Social media algorithms are designed to make you angry, and the old media is only interested in sensation or 'if it bleeds, it leads.' So you might be surprised to find there's lots of good news in the world.
Here's some – globally, more and more land is being rewilded and going back to nature, and the trend looks like it's permanent. Decades-long productivity trends mean more and more food is being produced per square kilometer. With lab-grown meat and vertical farming in our future, these rewilding trends might even accelerate. Even if the human population finally peaks at 9 billion or so in a few decades, it won't reverse the trend.
Humanity has entered an Age of Rewilding. Global agricultural land use has been declining since the 2000s, and even with the population projected to peak at 9 billion, it will still decline further.
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
8 Comments
I love this and hope to one day participate in helping rewild the world. First up is solar in eastern Washington and taking the snake river dams down. Next up is mass reintroduction off beavers. Beavers are a keystone species that help create ecosystems.
I hope lab grown meat especially is fully funded and not far in our future.
Hmmmm…. but isn’t the synopsis that the reduction is caused by agrochemicals, factory farms and plastic clothes? I like where they’re going with the Dutch model and lab meat, but isn’t there a very real risk of soil and climate breakdown before we get to that point?
It amazes me how much land is used by cows. If you include cropland used to grow feed for cattle, and their grazing land – **50% of all the land in the US is used by cows.**
I’ve sometimes wondered if those supposed alien cattle mutilations are by confused aliens who think cows are the dominant life form. They’d be forgiven for being confused, given cows take up so much more space than the human population.
It’s a good thing, but given that rewilding isn’t going to be a good as not farming the land in the first place we still need to keep an eye on the amount of land newly used for agriculture. There’s certainly farmland that has become unusable or unprofitable over the last few decades through soil degradation and aridity. This will count as a reduction of land use, but isn’t much of a win for nature
I saw a reference to a company trying to scale up a process for making protein in a bioreactor. Hydrogen, CO2, and nitrogen go in, protein comes out. No photosynthesis.
If you run the numbers you find to generate the hydrogen via solar would take 1/100th the land area as growing corn.
From a gross thermo stand point a human needs 3kwh of energy a day. That’s what a 400W solar panel produces.
When you take a global view on this. I feel like some countries are feeding other countries. Reducing the need for farmland in wealthier nations.
Humanity’s rewilding means less farmland despite growing population—thanks to better farming, food tech, and nature reclaiming space. More green, less greed.
The moment we have an issue with our current crop yields not only this will trend abruptly reverse, but probably half of us will starve to death, or kill each other over resources.
Of course I hope this will never happen, but there are way too many humans on the planet to sustain without advanced tech like bio engineered crops, chemical fertilizers, and sophisticated weed killers.
Not sure honestly what that has to do with your post besides, yeah you are right unless THAT happens 😀