That the food you eat is grown using synthetic fertilizers, and that this is needed for agricultural productivity, because all soil loses its fertility naturally over time if it is not deliberately replenished.
This claim doesn’t make sense. If it were true, plants would not have survived to the present day.
Steelmanning (which I would say OP doesn’t do a good job of...), I’ll interpret this as: “we are technologically reliant on synthetic fertilizers to grow enough food to feed the current population”. But in any case, there are harmful environmental consequences to our current practice that seem somewhat urgent to address: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Economic_and_environmental_aspects
No, the claim as written is true—agriculture will ruin soil over time, which has happened in recent scientific memory in certain places in Africa. And if you look at the biblical description of parts of the middle east, it’s clear that desertification had taken a tremendous toll over the past couple thousand years. That’s not because of fertilizer usage, it’s because agriculture is about extracting food and moving it elsewhere, usually interrupting the cycle of nutrients, which happens organically otherwise. Obviously, natural habitats don’t do this in the same way, because the varieties of plants shift over time, fauna is involved, etc.
I guess your interpretation of “naturally” is “when non-sustainably farmed”? ;)
My impression is that we know how to keep farmland productive without using fertilizers by rotating crops, letting fields lie fallow sometimes, and involving fauna. Of course, this might be much less efficient than using synthetic fertilizers, so I’m not saying that’s what we should be doing.
See my comments above for some discussion of this topic. Broadly speaking we do know how to keep farmland productive but there are uncaptured externalities and other inadequacies to be accounted for.
This claim doesn’t make sense. If it were true, plants would not have survived to the present day.
Steelmanning (which I would say OP doesn’t do a good job of...), I’ll interpret this as: “we are technologically reliant on synthetic fertilizers to grow enough food to feed the current population”. But in any case, there are harmful environmental consequences to our current practice that seem somewhat urgent to address: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Economic_and_environmental_aspects
No, the claim as written is true—agriculture will ruin soil over time, which has happened in recent scientific memory in certain places in Africa. And if you look at the biblical description of parts of the middle east, it’s clear that desertification had taken a tremendous toll over the past couple thousand years. That’s not because of fertilizer usage, it’s because agriculture is about extracting food and moving it elsewhere, usually interrupting the cycle of nutrients, which happens organically otherwise. Obviously, natural habitats don’t do this in the same way, because the varieties of plants shift over time, fauna is involved, etc.
The claim I’m objecting to is:
I guess your interpretation of “naturally” is “when non-sustainably farmed”? ;)
My impression is that we know how to keep farmland productive without using fertilizers by rotating crops, letting fields lie fallow sometimes, and involving fauna. Of course, this might be much less efficient than using synthetic fertilizers, so I’m not saying that’s what we should be doing.
See my comments above for some discussion of this topic. Broadly speaking we do know how to keep farmland productive but there are uncaptured externalities and other inadequacies to be accounted for.