Industrial agriculture is responsible for widespread environmental
degradation and undermines the pursuit of human well-being. With a
projected global population of 10 billion by 2050, it is urgent ...for
humanity to achieve a more sustainable approach to farming and food
systems. This concise text offers an overview of the key issues in
sustainable food production for all readers interested in the
ecology and environmental impacts of agriculture. It details the
ecological foundations of farming and food systems, showing how
knowledge from the natural and social sciences can be used to
create sustainable alternatives to the industrial production
methods used today. Beginning with a discussion of the role of
agriculture in human development, the primer examines how
twentieth-century farming methods are environmentally and socially
unsustainable, contributing to global change and perpetuating
inequalities. The authors explain the principles of environmental
sustainability and explore how these principles can be put into
practice in agrifood systems. They emphasize the importance of
human well-being and insist on the centrality of social and
environmental equity and justice. Sustainable Food
Production is a compelling guide to how we can improve our
ability to feed each other today and preserve the ability of our
planet to do so tomorrow. Appropriate for a range of courses in the
natural and social sciences, it provides a comprehensive yet
accessible framework for achieving agricultural sustainability in
the Anthropocene.
When grazed intensively, grasslands can result in biodiversity loss and increased greenhouse gas emissions. However, when grasslands are maintained using agroecological practices, they can create ...diverse habitats and act as carbon sinks. Carbon sequestration in soil is mediated by the soil microbial community, which is largely affected by influxes of nutrients and the soil arthropod community. One such arthropod, the tunneling dung beetle Onthophagus taurus (Schreber 1759) incorporates animal dung into the soil, influencing both the soil microbial community and nutrient cycling. While dung beetles do affect the soil microbial community, there is a dearth of studies that examine the effect of tunneling dung beetles on soil microbial communities that may be associated with nutrient cycling. This study looks at the effect of the tunneling dung beetle O. taurus on the fungal, bacterial, and archaeal community of grassland soil in an in situ experiment in California's Central Coast region, using eDNA metabarcoding of the 16S locus for bacteria and archaea and the ITS1 locus for fungi. We find that O. taurus has a clear effect on the soil microbial community and its presence increases the abundance of soil microbes affiliated with degrading plant materials and carbohydrate metabolism.
As we saw in chapter 1, sustainability is a socioecological construct, and an important part of this construct (lower left of figure 1.8) is the concept of ecosystem services, also known as nature’s ...services, environmental services, or ECOSERVICES. In economics, buyers and sellers exchange goods, which can be tangible things like food, homes, and phones or valued intangibles, such as insurance, education, and health care. Services concern this exchange of intangibles, where the sellers are service providers and the buyers are the service recipients, clients, or customers.
While we are accustomed to think of insurance companies, schools, and clinics as service providers,
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT Lipton, Suzanne; van Huysen, Tiff; Naeem, Shahid
Sustainable Food Production,
11/2021
Book Chapter
We’re newcomers to the living world. It’s difficult to date just when we arrived, but at some point, a baby was born on Earth who was distinctly one of us, meaning that its genome, or its complement ...of genes, differed little from ours. On that day, Homo sapiens joined the millions of SPECIES on Earth. Our current guess is that our species was born only about 195,000 years ago. That may seem like a long time ago, but not when you consider that species in the genus Homo arose ~2– 3 million years ago and that our apelike ancestors arose ~5
This chapter builds upon the principles of environmental sustainability we reviewed in chapter 1 and the ecosystem service framework we reviewed in chapter 2 to explore each of the three dimensions, ...or pillars of sustainable development, as they relate to food production. Here, we consider the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainable development separately. Of course, as chapters 1 and 2 emphasized, sustainable development integrates across these three dimensions, and, as we will see, they are intrinsically related.
The steady state of nature is so familiar to us all that we seldom think about it. We expect that repeated
In chapter 1, we considered that development from an ecological perspective is a form of niche construction. Something members of almost every species do is modify their homes and habitats to better ...their lives. In the course of a few millennia, however, humans have vastly exceeded anything any other species has ever been able to do. So extensive is our niche construction that we have modified the entire planet to produce and sustain approximately 471 million tons of human mass: about 7.6 billion people. We noted, however, that while our biological success in terms of mass and numbers is indisputable,
BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER Lipton, Suzanne; van Huysen, Tiff; Naeem, Shahid
Sustainable Food Production,
11/2021
Book Chapter
In chapter 3, we observed that humanity’s impact on Earth is so massive that it is global in extent and rivals that of any other species that has ever lived on Earth. Because of this anthropic ...transformation of Earth, many have argued that we should name our current geological epoch the Anthropocene . Unlike other geological terms, such as “Pleistocene” or “Holocene,” “Anthropocene” is not official yet, though the name is widely used. The International Union of Geological Sciences has the final say, and they are still deliberating, but it appears “Anthropocene” is on its way to becoming official.
Though
