The population boom was caused by the invention of artificial fertilizers. It allowed us to grow a lot of cheap food. You need coal oil and natural
gas to make them
Did you know that sailing ships used to go all the way from England to Patagonia to collect bat guano for fertilizer ? That was before artificial
fertilizer was invented, shows how important it is.
Now, because oil will run out, food will become more and more expensive, because fertilizers become more expensive, and there will be no need for
population control, the population will correct itself
If you don't use fertilizers, the land will eventually become a dessert , look at this description of Greece by Plato :
What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man. . . . Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains
that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees.
Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it
absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned
shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true
There are other ways to do agriculture, without the need for fossil fuels, insecticides or machinery :
How to grow winter wheat
See this :
The oil we eat
Walk from the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. Settlers'
accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a moldboard
plow. A robbery was in progress.
Today we do the same, only now when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers.
So we should learn how to grow food in a sustainable way and without use of artificial stuff. It can be done, but the production will fall.
And grow everything locally. Anywhere people need to import food - any city for example, that place is not sustainable
Daedalus24, to do what you say you need cheap oil and natural gas. Do you know how much natural gas is used to extract oil from Alberta's tar sands
?
A lot, and here you see that there are better uses for it :
www.petroleumnews.com...
Agrium is closing its nitrogen fertilizer operations on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula by the end of September due to a shortage of natural
gas
[edit on 7-7-2008 by pai mei]
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