The main cause of environmental destruction?
Fossil fuels and livestock.
The livestock?
Along with agriculture, it is the most important cause of loss of habitat, native fauna, soil degradation, air and water pollution, and climate change. The use that is made of the land is terrible.
explain it to me
We have plowed, fenced off and turned over large areas of the planet to pasture, cutting down forests, exterminating wildlife and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed us.
How does it affect agriculture?
Half of the world’s habitable land has been colonized to produce food, and yet some 800 million people go hungry.
How do you propose that we feed ourselves?
Agriculture should offer a high yield in order not to have to occupy huge areas, and a very promising perspective is the cultivation of perennial cereals.
What do we achieve with this?
Avoiding annual plantings, which are an environmental disaster, involve clearing the land with a plow or herbicides every year. These annual seeds need a lot of fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and water. All this leads to a great destruction of the soil and the life that surrounds the crops, the rivers and the sea.
What do perennial seeds allow?
Save the wear and tear of the earth and the use of so many toxic chemicals.
Are they already being used?
There are a number of crops that are able to do this and are being developed in the US and China, where they have already commercialized their perennial variety of rice, which produces at a greater rate than annual rice. And there are a lot of perennial grains in the pipeline, it’s a very exciting thing.
I like that it excites him.
Well, it also excites me that foods rich in proteins and fats based on meat, fish, eggs and dairy products are no longer produced. We are already at it, we have the technological means to do it.
Synthetic meat?
There is a space for productions based on animal cells, but I believe that this will be a much less important aspect than the cultivation of single-celled organisms.
Microbes, bacteria and fungi?
Yes, using unicellular organisms we can generate fats and proteins that can be produced much more efficiently, with much less land, water, fertilizers and discharges into the environment.
Propose to eat bacteria?
We already do it with yogurt, sauerkraut or kimchi, but we are talking about producing whole foods based on bacteria, it is a method called precision fermentation, a very refined form of fermentation that is being carried out by several companies.
Have you visited them?
Yes, in Finland I ate coquettes made of bacteria. Delicious!, very succulent and tasty and with 65% protein. We had to add flour to reduce the protein because otherwise it was like an omelette.
Is it economical and viable to feed humanity?
Very quickly it will become something much cheaper than animal products; we are talking about modular production that requires much less space, in fact requires much less of everything than animal production, and does not pollute at all.
He says sheep are as destructive as cars.
Yes, along with cattle, because they produce very high levels of greenhouse gases and need a lot of space, and land is the most important resource.
Per?
Life on the planet depends on forests, wetlands, jungles and savannahs. If we give them space we can stop the sixth mass extinction, because they are the regulators of the planetary system. But the most important use we give to land is for pastures, twice as much as all other uses combined.
28,000 species in imminent danger of extinction due to agriculture?
Yes, it is by far the main cause of extinction and we have overlooked it.
What lives under a square meter of soil?
The soil is the richest, most abundant and fascinating ecosystem that exists. Its wealth is similar to a jungle or a coral reef, it is a biological structure created by the creatures that live on that land, without those creatures the soil would not exist.
Really?
We are just beginning to understand it, it has very strange properties that are not found in any other ecosystem and a level of connection that we do not yet understand. It is as if the earth itself were a living organism; and 99% of our calories come from it.
