It is a fact that growing livestock is a very inefficient way to feed people.
Political and economic systems have nothing to do with the veracity of that fact. Certainly the societal choices made will affect how much of the sun's incoming energy is used to feed beef, and how much to feed people. The fact remains that supporting a given human population on meat instead of vegetables is much more costly in terms of land area, species loss, fossil fuel consumption...just about any measure you might choose.
FT says:
"In all of Earth's history, more than 99% of all species that once existed are now extinct. Almost none of these extinctions were/are due to Man or industry. It is simply nature's way. We have the bio-technology to resurrect species. If any is in danger of becoming extinct, all we need is a bit of genetic material to bring it back into existence. Think of the possibilities: withing 50 years we can repopulate the world with Giant Sloths and Dodo birds."
Sorry, FT, but these statements are mostly fiction. The first one is misleading. If you accept the figure of "99%" and consider that humans have been around for say 50,000 of the last 2 billion years, you might realize that the 1% caused by humans have occured in 0.0025% of the time that life has been found on earth. By any objective measure, the rate of extinctions right now greatly exceeds the rates that occured in the five greatest mass extinction events of the geologic record. The mass extinctions of the Ordovician (440 MYA), Devonian (365 MYA), Permian (245 MYA), Triassic (210 MYA), and Cretaceous (65 MYA) each occured over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. The fossil evidence shows that in each case life recovered to the same or greater level of diversity that had existed before, but complete recovery took 10 to 100 million years. The present ongoing mass extinction is happening much faster than any previous event.
Twelve thousand years may seem like a long time to a day trader, but 12,000 years ago, the humans were first arriving in North America from Siberia. They found horses, ground sloths, long-horned bison, camels, antelopes, sabertooth cats, tapirs, and mammoths. 73% of the large mammal genera that were found in North America 12,000 years ago are now extinct. In South America, the fraction is even greater. There were also climatic changes occuring, but the widespread extinctions of large mammals had not occured in the previous 22 glacial cycles. Similar extinctions have been observed in recent prehistoric times with the arrival of humans in Madagascar, New Zealand, and Australia.
Those extinctions were carried out with stone tools - no bulldozers, chainsaws, insecticides, fences, mines. Furthermore, the world population of humans 12,000 years ago was about 7 million. There are now almost 1000 times as many people. It should come as no surprise that observed extinction rates for both large and small animals and plants are greater than at any time in the prehistoric record.
The second point that I would like to refute is the claim that we can restore lost species...despite the clear evidence offered by Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg in Jurassic Park, the techniques of creating a species from scraps of DNA are very much science fiction. There is much more to restoring a species than simply piecing its DNA back together. I have a great deal of faith in the capabilities of technology and science, but we still have great gaping holes in our knowledge of how complex systems function. Recreating a butterfly from its genetic material would be a complete failure if we didn't also recreate the one flower that it chose to feed on in the spring. And that flower might not bloom without the unique fungus that grows on its roots...and so on...
Presently, we have no idea how complex ecosystems interact, but we do know that simple changes can completely alter the overall system. The introduction of rats into Hawaii, for example, has led to the loss of most of the snail and bird species that were native to the islands. We do not have the means now or in the readily forseeable future to preserve ecosystems any way other than intact.
Anyone who counts on the power of Nature or Technology to heal the wounds of mass extinctions, may find themselves waiting several million years for meaningful results.
-zm
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