Protein Crunch , livre ebook

Andrews UK - Jason Drew

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83 pages

English

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The Protein Crunch - Civilisation on the brink is a capitalist's tour of the environment. The authors reveal the hard facts of how environmental degradation is already affecting all of us from food price riots to the collapse of countries like Somalia. Water, land and sea combine to produce the food we eat and these natural resources have become critically degraded at a time when our expanding population needs them most, bringing us to The Protein Crunch. Supported by in-depth research, The Protein Crunch looks at the risks we are running that may lead to the collapse of the western way of life - and the extraordinary opportunities for entrepreneurs in the business of fixing the environmental issues we face. A brilliant, accessible and inspirational work - it brings the environment to life in a business like manner. Hope without action is just a comforting illusion. Reviews: "The Protein Crunch is extremely timely and important, and it is also clear and convincing. It should be read by everyone who is concerned about the sustainability of the situation we have created on this small planet." (Dr. E Lazlo - Founder of the Budapest Club... "I found it full of fascinating information, well put together to constitute a kind of manifesto or warning for the future. Think differently, or see our society and its precious environment go horribly wrong" (Sir Crispin Tickell, GCMG, KCVO, President of the Royal Geographical Society London)... "The Protein Crunch" provides an excellent summary of all those systemic linkages regarding food, energy, water, land use and population, with plenty of pointers as to how to change course even at this very late stage. I can only hope that it will seriously affect the way people see our world!" (Jonathon Porrit)... "Jason Drew is a Renaissance Man... deeply knowledgeable - and passionate about saving our world" (Sue Grant - Marshall, Radio Today)... "The one book on the environment everyone should read" (Robert Swan MBE FRGS, Polar explorer).

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Sciences et techniques

Environmental management

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	26 juin 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849896429
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Title Page

The Protein Crunch Jason Drew and DaOid Lorimer

Publisher Information

First published in South Africa in 2011 By Print Matters Planet an imprint of publishing Print Matters (Pty) Ltd www.printmatters.co.za Digital edition converted and published by Andrews UK Limited 2011 www.andrewsuk.com Copyright Text © 2011 Jason Drew and David Lorimer The moral right of the authors has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publishers or author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Editorial Panel Melissa Siebert and Robin Stuart-Clark Cover Design Katrin Hannusch and Kirsty Macfarlane Book Design & Production Stuart-Clark & Associates cc and Kirsty Macfarlane, Cape Town www.theproteincrunch.com

Dedication For our children Jack and Charlie Drew, Charlotte and George Lorimer

Acknowledgements This work brings together the detailed research of many international scientists and environmentalists who are too numerous to name and thank here individ ually. Without their inspiration and commitment to the environment the story of The Protein Crunch would not have been written. We also acknowledge the very real suffering of the near one billion people who wake up hungry each day as a result of the environmental damage we have caused and the food system we have created. Jason Drew and David Lorimer – May 2011

Introduction The credit crunch has shaken our global economy, but it will recover. ‘The Protein Crunch’ is far more serious and, if we open our eyes, it is unfolding right in front of us. Our food – protein – comes from three sources: our water, land and seas. All of these natural resources are under increasing pressure from our burgeoning population: when more demand meets less supply, we arrive at ‘The Protein Crunch’. Every day, newspapers cover some element of this lo oming issue: mine water pollution in Johannesburg, Chinese land purchases in the Congo, a single tuna sold for $380,000 in Tokyo, floods in Pakistan and the food price riots that ignited North Africa. Few of us understand the causes of these crises and events, nor how they are all connected. This book is the story of the crisis we face, from the viewpoint of an unashamed capitalist and entrepreneur. My belief is it will make you think; my hope is that it will make you act. I have spent the last 25 years of my life fighting and winning in the game of business – from running other people’s multinational companies to creating and then selling my own. Two heart attacks later, I realised that the only game worth playing was tha t of living.I changed the struggles of the boardroom for a passion for life and moved to live full time on my farm in South Africa’s beautiful Tulbagh Valley. I decided to walk myself fit. It turned out to be a journey of understanding of both the environment and myself. As the seasons changed I saw the streams dry up in summer and then flood in winter. Where we had felled trees, I saw soil erosion that turned the rivers muddy as they carried away the soil. This lit in me a passion and a concern for the environment: I began to read everything I could find on our water, land and seas. I then travelled the world to see for myself the damage man is wreaking on these three vital eco-systems. I began to understand the extraordinary and unexpected connections between the many things I saw: from the teeming masses of China’s cities to the fertile plains of the Indus Valley and the dry rivers of America’s Mid-West – to name but a few. I began to realise the complexity of Nature and how the environment has shaped our past and will determine our future. During my travels over the last three years, two stories made an impact on me.

The first is a story of how wolves brought back the aspen trees to America’s Yellowstone National Park. The aspen trees have always been a feature of its landscape, but the established trees were ageing and no new trees were replacing them. The last wolf in the park was shot in the 1920s, since when the elk population expanded rapidly and grazed on the young aspen saplings before they could grow and mature. Since the re-introduction of the w olves in 1995, the elk population has been reduced and their natural grazing habits have returned. The elk, frightened of the wolf packs, no longer graze at the river edges or in woods but on the open plains. Young sapling aspen trees now survive and as they mature the woodlands are naturally re-establishing themselves.

The second story is of a small island in the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia. In 1944, a coastguard introduced 29 reindeer to the remote St Matthew Island as a reserve source of food for the men working there. The base was closed at the end of the Second World War, and all the men left the island. Just 13 years later, as they grazed on the abundant and nutritious lichen that covered much of the island, the reindeer population had reached 1,350. Without any natural predators on the island, the population exploded over the next six years, so that by 1963 there were 6,000 reindeer. But then disaster struck: the deer had eaten all the lichen, and just three years later there were only 42 left – 41 females, one sickly male and no fawns. This is a cautionary tale of what can happen when a species multiplies exponentially. In destroying their habitat, the reindeer destroyed themselves.

Just a 100 years ago it would have been inconceivab le to think that the human impact on the environment might become so great as to threaten the Earth and our own survival. We now stand at a turning point in our history and in the history of the Earth. Mankind has acquired the scale and the power to wreck the biosphere on which we depend – yet also the knowledge to fix it. Throughout history, humans have cleared land or fished out rivers, and after exhausting other natural resources, moved on. Now with nearly seven billion people on t he planet we are destroying environmental

systems everywhere and simultaneously. There is nowhere else for us to go. It is increasingly apparent that our capitalist glo bal food system is not functioning effectively. With nearly one billion people hungry and another billio n people overweight or obese, something clearly isn’t working. Having watched the recent credit crunch unfold, I saw many similarities in the way our environmental and food production systems were and are being stretched to breaking point. With food demand outstripping supply, food prices will inevitably increase. Food price inflation brings with it civil unrest and political turmoil, as we have witnessed in the first months of 2011. Social order has already started to collapse in many failed states like Sudan and Afghanistan. In our interconnected global world, st ate failure may become contagious as environmental refugees migrate to survive. Our civilisation is on the brink of disaster. I decided to write the story of what I had seen wit h a family friend, environmentalist and author David Lorimer.The Protein Crunchexplains our impact on the earth’s natural systems and its resources on which we all depend. As some of these ecosystems become less productive or fail altogether, the speed and severity of ‘The Protein Crunch’ will accelerate. The way we respond to these environmental challenges is a matter of life and death, first for the poorest then for the rest of us, not to mention future generations. Many civilisations have collapsed before ours, but will we be the first to foresee our demise and prevent it? It seems that our brains are wired to react to emergencies, but if the threat is not immediate we find it hard to galvanise ourselves into action. It is as i f we are floating down a river heading towards a waterfall, ignoring the roar of the water and waiting until we see the foaming water, before we react and then look for someone else to blame for our predicament. What the Earth needs is for many more of us to understand our predicament, in order to change our collective consciousness and start the sustainability revolution we need to survive. There will be no time to waste looking for scapegoats: we will need to move and make change happen fast. Capitalism may have caused many of our existing environmental problems, but the best way of making this change happen quickly is to use capitalism itself. As a lifelong capitalist and now eco-entrepreneur, I have seen and become involved with some extraordinary businesses around the world. Three of these are both unusual and interesting: us ing fly larvae, Gibraltar-based Agri-protein recycles abattoir waste into useable protein for animal feed at a fraction of the price of existing natural sources; the UK’s Oxitec genetically modifi es and breeds sterile male mosquitoes, which when released breed with wild females that lay eggs that won’t hatch, substantially reducing disease-carrying mosquito populations; the Urban Wind Farm in Belgium has borrowed wind- accelerating techniques from aircraft wing construction as well as braking technology from Formula One racecars to help generate clean power from urban rooftops. All of these could be billion- dollar businesses within the next 10 years. The next Bill Gates and M ark Zuckerberg will make their fortunes in the business of the environment. Before my journey into the environment, I understoo d neither the unbelievable risks we are running nor the extraordinary opportunities for entrepreneurs and eco-capitalists like myself. Commitment is the only thing that drives change. When you commit you act, and the world changes around you, conspiring to help you in ways you never thought po ssible. I am now committed full time to making a difference to the world we live in – through crea ting more awareness of the environment and excitement about the opportunities it can bring us all. The clock is ticking. We are in a race between education and catastrophe.The Protein Crunchwill help you understand the harsh reality of where we a re and the exciting future we can make for ourselves. Let’s get busy repairing the future. Jason Drew – May 2011 Tulbach, Western Cape, South Africa