Waste [antikvár]

Introduction The Effluent of Affluence Picture an aerial view of the earth. Over the last ten millennia, it has changed beyond recognition. By far the biggest invaders of the natural landscape are not tarmac and concrete, but fields - those green, furrowed units in the countryside. Where forests once cloaked the ground, fields now stretch across continents, transforming the land into a food factory. Cities, roads and industries are mere spots and veins on the body of the earth compared to the changes brought about by cultivation. Since the advent of agriculture, humans have replaced the world's diverse ecosystems with a handful of domesticated species designed to harness the sun and soil exclusively for human food.^ Civihzation is based on the yields that result. But the advance of agriculture now threatens the Hfe it was designed to support. In a globahzed food industry, almost everything we eat - from bananas to locally grown beef - is connected to the system of world agriculture. Demand for food in one part of the world indirectly stimulates the creation of fields thousands of miles away. The onward march of agriculture into natural forests is currently most visible in Latin America and south-east Asia. On one side of the frontier there are pristine forests; on the other are monocultures of soybeans, oil palms and grass; at the margin there is a strip of fire, and an army of loggers.^ Unknown species of plant and animal are lost and billions of trees vaporized into as many tonnes of greenhouse gases to satisfy our hunger. This process is also upsetting the chmate, hydrological cycle and soil to such an extent that the United Nations now estimates that the world's agricultural land may dechne in productivity by up to 25 per cent this century, which could undermine humanity's fiiture abihty to grow enough food at all.^