The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

188 / the world peace diet
past twenty years. 15 Meanwhile, every year more crops are lost to pests
because of monocropping and the abandonment of traditional soilregenerating
practices. When large tracts of land are used to grow only
one crop, the fields strongly attract “pest” species that feed on that specific
crop. Because of the lack of variety in the plant and insect population
of the area, few birds and other predators come there to feed, and
the pests become immune to the ever-increasing levels of pesticides
directed at them. The same crop is planted in the same soil season after
season, compounding the profusion of pesticide-resistant organisms.
According to Worldwatch Institute, there are now about a thousand
major agricultural pests that are immune to pesticides. 16 Dousing our
food fields with poison is part of a cancer-causing battle against nature’s
persistent resistance to the industrialized methods agribusiness prefers,
which turn millions of acres of monocropped lands into toxic killing
fields for wildlife.
Modern intensive agriculture also inevitably destroys topsoil, which
requires centuries to build up—approximately five hundred years for
one inch. 17 Because of the harshness of industrial agriculture, cropland
soils are eroding at thirty times the formation rate, and every year more
than two million acres are lost to erosion and to salinization from
chronic irrigation. 18 At this point, the soil of large-scale monocropping
operations is depleted of minerals and nutrients, and is little more than
a lifeless medium into which agribusiness pours inorganic nitrogen fertilizer
in order to produce high-yield crops—primarily livestock feed—
of questionable nutritive value.
This intensive agriculture is unsustainable. The more it damages
land and water supplies and drains aquifers, the more fossil fuel input it
requires to irrigate, replace nutrients, provide pest protection, and simply
hold crop production constant. Unless we switch from eating
resource-gobbling animal foods, we will have to face the consequences
of our limited and declining supply of fossil fuels.
Richard Heinberg makes clear in his book The Party’s Over: Oil,
War and the Fate of Industrial Societies that leading petroleum experts
believe that worldwide production of petroleum is currently peaking,
and we are now entering a period of declining production as existing