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Emulating the circle of life
We need to rethink efficiency in our food system.
Biel, Robert http://theecologist.org/2019/mar/25/emulating-circle-life
Publisher: The Ecologist
Date Written: 25/03/2019
Year Published: 2019
Resource Type: Article
Developing food systems that simulate the processes found in nature can make food production more sustainable.
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
When we build or manufacture things that don't exist in Nature, the bad tendency has been to neglect the tucked-in loops, so there's simply a lot of energy and scarce matter flowing into each process, and a degraded form of these is pumped out in the form of garbage, pollution and greenhouse gases.
But we can address this problem by introducing a circular-systems approach. A good example is industrial ecology (or industrial symbiosis), where many productive processes are networked, the waste of one becoming "the meat of another"....
In a realistic context, however, we are of course entirely dependent on the wider ecosystem within which our farm is inserted, so the 'closedness' is merely illusory. And the danger of a survivalist version of closed loop is that we become introspective and cut ourselves off from our place in society.
The point is that a farming model of the future must be able to feed the wider population in a sustainable way – which requires a large surplus over and above the consumption of the cultivators themselves
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