Originally published January 13 2015
Industrial agriculture and GMOs are major purveyors of man-made CO2
by Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
(NaturalNews) If you intentionally burned wood in your fireplace without opening the flue or some windows, your entire house would quickly become engulfed in smoke with nowhere for it to escape. This is akin to the current situation with man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which thanks to industrial agriculture and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have nowhere to go but up into the atmosphere.
If it weren't for these destructive systems, all this carbon would be naturally reabsorbed back into the soils where it would regenerate plants and food crops. But because of agricultural chemicals, industrial pollution, synthetic fertilizer runoff and other factors, it ends up becoming trapped in the atmosphere. This disruption prevents normal photosynthesis from occurring and actually kills off organisms in the soil that need carbon to survive.
These organisms are responsible for breaking down organic matter and other complex molecules that contain nutrients necessary for feeding plants, including those we grow for food. When this process is obstructed, the soil becomes "dead," unable to support life without artificial injections of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Perhaps not surprisingly, if industrial agriculture was halted immediately, CO2 emissions of the kind constantly being warned about in the media would cease to exist within about three years.
"According to NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], if we could magically cut all current CO2 emissions worldwide to zero today... it would do nothing to stop climate change from continuing to get worse for centuries," wrote Larry Kopald for The Huffington Post. "Unless we actually draw some of the carbon already emitted back down to earth we are simply telling a 400-pound patient to gain weight a little more slowly."
All current CO2 emissions could be 100% sequestered in 3 years if destructive industrial agriculture methods were abolished
It is a fact that carbon isn't actually created or destroyed: It is simply moved around as a result of human activity. In this case, industrial agriculture and everything it entails is acting as a roadblock in the normal maintenance of nature, whereby carbon is recycled and reused by plants and ecosystems to perpetuate life.
"We are literally disrupting the process of photosynthesis -- where plants break CO2 molecules apart, release the oxygen and take the carbon underground -- by killing the life that should exist in soil that needs that carbon," added Kopald. "We do this by spraying it with chemicals, tilling and killing the latticework of fungi, and growing one plant in a field when nature needs variety the same way we need proteins and fats and fruits and vegetables to remain healthy."
Fixing the problem obviously isn't just about stopping CO2 emissions. It involves actively reconfiguring the way we produce food for ourselves. It is a misconception that GMOs, chemicals, monoculture and other common methods of mass-producing food are necessary to feed an ever-growing planet -- if we simply went back to the ways of old, utilizing the latest technological advances in the process, our current quagmire would cease to exist in as little as three years.
"[R]egenerative farming yields are equal to industrial yields in normal weather, and superior to them in stress times of drought and flooding," explained Kopald. "Currently we have over 400 PPM [parts per million] of carbon in the atmosphere. We have been told we need to stay below 350 to maintain a livable planet. New data, however, report that every 1% of organic matter added to our farming and grazing soil reduces the PPM by 50."
"Studies have also shown that we could literally return the atmosphere to pre-Industrial Age conditions in as little as twenty years."
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com
http://rodaleinstitute.org
http://www.ifoam-eu.org[PDF]
http://truthwiki.org/Genetically_modified_cr...
http://truthwiki.org/GMO_Dangers,_opinion
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