Food is a constant tug-of-war between people and planet. We can’t feed ourselves without doing environmental harm.
“Agriculture costs us no matter what,” says Rattan Lal, director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University. “Every option has trade-offs.”
Food production takes a toll, and neither maximizing the food nor minimizing the toll is a workable response. No one principle can reliably tell us how to make those trade-offs, because every situation is different.
Which doesn’t mean there are no good ideas. Take organic agriculture, based on the idea of building soil health. Everyone — literally, everyone — agrees that building soil health is important. But if you take that idea and build a system around it, a system with rules and prohibitions and certifications, you take away the flexibility to make case-by-case calls. Heavy use of chemical fertilizers can lead to water-polluting runoff, but that doesn’t mean the best alternative is no chemical fertilizers at all.