Rodney Heitschmidt and Jerry Stuth point out that “[h]umankind has historically fostered and relied upon livestock grazing for a substantial portion of its livelihood because it is the only process capable of converting the energy in grassland vegetation into  an energy source directly consumable by humans.” Nineteen billion metric tons of vegetation are produced by [...]

Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, [...]

And when you suggest these are the things that will insure the future of good food, someone somewhere stands up and says, “Hey guy, I love pink flamingos, but how are you going to feed the world? How are you going to feed the world?” Can I be honest? I don’t love that question. No, [...]

And agriculture suddenly appeared to me not as an invention, not as a human technology, but as a co-evolutionary development in which a group of very clever species, mostly edible grasses, had exploited us, figured out how to get us to basically deforest the world. L’agricoltura improvvisamente non mi è apparsa come un’invenzione, come una [...]

Alle volte mi balena in mente una cosa: spesso do per scontate certe verità che reputo ormai assodate. Invece non per tutti sono tali: per questo, spesso è meglio ribadire anche ciò che pare ovvio. Comprare un’auto, qualsiasi auto, resta un atto profondamente negativo per l’ambiente. Le auto sono sistemi meccanici complessi, e richiedono un [...]