PS 34-218 - Restoring the planet while feeding the world

Abstract: A large fraction of Earth's land is invested in artificial ecosystems, approximately two-fifths, with consequences that are not under control -- destroying wild habitats, launching a great extinction debt, generating global greenhouse emissions, reducing soil fertility, polluting waterways, killing pollinators, and other massive ecological effects. Our team has studied equally massive solutions to these global ecological problems and have identified a sequence of four major steps to ameliorate them:

(Step 1) Construction, which is replacing lands now in low-diversity crops such as corn and wheat with harvestable high-diversity ecosystems derived from natural flora, such as native prairies, then harvesting the high-diversity ecosystems in ways that will not harm the recolonizing wildlife. This is a new kind of constructive ecological agriculture that our large-scale experiments demonstrate is possible, at least in prairie ecosystems.

(Step 2) Deconstruction, which is separating the harvested plant materials into essential nutrients -- amino acids, sugars, salts, fatty acids, and other nutrients of life -- plus separating and recovering the large amounts of carbon in plant tissues beyond that needed for essential nutrients, removing carbon from the atmosphere as a consequence. This step involves extended biological and bioengineering research on processes that are entirely exothermic and related to processes performed naturally by herbivores. Our calculations indicate that with the low-diversity agricultural lands of the world converted in this way, not only could enough food be produced, but enough carbon could be removed, over the course of a century, to restore the atmosphere to its state before the industrial revolution.

(Step 3) Reconstruction, which is building the deconstructed nutrients of the prior step into clean, safe foods, in part through the emerging methods of tissue culture, creating biologically pure foods ranging from vegetables to meats. These would be microscopically equivalent and macroscopically indistinguishable in taste, texture, and appearance from ordinary agriculturally grown foods. This step is already well under development commercially, getting ready to be integrated with the prior two steps.

(Step 4) Distribution, which is transporting foods and preparing meals. This step is already understood.

In summary, our experimental and theoretical studies show how these four steps can restore the planet while feeding the world. Humans are the first species to become consciously aware of the global ecological impacts of their actions. Therefore, collective global efforts should help guide us toward prudent paths into the future and help us guard the ecology of the planet.