Maglevs and the Vision of St. Hubert
Or
The Great Restoration of Nature: Why and How
Jesse H.
Ausubel
Director, Program for the Human Environment
The
Rockefeller University
1230 York Avenue
New York, NY 10021-6399
USA
Phone 212-327-7917 Fax
212-327-7519
ausubel@mail.rockefeller.edu
URL: http://phe.rockefeller.edu/sthubert/
Challenges of a Changing Earth, W. Steffen, J. Jaeger, and D. Carson
(eds.), Springer, Heidelberg, 2002. Also in Proceedings of the Global Change
Open Science Conference, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 10-13 July
2001. September 2001 revision. The color figures are at the end of this document for easier online reading.
PDF version: hubert.pdf
Abstract: Better
technology and behavior can do much to spare and restore Nature during the 21st
century, even as more numerous humans prosper. Magnetically levitated trains
(maglevs) symbolize technology, while the fellowship of St. Hubert with other
animals symbolizes behavior. I explore the areas in human use for fishing,
farming, logging, and cities. Offsetting the sprawl of cities, rising yields in
farms and forests and changing tastes can spare wide expanses of land. Shifting
from hunting seas to farming fish can similarly spare Nature. Cardinal
resolutions to census marine life, lift crop yields, increase forest area, and
tunnel for maglevs would firmly promote the Great Restoration of Nature on land
and in the sea. 1. Introduction The emblems of my essay are
maglevs speeding through tunnels below the earth and a crucifix glowing between
the antlers of a stag, the vision of St. Hubert. Propelled by magnets, maglev
trains levitate passengers with green mobility. Maglevs symbolize technology,
while the fellowship of St. Hubert with other animals symbolizes behavior.
Better technology and behavior can do much to spare and restore Nature
during the 21st century, even as more numerous humans prosper. In this
essay I explore the areas in human use for fishing, farming, logging, and
cities. Offsetting the sprawl of cities, rising yields in farms and forests and
changing tastes can spare wide expanses of land. Shifting from hunting seas to
farming fish can similarly spare Nature. I will conclude that cardinal
resolutions to census marine life, lift crop yields, increase forest area, and
tunnel for maglevs would firmly promote the Great Restoration of Nature on land
and in the sea. First, let me share the vision of St. Hubert. 2. The
Vision of St. Hubert In The Hague, about the year 1650, a 25 year-old
Dutch artist, Paulus Potter, painted a multi-paneled picture that graphically
expresses contemporary emotions about the
environment.[i] Potter named his
picture "The Life of the Hunter" (Figure 1). The upper left panel establishes
the message of the picture with reference to the legend of the vision of St.
Hubert.[ii] Around the year 700,
Hubert, a Frankish courtier, hunted deep in the Ardennes forest on Good Friday,
a Christian spring holy day. A stag appeared before Hubert with a crucifix
glowing between its antlers, and a heavenly voice reproached him for hunting,
particularly on Good Friday. Hubert's aim faltered, and he renounced his bow
and arrow. He also renounced his riches and military honors, and became a
priest in Maastricht. The upper middle panel, in contrast, shows a hunter
with two hounds. Seven panels on the sides and bottom show the hunter and his
servant hounds targeting other animals: rabbit, wolf, bull, lion, wild boar,
bear, and mountain goat. The hunter's technologies include sword, bow, and guns
. One panel on either side recognizes consciousness, in fact,
self-consciousness, in our fellow animals. In the middle on the right, a
leopard marvels at its reflection in a mirror. On the lower left apes play with
their self-images in a shiny plate. In the large central panels Potter
judges 17th century hunters. First, in the upper panel the man and his hounds
come before a court of the animals they have hunted. In the lower central,
final panel the animal jury celebrates uproariously, while the wolf, rabbit, and
monkey cooperate to hang the hunter's dogs as an elephant, goat, and bear roast
the hunter himself. Paulus Potter believed the stag's glowing cross converted
St. Hubert to sustainability. The hunter remained unreconstructed. With
Paulus and Hubert, we can agree on the vision of a planet teeming with life, a
Great Restoration of Nature. And most would agree we need ways to accommodate
the billions more humans likely to arrive while simultaneously lifting
humanity's standard of living. In the end, two means exist to achieve the Great
Restoration. St. Hubert exemplifies one, behavioral change. The hunter’s
primitive weapons hint at the second, technology. What can we expect from each?
First, some words about behavior. 3. Our Triune Brain In a
fundamental 1990 book, The Triune Brain in Evolution, neuroscientist Paul
MacLean explained that humans have three brains, each developed during a stage
of evolution.[iii] The earliest,
found in snakes, MacLean calls the reptilian brain (Figure 2). In mammals
another brain appeared, the paleomammalian, bringing such new behavior as care
of the young and mutual grooming. In humans came the most recent evolutionary
structure, the hugely expanded neocortex. This neomammalian brain brought
language, visualization, and symbolic skills. But conservative evolution did
not replace the reptilian brain, it added. Thus, we share primal behavior with
other animals, including snakes. The reptilian brain controls courting mates,
patrolling territory, dominating submissives, and flocking together. The
reptilian brain makes most of the sensational news and will not retreat. Our
brains and thus our basic instincts and behaviors have remained largely
unchanged for a million years or more. They will not change on time scales
considered for “sustainable development.” Of course, innovations
may occur that control individual and social behavior. Law and religion both
try, though the snake brain keeps reasserting itself, on Wall Street, in the
Balkans, and clawing for Nobel prizes in Stockholm. Pharmacology also tries
for behavioral control, with increasing success. Having penetrated only perhaps
10% of their global market, sales of new “anti-depressants,” mostly
tinkering with serotonin in the brain, neared $10 billion in 2000. Drugs can
surely make humans very happy, but without restoring Nature. Because, I
believe, behavioral sanctions will be hard-pressed to control the eight or ten
billion snake brains persisting in humanity, we should use our hugely expanded
neocortex on technology that allows us to tread lightly on Earth. Since ever,
homo faber has been trying to make things better and to make better
things. During the past two centuries we have become more systematic and
aggressive about it, through the diffusion of research & development and the
institutions that perform them, including corporations and universities.
What can behavior and technology do to spare and restore Nature during the
21st century? Let's consider the seas and then the
land. 4. Sparing sea life St. Hubert exemplifies behavior to
spare land's animals. Many thousands of years ago our ancestors sharpened
sticks and began hunting. They probably extinguished a few species, such as
woolly mammoths, and had they kept on hunting, they might have extinguished many
more. Then without waiting on St Hubert, our ancestors ten thousand years ago
began sparing land animals in Nature by domesticating cows, pigs, goats, and
sheep. By herding rather than hunting animals, humans began a technology to
spare wild animals -- on land. In 2001 about 90 million tons of fish are
being taken wild from the sea and 30 from fish farms and ranches. Sadly, little
reliable information quantifies the diversity, distribution, and abundance of
life in the sea, but many anecdotes suggest large, degrading changes. In any
case, the ancient sparing of land animals by farming shows us an effective way
to spare the fish in the sea. We need to raise the share we farm and lower the
share we catch. Other human activities, such as urbanization of coastlines and
tampering with the climate, disturb the seas, but today fishing matters most.
Compare an ocean before and after heavy fishing. Fish farming does not
require invention. It has been around for a long time. For centuries, the
Chinese have been doing very nicely raising herbivores, such as
carp. Following the Chinese example, one feeds crops grown on land by farmers
to herbivorous fish in ponds. Much aquaculture of carp and tilapia in Southeast
Asia and the Philippines and of catfish near the Gulf Coast of the USA takes
this form. The fish grown in the ponds spare fish from the ocean. Like
poultry, fish efficiently convert protein in feed to protein in meat. And
because the fish do not have to stand, they convert calories in feed into meat
even more efficiently than poultry. All the improvements such as breeding and
disease control that have made poultry production more efficient can be and have
been applied to aquaculture, improving the conversion of feed to meat and
sparing wild fish.[iv] With due care
for effluents and pathogens, this model can multiply many times in tonnage. A
riskier and fascinating alternative, ocean farming, would actually lift life in
the oceans.[v] The oceans vary vastly
in their present productivity. In parts of the ocean crystal clear water
enables a person to see 50 meters down. These are deserts. In a few garden
areas, where one can see only a meter or so, life abounds. Water rich in iron,
phosphorus, trace metals, silica, and nitrate makes these gardens dense with
plants and animals. The experiments for marine sequestration of carbon
demonstrate the extraordinary leverage of iron to make the oceans
bloom. Adding the right nutrients in the right places might lift fish yields
by a factor of hundreds. Challenges abound because the ocean moves and mixes,
both vertically and horizontally. Nevertheless, technically and economically
promising proposals exist for farming on a large scale in the open ocean with
fertilization in deep water. One kg of buoyant fertilizer, mainly iron with
some phosphate, could produce a few thousand tons of
biomass.[vi] Improving the
fishes' pasture of marine plants is the crucial first step to greater
productivity. Zooplankton then graze on phytoplankton, and the food chain
continues until the sea teems with diverse life. Fertilizing 250,000 sq km of
barren tropical ocean, the size of the USA state of Colorado, in principle might
produce a catch matching today’s fish market of 100 million tons.
Colorado spreads less than 1/10th of 1% as wide as the world ocean. The
point is that the today's depleting harvest of wild fishes and destruction of
marine habitat to capture them need not continue. The 25% of seafood already
raised by aquaculture signals the potential for Restoration (Figure 3).
Following the example of farmers who spare land and wildlife by raising yields
on land, we can concentrate our fishing in highly productive, closed systems on
land and in a few highly productive ocean farms. Humanity can act to restore
the seas, and thus also preserve traditional fishing where communities value it.
With smart aquaculture, we can multiply life in the oceans while feeding
humanity and restoring Nature. St. Hubert, of course, might improve the marine
prospect by not eating fellow creatures from the sea. 5. Sparing
farmland What about sparing nature on land? How much must our farming,
logging, and cities take? First, can we spare land for nature while producing
our food? [vii] Yields per hectare
measure the productivity of land and the efficiency of land use. For centuries
land cropped expanded faster than population, and cropland per person rose as
people sought more proteins and calories. Fifty years ago farmers stopped
plowing up nature (Figure 4). During the past half-century, ratios of crops to
land for the world's major grains-corn, rice, soybean, and wheat-have climbed
fast on all six of the farm continents. Between 1972-1995 Chinese cereal yields
rose 3.3% per year per hectare. Per hectare, the global Food Index of the Food
and Agriculture Organization of the UN, which reflects both quantity and quality
of food, has risen 2.3% annually since 1960. In the USA in 1900 the protein or
calories raised on one Iowa hectare fed four people for the year. In 2000 a
hectare on the Iowa farm of master grower Mr. Francis Childs could feed eighty
people for the year. Since the middle of the 20th century, such productivity
gains have stabilized global cropland, and allowed reductions of cropland in
many nations, including China. Meanwhile, growth in the world’s food
supply has continued to outpace population, including in poor countries. A
cluster of innovations including tractors, seeds, chemicals, and irrigation,
joined through timely information flows and better organized markets, raised the
yields to feed billions more without clearing new fields. We have decoupled
food from acreage. High-yield agriculture need not tarnish the land.
Precision agriculture is the key. This approach to farming relies on technology
and information to help the grower prescribe and deliver precise inputs of
fertilizer, pesticides, seed, and water exactly where they are needed. We had
two revolutions in agriculture in the 20th century. First, the tractors of
mechanical engineers saved the oats that horses ate and multiplied the power of
labor. Then chemical engineers and plant breeders made more productive plants.
The present agricultural revolution comes from information engineers. What do
the past and future agricultural revolutions mean for land? To produce their
present crop of wheat, Indian farmers would need to farm more than three times
as much land today as they actually do, if their yields had remained at their
1966 level. Let me offer a second comparison: a USA city of 500,000 people in
2000 and a USA city of 500,000 people with the 2000 diet but the yields of
1920. Farming as Americans did 80 years ago while eating as Americans do now
would require 4 times as much land for the city, about 450,000 hectares instead
of 110,000. What can we look forward to globally? The agricultural
production frontier remains spacious. On the same area, the average world farmer
grows only about 20 percent of the corn of the top Iowa farmer, and the average
Iowa farmer lags more than 30 years behind the state-of-the-art of his most
productive neighbor. On average the world corn farmer has been making
the greatest annual percentage improvement. If during the next 60 to 70 years,
the world farmer reaches the average yield of today’s USA corn grower, the
ten billion people then likely to live on Earth will need only half of
today’s cropland. This will happen if farmers maintain on average the
yearly 2% worldwide growth per hectare of the Food Index achieved since 1960, in
other words, if dynamics, social learning, continues as usual. Even if the rate
falls to 1%, an area the size of India, globally, could revert from agriculture
to woodland or other uses. Averaging an improvement of 2% per year in the
productivity and efficiency of natural resource use may be a useful operational
definition of sustainability. Importantly, as Hubert would note, a vegetarian
diet of 3,000 primary calories per day halves the difficulty or doubles the land
spared. Hubert might also observe that eating from a salad bar is like taking a
sport utility vehicle to a gasoline filling station. Living on crisp lettuce,
which offers almost no protein or calories, demands many times the energy of a
simple rice-and-beans vegan
diet.[viii] Hubert would wonder at
the greenhouses of the Benelux countries glowing year round day and night. I
will trust more in the technical advance of farmers than in behavioral change by
eaters. The snake brain is usually a gourmet and a gourmand. Fortunately,
lifting yields while minimizing environmental fall out, farmers can effect the
Great Restoration. 6. Sparing forests Farmers may no longer
pose much threat to nature. What about lumberjacks? As with food, the area of
land needed for wood is a multiple of yield and diet, or the intensity of use
of wood products in the economy, as well as population and income. Let’s
focus on industrial wood -- logs cut for lumber, plywood, and pulp for paper.
The wood "diet" required to nourish an economy is determined by the tastes
and actions of consumers and by the efficiency with which millers transform
virgin wood into useful products.[ix]
Changing tastes and technological advances are already lightening pressure on
forests. Concrete, steel, and plastics have replaced much of the wood once used
in railroad ties, house walls, and flooring. Demand for lumber has become
sluggish, and in the last decade world consumption of boards and plywood
actually declined. Even the appetite for pulpwood, logs that end as sheets of
paper and board, has leveled. Meanwhile, more efficient lumber and paper
milling is already carving more value from the trees we
cut.[x] And recycling has helped
close leaks in the paper cycle. In 1970, consumers recycled less than one-fifth
of their paper; today, the world average is double that. The wood products
industry has learned to increase its revenue while moderating its consumption of
trees. Demand for industrial wood, now about 1.5 billion cubic meters per year,
has risen only 1% annually since 1960 while the world economy has multiplied at
nearly four times that rate. If millers improve their efficiency, manufacturers
deliver higher value through the better engineering of wood products, and
consumers recycle and replace more, in 2050 virgin demand could be only about 2
billion cubic meters and thus permit reduction in the area of forests cut for
lumber and paper. The permit, as with agriculture, comes from lifting yield.
The cubic meters of wood grown per hectare of forest each year provide strong
leverage for change. Historically, forestry has been a classic primary
industry, as Hubert doubtless saw in the shrinking Ardennes. Like fishers and
hunters, foresters have exhausted local resources and then moved on, returning
only if trees regenerated on their own. Most of the world's forests still
deliver wood this way, with an average annual yield of perhaps two cubic meters
of wood per hectare. If yield remains at that rate, by 2050 lumberjacks will
regularly saw nearly half the world's forests (Figure 5). That is a dismal
vision -- a chainsaw every other hectare, skinhead Earth. Lifting yields,
however, will spare more forests. Raising average yields 2 percent per year
would lift growth over 5 cubic meters per hectare by 2050 and shrink production
forests to just about 12 percent of all woodlands. Once again, high yields can
afford a Great Restoration. At likely planting rates, at least one billion
cubic meters of wood -- half the world's supply -- could come from plantations
by the year 2050. Semi-natural forests -- for example, those that regenerate
naturally but are thinned for higher yield -- could supply most of the rest.
Small-scale traditional "community forestry" could also deliver a small fraction
of industrial wood. Such arrangements, in which forest dwellers, often
indigenous peoples, earn revenue from commercial timber, can provide essential
protection to woodlands and their inhabitants. More than a fifth of the
world's virgin wood is already produced from forests with yields above 7
m3 per hectare. Plantations in Brazil, Chile, and New Zealand can
sustain yearly growth of more than 20 m3 meters per hectare with pine
trees. In Brazil eucalyptus -- a hardwood good for some papers -- delivers more
than 40 m3 per hectare. In the Pacific Northwest and British
Columbia, with plentiful rainfall, hybrid poplars deliver 50 m3 per
hectare. Environmentalists worry that industrial plantations will deplete
nutrients and water in the soil and produce a vulnerable monoculture of trees
where a rich diversity of species should prevail. Meanwhile, advocates for
indigenous peoples, who have witnessed the harm caused by crude industrial
logging of natural forests, warn that plantations will dislocate forest dwellers
and upset local economies. Pressure from these groups helps explain why the
best practices in plantation forestry now stress the protection of environmental
quality and human rights. As with most innovations, achieving the promise of
high-yield forestry will require feedback from a watchful public. The main
benefit of the new approach to forests will reside in the natural habitat
spared by more efficient forestry. An industry that draws from planted forests
rather than cutting from the wild will disturb only one-fifth or less of the
area for the same volume of wood. Instead of logging half the world's forests,
humanity can leave almost 90 % of them minimally disturbed. And nearly all new
tree plantations are established on abandoned croplands, which are already
abundant and accessible. Although the technology of forestry rather than the
behavior of hunters spared the forests and stags, Hubert would still be
pleased. 7. Sparing pavement What then are the areas of land
that may be built upon? One of the most basic human instincts, from the snake
brain, is territorial. Territorial animals strive for territory. Maximizing
range means maximizing access to resources. Most of human history is a bloody
testimony to the instinct to maximize range. For humans, a large accessible
territory means greater liberty in choosing the points of gravity of our lives:
the home and the workplace. Around 1800, new machines began transporting
people faster and faster, gobbling up the kilometers and revolutionizing
territorial organization.[xi] The
highly successful machines are few—train, motor vehicle, and
plane—and their diffusion slow. Each has taken from 50 to 100 years to
saturate its niche. Each machine progressively stretches the distance traveled
daily beyond the 5 km of mobility on foot. Collectively, their outcome is a
steady increase in mobility. For example, in France, from 1800 to today,
mobility has extended an average of more than 3% per year, doubling about every
25 years. Mobility is constrained by two invariant budgets, one for money and
one for time. Humans always spend an average 12-15% of their income for travel.
And the snake brain makes us visit our territory for about one hour each day,
the travel time budget. Hubert doubtless averaged about one hour of walking per
day. The essence is that the transport system and the number of people
basically determine covered
land.[xii] Greater wealth enables
people to buy higher speed, and when transit quickens, cities spread. Both
average wealth and numbers will grow, so cities will take more land. The USA
is a country with a fast growing population, and expects about another 100
million people over the next century. Californians pave or build on about 600
m2 each. At the California rate, the USA increase would consume 6
million hectares, about the combined land area of the Netherlands and Belgium.
Globally, if everyone new builds at the present California rate, 4 billion added
to today’s 6 billion people would cover about 240 million hectares, midway
in size between Mexico and Argentina. Towering higher, urbanites could
spare even more land for nature. In fact, migration from the country to the
city formed the long prologue to the Great Restoration. Still, cities will take
from nature. But, to compensate, we can move much of our transit
underground, so we need not further tar the landscape. The magnetically
levitated train, or maglev, a container without wings, without motors, without
combustibles aboard, suspended and propelled by magnetic fields generated in a
sort of guard rail, nears readiness (Figure 6). A route from the airport of
Shanghai to the city center will soon open. If one puts the maglev underground
in a low pressure or vacuum tube, as the Swiss think of doing with their
Swissmetro, then we would have the equivalent of a plane that flies at high
altitude with few limitations on speed. The Swiss maglev plan links all Swiss
cities in 10
minutes.[xiii] Maglevs in low
pressure tubes can be ten times as energy efficient as present transport
systems. In fact, they need consume almost no net energy. Had Hubert crossed
the USA in 1850 to San Francisco from St. Louis on the Overland Stage, he would
have exhausted 2700 fresh horses. Future human settlements could grow around
a maglev station with an area of about 1 km2 and 100,000 inhabitants,
be largely pedestrian, and via the maglev form part of a network of city
services within walking distance. The quarters could be surrounded by green
land. In fact, cities please people, especially those that have grown naturally
without suffering the sadism of architects and urban planners. Technology
already holds green mobility in store for us. Naturally maglevs want 100 years
to diffuse, like the train, auto, or plane. With maglevs, together with
personal vehicles and airplanes operating on hydrogen, Hubert could range
hundreds of kilometers daily for his ministry, fulfilling the urges of his
reptilian brain, while leaving the land and air pristine. 8. Cardinal
Resolutions How can the Great Restoration of Nature I envision be
accomplished? Hubert became only a Bishop, but in his honor, I propose we
promote four cardinal resolutions, one each for fish, farms, forests, and
transport. Resolution one: The stakeholders in the oceans, including the
scientific community, shall conduct a worldwide Census of Marine Life between
now and the year 2010. Some of us already are
trying.[xiv] The purpose of the
Census is to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of
marine life. This Census can mark the start of the Great Restoration for marine
life, helping us move from uncertain anecdotes to reliable quantities. The
Census of Marine Life can provide the impetus and foundation for a vast
expansion of marine protected areas and wiser management of life in the
sea. Resolution two: The many partners in the farming enterprise shall
continue to lift yields per hectare by 2% per year throughout the 21st century.
Science and technology can double and redouble yields and thus spare hundreds of
millions of hectares for Nature. We should also be mindful that our diets, that
is, behavior, can affect land needed for farming by a factor of
two. Resolution three: Foresters, millers, and consumers shall work together
to increase global forest area by 10%, about 300 million hectares, by 2050.
Furthermore, we will concentrate logging on about 10% of forest land. Behavior
can moderate demand for wood products, and foresters can make trees that
speedily meet that demand, minimizing the forest we disturb. Curiously, neither
the diplomacy nor science about carbon and greenhouse warming has yet offered a
visionary global target or timetable for land
use.[xv] Resolution four: The
major cities of the world shall start digging tunnels for maglevs. While cities
will sprawl, our transport need not pave paradise or pollute the air. Although
our snake brains and the instinct to travel will still determine travel
behavior, maglevs can zoom underground, sparing green landscape. Clearly,
to realize our vision we shall need both maglevs and the vision of St. Hubert.
Simply promoting the gentle values of St. Hubert is not enough. Soon after he
painted his masterpiece, Paulus Potter died of tuberculosis and was buried in
Amsterdam on 7 January 1654 at the age of 29. In fact, Potter suffered poor
engineering. Observe in The Life of the Hunter that the branch of the tree from
which the dogs hang does not bend. Because we are already more than 6 billion
and heading for 10 in the new century, we already have a Faustian bargain with
technology. Having come this far with technology, we have no road back. If
Indian wheat farmers allow yields to fall to the level of 1960, to sustain the
present harvest they would need to clear nearly 50 million hectares, about the
area of Madhya Pradesh or Spain. So, we must engage the elements of human
society that impel us toward fish farms, landless agriculture, productive
timber, and green mobility. And we must not be fooled into thinking that the
talk of politicians and diplomats will achieve our goals. The maglev engineers
and farmers and foresters are the authentic movers, aided by science. Still, a
helpful step is to lock the vision of the Great Restoration in our minds and
make our cardinal resolutions for fish, farms, forests, and transport. In the
21st century, we have both the glowing vision of St. Hubert and the technology
exemplified by maglevs to realize the Great Restoration of
Nature. Acknowledgements: Georgia Healey, Cesare Marchetti, Perrin Meyer,
David Victor, Iddo Wernick, Paul Waggoner, and especially Diana Wolff-Albers for
introducing me to Paulus Potter. Figures
Figure 1. The
Life of the Hunter by Paulus Potter. The painting hangs in the museum of the
Hermitage, St. Petersburg.
Figure 2. Symbolic representation of the
triune brain. Source: P. D. MacLean, 1990.
Figure 3. World capture fisheries and aquaculture
production. Note the rising amount and share of aquaculture. Source: Food and
Agriculture Organization of the UN, The state of world fisheries and aquaculture
2000, Rome.
http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/003/X8002E/X8002E00.htm
Figure 4. Reversal in area of land used to feed a person. After
gradually increasing for centuries, the worldwide area of cropland per person
began dropping steeply in about 1950, when yields per hectare began to climb.
The square shows the area needed by the Iowa Master Corn Grower of 1999 to
supply one person a year’s worth of calories. The dotted line shows how
sustaining the lifting of average yields 2 percent per year extends the
reversal. Sources of data: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations, various Yearbooks. National Corn Growers Association, National
Corngrowers Association Announces 1999 Corn Yield Contest Winners, Hot Off the
Cob, St. Louis MO, 15 December 1999; J. F. Richards, 1990, “Land
Transformations,” in The Earth as Transformed by Human Action, B.
L. Turner II et al. eds., Cambridge University: Cambridge, UK.
Figure 5. Present and projected land use and land cover. Today's 2.4
billion hectares used for crops and industrial forests spread on "Skinhead
Earth" to 2.9 while in the "Great Restoration" they contract to 1.5. Source: D.
G. Victor and J. H. Ausubel, Restoring the Forests, Foreign Affairs
79(6): 127-144, 2000.
Figure 6. Smoothed historic rates of growth (solid lines) of the major
components of the US transport infrastructure and conjectures (dashed lines)
based on constant dynamics. Rhythm evokes a new entrant now, maglevs. The inset
shows the actual growth, which eventually became negative for canals and rail as
routes were closed. Delta t is the time for the system to grow from 10% to 90%
of its extent. Source: Toward Green Mobility: The Evolution of Transport, J. H.
Ausubel, C. Marchetti, and P. S. Meyer, European Review 6(2): 137-156
(1998).
References and Notes
[i] A. Walsh, E. Buijsen, and B.
Broos, Paulus Potter: Schilderijen, tekeningen en etsen, Waanders,
Zwolle, 1994.
[ii] The upper right
panel shows Diana and Acteon, from the Metamorphosis of the Roman poet
Ovid. Acteon, a hunter, was walking in the forest one day after a successful
hunt and intruded in a sacred grove where Diana, the virgin goddess, bathed in a
pond. Suddenly, in view of Diana, Acteon became inflamed with love for her. He
was changed into a deer, from the hunter to what he hunted. As such, he was
killed by his own dogs. This panel was painted by a colleague of
Potter. [iii] P. D. MacLean, The
Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions, Plenum, New
York, 1990. [iv] In some fish
ranching, notably most of today’s ranching of salmon, the salmon
effectively graze the oceans, as the razorback hogs of a primitive farmer would
graze the oak woods. Such aquaculture consists of catching wild
“junk” fish or their oil to feed to our herds, such as salmon in
pens. We change the form of the fish, adding economic value, but do not address
the fundamental question of the tons of stocks. A shift from this ocean ranching
and grazing to true farming of parts of the ocean can spare others from the
present, on-going depletion. [v] J.
H. Ausubel,
The Great Reversal: Nature's Chance to Restore Land and Sea,
Technology in Society 22(3):289-302, 2000; M. Markels, Jr., Method of
improving production of seafood. US Patent 5,433,173, July 18, 1995, Washington
DC. [vi] Along with its iron
supplement, such an ocean farm would annually require about 4 million tons of
nitrogen fertilizer, 1/20th of the synthetic fertilizers used by all land
farms.
[vii] P. E. Waggoner and J. H.
Ausubel,
How Much Will Feeding More and Wealthier People Encroach on Nature?
Population and Development Review 27(2):239-257, 200.
[viii] G. Leach, Energy and
Food Production, IPC Science and Technology Press, Guildford UK, 1976,
quantifies the energy costs of a range of food systems.
[ix] I. K. Wernick, P. E.
Waggoner, and J. H. Ausubel,
Searching for Leverage to Conserve Forests: The
Industrial Ecology of Wood Products in the U.S., Journal of Industrial
Ecology 1(3):125-145, 1997.
[x] In the United States, for
example, leftovers from lumber mills account for more than a third of the wood
chips turned into pulp and paper; what is still left after that is burned for
power.
[xi] J. H. Ausubel, C.
Marchetti, and P. S. Meyer,
Toward Green Mobility: The Evolution of Transport,
European Review 6(2):143-162, 1998.
[xii] P. E. Waggoner, J. H.
Ausubel, I. K. Wernick,
Lightening the Tread of Population on the Land: American
Examples, Population and Development Review 22(3):531-545,
1996.
[xiii]
www.swissmetro.com [xiv] J. H.
Ausubel,
The Census of Marine Life: Progress and Prospects, Fisheries 26
(7): 33-36, 2001.
[xv] D. G. Victor and J. H.
Ausubel,
Restoring the Forests, Foreign Affairs 79(6): 127-144,
2000.
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