Making the Case for Some Technofixes

To save Earth's diverse life, we need to embrace and improve upon technologies that have already allowed humanity to squeeze more out of less.

screenshot of The Cannery housing complex website
A screenshot of The Cannery’s website. The housing development and the Davis Farmers’ Market exemplify a certain kind of Western, upper-middle-class idea of the good life. The problem is that this way of living doesn’t scale — it consumes monstrous amounts of land, water, and other resources.

IN DAVIS, CALIFORNIA, a young couple is opening the cupboards of a model home in a new development — the Cannery — built on the site of a shuttered tomato packing plant. The Cannery has everything from townhouses for downscaling retirees in the mid-$400,000s to sprawling homes well above the million-dollar mark. The various tracts have appealing names — Sage, Heirloom, Persimmon. There’s something very culinary about these brands, and that’s no accident. The Cannery is billed as a farm-to-fork lifestyle destination. All along one side of the development runs a skinny parcel of land that is actively under cultivation by the Center for Land-Based Learning. Residents can buy the farm’s produce at a mini farmers’ market on-site or subscribe to a weekly box. The farm is not terribly active when I visit in February, but it is studded by bee boxes and bat houses and I see jackrabbits, bluebirds, ground squirrels, and other wildlife frolicking under the late winter sun.

The key to deploying this little ribbon of agriculture as a tempting residential amenity is twofold: first, the New Home Company, the developer of the Cannery, links the presence of the farm with a general mood of sustainability, supported by extra insulation in the homes and a gratis 1.5-kilowatt solar system on every roof. Second, they do not ask the residents themselves to actually do any of the farming. The houses come with token, miniature gardens. Those in the front are conveniently maintained by professional gardeners. One can live here and breathe in the smell of moist loam without ever getting one’s hands dirty.

The morning after my tour of the Cannery, I wandered through the Davis Farmers’ Market, which is held in its tastefully landscaped central park. Enormous oranges, local greens, purplish lengths of sugar cane, and heaps of appealingly matte Pink Lady apples were heaped on stall tables. People of a rainbow of races, ages, orientations, and abilities drank coffee and ran into old friends. Signs pinned to the stalls reassured buyers that “we grow what we sell.” People chowed down on breakfast banh mis and green juices and bought flowers, happy that their purchases were not from the “ industrial ” agricultural system and serene in their understanding of themselves as green, right-thinking people.

The Cannery and the Davis Farmers’ Market exemplify a certain kind of Western, upper-middle-class idea of the good life. It is one that weds buying grass-fed steaks and organic oranges straight from small-scale producers with having a 200-square-foot bathroom. The problem is that this way of living doesn’ t scale — it consumes monstrous amounts of land, water, and other resources that could otherwise be habitat for the millions of nonhumans with which we share the planet. This is the paradox of the “natural upscale” lifestyle — many modes of farming, production, distribution, and living that feel “ natural ” to us are actually less efficient, and have a much larger environmental footprint.

IF WE REALLY WANT to make room for other species here on our shared planet, we must reduce our per-capita and cumulative human footprint. In most cases, this means embracing and improving upon technological advancements that have already allowed humanity to squeeze more out of less, particularly improvements in agricultural yield, food distribution, and reducing food waste. It probably also means that the richest have to accept a less lavish quality of life, which is probably good for their souls anyway. No one really needs a bathroom that big.

We need to decouple human wellbeing from natural resources.

But I do not think it should mean that the poorest should hunker down and accept their lot. I believe everyone on Earth should have access to modern medicine, electricity, and labor-saving technologies that free people — especially women and girls — from drudgery and create time for a life of the mind.

We can achieve this necessary progress without further damaging the planet by “decoupling” human wellbeing from natural resources. The United Nations Environment Program uses the decoupling framework to tout the desirability of delinking economic growth and development from overuse of resources including freshwater, energy, and land. The 2015 “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development ” includes as a goal “Improve progressively, through 2030, global resource efficiency in consumption and production and endeavor to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation, in accordance with the 10-year framework of programs on sustainable consumption and production, with developed countries taking the lead.”

The 2015 Ecomodernist Manifesto also pins its hopes for planet Earth on “committing to the real processes, already underway, that have begun to decouple human well-being from environmental destruction.”

Some decoupling has indeed already begun. For example, the amount of land required to feed one person dropped from 1.5 hectares in 1961 to 0.7 hectares in 2013 . On a per capita basis, wood and water consumption is down too. After all, improvements in efficiency and reductions in the cost of inputs often mean greater profit. But the market alone certainly can’t save us. Capitalism only pursues technologies that spare nature when doing so increases profits. If there is another option — say outsourcing production to a country with lax or poorly enforced environmental and human rights laws — it will skip the hard work. This single-minded pursuit of profit explains a recent disappointing turnabout in the amount of physical materials used to produce each unit of global gross domestic product, or GDP. According to a United Nations Environment Program report, the world economy was getting more and more efficient for many decades until about the year 2000, when the trend reversed, “because production has shifted from material-efficient economies such as Japan, South Korea, and Europe to far less material-efficient economies like China, India and South East Asia.”

cows in a field
I am becoming more and more convinced that most meat animal production should be eliminated in favor of factories that produce cell-culture “lab meat” or vegetable protein products. Photo by Tobias Nordhausen.

The lesson here is that the world can do more with less, but it won’t do it without the people demanding a socioeconomic structure that shrinks the environmental footprint of everything over time. One way to speed up decoupling is to robustly fund international nonprofits such as the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers — places where bright minds work for the good of humanity and the planet, not for shareholders. Another way is to pass something like the Green New Deal, which uses central planning to accelerate the adoption of new technologies to make buildings more energy efficient, electricity and transport carbon-free, and manufacturing less environmentally destructive.

There’s a lot to like about decoupling. Decoupling does not pit the planet’s poor people against its endangered species, nor does it rely on a sudden and unprecedented improvement in our moral character. No grand sacrifices or mandatory birth control programs will be necessary. It is a solution based on technological improvements, enlightened policy, and the marriage of human rights with environmentalism.

THE BEST GUESS OF UN demographers is that the human population on Earth will hit 10.9 billion by 22100.he real cost of living the Davis dream is agricultural acreage. If you want all your food grown using organic or traditional methods, including your meat, you are signing up for a reduction in yield of about 20 to 30 percent for crops and up to 80 percent for beef. Switching everything over to organic or traditional methods even as poorer countries begin to demand a more Western diet would balloon global agricultural acreage.

It’s true that advocates for organic have long claimed that their techniques can match or even outperform industrial agriculture on yields. Much depends on which crop one is discussing and where it is being grown. And most calculations don’t really wrestle with organic agriculture’s biggest problem. Because the rules of its game prohibit synthetic nitrogen, it is highly reliant on manure sourced from organic and conventional livestock operations. And meat, especially beef, is the least efficient use of land you can imagine. Taking into account the land they occupy for grazing and the land used to grow the feed they eat, cattle gobble up 28 times as much land per calorie as dairy, chicken, pork, or eggs, and 160 times as much land per calorie as rice, potatoes, or wheat. And don’t blame these terrible statistics on “ industrial beef. ” From the perspective of its land footprint, grass-fed beef is worse. (Yes, some grass-fed beef is pastured on land that can’t be used for crops. But it could be “used” for wild grassland ecosystems dominated by undomesticated herbivores like bison!)

Researchers estimate that global food availability can increase 100 to 180 percent with rigorous efforts to eliminate waste, close yield gaps in poorer countries, tighten up efficiencies, eliminate biofuel subsidies, and — crucially — quit feeding such a huge fraction of our crops to animals. Indeed, if meat demand is sharply reduced, organic agriculture could hypothetically feed the world on the current agricultural footprint even if it does often have lower yields. But I’d like to actually shrink the current footprint.

I am becoming more and more convinced that most meat animal production should be eliminated in favor of factories that produce cell-culture “ lab meat ” or vegetable protein products spiked with meaty-tasting heme molecules like the Impossible Burger. The rapid expansion of these protein sources could be a real game changer. Some of them use genetic engineering. That doesn’t bother me in this context. I don’t see it as much different from radically changing organisms through conventional breeding.

Good fake meat works because it means people can switch their diets without a sense of sacrifice. In general, sacrifice has proved to be an ineffective environmental tool. Few of us can keep it up very long in the face of easy, cheap, and convenient alternatives. The smarter move is always to make the environmentally superior choice the cheap and easy choice. Lab meat and good faux meat can do that. Ultimately a public that will accept a McNugget will accept the new alternatives — especially when they do not have to contemplate the animal-rights horrors of industrial agriculture as they take a bite. Animal-free “meat” may not ever represent 100 percent of global meat production; cultural factors such as the appeal of animal husbandry and religious butchering practices may mean that a mix of majority lab meat and minority humanely, traditionally raised meat for special occasions may emerge.

traditional terrace rice paddy
Recognizing that the role of low-yield traditional agriculture is essentially cultural doesn’t make it less important or urgent. But it does clarify its role in a helpful way. Photo by shankar s./Flickr

If we stop raising so many meat animals, organic farming runs out of poop and would have to rely on rotating in nitrogen-fixing cover crops, which means a lot of land not growing anything for a lot of the time — a real yield killer. Organic rules are a product of history, and there’s no reason, other than purely ideological, why we have to stick to them. Instead, we should do as Grist food writer Nathanael Johnson recommends and use best practices from organic and conventional and permaculture agriculture to create a soil-building, nonpolluting, possibly genetically modified, hybrid masterpiece that will take yields to stratospheric heights. Synthetic fertilizer, when used, could be created with renewable energy and applied in precisely measured amounts. Such an approach would weave together the respect for land and soil inherent in organic farming with a passion for innovation and technological improvement that is currently seen as suspect in many organic circles.

Putting together demand- and supply-side improvements — faux and lab meat, hyperefficient “hybrid” style agriculture, reductions in food waste, and an end to biofuels — could dramatically decouple our dinner plates from huge swaths of planet Earth. And that land could return to diverse autonomous ecosystems — to what many of us call “nature”. Decoupling from other natural resources, including timber, firewood, wild game, and freshwater, will amplify the effect. It is an exciting prospect.

UNFORTUNATELY, DECOUPLING MAY have a bit of a branding problem. When many imagine a strongly decoupled future, they see a vision of humanity that has embraced technology and human well-being but cut itself off from nature — a “ technofix ” that rips out our hearts. One hears the term “decoupling” and one imagines sterile protein factories, massive industrial farms run by robots, and gray, hyperdense cities without gardens or places for kids to play in the dirt.

An ideal future will feature what I call “interwoven decoupling,” in which nature is easily accessible and part of our daily lives.

But this isn’t what most proponents of the decoupling framework actually want. While our best hope for protecting nature may be using it less as a resource base, this need not entail physical, emotional, cultural, or spiritual separation. An ideal future will feature what I call “interwoven decoupling,” in which the nature thriving by virtue of our efforts to consume less of it is easily accessible and part of our daily lives.

So — how to have our nature and love it too? While most of our food is grown on super-high-yield farms or in cultured meat factories, we will keep our urban P-Patches and demonstration farms and backyard vegetable gardens and chickens — up to and including beautiful midsize farms with some yurts out back for tourists. For those of us who are Indigenous, we will continue to hunt, fish, forage, harvest, and interact with local ecosystems in culturally meaningful ways. We will keep beloved practices and relationships with the nonhuman world going not because they are making a materially meaningful contribution to our food supply, but because we like them.

Recognizing that the role of low-yield traditional agriculture (or neotraditional, in the case of such agricultural systems as organic, biodynamic, or permaculture) is essentially cultural doesn’t make it less important or urgent. But it does clarify its role in a helpful way. Once we see these farms as important cultural amenities, it becomes obvious that equitable access to these farms is more important than their total acreage. Rich and poor children alike should have the opportunity to grow snap peas and pet piglets if these things interest them. Men and women of all ages and social classes should have access to a bit of land to grow food on if they so desire.

While we nourish our sprits with this small-scale food production and wild harvest, we should not disdain the farms outside the city that grow the bulk of our staple foods. Today, some food activists sneer at “factory farms” and “ industrial agriculture ” in part because of real concerns about pollution and animal welfare, but in part because they simply aren’t considered pretty or charming. As these farms become even more efficient and less polluting, and get out of the business of raising sentient creatures, I hope that even those browsing the Davis Farmers’ Market with their basket in hand will learn to see the contemporary beauty in their careful control, closed-system design, and outstanding yields.

After all, the hyper-domesticated tomatoes and broccoli we will be growing in our rooftop community gardens are technological human inventions barely resembling their wild forebears. The high-yield hybrid agriculture that we will need to feed 11 billion people without devastating global habitat loss is no more “unnatural” — it is an extension of the deep and interwoven relationship we have had with the species we eat for thousands of years. And it is that same relationship that we desire to enact and celebrate in micro-farms and gardens dotted throughout the urban matrix. The farms that actually feed us and the farms we can walk to from our dense urban housing are not opposites but cousins. Approaches, innovations, and deliciousness from each can cross over from one into the other.

As in food production, so in many other domains of life. The enemy of environmentalism is not technology, it is unfettered capitalism. When the people demand a green future, using new technologies to decouple human wellbeing from natural resources can be part of the solution. But as we deploy it, we must take care not to alienate ourselves from the other species we intend to benefit. We must take less from Mother Earth but interact more.

An earlier version of this article was originally published in The Breakthrough Journal.

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