The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq
Wed 25 Jun 2008 6:21pm
by Richard Manning (Harper's Magazine) - " ... we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth's primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others. ...
Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find what Iowans call a 'postage stamp' remnant of some, it most likely will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. ...
David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years."
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915