Today I Learned

Okay, but can we stop using suitable farmland to grow corn cattle feed?

It's not only pastures. Growing animal feed is vastly less efficient than growing food for humans directly. We could stop farming animals, use some of that land for growing human food, rewild the excess, and rewild the pastures.

Yes, but you omitted all the croplands we use for feeding non-human animals.

Poore and Nemecek estimate that 50% of croplands are used for human food, 38% is for livestock feed and 12% is for non-food uses.

https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

Also, if our goal is to find the truth in all of this, why be mean?

Land use would be lower if we reduced livestock, but likely not massively. Lots of grazing land isn’t suitable for farming, letting it go wild would also require a massive effort to reintroduce natural grazing animals, which would likely need active management.

16% of the current farmland gives us around 75% of our diets. That means we only need around 21% for a 100% plant based diet. This also means we can free up 75% of animal land. I sure we can easily find that 5% in that whole 80%, don't you think?

There’s also the fact most of our crops would need to change to optimize for human consumption, and humans aren’t as efficient at consuming those calories as livestock.

This is incorrect.

There's a few diseases and allergies though where this becomes a thing. But even in such cases meat can be avoided.

Even after transitioning crops there’s going to be a significant amount that isn’t processable by humans that would sustain some amount of livestock.

This could be an argument if it was forced overnight but that would never happen. Transitioning towards a plant based society is not something that can happen overnight and will definitely take time. Phasing it out happens naturally.

Rewild the grazing land and grow human food crops on the animal feed crop fields

Not just native cultures. Very little of any animal goes to waste, from food to clothes to compost. If capitalism is good for anything, it's finding value in every part.

It's close, I worked on a paper pretty much doing exactly this a while back and we had included all of this, metal and oil extraction, all roads, railways, even golf courses on top of your housing. We were at 1.2% of world's land usage. So I'm sure whatever they got is sensible.

Logging might be missing, but in our data logging was part of forests. So it ties in that regard.

Most unsustainable “logging land” is basically turned into grazing land. Brazil and the cut rainforests are a great example. But logging can be quite sustainable too: with some caveats, that can basically count as forest.

Oil fields are tiny, and share lands with other projects. See: west Texas, with cattle and windmills on the same land as the wells.

Parkland is often more “wild” than actual wild. Especially nature reserves.

IDK about highway statistics, but they really don’t take up a lot of physical land. Though their effect of dividing wilds is certainly understated in the graph.

IDK about mining either, but also it doesn’t seem like this would take up a ton of land. It’s really concentrated by necessity, and the worst environmental effects are usually related to pollutants or other knock-on effects.

The one fishy thing to me is grazing land. In places like Africa, there are lots of tribes and other low tech herders, and if you walk around, it really feels like their unfenced areas straddle the line between wilds and grazing lands. It’s nothing like (say) west Texas with vast fields of clearly dedicated grazing land.