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Opinion | No One Wants to Say ‘Put Down That Burger.’ But We Really Should.


Earth is in the midst of its worst mass extinction since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago — and this time, that asteroid is us. Humans are displacing other species on the planet at an unprecedented rate, a disaster that the United Nations’ landmark Biodiversity Conference known as COP15 will focus on this week in Montreal. We are a unique threat, but at least we have a unique ability to recognize it and do something about it.

Of course, the first step to recovery is to acknowledge your problem and conference draft plan forewarned that a million species will face extinction if we don’t clean up our actions. But while delegates in Montreal are pointing the finger at everything from plastics to pesticides to invasive species, the loss of biodiversity is not a complicated mystery.

The fundamental problem is that we have converted half of the habitable land on Earth into agricultural land. We are destroying and degrading the habitats of other species to get our food.

This means that the fate of bugs, rabbits, and other creatures and creatures in the world — and what remains of the forests, swamps, and other habitats they call home — depends more on anything else into what we put in our mouths and how they’re made. Unfortunately, telling people what to eat and how farmers farm are politically uncomfortable tasks, which helps explain why yak festivals like COP15 tend to mask the problem. with the word salad.

Environmentalists hope to leave Montreal with commitments from governments to conserve 30% of the Earth’s land area by 2030 and meet 21 other goals. But governments have failed to meet less ambitious conservation targets set for 2010 and 2020. There are also rumors surrounding the company’s commitment to greener supply chains. , but COP15 mostly revolves around the crux of the biodiversity crisis.

The bottom line is that if current eating and farming trends continue, the world will clear at least one quarter more Indians to the year 2050. That would be a disaster for climate and wildlifedestroy carbon-rich and biodiversity-rich ecosystems such as the Amazon and Congo rainforests.

So the trends of better eating and farming should not continue. Humanity needs to start shrinking our agricultural footprint and expanding our natural footprint, after thousands of years of doing the opposite.

This will be an extraordinary challenge, because we will also need to produce more than 7.4 trillion extra calories per year to feed our growing population, in an age where droughts, heat waves, , floods and climate-induced diseases can make it more difficult to grow the dish.

You can see why the word salad sounds more appetizing.

You can also understand why promises to conserve land or advertise “no deforestation” products can be meaningless. Governments may pledge to ban land clearing, but when their people are hungry, the land will be cleared. Some companies may sign agreements to avoid buying soybeans or beef from the newly cleared land, but it won’t do much if other companies continue to buy soybeans or beef from the newly cleared land. Forest.

If we’re serious about cleaning up the mess we’re making for less-affected species, there are four things that individuals as well as nations and corporations can do.

The first is to eat less meat, which is a lot easier if meat is not loved and delicious. Restricting access to cheese sandwiches can turn politicians into ex-politicians, so it’s no coincidence that the Montreal draft mentions changing diets only if it passes the second goal. 16. But the hard truth is that when we eat cows, chickens and other livestock, we can also eat macaws, jaguars and other endangered species.

That’s because cattle chew up more soil per calorie than crops. Producing beef takes 100 times more land than growing potatoes and 55 times soil-intensive like peas or nuts. Cattle currently use nearly 80% of total agricultural land, while producing less than 20% of total calories. Cattle are the leading cause of deforestation in the Amazon, followed by soybeans, another commodity, used as feed for pigs and chickens.

Meat consumption is expected to increase sharply as billions of poor people globally lift themselves out of poverty. If Americans continue to eat an average of three burgers a week while the developing world starts to go our way, it’s hard to see how the Amazon survives.

But we can at least shrink the agricultural footprint by shifting our diets to meat-free meat, like the plant-based alternatives offered by companies including Impossible Foods or other than meator maybe one day meat is grown from animal cells.

Next thing we need to do is waste less food. About a third of the food grown on Earth is lost or thrown away before it reaches our mouths, which means that a third of the land (as well as water, fertilizers and other resources) is wasted. used to grow that food is also wasted. But the Montreal text includes only a single mention of the need to “halve global food waste per capita,” with no hint of technological, behavioral and policies can help achieve such ambitious goals.

Every acre of land on Earth matters, because we desperately need to grow more food, provide habitat for more native flora and fauna, and store more carbon to limit climate change. And that’s why using Earth’s limited land to fuel development. A third way to ease global land squeeze is to stop using farmland efficiently to produce biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel — and stop burning trees for electricity — but the plan Montreal doesn’t even mention the topic.

In fact, there is global momentum to extend the dominance of terrestrial bioenergy. a new one paper in the journal Nature estimates that new European Union policies could wipe out half of the continent’s most biodiverse grasslands and convert a fifth of arable land to energy crops, which would leading to the clearance of overseas land to replace lost food. The EU is also promoting wood-burning power plants, a recipe for massive deforestation around the world.

Farm and forest interests have so much political power that government efforts to increase demand for crops and timber are often seen as untouchable. But if biodiversity is a real priority, they can’t.

Ultimately, if we shrink our agricultural footprint enough to stop deforestation and hopefully restore some degraded ecosystems so they can once again serve as animal habitats, wildlife and carbon sinks, farmers would have to increase production enough to produce more food with much less land. And while the Green Revolution of the 20th century has boosted productivity using fossil fuel fertilizers, toxic pesticides, and other environmentally damaging innovations, the 21st century will need a Some greener revolutions can increase productivity without disturbing the planet.

Again, this doesn’t seem to be a priority in Montreal. There has been more focus on regenerative agriculture, agroforestry and gentler, lower-yielding alternatives to intensive industrial farming that can improve biodiversity on farmland . The problem is that they can require more farmland to produce the same amount of food, accelerating the destruction of natural lands that offer far more biodiversity than farmland. – and sucking in more heat-trapping carbon from our overloaded atmosphere.

Earth now has more than 12 billion acres of farmland, an area twice the size of North America. Adding more is the surest way to wipe out more species – and maybe, one day, our own.

Michael Grunwald, host of the podcast “Climavores,” is writing a book on how to feed the world without frying it.

The Times is committed to publishing variety of letters to the editor. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this or any of our articles. Here are some advice. And here is our email: [email protected].

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