Let My People Go Surfing (2016)

I confess, I drank the Kool-Aid.

I’ve wilfully chosen to review a book written by Yvon Chouinard, the founder and leader of the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, and I’m wary of the fact that I may be about to write a free piece of promotion for the company, having read a disguised piece of propaganda.  However, I hope what actually follows is a sober investigation of a truly modern and sustainable company; a company that I believe can provide a blueprint for others. 

Buy their clothes, don’t buy their clothes; I don’t care.  But I do care that Patagonia has a point to make about how to run a conscientious and positive company.  It’s a company that has a point to make about how to embrace responsibility and about how the private sector can be an environmental champion.  

History

Yvon Chouinard explains his reluctance to become a businessman without regard to convention.  The fact that his story may sound like a pastiche of the ‘hippy entrepreneur’ or the ‘champagne socialist’ is not indicative of a caricature.  Chouinard’s story is as original and authentic as they come, and may only now be met by cynicism due to the number of phoney replicas that have attempted to mimic his ethos in the subsequent decades.

For it was in the 1960s, when Chouinard was climbing the mountains of North America as a young man, that he made his first foray into business.   At twenty-something he was hiding out in Yosemite National Park, USA, evading park rangers who sought to enforce the two-week camping limit.  He took special pride in the fact that climbing had no economic value and viewed himself and his friends as rebels from the consumer culture.  Characteristic of a 1960s idealist, Chouinard viewed politicians and businessmen as “greaseballs” and corporations were the source of all evil.  The natural world was his home and he idolised the European climbers: Gaston Rebuffat, Riccardo Cassin and Hermann Buhl. 

However, it was the European attitude to climbing that gave him his first business idea.  The European attitude to climbing mountains was to “conquer them”.  All the gear was left in place to make it easier for others to follow.  If you tried to take out and reuse the iron pitons, the head would often break off.  However, American climbers were brought up reading the transcendental writers: Ralph Emerson and Henry Thoreau.  You climb the mountains or visit the wilderness but leave no trace of having been there.  It was this sense of appreciation and preservation that led Chouinard Equipment Ltd to begin manufacturing the world’s first reusable climbing piton.

In 1966, Chouinard moved from Burbank to Ventura (both in California) to be closer to the point of the surf breaks of Ventura and Santa Barbara.  He set up shop in a rented tin boiler room of an abandoned packing company slaughterhouse and set about manufacturing climbing equipment for his dirtbag friends.

The guiding principle of his design stemmed from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French aviator, ”In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to it nakedness.”  This minimalist attitude, striving always for quality and durability, has been the Northern Star of Patagonia design ever since.

By 1970, Chouinard Equipment had become the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the United States.  However, it had also started down the path to becoming an environmental villain. 

The popularity of climbing, though growing steadily, remained concentrated on the same well-tried routes in areas such as El Dorado Canyon near Boulder, the Shawangunks in New York and Yosemite Valley.  The repeated hammering of hard steel pitons, during both placement and removal in the same fragile cracks, was severely disfiguring the rock.  After an ascent of the nose on El Capitan in California, which had been pristine a few summers earlier, Chouinard came home disgusted with the degradation he had seen.  In a radical and cannibalising decision, he decided Chouinard Equipment would phase out of the piton business.  Pitons were the mainstay of his business, but he could not avoid the realisation that they were destroying the areas he loved.

A transition to climbing gear and clothing saw the birth and growth of Patagonia.  The business grew throughout the 1970s and 1980s using traditional practices: increasing the number of products, finding new dealers, opening new stores and developing new foreign markets.  However, it was this very success that taught Chouinard the value of sustainability.  The danger of outgrowing itself posed difficult philosophical questions for the company.  Can a company that wants to make the best quality outdoor clothing in the world be the size of Nike?  Can a ten-table, three-star French restaurant retain its third star when it adds fifty tables?  Can you have it all?  The problem haunted Chouinard as Patagonia evolved.  Simultaneously, another problem came to haunt Chouinard more: the deterioration of the natural world. 

Consequently, when the business overextended itself in the early 1990s, Chouinard and his colleagues went back to drawing board.  Just as they had done when they reinvented themselves without pitons, Patagonia set about drafting a completely new raison d’etre to capture a love for quality products, respect for the environment, empowerment of employees and engagement with customers.

Patagonia Values

The following statement of values was drafted in 1991.  I struggle to think of company in the last 26 years that has more perfectly captured the essence of what it is to love what you do, to do it well and to address problems bigger than yourself.  To the modern eye, these values may be considered self-evident or uncontroversial.  However, as one of the first holistic expressions of sustainability in private practice, I believe it was ahead of its time.

• “All decisions of the company are made in the context of the environmental crisis.  We must strive to do no harm. Wherever possible, our acts should serve to decrease the problem.  Our activities in this area will be under constant evaluation and reassessment as we seek constant improvement.
• Maximum attention is given to product quality, as defined by durability, minimum use of resources (including materials, raw energy and transport), multifunctionalism, nonobsolescence and the kind of beauty that emerges from absolute suitability to task.  Concern over transitory fashion trends is specifically not a corporate value.
• The board and management recognise that successful communities are part of a sustainable environment.  We consider ourselves to be an integral part of communities that also include our employees, the communities in which we live, our suppliers and customers. We recognise our responsibilities to all these relationships and make our decisions with their general benefit in mind.  It is our policy to employ people who share the fundamental values of this corporation while representing cultural and ethnic diversity.
• Without giving its achievements primacy, we seek profit on our activities.  However, growth and expansion are values not basic to this corporation.
• To help mitigate any negative environmental consequences of our business activity, we impose on ourselves an annual tax of 1 percent of our gross sales, or 10 percent of profits, whichever is greater.  All proceeds of this tax are granted to local community and environmental activism.
• At all levels of operation – board, management and staff – Patagonia encourages proactive stances that reflect our values.  These include activities that influence the larger corporate community to also adjust its values and behaviour, and that support, through activism and financially, grassroots and national campaigners who work to solve the current environmental and social crisis.
• In our internal operations, top management will work as a group and with maximum transparency.  This includes an “open book” policy that enables employees’ easy access to decisions, within the normal boundaries of personal privacy and “trade secrecy”.  At all levels of corporate activity, we encourage open communication, a collaborative atmosphere and maximum simplicity, while we simultaneously seek dynamism and innovation.”

I want to spend the rest of this review examining how these carefully crafted values inform the product, marketing, financial, management and environmental philosophies of the company.

Product Philosophy

One of the first things Patagonia did after its struggles in 1991 – and as part of the sober task of rebuilding the company by doing the right thing – was to commission an independent assessment of the environmental impacts of the fibres most commonly used in clothes: hemp, linen, rayon, cotton, polyester, nylon and wool.

Let’s look at wool, for example.  Wool can be very damaging or benign,  depending on whether the sheep are grazing in fragile desert environments or in areas with frequent rain, plenty of natural grass, and no predators.  Wool also relies on chemicals at every stage.  The sheep are dipped in pesticides to kill parasites; the fleece is scoured with petroleum-based detergents; the yarn is bleached with chlorine and then dyed with heavy, metal-based dyes.  Evidently, understanding your supply chain is crucial to being a conscientious producer.

Consequently, Patagonia created an alliance with the Nature Conservancy and Ovis 21, an Argentine company that manages and develops a network of wool producers to reverse more than one hundred years of overgrazing on fifteen million acres of Patagonia (the region, not the company) grassland.  The result was a more sustainable grazing protocol involving the movement of herds that helped build the soil, transport the seeds, and deepen the roots of plants to reverse the desertification of the grasslands.  Additionally, it further cleaned up the processing of the wool to eliminate the use of chlorine, dioxins and other harsh chemicals.

One of the first ingredients Patagonia identified as needing to be phased out was polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which is a toxic, carcinogenic plastic used everywhere in our society.  It’s in the coating on durable vinyl luggage and it’s a plasticiser for printing on T-shirts.  Next, Patagonia sought to change neoprene production, the most environmentally harmful part of making a wetsuit.  By partnering with Yulex, they were able to develop a biodegradable wetsuit material that used guayule, a desert shrub native to the southwestern United States.  This plant-based biorubber reduced the environmental footprint of wetsuits, with no loss of warmth, stretch or durability.

In doing so, Patagonia was one of the first clothing companies to think about product life cycles in a holistic and sustainable way.  Going one step further, Patagonia was also the first to apply industrial design principles to clothing design.  Just as Chouinard had followed the teachings of Saint-Exupery in designing his first pitons, he was now invoking the precept of industrial design: that the function of an object should determine its design and materials.  In a throw-away culture, he recognised that the overall durability of a product is only as good as its weakest element.  Therefore, the ultimate goal should be a product whose parts wear out at roughly the same time and only after a long life.

To get all the components of a product to be roughly equal in durability, researchers would continually test in both the lab and the field.  They tested until something failed, strengthened that part, then saw what failed next, strengthened that, and so on until confident that the product is durable as a whole.  Patagonia is so serious about its promise to deliver a durable product that it has set up a repair centre in Reno, Nevada that is free to its customers.  It is the largest garment repair facility in North America and it employs more than fifty people who complete more than forty thousand repairs per year.

And since function comes first, a refusal to compare themselves to competitors’ most popular styles and to replicate popular items or chase fashion trends is paramount.  When the clothing line gets too big, and the differences between products become too small, that’s when the company knows it is not living up to its own philosophy.

Marketing Philosophy

Chouinard’s distain for conventional forms of marketing is summed up perfectly by the following excerpt from the book:

“When I die and go to hell, the devil is going to make me the marketing director for a cola company.  I’ll be in charge of trying to sell a product that no one needs, is identical to its competitor and can’t be sold on its merits.”

In attempting to build an authentic brand that never strays too far from its roots as a company for the offbeat climbers, campers, rafters, skiers and general dirtbags of the world, it’s obvious that Chouinard views the hyperbole of most modern advertising campaigns as the antithesis of authenticity.  Chouinard proudly crows that others are wasting their money; to him advertising rates dead last as a credible source of information.  Instead, what has worked best has been paid announcements for new store openings or helping create environmental awareness on specific issues in which the company is involved.  Having a genuine link to a cause is a much stronger identifier and reason for customer loyalty than memorable logos or commercials.

The basic tenets of the Patagonia philosophy are:

“a deep appreciation for the environment and a strong motivation to help solve the environmental crisis; a passion for the natural world; a healthy scepticism toward authority; a love for difficult, human-powered sports that require practice and mastery; a distain for motorised sports like snowmobiling or jet skiing; a bias for wacko often self-deprecating humour; a respect and taste for a real adventure (defined best as a journey from which you may not come back alive – and certainly not as the same person); and a belief that less is more (in design and in consumption).”

Well said, but is this just careful marketing of their own?  Obviously the answer is yes, and I’m well aware that I’m the target market for just such a statement, but does that prevent it from being genuine?  As is becoming a common thread in this review, it’s possible that I’m a sucker for an ingenious branding campaign.  But, what is also evident from the company’s actions is that it can walk the walk. 

If it weren’t for the financial, management and environmental philosophies that follow, I would be the first to point the finger of hypocrisy.  As it is, taking a principled and often stymieing  stance, gives the company an authenticity that feels distinctly different to most companies’ posturing.

Financial Philosophy

Chouinard begs the question, who are businesses really responsible to?  Their customers?  Shareholders?  Employees?  Patagonia’s financial philosophy argues that it’s none of the above.  Fundamentally, businesses are responsible to their resource base.  Without a healthy environment there are no shareholders, no employees, no customers and no business.

The crucial element of the business that allows Patagonia to take this slightly philosophical and altruistic stance is its ownership structure.   Patagonia remains a private company held by a select few, likeminded shareholders (Chouinard remains the majority shareholder).  As Chouinard quips, “It’s okay to be eccentric, as long as you are rich; otherwise you are crazy.”

Chouinard reports getting approached by prospective buyers almost weekly, and their intent is always the same.  They see an undervalued company that they can rapidly grow and take public.  But being a publicly held corporation would put shackles on how the company operates, restrict what it does with its profits and put it on a growth track that is counter to its values.  Patagonia’s intent is to remain a closely held private company so that it can continue to focus on its bottom line: doing good. 

In many companies, the tail (finance) wags the dog (corporate decisions), but by remaining a private company, decision making is not governed by short-term stock price and a long-term approach can be administered in a relatively calm fashion.

Staying private and relatively debt-free is a luxury of the lucky, brave or mature, and there are a thousand good reasons for a company to leverage its equity to attract new investment and grow the business.  But underlying Patagonia’s eccentricity is a forgotten truth: modern businesses are too obsessed with listing themselves on the stock exchange and having the largest growth figures.  By retaining private control and developing a consensus around sustainable growth, the tyranny of the shareholder and the profit motive can be curtailed and more impactful objectives for being in business can take precedence.

The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to have it all, the sooner it dies.  Patagonia will never be the size of Apple.  But perhaps that’s the point.  I know I’d rather have 1,000 Patagonias than one Apple.

Management Philosophy

When you actively employ a bunch of surfers, the office is going to want to be pretty quiet when the perfect wave rolls in.  The fact that Chouinard is usually the first one out the door indicates that, to Patagonia, “flex time” and “work-life balance” aren’t just platitudes.

In fact, Patagonia may have been one of the first companies to introduce the idea of flex time.  Your work needs to get done, but Chouinard doesn’t strictly enforce working hours and openly encourages his employees to take advantage of any weather that lends itself to being outdoors; whether that’s fresh snow, big waves or just warm sunshine.

This outlook is all about maintaining employees’ passion for the sports that underlie the company’s success, but also it’s about creating a community in which employees feel respected, empowered and valued. 

It’s this same outlook that led Patagonia to create a free, on-site childcare centre for each and every one of its offices.  Employees are encouraged to bring their kids to work with them, drop them off at the childcare centre and stop in to see them whenever they want during the day.  Chouinard argues that the childcare centres make financial sense too.  Considering that mothers can return to work earlier, breastfeed whenever they need to throughout the day and be on hand to deal with any issues, it is no surprise that employee retention is well above industry average and the company rarely encounters any issues to do with employee absenteeism.

Additionally, Chouinard is big proponent of smaller offices that foster this sense of community and reduce the often impersonal way that companies sometimes work:

“I believe that for the best communication and to avoid bureaucracy, you should ideally have no more than a hundred people working in one location.  This is an extension of the fact that democracy seems to work best in small societies, where people have a sense of personal responsibility.  In a small Sherpa or Inuit village there’s no need to hire trash collectors or firemen; everyone takes care of community problems.  And there’s no need for police; evil has a hard time hiding from peer pressure.”

I have no doubt that, were I to talk to Patagonia employees, I could still find plenty of people who would have stories of nightmare projects, horrible bosses and workplace grievances.  However, in creating an environment that reduces stress, increases autonomy and respects the many dimensions that make up a full and challenging life, I think Patagonia is at the vanguard of modern working practices.

Environmental Philosophy

You could say that all of the philosophies discussed so far have an environmental element, but what separates Patagonia from a lot of “green” businesses is that it’s committed to putting its money where its mouth is.

In 1986, the company promised to donate ten percent of profits each year to grassroots environmental movements.  The company later upped the ante to one percent of sales, or ten percent of pre-tax profits, whichever was greater.   Small groups and activists working on specific problems are given preference over large NGOs with big staffs, overheads, corporate connections and broad remits.  What is more, employees are free to nominate groups and to donate their time to the cause. 

Chouinard had a vision that Patagonia’s commerce could be used to create a groundswell of environmental change and now he’s trying to get as many other companies as possible to share in his vision.

In 2001, Craig Mathews (the founder of Blue Ribbon Flies, a US fly fishing outfitter) and Chouinard decided to start an organisation called 1% for the Planet, an alliance of businesses pledging to donate at least one percent of sales toward active efforts to protect and restore the natural environment.  Each 1% member disperses its own contributions directly, which simplifies the decision making process, minimises bureaucracy and encourages member companies to develop independent relationships with the groups they support.  In return, member companies then use the 1% for the Planet logo to communicate their environmental commitment to their customers.

The company has taken this commitment one step further with the creation of Tin Shed Ventures, the company’s venture capital fund for environmental start-up businesses that has recently helped to start a clean textiles business and food waste collection business.

There is no delusion that large public corporations will suddenly become responsible for their own sake before being forced to by the law or until it is proved to be more profitable for the shareholders.  But what can be advanced is a form of capitalism that is conscientious and sustainable.  Just as we would hope to behave as individuals, companies can discipline themselves to lead an examined life, clean up their own act, support civil democracy and influence their peers by example.

Conclusion

As I tried to allude to at the beginning of this review, I’m aware that I could be charged with naivety in the extreme for swallowing this one-sided account of a business’s persona.  I understand that supporting environmental regeneration is a sound business decision for an outdoor clothing company for two primary reasons: customers are likely to feel a kinship with the brand for supporting a cause they care about, and the preservation of mountains, rivers and grasslands is likely to sustain the very activities that create the demand for their products.

Nevertheless, I believe that Chouinard has harnessed the free-thinking rebellion of the 1960s in corporate form.  He’s subverted the norms of capitalism by turning what may have become a driver of private wealth into a tool for the redistribution of wealth into environmental causes.

As Chouinard neatly summarises:

“It seems to me if there is an answer, it lies in these words: restraint, quality and simplicity.  We have to get away from thinking that all growth is good.  There’s a big difference between growing fatter and growing stronger.”

I, for one, think there is room for a lot more businesses like Patagonia.

The Planet Remade: How Geo-Engineering Could Change the World (2015)

Dwight Eisenhower famously said, “Whenever I run into a problem that I cannot solve, I always make it bigger.  I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”  And so it follows that geo-engineering, the idea that the effects of climate change can be reversed by large-scale engineering projects, is gaining traction in world where solutions have become increasingly modular and entangled.  Due to the complications brought on by rising temperatures and competing interests, the appeal of a “silver bullet” has never been higher.  It is for these reasons that I wanted to learn more about the potential of geo-engineering solutions and why I picked up Oliver Morton’s book, The Planet Remade: How Geo-Engineering Could Change the World.

It doesn’t take a lot to note the difficulties faced by conventional climate change solutions that involve more cleanly producing, or more efficiently using, energy.  The book notes that even if the world had the capacity to deliver one of the largest nuclear power plants ever built once a week, it would take 20 years to replace the current stock of coal-fired plants (at present, the world builds about three or four nuclear power plants a year, and retires old ones almost as quickly).  To replace those coal plants with solar panels at the rate such panels were installed in 2013 would take about a century and a half.

More broadly, energy transitions just take time – for the steam engine to completely replace the energy of the horse-drawn cart and the waterwheel took about a century.  The accelerating effects of the IT revolution will greatly reduce transition time moving forward, but the point remains that renewable energy and energy efficiency gains are a hard slog.

Furthermore, environmental policies are often distorted as they reach prominence, mutating to appease voters and lobbyists to the detriment of their original vision.  People see wind turbines being built in prodigious numbers and see solar cells on roofs and think they are looking at the solution.  Plenty argue that, impressive as these sights are, they are not achieving enough in terms of providing sustainable power or mitigating the effects of climate change.

Consequently, the allure of geo-engineering undoubtedly lies in an almost instantaneous relief from the mental fatigue of continually combatting the problem.  Climate geo-engineering can be pursued in many different ways, but the aim is always to decouple the climate from humanity’s cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide and to avoid the worst effects by preventing temperature rises.  It is to unshackle, if only to a very limited extent, the future from the past and thereby continue with life as we know it.

Humans know two ways of making a difference to the workings of the “earthsystem” (as Morton rather flamboyantly likes to refer to interconnectedness of the earth’s climate and energy).  One requires large, species-wide effort, such as millennia spent devotedly farming, or a century’s concentrated effort devoted to the burning of fossil fuels.  The other requires finding a small thing that makes a big difference – something that offers leverage.   Finding that powerful lever is the key to geo-engineering.

The Trenberth Diagram shown below is at the heart of locating that lever.  It demonstrates the macro-movement of energy in and out of the Earth’s atmosphere (and thereby, how the planet is heating up).  By understanding this diagram, one can begin to identify which levers to pull in order to cool the planet.

With this picture in mind, I want to set out the broad categories of geo-engineering ideas that I intend to cover:

• Cloud (or Veil) creation;
• Cloud seeding;
• Increasing the oceans’ alkalinity; and
• Increasing the reflectivity of Earth’s surface.

Cloud/Veil creation

The most obvious way to find a lever is to imitate nature.  In 1990, the volcano of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines let out one of the most violent eruptions in recent history.  The monstrous cloud of ash and dust that was immediately sent flying up into the stratosphere included more than 20 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide.

Dry as the stratosphere is, it still contains some water vapour, and the sulphate ions within sulphur dioxide turn this vapour into tiny droplets that create an aerosol mist.  Because sulphate drops are smaller than volcano ash, the mist can then stay in the stratosphere for years.  This is of interest to geo-engineers because the droplets are so tiny that they create remarkably high combined surface area, thus creating a veil-like effect against solar radiation.  In fact, studies have shown a veil could be created that would offset two thirds of global warming.

However, the manner in which Pinatubo delivered 20 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide to the stratosphere was surprisingly inefficient.  The gas rose because it was hot and buoyant; keeping it hot and buoyant when was the business of the millions of tonnes of hot rock thrown up into the air with it.  A system designed to lift the gas alone could do it with a lot less waste (and destruction). 

The obvious way to do it would be to lift the gas in an aircraft.  Morton proposes a fleet of 14 Boeing 747-400 jumbo jets at a cost of a bit less than a $1 billion, and a year’s operating costs at another billion. However, spraying out aerosols behind a jumbo jet would be less than ideal.  With a ceiling of 14 km (45,000 ft), 747s can’t get above the tropopause in the tropics, where the veil could be most effective.  They would only be able to put aerosols into the stratosphere in temperate and high latitudes, and then only into its lowest reaches.  That would limit the aerosol’s ability to stay up for a long time and spread around the world.

In principle, a ton of gas can be lifted to the skies with about 70 kilowatt-hours of energy, which is not a great deal – less, in fact, than you get from burning ten litres of gasoline.  If you spread the process out over a year, you could lift 20 million tonnes into the stratosphere with a constant output of about 160MW – the sort of power you can get from a power station running a couple of modern gas turbines.

Consequently, other engineers who have looked at the problem favour vast balloons holding aloft 30-km hosepipes, attached at pumping stations on the surface. However, the balloons would have to be very large indeed.  Larger than the 100m behemoths that NASA uses to lift specialised telescopes into the stratosphere.

Mechanics aside, experience has taught us that veils of sulphur dioxide create unintended consequences.  The post-Pinatubo sulphate aerosol supplied a lot of new surface area for ozone-depleting chemistry.  In 1992, the amount of ozone contained in the stratosphere as a whole dropped lower than at any other time on record.  A decade’s worth of thinning occurred in one year and the hole over Antarctica let in more ultraviolet than ever before.  So a geo-engineering programme that employs sulphate aerosols would, as Pinatubo did, thin the ozone layer globally, with particular notable effects at the poles.

Other expected effects had unexpected consequences.  The aerosols were warmed by the sun and by infrared coming up from the surface; the infrared they emitted as a result warmed the stratosphere around them.  This warming was greatest in the tropics.  So in the lower stratosphere the difference between the temperature at the equator and that at the poles – the driving force for so many of the Earth’s weather systems – increased.  The greater flow of heat away from the equator strengthened the circumpolar jet streams, locking the weather into self-reinforcing patterns of increasingly extreme weather.

Scientists have looked at other aerosols such as oxides of aluminium and titanium or even very small diamonds, but none have been proven to be commercially, or environmentally, feasible.

And, as we see with a lot of geo-engineering projects, the list of potential problems goes on:

• a veil could severely affect the hydrological cycle changing where the rains come and how often;
• to create a uniformly thick veil around Earth would be very difficult to achieve and sustain.  Consequently, each region would be effected differently, creating groups of veil ‘winners’ and ‘losers’;
• on an aesthetic level, creating a veil would quite literally change the way we see the skies by creating a near-constant and unnatural haze; and
• perhaps most worryingly, as the veil increases in effectiveness, there is an ever-increasing threat of rapid warming that could be unleashed by not renewing it.

Cloud seeding

So what about the opposite?  If we don’t want to create a veil, why don’t we make clouds disappear?

In 1946, General Electric discovered that dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) and silver iodide could make tiny water droplets freeze.  Thus, the idea for cloud seeding was born where, if you drop a few kilograms of either out a plane, you could make it rain.  Hurricanes could theoretically be rerouted and dust bowls watered.  Unfortunately, enemy states could also be soaked.  Military interest in cloud seeding has always been strong and it is known that techniques were covertly deployed in attempts to render the Viet Cong supply routes in Laos too muddy to operate during the Vietnam War.

According to the World Meteorological Organisation, there were already 42 countries in 2013 using cloud seeding for hail suppression, precipitation enhancement or both.

As powerful as this ability feels, the problem with cloud seeding is quite obvious: you’ll never create enough rain to keep the global temperature from rising.  At best, cloud seeding can be a useful string to the bow of climate change adaptation.  At worst, cloud seeding can be a nefarious tool used by wealthy countries to push weather problems onto their poorer neighbours.

Increasing the ocean’s alkalinity

Another popular idea is to make the surface waters of the ocean more alkaline, thereby increasing the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon (after which the ocean breaks down the carbon dioxide and sequesters it at the ocean floor).  The problem with this problem is very similar to cloud seeding in that it doesn’t offer a huge amount of leverage.  In other words, it requires a huge amount of input to create the requisite output. 

Imagine using lime – calcium oxide – to add alkalinity.  Morton notes that for every five molecules of calcium oxide added to the seas, you could expect to draw down eight or nine carbon atoms from the atmosphere.  Unfortunately, because calcium is a heavier atom, this means in order to pull a billion tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere we would need to pour two billion tonnes of lime into the ocean.  Consequently, we’re talking about the excavation and relocation of a natural resource on a scale similar to the coal industry.  That’s without even considering what would happen to the world’s marine and ocean life.  Who would pay for such a thing?  Politically, how would you sell the idea to the world that you are going to dig up the ground and scar the earth in order to pollute the ocean and fundamentally change its chemistry?

Other models have suggested using iron (a more expensive and rare natural element).  However, for such a scheme to come close to sequestering a billion tonnes of carbon a year, models suggest the entire Southern Ocean would have to be targeted.  The cost and irreversible nature of such a plan means that it would only be palatable to lime or iron-rich countries with poor environmental records.

Increasing the reflectivity of Earth’s surface

A simpler and less divisive method to cool the planet would be to bounce heat and light back into space.  Brilliantly elegant solutions are littered throughout the book:

• you could paint all the roofs in the world white, scatter the desert with metalised particles or even launch reflecting panels in the Earth’s orbit;
• you could genetically engineer crops to give them more reflective leaves (a plan currently being researched by Bristol University); or
• you could make clouds brighter in order to make them more reflective (Scientists are researching ways in which to brighten clouds by using the “Twomey Effect”.  The Twomey Effect states that the smaller the cloud condensation nuclei (the specks on which water droplets form to create clouds), the brighter the cloud will be because there would be a greater number of smaller droplets and thus more surface area for a given amount of water which means more scattering of light by reflection.  Smaller droplets also make clouds last longer.  Clouds over the sea tend to have much lower numbers of nuclei than those over the land.  Consequently, you might rectify this with some sort of system for making very little droplets of water near the sea surface; the water would evaporate, leaving behind little salt crystals which, by convection, would be sucked up to become condensation nuclei for brighter clouds).

However, these plans to be stored under “Science Fiction” for now.  The science is unproven and the collective will does not yet exist.  Try telling someone in the depths of winter in Northern Alaska that painting there house white will help keep the planet cooler or, try telling a poor South American farmer to plant a different crop that could scare away his customers.   Plans for such homogeneous action fails to account for the variety of lifestyles and considerations that the human populace possesses.  Enforcing such a plan would be painfully dictatorial, nevermind unrealistic.

A world already geoengineered

For all of the negative reaction and cries that it cannot be done, geo-engineering the planet to our advantage is not a new or a novel concept.  Dams are changing the flow of rivers, engineering works are altering the processes of erosion, agriculture is redefining the global cycling of nutrients and patterns and pace of extinction – which is to say, evolution. 

Humans constantly outstrip nature with our dominance of the nitrogen and carbon cycles and the amount of soil we move around with ploughs and bulldozers, greatly accelerating the transfer of sediment to the sea and creating completely new ecosystems.

The most striking deliberate human intervention in the earthsystem lacks almost any hint of the sublime.  No awe-inspiring volcanoes; no nifty stratospheric jets; no angsty symbolist sunsets: just bags of fertiliser.  When fertiliser fixes nitrogen (taking an inert gas from the air and turning it into something biologically useful – see the Haber-Bosch process designed in 1919 that first fixed nitrogen and directly led to the global use of fertiliser), the cycle of nitrogen was irreparably altered. As we continue to pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere and put it into the ground, we are now oversupplying nitrogen to the soil, which is ironically killing the fertility of the soil it once sought to invigorate.

Consequently, we already live on a vastly disrupted planet.  Why shouldn’t we disrupt it a little more?

Conclusion

The inescapable truth about geo-engineering is that it is not an antidote to climate change; it is an additional form of climate change. An additional form of climate change that has some effects that work counter to those brought on by greenhouse warming. Even if one were to know for sure that intervening in the climate would reduce the risks the world faces, it would not follow that such intervention was necessarily a good idea. 

If I assert that a geo-engineering scheme will not succeed due to some sort of technological inertia, some scientific hubris, or by the intervention of some commercial interest or political power, then I must to accept that the same is true of more or less any big international attempt to deal with the climate.  However, as compared to more traditional climate change mitigation or adaptation techniques, I find the following problems to be insurmountable:

• Implementing geo-engineering solutions creates a moral hazard, in that, it disguises the underlying problem and allows us to continue the original behaviour.  I think having such an insurance policy only encourages more risky behaviour.
• There are no laboratories big enough to know for sure how geo-engineering projects will actually play out once unleashed globally.
• Whose hand is on the thermostat?  Almost every level of geo-engineering would be suboptimal for at least some regions of the planet.  All could be winners, but all would be in a different position if the system were deployed differently.  Which countries or organisations are able to make such decisions for the world? And how would they be held accountable?
• Making geo-engineering a bigger part of climate change discussions and taking the prospect seriously, is difficult, dangerous and unpalatable.  It normalises what should remain an outrage.  A world in which such things are discussed is a world less natural.
• Once implemented, the operator holds a disproportionate amount of power as to stop the programme would be to invite a sudden and dangerous degree of warming.
• But perhaps most importantly, geo-engineering is a top-down solution in world where we all want to be empowered.

I would not discount geo-engineering completely.  Some of the solutions suggested above can be sensibly integrated into a larger adaptation arsenal with minimal risk.  However, the lever that we need to find will not manifest in a physical place or a specified action.  It will be an institution, a shared goal, a new understanding of nature, and an obligation of solidarity to address the underlying cause, rather than to mask the smell. 

Morton’s book was a challenging and, at times, overly verbose read.  His flowery use of prose and overly simplistic optimism surrounding the subject only sought to convince me of the opposite.  Cutting against President Eisenhower’s sentiment, when it comes to climate change solutions, I have yet to see a viable short cut.

The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed a Crowded World (2015)

The world contains more than 50,000 edible plants, but only three – wheat, rice and corn – directly or indirectly (through livestock feed) provide 80-90 per cent of all the calories that humans consume.  What is more, there are only three requirements for growing these plants: 

1. fertile soil,
2. adequate freshwater, and
3. a climate that food crops can endure.   

You would think that feeding the planet would be a piece a cake.  Yet, we all know it's not. 

The first two requirements are finite resources increasingly pressed by a global population racing towards nine billion.  All three are increasingly impacted by climate change.  It was originally posited that climate change's effect on world agriculture would be neutral.  As arable land became too hot or dry for crops, it would be offset by land in the colder regions of Russia, China or Canada becoming warm enough to make farming possible.  Therefore, any yield loss from increased heat stress would be counterbalanced by yield boost from the extra CO₂ in the atmosphere.  That hasn't turned out to be the case.

Consequently, what The End of Plenty presents, brought brilliantly to life by the agronomist and former National Geographic editor Joel Bourne, is a problem of monumental proportions and critical importance.  We're struggling to feed ourselves right now, and we're struggling to live off of the land without ravaging it's fertility for future generations.  How will population growth and climate change make those challenges harder?  And is there a plan to address it?

The Problem

In 1992, an estimated 824 million people were considered malnourished (the vast majority of which lived in rural areas of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa).  The problem was so dire that at the UN World Food Summit of 1996 the developed nations committed to halving world hunger by 2015.  Progress has been agonisingly slow.  With that deadline now passed, the number of malnourished has fallen by less than 20 million.

After decades of surplus and low food prices, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation now projects that grain production will need to be increased by at least 70 per cent by 2050 to enable food to be sufficiently cheap and ubiquitous.

Those predictions assume that global water supply will be unaffected, however, the World Bank estimates that 15-35 per cent of global water withdrawals were unsustainable in 2009.  In 2012, some 2 billion people lived in areas that suffered from water stress or scarcity.  In two decades that number will rise to 3.6 billion, half the population of Earth.

Faced with such arresting realisations, why is it still shocking to read that each year famine kills more people around the world than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined?

Causes of Famine

Bourne’s examination of the causes of famine reveals a multifaceted problem.  

Firstly: poverty.  At present, the world's farmers produce enough calories to feed 9 billion people a healthy, 2,700 calories-per-day diet (admittedly it would be a mostly vegetarian diet; meat is in short supply).  It is the cost of transport (or rather, the poor’s inability to pay for the cost of transport) that prevents those calories reaching the needy.  Despite the constant demand, prices aren’t driven down due to the perishable nature of food.  Considering nearly half of the planet lives on less than two dollars per day, a small price spike can radically alter a person's ability to feed himself or his family.

Historically, food reserves have helped to decrease price volatility. From 1960 to 1999 cereal grain consumption only exceeded production in 15 of those years (being less than 1 in 2 allows for rebuilding of the reserves).  Since 2000 however, the world has consumed more grain than it has grown in 12 years out of 15, shaving global stockpiles to less than 70 days of consumption.  In 2007, during one of the recent food price crises, world grain reserves fell to a 61-day supply, the second lowest level on record.  Consequently, even if poverty levels remained even, the fact that reserves are diminishing drives up prices and exacerbates the impact of poverty.

Secondly: population.  This is a simple one; population growth is the base driver of food demand. It is projected that the world will have nearly 80 million more mouths to feed each year, and another 2.4 billion people by mid-century.

Thirdly: diet.  When people have more money, they tend to eat more meat and dairy products.  Bourne's intense study of the farming and meat industries reveals that it takes us five times more grain to get the equivalent amount of calories from pork as it does from simply eating grain itself.  Ten times more in the case of grain-fattened beef.  More than two-thirds of the world’s agricultural land is used to grow feed for livestock and world meat consumption is on track to double by 2020.  Not to pick on Americans, but if everyone in the world ate as much meat as they do (176 pounds per person per year), we’d need to find another planet to raise the feed and fodder for all our livestock.

Lastly: farming practices. Unsustainable farming practices are quietly stripping the fertile top layer of the Earth’s surface despite well-known farming techniques designed to protect soil, such as terracing, strip tillage and no-till farming.  Bourne presents estimates that suggest the amount of farmland lost to degradation each year amounts to about 30 million hectares – an area roughly the size of the Philippines. 

Malthusian Thinking

All of this thinking harks back to an English philosopher whose ideas are almost as unpopular now as they were then.  For it was Thomas Malthus who first said in the 1800s:

“The natural inequality in the two powers of population and production in the earth…form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society…I see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animated nature.  No fancied equality, no agrarian regulations in their utmost extent, could remove the pressure of it even for a single country.”

When the British agricultural revolution occurred between 1750 and 1850, it produced so much food that the population of England nearly tripled from 5.7 to 16.6 million.  Everyone laughed at Malthus's doom-mongering.  How foolish to doubt the ingenuity of man.

And the world continued to go from strength to strength, seemingly in defiance of Malthus’s principle.  In the twentieth century world grain production increased fivefold, from 400 million to 1.9 billion tons (five times more in one century than we were able to produce in the previous 10,000 years combined) and, in that same time, the world population nearly quadrupled from 1.6 to 6.1 billion. 

In that way, Bourne is another canary in the coal mine just like all the Neo-Malthusians before him: Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968), Garret Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) and the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth (1972).

Yet, in spite of the world's great successes, Malthus’s ideas may be reaching maturity.  Consequently, we are seeing an increasing number of examples of populations that have outgrown their resource base and then been cut back down by horrific famines (France, Japan, Egypt, India and China to name just a few of the more recent surprising ones).  

Bengal Famine

In support of both the theory that the world is approaching its limits and in exploration of the understanding of the causes of famine, Bourne dissects the Bengal Famine of 1943.  It was a horrendous famine in which over 2 million Bengali people died.  From the ashes of such devastation, however, came two opposing philosophies that have shaped the way in which the world views food crises.

The first theory came from a Bengal economist named Amartya Sen.  Sen blamed the millions of deaths on hyperinflation caused by the war boom (WWII) and poor government policies, especially the overprinting of currency to finance the war effort.  Inflation fuelled rampant speculation and hoarding by traders that quickly drove the price of rice out the reach of the poor.  Sen called this a “boom famine”.  Therefore, in Sen's view millions of people died, not from crop failure, but from the failure of the government and the market to distribute the crop equitably.

Alternatively, S.Y. Padmanabhan, a Bengal agronomist, claimed that a plant pathogen epidemic which attacked the rice crop that year was the cause.  The outbreak was said to be on a scale similar to the blight that caused the Irish potato famine.

It’s hardly surprising that a philosopher-economist saw political and economic failure, while an agronomist saw blight and crop loss on a biblical scale.  Bourne is even-handed in asserting that both must play a role.  However, Bourne reserves special praise for Sen as he was the first to shift world’s focus from natural disasters to famine prevention and the economic lives of the poor, who still remain the greatest victims of both crop and market failures.  This is a critical and important distinction: understanding that feeding the world and preventing famine is both an environmental and an economic problem.

Water

Water is the most precious of agricultural resources and illustrates perfectly the entwined problems of resource conservation and economic stimulus.

Bourne highlights that we’ve stored so much water behind dams, in lakes and reservoirs, that the collective weight has created a measurable wobble in the spin of the planet.  And, of all freshwater available for human use around the world, agriculture sucks down nearly 70 per cent of it (or about 2.7 million cubic metres, enough to fill a canal 100 metres wide, 10 metres deep, circling the globe 180 times).  Consequently, the problem of water in the context of agriculture is one of scale.  That becomes even clearer when you realise it takes roughly 2,000 tons of water (1,830 cubic metres) to grow a single ton of wheat.

What causes this great demand for water is the need to irrigate farmland.  It is no understatement to say that irrigation has fundamentally changed the course of human history.  It has allowed societies to develop away from the river's basin and provided a great bounty crops in the process.  Even though only 20 per cent of the world’s farmland is under irrigation, those 300 million hectares put 40 per cent of the food on the world’s tables each year.

However, the environmental cost of turning free-flowing rivers into slack-water ponds, has often been overlooked.  What irrigation gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.  By way of an example, 15 million salmon used to return to the Columbia River basin each year (in the state of Washington, USA), providing an abundant renewable food source that fed the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest of the US for millennia.

Our success in diverting and stopping those waters has destroyed the salmon's migratory schedule.  Today, only 100,000-300,000 wild Columbia basin salmon remain – less than 2 per cent of their historic population.  All over the globe, freshwater animals are going extinct five time faster than those that live on land or in the sea, primarily through habitat loss caused by our insatiable demand for water.

Furthermore, now that we have depleted our freshwater sources, our freshwater sources are depleting us.  Where meltwater from the Himalaya, the Tien Shan and the Rockies used to provide 40 per cent of the world’s irrigated farmland with a free form of irrigation, the waters are now arriving in smaller quantities and at the wrong time.  A future with less snow and ice means more runoff in winter and spring, when crops are small or not yet planted, and less runoff in summer, when they need it most.

Many people look to the world's oceans as a saviour.  In fact, it was apparent to John F. Kennedy in the 1960s that “If we could ever competitively, at a cheap rate, get freshwater from seawater that would dwarf any other scientific accomplishment.”  But the science has not yet reached maturity.

Though the cost of desalination has fallen dramatically in recent years, to about 50 cents per cubic metre, it still makes no sense to buy $900 worth of water to produce about $300 worth of wheat.  The cost of technologies will certainly fall.  But they will likely only supply water to entities that can afford to pay such as industries or large coastal cities.  Agriculture, with its high-use and low-value commodities, offers the lowest economic return per gallon.

Consequently, the world’s top water experts have concluded that, without significant gains in productivity in the world’s rain-fed fields, water demand by agriculture will nearly double by 2050.

Green Revolution

To put this increased demand into perspective, I want to rewind the clock a little.

Whenever I've used the term "Green Revolution" I've had a pretty vague picture in my head that refers to an idea that started with people like Rachel Carson and James Lovelock in the 1960s when we started thinking about how ecosystems interact and how harmful pesticides can be, all the way up to the present climate change, renewable energy and energy efficiency movements.  To anyone familiar with the history of food production, the Green Revolution is something quite different.

It was Norman Borlaug’s work as a plant pathologist in a small, Mexican wheat field that gave birth to this Green Revolution and changed the face of food production forever.  Working for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the 1960s, the Minnesota-native developed a strand of rust-resistant wheat and rice via genetic cross-breeding.  That doesn't sound like much, but when you consider that rust regularly halved crop yields each year, the value of a rust-resistant breed of two of the world's most profligate food sources becomes abundantly clear.  Within just a few years, Borlaug's wheat and rice has swept the global, driving yields up and prices down.

Its effect was such that economists have estimated as much as 54 per cent of all poverty reduction between 1960 and 1990 came directly from the Green Revolution yield increases in Asia and Latin America.  Another 29 per cent was indirectly attributed to agriculture, since the increasing yields enabled some labourers to move into more productive sectors of the economy.

However, fifty years after the Green Revolution transformed world agriculture, its legacy is still hotly debated.  The benefits were substantial, especially in Asia.  The number of calories consumed per capita increased by nearly 30 per cent, while the price of wheat and rice dropped and stayed low.  Even with lower prices the higher yields stimulated the rural economy.  Real per capita income nearly doubled between 1970 to 1995, while the number of people in poverty was cut in half.

But the vociferous critics of the Green Revolution focus on the enormous cost it levied on both people and the planet.  The rise in the popularity of Borlaug's rust-resistant wheat and rice led to vast pastures of monoculture crop.  Such monocultures greatly reduce a crop's natural ability to fend off pests.  Consequently, we saw an enormous uptake of pesticides in agriculture and the associated harmful effects first documented by biologist Rachel Carson in her 1962 book, Silent Spring.

Borlaug himself was left to lament the duality of his creation when noting:

“The initiation of explosive agriculture, without a proper understanding of the various consequences of every one of the changes introduced into traditional agriculture, and without first building up a proper scientific and training base to sustain it, may only lead us in the long run into an era of agricultural disaster rather than one of agricultural prosperity.”

That disaster has routinely been personified by the use of pesticides.  Now pesticides have come to represent the start of the food industry as something that increases inequality by prioritising profit over the provision of food to the hungriest.

Food for fuel (and profit)

Bourne argues that at the turn of twenty-first century, two new factors drastically altered the food industry: food grains became the base ingredient for new forms of fuel (that many positioned as environmentally friendly); and commodity markets were deregulated, enabling investment banks and brokerages to buy and sell billions of bushels with the click of a mouse.  Now, no matter how much grain is produced, poor hungry people around the world must now compete for it with Big Biofuel and Wall Street.

The US has been called the Saudi Arabia of corn.  It produces 36 per cent of the world corn crop and supplies nearly half of the world’s exports.  Nearly 40 per cent of that harvest (which would feed everyone in Africa for a year) gets converted into biofuel every year.  This is in spite of the fact that biofuel is more expensive than traditional petroleum fuels, has limited environmental benefits, and may never significantly reduce the amount of oil we burn.  But most importantly, corn is food. 

When you take a bushel from someone's plate and put it in someone else's engine, you deprive them of nutrients, you drive the price of food up and you decrease their ability to purchase sustenance.  It is undoubtedly true that we need to find an alternative to fossil fuels, but food fuels may be an even more disastrous idea.  Only in the First World could we dream of such a solution.   

Another less visible culprit has the potential to drive food prices even higher: financial investment in commodity baskets via derivative markets.  Essentially people have started speculating and gambling on the price wheat, rice and corn.  And just like the sub-prime mortgage crisis, speculating and repackaging an asset, increases price volatility and compounds the resulting effects of a fallout.  Food is not a normal commodity.  Either you buy it for consumption or you buy it as an ingredient to convert it into something else of value.  We should not encourage middle men who merely drive the price up.

Their combined effect can most easily be observed in the food crises of 2008 and 2011 where the price of commodity baskets jumped through the roof.  In the lead up to this period, the IMF stated that biofuels are the predominant factor in a 43 increase in the price of food from 2006 to 2007.  Thereafter, modelling every possible cause and effect for the rising food prices – the drought in Australia, the increased consumption of the growing middle class in China and India and/or the weak dollar – the IMF concluded that the cause of the food crises of 2008 and 2011, and the continued record-high prices, are due almost entirely to the rapid growth of corn ethanol and the machinations of large institutional speculators.  Consider it a new global food tax levied on the world’s poorest people.

Far away from Wall Street, where people spend on average 50-70 per cent of their income on food, the price spike of 2007-8 drove an estimated 100 million people into poverty.

Genetic Modification (GM)

For those reading with a quiet confidence that science will save the day, Bourne handles our silver bullet with appropriate care.

Pro-GM lobbyists and advocacy groups often portray their opponents as well-fed, technophobic food snobs who want to impose pest-ridden agriculture on a starving world.  The anti-GM argument paints an equally charged picture of unnatural frankenseeds that put human health and biodiversity at risk so that corporate agriculture giants can control the world’s seeds and enslave poor farmers.  Truth be told, Bourne presents plenty of evidence for both.

Unlike the Green Revolution, which emerged from foundations and land-grant universities, the gene revolution was born largely in the labs of chemical and pharmaceutical industry giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and Bayer.  These companies rapidly bought small, family-owned seed companies during the 1980s and 1990s to gain access to a wide range of genetic material.  By 2008, the four largest seed companies controlled 56 per cent of all commercially branded seeds.  Not surprisingly, the first products they made were marketed to large-scale, relatively wealthy farmers who could afford the hefty prices the companies had to charge to recoup the R&D cost. 

The techniques they developed moved beyond the simple cross-breeding used by our ancestors (unless you are a feral wilderness dweller, virtually everything you eat has already been genetically modified by the early farmers who domesticated crops) and away from the exposure of seeds to mutagenic chemicals or gamma rays as seen in science fiction, to the point where we can now actually insert slivers of genetic material from one species into another.  These hybrids would be unlikely occur in the wild, yet they can deliver tremendous and targeted benefits.  In a world where half of the world’s people depend on rice to provide the bulk of their daily calories, packing rice full of vitamins and nutrients (see the Golden Rice Project) could fundamentally change global health.

Consequently, I must agree with Bourne that costly and restrictive regulation of GMOs based on ideology, rather than risks and benefits, hinders public research on crops geared to the greater good, leaving the technology in the hands of the wealthy few companies that see no profit in developing crops for the poor.  The continued opposition to new generations is no longer justifiable.  You cannot call yourself a humanitarian and be opposed to GM crops.

However, GMO critics are right that their increased use has accelerated the rise of resistant insects and weeds.  Furthermore, due to the commercial pressure of the suppliers and of the expense such seeds, many farmers have abandoned the most important agronomic practice of crop rotation in favour of planting GMOs season after season.

It is therefore important to state that not all GMOs are created equal, and each must be judged on its own merits.  Corporate biotech companies, whose annual agricultural research budgets have swelled 20-fold in the last three decades remain focused on their bottom line: developing crops that sell more seeds, more pesticides, and create more profit, while aggressively guarding their patents and restricting the flow of their genetic material to public researchers.  In 2006 the USDA reported that private companies spent $5 billion on research into food processing and crop development and effectively zero on research relating to the environment and natural resources or human nutrition and food safety.  These critical issues, along with basic agricultural research, remain the domain of government-funded research and land-grant universities.

Organic Agriculture

Lastly, what to make of the organic food movement?

In the First World, where eating organic food has become more of a fashion statement than a health or environmental choice, it's worth reminding ourselves exactly defines organic food.  Organic food is that which is grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or GMOs, and livestock raised without hormones, antibiotics or via the use of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

Besides being righteous, organic agriculture gets soil scientists excited because it increases the amount of organic matter in the soil leading to greater porosity, more water-holding capacity, more gaseous exchange and more cracks and crevices in which roots can grow.  It means more fungi, earthworms, grubs, bacteria, arachnids, insects and all the other wondrous soil organisms that help make soil fertile. 

But more organic matter in soil excites climate scientists for a completely different reason: the world’s soil contains roughly 2,500 pentagrams of carbon.

One pentagram equals a billion metric tons.  Thus, the world’s soils contain more than three times the carbon currently floating around in the atmosphere and four times the amount currently tied up in forests and plants.  Global agriculture, in repeatedly churning up the soil, has released 50-70 per cent of the original carbon stored in soils in to the atmosphere.  And therein lies the real benefit to organic agriculture.  If farmers could increase soil organic matter (which is almost 60 per cent carbon by weight) on the world’s farmland, they could sequester as much as a third of annual global carbon emissions and help grow healthier, more draught-resistant crops in the bargain.

Conclusion

Malthus’s basic challenge to the world remains.  In fact, his predictions appear more prescient than ever.  We are locked in a never-ending two-step between our numbers and the sustenance we can muster from the 6 inches of topsoil beneath our feet and to think otherwise is naive in the extreme.  Whether we have reached our limit is something that will have to be continually monitored, but it's never too early to devise a plan.  To that end, Bourne has a pretty comprehensive albeit woolly one:

1. Stop farmland expansion, especially in the tropical rainforests.
2. Use existing agronomy to close yield gaps in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe.
3. Reallocate critical inputs like irrigation water, fertilisers, and chemicals from places where they are overused to places where they are scarce.
4. Shift our diets away from meat and wean our cars off of biofuels.
5. Reduce the amount of food that is discarded, spoiled or eaten by pests, which amounts to fully a third of global agricultural production.

It’s not enough just to increase food production (even though that will be challenging enough); we have to increase the purchasing power of the vast underprivileged masses to improve their access to the new agricultural bounty.  It is perhaps the ultimate irony that Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, the man most responsible for destroying the credibility of the neo-Malthusians of his day, was the most ardent Malthusian of them all.

Now we must face the hard reality is that unless we radically alter the way we live, eat and farm, it’s hard to see how we will be able to feed than 9 billion people by 2050 without adding hundreds of millions to the burgeoning ranks of the hungry or ploughing up every acre of potentially arable rain forest, savannah and prairie in a desperate attempt to make our agricultural ends meet.