#7 — Saving the future
I had an epiphany yesterday while talking about the future of our planet.
I met someone yesterday who is a farming consultant, a job I didn’t know existed until yesterday. As a farming consultant, he works with companies and people who want to farm for something and helps them get the most return on their investment. We talked about Indonesian land and how the crop yields are going down, and to counteract the decrease in the output, more farm land is being grazed.
Let’s say, hypothetically, you owned 1 acre of land, and the land produced about 100 tons of corn. If the land does not have the right nutrients or whatever else it needs to grow corn most effectively, the yields next year will go down. If next year, the yields are only 90 tons, you would counteract this by owning more land and grazing more corn, so that you still got 100 tons worth of corn.
We later talked about fish farming; and about competition. And this is where the conversation got interesting. Even if you didn’t graze any additional land, and did everything in your control to keep up the yields, other people — competition — might come in and do that for you. There is no control over that.
And this idea struck a chord with me.
People — especially those in power — I think understand this concept well. No matter how much you do to prevent forestland and the degredation of the environment, you have absolutely no control over the actions of the others. Unless the powers-that-be (governments, etc.,) mandate that certai farmland and forestland is necessary for the protection of our future, there is no way to ensure that our these lands will be protected, no matter how much you and I try.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t do our part. We must do what we believe to be right in our hearts.
This idea, I think, powerful people have understood: Limiting resources is not possible, merely because there are so many variables to control. The only response to the growing need (and greed) of humanity is to find more resources, whether through space or recycling or technology or whatever else.
The only way to save the future — and ourselves — is to find more resources.
Tarun’s Book, ‘The Things We Don’t Know’, is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other major retailers worldwide.
