Things like permaculture and sustainable farming sound very romantic but you must not forget the huge overpopulation. If you account for the amount of people living on this planet, there is no such thing as sustainable farming. You'll have to decide whether you want to decrease your crop yield by farming "sustainably" and protect the land, or farm in a non-sustainable way, just to be able to feed the world.
And the fertility of the soil isn't our only problem. The greenhouse effect, the overuse of antibiotics and the depletion of the planet's resources are just some of the problems. It's easy to throw glamorous words like crypto and crowd sourcing into the conversation but until some of the aforementioned problems are actually being solved, those terms remain nothing but a philosophy to me.
It's easy to make claims and I know that the internet is full of those, but sometimes it is important to do some "back-of-the-envelope" thinking to keep the conversation realistic.
That is very true it is far deeper than just changing farming practices but that is a start. From my standpoint the only way to really start fixing things is to first build the paradigms that will support an clean future.
Don't we need to build programs that fix the problem? That requires an approach built by both optimists and "back of the envelope thinkers".
Its about solution seeking through the means that are at our disposal. As an environmental scientist I am sure you do loads of things to that end. My point is that it is very possible to start crowdfunded projects that at least help change the paradigms of waste that we have as a "developed culture".
From an experts point of view what would be a realistic solution?
I agree. The current farming practices will have to be changed and you got to start somewhere. Crowdfunding is certainly a great way for small people to have a meaningful impact on the planet. But when I see how people throw their money at campaigns like solar roadways and self-refilling water bottles that suck moisture out of the air, it does make me wonder what could have been funded with that amount of money instead. (I'm not joking. Those are real things. If you're interested, I highly recommend watching the YouTube videos Thunderf00t and EEVblog made on those topics!)
I wish I had a realistic solution. There are promising experiments with growing algae to create fuel. Those algae could just as well be eaten by humans. They could be genetically modified to provide everything the human body needs, but I don't see earths population switching to an algae diet anytime soon...
Then there are of course insects which are already eaten in some parts of the world. They sound quite promising but they need to be fed with food that could have already been eaten by us in the first place. Probably the best solution, and the most controversial one, is restricting the amount of children people are allowed to have. I don't even want to go into the moral and social questions of that but fact is that the human race is the root of the problem and it could be an option to grab the problem by its roots before our environment grabs it by its roots and reduces the population in its own way.
I see your point crowdsourcing does have its pitfalls (mainly the ridiculous ideas that get supported and trust). You also make a good point on population control which is very do able. I read a UN article that did some surveys on the correlation between female education and the amount of children they have. It was pretty promising, in the aspect that it showed a clear correlation between the decline of the # of kids a woman has when her educational opportunities increase.
Shucks just having this conversation is a start to making a better world.
I appreciate you taking the time to Rap !
Greetings,
I have to disagree dercoco; they're not romantic at all, I also understand and know people from permaculture and I would like to believe it's possible; btw ,what's a realistic conversation? I don't find very useful when I dismiss any brainstorm about solutions just because I only see problems... "Things like" solutions are romantic, given the people we have to deal with everyday but that doesn't make them less real (both the solutions and the people), therefore to have a realistic conversation you have to acknowledge all aspects of reality, even those you can't grasp quite yet.
A realistic conversation, in my eyes, is a conversation where you don't come back to the same glorified solutions over and over again, which were already dismissed the first time they were mentioned. I'm not saying that coming up with crazy brainstorm solutions is a bad thing. It's not. It's a very good thing and it's the only way to come up with a valuable solution for a problem this big.
But if a solution is dismissed with proper reasoning, there is no reason to polish the turd any further.
And don't get me wrong; I love permaculture and I'm all about saving our soil. It's just that it's not a solution that will work globally.
In hindsight, my "Things like" intro isn't very professional. Thanks for pointing that out. English is not my native language 😇
nor mine. portuguese here :) but still; dismissed by who, and what proper reasoning could totally dismiss the idea, was the agro-forest concept dismissed too? Sorry if I'm being annoying... just want to get to the bottom of this...
Nice, I'm German! It's dismissed by the science community for being no viable solution to feed the world, simply because it takes up too much space. Or in different words: The yield per acre is not enough to feed the world in the long term. So we need to either increase the yield or decrease the population.
Agroforestry has a lot going for it in an ecological way but it's suffering the same problem of that the yield isn't very high. On the other hand wood is a valuable resource so it could make sense to use it in areas where wood is a main resource for heating or as a building material. On top of that, agroforestry is something that requires quite a lot of skill and knowledge. So it could be difficult to teach about this method in areas where it is not common to go to school. But that will probably be the same issue with any other solution; if farmers can't or don't want to learn about new techniques/ chemicals/ tools or whatever else is needed or don't have access to it, then that's the first problem that needs to be tackled.
So as you can hopefully see, I'm very torn on the subject of managing lands. On one hand you have people that preach to go "back to the roots" to save the soil, which is great for the soil and the ecology but not viable due to the small yield. On the other hand you have massive amounts of deforestation to farm genetically invariant coconut oil and corn which produces enough to feed the world but destroys the very land that we depend on.
and philosophy is the mother of realistic conversations.