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18. Greener Than Green
- University Press of New England
- Chapter
- Additional Information
I grew up by a cornfield. In the early 1980s, my parents came to the obvious conclusion that the United States was a better place to live and raise a child than Egypt. Immigration law didn’t make it easy to stay. The normal requirement of the law was for us to return home to Egypt after my mother finished her studies. Then, after two years in Egypt, U.S. law would allow us to apply for the lottery of a small number of immigration visas allocated to Egyptian nationals. With fifty applicants for every visa issued, the odds were slim. Fortunately, the law had one provision that might allow us to stay in the UnitedStates.A physicianproviding acritically neededserviceinacommunity where no one else provided that service was eligible to apply for a “sixth preference ” green card, of which a very limited number were available. So it was that we packed up and moved to tiny Flora, Illinois, population 5,000, where my dad would set up shop as the only surgeon in the surrounding county. When I say that I grew up by a cornfield, I don’t mean that a cornfield was just nearby. I mean that our yard ended, and a cornfield began. There wasn’t a fence or a gate or a marker of any kind. There was just an invisible line. On one side of that line, I mowed the grass. On the other side, a combine harvester reaped and threshed the corn. Of all the things that have changed about how humans live since the dawn of our species, how we get food may be the largest. Food is the first and most fundamental energy source for humans. For most of the history of humanity , everyone in the tribe, except for the very young and very old, worked to bring in that energy. The advent of industrialized farming has changed that. A combine harvester does the work of hundreds of men. Fertilizer added to the land doubles its outputs. Pesticides keep insects at bay and kill off weeds that once had to be pulled by hand. Now, less than 2 percent of the citizens of industrialized countries farm, while producing more food per person on the planet than ever before. eighteen greener than green 245 G r e e n e r T h a n G r e e n The industrialization and intensification of agriculture has been a blessing. In the last fifty years alone we’ve tripled food production. We’ve managed to feed billions of people that experts told us we had no chance of feeding. And amazingly, we’ve done it without chopping down the world’s remaining forests and turning them into farmland. The Green Revolution that boosted yields has been a tremendous success. It’s one of the clearest stories of innovation overcoming apparent limits that we’ve ever seen. But it’s not without its downsides. NitrogenrunofffromU.S.farmsintheMidwesthascreatedan8,000-squaremile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, an area roughly the size of New Jersey.1 Runoffs of pesticides are the number one source of pollution in U.S. lakes and rivers.2 Farm irrigation uses 70 percent of the world’s freshwater, draining rivers, and drawing down aquifers on every continent that humans farm. Agriculture remains the number one cause of deforestation in the tropics, where farmers burn down tropical rain forest to plant crops, releasing CO2 in the process. Synthesizing fertilizer, running farm combines, and operating other machinery release more CO2. On top of that is the worst climate impact of agriculture: cows and sheep on farms around the world release 80 million tons of methane. Those emissions from livestock alone account for an estimated 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas output. That’s more than all the world’s cars combined.3 In the next forty years, the demand for food around the world is expected to rise by 70 percent, with much of that being demand for more meat and dairy products. At the same time, extreme weather, with droughts, floods, and heat waves, is likely to become more intense. And we must reduce the environmental damage that agriculture accounts for. We face not just one challenge with agriculture, but four: How do we grow 70 percent more food? How do we do so in the face of climate risks? How do we do so without chopping down the rest of the world’s rainforests? And how do we...