The Gobal Syndemic, Part Three: Limits

I expect that well-informed people generally are aware of the information in the first two posts of this series, at least in broad terms. However, I don't think that nearly as many people know about what I'm going to discuss today, or are even aware of it at all. Here's the basic problem:

 

 

We cannot triple our use of natural resources, or increase it by any amount. Here is the history of the world, in one snapshot.

 

 

 

How are we feeding all those people? Half of the habitable land on earth is now devoted to agriculture, of which more than 3/4 is devoted to livestock..

 

In order to expand agriculture, we need to destroy forests. There is no other way. That is in fact what's happening, as I mentioned last time, but there's almost no room left. And there isn't enough water.

 

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As the map below shows, the places where there won't be enough water are the major grain production regions of the planet.

 

 There is exactly one way out, to avoid mass starvation. Only one way out.

 

 

According to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Today, the biomass of humans (≈0.06 Gt C; SI Appendix, Table S9) and the biomass of livestock (≈0.1 Gt C, dominated by cattle and pigs; SI Appendix, Table S10) far surpass that of wild mammals, which has a mass of ≈0.007 Gt C (SI Appendix, Table S11). This is also true for wild and domesticated birds, for which the biomass of domesticated poultry (≈0.005 Gt C, dominated by chickens) is about threefold higher than that of wild birds (≈0.002 Gt C; SI Appendix, Table S12).

Don't eat tetrapods!