Period 3. Changes in land cover: The other inconvenient truth

 This week the topic is changes in land cover. When I think about the subject the first thing that comes to my mind is deforestation, especially cutting down the rainforests for farming and for cattle. In Brazil the problem is meat and soy bean production, in Indonesia it's the palm oil industry, or at least that's what I think

I started by watching Jonathan Foley's TED Talk about agriculture. I already knew that a huge area of the world is used for food production but it still came to me as a bit of a shock that the area used for agriculture is 60 times bigger than urban areas. The thing that really surprised me and what I learnt most new about was the water aspect of agriculture as well as it's affects to climate change.  The fact that agriculture spends so much water that it could fill up 7305 Empire State buildings every day sounded unbelievable. 

 

I wonder why these things aren't really talked about in media or at school. It's probably - as Foley said - because food is a necessity, not a luxury to us. The thing that is talked about schools and media is the growing world population and how we will be able to feed everyone. And it seems that at the same time we should make agriculture more environmentally friendly. Sounds quite of a challenge, but Foley's talk gave me hope and the idea of terraculture sounded good. The term "terraculture" was new to me and I hope to learn more about it in the future. I also have a faith that in Finland universities, especially University of Helsinki's faculty of agriculture and forestry are thinking of ways solving the problems we are facing with agriculture. This was actually a education path I was also interested other than biology as my dad is a farmed and we own farm land.

In my opinion, we need to also start taking a better look at our diets. The consumption of meat needs to go down globally because otherwise we will be in a huge problem as the population grows and more and more people can afford eating more meat. This is where the Western countries need to show an example and by government level encourage people to eat less meat. The meat can't be replaced with fish though, as our oceans already are being overfished and fish populations are suffering. We need new a new way of thinking and I think it is possible.