For example, if farming didn’t already exist, it would probably be illegal to start it, because of how turning big patches of earth into monoculture completely destroys preexisting ecosystems. There is no known effective way to mitigate this damage, efficient farming at scale requires this, and inefficient methods will require more land and likely cause more damage.
Similarly, blanketing deserts with solar panels will very much significantly damage existing fragile desert ecosystems. You can maybe avoid some of the negative aspects by carefully chosen procedures, but in general, there is no way around it.
The question is whether the specter of environmental destruction will hold us hostage, and allow other, grandfathered environmental destruction to proceed.
Permaculture people would probably argue about the higher productivity of permaculture systems (which theoretically have a better shot at maintaining/mimicking natural ecosystems) versus standard monoculture farming. The problem is that permaculture outputs don't fit neatly into the existing industrialized food supply chain.
In theory we could produce more food and fuel while preserving diverse ecosystems, but it would require refactoring our entire conception of what we eat, how it is produced & preserved, distributed, etc...
“Permaculture” is just a meme among hobby farmers with an environmental knack, it’s simply not possible to feed the people this way (whatever permaculture actually is in practice, as it seems to mean something different every time I hear about it), and even then it still destroys the preexisting ecosystems.
> The problem is that permaculture outputs don't fit neatly into the existing industrialized food supply chain.
No, that’s not a problem, “food supply chain” will buy produce from you with not a lot of concern of how you have grown it, as long as it meats the specs. The problem with “permaculture” kind of stuff is that it simply doesn’t produce adequate amounts of food, relative to required investment of labor. That’s the problem with it, not “industrial supply chain”.
> In theory we could produce more food and fuel while preserving diverse ecosystems, but it would require refactoring our entire conception of what we eat, how it is produced & preserved, distributed, etc...
I hear this kind of vague stuff often, but rarely any concrete proposals. Whenever I do, these almost always involve reducing the human population to a fraction of existing population, and have the remaining ones consume only a fraction of what people consume today, with higher labor investment required from each. This is, obviously, a non-starter, which is why actual, concrete proposals are not forthcoming.
For example, if farming didn’t already exist, it would probably be illegal to start it, because of how turning big patches of earth into monoculture completely destroys preexisting ecosystems. There is no known effective way to mitigate this damage, efficient farming at scale requires this, and inefficient methods will require more land and likely cause more damage.
Similarly, blanketing deserts with solar panels will very much significantly damage existing fragile desert ecosystems. You can maybe avoid some of the negative aspects by carefully chosen procedures, but in general, there is no way around it.
The question is whether the specter of environmental destruction will hold us hostage, and allow other, grandfathered environmental destruction to proceed.