Keynote Presentation: Food, Water, and Energy

While blatant food waste late in the production chain is apparent to most of us, less apparent is the inefficiency of resource use in the processes whereby we produce, harvest, process, package, store, and deliver the food that we eat. We waste water: 72% of water “used” worldwide is applied directly to cropland, much of it via archaic technology. We move water from where it is plentiful to places where we imagine it will be more useful. We waste nutrients, even those that we know are in limited supply, by careless or excessive application. Effluent from fertilized cropland has contaminated soils, groundwater, streams, and vast areas of the ocean. We waste our wild fisheries by extraction beyond their capacity to recover, and by contaminating the water on which they depend. Exhaustion of marine fisheries was extensive before the first inventories were undertaken; thus, available baselines of fishery declines are not adequate to inform current management strategies. We waste energy by pumping irrigation water against gravity, and in every stage of the food industry. Today, the US food industry invests 10 calories of energy for every food calorie delivered to an American household. Surviving subsistence-agriculture societies deliver as much as 50 food calories for every calorie invested. Most of those invested calories today come from fossil hydrocarbons. We have largely eliminated natural ecosystems, replacing floral diversity with industrialized monoculture, and wild fauna with food animals, Fifty percent of the crops that we raise we use to feed food animals, which we then eat. We have not exploited opportunities to develop alternative food sources via hydroponic systems, aquaculture, insectivory, nutrient recycling, etc. In 1900 the Earth supported 1.6 billion people, many of them not well. Futurists of that time estimated that the carrying capacity of Earth was not higher than 2.5 billion people. Today we feed 7.2 billion people more calories/person than was the case in 1900, higher in the food chain, and on less land than was under cultivation in 1900. This has been achieved via development of a synthetic fertilizer industry, by selection of high-yielding crops, by energy-intensive cultivation practices, and, most recently, by genetic manipulation of food plants and animals. We have not extended the global carrying capacity by reverting to traditional agricultural practices. Even with these advances, we do not feed 7.2 billion people well. However, nutrition deficiencies are more the consequence of distribution inefficiencies than of inadequate supply. The systems that now produce food for 7.2 billion people can accommodate many more, as even newer technical advances are developed and implemented. But the most obvious and immediate strategy to feed the people we now have, and the people we expect, is to reform current practices to reduce waste in every stage of the food industry. The global food industry has come a long way. Rational analysis and judicious inventiveness can substantially advance the capacity of that industry to accommodate a larger human population

Modern Spectral Climate Patterns in Rhythmically Deposited Argillites of the Gowganda Formation (Early Proterozoic), Southern Ontario, Canada

Rhythmically deposited argillites of the Gowganda Formation (ca. 2.0–2.5 Ga) probably formed in a glacial setting. Drop stones and layered sedimentary couplets in the rock presumably indicate formation in a lacustrine environment with repeating freeze–thaw cycles. It is plausible that temporal variations in the thickness of sedimentary layers are related to interannual climatic variability, e.g. average seasonal temperature could have influenced melting and the amount of sediment source material carried to the lake. A sequence of layer couplet thickness measurements was made from high-resolution digitized photographs taken at an outcrop in southern Ontario, Canada. The frequency spectrum of thickness measurements displays patterns that resemble some aspects of modern climate. Coherent periodic modes in the thickness spectrum appear at 9.9–10.7 layer couplets and at 14.3 layer couplets. It is unlikely that these coherent modes result from random processes. Modern instrument records of regional temperature and rainfall display similar spectral patterns, with some datasets showing significant modes near 14 yr in both parameters. Rainfall and temperature could have affected sedimentary layering in the Gowganda argillite sequence, and climate modulation of couplet thickness emerges as the most likely explanation of the observed layering pattern. If this interpretation is correct, the layer couplets represent predominantly annual accumulations of sediment (i.e. they are varves), and the thickness spectrum provides a glimpse of Early Proterozoic climatic variability. The presence of interannual climate patterns is not unanticipated, but field evidence presented here may be of some value in developing a climate theory for the Early Proterozoic