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By Root 729 0

by combining the best of modern science and traditional knowledge. Walkers in the FAI’s fields on the banks of the Thames will find sheep and chickens sharing space under specially planted shade trees, while barn owl nest boxes scattered around the farm encourage the population of this threatened farmland bird. Nearby haymeadows, protected as Sites of Special Scientific Interest, nurture bee orchids and other rare grassland flowers, while carp are raised in a former slurry lagoon that now collects water runoff from the main farm buildings. FAI has a successful outreach program to help youngsters appreciate where their food comes from: My son Tom and his classmates from the local primary school enjoy their fortnightly visits to the farm and learn a great deal about ecology, the seasons, and farming in the process. FAI’s eggs are sold in our village shop as well as farther afield. None of this means rejecting modern technology or big business: One of the farm’s partners is McDonalds Europe, and FAI’s director Mike Gooding makes clear that ecological farming must be “commercially robust” if it is to be widely practiced and effective.

MEAT AND ENERGY

There are two major current trends that mean the world must continue to produce more and more food from a limited area of land, probably necessitating a doubling of production within forty years. The first is the growing world population, which will reach 9 billion or more people by mid-century. The second is the tendency of more prosperous populations to consume more food in general and to increase the proportion of meat and dairy in their diets. It is important to recognize that there is almost nothing we can or should do to influence either of these trends inasmuch as they affect the environment. Population growth is a given for now, as I will discuss later. Moreover, efforts by well-intentioned Westerners to convince richer Chinese people not to eat more meat are likely to meet with a robust response, to say the least. There is certainly a strong health case to be made that people in developed countries, the U.S. in particular, currently consume too much meat and saturated fats. But campaigners are on to a loser if they try to convince people either to convert en masse to vegetarianism or to have fewer children for the good of the planet.

People’s desire to eat more meat as they get more wealthy is so deeply embedded in most cultures (and getting lots of protein may even be a biological impulse inherent in all of us) that it is not something that is amenable to outside influence. As with climate change, the only pragmatic option is to concentrate efforts to fulfill people’s desires and demands in a way that protects natural ecosystems as far as possible—not to try to challenge patterns of consumption per se by insisting that they are unsustainable, even if this appears to be the case in the short term. Such an approach has failed in the past and will continue to fail in the future. It may also be counterproductive to insist that people deny themselves consumptive pleasures or offspring, sparking populist campaigns that seek to deny the very reality of environmental challenges. A successful environmental movement must work with people’s aspirations for prosperity and comfort, not try to suppress these impulses.

One trend that can and should be challenged however is the global rush to biofuels. There is nothing inevitable about the increasing use of corn to produce ethanol or soybeans to manufacture biodiesel—these technologies offer no benefits to consumers, and have instead been driven by mistaken subsidies supposedly aimed at tackling climate change, but which instead most likely make it, and a whole host of other environmental problems, worse. I once met a well-known American environmentalist who proudly told me that he burned wheat on his home biofuel stove to keep his house warm. I was horrified—and I still am. Putting ethanol from U.S. corn into cars is equally wasteful, unethical, and unnecessary. Burning food crops for power is the worst use of scarce land imaginable