By Ecological Internet's Climate Ark Climate Change Portal

TAKE ACTION HERE NOW!

Securing world food security while maintaining operable forests, global climate, water, ocean and terrestrial ecosystems – and human rights, justice and equity – is the biggest challenge facing humanity. Water and food are the next bubbles to burst -- expect severe shortages of both in the 2010s. It is long past time to get back to the land through protecting and restoring old forests and organic permaculture farming. Our survival depends upon being with land, collecting water, letting forests age and growing food.

Today industrial-style agriculture uses huge amounts of water, energy, and chemicals – replacing natural terrestrial ecosystems with toxic monocultures; while poisoning and displacing local peoples. Farms are large, highly specialized, and run like factories with large inputs of fossil fuels from pesticides, other synthetic chemicals and transportation fuels. Land degradation — the decline in the quality of soil, water and vegetation — is of profound importance for any serious negotiations upon climate change. A new study finds that 24% of the Earth???s land is degrading, some of it formerly quite productive.

Large scale biofuel/biomass production – particularly promoting monoculture tree plantations within the context of Copenhagen “solutions” – runs counter to urgently addressing climate change and threatens to cause more deforestation, human rights abuses, and degradation of soil, water and biodiversity. All biofuels based upon industrial agricultural practices worsen climate change and ecologically diminish soils and ecosystems, drive food prices up, and force more people worldwide into hunger and malnutrition.

It is time to transform agriculture into an ecologically sustainable enterprise, based on systems which can be employed for centuries. To reduce the pressures upon the land and allow forests to undergo succession, we must promote organic, permaculture, low impact agriculture, agro-forest and other agro-ecological systems to meet human food needs, including major reduction in meat consumption. And protecting and restoring old forests where they historically occurred is vital as well. TAKE ACTION HERE NOW!