Environmental Sustainability, Peak Oil and World Hunger

Environmental sustainability isn't just an idea that marketing departments for large companies can shine up with snazzy graphics and a captive consumer market. Environmental sustainability is a genuine necessity in order to continue at even a fraction of our current consumption levels for survival.

The aim here is not to be alarmist; it is simply to make a point of equations. The United States uses 25% of the world's oil reserves on the daily while boasting a mere 4% of its population. Twenty-five per cent: It's a lot of oil.

Now, we can blame the cars. We can blame the factories. We can blame a number of institutions, but really, we only have to blame ourselves. People are starving in the world because we allow them to starve. This inequality is a direct result of surplus to lack. It's so easy to forget that the earth has a natural balance. When one takes more, another one is taken from. We are all given equal parts, no matter how we try to justify otherwise.

Last year, The United Nations reported that over one billion people in the world are starving. That's more than 16% of the world population that are in extreme want for food; meanwhile industrialized nations waste almost equal to their consumption. And considering the general girth of industrial waistlines, that's a lot of food.

The biotech industry would cry out that we need to produce more genetic modification,  more herbicides and more oil-based production methods to feed the expected 3 billion new earthly residents by 2050. But if we don't have clean soil and water, viable seed, and dedicated knowledge of working the land sustainably, it's not going to matter how much food we produce. Nobody will get any benefit of it.

Enter the inevitable rise of famine. Those that are already starving are likely to die as factory farms push toward making a fatter cow, faster. It seems somewhat counter-intuitive when the grain used to feed the cows could easily be grown for human consumption and shipped to starving nations. This is a far more useful spending of oil than, say, deep frying Coca-Cola.

There are a few new books on the market that address these sorts of problems and arguments. If you're looking to consume something, eat up one of these reads:

• The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It by Julian Cribb


• American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half Of Its Food (and what we can do about it) by Jonathan Bloom


• Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Evan D.G. Fraser