Name: Can We Feed Ourselves without Devouring the Planet? | George Monbiot | TED
Uploaded: 2022-11-15T17:10:07.000Z
Duration: 15 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What's the worst thing we've ever done to the planet?

because it conflicts with some of our most cherished beliefs.

Farming is the greatest cause of habitat destruction,

the world's greatest cause of extinction.

It's caused roughly 80 percent of the deforestation this century.

Only 29 percent of the weight of birds on Earth

Just four percent of mammals, by weight, are wild.

and farmed animals make up the remaining 60 percent.

Yes, look, we all need food and we all need farming.

that it's also among the world's foremost causes of climate breakdown,

as perhaps the most important of all environmental questions.

Every acre of land that we use for our own purposes

is an acre that can't support wild ecosystems,

such as forests and wetlands and savannahs,

on which the great majority of the world's species depend.

is driving the sixth great extinction of species.

Now, there are some thrilling and world-changing solutions

and I'll be coming to those in just a minute.

and have the potential to solve several problems at the same time.

But in order to understand them and the need for them,

first, we need to understand the scope and direction

We rail against urban sprawl, and rightly so.

But all our homes and businesses and infrastructure

occupy just one percent of the planet's land.

Agricultural sprawl is a far greater ecological threat.

Farming occupies 38 percent of the planet's land.

Most of the rest, incidentally, is protected areas,

So we have this vast amount of land being occupied.

A lot of people complain about intensive farming

and the harm that it does to us and our world,

But so is the harm caused by extensive farming,

which means using more land to produce a given amount of food.

Now, I know some of you will find this a shocking statement,

but the most damaging of all farm products is pasture-fed meat,

and that's because of the agricultural sprawl it causes.

You remember that 38 percent of land used by farming?

Well, only 12 percent of the land is covered by crops.

The remaining 26 percent is used for pasture,

Our environmental crisis is not driven by intensive farming

but by a disastrous combination of the two.

by the environmental harm that it's contributed to,

such as climate breakdown and soil depletion

But there could be an even greater threat to our food supplies.

It's possible to see the biggest threat that the global food system faces

It's beginning to look a bit like the global financial system

Now for a long time, we thought we were beating hunger.

Between the 1960s and 2014, hunger was declining fairly steadily.

But then, in 2015, the trend began to turn,

and the number of chronically malnourished people began rising

Astoundingly, that rise began just as world food prices were falling.

Well, the world food system, like global finance,

and complex systems behave in counterintuitive ways.

They're resilient under certain conditions,

because there's weird self-organizing dynamics [to] stabilize them.

But if they're pushed by an extreme amount of stress,

can start transmitting shocks across the network.

they can tip the whole network past its critical threshold,

whereupon the system collapses, suddenly and unstoppably.

the crucial elements of systemic resilience

that we call redundancy, modularity, circuit breakers and backup systems

have been stripped out by corporate strategies.

On one estimate, just four companies now control

Only four crops, which are wheat, rice, corn and soy,

account for almost 60 percent of the calories that farmers produce.

And the production for export of those crops

has become highly concentrated in a handful of nations,