Tag Archive

Getting Our Nitrogen Fix

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Our ability to pull nitrogen from the air fed a growing human population. Can 21st century biotechnology refine the process while reducing environmental impact?
In 1968 the entomologist Paul Ehrlich published a foreboding manifesto called The Population Bomb, in which he argued that the explosive growth of the human population would lead, within the [...]

Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?

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Dr. Robert Zeigler, an eminent American botanist, flew to Saudi Arabia in March for a series of high-level discussions about the future of the kingdom’s food supply. Saudi leaders were frightened: heavily dependent on imports, they had seen the price of rice and wheat, their dietary staples, fluctuate violently on the world market [...]

Letting a thousand flowers wither

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The world will not halt the rate of reduction of biodiversity by 2010
SEEKING to alleviate poverty, reduce world hunger and protect biodiversity sounds, to your correspondent’s ears, like something a Miss World hopeful might have pledged in the 1980s. In fact, it was what a professor of soil quality at a [...]

Another Inconvenient Truth: The World’s Growing Population Poses a Malthusian Dilemma

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Solving climate change, the Sixth Great Extinction and population growth… at the same time
By 2050, the world will host nine billion people—and that’s if population growth slows in much of the developing world. Today, at least one billion people are chronically malnourished or starving. Simply to maintain that sad state of affairs would [...]

A Farm on Every Floor

IF climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly 50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist.