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that these areas mostly have low if any agricultural value (no one is suggesting plowing up Antarctica, for obvious reasons), the bill for global protection could be as low as $50 billion.25 If this one-off payment is concentrated as an endowment, then management and compensation could be provided in perpetuity from the interest it generates. Here is an opportunity for conservationists to be much more ambitious and to focus on vast areas of the planet that have little economic value and so can be protected very cost-effectively. We need a global movement for wilderness protection that is less focused on small areas within nation-states, and more concerned with transboundary ecological zones that extend around the entire planet.

Hand in hand with the protection of high-biodiversity and wilderness areas must come a better use of the land that is devoted to human-centered agriculture. This does not mean, as the previous chapter showed, that world farming should become organic: quite the opposite. Because organic agriculture produces on average only half the yield of crops per unit of land as conventional farming, any mass conversion to organic would end up using much more land and rapidly breaching the land-use limit proposed by the planetary boundaries expert group. Here some trade-offs between different planetary boundaries come into evidence: Organic is certainly better for reducing nitrogen runoff and the toxic impacts of pesticides, and may also help to promote wildlife in situ; but by using more land it is bound to end up further displacing natural ecosystems and reducing biodiversity overall. Instead, intensification—producing more yield per unit of existing farmland—using advanced farming technologies and high-yielding varieties of crops offers a more promising route to feeding a larger and more prosperous human population. Even so, some additional land will need to be brought into production to satisfy future increases in demand. The planetary boundaries expert group suggests a focus on abandoned cropland in Europe and North America, together with land in the former Soviet Union and “some areas of Africa’s savannas and South America’s cerrado” for this unavoidable increase in cultivated area.

Questioning organic agriculture because of its land-use implications does not mean rejecting ecological principles in general. Instead, it means that farmers need to take the best of modern science and ecology to deliver maximum yields with minimum environmental damage. The precise combinations of herbicides, pesticides, irrigation, machinery, and crop types will differ in different regions and climates. Some benefits may be unexpected: As we have already seen, the combination of weedkillers and genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant crops has allowed the widespread adoption of no-till agriculture in the U.S. and Canada, improving soil carbon stocks and reducing erosion. Transgenic crops that incorporate their own pest resistance have also dramatically reduced the use of toxic pesticides, benefiting the environment still further.

In some areas, integrated pest management—encouraging natural predators to reduce pest infestations in crops—may be a better way to maximize yields than toxic pesticide sprays and could work well together with genetic engineering. Combining different crops can also be highly beneficial, for example via agroforestry, where trees are part of the production system and deliver shade and timber as well as benefits for wildlife. Aquaculture, where fish are raised in water-storage ponds or in flooded rice paddies, helps recycle nutrients as well as maximizing the production of animal protein on a farm. The agricultural scientist Jules Pretty calls this “sustainable intensification”—maximizing productivity while also protecting ecosystems as far as possible within the wider landscape.

Just down the road from me in Oxfordshire, outside the pretty village of Wytham with its thatched stone-built cottages, is the Food Animal Initiative (FAI), a farm run on ecological principles that seeks to meet these challenges