> They are unnecessary. Humanity lived thousands of years without them.
Totally agree.
Cca 75% of pesticides/herbicides are used for meat & dairy production (we need 75% of agriculture land for it).
> They harm billions of animals.
And they harm people, too. Pesticide bioaccumulation in milk has been linked to Parkinson's disease, for example.
> But not using them would condemn us to a subsistence economy.
I'm not sure that's true.
There is a lot of regenerative agriculture styles not needing pesticides/herbicides. Current agriculture practices are oriented on mass scale and low prices - when you modify that need, you can have much greater yields, but have to change your way of thinking about it.
One example (sorry, have to return to work process). We've all seen the large fields of wheat, so large, you can see the earth curvature. And not a single tree in sight.
If you remove all the nature, tile it, seed large swaths of land with a monoculture, you remove a place for wildlife to live in.
Without predators (foxes, owls) your crop gets all eaten by mice, which overpopulate easily. So you have to use pesticides (which we then eat in our food & drink in our water).
If you have a monoculture, then bugs easily propagate and there is nothing to stop them and you'll have a large loses. But if you stop planting monoculture (maybe alternating rows of crops with rows of trees, and some bushes & flowers between them), bugs will have harder time to infect whole harvest and there is enough natural predators from the bug world to take care of them.
I find your take on alternative forms of agriculture a little too optimistic. Even with rotation and biodiversity famines and plagues were common before the use of pesticides. Our technology and knowledge are better now but even with that, I doubt that we could sustain the current population. Not in a way as predictable as now for sure. And for the figure of 75% it is not that simple. A considerable part of the crops consumed by meat production are conformed by not edible material that would have to be produced anyway. Material that ruminants can magically transform into food.
But for the sake of the argument let's say you are right. I'm not as interested in the pesticides example as in knowing how much are you willing to sacrifice in order to follow that logic. Let me rephrase my question then.
- Having more than 2 kids per couple is unnecessary (even less than that for some time).
- Each extra human consumes resources necessarily damaging the animals and the earth.
Would you pass a law banning having children whenever the birth rate surpasses 2?
> I find your take on alternative forms of agriculture a little too optimistic.
I've read a lot about alternative agriculture systems and methods. Maybe that's where my optimism comes from.
> the figure of 75% it is not that simple
I know that 75% is not so simple. But meat industry needs cca 75% of the agriculture land and meat is produced mostly by feeding the animals seeds and vegetable oils, so ... yes, it's a guess, but if we'll account for other stuff, like antibiotics ...
> conformed by not edible material that would have to be produced anyway
The ruminants supply a fraction of our nutritional needs, so I would argue, that we don't need them and that we can switch to more sustainable (less land expensive) sources of food. I would return that "non-edible" areas into forests for wildlife/biodiversity, which they were previously and which could even reverse our climate/extinction events currently happening.
Other non-consumable material could be composted and/or left in the fields as a mulch. Exposed soil kills microbes/fungi in the soil.
> Would you pass a law banning having children
No, I would not, because I now know that there is better way.
That population is still growing is a result of our exploitation of poor countries, poverty, a lack of education, and our religious and governmental practices. As we see in western countries, the developed and educated countries have a tendency to stabilize their population.
So the current growth will stop on its own, in time. But we have to make sure that we set the correct example for the new billions, or we'll together eat the Earth dry, till nothing than deserts will remain.
No, that's bad formulation on my part (bad language skills and time pressure, i'm not used to debating on the net all day).
But I think that human civilizations does not have the right to live to the detriment of wild animals or that we have the right to destroy nature completely, just because we love our current food so much.
Totally agree.
Cca 75% of pesticides/herbicides are used for meat & dairy production (we need 75% of agriculture land for it).
> They harm billions of animals.
And they harm people, too. Pesticide bioaccumulation in milk has been linked to Parkinson's disease, for example.
> But not using them would condemn us to a subsistence economy.
I'm not sure that's true.
There is a lot of regenerative agriculture styles not needing pesticides/herbicides. Current agriculture practices are oriented on mass scale and low prices - when you modify that need, you can have much greater yields, but have to change your way of thinking about it.
One example (sorry, have to return to work process). We've all seen the large fields of wheat, so large, you can see the earth curvature. And not a single tree in sight.
If you remove all the nature, tile it, seed large swaths of land with a monoculture, you remove a place for wildlife to live in.
Without predators (foxes, owls) your crop gets all eaten by mice, which overpopulate easily. So you have to use pesticides (which we then eat in our food & drink in our water).
If you have a monoculture, then bugs easily propagate and there is nothing to stop them and you'll have a large loses. But if you stop planting monoculture (maybe alternating rows of crops with rows of trees, and some bushes & flowers between them), bugs will have harder time to infect whole harvest and there is enough natural predators from the bug world to take care of them.
Biodiversity is the key.
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8969332/ - The Biggest Little Farm, sustainable farm on 200 acres outside of Los Angeles talks in some lengths about this] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/07/secret-w...] [https://www.agricology.co.uk/field/farmer-profiles/iain-tolh... - a single person from previous article]