Surviving the Anthropocene
By Conor Odell
Key Questions
—  How will we humans survive survive?
—  How will the other living organisms survive?
—  These are not separate questions; they are both
interdependent.
—  By 2050 there will be at least 9 billion people on Earth.
—  1 in 6 species worldwide is threatened with extinction,
according to a new analysis published recently in Science.
How will we feed ourselves?
Important implications for climate change and biodiversity.
•  About one third of greenhouse gas emissions come from
agriculture according to the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in 2012.
•  Not just in the form of CO2: in the US, agriculture produces
about 75% of all nitrous oxide emissions and globally,
agriculture contributes almost 67% of methane emissions.
•  Agriculture is also one of the primary uses for freshwater.
•  More than a third of Earth’s ice-free land surface is used to
grow crops, however, only 55% of those crops feed humans
directly.
National Geographic: Feeding Nine Billion
“Five-Step Plan” for Fixing
Agriculture – Jonathan Foley
—  Use resources more efficiently
—  Grow more on existing farmland
—  Stop expanding farms
—  Shift our diets
—  Reduce (food) waste
Growing more food
—  We need to double crop production by 2050 to keep
up with population growth and rising demand for
meat.
—  Problem: it’s getting harder to grow food due in
large part to climate change:
—  Increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather
events and climate conditions like droughts and
floods, changing growing seasons.
—  Arable land is being lost to desertification and salt
buildup in soil.
—  Sea levels are rising and glaciers are melting, with
huge effects on water available for irrigation.
—  Insect pests and plant diseases are expanding in
range.
Growing more food with
GM crops?
—  A variety of beneficial traits could be engineered
into crops:
Resistance to pests and diseases
Increased drought/heat tolerance
Faster growth
More efficient photosynthesis (C4 vs. C3
photosynthesis)—more efficient use of water and
nutrients (“more crop per drop”)
—  Self-fertilizing.
—  The technology to accomplish this is more precise
than ever before.
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Self-fertilizing Crops?
—  Legumes (beans, soybeans, alfalfa, peanuts, and peas) harbor
nitrogen-fixing bacteria in nodules on their roots.
—  Why can’t other crops do that? (oxygen)
—  Enter Streptomyces thermoautotrophicus
—  It can fix nitrogen even in the presence of O2
—  Potentially easier to introduce into non-legumes
without the need for specialized root structures.
—  Using the Haber-Bosch process to convert atmospheric N2 to
ammonia consumes around 2% of the world’s total annual
energy supply.
Changing Diets—moving away
from meat consumption
—  Growing crops to feed livestock is inefficient.
—  Only 55% of the food crops grown feed humans
directly. 36% are used for animal feed.
—  “For every 100 calories of grain we feed animals, we
get only about 40 new calories of milk, 22 calories of
eggs, 12 of chicken, 10 of pork, or 3 of beef” (Foley)
—  Shift to chicken or pork, or better yet, insects!
Rising meat consumption over the past 50 years
Health Risks of IndustrialScale Livestock Operations
—  Antibiotic Resistance
—  80% by weight of all antibiotics sold in the US each year are
given to livestock.
—  This could pose a direct risk to people who eat this meat. It
could also enter the environment through manure and runoff
into groundwater and rivers.
—  Antibiotics are also common in aquaculture. As of 2012, people
ate more farmed fish than beef worldwide.
—  Antibiotics can wash out of holding pens for fish and shrimp
into the surrounding ocean.
—  Zoonotic diseases??
Anthropogenic Chemicals
– Another Lasting Legacy
—  Pesticides
—  Fertilizers
—  Antibiotics and growth promoters
—  Organohalogens
—  Endocrine disruptors