“High-yield agriculture and long-distance trade have long delivered a similar outcome—more abundant and affordable food with reduced environmental impact—on a global scale…. So prepare your meal from the most affordable food you can find to do both your wallet and the planet a favor.”
The lessons of history can be very eloquent, if only we are willing to take the time to learn them. In a 2008 National Geographic article, journalist Charles Mann discusses how soil management policies in communist China led to the creation of terrace agriculture in unsuitable conditions, the cutting down of trees, and the planting of grain on steep slopes. The main results were increased soil erosion and soil depletion.
Daring to challenge official edicts, some villagers replanted the steepest and most erosion-prone third of their land with grass and trees, covered another third with harvestable orchards, and concentrated their crops on the remaining lower flat plots that had been enriched by the soil washed down from the hillsides.…
“Anti-petroleum activists would have us give up on long-distance trade and the food security inherent to the reliance on multiple suppliers based in a wide variety of geographical locations. Far from keeping the third horseman at bay, their carbon dioxide obsession will bring him back with a vengeance.”
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter (1940) is generally regarded as the most historically accurate book of her Little House on the Prairie series. It tells the story of how her family and the other inhabitants of DeSmet, South Dakota—but then the Dakota Territory—narrowly avoided starvation during the severe winter of 1880-81. That year, after a lean harvest, a series of blizzards dumped more than 11 feet of snow and immobilized trains on their tracks, in the process cutting off the settlers from the rest of the United States.…
“By concentrating the growing of crops in ever more suitable locations, hydrocarbon-powered long distance trade not only maximized output and drastically lowered prices, but also significantly reduced the environmental impact of agriculture.”
“Turning our back on the global food supply chain and, in the process, reducing the quantity of food produced in the most suitable locations will inevitably result in larger amounts of inferior land being put under cultivation, the outcome of which can only be less output and greater environmental damage.”
An article of faith among local food activists is that modern industrial agriculture damages the environmental more than decentralized food systems. The article of faith is that concentrated impacts are worse than multiple, smaller operations–negative environmental scale economies, as it were.
This belief is erroneous, creating a gulf between (good) intentions and result.…