Submitted by Ant in quotes (edited )

Slightly broader context of the quote:

However, we do not have to wait until then to overshoot the planet’s human carrying capacity (its maximum permanently supported load) as we have probably done so already. Industrial civilisation has managed to push up food supply by both colonising ever more wild land for agriculture and developing fossil fuel reliant ‘green revolution’ agro-technologies and transportation. Essentially, industrial agriculture relies on the harvesting of ghost acreage (the fossilised photosynthetic production of ecosystems millions of years ago) to produce food at the present rate. This can be only temporary, for unless one is a believer in the cornucopian myth that resources are limitless, someday the fossil-fuel hunting will draw a blank. When this will happen no-one really knows, though many argue that we have already passed ‘peak oil’. Some may counter that hydrogen fuel cells, solar power, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and green goo will somehow avert a population crash. These apostles of progress more and more resemble cargo cults in their belief that technology marshalled by either the market (if capitalist) or state planning (if socialist) will provide all that is needed. In the unlikely event that they’re right, and the food supply does keep up with population growth, the highly managed nature of the provision will guarantee that the ‘freedom supply’ (for both humans and other animals) is increasingly scarce. So the rapidly growing human population needs fossil fuels to stay alive.
Most of us are eating oil and illness is largely controlled with high energy reliant technologies. Here is yet another reason I doubt the ability of activists, or states for that matter, to convince society to decarbonise. It sounds nice, but for millions, if not billions, it would mean shorter lives if humanity stopped importing from the past.


readdesert.org

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MHC wrote

Farming is mining soil!

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