There are small pockets of the US where people have access to a wide array of fruits and vegetables. These are the towns and neighborhoods where the organization A Fierce Blue Fire operates widescale urban farming, permaculture, and agroforestry cooperatives. Impressively, they’ve practiced seed diversity, integrated pest management, and other practices that have produced yields where industrial agriculture has declined. Expanding their conservation agriculture model is a worthwhile investment.
Federal and state governments should begin to use eminent domain to tear out golf courses, ski resorts, horse farms, and all other recreational lands that utilize scarce water resources and begin growing food immediately, particularly in the American West, where the golf courses use more water than many small nation-states.
During World War II victory gardens grown in backyards and vacant lots supplied 40 percent of the country’s vegetables. This can easily be replicated. The simplistic debate between small-acre farming versus agribusiness systems is a false choice. Feeding a mostly urban populace can only be done through high-intensity broadacre farming. Still, the aggregate impact of every home growing a portion of fruits and vegetables would be significant.
Water recycling is a virtual necessity, but we should also be separating out urine and human waste. We are currently flushing a bounty of treasure down the toilet. Urban sewage can be harvested and used as fertilizer or for urban horticulture. Cities are already concentrating these nutrients but simply flushing it into the oceans.
The US pet industry, mostly consisting of felines, canines, and certain bird species, is a spectacular waste of precious food resources. As the ecology of the planet has shifted drastically, wild animals fade to extinction, replaced by livestock and an estimated 500 million domesticated dogs and 400 million housecats. This has proven an unheralded environmental catastrophe. Cats now eat more fish protein than humans while dogs consume more kilowatt hours of energy than people who eat vegetarian diets (dogs consume double the energy of vegans). In aggregate, pets are responsible for 25 to 30 percent of all meat-based greenhouse gas emissions in the US. I find it bizarre that we ethically countenance a pet culture in which individual animals are vastly outeating the world’s hungriest children. Ending the commercial pet industry and ordering all food earmarked for pets to be diverted to global food aid would alleviate human suffering almost immediately. Furthermore, these pets are as edible as any commercially grown pork or cattle. The cultural taboo against eating dog flesh is only an accident of whose ancestors had access to cheap ruminants. Perhaps it’s unpopular to suggest that we eat all pets rather than letting them starve, but they, along with deer, varmints, and other “low-status” protein, would provide an important source of calories for a nation suddenly lacking in both.
Our agricultural systems were developed and propagated in a climatological regime that is now extinct. Research in food production has gone dangerously underfunded. The world spends some $2 trillion on armaments and perhaps 0.0125 percent of that on food research. The ban on GMO seeds in Europe is counterproductive and damaging for the movement of food globally. Drought-tolerant maize will be crucial, as will the beta-carotene-fortified golden banana. Flood-tolerant, salt-tolerant rice has been the only way to keep yields up in the Mekong Delta and other flood-inundated regions, while C4 rice that fixes its own nitrogen remains a holy grail.
Peter has pointed me to several aquaculture companies attempting to farm the oceans more effectively. This includes marine fish farms in deep offshore waters and genetically engineered “superfish,” which are enormous, grow quickly, and eat anything. Wild-caught fish should continue, though we must impose strict catch limits. Farming the oceans for kelp, seaweed, and algae should become a policy priority. We could produce more food than traditional livestock with a fraction of the ecological footprint using integrated multitrophic aquaculture.
Conclusion: The crux of my most heated arguments with Seth was that I believed creating Forrest was an immoral act (and alas, still do). It was not just the resources Forrest will consume: the water, plastic, and greenhouse gases, the rubber, tin, and timber. No. It’s what lies over the horizon of his lifetime as men and women he will never know make decisions that lock him into an age of terror, violence, and unraveling. As I finished the congressional white paper, I also brought to a conclusion my experiment with Forrest and myself. I returned him to a diet of one thousand calories a day and myself to a standard two thousand, give or take. No doubt you, my sister, and anyone else would be aghast at the experience I put Forrest through, but when I watch my sister blithely feeding Noor and Gregory, I’m convinced mine was an experiment every parent should force themselves to contemplate, for this is the future of our world. It wasn’t the crying that persuaded me how necessary this exercise was, but the silence that followed. When he slapped his bathwater and simply shook his head that he was no longer hungry, that his stomach had tightened to the point where he no longer expected to be fed, I had to leave him. I had to go to another room because I felt as much violet fear as I can ever remember, a glowing amethyst coloring the fringes of every mental avenue. I missed Seth desperately, but this mourning included the strangers I’d met the world over. It included an unquenchable desire to drain all the misery flooding our planet, to put back what has already left us. Because food scarcity may soon be dwarfed by a larger issue. Data from the ICESat-2 satellite indicates that the Thwaites and Pine Island Glaciers in West Antarctica are now retreating at 10 km a year and will likely break off within the next six to eighteen months. At that point, the ice they are holding back will begin to enter the oceans and sea level will begin a dramatic climb. This promises for humankind one ineluctable destiny. Last night, Forrest and I indulged in a decadent meal. I cooked roast duck for myself and bought a cake and ice cream for Forrest. Afterward, my son and I played with blocks in the living room until the boy fell asleep in my arms. I felt him against my chest, heavy and healthy and warm. I listened to his breath whistling through his small lips. I yearned to build a wall as high as a skyscraper to protect him from all the unchecked suffering of our luckless civilization.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
OPINION | GUEST ESSAY
The Legacy of August 1, 2034
Aaron R. McGuirk
April 19, 2035
When asked to resign from my position as vice president of the United States, I hesitated, a rare moment in my life for which I will always carry great shame. This was an unbearable decision, and one that I will always second-guess.
Friends, advisors, and my own wife were begging me to do so, while many within the administration demanded I stay on. I was the only official who could not be legally fired by President Victor Love. If the cabinet could just rally to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, they said, or if Congress could bring itself to impeach, I would be elevated, and a dangerous man would be torn away from the levers of power.
Of course, none of that happened. Victor Love is still president, his cabinet loyal, his allies in Congress shielding him from responsibility for the massacre that took place in the nation’s capital, his Republican opponents besieging him for his weakness in letting the occupation go on for as long as it did. Seven hundred and thirty-six Americans are dead, over a thousand more wounded or grievously injured. Survivors such as Thomas Lewis Levine, a former congressional staffer whom I crossed paths with while I served Minnesota’s second district in the House of Representatives, will be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Krystal Denise Robison, a nineteen-year-old college freshman at the University of Maryland studying sustainable agriculture, was permanently blinded. Second Lieutenant Walter Anthony Pasquina of the United States Marine Corp went AWOL out of loyalty to the nation he served and was shot dead trying to aid a wounded woman. These were not terrorists or Weathermen thugs. These were patriots who wanted to change their country for the better.