this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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It's not just climate, it's the crop breeding specialists. The sector demands quantity over quality, like in many other scenarios, and the people who develop new cultivars tend to focus on that quantity. When we have regulations for nutrient density or the consumers demand it, we'll see that change. Climate is adding to this problem, yes.
Note that it affects all biomass, including the second-hand sources of amino acids, lipids, sugars and other nutrients: animals.
Thank you for beating me to it. I 100% agree with you.
But I have to say, in order to meet the nutrient density requirements, they would have to completely reform the agricultural sector. Which I would love, but we know how this goes with these people.
And the fact that in 2025, we keep stacking people on top of each other to the point that more than half of the world's population is living like this in cities, which is integrated in a vertical axis, but the energy consumption of the same people is still spreading elsewhere on an horizontal axis... that is foreboding the worst of outcomes in this regard.
The permaculture philosophy and the syntropic method would have to be integrated. And with it, vertical indoor farming in cities as a necessary response. But this would mean the end of monocultures and pesticide use. No more plowing either. Terrible for the microorganisms in the soil, means terrible for everything else. Soil policy would have to be in place as a baseline... it's a lot.
But I keep saying this... Environmentalism, veganism, sustainability and ethics are all the same thing. The very same thing. It's trying to insure that our lives as both the individual and the mass population causes the least destruction and suffering as possible. And that we can aspire to be net positive to all biological life on the planet. If the general population understood this, we could be heading somewhere. Unfortunately without understanding entropy and how the trophic balance is achieved, I doubt that one can understand syntropy or what the hell I'm even talking about right now.
But yeah... Syntropy vs Entropy is hard to explain in a small paragraph to the ADHD crowd of our time, I guess.
So... Optimism is just not in the cards. Not for me at least.
Optimism is for fools. Let me add a bit in the other direction: if most of the population became rural, then the work going on would be in rural activity. That sounds great until you realize that it requires a technological level that is similar to the pre-industrial life. And it's not just machines, complex science goes away and medicine mostly goes away, because you can't have that many specialists if everyone's working in agriculture and horticulture. One of the consequences of that would be that all the people who depend on modern technology to live, directly, would have a problem with living: that goes from vision aids to all medical treatments to pharmaceuticals to vaccines to surgeries (start at: no C-Section) to managing all disabilities (that we can manage now).
Most people don't work on anything that technology and medicine depend on. There are so many jobs that only exist because capitalism is inefficient and gives rich people the right to get other people to do useless things.
Imagine how many people would be unemployed (freed up for rural living) if we got rid of the meat industry, replaced cars with public transit and bicycles, replaces airplanes with high speed rail and ships and not going, had built cities to be walkable from the start, gave people a comfortable life regardless of whether they worked, banned advertisements, made clothes and other products designed to last a lifetime, had a library economy to vastly reduce the number of tools necessary, got rid of intellectual property law so people didn't need to design new drugs to repatent things and corporate megaprojects would collapse, redistributed wealth so people wouldn't buy useless toys or mansions, and put everyone in comfortable rural spaces with lots of greenery and spaces where they could hang out for free so mental health is better and people get plenty of exercise.
Most people could work in agriculture without decreasing the amount that work on maintaining and improving our level of technology.