Oil’s Other Use

[Originally posted on goofyblog 1.31.07]

Overshoot: when a species reproduces to a number that its environment can not sustain.

In 1944, for example, 29 reindeer were introduced onto St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea. With few competitors, no predators and plenty to eat, the herd increased to about 6,000 by the summer of 1963, consuming almost all available food. That winter most of them died. The surviving population in 1966 numbered 42.

At the end of the 19th century the human population was 1.6 billion. It is now 6.5 billion.

The food that made this amazing increase possible came primarily by boosting crop yields with petroleum. With fertilizer from natural gas, with crops bred to capitalize on that fertilizer and with petroleum-powered machinery and irrigation wells, we can produce huge yields — more than 7,000 pounds of corn per acre, for example. Just one lifetime ago, corn yields were one-fifth of that. Wheat yields have almost tripled. Similar comparisons can be made for other grains.

But, this can’t last. The aquifers, oil and natural gas that made possible a fourfold population increase are finite. Over the coming decades petroleum will become harder and harder to find, extract and put to use, until eventually it becomes unavailable for agriculture in any significant amount. Meanwhile, another 2 billion people are predicted worldwide by 2050.

–David Bacon, Prairie Writers Circle, The Population Bubble

This year, 2007, is the year that over half the world’s population will be living in cities:

While the world’s urban population was just one billion in 1804, by 1985 it had risen to two billion and by 2002 it was three billion. If the trend continues, the world’s urban population will double every 38 years, say researchers.

A significant development has been the rise of the “megacity”, conurbations - such as Tokyo, Mexico City, Bombay, Sao Paulo and New York - that have populations in excess of 10 million inhabitants.

One billion people, one-sixth of the world’s population, now live in shanty towns.

Factory farming isn’t labor-intensive. People who can’t make it in the country have to come to the city where they heard there’re jobs a plenty. What they find instead may curl your hair, but it’s probably better than starving.
They will need food from the countryside, but can our system of factory farming (the same system that drives rurals to the city) powered by oil continue? Well, no:

[Factory farming] relies on an energy-intensive process of producing nitrogen-rich fertilizer from oil and cattle feed from natural gas. It requires about 10 calories of oil energy to produce every calorie of corn grown in the United States. Meanwhile the process, combining nitrogen with toxic chemical weedkillers, is literally destroying the soil that our food grows in. The chemically-enhanced crops we grow in monoculture, like corn, are sucking all the nutrients out of the topsoil, turning it into dust. For more information on “catastrophic agriculture,” the energy-intensive farming that requires the equivalent of “4,000 Nagasakis” in Iowa alone every year, check out “The Oil We Eat,” by Richard Manning.

[Non-factory farming] is possible. Over in Castro’s Cuba, the collapse of the Soviet Union doomed an economy based on energy-intensive industrial agriculture and cash crops. The Cuban government responded by mandating an agricultural revolution. Organics replaced industrial, and now Cuba is almost entirely self-sufficient when it comes to food—the country is actually de-industrializing and becoming more agrarian. In 1999 the Swedish parliament awarded the Cuban Organic Farming Group its Right Livelihood Award, often styled the “alternative Nobel.”

-Ethan Heitner, The Dirt on Our Farms

At the end of 2004, the New York Times Magazine reported on the new term,”feral cities,” to describe large world cities where the government has lost the ability to enforce the rule of law. So the demand for food to feed the billions in urban cities will just increase from here on.

But, our species can’t sustain growth if we are depending on big agra and its oil economies. In addition to the global warming/dimming problem (which will affect crop yields and arable land), the topsoil is fading as well. It would take enlightened leadership focused on the long-term, something at which corporations beholden to shareholders and politicians beholden to corporate lobbyists aren’t very good.

On our own, we need to develop and implement an alternate way of producing food PDQ and/or a way to reduce our population growth or we’ll overshoot like those reindeer on St. Matthew Island.