Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Over the past one hundred years, agriculture has mainly been a brute force equation. First we industrialized our farms, next we industrialized our food. We backboned our food production and distribution systems with petroleum products. These days, it takes 10 calories of oil to produce 1 calorie of food. In a world facing energy shortages, this alone makes the process untenable. Irrigation systems have pumped our reservoirs dry. Major aquifers in both China and India are almost gone, resulting in dust bowls far worse than the American Midwest suffered in the 1930s. Toxic herbicides and pesticides have destroyed our waterways. Runoff from nitrogen-laden fertilizer has turned our coastal waters into dead zones so severe that the United States, a nation surrounded by oceans, must now import 80 percent of its seafood from abroad. But even that bizarre practice can’t last. Modern fishing practices are another part of this brute force equation. Bottom trawling destroys about six million square miles of that sea floor every year—that’s an area the size of Russia. So forget about importation. A 2006 report in the journal Science, written by an international group of ecologists and environmentalists, showed that at our current pace of exploitation, the world will run out of seafood by 2048.