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