peak hunger

For those of you who think aquaculture will save fish production, take a look at the New York Times article entitled "Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler." The article is a gem in its own right and it clearly shows how our appetite for meat is accelerating environmental destruction by several orders of magnitude. The same is already happening to aquaculture.

Our farming methods are unsustainable in the long run. It takes us almost 10 calories to produce one calorie of food. Those ten calories not only represent a huge waste, they also come with a slew of environmental destruction. If one then uses these food calories to feed another animal, be it beef or fish, there is another 10 fold reduction in yield. And another 10 fold expansion in waste and pollution. Add to that an ever increasing population that wants these food items and one can see that the end is near.

Environmental destruction leads to less food production. First it affects yields and later on it destroys entire plots and renders them unusable. The process can sustain itself and may grow exponentially for a while. There is some evidence that it is already quite far along. Growth in production area is now accomplished by destroying valuable rain-forest, something that can only accelerate the destruction elsewhere. It is much like the negative amortization mortgages that were so popular a couple of years ago. It is a concept people do not understand, or do not want to understand.

There are some amazing parallels between the Green Revolution and the subprime mortgage crisis. Both were driven by greed instead of need. And both will cost us dearly. In both cases we took out loans against our equity. We overvalued our equity and took out huge loans. With cheap oil we greatly overestimated how much food we could grow in a sustainable manner. That is our inflated planetary property value.

Then we quickly spent the money. In one crisis we did so by buying more gadgets. In the global crisis we did so by acquiring more people. Uncontrolled population growth was the big spend of the previous century. It is a spend we cannot possibly pay back. In the meantime the value of our property has declined or returned to more normal levels and we are left with more debt than equity. In the case of earth the value of our property is how much food we can grow. That level was artificially inflated when we brought oil into the equation. We also did not account for the excess waste we were generating. We are about to lose the benefits of the oil while the waste is already affecting our yields. In the meantime, the people keep on consuming more.

Unlike the subprime crisis, the planetary crisis is yet to unfold. We are still in spending mode and we are still hopeful that we will be able to repay the balance. Unfortunately, while the US subprime crisis was somewhat contained, our planetary crisis is on a worldwide scale. There are also no outside regulators to stop the madness early on. No matter how bad the US mortgage crisis is, it was stopped long before really big problems hit. The same will not be true for our planetary binge. It will be paid in human lives. And it will be paid many times over.