“Some look at solving food problems with crops grown in higher temperatures; some look at reducing waste,” he said. “It’s crystal clear that none of the things that need to be done are being done on a scale that would be helpful.”
It’s not just about pumping out more crops or reducing the amount of people. “Planning for a sustainable and effective food production system will surely require heeding constraints from nature,” Ehrlich and Harte wrote.
They argue that economic equality, population growth and environmental health are all linked. Governments must address the whole system to avoid future #famine.
This means limiting greenhouse gases that warm the planet, avoiding biodiversity losses and reducing populations, they say. It means cutting back on all of the pesticides and antibiotics used to grow food. It means moving climate change to the top of political agendas and ending incentives to pull fossil fuels out of the ground.
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“Germany is much less sunny than most of the United States, and they’re approaching almost half of all electricity production from renewables," Harte said. "There’s no reason we can’t too.”
Underlying all this, the two say, is a fundamental shift in people’s values, including a turn away from everything being driven by financial interests. Instead, they write, society’s focus should shift to “resilience, a striving for virtue, equitable distribution, and extreme vigilance to insure that governance is working in parallel, not in opposition, to achieve these goals.”
In other words, a revolution.
Ehrlich and Harte are optimistic about the solutions. But when it comes to the full-scale revolution, not so much.
“U.S. Congress is ruled by a majority that doesn’t want to listen to facts.... Most don’t believe in science,” Harte said. “They don’t understand the magnitude of the threat civilization is facing.
“If they listened to engineers and scientists and did the right thing, I’d be optimistic. There are solutions out there.”
