[Ayame]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('2cher', 'T')he worlds population is to high anyway, it is time for governments to start making hard choices about population growth and start limiting births and the age it's citizens can attain. Get rid of social programs that allow life's failures to continue to survive. This means not only SS, Medicare, and welfare. It also means humanitarian aid to foreign countries. It also means emptying the prisons of violent offenders, child molester, and rapists by lining them up and executing them.

[dsula]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('billg', 'i')'m using it to illustrate a point...it's not supposed to be sexual...it's a man drinking raw milk from a cow.

Link to image deleted by eastbay

[rangerone314]

I look upon red meat as sort of a luxury. I don't buy hotdogs, hamburgers or groundbeef except as the occasional "treat" for a cookout or for taco meat. So I'm OK with a mostly vegetarian diet. Its more efficient land user for my 2+ acres.

Most of my protein comes from beans, peanuts, chicken, eggs, and then fish. I still buy milk.

When I am growing enough food, I will start to phase out some purchases, like chicken, eggs and fish. (Substitutes = my own chicken flock's eggs in September, green purslane etc for Omega-3)

I plan on an increasingly larger # of hazelnut/filberts.

Right now I have about a dozen wild hazelnuts and 8 hybrid hazelnuts. Eventual plan is to add probably another 30 hybrid hazelnuts. The farthest reach of the property has a mulberry tree, multiple pawpaw trees and a few persimmon trees.

In maybe 1200 square feet dwarf fruit tree area I have 2 fig trees, 3 apple trees, 1 plum tree, 2 cherry trees, 2 peach trees and 2 pear trees.

In the 900 square foot fruit bush area I have 20 blueberry bushes, unknown amount of strawberries & teaberries, 7 cranberry vines, 9 aronia bushes, 2 pussy willows)

Crop area #1 has 840 square feet (2 beds of corn, 1 beds of potatoes/turnips/onion, 1 beds of potatoes/maca, 1 bed garlic/radishes, 1 bed of leeks, 1 bed of sweet potatoes/salsify/parsnips). There will eventually be 19 crop areas (@ 16,000 sqFt) within about 6 years.

The grassy chicken run is 288 sqFt and that has 2 roosters and 19 hens.

The perennial asparagus and annual tomato/radish/basil area is about between 200 and 300 sqFt with about 50 asparagus plants (and this year, 9 heirloom tomato plants)

[dohboi]

Sounds like a nice set up, rangerone.

"I look upon red meat as sort of a luxury."

This is the central point. For most people through most of history, meat has been a luxury--chicken on Sunday...

The problem currently is that the bizarre and very recent US diet, with lots of meat at every meal, is becoming popular everywhere that people can afford it. This growth in meat eating, especially as most meat is grown to feed this burgeoning diet, is what is unsustainable.

Everyone could be carnivorous and still we could feed everyone--but meat would have to be a rare treat or a flavoring factor for most people most of the time.

Of course, a great increase in a particular kind of "meat" eating would be quite sustainable.

link--not for the faint of heart

[Pretorian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', 'W')hy an adult mammal has to continue suckling at the breast beyond infancy is another question.

[Pretorian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ayame', ' ')I would happily let your children inherit the earth because as I see it life can be sadistically cruel and nasty, I would not wish the burden of existance on any relative of mine.

[Carlhole]

PopSci
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he raising of livestock consumes two-thirds of the planet's farmland, and is a major source of greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, tons of edible, sustainable protein swarms all around us, free for the taking. In a new policy paper being considered by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Belgian entomologist Arnold van Huis makes the sensible recommendation that the western world eat more insects.

Farming edible insects like mealworms and crickets would produce far less greenhouse gas -- 10 times less methane and 100 times less nitrous oxide -- than the large mammals we currently farm. Insects are metabolically much more efficient, which makes them far cheaper to feed and raise; and, since they're so biologically different from humans, they are less subject to contagious disease scares like mad cow. They are high in protein and calcium, and, with over 1,000 edible species, offer plenty of delicious variety.

[ian807]

Ah..... Grasshopper.

[eastbay]

We could stamp or cut the dried resultant goo into tasty chips ... green chips. Green wafers or 'chips' might sell better. We could skip soy and grains because of the harm they cause to farmland and soil. It would be wheat and corn-free... plus, soy-less and green.

I'm sure someone could come up with a catchy name for these wafers.

[efarmer]

I posted on this long ago, and think if they could be processed into a common protein format, it could find purchase and migrate into Western diets.

"That was one soft drink and a 10 piece order of Fricken McBuggets. That will be $3.61, please pull around to the second window."

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('efarmer', 'F')ricken McBuggets

[eastbay]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('efarmer', 'I') posted on this long ago, and think if they could be processed into a common protein format, it could find purchase and migrate into Western diets.

"That was one soft drink and a 10 piece order of Fricken McBuggets. That will be $3.61, please pull around to the second window."

[Pretorian]

Humanity ate and keeps eating bugs since forever. There are factory-canned worms for sale in some african countries too.If it would be easy and or profitable to breed bug it would be done so centuries ago, as it is done now with fish/reptile food ets. Anyways there is no way out of overpopulation other than through graveyard. Folks from UN should know it already.

[efarmer]

You haven't lived Pretorian until you have had a taste of animated snackage.

[Keith_McClary]

I heard a rumor that McBurgers contain beef.

[PrestonSturges]

Cambodian Cricket harvesting. A couple fluorescent lights hooked up to car batteries can yield buckets of protein a night

http://www.cpmec.com.kh/En/news.php?newsID=802

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')t's a bumper year for crickets here in what is known informally as Cambodia's cricket capital. By night, the rice fields blaze with lights from the traps farmers set up to lure the insects. By morning, the markets are hopping with great heaps of dead and dying crickets.

Men stand around nibbling from the bags of deep-fried bugs they've promised to bring home to their wives and children. Sor Van Nin came all the way from the capital, Phnom Penh, for these crickets, and he can't stop eating them.

"They're so fresh," he says, grinning, a few stray antennae stuck to his chin.

I've come to Kampong Thom with my friend, Yun Samean, who is crazy for crickets. I think he came mostly for the snacks. I came for the history. Pol Pot, who oversaw the deaths of 2 million people in Cambodia in the late 1970s, grew up here, just down a slow lane by the Stung Sen River. His neighbors remember him as a nice kid.

That is a Cambodian mystery I will never solve, but maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to understand the strange – but, to me, terrible – appeal of the cricket. I will try anyway, an effort that will surely involve eating one, and if I am going to eat a cricket, I want the finest, freshest, crunchiest cricket around. And that means driving to Kampong Thom.

[eXpat]

But what do they know? /sarcasm
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'H')umanity is close to breaching the sustainability of Earth, and needs a technological revolution greater – and faster – than the industrial revolution to avoid “a major planetary catastrophe,” according to a new United Nations report. The world is facing exploding population, an energy crisis, global climate change, increasingly destructive natural disasters and increasing starvation.
Major investments will be needed worldwide in the developing and scaling up of clean energy technologies, sustainable farming and forestry techniques, climate-proofing of infrastructure, and in technologies reducing non-biological degradable waste production, according to The World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation, published today by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).

“It is rapidly expanding energy use, mainly driven by fossil fuels, that explains why humanity is on the verge of breaching planetary sustainability boundaries through global warming, biodiversity loss, and disturbance of the nitrogen-cycle balance and other measures of the sustainability of the earth’s ecosystem,” the report says. “A comprehensive global energy transition is urgently needed in order to avert a major planetary catastrophe.”
The survey says $1.9 trillion per year will be needed over the next 40 years for incremental investments in green technologies. At least $1.1 trillion of that will need to be made in developing countries to meet increasing food and energy demands.

“Technological transformation, greater in scale and achievable within a much shorter time frame than the first industrial revolution, is required,” it says. “The necessary set of new technologies must enable today’s poor to attain decent living standards, while reducing emissions and waste and ending the unrestrained drawdown of the Earth’s non-renewable resources.”

“Staging a new technological revolution at a faster pace and on a global scale will call for proactive government intervention and greater international cooperation. Sweeping technological change will require sweeping societal transformation, with changed settlement and consumption patterns and better social values,” it adds.

In the preface to the report, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon writes that “rather than viewing growth and sustainability as competing goals on a collision course, we must see them as complementary and mutually supportive imperatives. This becomes possible when we embrace a low-carbon, resource-efficient, pro-poor economic model.”

The survey concludes: “Business as usual is not an option. An attempt to overcome world poverty through income growth generated by existing ‘brown technologies’ would exceed the limits of environmental sustainability.”

[RedStateGreen]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'H')umanity is close to breaching the sustainability of Earth, and needs a technological revolution greater – and faster – than the industrial revolution

[peeker01]

i hang on every word the un says.......