CREATING A ZERO ECOLOGICAL IMPACT HUMAN CIVILIZATION - PART 2

At the end of my last installment, I left the reader hanging as to what was the root cause of all our environmental problems. A while back, I did a survey; not a particularly scientific survey, but a survey nonetheless, of about 100 people to see what they thought the root cause was of our environmental problems. I had to discount a small number of the responses because they attributed our problems to political parties, political figures or commercial concerns, such as McDonald's restaurants. The intelligent answers that were most often cited centered on the various factors thought to be causing global warming. These answers pertained to the use of fossil fuels for industry or transportation. I then pointed out to those individuals that if there were a smaller number of us overall, the impact of the burning of fossil fuels would be minimal. Most of the respondents in that group then came to the conclusion that many others I asked had already come to, that human overpopulation was the problem. When I asked what the root cause of overpopulation was to those who felt it was the major cause of our environmental degradation, I got a lot of different answers, everything from religion to lack of responsible reproductive practices.

The fact is that overpopulation is a direct result of the root cause of all of our environmental problems. And the root cause of all of our environmental problems is plant-based agriculture. Plant-based agriculture is the root cause of our environmental problems on two different levels. The first and most obvious level is the fact that plant-based agriculture creates artificially high food supplies for human beings and allows to our population to grow to the point where seemingly insignificant activities by individuals are multiplied to the point of altering the natural environmental state. The other level on which plant-based agriculture affects our environment is more basic, and a far more destructive level. In the rest of today's installment I'll examine and explain both of these levels of interference with the normal environmental processes.

By creating artificially high food supplies for human beings, plant-based agriculture has allowed permanent settlements and the resulting industrialization that we currently view as the number one cause of environmental degradation. The artificially high food supplies have also allowed our population to grow far beyond what any environmental balance would allow. When our species first adopted plant-based agriculture, we ceased to be the hunter-gatherers who had no negative impact on the environment, but were one more balancing element in it. We became a force in the environment that altered the other elements of the environment. As a hunter-gatherer species, we were nomadic, we moved around, following food sources, never having a long-term effect on any one area. With the advent of plant-based agriculture, we no longer moved around. We could stay in one place for an entire lifetime, even for many generations. As we stayed in one place for longer periods of time our waste products accumulated. And instead of being part of the natural processes, our waste products overwhelmed areas. We also created permanent structures and altered the natural flow of the erosion and other forces that formed the geology of our environment. Larger settlements meant even more waste products and more alteration of the world around us. They also allowed for free time where humans could exchange ideas, create new inventions, and develop culture as we now know it. This is not necessarily a bad thing. However, it has led to the situation in which we now find ourselves .

These first settlements that came about because of plant-based agriculture have led to the creation of cities. The ideas spawned by these first settlements have led to the industrialization and utilization of fossil fuels that is now so prevalent. Without plant-based agriculture, none of the environmental degradation that we are currently experiencing would ever be possible.

Plant-based agriculture in itself is the single most destructive thing we do to our planet. This is not just my opinion; this is an accepted fact by the responsible scientific community. Because the environment is a rather complicated entity, I should explain just how plant-based agriculture in itself does so much to degrade the environment in which we live. On the most obvious level, plant-based agriculture destroys the normal biodiversity of the area in which it is practiced and replaces it with the monoculture of the plants we’re cultivating. If you view the extreme situation in which all the land in the world was under cultivation, there would only be a narrow selection of possible species of plants that we are cultivating. Animal species that needed plants other than those we were cultivating for their survival would go extinct. Other animal species that depended upon those extinct animal species as their food source would also go extinct.

This has already happened. The example I like to use is that of the now-extinct passenger pigeon of North America. As with many things, the true cause of the extinction of the passenger pigeon has been hidden and a politically correct reason is now given. It is currently taught that the passenger pigeon was hunted into extinction, but historical records show that this was not true. The passenger pigeon was a migratory bird that spent the warmer months in the northern part of what is now the United States and southern Canada. When winter came, they migrated to what is now the southern United States. Their food source is what is called mast crops, plant matter that comes from forests, such as acorns and other nuts . What actually happened to the passenger pigeon was that their wintering area in the southern United States was deforested for plant-based agriculture. As that happened, passenger pigeon flocks had to winter over further and further north where the forests, and their food source, still existed. The wild passenger pigeons were all killed and the species went extinct one winter when a particularly bad blizzard occurred in the area where they were forced to spend the winter. If their original wintering area had remained forested instead of converted into farm land, that blizzard would have had no effect on them.

We currently have a situation where plant-based agriculture in the southern part of the United States is leading to a mass extinction in the Arctic. One species of Arctic bird, the snow goose, has a lifecycle in which they nest and breed in the Arctic during the spring and summer, and then migrate to the southern United States for the winter months. Before North America was so radically altered by plant-based agriculture, there was a certain balance within the snow goose populations. As they nested and bred, Arctic predators killed a number of mature birds, eggs and young birds, but not enough to decrease their overall numbers. At the end of the summer when the young birds were able to fly, the snow geese migrated south to the band of land that stretches between the Chesapeake Bay and the Texas Gulf coast. Snow geese are grazers eating grasses, water plants and the like, so their food sources were limited as they migrated across the forested northern tier of the United States. Migrations in themselves are rather arduous tasks and the combination of limited food sources, the hardships of the migration and predatory animals along the migration route further decreased the number of snow geese. When they arrived at their wintering grounds, they were met with the biodiversity of the plants there, and that limited their food sources and consequently their numbers. There were also predatory animals that again set upon the snow geese as a food source. When spring arrived, a far smaller population of snow geese returned to the Arctic than had left it. Through the reproductive process, their numbers were increased and the cycle started over.

That balance changed with the advent of plant-based agriculture in North America. It has changed so radically in the last couple of decades that now, when the snow geese leave the Arctic, they no longer pass over forested areas with limited food supplies, but over agricultural lands, where there is plenty of food. These agricultural lands, as explained , have altered the diversity of the animals that originally inhabited these lands. There are now far fewer predators. So the snow goose migration, which would have ordinarily claimed a large number of geese, no longer does. Now they arrive at their wintering areas in greater numbers than ever before. Their wintering areas have also been altered by plant-based agriculture. In the last couple of decades, the surge in vegetarianism has altered the wetlands where the snow geese spend the winter. These areas have now been turned into rice-growing enterprises. This change not only provides an abundant food source for the snow geese, it has also eliminated most of their predators as a result of being a monoculture of plants. The normal reduction in the snow goose population no longer occurs. Larger and larger numbers of snow geese return to the Arctic tundra every year. There they breed as they have always done; however, the larger number of snow geese now overgraze the fragile Arctic environment and suppress the populations of other animals that are also dependent upon the Arctic plants. As has always been when the snow geese leave for the winter, the Arctic predators become dependent upon the animals that stay for their food source. With decreased numbers of those prey animals, the number of predators also declines. Now with the declining number of predators, the nesting snow goose success rate is far greater than it has ever been. Soon the overgrazing of the Arctic by the snow geese will cause a complete collapse of that ecosystem. So here we have a situation where plant-based agriculture far from the Arctic has had a tremendously detrimental effect on it.

There is even substantial evidence that plant-based agriculture was responsible for the extinction of the megafauna, animals such as the mastodon and mammoth. It has been proven that the first humans to arrive on the North American continent brought with them the knowledge of agriculture. At this point, it’s best to examine just what the environment was like at that time. We know that massive glaciers covered a large portion of the northern hemisphere. We know that substantially more of the earth’s water was locked up as ice. We also know that the oceans were at least 200 feet more shallow than current levels, probably more, and that there was far less ocean surface area for evaporation and, consequently, far less water in the atmosphere. These factors indicate that the earth was far drier at that time. Drier climates favored plants that grow from the roots, such as grasses. Plants that grow from the roots can survive periods of drought by having their upper parts die off, much the same as lawns do in August, and then grow again when water becomes available. Plants that grow from their tops, such as the woody plants that are currently prevalent, die when subjected to drought conditions. It's safe to assume that the majority of plant matter during the ice age was the grassy type. This is further substantiated by one of the last survivors of the Ice Age, the horse. Horses are grass eaters. The last remaining populations of wild horses were found on the steppes of Russia and in the Himalayas. In both of those areas, the habitat is primarily grasses. Domestic horses also eat primarily grasses and their seeds. Even domestic horses that have re-established themselves in areas where they were once extinct do best in dry areas that favor grass growth. There are no wild horse populations in forested areas.

Since it is fair to assume that the megafauna sustained themselves by grazing on grasses we have to examine what impact the first humans on North America made with their agricultural practices. Primitive people all use fire to clear the land for agriculture. When those first humans that inhabited North America set forth to clear the land to plant their crops, they burned the grasses. They also didn't extinguish the fires when they had burned off the amount of land that they needed to clear. They let the fires burn themselves out. In order to clear an acre of land to plant crops, they could have burned a thousand. Now multiply that by the number of different groups inhabiting North America, and you have vast amounts of land that can no longer support the indigenous animals for the few months it took for the grasses to grow back. This could cause mass starvation. The weakened animals would also be more susceptible to predation. Also, by depriving these animals of large portions of their food sources, there would be compromised reproductive success of those that did survive. The second effect that fire would have had upon the megafauna was not as obvious, but far more devastating. The massive amount of burning that occurred would have released substantial amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps the sun's heat and warms the planet. This increased warming sped up the melting of glaciers and made far more water available to the plants of the planet very quickly. As more water became available to plant life, the plant life changed from the grasses to the woody-type plants we now have. It's fair to assume again that the woody plants of a wetter environment could not be utilized by animals which had adapted to feed on grasses. In essence, the megafauna starved to death. The explanation that I have just given really just scratches the surface of the extinction of the megafauna, and I'll examine that to a far greater degree in another blog.

Plant-based agriculture itself is currently the single leading cause of greenhouse gas production on the planet Earth. It's a well-known fact that the majority of carbon dioxide increases come from deforestation for the purpose of creating plant-based farms. Let me explain that for you. To understand that, you need to know how photosynthesis works. Green plants, in which photosynthesis occurs, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and by utilizing the energy of sunlight, convert that carbon dioxide into starches. The byproduct of this process is oxygen. The other thing that you need to know is that virtually all living organisms, including green plants, utilize oxygen in breaking down their food sources and generate carbon dioxide. So there seems to be a certain balance. As a matter of fact, from that simple statement, one could argue that plant-based agriculture is the answer to global warming rather than the primary cause of it. This assumption is an example of just how complex our environment is and how simplistic answers are seldom correct.

In a natural state, very little sunlight ever hits the ground. Green plants will capture every bit of it through expansive growth. This is best illustrated by walking into a dense mature forest. It's dark under the canopy, and if there is a break in the canopy due to the death of a tree, other plants immediately begin growing where the sunlight hits the ground. In a very short time, they will fill in that void in the canopy. With plant-based agriculture, we change all that. Plant-based agriculture requires that we spread our plants apart so they can absorb the maximum amount of sunlight and soil nutrients for maximal growth. Sunlight hits the ground all around our cultivated plants. Without a dense growth of green plants, carbon dioxide absorption is limited. With the absorption of carbon dioxide decreased by fewer numbers of plants, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases due to the natural production by other living organisms. Now you can see how our plant-based agriculture is the primary cause of global warming and the decreasing biodiversity due to extinctions.

This is not a new concept; there is even a biblical reference to this. I believe the story of Cain and Abel is a direct reference to the negative effects that plant-based agriculture has on the environment. The story of Cain and Abel seems to be a rather important one because it is contained in the holy books of three major religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Let me refresh you on this story. The story goes that Cain, a farmer, and his brother Abel, a herdsman, both made offerings to God. God accepted the herdsman Abel’s offering and rejected Cain’s, the farmer’s, offering. The story says that God gave no reason for rejecting the farmer’s offering. The story then goes on to say that Cain, the farmer, kills his brother, the herdsman, in a fit of rage over this rejection. The story continues by saying that God then cast the farmer out into the world, and that the farmer asked God to put a mark on him to protect him from all other people of the world. No mention was made of what the mark was.

Over time, we've come to think of this story as a story about fratricide. I do not believe that was the purpose of the story. One of the things I find troublesome is the fact that God gave no reason for rejecting the farmer’s offering, nor was it said what the mark was which He placed on the murderer. There should have been a reason somewhere for this action and a description of the mark, that's the purpose of these stories. I believe the original story did have a reason for God’s rejection of the farmer’s offering and acceptance of the herdsman's offering. And I believe it has to do with plant-based agriculture. In my opinion, God rejected the farmer’s offering because plant-based agriculture destroyed the biodiversity that God had created, and had a negative impact on His world. Being a herdsman, on the other hand, did nothing to destroy the biodiversity. The herd of domestic animals fed off the natural plants just like they had before humans started to tend them. If the domestic animals overgrazed an area, the herdsman would have to move them to a new area, and the overgrazed area would recover. If a herdsman’s flock became too large, predatory animals would reduce its number, just as they would if the flock became large without human care. So as you can see, the herdsman’s activity was far less damaging to the environment than the farmer's . As for the part of the story about the farmer being cast out into the world and asking God to put a mark on him to protect him from other humans, I believe that mark was tooth decay. There's more than substantial archaeological evidence that tooth decay became commonplace in humans with the advent of plant-based agriculture. Tooth decay is unknown in skulls found prior to the advent of plant-based agriculture. Now if you put yourself into the times of this story, you realize that smells were very important to people then. Anyone with a mouth full of decaying teeth has a particularly offensive odor about them, almost an odor of sickness and death. Taken in that context, other humans would instinctively avoid anyone with that odor.

It's also a fair assumption that this story was passed around orally long before was written down. The people who did write it down were those living in permanent settlements that depended on plant-based agriculture for their very existence. It would be in their best interest to omit the reason that God rejected the farmer’s offering and the mark that God placed upon the farmer, because they too were people with extensive tooth decay, due to their plant-based diet.

As you can see, I've made a very strong case for plant-based agriculture being the basis for all our current ecological problems, and I am not alone in this opinion. The reputable scientific community also shares this opinion. There is a problem with the non-reputable scientific community. Rather than viewing facts objectively and drawing conclusions, they look to conclusions first, usually based on political correctness, and then assemble only some of the facts to support their preconceived conclusion, much like what has happened with the story of Cain and Abel. For some unknown reason, those that have totally ignored the scientific method seems to be the ones that get the most time in the popular press and consequently disrupt any real efforts to solve our environmental problems. I hope that you, the reader, can view what I've just presented objectively and draw conclusions, and point out errors based on fact, and not on political correctness.

As I mentioned before, I have devised a civilization that has zero impact in an ecological sense, yet still retains our technological and cultural advances. In the next installment, I will go into just what that would be, and in future installments, how it could be successfully implemented.