Millions of people around the world are desperately attempting to make a living feeding other people, and the intensity of the wording sure makes it sound like this is something very, very bad.
New Maps Reveal the Human Footprint on Earth: As global populations swell, farmers are cultivating more and more land in a desperate bid to keep pace with the ever-intensifying needs of humans. As a result, agricultural activity now dominates more than a third of the Earth's landscape and has emerged as one of the central forces of global environmental change, say scientists at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) at UW-Madison.UW-Madison thinking has come up with a new way to use modern technology to make humans feel guilty about being human.
Food Crisis Feared as Fertile Land Runs Out: Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison combined satellite land cover images with agricultural census data from every country in the world to create detailed maps of global land use. Each grid square was 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) across and showed the most prevalent land use in that square, such as forest, grassland or ice. … "The maps show, very strikingly, that a large part of our planet (roughly 40%) is being used for either growing crops or grazing cattle," said Dr Navin Ramankutty, a member of the Wisconsin-Madison team. By comparison, only 7% of the world's land was being used for agriculture in 1700.I should have known this much crisis hyperbole has something to do with cows. Without getting into any deep analysis, the message is too much agriculture is bad for nature, so fewer people eating fewer cows is good for nature. Mother Earth no longer resembles the eighteenth century but she no longer resembles Jurassic Park either.
