Oceans running out of fish as undeclared catches add a third to official figures

We are running out of arable land, though. Sure, humans only take up about 1% of the Earth's surface...because if we took up much more global fresh water supplies would be gone within a decade. Chemical fertilizers and factory farming have destroyed most of the best farmland, there's a reason your parents/grandparents talk about how food tasted so much better 40+ years ago and now all the grocery store stuff tastes like colored water: because that actually is the case. When you grow a tomato yourself, in a garden with earthworms and compost and crop rotation, there's a reason it tastes so much better: because the hard work that goes into a tasty garden is actually just the basic responsible agricultural practices people used before the post-WW2 industrial ag boom. All of those things could be done cheaply and (partially) by machines, and they were, but then it was discovered that going completely chemical without caring for the earth was even cheaper, and that greater profits could be reaped in the short term and the earth destroying long term effects would occur long after the ag execs had made their money and died.

Almost all of the land is dead now, and in India, China West Africa, and even the (now largely nonexistent) Amazon rainforest it's irrevocably turning to desert at the rate of a Texas per year. It's too late for crop rotation, we'd need to return the land to nature for a few decades and reduce the earth's population by about 3 billion (no, we won't be genociding people, reducing global birthrates to European levels and forcing backwards religious nutjobs who think woman are babymaking machines and every unused sperm is murder to use condoms and birth control pills should do the trick within a century without making anyone dead) if we re to have any hope. Did you know that the arid, rocky Mediterranean climate that Greece and Italy are famous for used to be a lush rainforest with great soil before bronze age humans who were just learning how to farm killed the whole region? What we're doing now is basically a 21st century version of that.

/r/worldnews Thread Parent Link - theecologist.org