Reply #2: More easily said than done... [View All]

[bhikkhu]

we tend to think of cars and airplanes when we think of oil, but how about fertilizer? In the 60's and 70's there were bouts of panic that world population was exceeding the planet's capacity to grow food. The "Green Revolution" was a strategy developed to save the world from hunger, and since then human populations have doubled. The strategy is complex, combining four things in combination to double the yield - high-producing strains, irrigation, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizer. There are problems with the second and third things, but the real problem is the fourth: synthetic fertilizer is a petroleum product.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution


As food production is already strained to the limits of water availability, arable land availability, what happens if we ask farmers to end their oil addiction? The world needs a smaller population, and we have only a small window of opportunity to make this voluntary and relatively painless...