With the end of 2016 nearing, a crucial question keep popping up every time we are confronted with welcoming festive tables full of abundant dishes and lush food. How would our next generation christmas dinner look like?
If we believe the worrisome facts, we might decide to call these feasts of food doomed:
- The world population is growing towards 9 billion in 2050.
- The amount of workable land is shrinking because of desertification and erosion.
- Our way of consumption needs more and more meat and vegetables. With our current ‘diet’ we cannot even feed ourselves in the future.
- We are destroying more rainforest and using manipulated seeds, trying to maintain our digestive way of life.
So there it is. All undeniable facts, too confronting to digest with a grin. Should we panic? Should we raise the alarm and go into the survival mode?
No. We should do what humans are good at. We should take the last chance of making a change and save ourselves. Because we can. Because there is hope.
- Western countries eat 70 to 300{f4c266a470fc3d8c9597148c9dcc3fa35634a6db0fc07f292e7d1e393ba820aa} more meat then is required for a healthy lifestyle. And downsizing has a great value:
- Almost 50{f4c266a470fc3d8c9597148c9dcc3fa35634a6db0fc07f292e7d1e393ba820aa} of land needed to harvest is used to feed animals and to produce bio fuel… if we downsize on those, we can restore balance!
- We can turn back desertification by starting big scale eco restoration projects.
- We only need half an acre of arable land per person to be completely self sufficient. And calculations show we can manage that, even with the expected growth of the population.
So that’s what’s really on the table: if we change our global diet (less meat!!), invest in eco restoration combined with more diverse cropping systems, and break down mono cropping into small community parcels we could pull through. Not only that: we could all live a self sustaining life with our own energy systems, growing our own healthy food within our own community setting in balance with nature.
If you don’t mind:….We already started!!
