In the hundred-plus years since Crookes gave his speech, the human population has doubled, and doubled again, and will double again in the next few decades. As a species we long ago passed the natural ability of the planet to support us with food. Even using the best organic farming practices available, even cutting back our diets to minimal, vegetarian levels, only about four billion of us could live on what the earth and traditional farming supply. Yet we now number more than six billion, and growing, and around the world we are eating more calories on average than people did in Crookes’s
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