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Food, Energy, and Society

John Hopkins → 30::January::2010 07:58 → cats::bibliography, thesis

For most of the time that humans have inhabited the earth, their prime source of power has been their own muscle power. …

Early additional sources of power included human slaves and domesticated animals. The hunting/gathering societies were helped when an extra food gatherer or hunter could join in the task of securing food. Likewise, the labor intensiveness of primitive agriculture increased both the need for and the usefulness of slave and animal labor. …

A slave or extra hunter, of course, would have to be fed. However, two hunters could kill more than twice as much game as a single hunter could kill alone. In this way, additional labor provided a greater return in energy than the energy input required for its maintenance. (p. 68)

Pimentel, D., Pimentel, M., 2008, Food, Energy, and Society, Third Edition, Taylor And Francis Group, Boca Raton, Florida. [Pimentel, D., Pimentel, M., 1996, Food Energy and Society (revised edition), University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, 1996]

I haven’t gotten access to the most current (2008) edition of this major collation of numbers, but the 1996 version is recent enough for the extrapolation process to be framed and the principles to be clearly demonstrated. Unfortunately that extrapolation reveals a worsening situation than they originally laid out (or imagined!) in 1979. With a detailed quantitative analysis of the (energy) costs of all eras and types of food production, as well as an examination of pesticide use, water, biodiversity, and soil resource issues, the separate chapters are full of numbers and comparisons which are remarkable in extent and sobering in their basic message. It would be possible to verify the extensive research in detail by tracking down the fifty-pages of references, but the message is simple: the human species is exerting an ever-increasing energy drain on the global environment merely to subsist, and there are definitely better and worse ways to marginally affect the situation. Humans tend to be wasteful — but any life-form causes this process of entropic waste (energy) production merely by living — it is not an avoidable condition. It appears now that the problems are of such a wide-scale, and the solutions are presently so haphazard (as applied by nation-states rather than through some trans-national instrument), that the inevitable upward geometric curves (population, resource consumption, environmental degradation, etc) will reach their limit. Those curves as they exist in the mathematical domain have no real upward limit and may approach infinity asymptotically. This would represent the system with infinite energy reserves. The earth as a sub-system of the cosmos is finite, and so are the energy resources it makes available for human use.

At some level, all of this is obvious and has been communicated from the science community to the general population in a variety of forms since the 1960’s. The problem is that the behavioral feedback structured by the wider and increasingly complex social system completely overrides almost any reasonable possibility to connect cause and effect. One could begin to try and connect the dots: the energy expended driving five kilometers to the grocery store — just in the hydrocarbon cost, not accounting for the energy cost of the vehicle, the roads, the massive food distribution system — is itself enough, converted to plant protein, to live off of for several months. This book allows one to ‘do the math,’ problem is, most people can’t do math, and wouldn’t if they could. It is the principle that matters. The connection between higher technological systems and increased per capita energy consumption for ‘basic’ living is direct. While there are a few surprises, most data reflects common sense. Although common sense (common knowledge) would likely not realize that 1 kg. (2.2 lbs) of chocolate or coffee requires 18,000 kcal of energy input for the processing — and that doesn’t include packaging, delivery, or brewing. That’s the amount of energy a well-nourished adult in a developed country consumes in four days. More elsewhere!

As for slavery, mentioned above, that is another topic to address later!

I think I may fairly make two postula. First, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature, and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe, and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations.

Assuming then my postula as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increase in geometrical ratio. — Thomas Robert Malthus, from “An Essay on the Principle of Population”

According to the International Programs Center, U.S. Census Bureau, the total population of the World, projected to 02/03/10 at 16:08 UTC (EST+5) is 6,800,475,730