Item — HN Reader

> rampant use of fungicides on crops is contributing to the surge in drug-resistant fungi infecting humans

Another looming side effect of mono-cropping — planting huge fields of a single, highly specialized cultivar with very low genetic diversity.

Many of these cultivars are reliant on huge amounts of fertilizer, insecticide and fungicide. They produce high yields when times are good, but come with massive vulnerabilities and large negative externalities.

There has been some movement in recent decades away from typical industrial agriculture toward more diverse planting and sustainable and scientific farming, which in the long run produce healthier soil, crops and environment. Sadly this is still fairly niche and not applied to the millions of acres of single crop areas around the globe, mostly because it’s still super cheap to pump fields for all their worth with cash crops.

Unless we adopt a more difficult path, we’ll be paying for our cheap calories in more ways than just algae blooms and drug-resistant fungus. But I guess the same could be said about everything, climate change et al.

1 comments

I think a different term needs to be adopted by now, since climate change is perhaps only half the story.

Yes, the greenhouse gases from converted fossil fuels used for transportation and the release of energy to do work, all of which leads to global warming, is of great concern, and in terms of survival of our species, matters very much.

But there are a number of looming adjacent narratives that go hand-in-hand with climate change, but are not necessarily of climate change alone, while human activity beyond the use of fossil fuels is certainly at the heart of the matter.

Fish dying off, colony collapse disorder, birds disappearing, general insect volume depletion throughout zones of historically higher activity, radiological contamination of the ocean by at least one major nuclear incident, the pacific garbage patch and microplastics in general, chemical pollution of waterways, disruptive hydroelectric dams, fracking, slag lagoons (ruptured and unruptured), superfund sites like the gowanus canal as a particular expample of a failure to clean up even one hazardous zone in a major city, pesticides in general (even ignoring insect populations as keystone species and colony collapse). The list goes on.

Beyond just climate change, the grand scope of human activity has some serious detrimental side effects, with deep ramifications for the world around us. Yes it's getting hotter, and the weather patterns are strange, but taken together with other issues, the big picture is that The Anthropocene as a period of time represents itself a challenge of challenges.

That we now can safely call this The Anthropocene is enough to say we have a problem, as we become a force of nature unto itself. This being The Anthropocene is akin to us being the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Terrible lizards though they were, we are worse.

We are the asteroid. Don't call is merely climate change. Call it The Anthropocene, and understand that the full scope of human activity is the full scope of the problem.