The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [182]
p. 139 ‘Robert Malthus’. Yes, Robert: to call Thomas Robert Malthus by his first name which he did not use, is like calling the first director of the FBI John Hoover.
p. 140 ‘the eminent British chemist Sir William Crookes gave a similar jeremiad’. Crookes, W. 1898. The Wheat Problem. Reissued by Ayers 1976.
p. 140 ‘Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch’. Smil, V. 2001. Enriching the Earth. MIT Press.
pp. 140–1 ‘As late as 1920, over three million acres of good agricultural land in the American Midwest lay uncultivated’. Clark, C. 1970. Starvation or Plenty? Secker and Warburg.
p. 142 ‘a scientist working in Mexico called Norman Borlaug’. Easterbrook, G. 1997. Forgotten benefactor of humanity. The Atlantic Monthly.
p. 143 ‘In 1968, after huge shipments of Mexican seed, the wheat harvest was extraordinary in both countries.’ Hesser, L. 2006. The Man Who Fed the World. Durban House. See Borlaug, N.E. 2000. Ending world hunger: the promise of biotechnology and the threat of antiscience zealotry. Plant Physiology 124:487–90. Also author’s interview with N. Borlaug 2004.
p. 144 ‘Intensification has saved 44 per cent of this planet for wilderness.’ Goklany I. 2001. Agriculture and the environment: the pros and cons of modern farming. PERC Reports 19:12–14.
p. 144 ‘Some argue that the human race already appropriates for itself an unsustainable fraction of the planet’s primary production’. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that humankind is already overdrawn in its use of earth’s resources, but it reaches this conclusion only by including a vast acreage of new forest planting needed to balance each person’s carbon emissions.
p. 144 ‘HANPP – the “human appropriation of net primary productivity”’. Haberl, H. et al. 2007. Quantifying and mapping the human appropriation of net primary production in earth’s terrestrial ecosystems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:12942–7.
p. 145 ‘These findings suggest that, on a global scale, there may be a considerable potential to raise agricultural output without necessarily increasing HANPP’. Haberl, H. et al. 2007. Quantifying and mapping the human appropriation of net primary production in earth’s terrestrial ecosystems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:12942–7.
p. 145 ‘Even the confinement of chickens, pigs and cattle to indoor barns and batteries’. Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute has written on this. See http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=3988.
p. 146 ‘Colin Clark calculated that human beings could in theory sustain themselves on just twenty-seven square metres of land each’. Clark, C. 1963. Agricultural productivity in relation to population. In Man and His Future, CIBA Foundation; also Clark, C. 1970. Starvation or Plenty? Secker and Warburg.
p. 146 ‘the world grew about two billion tonnes of rice, wheat and maize on about half a billion hectares of land’. Statistics taken from the FAO: www.faostat.fao.org.
p. 147 ‘would mean an extra seven billion cattle grazing an extra thirty billion acres of pasture’. Smil, V. 2001. Enriching the Earth. MIT Press. See also http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/22792/Greenpeace_Farming_Plan_Would_Reap_Environmental_Havoc_around_the_World.html: Dennis Avery asked Vaclav Smil to make this calculation.
p. 147 ‘Lester Brown points out that India depends heavily on a rapidly depleting aquifer and a slowly drying Ganges’. Brown, L. 2008. Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilisation. Earth Policy Institute.
p. 148 ‘Once it is properly priced by markets, water is not only used more frugally’. Morriss, A.P. 2006. Real people, real resources and real choices: the case for market valuation of water. Texas Tech Law Review 38.
p. 149 ‘as a professor and a chef have both suggested on my radio recently’. The professor and the chef I refer to are Tim Lang and Gordon Ramsey. ‘Why are we buying food from other people which should be feeding developing countries?’ asked Tim Lang, member of the Sustainable Development Commission, on the BBC Today programme, 4