Amazing and humbling to read about technological marvels from 1400 years ago. It really puts our modern achievements in a new light. It's tempting sometimes to think of innovation as a recent phenomen, but people have been innovating and solving the same problems for thousands of years. To be honest, I didn't even know they HAD e-commerce back then!
People seem to take for granted that since agriculture is one of the oldest technologies, it must be a "solved problem" and our modern approach is optimal.
When in reality, modern industrial agriculture is one of the most ham fisted and naive approached to the problem: just bulldoze, fertilize, irrigate, and spray everything into submission. With many negative consequences of course, which we generally refer to as "unsustainable".
Because understanding all the complex relationships within an ecosystem, and then how to engineer it to yield surplus material for human use without intolerable negative consequences, is in fact a cutting edge and poorly grasped science.
The "biocultural legacy" is an empirical approach to this problem refined over milenia, which we would do well to understand and appreciate.
I'd hardly call the solution to Malthusian traps "ham fisted". Modern industrial agriculture, or at least fertilizer use, has let us escape from constant famine.
If you believe in Malthusian traps then at best we've just kicked the can down the road and set ourselves up for an even greater collapse. When it's not just that humans are starving, but the topsoil is gone, the pollinators are dead, the oceans have warmed and the ice caps melted, etc etc.
The "green revolution" (a misnomer with our current use of the word) sure was effective; the point is that it was also unsustainable.
Of course the land has a finite carrying capacity. And I'm not anti-ag-tech either. In fact I believe higher precision and intelligence is the answer. We need to create highly diverse and cohesive ecosystems tailored to the local environment, which requires lots of observation and iteration.
You’re missing a critical step in your analysis, birth rates.
The exit for Malthusian traps is to temporarily have enough abundance to reduce the birth rate dramatically not simply to steadily increase food production. Being unsustainable isn’t actually a problem if the total population starts dropping.
I'm not claiming we need indefinite growth or really even care about the hypothetical traps - that was a response to the parent and the history of the green revolution.
"Unsustainable" isn't about matching rates; I mean we are washing away the topsoil, polluting the ocean, and releasing greenhouse gases (via fertilizer production from fossil fuels) that cause widespread climate change -- things that will make industrial agriculture itself impossible.
Yes you can imagine an amount of degrowth that allows us to keep using these technologies without as much broad negative impact, but that doesn't seem as likely. Or even necessary, if we get our act together on clean energy and "regenerative" agriculture.
Wealthy societies can change their practices rather than seeking maximum short term efficiency that’s ultimately the solution not any one set of practices.
Regenerative agriculture doesn’t produces nearly as much food from the same resources so that’s only an option if you’ve escaped the trap.
Similarly there’s plenty of nitrogen in the atmosphere genetic engineering is a viable solution as long as you’re willing to take a slight hit to productivity as plants need energy to use atmospheric nitrogen.
Alternatively we can spend more energy to capture atmospheric nitrogen, but again only if we can avoid maximize output while minimizing inputs. And so fort across every issue you’re talking about.
> things that will make industrial agriculture itself impossible
You can continue to do all of those things across geological timeframes. Industrial agriculture doesn’t need healthy oceans, natural topsoil, or current levels of CO2. Carbon capture to produce chemical feedstocks or even fuels isn’t an efficient process, but it’s a proven technology. If batteries weren’t an option for example, we wouldn’t just give up.
In what way does that counter the claim it's ham fisted? Modern agriculture is a solution to malthusian traps because of its scale, not its precision. Shifting from small scale, artisanal farming to large, standardized operations was one of the key components of massively increasing food production.
Yeah, it's a weird catch-22 for modern ag: don't use aggressive chemical herbicide and pesticides, but mechanical weed control has it's downsides too: with compacting that ground or erosion or use too much fuel.
When I had one piece of birthday cake it was "a celebration" but now when I eat two entire cakes by myself it's "gluttony" and "concerning for my health." Makes sense.
I’m well aware. My point is that these ancient cultures all weren’t in equilibrium with nature, also cut down as much as they could, and also destroyed the environment for farmland.
They only lacked scale. Lets not paint them nobler than they are.
You are correct they lacked scale. They also lacked machinery. They lacked the loans taken out to buy the machinery. They lacked the urgency to repay those loans by profiting. That's not "noble." But it's very different at the level of needs and incentives.
By storing carbon they are meaning that the wetlands literately store CO2, and if they are allowed to break down that carbon will largely be released back into the active cycle and be part of our current atmospheric problems. Much like the oceans hold an amount CO2, a large amount because of their size, but as they heat up this is less efficient so they hold less and the excess seeps into the atmosphere.
Those areas are probably not capturing/trapping further carbon, they have probably been at an equilibrium point for quite some time with some entering & leaving the system without the overall amount not increasing, but they are effectively storing a notable amount that would be released if the properties that enable them to hold onto it degrade.
Carbon dioxide is not "carbon", it is a compound of carbon. Compounds do not always behave much like the elements they are made up of. We need to change the rhetoric on this: "reducing carbon" is nonsensical, considering you, me and all the plants and animals around us contain carbon compounds. If they mean anthropogenic climate change, then there are better ways to phrase it.
It's pretty well understood in the scientific communities studying this topic what carbon means and why carbon is the biggest driver of climate change and warming.... Do you have a particular issue or just the usual well poisoning on human caused climate change.
In the first case the carbon dioxide is already concentrated, and in the second it has to be extracted by processing (at least) 2500 tons of air for each ton of carbon dioxide obtained. There are easier cases for carbon capture, when CO2 can actually be captured at the point of release (steel and cement plants, landfills) but atmospheric extraction is hard. Of course, plants can and do process lots of air (by it blowing over the leaves) but massively increasing plant growth is also hard.
As someone else pointed out, I use phrases which appear in the article. I read the story twice on different sites.
Handing control over to a United Nations group on another continent is not empowering indigenous people and it is disingenuous to imply that such giveaways of local autonomy would do so.
Just because a phrase appears, doesn't lead to what you said. "UNESCO" appears once, but no where says UN people "are being brought in to administer it".
UNESCO is an unelected NGO run by the United Nations based on another continent. There are plenty of other buzzwords such groups love such as "resilience" and "sustainability", which they have effectively redefined.
Those are real words, that’s true. The following however is anywhere from not true to wild speculation without any factual basis.
>Global responsibility sounds like the direct opposite of self-determination.
>Some United Nations NGO bureaucrats being brought in to administer it, without acknowledging local knowledge. Getting UNESCO to administer it is not "honoring indigenous traditions"
>Also "store carbon", is more cargo cult pop science.
>They are probably trying to refer to trapping and reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but this is a misleading way of doing so.
It isn't speculation. The article talks about local tribes and UNESCO as if the two ever had much in common. That isn't wild speculation.
We also need to stop referring to carbon dioxide as carbon. It may be a compound of carbon but it is not the same thing. Elemental carbon is not the problem.
Amazing and humbling to read about technological marvels from 1400 years ago. It really puts our modern achievements in a new light. It's tempting sometimes to think of innovation as a recent phenomen, but people have been innovating and solving the same problems for thousands of years. To be honest, I didn't even know they HAD e-commerce back then!
People seem to take for granted that since agriculture is one of the oldest technologies, it must be a "solved problem" and our modern approach is optimal.
When in reality, modern industrial agriculture is one of the most ham fisted and naive approached to the problem: just bulldoze, fertilize, irrigate, and spray everything into submission. With many negative consequences of course, which we generally refer to as "unsustainable".
Because understanding all the complex relationships within an ecosystem, and then how to engineer it to yield surplus material for human use without intolerable negative consequences, is in fact a cutting edge and poorly grasped science.
The "biocultural legacy" is an empirical approach to this problem refined over milenia, which we would do well to understand and appreciate.
I'd hardly call the solution to Malthusian traps "ham fisted". Modern industrial agriculture, or at least fertilizer use, has let us escape from constant famine.
If you believe in Malthusian traps then at best we've just kicked the can down the road and set ourselves up for an even greater collapse. When it's not just that humans are starving, but the topsoil is gone, the pollinators are dead, the oceans have warmed and the ice caps melted, etc etc.
The "green revolution" (a misnomer with our current use of the word) sure was effective; the point is that it was also unsustainable.
Of course the land has a finite carrying capacity. And I'm not anti-ag-tech either. In fact I believe higher precision and intelligence is the answer. We need to create highly diverse and cohesive ecosystems tailored to the local environment, which requires lots of observation and iteration.
You’re missing a critical step in your analysis, birth rates.
The exit for Malthusian traps is to temporarily have enough abundance to reduce the birth rate dramatically not simply to steadily increase food production. Being unsustainable isn’t actually a problem if the total population starts dropping.
I'm not claiming we need indefinite growth or really even care about the hypothetical traps - that was a response to the parent and the history of the green revolution.
"Unsustainable" isn't about matching rates; I mean we are washing away the topsoil, polluting the ocean, and releasing greenhouse gases (via fertilizer production from fossil fuels) that cause widespread climate change -- things that will make industrial agriculture itself impossible.
Yes you can imagine an amount of degrowth that allows us to keep using these technologies without as much broad negative impact, but that doesn't seem as likely. Or even necessary, if we get our act together on clean energy and "regenerative" agriculture.
Wealthy societies can change their practices rather than seeking maximum short term efficiency that’s ultimately the solution not any one set of practices.
Regenerative agriculture doesn’t produces nearly as much food from the same resources so that’s only an option if you’ve escaped the trap.
Similarly there’s plenty of nitrogen in the atmosphere genetic engineering is a viable solution as long as you’re willing to take a slight hit to productivity as plants need energy to use atmospheric nitrogen.
Alternatively we can spend more energy to capture atmospheric nitrogen, but again only if we can avoid maximize output while minimizing inputs. And so fort across every issue you’re talking about.
> things that will make industrial agriculture itself impossible
You can continue to do all of those things across geological timeframes. Industrial agriculture doesn’t need healthy oceans, natural topsoil, or current levels of CO2. Carbon capture to produce chemical feedstocks or even fuels isn’t an efficient process, but it’s a proven technology. If batteries weren’t an option for example, we wouldn’t just give up.
In what way does that counter the claim it's ham fisted? Modern agriculture is a solution to malthusian traps because of its scale, not its precision. Shifting from small scale, artisanal farming to large, standardized operations was one of the key components of massively increasing food production.
Yeah, it's a weird catch-22 for modern ag: don't use aggressive chemical herbicide and pesticides, but mechanical weed control has it's downsides too: with compacting that ground or erosion or use too much fuel.
Non-syndicated Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/news/2025/11/06/landscapes-that-...
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When I had one piece of birthday cake it was "a celebration" but now when I eat two entire cakes by myself it's "gluttony" and "concerning for my health." Makes sense.
Scale and speed matters. Population scale. The capabilities of equipment and tools. So, sure, have a copper axe and go cut down a forest.
I’m well aware. My point is that these ancient cultures all weren’t in equilibrium with nature, also cut down as much as they could, and also destroyed the environment for farmland.
They only lacked scale. Lets not paint them nobler than they are.
You are correct they lacked scale. They also lacked machinery. They lacked the loans taken out to buy the machinery. They lacked the urgency to repay those loans by profiting. That's not "noble." But it's very different at the level of needs and incentives.
[flagged]
By storing carbon they are meaning that the wetlands literately store CO2, and if they are allowed to break down that carbon will largely be released back into the active cycle and be part of our current atmospheric problems. Much like the oceans hold an amount CO2, a large amount because of their size, but as they heat up this is less efficient so they hold less and the excess seeps into the atmosphere.
Those areas are probably not capturing/trapping further carbon, they have probably been at an equilibrium point for quite some time with some entering & leaving the system without the overall amount not increasing, but they are effectively storing a notable amount that would be released if the properties that enable them to hold onto it degrade.
Carbon dioxide is not "carbon", it is a compound of carbon. Compounds do not always behave much like the elements they are made up of. We need to change the rhetoric on this: "reducing carbon" is nonsensical, considering you, me and all the plants and animals around us contain carbon compounds. If they mean anthropogenic climate change, then there are better ways to phrase it.
It's pretty well understood in the scientific communities studying this topic what carbon means and why carbon is the biggest driver of climate change and warming.... Do you have a particular issue or just the usual well poisoning on human caused climate change.
What is the difference between "storing carbon" vs. "trapping carbon"?
probably mostly pedantry, but a lot of things can naturally store carbon, so maybe trapping carbon is specifically the unnatural capture of it?
In the first case the carbon dioxide is already concentrated, and in the second it has to be extracted by processing (at least) 2500 tons of air for each ton of carbon dioxide obtained. There are easier cases for carbon capture, when CO2 can actually be captured at the point of release (steel and cement plants, landfills) but atmospheric extraction is hard. Of course, plants can and do process lots of air (by it blowing over the leaves) but massively increasing plant growth is also hard.
Did you read the article?
As someone else pointed out, I use phrases which appear in the article. I read the story twice on different sites.
Handing control over to a United Nations group on another continent is not empowering indigenous people and it is disingenuous to imply that such giveaways of local autonomy would do so.
Did you? All of those phrases appear in it.
Just because a phrase appears, doesn't lead to what you said. "UNESCO" appears once, but no where says UN people "are being brought in to administer it".
UNESCO is an unelected NGO run by the United Nations based on another continent. There are plenty of other buzzwords such groups love such as "resilience" and "sustainability", which they have effectively redefined.
What "did I say"? Keep in mind that I am not nephihaha.
Those are real words, that’s true. The following however is anywhere from not true to wild speculation without any factual basis.
>Global responsibility sounds like the direct opposite of self-determination.
>Some United Nations NGO bureaucrats being brought in to administer it, without acknowledging local knowledge. Getting UNESCO to administer it is not "honoring indigenous traditions"
>Also "store carbon", is more cargo cult pop science.
>They are probably trying to refer to trapping and reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but this is a misleading way of doing so.
It isn't speculation. The article talks about local tribes and UNESCO as if the two ever had much in common. That isn't wild speculation.
We also need to stop referring to carbon dioxide as carbon. It may be a compound of carbon but it is not the same thing. Elemental carbon is not the problem.
> Those are real words, that’s true. [...]
Yeah that's a strawman.