The other inconvenient truth Jonathan Foley

tonight I wanted to have a conversation

about this incredible global issue

that’s at the intersection of land use

food and environments something we can

all relate to and what I’ve been calling

the other Inconvenient Truth but first I

want to take you on a little journey

let’s first visit our planet but at

night and from space this is what our

planet looks like from outer space at

nighttime if you were to take a

satellite and travel around the planet

and the thing you would notice first of

course is how dominant the human

presence on our planet is we see cities

we see oil fields you can even make out

fishing fleets in the see that we are

dominating much of our planet and mostly

through the use of energy that we see

here at night but let’s go back and drop

it a little deeper and look during the

daytime what we see during the day is

our landscapes this is part of the

Amazon basin the place called rondônia

in the south center part of the

Brazilian Amazon if you look really

carefully in the upper right hand corner

you’re gonna see a thin white line which

is a road that was built in the 1970s if

we come back to the same place in 2001

what we’re gonna find is that these

roads spurt off more roads and more

roads after that at the end of which is

a small clearing in the rainforest or

there gonna be a few cows these cows are

used for beef we’re gonna eat these cows

and these cows are eaten basically in

South America in Brazil and Argentina

they’re not being shipped up here but

this kind of fishbone pattern of

deforestation is something we notice a

lot of around the tropics especially in

this part of the world if we go a little

bit further south in our little tour of

the world we can go to the Bolivian edge

of the Amazon here also in 1975 and if

you look really carefully there’s a thin

white line through that kind of scene

and there’s a lone farmer out there in

the middle of the primeval jungle let’s

come back again a few years later here

in 2003 and we’ll see that that

landscape actually looks a lot more like

Iowa than it does like a rain forest

in fact what you’re seeing here are

sleeping fields these soybeans are being

shipped to Europe and to China as animal

feed especially after the mad cow

disease scare about a decade ago where

we don’t want to feed animals animal

protein anymore because that can

transmit disease instead we want to feed

them more vegetable proteins so soybeans

have really exploded showing how trade

and globalization are you know really

responsible for the connections to

rainforest in the Amazon incredibly

strange and interconnected world that we

have today well again and again what we

find is we look around the world in our

little tour of the world it’s a

landscape after landscape after

landscape have been cleared and altered

for growing food and other crops so one

of the questions we’ve been asking is

how much of the world is used to grow

food and how where is it exactly and how

can we change that into the future and

what does it mean well our team has been

looking at this in a global scale using

satellite data and ground-based data

kind of attract farming at a global

scale and this is what we found in it’s

startling this map shows the presence of

Agriculture on planet Earth the green

areas are the areas we used to grow

crops like wheat or soybeans or corn or

rice or whatever that’s 16 million

square kilometers worth of land if you

put it all together in one place would

be the size of South America

the second area in brown is the world’s

pastures and rangelands where our

animals live that area is about 30

million square kilometers or about an

Africa’s worth of land a huge amount of

land and it’s the best land of course is

what you see and what’s left is the

middle of the Sahara Desert or Siberia

or the middle of a rainforest we’re

using of planets worth of land already

if we look at this carefully we find

it’s about 40% of the Earth’s land

surface is devoted to agriculture and

it’s 60 times larger than all the areas

we complain about our suburban sprawl in

our cities where we mostly lived half of

humanity lives in cities today but it’s

60 times larger area is used to grow

food so this is an amazing kind of

result but it really shocked us when we

looked at that

so we’re using an enormous amount of

land for agriculture but also we’re

using a lot of water this is a

photograph flying into Arizona and when

you look at it you’re like what are they

growing here it turns out they’re

growing lettuce in the middle of the

desert using water sprayed on top now

the irony is that’s probably sold in our

supermarket shelves in the Twin Cities

but what’s really interesting is this

waters got to come from someplace and it

comes from here the Colorado River in

North America well Colorado and it’s

typical day in the 1950s this is just in

a not a flood not a drought kind of an

average today it looks something like

this but if we come back today during a

normal condition to the exact same

location this is what’s left the

difference is mainly irrigating the

desert for food or maybe golf courses in

Scottsdale you take your pick well this

is a lot of water and again we’re mining

water and using it to grow food and

today if you travel down further down

the Colorado it dries up completely and

no longer flows into the ocean we’ve

literally consumed an entire River in

North America for irrigation well that’s

not even the worst example in the world

this probably is the aral sea now a lot

of you will remember this from your

geography classes this is in the former

Soviet Union between Kazakhstan and

Uzbekistan one of the great inland seas

the world but there’s kind of a paradox

here because it looks like it’s

surrounded by desert why is this sea

here the reason it’s here is because on

the right hand side you see two little

rivers kind of coming down through the

sand feeding this Basin with water those

rivers are draining snowmelt from

mountains far to the east for snow melts

it travels down the river through the

desert and forms the great arrow see

well in the 1950s the Soviets decided to

divert that water to irrigate the desert

to grow cotton believe it or not in

Kazakhstan to sell cotton to the

international markets to bring foreign

currency into the Soviet Union they

really needed the money well you can

imagine what happens you turn off the

water supply to the Aral see what’s

going to happen here it is 1973 1986

1999 2004 and about 11 months ago

it’s pretty extraordinary now a lot of

us in the audience here live in the

Midwest imagine that was Lake Superior

imagine that was like Huron

it’s extraordinary change this is not

only change in water and where the

shoreline is is a change in the

fundamentals of the environment of this

region let’s start with this the Soviet

Union didn’t really have a Sierra Club

let’s put it that way so what you’re

find in the bottom of the air we’ll see

ain’t pretty there’s a lot of toxic

waste a lot of things that were dumped

there they’re now becoming airborne one

of those small islands that was remote

and impossible to get to as a site of

Soviet biological weapons testing you

can walk there today weather patterns

that’s changed 19 of the unique 2050

seas found only in the Aral Sea are now

wiped off the face of the earth this is

an environmental disaster writ large but

let’s bring it home this is a picture

that Al Gore gave me a few years ago

that he took when he was in the Soviet

Union a long long time ago showing the

fishing fleets of the Aral Sea you see

the canal they dug they’re so desperate

to try to kind of float the boats into

the remaining pools of water but they

finally had to give up because the piers

and warning simply couldn’t keep up with

a retreat in shoreline I don’t know

about you but I’m terrified that future

archaeologists will dig this up and

write stories about our time in history

and wonder what were you thinking well

that’s the future we have to look

forward to we already use about 50% of

the Earth’s fresh water that’s

sustainable and agriculture alone is 70%

of that so we use a lot of water a lot

of land for agriculture we also use a

lot of the atmosphere for agriculture

usually do we think about think about

the atmosphere we think about climate

change in greenhouse gases and mostly

around energy but it turns out

agriculture is one of the biggest

emitters of greenhouse gases - if you

look at carbon dioxide from burning

tropical rainforest or methane coming

from cows and rice or nitrous oxide from

too many fertilizers it turns out

Agriculture’s 30 percent of the

greenhouse gases going into the

atmosphere from human activity that’s

more than all our transportation it’s

more than all our electricity it’s more

than all other manufacturing in fact

it’s the single largest emitter of

greenhouse gases of any human activity

in the world and yet we don’t talk about

it very much so we have this incredible

presence today of agriculture dominating

our planet whether it’s 40 percent of

our land surface 70 percent of the water

we use 30 percent of our greenhouse gas

emissions we’ve doubled the flows of

nitrogen and phosphorus around the world

simply by using fertilizers causing huge

problems of water quality from rivers

lakes and even oceans and it’s also the

single biggest driver biodiversity loss

so without a doubt agriculture is the

single most powerful force unleashed on

this planet since the end of the Ice Age

no question and it rivals climate change

in importance and they’re both happening

at the same time but what’s really

important here to remember is that it’s

not all bad it’s not that agriculture is

a bad thing in fact we completely depend

on it it’s not optional it’s not a

luxury it’s an absolute necessity we

have to provide food and feed and yeah

fiber and even biofuels

• something like 7 billion people in the

world today and if anything we’re gonna

have the demands on agriculture increase

into the future it’s not gonna go away

it’s gonna get a lot bigger mainly

because of growing population or 7

billion people today heading towards at

least 9 probably nine and a half before

we’re done more importantly changing

diets as the world becomes wealthier as

well as more populous we’re seeing

increases in dietary consumption of meat

which take a lot more resources than a

vegetarian diet does so more people

eating more stuff and richer stuff and

of course having an energy crisis at the

same time where we have to replace oil

with other energy sources that will

ultimately have to include some kinds of

biofuels and bioenergy sources so you

put these together it’s really hard to

see how our get get to the rest of the

century without at least doubling global

agricultural production well how are we

going to do this how are we gonna double

global AG production around the world

well we could try to farm more land this

is an analysis we’ve done where on the

left is where the crops are today on the

right is where the

be based on soils and climate assuming

climate change doesn’t disrupt too much

of this which is not a good assumption

we could farm more land but the problem

is the remaining lands are in sensitive

areas they have a lot of biodiversity a

lot of carbon things we want to protect

so we could grow more food by expanding

farmland but we better not because it’s

ecologically very very dangerous thing

to do instead we maybe want to freeze

the footprint of agriculture and farm

the lands we have better this is work

that we’re doing to try to highlight

places in the world where we could

improve yields without harming the

environment the green areas here show

where corn yields just showing corn as

an example are already really high

probably the maximum you could find on

earth today for that climate and soil

but the brown areas in yellow areas are

places where we’re only getting maybe 20

or 30% of the yield you should be able

to get you see a lot of this in Africa

even Latin America but interestingly

Eastern Europe where Soviet Union and

Eastern Bloc countries used to be is

still a mess agriculturally now this

would require nutrients and water it’s

going to either be organic or

conventional or some mix the two to

deliver that plants need water and

nutrients but we can do this and there

are opportunities to make this work but

we have to do it in a way that is

sensitive to meeting the food security

needs of the future and the

environmental security needs the future

we have to figure out how to make this

trade-off between growing food and

having healthy environment work better

right now it’s kind of an all-or-nothing

proposition we can grow food in the

background that’s a soybean field and in

this flower diagram it shows we grow a

lot of food but we don’t have a lot of

clean water we’re not storing a lot of

carbon we don’t have a lot of

biodiversity in the foreground we have

this prairie that’s wonderful from the

environmental side but you can’t eat

anything what’s there to eat we need to

figure out how to blink both of those

together into a new kind of Agriculture

that brings them all together and when I

talk about this people often tell me

well isn’t blank the answer organic food

local food GMOs new trade subsidies new

farm bills and you know we have a lot of

good ideas here but not

one of these is a silver bullet in fact

what I think they are is more like

silver buckshot and I love silver

buckshot you put it together and you’ve

got something really powerful but we

need to put them together so what we

have to do I think is invent a new kind

of Agriculture that blends the best

ideas of commercial agriculture in the

green revolution with the best ideas of

organic farming and local food and the

best ideas of environmental conservation

not to have them fighting each other but

for they have them collaborating

together to form a new kind of

Agriculture something I call Terra

culture or farming for a whole planet

now having this kind of conversation has

been really hard and we’ve been trying

very hard to bring these key points to

people to reduce the controversy to

increase the collaboration and we’re

going to show you a short video that

does kind of show our efforts right now

to bring these science together into a

single conversation so let me show you

that

you

is that we face one of the greatest

grand challenges in all of human history

today the need to feed 9 billion people

and do so sustainably and equitably and

justly at the same time protecting our

planet for this and future generations

this is going to be one of the hardest

things we ever have done in human

history and we absolutely have to get it

right and we have to get it right on our

first and only try so thanks very much