Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

The key is producing more food on less land. While the amount of land used for agriculture has increased by 8 percent since 1961, the amount of food produced has grown by an astonishing 300 percent.22 Though pastureland and cropland expanded 5 and 16 percent, between 1961 and 2017, the maximum extent of total agriculture land occurred in the 1990s, and declined significantly since then, led by a 4.5 percent drop in pastureland since 2000.23 Between 2000 and 2017, the production of beef and cow’s milk increased by 19 and 38 percent, respectively, even as total land used globally for pasture shrank.24 The replacement of farm animals with machines massively reduced land required for food production. By moving from horses and mules to tractors and combine harvesters, the United States slashed the amount of land required to produce animal feed by an area the size of California. That land savings constituted an astonishing one-quarter of total U.S. land used for agriculture.25 Today,