Humanity’s heavy footprint
has been treading across the globe at an unprecedented rate, evidenced by increasing
loss of wilderness and geographically isolated nations’ increasing familiarity
with western industry. Leaps
in human evolution, due to agricultural settlements, have led to advances in
medicine, science, technology and industry. However, many production systems have been designed
with linear thinking and have had devastating consequences. Current food production and
distribution have created great inequality, exploiting both environmental and
human rights. While modern
technology has contributed to humanity’s disconnect with nature, it may also
provide appropriate tools to unite us towards regenerating our landscape into a
more livable planet.
The human responsibility can be understood by examining the
past to find the appropriate path to the future. Our impact has changed the conditions of the environment more
drastically in the last 200 years than the previous 100,000 years. We also
depend on a resource base that is finite.
A shift in our social habits and energy dependence from fossil fuel to
solar energy is necessary to promulgate and sustain our food systems. Utilizing technology and a modern
understanding of interdisciplinary environmental sciences, we must create
resilient agricultural systems that absorb disturbance (i.e. extreme
temperature changes, floods, droughts, and human development). Some adaptive practices include crop
rotations, planting cover crops, cycling nutrients on the farm, and increasing
biodiversity to strengthen resilience and produce a consistent yield.
Merging these modern schools
with knowledge developed by traditional cultures can allow us to grow
regenerative ecosystems, balance human culture, and create socio-economically
productive and ecologically responsible food systems. To support this growth, we would have to reach a
groundbreaking level of local and global cooperation, which can be achieved
through fostering social media’s ability to create better connections between
consumers and local farms.
A whole system makeover,
from production to direct marketing to distribution, is necessary. Shifts in methodology and culture would
include the following:
1) Reduce food waste produced in America from 35% to
below 10%.
2) Install perennial polycultures that yield more
calories per acre than monocropped fields.
3) Educate consumers about how, where and who is
growing their daily sustenance and nutrition.
4) Affect small shifts in policy, such as allowing
cafeterias to serve food grown in school gardens.
5) Train farmers in majority (known to some as developing) nations to build
resilient Agroecosystems. Teach them how to build their soil, not deplete the foundation of their nourishment by exporting our toxic, unsustainable fossil fuel dependent technologies.
Multiple
emerging technologies will help transition current practices to organic
operations. These technologies and modern scientific understanding of ecology
enable us to model food production systems based on nature’s low input design.
Social media offer the ability to enact significant change on a relatively
small timeframe and share an immense amount of knowledge to the public. A
few future long term goals include:
1) Team up with engineers to develop equipment that can harvest
multi-layer cropping systems.
2) Merge traditional knowledge with modern research to
create closed loop cycles.
3) Research and develop educational growing sites that produce
high yielding nutritious crops in biodiverse systems resilient to climate
change.
The time is
ripe for change, and during this formative time period of the planet, humans (a
key species in the ecological food web) are opening themselves up to alternative
solutions. While the powers at play are strong and often opposing each other,
many brilliant examples of flourishing integrated systems have been sprouting
up throughout the world, and the longer they are existence, the stronger they
grow. "Think Globally, Act Locally," has been catching like
fire, as it presents a long term solution. Meanwhile, certain tech
companies promote the philosophy, "Go Global or Die Local." Though
this has provided a higher quality of life and opportunity for some, it also
has devastated the environment and created an enormous amount of social and
international inequality. Will we continue to be the herd of
buffalo being driven off of a cliff or will we reroute our path towards one of
cooperation, physical and spiritual growth, preparing ourselves for the
uncharted territories that lay ahead?
