Shahid Naeem - Sustainable Food Production: An Earth Institute Sustainability Primer

SUSTAINABLE FOOD PRODUCTION

SUSTAINABLE
FOOD
PRODUCTION

AN EARTH INSTITUTE SUSTAINABILITY PRIMER

SHAHID NAEEM, SUZANNE LIPTON, AND TIFF VAN HUYSEN

Columbia University PressNew York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2021 Shahid Naeem, Suzanne Lipton, and Tiff van Huysen

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-54844-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Naeem, Shahid, author. | Lipton, Suzanne, author. | van Huysen, Tiff, author.

Title: Sustainable food production : a primer for the twenty-first century / Shahid Naeem, Suzanne Lipton, Tiff van Huysen.

Other titles: Columbia University Earth Institute sustainability primers.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2021] | Series: Columbia University Earth Institute sustainability primers | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021016646 (print) | LCCN 2021016647 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231189644 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231189651 (trade paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Sustainable agriculture. | Food industry and tradeEnvironmental aspects. | AgricultureEnvironmental aspects. | AgricultureHealth aspects. | Sustainable development.

Classification: LCC S494.5.S86 N333 2021 (print) | LCC S494.5.S86 (ebook) | DDC 338.1dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016646

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016647

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky

Cover photograph: gettyimages

BEFORE WE START

This short, introductory book, or primer, is about sustainability, which is simply the ability of a system to sustain its functioning indefinitely. In the case of nature, the systems of interest are ecosystems, such as grasslands, forests, coral reefs, or agroecosystems (farms). Environmental sustainability, by extension, is the ability of a system to sustain its functioning for many generations without adverse environmental consequences. A related term, sustainable development, concerns managing systems to improve human well-being but doing so in an environmentally sustainable way. Over the long term, ecosystems are inherently environmentally sustainable, but agroecosystems are or are not, depending on how we manage them.

The focus of this primer is on agroecosystems, that is, ecosystems that are managed primarily to produce one or more desired biological products. The dominant bioproducts of farms tend to be foods like vegetables, fruits, grains, and meat, but farms produce much more, including biofibers like cotton and silk, biofuels like dung and ethanol, and many other products of mixed utility, such as flowers, feathers, leather, coffee, tea, naturopathic medicines, tobacco, cocaine, and heroin. Irrespective of the bioproduct produced, whether maize (i.e., corn) or marijuana, an agroecosystem can be managed as an environmentally sustainable system.

Although farming has been practiced for millennia, it has not always been sustainable, and it has rarely been environmentally sustainable. Agroecosystems today dominate the biosphere, and there is a broad consensus that farming, on a global scale, is currently environmentally unsustainable. This is worrisome because billions of people are in need of improving their well-being. And given that another 2 to 3 billion people will be joining our population over the next few decades, farming desperately needs to become environmentally sustainable so that we can both improve human well-being today without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to do the same.

Before we start, we thought a preface considering the core ideas underpinning this volume and offering a guide to our primers content and intent would be worthwhile.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY OF A SEALED SYSTEM

The core principles of environmental sustainability were discovered by Joseph Priestley, an eighteenth-century British theologian and natural scientist, nearly two centuries ago. Priestley discovered that if you put a mouse in a sealed jar, it eventually expires, and if you try to introduce another mouse, it dies quickly. He concluded that a mouse injures the air by adding something toxic to it, something he referred to as the putrid effluvium. What was truly astonishing, however, was that if he put a plant in the jar, after a while he could introduce another mouse and it would live. Plants somehow undid the injury to the air caused by mice. We now know that mice die in a sealed jar because carbon dioxide (CO2) builds up and oxygen (O2) is depleted, two processes that plants can reverse if there is sufficient light, warmth, water, and nutrients to permit photosynthesis.

Of course, Priestley never used the term sustainability, let alone environmental sustainability or sustainable development, but had he gone further in his research, he might well have. Imagine if he put mice and plants together in a sealed jar and then experimented to find out what it would take for such a system to persist indefinitely. In this experiment, he would have to select plants that would not only purge the system of the putrid effluvium but would also serve as food for the mice. Wastes and dead organic matter would also build up over time, so he would need to ensure that a healthy, active soil is present, one that contained the microbial species necessary to decompose and recycle these materials. If he succeeded in managing his sealed jar of animals, plants, microbes, soil, water, air, light, and temperature such that the system persisted for many generations of mice, then he would have achieved environmental sustainability.

Its possible, however, that such an environmentally sustainable jar might be a miserable place, full of scrawny mice living lives nasty, brutish, and short. If humans were in the jar, they might hope for a little more than the bare minimum. Consider the Biospherians, eight people who, in 1991, sealed themselves in a $200,000,000, ~7 million cubic foot (~204,000 m3) controlled environmental facility called Biosphere 2. They were accompanied by hundreds of species of plants, dozens of species of vertebrates and other animals, including pollinators, and several species of domestic animals, including goats, pigs, and chickens. In many ways, Biosphere 2 was a five-star, luxury version of Priestleys jar. At the experiments end, just two years later, the system hadnt collapsed, but invasive species and weeds had wreaked havoc, carbon dioxide levels were toxic, and many plant and animal species had gone extinct. The mental and physical health of the Biospherians declined, and they worked hard, spending half their time tending their ~0.5 acre (2,000 m2) farm to produce just enough food to eke out survival. Their management of Biosphere 2 was environmentally unsustainable, and their well-being was compromised.

Our world, the biosphere, is in some ways like Priestleys jar and Biosphere 2. It is a sealed system (in an atmospheric shell) containing many plant, animal, and microbial specieshowever, this system has been environmentally sustainable for billions of years, with most of its functions contributing to environmental resiliency. Currently, however, the global consensus is that our impact on the biosphere has altered it enough so that it is no longer environmentally sustainable. Invasive species are rampant, the climate is changing, mass extinction is underway, and billions of people are poor, malnourished, or unhealthy and face lives in which their well-being and those of their children and their childrens children is uncertain.