Word: cropland
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...away from food, driving up the price of staple crops like corn. But the Science papers make a more sweeping argument. In their paper, Fargione's team calculated the "carbon debt" created by raising biofuel crops - the amount of carbon released in the process of converting natural landscapes into cropland. They found that corn ethanol produced in the U.S. had a carbon debt of 93 years, meaning it would take nearly a century for ethanol, which does produce fewer greenhouse gases when burned than fossil fuels, to make up for the carbon released in that initial landscape conversion. Palm tree...
...have become so widespread that, even if we wanted to, it would take years to switch back to natural produce—and it may already be completely impossible. By 2000, farmers in the U.S. alone were planting over 75 million acres—18 percent of the total cropland and an area three times larger than the state of New York—with GM crops, and this figure is increasing at an almost exponential rate. More worryingly, though, these GM crops are not only spreading through increases in voluntary planting, but clandestinely by migrating to and establishing themselves...
Deforestation Burning of forests to create cropland and unregulated timber harvesting have destroyed more than 15% of the Amazon in only 30 years...
...over land and water and economics, but also over language. To the Bureau of Reclamation, Upper Klamath Lake is habitat that supports endangered fish, and when the water level began to drop from drought this year, its federal keepers cut off irrigation water to 240,000 acres of cropland. To the Klamath's farmers, however, the valley has a simpler name: home. Its federally subsidized waters support their very way of life, and have for decades...
According to the laws of Mother Nature, electricity follows the path of least resistance. Mother apparently hasn't been hanging around California recently, where last week rolling blackouts spread darkness at noon across some of the richest cropland, most complex high-tech factories and busiest streets in America...