What Is a Peer Reviewed Article for a Vision for Human Occupancy of Earth in the Fourth Millennium

In Davis, California, a young couple are opening the cupboards of a model home in a new development — the Cannery — built on the site of a shuttered love apple packing constitute. The Cannery has everything from townhouses for downscaling retirees in the mid-$400,000s to sprawling homes well to a higher place the meg-dollar mark. The various tracts have appealing names — Sage, Heirloom, Persimmon. In that location's something very culinary near these brands, and that's no accident. The Cannery is billed as a subcontract-to-fork lifestyle destination. All along one side of the evolution runs a skinny parcel of land that is actively under cultivation by the Heart for Land-Based Learning, crowned past an elegant 5,200-square-pes barn that I assumed was restored, merely turns out to be make new and artfully distressed. Residents tin buy the subcontract's produce at a mini farmers' market on-site or subscribe to a weekly box. The farm is not terribly agile when I visit in Feb, but it is studded past bee boxes and bat houses and I run into jackrabbits, bluebirds, ground squirrels, and other wildlife frolicking under the late winter sunday.

The key to deploying this little ribbon of agriculture as a tempting residential amenity is twofold: outset, the New Home Company, the developer of the Cannery, links the presence of the farm with a general mood of sustainability, supported past extra insulation in the homes and a costless 1.5-kilowatt solar organisation on every roof. Second, they practise not ask the residents themselves to really practice whatsoever of the farming. The houses come with token, miniature gardens. Those in the front are conveniently maintained by professional gardeners. One can alive here and breathe in the scent of moist loam without e'er getting 1'south hands dirty.

The morning time after my tour of the Cannery, I wandered through the Davis Farmers' Market, which is held in its tastefully landscaped central park. Enormous oranges, local greens, purplish lengths of sugar pikestaff, and heaps of appealingly matte Pink Lady apples were heaped on stall tables. People of a rainbow of races, ages, orientations, and abilities drank coffee and ran into former friends. Little kids in tutus and tiny Patagonia fleece jackets chased the falling petals of early on-blooming fruit copse. Signs pinned to the stalls reassured buyers that "nosotros grow what we sell." People chowed downward on breakfast banh mis and green juices and bought flowers, happy that their purchases were not from the "industrial" agricultural system and serene in their understanding of themselves equally dark-green, correct-thinking people.

The Cannery and the Davis Farmers' Market exemplify a certain kind of Western, upper-middle-class idea of the good life. It is i that weds buying grass-fed steaks and organic oranges straight from minor producers with having a 200-square-pes bathroom. The problem is that this manner of living doesn't calibration — information technology consumes monstrous amounts of country, water, and other resource that could otherwise be habitat for the millions of nonhuman animals with which we share the planet. This is the paradox of the "natural upscale" lifestyle — modes of product, distribution, and living that feel "natural" to us are often older, less efficient, and have a much larger ecology footprint.

ane.

If we actually want to brand room for other species here on our shared planet, we must reduce our per-capita and cumulative human footprint. In near cases, this means embracing and improving upon technological advancements that take already allowed humanity to squeeze more out of less, particularly improvements in agricultural yield, food distribution, and food waste elimination. This "decoupling" has already begun in do. After all, improvements in efficiency and reductions in the price of inputs mean greater profit. Decoupling too owes much to regime-sponsored research and international nonprofits such as the Consortium of International Agronomical Research Centers. Because of market forces, national competitiveness, and a dollop of goodwill toward humankind, our lives are getting "lighter." It took around 25 per centum less "material input" to produce a unit of measurement of GDP in 2002 as compared with 1980.¹ Meanwhile, it takes one-half as much farmland to feed one person equally it did 50 years ago.² The 2022 Breakthrough Establish written report Nature Unbound found that "nearly all forms of land use, wildlife extraction, water consumption, and pollution have been failing on a per-capita footing for decades, and in some cases for centuries." Of course, at that place is much work still to do.

The United Nations Environs Programme uses the decoupling framework to tout the desirability of delinking economical growth and evolution from overuse of resources including freshwater, energy, and land.^three The 2015 Ecomodernist Manifesto, penned by many authors affiliated with this journal, pins its hopes for planet Globe on "committing to the real processes, already underway, that have begun to decouple human well-being from ecology destruction."⁴

Information technology takes half every bit much farmland to feed 1 person as it did 50 years ago.

At that place's a lot to like most decoupling. Decoupling does not pit the planet's poor people against its endangered species, nor does it rely on a sudden and unprecedented comeback in our moral grapheme. No grand sacrifices or mandatory birth control programs will be necessary. It is a solution based on technological improvements, enlightened policy, and the marriage of human rights with environmentalism.

The all-time guess of United Nations demographers is that the homo population on Earth will hit 11.2 billion by 2100.^v The real toll of living the Davis dream is agricultural acreage. If you want all your food grown using organic or traditional methods, including your meat — you lot are signing up for a reduction in yield of about 20–thirty pct for crops and upwards to 80 percent for beef.^six Switching everything over to organic or traditional even equally poorer countries begin to need a more than Western diet would airship global agricultural acreage.

Information technology's truthful that advocates for organic have long claimed that their techniques can match or even outperform industrial agronomics on yields.⁷ And researchers have shown that if meat demand is sharply reduced, organic agriculture could feed the world on the current agricultural footprint even if it does have lower yields.^viii But organic agriculture has a big trouble. Because the rules of its game prohibit synthetic nitrogen, information technology is highly reliant on manure sourced from organic and conventional livestock operations. And meat, especially beef, is the least efficient use of land you can imagine. Taking into account the country they occupy for grazing and the land used to grow the feed they eat, cattle gobble up 28 times every bit much state per calorie every bit dairy, chicken, pork, or eggs, and 160 times as much land per calorie every bit rice, potatoes, or wheat.⁹ Globally, 36 percent of crops are used to feed livestock, and pasture occupies 3.4 billion hectares, which is 26 per centum of global ice-free land.^10,11 And don't arraign these terrible statistics on "industrial beef." From the perspective of its state footprint, grass-fed beef is worse.

Thus, organic agriculture is not only lower-yield itself in well-nigh contexts; information technology also relies on the continued beingness of a hyper-inefficient meat production arrangement. If we really want to freeze or compress our agronomical land footprint every bit nosotros approach 11 billion, nosotros need to radically reform meat production and comprehend constructed fertilizer. Indeed, I am becoming more than and more than convinced that almost meat animal production should be eliminated in favor of factories that produce cell-civilisation "lab meat" or vegetable poly peptide products spiked with meaty-tasting heme molecules.

Researchers judge that global food availability tin increment 100–180 percent with rigorous efforts to eliminate waste matter, shut yield gaps in the global S, tighten up efficiencies, eliminate biofuel subsidies, and — crucially — quit feeding such a huge fraction of our crops to animals.¹²

Encouraging people to adopt vegetarianism or veganism is a possible strategy to reduce the demand for meat. I myself have adopted the slogan of food activist Brian Kateman, who encourages us to be "reducetarians" — to simply consciously cut back on this environmentally expensive food.¹³ Cultural change can add upwards to something more only a gesture made by a few (consider smoking rates and the declining social acceptability of smoking tobacco in many countries), and disapproval and disgust with the sometimes inhumane methods employed past large meat fauna operations seem to exist increasing. Even given all that, however, I fright that the dietary transition toward richer, meatier diets in many of the currently developing countries will swamp the efforts of the reducetarians, vegetarians, and vegans.

Decoupling does not pit the planet's poor people against its endangered species, nor does it rely on a sudden and unprecedented improvement in our moral character.

More broadly, sacrifice has proved to exist an ineffective environmental tool. Nosotros don't like to cede. Few of us can continue it upwards very long in the face of easy, cheap, and user-friendly alternatives. The smarter move is always to make the environmentally superior choice the inexpensive and easy choice. Lab meat tin can do that. It still has a manner to go in terms of product development and public acceptance, only ultimately a public that will accept a McNugget will have cultured meat — especially when they practise not have to contemplate the animal-rights horrors of industrial agriculture as they take a bite. Lab meat may not always represent 100 per centum of global meat product; cultural factors such as the appeal of animal husbandry and religious butchering practices may mean that a mix of majority lab meat and minority humanely, traditionally raised meat for special occasions may sally.

If we go lab meat, organic farming runs out of poop and would accept to rely on rotating in nitrogen-fixing cover crops, which ways a lot of land non growing anything for a lot of the time — a existent yield killer. Organic rules are a product of history, and at that place'southward no reason, other than purely ideological, why we have to stick to them. Instead, we should practice as Grist food writer Nathanael Johnson recommends and apply all-time practices from organic and conventional and permaculture agriculture to create a soil-edifice, nonpolluting, peradventure genetically modified, precision-guided hybrid masterpiece that will take our yields to stratospheric heights.¹⁴ Nosotros can even fertilize it with small, micro-measured amounts of synthetic nitrogen produced using clean energy. Such an approach would weave together the respect for land and soil inherent in organic farming with a passion for innovation and technological improvement that is currently seen every bit doubtable in organic circles.

Putting together demand- and supply-side improvements — lab meat, hyperefficient "hybrid" style agriculture, reductions in food waste, and an end to biofuels — could dramatically decouple our dinner plates from huge swaths of planet Earth. And that land could return to diverse autonomous ecosystems. Decoupling from other natural resources, including timber, firewood, wild game, and fresh water, volition dilate the effect.

2.

Unfortunately, "decoupling" may take a bit of a branding problem. When many imagine a strongly decoupled future, they meet a vision of humanity that has embraced technology and human well-being merely cut itself off from nature — a "technofix" that rips out our hearts. Ane hears the term "decoupling" and one imagines sterile protein factories, massive industrial farms run by robots, and gray, hyperdense cities without gardens or places for kids to play in the dirt.

But this isn't what most proponents of the decoupling framework actually want. While our all-time hope for protecting nature may be using it less as a resource base, this demand not entail concrete, emotional, cultural, or spiritual separation. An ideal future will feature what I call "interwoven decoupling," in which the nature thriving by virtue of our efforts to swallow less of it is easily accessible and function of our daily lives. The 2015 Ecomodernist Manifesto pauses to make this same point: "Even if a fully synthetic world were possible, many of us might still choose to continue to live more coupled with nature than human sustenance and technologies require."^fifteen

Interestingly, it is really more than-traditional conservationists, those whose environmentalism is deeply informed by a sense of loss and grief over humanity's destructive tendencies, who seem to advocate the near radical separation betwixt humans and the residual of nature. Consider the work of Roderick Frazier Nash, author of the indispensable Wilderness and the American Mind, which traces one of our well-nigh complex and indelible nature concepts from prehistory to the 21st century. Nash believes that the best possible future for humans on Earth is a model he calls "Island Civilisation," in which "advanced applied science permits humans to reduce their environmental bear on" and, while voluntarily capping our population at nigh 1.5 billion, humanity retreats into 500 "100-mile closed-circumvolve units": dense conurbations where all nutrient, energy production, and housing are located, leaving the bulk of the planet wild.¹⁶ Trade between these islands would be minimal. Each would be completely cocky-sustaining and contained. "Of course Island Culture ways the cease of the idea of integrating our civilisation into nature," Nash admits.¹⁷ The sole contact these futurity humans would have with nature would be "minimum-touch on vacations in loftier-quality wilderness."^xviii

Instead of building walls between people and nature, we need to envision a future where human well-beingness has decoupled from the destruction of nature, simply not from nature itself.

Nash's walled-off cities came to heed recently as I read eminent naturalist E. O. Wilson's latest book, Half-Earth, where I found him waxing sanguine about the opportunity to return big areas of land to nature afforded past advancing technology and the gratuitous marketplace shrinking the homo footprint.¹⁹ I was merely mildly surprised to see him advocating decoupling; he is a great believer in the power of scientific discipline to work for good, after all. Wilson's promise is that decoupling can be avant-garde to such an extent that one-half the planet would consist of "inviolable natural reserves." The suggestion is that people are not welcome in these reserves every bit permanent residents. The reserves would be open only to vacationers who visit, very advisedly, so get out — something non unlike the current organisation of designated wilderness areas in the United States. (Designated wilderness, incidentally, represents just 2 percent of the Us at the moment.)²⁰ Wilson also suggests that we can retain a connection by means of "a thousand or then high resolution cameras . . . that circulate live and effectually the clock from inside the reserves."²¹ Wilson is vague about the "non-nature" half of the planet, and I imagine he'd be happy to see it include parks and gardens. But there is the sense that humans should largely stay out of the best nature.

These visions of a separation between humans and nature are recipes for misery. Instead of edifice walls between people and nature, we need to envision a future where man well-being has decoupled from the destruction of nature, but not from nature itself. Nature is as necessary to us as air and water — and non just considering thriving nature provides usa with clean air and water.

three.

In addition to its other virtues, the decoupling framework offers u.s. an opportunity to accost our emotional, cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic connections to nature, as we tin can at present consider them without conflating them or subordinating them to the "ecosystem services" that have been used to justify the preservation of nature on pragmatic grounds.

The "ecosystem services" approach to saving nature argues that nosotros benefit from nature in concrete ways that we tin braze a price to. From the water filtration provided by a forested watershed to the hunting opportunities in wetland, nature's real and measurable value must simply be measured and accounted for in our cost-benefit analyses, and we will brainstorm caring for fens, tropical forests, and mangrove swamps out of our own cocky-involvement.

Natural landscapes and nonhuman species exercise deliver us humans incredible value; our lives merely would not exist possible without "services" provided past nature like soil nutrients, pollination, and oxygen generation. And in specific situations, measuring and highlighting the economic benefits of various natural landscapes can be effective tools. But there are two problems with using ecosystem services equally the but or even the primary justification for conservation.

The showtime is that technology volition continue to develop. Services that are currently provided more than cheaply by nature may be eclipsed by machines and congenital infrastructure in the time to come. A mean solar day when water filtration is more cheaply achieved with a found than with plants, and pollination is more economic when done by mechanical drones than past honeybee drones, may exist only decades abroad. If nosotros have trained the public to value nature only insofar as information technology acts every bit "natural infrastructure,"²² and then nosotros risk devaluing nature as soon as it is less efficient than a synthetic alternative.

The second is that many, if non most, advocates for an ecosystem services framework are really personally motivated by the intrinsic value of nature — not the instrumental value. As philosopher Eugene Hargrove noted back in 1992, most people "believe that just instrumental value arguments piece of work — but yet wish it were not then."²³

Nature is valuable considering people value it for what it is, independently of any concrete economic or practical benefit it provides.

When I say "intrinsic value" hither, I really mean what Hargrove called "weak anthropocentric intrinsic value." That is, nature is valuable because people value it for what information technology is, independently of any concrete economic or practical benefit it provides. Thus, we feel that people ought not cut downward old-growth redwood trees, fifty-fifty if we ourselves are unlikely to do good from their continued existence or even meet a redwood tree in our lifetimes. It is plenty that nosotros value redwoods for what they are to argue for protecting redwoods.²⁴

I maintain that this kind of valuation of nature, which we variously characterize every bit love, respect, connexion, awe, sense of place, and then on, is by far the most powerful motivator for those who work to protect nature. We meet this at the Cannery, where the mini-farm and bluebirds are amenities not because they volition meaningfully feed the residents or save species but simply because people love them. Nosotros humans arguably love nature more now than ever before, as more than and more of us lead lives that are affluent and sheltered enough that nature has ceased to pose material threats to our well-being and has become something we can admire from a range of distances, from safely snuggled on the couch in front end of Planet Earth to elbow-deep in the viscera of a mule deer to riding a high of adrenaline and oxygen deprivation on the meridian of a mountain.

If this love and respect are central to environmentalism, they are also routinely downplayed in favor of "improve" reasons to save nature. Hard-headed pragmatists talk almost ecosystem services even when at that place is really honey in their hearts. Ecologists and conservation biologists insist that biodiversity boosts "ecosystem office" and "resilience" when they might every bit well insist that biodiversity is simply splendid. Restoration ecologists and conservationists are in the habit of framing their desired ecosystem states as objectively the "correct" state. They act every bit if culture and man preferences have nothing to exercise with it.²⁵ Appeals to "historical range of variability" or "reference systems" or "ecosystem heath" or "integrity" mask the fact that the species they desire and the arrangement they desire them in are, generally speaking, dictated past human culture. Problematically, the desired state is usually gear up past what the ecosystem happened to look like on the day the first white man showed up and started naming things later himself.

If love and respect are fundamental to environmentalism, they are also routinely downplayed in favor of "better" reasons to relieve nature.

Acknowledging the fact that nosotros value nature for what it is has two of import implications. First, our deep love for nature suggests that human flourishing requires some level of interaction with nature. Second, it implies that some level of interaction with and care for nature might be a prerequisite for saving it in the time to come. If nosotros wall ourselves off from nature to salvage it, nosotros take chances creating a generation that doesn't really like it. If that happens, we will run into all too well the importance of human valuation of nature for its own sake as the backbone of conservation.

There is a third implication as well, which is that once we manipulate with the thought that at that place is some essential or correct organization of species and habitats that tin can exist adamant by science, economics, or rights, we really have to negotiate the desired arrangements that we want with each other. It is perhaps to avoid this negotiation that conservation scientists tend to prefer to appeal to ecosystem services or "integrity" or something else that sounds objective. By and large trained as scientists, these men and women would rather keep values out of it — and keep the authority that flows from their expertise. Yet, just because restoration targets or land management practices are up for fence doesn't mean that some outcomes are non better than others. Nosotros who love nature must simply now make the case that the mountaintop is better than the mine, the decadent orchard burbling with birdsong meliorate than the superfluous retail park, the jungle better than yet another soy field.

And we won't always win. But we have not managed to stop the destruction of nature with our current approach either. Albeit that our preferred event is based at least in part on our values is intellectually honest and potentially more effective. A pair of 2010 and 2011 Nature Conservancy surveys showed that among adults, 45 per centum said that the best reason to conserve nature is "to preserve the benefits people tin can derive from it," while 42 percent said that the best reason is "for its own sake." But among youth, 56 percent chose "for its ain sake" as compared to 44 percent who chose "to preserve benefits people can derive from it."²⁶ The implication I draw is either that US society is increasingly valuing nature intrinsically, or that we all start out valuing nature intrinsically and are trained as adults to move to a more instrumental rhetorical strategy. Either style, it seems that speaking about valuing nature for what it is comes closer to matching the true motivation of the generation coming upwards.

4.

Interwoven decoupling includes the ideal of equitable and easy access to nature — both bucolic and wild — non just in terms of physically including them in the cities where well-nigh humans will reside, but too including roles for humans in all that nature out there beyond the metropolis, from conservation interventions to cultural or recreational sustainable use.

So — how to have our nature and love it too? While most of our food is grown on super-high-yield farms by highly trained farmers or in cultured meat factories, we will proceed our urban P-Patches and demonstration farms and backyard vegetable gardens and chickens — up to and including beautiful midsize farms with some yurts out back for tourists. We will keep them non because they are making a materially meaningful contribution to our food supply, but considering we like them. Mary Kimball, the executive director at the Center for Land-Based Learning, which runs the subcontract at the Cannery, has been farming since she was a child. She says that urban agriculture will e'er supply a tiny percentage of calories, but that it is valuable because people are "longing for that connection" to the soil, to nutrient production, and to our species' m history of agriculture. But these urban ag areas need not be vast. Every bit the Cannery demonstrates, many people prefer to gaze upon pole beans or henhouses as they jog or walk past rather than do whatsoever sowing, reaping, or mucking themselves. And that's okay. Just many of united states of america do desire this stuff around.

Recognizing that the role of low-yield traditional agriculture (or neotraditional, in the instance of such agricultural systems every bit organic, biodynamic, or permaculture) is essentially cultural doesn't brand it less important or urgent. Only information technology does analyze its role in a helpful way. If we are promoting traditional and neotraditional farming because we remember it is the best way to feed the world, then it doesn't matter and so much where the farms are or who is farming or whether the farms are open to the public at all. But one time nosotros see these farms every bit important cultural amenities, it becomes obvious that equitable admission to these farms is more of import than their full acreage. Rich and poor children alike should have the opportunity to abound snap peas and pet piglets if these things interest them. Men and women of all ages and social classes should take access to a bit of land to grow food on if they so desire. Community gardens should not be immune to leap up haphazardly in neighborhoods where hipster gardener types tend to live, but deployed throughout cities equally a affair of urban planning.

While we nourish our sprits with this minor-scale food production, we should non disdain the farms outside the metropolis that abound the bulk of our food. Today, nutrient activists sneer at "manufacturing plant farms" and "industrial agriculture" in part because of real concerns near pollution and creature welfare, merely in function because they simply aren't considered pretty or charming. Equally these farms become fifty-fifty more efficient and less polluting, and become out of the business of raising sentient creatures, I hope that even those browsing the Davis Farmers' Market place with their basket in mitt will acquire to see the gimmicky beauty in their careful control, airtight-system design, and outstanding yields.

After all, the hyperdomesticated tomatoes and broccoli we will exist growing in our rooftop community gardens are technological human inventions barely resembling their wild forebears. The high-yield hybrid agriculture that nosotros will need to feed 11 billion people without devastating global habitat loss is no more "unnatural" — information technology is an extension of the deep and interwoven human relationship nosotros have had with the species we eat for thousands of years. And it is that same relationship that we desire to enact and gloat in micro-farms and gardens dotted throughout the urban matrix. The farms that actually feed usa and the farms we can walk to from our dense urban housing are not opposites but cousins. Approaches, innovations, and deliciousness from each tin cross over from one into the other.

In the "interwoven decoupling" scenario, the human footprint is much reduced in size, but the cities where nigh people live aren't islands, separated from nature. And the nature in cities isn't express to the mini-farms where people can meet agricultural nature. Nosotros need wilder nature too. So in this vision, tendrils of nature extend from the very large natural landscapes made possible past compact, efficient agricultural systems into the very heart of every city. Advances in free energy technology will, i tin can hope, reduce the need for roads, pipelines, well pads, seismic lines, and other energy infrastructure that have cut ecosystems like the southern boreal forest and Gulf Coast wetlands into fine lace. All energy sources have some footprint, and and then some trade-offs are inevitable, but the footprint for clean energy sources should shrink over time as technology improves.

So — how to take our nature and dear it as well?

Just as the urban farms exist not primarily to produce calories but to produce experience, and so will the ribbons of undeveloped land that wind throughout the city provide experience first and biodiversity 2d. These inclusions will increase the size of the metropolis to some degree, but they need not be huge, and by planning linear natural parks and farms, they tin can be within walking distance of every resident without roofing too much expanse. Those people who desire vaster spaces or fewer other people to enjoy their natural recreation can simply follow these corridors out into the large core areas of nature outside the city. The urban center'south natural places will include our current style of manicured city parks, which have been included in urban planning since the 1850s pattern of New York's Key Park — 843 acres of greenery right in the middle of one of the densest cities in the nation — and earlier. They'll also include far wilder and freer spaces, places to run and play and forage and maybe fifty-fifty campsite.

The majority of the earth will exist given over to nature (though non devoid of humans — at that place will always be groups and individuals who choose to alive outside the city, from indigenous groups with deep ties to the land to those for whom being-in-nature is a securely felt avocation). Nature will besides be invited into the urban matrix in the form of wilderness parks and mini-farms. The tricky urban planning piece will exist making certain that those who want to interact with each type have equitable access.

The most obvious way to practise this is but to make sure that natural areas are within walking distance of every resident. Flooding the market with green infinite will also help avoid "environmental gentrification," in which well-meaning projects designed to improve neighborhoods by welcoming in nature end up making those areas then desirable that poor people are priced out.²⁷ Ane mode to calibration upward greenish space apace is to embrace the "novel ecosystems" that are already a feature of every urban, suburban, and peri-urban landscape. These are the feral, untended lots, the disregarded highway medians, the bit of woods out back of the big-box shop. These places are wild and diverse only take been considered trashy because they tend to feature a robust population of nonnative species. Equally our aesthetics and ideologies of ecological purity change in a changing world, I hope that these fascinating spontaneous natures will be embraced as the small wildernesses that they are. They can exist brought into the fold past a few minimal interventions to make sure that they are rubber and accessible — paths and benches, removal of trash and poisonous plants, and then on. Just I hope that we'll acquire to appreciate and preserve their fascinating and cute spontaneous ecologies.

Natural areas should have a multifariousness of rules; non all should exist of the "look just don't touch" diversity — a style of interaction with nature peculiar to the Western elite. People who want to hunt, fish, swim, build forts, collect mushrooms, and otherwise interact in a more interventionist style should take areas where those activities are immune within the metropolis, and outside it, for those activities, like hunting big game, that require larger landscapes. Those who want to participate in ancient or mod cultural relationships with nature should be able to do and then, whether it be ethnic food gathering, tending hedgerows, or rock climbing.

This vision does non require a radical rewiring of the landscape, at least non in the U.s.a.. Twenty-eight percent of the country is already federally owned public state,²⁸ city parks brand up an average of viii.2 percent of our cities,²⁹ our population is 80.vii pct urban and rise, and agricultural yields continue to improve. Other countries are different stories, but urbanization is on the rise everywhere, and there is at least a global want to increase agricultural yields, improve distribution, and reduce waste, even if the ways are in some places wanting. What remains is to improve the agricultural system further and bring that highly efficient mode of agriculture to all countries, to add and aggrandize protected areas for nature, to support pocket-sized farms and parks in the cities and ensure that all residents have access to them, and to connect everything up in a vast web of green.

If nosotros use up nature, we will be miserable. If we wall ourselves off from nature, we will be miserable. The path to joy is to allow nonhuman nature to thrive past reducing our demands upon it, while loving ourselves enough to permit ourselves to remain within information technology. The future won't be quite like the Cannery. Those houses are also big and the prices besides high. Simply in that location are glimmers of a future city here: dense, walkable, crisscrossed by light-green, buzzing with bees. Every bit the developer of the Cannery showed me around its back end, nosotros observed several healthy-looking jackrabbits loping upward the gradient of a water retention feature. I asked near coyotes, and he got nervous. He feared his customers wanted nature just non something quite that wild. But we do, in our hearts. Upon every child's caput, a buttercup crown, backside every neighborhood, a den of coyotes, and in every pot, a vat-cultured craven.

Read more from Quantum Journal, No. seven
Democracy in the Anthropocene
Featuring pieces by Erle Ellis, Calestous Juma,
Jennifer Bernstein, and Siddhartha Shome

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one. UNEP. 2011. Decoupling Natural Resource Use and Environmental Impacts from Economic Growth. A Report of the Working Group on Decoupling to the International Resource Panel. Fischer-Kowalski, Grand., Swilling, M., von Weizsäcker, E. U., Ren, Y., Moriguchi, Y., Crane, Due west., Krausmann, F., Eisenmenger, N., Giljum, S., Hennicke, P., Romero Lankao, P., Siriban Manalang, A., and Sewerin, S. United Nations Environs Programme.

2. Blomqvist, L., T. Nordhaus, and G. Shellenberger. 2015. Nature Unbound: Decoupling for Conservation. Oakland, CA: Breakthrough Institute.

3. UNEP, Environmental Impacts from Economical Growth.

iv. Asafu-Adjaye, J., et al. 2015. An Ecomodernist Manifesto.

5. United Nations. 2015. World Population Projected to Accomplish 9.7 Billion by 20150 with Almost Growth in Developing Regions, Peculiarly Africa — says Un. http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf/other/x/World_Population_Projections_Press_Release.pdf.

6. Capper, J. L. 2012. "Is the grass always greener? Comparing the ecology touch on of conventional, natural and grass-fed beefiness production systems." Animals 2: 127–143.

7. Badgley, C., et al. 2007. "Organic agriculture and the global food supply." Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 22.2: 86–108.

viii. Erb, K. H., et al. 2016. "Exploring the biophysical pick infinite for feeding the world without deforestation." Nature Communications 7.

9. Eshel, Thousand., et al. 2014. "Land, irrigation water, greenhouse gas, and reactive nitrogen burdens of meat, eggs, and dairy production in the United States." Proceedings of the National University of Sciences 111.33: 11996–12001.

10. Cassidy, Due east. S., et al. 2013. "Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare." Environmental Research Messages 8.3: 034015; FAO. 2015. Inputs — Country. FAOSTAT. Available at http://faostat3.fao.org/browse/R/RL/East.

xi. Cited in Blomqvist et al. Nature Unbound.

12. Foley, J. A., et al. 2011. "Solutions for a cultivated planet." Nature 478.7369: 337–342.

13. Kateman, B. 2017. "The Reducetarian Solution: How the Surprisingly Simple Act of Reducing the Amount of Meat in Your Nutrition Tin Transform Your Wellness and the Planet." TarcherPerigee.

14. Johnson, N. 2015. "Do industrial agricultural methods actually yield more food per acre than organic ones?" Grist. http://grist.org/food/practice-industrial-agricultural-methods-really-yield-more-food-per-acre-than-organic-ones/.

xv. Asafu-Adjaye et al. An Ecomodernist Manifesto.

xvi. Nash, R. F. 2010. "Island Civilization: A Vision for Human Occupancy of Earth in the Fourth Millennium." Ecology History 15.iii: 377.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., 379.

19. Wilson, E. O. 2016. Half-Globe: Our Planet's Fight for Life. W. W. Norton & Company.

20. The Wilderness Society. "Wilderness Designation FAQs." http://wilderness.org/article/wilderness-designation-faqs.

21. Wilson, Half-Earth, 192.

22. Gartner, T., et al. 2013. Natural Infrasturcture: Investing in Forested Landscapes for Source Water Protection in the The states. http://www.wri.org/publication/natural-infrastructure.

23. Hargrove, E. C. 1992. "Weak anthropocentric intrinsic value." The Monist 75.ii: 183–207.

24. For the purposes of this newspaper, I focus on weak anthropocentric value, only it is possible and, I believe, plausible, that nature could be valuable completely independent of our valuation of it.

25. Rohwer, Y., and Eastward. Marris. 2016. "Renaming restoration: Conceptualizing and justifying the action equally a restoration of lost moral value rather than a return to a previous state." Restoration Ecology 24.v: 674–679.

26. The Nature Conservancy. 2011. "Connecting America's Yourth to Nature." https://world wide web.nature.org/newsfeatures/kids-in-nature/youth-and-nature-poll-results.pdf.

27. Mock, B. 2015. "Tin nosotros green the hood without gentrifying it?" Grist. http://grist.org/cities/tin-we-green-the-hood-without-gentrifying-information technology/.

28. Vincent, C. H., 50. A. Hanson, and C. N. Argueta. 2017. "Federal State Ownership: Overview and Information." Congressional Research Service. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42346.pdf.

29. The Trust for Public Country. 2015. "2015 Urban center Park Facts." https://world wide web.tpl.org/sites/default/files/files_upload/2015-Metropolis-Park-Facts-Written report.pdf.

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Source: https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/issue-7/can-we-love-nature-and-let-it-go

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