Share food from water - References and quotes Philosophy 2021 REFERENCES AND QUOTES ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS – PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATIONS “Fossil fuels not only supply 85% of our energy needs, much of which is used to produce food, they also provide the raw materials for a substantial portion of our economic production, including ubiquitous plastics and, even more importantly, the fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides that help provide food for nearly 7 billion people. At this point, we do not have the technologies available to support 7 billion people in the absence of fossil fuels.” 82, 83 Use of solar energy. 19 trillions of tons of oil equivalent/year. “Over the eons, life has evolved to capture enough of this energy to maintain itself and the complex ecosystems that life creates. It would appear that the “order” of the global ecosystem over billions of years has reached a more or less stable thermodynamic disequilibrium.” 89 “Virtually all energy captured from the sun is captured by chlorophyll. In the absence of the evolution of some alternative physiological process for capturing sunlight, it would seem that our planet cannot sustain more low entropy than it currently does for any extended period.” 90 Ecosystems, structure and functions. Structural elements act together to create something greater than the whole - ecosystem functions. E.g energy transfer, nutrient cycling, gas regulation, climate regulation, water cycle. Variability, ignorance and uncertainty important when analyzing ecosystem. We don’t understand how ecosystem function emerge from the complex interaction of ecosystem structure. Fotnot 2 Thresholds. See THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER on boundaries 94 Uncertainty of renewable biotic resources. Carrying capacity. 98 Critical depensation, carrying capacity and maximum sustainable yield. 99 Minimum viable population and maximum sustainable yield vs uncertainty. Maximum sustainable yield will vary dramatically. Great uncertainty regarding minimum viable population. 101 Population breaking down to harvest and ecological mechanism poorly understood. Same for fish as plants. Removal of ecosystem structure can greatly affect ecosystem function. 102 “For virtually every renewable stock of significance, the rate of extraction is limited by resource scarcity, not by a lack of adequate infrastructure. It is a shortage of fish, not fishing boats, that has stagnated fish harvests over the last few years. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimates that 11 of the world’s 15 major fishing areas and 69% of the world’s major fish species are in decline and in need of urgent management. For instance, cod catches dropped by 69% from 1968 to 1992. West Atlantic bluefin tuna stocks dropped by more than 80% between 1970 and 1993.26 Similarly, it is a shortage of trees, not chainsaws, that limits wood production. As commercially valuable species are depleted, we turn to harvesting others that were formerly considered trash. As a result, for both fish and timber, the number of commercially valuable species has increased dramatically over recent decades.” 118 I SEAFOOD PRODUCTION - OUR WORLD IN DATA To encouragement Next encouragement