the past to get out of disaster will only accellerate collapse in the very slightly longer term.
The analogy that I’ve been using for some time is to the seawater used to extract oil in the Ghawar and other aging giant oilfields. Matt Simmons, the world’s expert on this subject, argues that you can make the oil production levels look good for a while - but the seawater you pump in only accellerates the day that disaster strikes. And that’s true of our agriculture - at this point, we’re in a losing race between expanding food production and climate change - all the conventional strategies for growing more food push us faster and faster towards the day that the planet can produce much, much less food. Every bite of food we eat now through conventional means takes food out of the mouths of our children.
I think many people, deep in their hearts, think that ecological disasters apply mostly to other people. But, of course, as Midwesterners are finding out right now, that’s not true. And it isn’t over - every image of floodwaters we see is brown - washing precious topsoil away, and pushing artificial fertilizers into water tables. And the rest of us will be thoroughly schooled in that lesson as well, most likely.
So how do we avoid becoming North Korea - are there personal or policy approaches that can fix this? Could you have guessed that I have some suggestions, some obvious, some perhaps not.
SNIP
We’re seeing now just how oil and natural gas costs reverbate through the food system, and while it is possible to use wise forms of management to reduce those reverbations, the only possible way to stabilize the food supply and seperate it from volatile energy prices is to end the dependency of the food supply on fossil fuels. We know that this is possible - besides the study mentioned in the paper above, other studies, including one last year at University of Michigan and a host of others have shown that organic agriculture can match and exceed yields. Moreover, organic practices that match yields in optimal seasons often exceed conventional yields in times of plant stress - that is organic soils rich in matter hold up better to drought, heavy rains and other difficult conditions. It isn’t a panacea, but in a world where drought and flooding are inevitable, we need the best cultural practices possible.
http://energybulletin.net/node/45482
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