The modern food system is one of the least circular large-scale systems humans have ever created. While it is easy to recognize that burning fossil fuels is not circular, the food system also relies on inputs that break natural cycles. Modern agriculture is heavily fueled by petroleum-based fertilizers, disrupting nutrient cycles in ways that undermine the long-term sustainability of earth’s systems. Yet the consequences of these disruptions on biosphere functions often receive far less attention.

Of all the planetary boundaries (limits that define a safe operating space for humanity on earth), the boundary for biogeochemical flows is among the most severely and longest transgressed. Yet it also receives comparatively little public attention. Unlike terms such as biodiversity loss or ocean acidification, “biogeochemical flows” is more difficult to grasp intuitively. Yet despite its relative obscurity, this boundary may be one of the clearest indictments of the modern food system.

When scientists discuss biogeochemical flows, they are primarily referring to two nutrients: nitrogen and phosphorus. The movement of these nutrients through earth’s systems profoundly influences life and ecosystem functioning.

Scientists estimate the planetary boundaries for these nutrients at

• 62 teragrams (Tg) per year for nitrogen and

• 11 teragrams (Tg) per year for phosphorus

Human activity currently releases approximately

• 190 Tg of nitrogen annually and

• 22 Tg of phosphorus annually

Humanity is therefore operating at over three times the safe boundary for nitrogen and double the proposed safe operating space for phosphorus.

These limits were established by estimating the capacity of earth systems to maintain stable conditions for life. Geological records from past mass extinction events demonstrate just how powerful disruptions to nutrient cycles can be.

During the End-Permian extinction, roughly 252 million years ago, massive eruptions from the Siberian Traps, which lasted two million years, triggered intense warming and accelerated weathering across continents. This weathering washed large amounts of phosphorus into the oceans.

The influx of nutrients fueled eutrophic conditions and facilitated massive growth in marine ecosystems, likely causing enormous algal blooms. Eventually, as the aquatic plants died, they sank into deeper waters where bacteria decomposed the organic matter.

This decomposition and explosion of bacteria consumed dissolved oxygen in the water. As oxygen levels declined, hypoxic zones (areas where the water contains less than 2 mg/L of oxygen) developed, and in some areas oxygen disappeared entirely, creating anoxic conditions where most life could not survive.

The expansion of these dead zones on a planetary scale became a major driver of marine extinction during the Permian extinction event, which ultimately eliminated roughly 90 percent of marine species.

A similar process likely occurred during the Devonian extinction, approximately 372 million years ago. During this period, plants evolved more advanced vascular systems through their co-evolution with fungi, allowing them to develop deeper roots and grow much larger. Early plants could only penetrate a few centimeters into the soil and reached heights of roughly 30 centimeters. Newly evolved trees could send roots several meters into the ground and grow as tall as 30 meters.

Over millions of years, forests of these newly evolved trees spread across the earth, aided by the evolution of seeds. In doing so, they transformed landscapes, created what we would recognize as soil, and accelerated weathering. Nutrients previously locked in rocks were consequently broken down and transported into streams, rivers, and oceans. As nutrient delivery increased, oxygen depletion expanded through processes similar to those seen during the Permian extinction, contributing to widespread marine ecosystem collapse.

These extinction stories are not simply fascinating tidbits from earth’s past. They are warnings.

Today, dead zones are expanding around the world at alarming rates. Yet there is still time to reduce nutrient pollution and decrease our dependence on artificial nutrient inputs.

The modern food system is now the largest driver of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. Globally, more than 115 million tonnes of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and 25 million tonnes of phosphorus fertilizer are applied to cropland every year. The production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer itself is also highly carbon intensive, generating more greenhouse gas emissions than the global commercial aviation sector and accounting for more carbon dioxide emissions than any other industrial chemical reaction.

Yet the majority of these nutrients are never even taken up by crops. Approximately two-thirds of the nitrogen (~75 million tonnes) and over half of the phosphorus (~14 million tonnes) applied to crops are not absorbed by plants. Instead, these nutrients move through soils into streams, rivers, lakes, and, eventually, oceans.

Additional nutrient pollution comes from livestock manure. In the United States alone, 24,000 factory farms together produce over 940 pounds of manure annually, or twice as much as the sewage produced by the entire country’s population.

The nutrients contained within this manure are enormous—7.4 Tg of nitrogen and 2.3 Tg of phosphorus, based on the most recently published estimates, from 2017. These quantities represent a substantial fraction of the global planetary boundary. Much of this manure is spread onto agricultural land, where excess nutrients similarly wash into waterways.

The story then begins to resemble the ancient extinction events. Excess nutrients fuel algal blooms. Algae die and decompose. Oxygen disappears. Hypoxic and anoxic zones form where life struggles or cannot survive.

Today, almost one thousand hypoxic or eutrophic hot spots exist globally, particularly where rivers meet oceans and lakes. Nearly every major river outflow now shows signs of nutrient-driven oxygen depletion. Inland, “Forty-two percent of the nation’s river and stream miles are in poor condition, with elevated levels of phosphorus, and 44% were in poor condition for nitrogen,” according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

These dead zones, now visible from space, are devastating aquatic ecosystems. Green regions visible in satellite imagery often indicate nutrient-fueled algal blooms associated with oxygen depletion. These algal blooms are often toxic to fish; one notable example occurred in 2021 in Florida, when thousands of dead fish washed ashore during a red tide bolstered by nutrient pollution, closing many miles of beaches.

The largest dead zone in the world, now over 63,700 square miles, is in the Arabian Sea, stretching and extending into large areas of the Indian Ocean. This dead zone is semi-permanent and growing year over year. Another, in the Baltic Sea, grows to larger than 34,000 square miles during its peak, covering roughly one-fifth of the seafloor. The largest dead zone in North America, by comparison, is in the Gulf of Mexico and was measured at 6,705 square miles in 2024, an area larger than the state of Connecticut.

Photo credit: NASA

Yet the spread of oxygen-depleted waters is no longer limited to coastal regions. Scientific monitoring increasingly shows oxygen decline occurring in the open ocean as well, with a recent analysis claiming that “oxygen-minimum zones in the open ocean have expanded by several million square kilometers and that hundreds of coastal sites now have oxygen concentrations low enough to limit the distribution and abundance of animal populations and alter the cycling of important nutrients.” These emerging hypoxic zones function almost like underwater deserts. Marine life flees when possible, and once the hypoxic zone is established, food webs and aquatic life are altered in devastating ways.

Photo from study: Declining oxygen in the global ocean and coastal waters

Like many other planetary boundary challenges, understanding the causes of nutrient pollution also provides clear pathways toward solutions.

Although synthetic fertilizers have been credited with supporting rapid population growth and increased agricultural production, their widespread use does not mean they are the only path forward or even the most productive way to grow food.

Research from organizations such as the Rodale Institute suggests that organic systems can achieve yields comparable to conventional agriculture. Their Farming Systems Trial, now running for over four decades, has shown that systems using crop rotations and ecological farming practices can match conventional yields and outperform them by up to 30 percent during periods of extreme weather while increasing soil organic matter and carbon storage. By integrating nitrogen-fixing cover crops that bind nitrogen in the soil, farmers can eliminate the need for fertilizers that easily wash away and the consequent nutrient leaching.

The Rodale Institute has trialed conventional systems against two organic systems for over four decades, showing that yields of organic systems are equal to conventional systems and more productive during years of extreme weather due to improved soil conditions.

Dietary and policy changes could also significantly reduce fertilizer demand. Large areas of cropland currently grow corn and soybeans primarily for livestock feed and biofuel production. Research suggests that a global transition toward plant-based diets could reduce agricultural land use by roughly 75 percent while maintaining food supply. Reducing land requirements at this scale would also substantially reduce demand for fertilizers. Reducing or eliminating animal consumption would simultaneously solve the manure problem.

Like many of humanity’s most pressing challenges, the crisis of biogeochemical flows is not difficult to understand. The science is remarkably straightforward: we are mining phosphorus from places where it has remained locked away for millions of years and creating nitrogen from petroleum-based processes, concentrating them at unprecedented scales, and releasing them into ecosystems faster than the earth can absorb them. The consequences are already visible, in rivers choked with algae, coastlines stripped of oxygen, and dead zones spreading through waters that once supported abundant life.

What makes this crisis difficult is not a lack of knowledge. It is our reluctance to transform the systems that created it.

The choices before us are larger than fertilizers or farming practices alone. They concern the kind of world we wish to build and the legacy we intend to leave behind. Every meal ties us to landscapes, waterways, farmers, forests, and oceans. Our food choices ripple outward through ecosystems and connect us to people and forms of life we may never see.

The same systems that now push us beyond planetary boundaries can be redesigned. We can grow food differently. We can waste less. We can reduce our dependence on systems that demand endless nutrient inputs and ecological sacrifice zones.

The dead zones expanding across the world today are not simply environmental statistics. They are warnings written into the fabric of the living planet. The geological record shows us where this path can lead. The question is whether we choose to listen before those warnings become something far more permanent.

Have you seen the impacts of nutrient pollution near you? What do you feel when looking back and reflecting on life and its evolution through these mass extinction events, and contemplating where we stand today?

This article is part of the Planetary Boundaries and Food series. This series explores how the global food system has pushed humanity beyond seven of the nine planetary boundaries, including climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, ocean acidification, biogeochemical flows, novel entities, and freshwater use. Each article examines how food production and consumption have driven us past these critical limits, and how reimagining our food system can help bring human activity back within a safe operating space for life on earth. To follow the series and read more about Food for a Sustainable Future, subscribe to stay up to date with the latest articles.

Walk into any modern supermarket, and you’re met with a cornucopian abundance: aisles packed with cereals, snacks, beverages, meats, and produce from around the world. It feels like the best time to be alive. It feels like choice. It feels like competition. But look a little closer, and that illusion begins to dissolve.

Many of those seemingly distinct brands are owned by the same handful of multinational corporations. Beneath the surface lies a deeply consolidated system that stretches from patented seeds and chemical inputs to farmland, processing plants, global commodity traders, and retail giants.

The story of the modern food system is often told as one of efficiency and productivity. But beneath that story is one about the consolidation of power. Power over land and markets. Power over what is grown, how it is produced, and who benefits.

This concentration of power has contributed to environmental degradation, economic inequity, and systemic fragility. It has created a system that is highly efficient at extraction but increasingly disconnected from the ecological foundations that sustain it.

But just how concentrated is the food system? How do we measure it, and what are its consequences for ecosystems, farmers, and consumers?

Let’s quickly define some key terms:

• Consolidation refers to the process by which a smaller number of firms increasingly control a market. It takes different forms, and understanding those distinctions is key.

• Market concentration is a measure of how much control the largest players have over a given market.

• Horizontal integration occurs when firms merge with competitors at the same stage of the supply chain (e.g., one food processor acquiring another).

• Vertical integration, on the other hand, happens when companies expand across stages (e.g., a poultry company controlling everything from hatcheries to feed mills to processing plants).

Economists often quantify concentration by using concentration ratios, particularly the CR3 and CR4, which measure the share of a given market controlled by the top three or four firms. A CR4 above 60 percent typically signals a highly concentrated market.

These metrics point to market power, the ability to set prices, dictate terms, shape supply chains, influence policy, and ultimately externalize environmental and social costs onto others.

Over the past 40 to 50 years, the food system has undergone a dramatic shift toward consolidation. This trend has been driven by deregulation, declining antitrust enforcement, and the globalization of supply chains.

Across nearly every stage of the food system, the top four firms often control 50 to 80+ percent of the market, placing much of the system firmly in the highly concentrated category.

At first glance, some might assume consolidation benefits consumers. Large firms are able to produce food at scale, and lower production costs can translate into lower prices at the checkout counter.

But this is only part of the story.

Although economies of scale can reduce prices in the short term, reduced competition over time allows dominant firms to gain price-setting power. This can lead to higher prices, less transparency, and greater volatility.

More importantly, the price of food rarely reflects its true cost. Environmental damage, public health burdens, and climate impacts are externalized and paid for by ecosystems and society rather than included in the price tag. Cheap food, in this sense, is heavily subsidized, just not in ways that are visible at the register.

Consumers also face a more subtle loss: the erosion of genuine choice. As mentioned before, despite the appearance of diversity on grocery store shelves, many products are owned by the same parent companies. At the same time, smaller producers face significant barriers to entry, limiting both competition and innovation.

So, the outcomes of consolidation for consumers are, at best, mixed. For producers, the impacts are more consistently negative.

Farmers increasingly operate in markets with very few buyers, creating what economists call monopsony conditions. This shifts bargaining power away from producers, who are often left with take-it-or-leave-it contracts and now only earn just 14 cents for every dollar spent on food.

Farmers also face a tightening income squeeze. Input costs, including for seeds, fertilizers, and equipment, continue to rise, in part due to consolidation upstream, while the prices farmers receive for their products often stagnate or decline.

In sectors like poultry and pork, contract farming has become the dominant model. Farmers take on significant debt to build facilities, while corporations retain control over inputs, pricing, and distribution. Risk is pushed onto farmers, while control remains centralized. Over the past half-century or so, this dynamic has contributed to the loss of roughly one in three farms and the hollowing out of rural communities.

Workers also often face wage suppression and difficult working conditions in highly consolidated processing industries. Recent strikes in the meatpacking industry highlight that efficiency gains have not translated into equitable outcomes for labor.

Yet consolidation in the food system has not only reshaped markets. It has reshaped the entire planet.

When fewer firms dominate, production systems tend to become more standardized and uniform. This means fewer crop varieties, widespread monocultures, and reduced genetic diversity. In the United States, soy and corn on their own occupy nearly 180 million acres, or more than half of all cropland. For context, the USDA estimates that urban and residential land covers roughly 145 million acres. The result is a system that is less resilient and more vulnerable to pests, disease, and climate shocks.

Large consolidated firms tend to favor industrial-scale production systems, which set off cascading environmental impacts. Monocultures degrade soil health, making crops more susceptible to pests and disease, which in turn drives increased reliance on synthetic fertilizers and biocides. Over time, this creates a cycle of dependency, locking farmers into input-intensive systems. These increasingly entrenched systems may be highly productive under ideal conditions, but they are brittle and heavily reliant on fossil fuels.

When a small number of firms control key points in the supply chain, disruptions can have outsized consequences. During the pandemic, the closure of just a handful of major meatpacking plants created bottlenecks that rippled across the entire food system. Farmers were left with animals they could not process, grocery stores imposed meat limits, and consumer prices rose.

This reflects a broader structural issue. Modern food systems are built on just-in-time logistics and global supply chains. They are optimized for efficiency when conditions are stable, but their scale and complexity ensure that when disruptions occur, failures can cascade quickly.

Much of the food we consume travels thousands of miles before reaching our plates. While the logistics of this system are impressive, it also operates with remarkably little buffer. Research has shown that US retail food stores hold, on average, roughly ten days’ worth of food at any given time and that the system depends on a constant, precisely timed flow of goods across regions and continents.

We have, in many ways, built a food system that is too big to fail and too complex to be truly resilient. Meanwhile, on an individual level, we are increasingly disconnected from the most basic components of how and where food is produced, meaning that if the system were to fail, we would be helpless to respond.

If consolidation is the result of policy choices and economic incentives, can it also be addressed by them? Yes. We could take many steps to improve this system:

• Stronger antitrust enforcement and more rigorous scrutiny of mergers could help limit excessive concentration. Greater market transparency would improve accountability and oversight.

• Building more diversified food systems, through regional supply chains and smaller-scale processing infrastructure, would enhance resilience.

• Alternative business models, such as cooperatives and producer alliances, offer pathways to redistribute power within the system.

• Public-interest supply chains could prioritize social and environmental outcomes alongside profit.

• Regenerative and agroecological approaches reduce dependence on consolidated input industries while restoring biodiversity and resilience.

Because in the end, efficiency is impossible on a dead planet. There can be no economy without ecology. No humanity on a planet devoid of life.

The current food system is not producing these outcomes by accident. Environmental degradation, public health crises, and the erosion of rural communities are the entirely predictable, logical consequences of a system organized to maximize extraction and profit.

If we want different outcomes, we cannot simply tweak the existing system. Rather, we need to fundamentally rethink it, with a greater focus on regeneration, resilient distribution, and care.

Where do you land on this topic? Do you think that we should be worried about current levels of consolidation in the food system? What examples have you seen that have impacted your views on consolidation? Leave a comment below.

This article is part of a series that explores the systems behind our food. Together, these articles trace the systems that have allowed for food to become a leading driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, and mass extinction; how food access has become increasingly unequal and concentrated, leaving more than two billion food insecure and threatening more than one billion with obesity and diet‑related disease; how current systems incentivize vast food waste and routinely externalize environmental and social harms; how a highly globalized food system has become fragile and vulnerable to sudden shocks; and, ultimately, what it would take to intentionally build food systems that nourish people while supporting a functioning biosphere.

The price you see on a grocery shelf is only a fraction of the real cost of your food. Behind every item lies a chain of hidden impacts: fertilizer pollution, climate emissions, deforestation, biodiversity loss, diet-related disease, labor exploitation, and more. These costs are not included in what we pay at the register. Instead, they are pushed onto ecosystems, public health systems, and society at large. Accounting for the true cost of food is not merely academic, but essential to understanding how our food system actually works and why it continues to drive environmental and social harm.

No other sector illustrates the gap between prices and costs more clearly than the food sector. A Trucost analysis done in partnership with the advising firm KPMG estimated that the environmental externalities of global food production amount to 224 percent of the sector’s earnings.

Several major global assessments echo these findings. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates $10–12.7 trillion in hidden costs annually from the food system, while the Food System Economics Commission places the figure closer to $15 trillion per year. The Global True Cost Accounting Study estimates $19.8 trillion in hidden costs, compared to roughly $9 trillion spent on food globally. A recent UNEP assessment suggests that environmental damages alone could reach $20 trillion annually (or $5 billion an hour) when biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation are fully priced.

Despite methodological differences, these assessments point to a consistent conclusion: the global food system generates trillions in hidden costs that exceed the value of the food itself.

This challenges the core assumption of modern economics: that markets efficiently price goods and services. When the true environmental and social costs of food are excluded, markets send distorted signals. Harmful practices remain profitable, while their consequences are borne by everyone else. The result is not efficiency, but systemic failure.

When these externalities reach planetary scale, the implications become existential. The food system is a leading driver of humanity exceeding seven of the nine planetary boundaries and the single largest contributor to biodiversity loss, fueling what scientists describe as earth’s sixth mass extinction. Left unaddressed, these trends point toward a destabilized climate and a degraded biosphere.

To close this gap, governments and businesses are beginning to experiment with ways to reflect the true cost of food. These efforts generally fall into two categories: policies that internalize environmental and health costs, and market experiments that reveal the true price of food to consumers.

At the policy level, many governments are turning to Pigouvian taxes and subsidies designed to align market prices with social costs. These taxes, named after the economist Arthur Pigou, who first developed the concept of economic externalities, impose additional costs on goods that produce social harm, such as tobacco, alcohol, pollution, or sugary drinks. Subsidies, in turn, support beneficial practices like environmental restoration or regenerative agriculture. In theory, these tools help correct the mismatch between market prices and total costs.

Critics often argue that such policies erode a free market and represent government overreach. But this perspective overlooks the scale of the problem and the current market’s apparent inability to fix it. When the food system is actively driving climate instability and mass biodiversity loss, failing to act is itself a decision with consequences borne globally and intergenerationally. These are not marginal inefficiencies that the market, as it stands, is well-equipped to deal with; they pose a huge threat to the stability of all life-supporting systems on earth.

Another common concern about Pigouvian taxes is that food would become unaffordable. Yet price changes would not be uniform. Foods with the largest environmental footprints, particularly livestock products, would increase the most in price, while lower-impact foods would change far less. In many cases, whole-food plant-based diets are already more affordable than meat-heavy diets. By making prices more accurate, true-cost pricing would largely reinforce this affordability for plant-based diets.

Some governments are already introducing such policies. Last year Denmark introduced the world’s first tax on livestock emissions, set to take effect in 2030. France, Denmark, Sweden, and Italy have implemented differentiated pesticide taxes of different forms. A number of European countries have instituted taxes on petroleum-based fertilizers, which now create more emissions than the entirety of the commercial aviation sector. Meanwhile, subsidies are being used to support regenerative practices, such as agroforestry, reduced tillage, and methane capture.

Businesses are also experimenting with increased transparency. The Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn has piloted dual pricing, showing both retail and “true” prices. In Germany, Penny’s “True Price Week” applied full environmental costs to products across more than 2,000 stores, revealing stark price increases for meat and dairy compared to minimal changes for plant-based foods and reducing meat and dairy consumption by approximately 50 percent. In Amsterdam, the supermarket De Aanzet has implemented permanent true-price labeling while working with farmers to reduce those costs over time, inspiring many to follow suit.

Even farmers’ markets offer a partial glimpse of this shift. By shortening supply chains and prioritizing ecological practices, they often come closer to reflecting the real cost of production.

These early experiments—mostly designed to build awareness rather than fully transform pricing systems—reveal a consistent pattern: when environmental costs are accounted for, animal products show the largest price gaps, and governments tend to focus first on measurable inputs like fertilizers and pesticides.

The next phase of true-cost accounting will likely include broader carbon pricing, nutrient pollution taxes, standardized labeling systems, and the removal of subsidies that incentivize environmentally harmful production.

At its core, this is about aligning economic systems with inescapable ecological realities. The current gap between price and cost allows environmental damage to scale unchecked. Closing that gap is not just about better economics—it is about whether our food system can operate within the limits of the planet.

The question is no longer whether these costs exist. It is whether we are willing to face them and act before they are fully, irreparably paid in ways we cannot control.

Where do you land on this topic? Do you think that the prices of food should better represent environmental externalities? Would you be willing to see price increases for certain foods with outsized environmental impacts? Leave a comment below.

This article is part of a series that explores the systems behind our food. Together, these articles trace the systems that have allowed for food to become a leading driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, and mass extinction; how food access has become increasingly unequal and concentrated, leaving more than two billion food insecure and threatening more than one billion with obesity and diet‑related disease; how current systems incentivize vast food waste and routinely externalize environmental and social harms; how a highly globalized food system has become fragile and vulnerable to sudden shocks; and, ultimately, what it would take to intentionally build food systems that nourish people while supporting a functioning biosphere.

Food and Biosphere Integrity: How Food Systems Are Driving, and Can Solve, Biodiversity Collapse

Without a functioning biosphere, what else really matters? A healthy biosphere is foundational to life itself, at the center of nearly everything. Yet today, the integrity of the biosphere is in severe decline, and we do not collectively reckon with this existential reality nearly enough. Doing so would require a fundamental reassessment of how we interact with nature, forcing us to confront our environmental footprint at every level: the spaces we inhabit and the resources required to feed, house, clothe, and entertain ourselves.

As the biosphere erodes more rapidly and visibly, ignoring these fundamental relationships does not merely threaten human well-being; it threatens the continuation of complex life as we know it. This article examines the current state of the biosphere to provide a clear-eyed understanding of where we stand, before turning to the role agriculture plays in driving these changes and how it also offers the most direct pathway toward stewarding life for future generations.

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The System Feeding Us Is Failing — Now What?

The environmental impacts of the food system can only be understood in the context of how that system is organized and the incentives that shape it. Incentives are the invisible architects determining what is produced, how it is produced, and who benefits or bears the costs. Today’s global food system, and the predicament we currently face, is not the result of inevitability or neutral market forces, but of historical decisions and long‑standing trends.

If we are to build a food system that operates within planetary boundaries, we must first situate the present system within its broader political, economic, and ecological context and then intentionally pursue whole‑systems change. Doing so requires more than technical efficiency gains or marginal reforms. It demands a shift in how we collectively think about food, from how it is produced and distributed to how it is valued and governed.

This article is the first of a series that explores the systems behind our food. Together, the articles will trace the systems that have allowed for food to become a leading driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, and mass extinction; how food access has become increasingly unequal and concentrated, leaving more than two billion food insecure and threatening more than one billion with obesity and diet‑related disease; how current systems incentivize vast food waste and routinely externalize environmental and social harms; how a highly globalized food system has become fragile and vulnerable to sudden shocks; and, ultimately, what it would take to intentionally build food systems that nourish people while supporting a functioning biosphere.

Read More

Without a functioning biosphere, what else really matters? A healthy biosphere is foundational to life itself, at the center of nearly everything. Yet today, the integrity of the biosphere is in severe decline, and we do not collectively reckon with this existential reality nearly enough. Doing so would require a fundamental reassessment of how we interact with nature, forcing us to confront our environmental footprint at every level from the spaces we inhabit, and the resources required to feed, house, clothe, and entertain ourselves.

As the biosphere erodes more rapidly and visibly, ignoring these fundamental relationships does not merely threaten human well-being; it threatens the continuation of complex life as we know it. This article examines the current state of the biosphere to provide a clear-eyed understanding of where we stand, before turning to the role agriculture plays in driving these changes and how it also offers the most direct pathway toward stewarding life for future generations.

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The State of Biodiversity Today

In 2024, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) released its Living Planet Report, finding an average 73 percent decline in monitored global wildlife populations between 1970 and 2020. While this does not mean total wildlife abundance has fallen by 73 percent everywhere (some populations have increased), this still represents a catastrophic global trend with profound ecological consequences.

These findings align with assessments from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which reports that over 48,600 species, or roughly 28 percent of those they assess, are threatened with extinction. The breakdown is sobering: 41 percent of amphibians, 26 percent of mammals, 11 percent of birds, 21 percent of reptiles, 34 percent of conifers, and 71 percent of cycads face the threat of extinction. Aquatic ecosystems show similarly severe declines, with shark and ray populations halved since 1970 and coral reef coverage reduced by roughly half since the 1950s, marking the likely crossing of earth’s first tipping point as of late 2025. Insects, which make up as much as 90 percent of all animal species, are harder to track comprehensively, but global reviews reveal widespread declines in common species across many regions.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) estimates that more than one million species globally are threatened with extinction. No matter how biodiversity is measured, whether through declines in migratory bird and butterfly populations or more human-centered metrics like shrinking crop seed diversity and even changes in the human microbiome, the signs of systemic distress are unmistakable.

While these figures are alarming on their own, their significance becomes even clearer when placed within the planetary boundaries framework, which defines a safe operating space for earth’s life-support systems. To assess biosphere integrity, scientists have identified two key control variables: genetic diversity and functional integrity. Genetic diversity is measured by the rate at which species are going extinct, while functional integrity reflects how much energy humans extract from ecosystems through activities like harvesting, hunting, and fishing.

The scientific consensus holds that extinction rates should not exceed 10–100 species per million species per year, with the boundary placed at the lower end to remain precautionary. This threshold reflects the highest rate of species loss the earth system can tolerate while maintaining ecological resilience and the genetic foundations of ecosystem functioning. This boundary was crossed in the mid-to-late twentieth century, and today the extinction rates are well above the upper bound of 100 extinctions per million species per year.

Functional integrity is measured through human appropriation of net primary production, with a boundary set at 10 percent. In other words, to remain within a safe operating space, humans should appropriate no more than 10 percent of the biosphere’s natural productivity. This limit was likely exceeded in the early twentieth century. Today, humans appropriate roughly 30 percent of global net primary production.

Together, these transgressions represent some of the most severe violations of the identified planetary boundaries. As a result, many scientists now argue that earth has entered a sixth mass extinction event, unfolding over an extraordinarily short span of time. If you were born before 1970, this dramatic transformation of the biosphere has occurred within your lifetime.

Agriculture and Biodiversity Loss

UN scientists identify the global food system as the primary driver of biodiversity loss, with agriculture alone implicated as a threat to 86 percent of species at risk of extinction. This is largely due to large-scale land-use changes, which have eliminated and fragmented wildlife habitat worldwide. Agriculture has historically been, and remains, the dominant driver of deforestation, accounting for nearly 90 percent of forest loss today. Additionally, agriculture has contributed to the near-total destruction of wetlands, with roughly 85 percent drained between 1700 and 2000.

Yet not all forms of agriculture affect ecosystems equally. Different food systems carry vastly different land requirements and ecological impacts, particularly when comparing plant-based foods with livestock-based production.

Agriculture occupies nearly half of all habitable land on earth, and approximately 80 percent of that land is used for livestock production. Despite this enormous footprint, livestock provides just 17 percent of global calories. Put differently, more than 80 percent of global calories come from less than one-fifth of agricultural land, which is dedicated to plant-based foods. This inefficiency lies at the heart of agriculture’s outsized role in biodiversity loss.

The transformation of wild ecosystems into agricultural land is reflected in global biomass distributions. Humans now account for 36 percent of mammal biomass, livestock for 59 percent, and wild mammals for just 5 percent. Among birds, farmed poultry make up 71 percent of total biomass, while wild birds account for only 29 percent.

In effect, vast areas once hosting complex ecosystems have been converted into simplified landscapes supporting livestock production. The extraordinary diversity of life that once occupied these regions has been replaced by the more than 85 billion land animals farmed annually. This disproportionate land use is why the WWF estimates that meat-heavy diets account for roughly 60 percent of global biodiversity loss. Essentially, we have engineered ecosystems around animal consumption so aggressively that we are now destabilizing the very systems that sustain life.

Agriculture as a Pathway to Recovery

Despite its central role in driving biodiversity loss (or perhaps because of it), agriculture also represents the clearest pathway to reversing it. By addressing the fundamental inefficiencies in land use, it is possible to restore habitat at scales large enough for biodiversity to recover.

A transition from livestock-based agriculture to plant-based food systems could reduce agricultural land use by 75 percent without any reductions to the global food supply. This would shrink the agricultural footprint from roughly 4 billion hectares to 1 billion hectares. The scale of this solution can be hard to appreciate. Not often do we think in terms of billions of hectares. Said another way, we could rewild and conserve an area larger than China, Australia, the European Union, and the continental United States—all without reducing the food supply. Returning this land to nature would allow ecosystems to regenerate, biodiversity to recover, and wildlife populations to rebound.

Our daily experiences often shield us from the realities of biodiversity loss, which frequently unfold far from where we live. Yet our choices ripple across the biosphere. While we tend to think of our land footprint in terms of housing and urban spaces, these pale in comparison to the land required to feed us. When it comes to life on earth, the choices we make with our forks are among the most consequential.

Yet, as humans, we possess a deep capacity for empathy and connection with the natural world. On some level, we all intuitively understand ourselves as a part of the larger web of life. The scale of biodiversity loss can evoke despair or shame, yet this same empathy offers a pathway toward intentional stewardship and care for life and the broader biosphere.

The first step is recognizing the problem for what it is: urgent, foundational, and solvable. In many ways, the simplicity of the solution is a gift. Relatively modest changes in what we consume can dramatically reduce pressure on the biosphere, opening space for conservation and regeneration. On the other hand, the scale of the problem requires a moonshot effort that demands total focus and clarity.

This may prove to be the defining challenge of our time. After mass extinction events, scientists estimate it takes around ten million years for complex life to recover. Life will persist in some form, but whether humanity remains part of that future depends on the choices we make now—choices deeply intertwined with how we feed ourselves and how we treat the living world that sustains us.

This article is part of the Planetary Boundaries and Food series. This series explores how the global food system has pushed humanity beyond seven of the nine planetary boundaries, including climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, ocean acidification, biogeochemical flows, novel entities, and freshwater use. Each article examines how food production and consumption have driven us past these critical limits, and how reimagining our food system can help bring human activity back within a safe operating space for life on earth. To follow the series and read more about Food for a Sustainable Future, subscribe to stay up to date with the latest articles.

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The environmental impacts of the food system can only be understood in the context of how that system is organized and the incentives that shape it. Incentives are the invisible architects determining what is produced, how it is produced, and who benefits or bears the costs. Today’s global food system, and the predicament we currently face, is not the result of inevitability or neutral market forces, but of historical decisions and long‑standing trends.

If we are to build a food system that operates within planetary boundaries, we must first situate the present system within its broader political, economic, and ecological context and then intentionally pursue whole‑systems change. Doing so requires more than technical efficiency gains or marginal reforms. It demands a shift in how we collectively think about food, from how it is produced and distributed to how it is valued and governed.

Food is not merely something we consume. It is deeply intertwined with health, labor and trade, land use, and our cultural relationship with the living world. How we organize food systems shapes our relationship with the land, each other, and the countless species sharing the planet.

This article is the first of a series that explores the systems behind our food. Together, the articles will trace the systems that have allowed for food to become a leading driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, and mass extinction; how food access has become increasingly unequal and concentrated, leaving more than two billion food insecure and threatening more than one billion with obesity and diet‑related disease; how current systems incentivize vast food waste and routinely externalize environmental and social harms; how a highly globalized food system has become fragile and vulnerable to sudden shocks; and, ultimately, what it would take to intentionally build food systems that nourish people while supporting a functioning biosphere.

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The foundations of the modern food system were laid in the early twentieth century, when increasing agricultural output became a central policy goal and industrial models were applied to farming. Mechanization, synthetic petroleum-based fertilizers, chemical pesticides adopted from wartime chemicals, and large-scale irrigation sharply reduced labor needs and expanded cultivation. Though these changes increased caloric availability, they have also had large-scale consequences for farming communities, soil and environmental health, nutrition, and long-term resilience. These changes also assured the tight coupling of agriculture to fossil fuels, embedding emissions and ecological degradation into the core of food production.

Trade liberalization and the commodification of food further reshaped global systems. Countries were encouraged to specialize in export-oriented agriculture through colonial and postcolonial means, binding farmers to volatile global markets and stretching supply chains across continents. At the same time, consolidation accelerated with a small number of corporations gaining control over seeds, agrochemicals, processing, and retail.

Policy choices reinforced these trends. Subsidies favored a narrow set of commodity crops, encouraging monocultures and chronic overproduction, while public investment flowed toward large-scale industrial operations. Infrastructure, markets, and livelihoods became organized around these decisions, creating lock-in effects that made alternatives increasingly difficult to pursue.

Beneath these shifts lies a consistent set of incentives. Profit maximization rewards scale, speed, and uniformity, while environmental damage, increased chronic diseases and healthcare spending, and labor exploitation are treated as externalities. Cheap food became both an economic objective and a political promise, obscuring its true costs and shifting them onto ecosystems, workers, and future generations. The result is a system built for efficiency and volume, not nourishment or ecological stability.

These incentives have profound human consequences. In an era of unprecedented abundance, access to food remains deeply unequal. Hunger and malnutrition persist not because the world cannot produce enough food, but because poverty, conflict, and unequal distribution are built into the system. At the same time, meat-laden and highly processed calorie‑dense foods dominate many markets, contributing to rising rates of obesity and diet‑related diseases. The coexistence of global hunger and the widespread availability of calorie-dense foods is not a contradiction; rather, these are two sides of the same system.

Power within food supply chains has become increasingly concentrated. Farmers operate on razor‑thin margins, squeezed between low prices for their products and high costs for inputs, while processors and retailers capture a disproportionate share of value. Labor exploitation is widespread, particularly among migrant and seasonal workers who face precarious conditions and limited protections. Rural communities are hollowed out as small farms disappear and wealth is extracted rather than reinvested locally.

Food insecurity, in this context, is not a failure of production but a structural feature. Overproduction of commodity crops coexists with widespread hunger, revealing how little the system is designed around meeting real human needs. That same overproduction drives massive food waste, from crops left unharvested in fields to edible food discarded along supply chains and in households.

What appears efficient under normal conditions also proves dangerously fragile. Highly globalized just‑in‑time supply chains leave little room for disruption. Climate extremes, pandemics, geopolitical conflict, and energy price volatility can cascade rapidly through the system, exposing its vulnerability. The promise of efficiency masks a deeper instability that becomes visible precisely when food is needed most.

The appropriate response to these challenges must transcend isolated fixes. What is required is a rethinking of food systems as a whole. One starting point is to recognize food as a commons: a form of shared infrastructure that underpins society and depends on collective stewardship. While food is produced and exchanged through markets, it relies on shared resources, such as land, water, soil, biodiversity, and knowledge. When governance fails, these resources are enclosed, degraded, and exhausted for short‑term gain.

Market‑only solutions are ill‑suited to problems rooted in system design. Technological innovation can play an important role, but it cannot substitute for changes in governance, incentives, and values. And incremental efficiency gains fail to address fundamental misalignment with ecological limits. What is needed instead is a shift in incentives away from profit, volume, and extraction and toward regeneration, resilience, and care.

Such a transformation will involve relocalization and diversification where appropriate, reducing reliance on long, brittle supply chains and strengthening regional food security. It will also necessitate reducing inefficiencies within food production by shifting from resource-intensive livestock-based systems to more lean and ecological plant-based systems of agroecology, agroforestry, and mixed farming systems that support biodiversity while producing healthy foods. Aligning food systems with planetary boundaries, as articulated in frameworks such as doughnut economics, offers a way to meet human needs without overshooting ecological limits.

At its core, whole‑systems change must recenter nourishment, resilience, and regeneration. This requires political choices about whose interests are prioritized and how power is distributed. These are not merely technical questions, but deeply social ones.

Food system transformation is no longer optional. We are approaching a climacteric, a turning point at which the economic and ecological assumptions underpinning modern food systems begin to break down under the pressures of climate change, biodiversity loss, and social instability. The coming decades will be marked by greater uncertainty and disruption. While these changes are inevitable, how we prepare for and respond to them remains up for debate.

Food sits at the intersection of some of our most pressing existential challenges, linking climate change, biodiversity, public health, and equity. Food system transformation offers a rare opportunity to address multiple crises at once rather than treating them in isolation. The articles that follow in this series will examine various parts of these interrelated issues shaping our collective future.

Ultimately, rethinking food means rethinking our relationship with the living world. What we choose to grow, eat, subsidize, and waste reflects what we value. The systems behind our food are human creations, and that means they can be changed. Whether they will be changed in time, and in whose interests, is the question this series invites readers to confront together.

This article is the first of a series that explores the systems behind our food. Together, the articles will trace the systems that have allowed for food to become a leading driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, and mass extinction; how food access has become increasingly unequal and concentrated, leaving more than two billion food insecure and threatening more than one billion with obesity and diet‑related disease; how current systems incentivize vast food waste and routinely externalize environmental and social harms; how a highly globalized food system has become fragile and vulnerable to sudden shocks; and, ultimately, what it would take to intentionally build food systems that nourish people while supporting a functioning biosphere.

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Hello Center for Nutrition Studies Food and Sustainability newsletter subscribers.

We’re excited to share that we’ve moved this newsletter to Substack and renamed it Food for a Sustainable Future.

Over the past year we have explored how food drives today’s most urgent environmental challenges and provides clear pathways to repair environmental systems pushed beyond their limits.

Yet this work has often felt like a one-directional broadcast when what we truly need is a conversation that brings together curiosity, concern, ideas, and lived experiences. We want this to be more than a newsletter; we want to cultivate dialogue to aid in imagining and building alternatives to our current food systems.

The topics we’ve covered recently have been heavy, even heartbreaking and overwhelming. Confronting the reality of planetary boundary overshoot or the staggering loss of biodiversity is emotionally taxing and, for many of us, deeply personal. But facing these truths together also opens the door to something powerful: a shared determination to create systems that are more regenerative, equitable, and life affirming. We need nothing less than a conservation moonshot, and we believe that collective understanding, mutual support, and shared action are essential to making it possible.

Substack is well designed for this kind of dialogue. It offers a space where readers can ask questions, share ideas, comment, respond, and help shape the direction of this work. It allows us to explore more varied, complex environmental issues with greater depth and collaboration. We invite you to leave comments on articles and engage with our content. This feedback is in large part why we do this work.

Our newsletter schedule will remain the same: you will receive one email each month. You do not need to do anything to ensure you continue receiving these monthly roundups in your inbox. If you do not wish to receive these emails moving forward you can always unsubscribe below.

Most importantly, we hope this transition helps us build a living and thriving space grounded in shared values, open dialogue, and a collective commitment to creating a future in which food systems regenerate rather than deplete, nourish rather than harm, and honor both people and the planet.

Steven Disla

Director of Food and the Environment at the Center for Nutrition Studies

Earth in Common: Reimagining a Thriving Ecological Commons and Moving Beyond the Myth of Inevitable Ruin

For most of history, humans survived not by owning the world, but by belonging to it. Yet today, we live as though water, soil, and even life itself can be fenced, commodified, and exhausted without consequence. This article traces how that shift happened; how shared systems that once sustained communities were enclosed and privatized, and how that loss was rebranded as progress; and why the story we tell ourselves about human nature and our impact on the environment has everything to do with our ecological crisis. Moving from ancient commons to modern environmental collapse, from the myth of the “tragedy of the commons” to the overlooked science that disproves it, this article explores how the greatest danger we face is not shared use, but shared denial. At a moment when planetary boundaries are being breached and ecological tipping points loom, rethinking and reclaiming the commons may be less a romantic idea than a prerequisite for survival. This article is the first in a series that will explore examples of commons around the world. We’ll be looking further into what makes these examples of commons fail or succeed while examining their role historically and their potential for changing our relationship with the environment.

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The Role Food Plays in Exceeding the Climate Change Planetary Boundary

Climate change is often framed as a problem of energy and transport, but one of the most powerful drivers of global warming sits quietly on our plates. This article cuts through the confusion surrounding food and climate change by asking and answering the question, How much do food choices really matter for climate change? Drawing on planetary boundaries science, competing emissions estimates, and the hidden role of land use, it explains why agriculture, and livestock in particular, has been systematically underestimated in climate debates. By unpacking why credible studies arrive at wildly different conclusions and what those differences obscure, the article reveals food as one of the fastest, most feasible levers we have to reduce emissions and restore carbon sinks. At a moment when climate targets are slipping out of reach, the evidence demands a harder look at the food system and the choices that shape it. This article is part of a series on planetary boundaries and the impact of our food system. Read the intro to that series here.

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How Food Was Kept at the Margins of COP Climate Talks

For decades, global climate negotiations have fixated on smokestacks and tailpipes while largely ignoring one of the most powerful forces reshaping the planet: the food system. This article examines why agriculture has largely remained on the margins of UN climate talks even as it has pushed humanity beyond multiple planetary boundaries. Tracing the political, accounting, and cultural forces that frame food as a victim rather than a driver of climate change reveals how emissions frameworks, methane blind spots, and land-use fragmentation have sidelined one of the most effective climate solutions available. As carbon budgets shrink and ecological limits are breached, the long-standing absence of food from COP negotiations is no longer a technical oversight but a fundamental failure. If climate targets are to remain within reach, we must confront this failure.

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For most of the history of the UN climate negotiations, food systems were treated as peripheral, if considered at all. Despite agriculture being one of the largest drivers pushing humanity beyond seven of the nine planetary boundaries, UN Conference of the Parties (COP) negotiations overwhelmingly focused on energy, industry, and transport, leaving food largely outside the core climate conversation.

This omission was neither accidental nor the result of a single oversight. Early COP discussions framed agriculture primarily as a victim of climate change rather than a driver of it. Food systems entered negotiations through the language of adaptation, crop failures, drought, heat stress, and farmer vulnerability. By positioning farmers and food production as subjects in need of protection, rather than systems in need of transformation, these early negotiations effectively shielded agriculture from emissions reduction obligations. Responsibility for mitigation was quietly shifted elsewhere.

At the same time, the architecture of international climate policy was built around more obvious sources of fossil fuel emissions: power plants, oil extraction, smokestacks, and tailpipes. Food-system emissions did not fit neatly into this framework. They are diffuse rather than centralized, spread across different greenhouse gases (methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide), and deeply entangled with land-use change, trade, and consumption. As a result, agricultural emissions were often relegated to secondary categories such as “Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use” where they were aggregated, blurred, or partially excluded. This accounting structure made food systems harder to regulate and, in practice, easier to ignore.

Perhaps the most significant barrier, however, was political. Livestock production sits at the intersection of powerful interests: multinational agribusiness, national food security narratives, rural livelihoods, cultural identity, and global trade. Unlike fossil fuels, which can be framed as external industrial villains, livestock is woven into everyday life. Asking countries to reduce meat and dairy production is still widely seen as politically radioactive, particularly in regions where livestock plays a central economic or cultural role. Faced with this reality, COP negotiators largely avoided the topic altogether.

This avoidance extended to consumption. While COPs routinely addressed energy efficiency, renewable deployment, and technological innovation, dietary change was framed as a matter of personal choice rather than public policy. Governments were expected to regulate energy systems, but food choices were left to individuals. The result was a false separation that sidelined one of the most powerful mitigation tools available: shifting diets away from high-impact animal-based foods.

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Methane further complicated the picture. Livestock emissions are dominated by methane, a gas with an intense short-term warming effect. Yet for years, COP frameworks prioritized long-term carbon dioxide stabilization, sidelining methane’s near-term climate impact. By the time methane reduction gained serious attention, most notably through the Global Methane Pledge at COP26 in 2021, decades of avoidable warming from agricultural methane had already been locked in. Even then, methane discussions focused primarily on oil and gas leaks, not livestock.

Land use, the connective tissue between food, climate, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration, was also fragmented across negotiation tracks. Forests were addressed through mechanisms such as REDD+, biodiversity through separate conventions, and agriculture elsewhere. This fragmentation prevented a systems-level reckoning with how food production drives deforestation, grassland conversion, and soil carbon loss, despite land-use change being one of the largest contributors to global warming.

Food systems eventually began to appear more explicitly in the negotiations, but late and cautiously. Not until COP26, and more clearly COP27 and COP28, was food named as a distinct theme. Even then, the language remained carefully constrained, with emphasis on “regenerative agriculture” rather than reduced livestock production, on productivity and resilience rather than absolute emissions cuts, and on voluntary initiatives rather than binding commitments. The introduction of a dedicated Food, Agriculture, and Water Day at COP28 marked a symbolic breakthrough, but it also underscored how long the issue had been deferred despite decades of scientific warning.

The consequences of this absence have been profound. It delayed recognition of agriculture as a primary climate mitigation pathway, allowed livestock emissions to grow largely unchecked, reinforced the idea that climate solutions are primarily technological rather than relational, and obscured the central role of land in stabilizing the biosphere. Perhaps most importantly, it narrowed our collective imagination of what climate action could look like.

As planetary boundaries are crossed and carbon budgets shrink, this omission is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The science is clear: without transforming food systems, especially livestock production, climate targets cannot be met. Food was absent from COP not because it did not matter, but because confronting it would have required rethinking power, consumption, land, and responsibility.

That reckoning is no longer optional. It is now unavoidable.

This article is part of the Planetary Boundaries and Food series. This series explores how the global food system has pushed humanity beyond seven of the nine planetary boundaries, including climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, ocean acidification, biogeochemical flows, novel entities, and freshwater use. Each article examines how food production and consumption have driven us past these critical limits, and how reimagining our food system can help bring human activity back within a safe operating space for life on earth. To follow the series and read more about Food for a Sustainable Future, subscribe to stay up to date with the latest articles.

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Scientists around the world are sounding the alarm on climate change. Their message is no longer abstract or distant: we must urgently transform the systems that fuel greenhouse gas emissions and begin drawing down the carbon already saturating our atmosphere. Delay is no longer a neutral choice but rather a decision that deepens risk.

Within the planetary boundaries framework, the safe boundary for climate change was set at 350 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a level below which earth system processes are far likelier to remain stable. That threshold was crossed in 1986, and today atmospheric CO₂ has climbed to 427.9 ppm.

Among all human activities, the food system stands out as one of the most powerful yet underappreciated levers to address this crisis. Food uniquely touches both sides of the climate equation: it can dramatically reduce emissions and restore ecosystems that naturally absorb and store carbon. This is because not all foods are created equal. Some demand vast amounts of land, water, and energy, leaving an outsized climate footprint. Others require relatively few inputs and strain the earth far less.

By shifting away from resource-intensive foods, especially livestock-based foods like beef and dairy, and toward plant-based alternatives, we can sharply reduce emissions while freeing land for forests, grasslands, and soils to once again act as carbon sinks. Few changes offer such a large climate payoff with such immediate feasibility.

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Yet confusion persists about how much agriculture, and livestock production in particular, has contributed to climate change. This lack of clarity has real consequences. It consistently leads to the systematic underestimation of food’s role in the climate crisis, sidelining one of the most effective tools we have for mitigation.

So how much does food production actually contribute to global warming? The answer, depending on the study, appears wildly inconsistent:

• A UN-backed assessment attributes 34% of global emissions to agriculture, while another UN report estimates livestock alone at 12%.

• A peer-reviewed 2025 study suggests agriculture has driven around 60% of global warming, echoing a 2009 Worldwatch Institute report that placed 51% of warming on livestock alone.

• The IPCC estimates that 21–37% of total greenhouse gas emissions come from the global food system.

• The USDA, by contrast, calculates agriculture’s share of US emissions at just 10%.

• Other peer-reviewed work estimates livestock contributed 23% of global warming in 2010, while another places food system emissions at 19–29%, with 80–86% tied to land-use change.

Why do these numbers diverge so dramatically? The answer lies not in disagreement about physics, but in what is counted and what is excluded. Each study defines “agricultural emissions” differently, depending on assumptions such as:

• Whether historical and ongoing land-use change, including deforestation, is fully included

• How methane’s warming effect is measured, given its short but intense atmospheric lifespan

• Whether respiration from the more than 80 billion farmed land animals is treated as an anthropogenic emission

• Whether cooling effects from aerosols released when fossil fuels are burned are included

• Which metric is used to compare gases (e.g., global warming potential or effective radiative forcing)

• How carbon sequestration on croplands and rangelands is calculated

Given this complexity, wide variation is unsurprising, especially for a system as culturally embedded and politically sensitive as food. Still, these figures matter. They form the baseline for estimating how much warming we could avoid by changing what we eat. And once again, the range of findings is broad:

• One study finds that adopting the plant-forward EAT-Lancet diet could reduce food-system emissions by 17%.

• Another estimates that a global shift to vegan diets could cut agricultural emissions by 77%.

• A third study suggests that replacing half of all animal-based foods with plant-based alternatives could reduce diet-related emissions by 35%, rising to around 70% if animal foods were fully replaced.

• On the lowest end, researchers at the USDA estimate that plant-based dietary shifts would reduce total US emissions by just 2.6%.

• One study goes further, arguing that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, food system emissions alone could make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C, and difficult even to remain below 2°C.

Taken together, these studies paint a confusing picture. But the confusion should not obscure what is most important. Two conclusions remain unmistakable: agriculture is a major driver of climate change, and livestock production is its most climate-intensive component.

Yet both defenders of industrial livestock systems and advocates of plant-based diets can point to studies that support their position. The result has been the quiet dismissal and underplaying of food-based climate solutions.

In many ways, this confusion is not accidental. Just as fossil fuel interests spent decades obscuring the reality of climate change itself, powerful economic interests benefit from clouding the role of agriculture and livestock. Doubt is buried beneath technical language like global warming potentials, radiative forcing, and selective system boundaries, while incomplete accounting ignores the full consequences of historical and ongoing land use change.

Yet much of the confusion surrounding food and climate dissolves when land use is considered: nearly half of all habitable land on earth is used to produce food, 80% of which is devoted to livestock production while providing just 17% of global calories; a shift toward plant-based food systems could reduce agriculture’s land footprint by roughly 75%, an area larger than China, Australia, the European Union, and the continental United States combined. Few statistics so clearly and potently illustrate the core imbalance and inefficiency at the heart of food production’s impact on the environment.

Food has reshaped the planet on a vast scale, transforming forests, grasslands, and wetlands into fields and pastures. When these land-use changes are fully accounted for, the food system’s role in climate change becomes impossible to deny. If we are serious about staying within climate targets and about limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, then we must honestly confront this reality.

The question is no longer whether food matters for the climate. It is whether we are willing to face what the evidence is telling us and act accordingly.

This article is part of the Planetary Boundaries and Food series. This series explores how the global food system has pushed humanity beyond seven of the nine planetary boundaries, including climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, ocean acidification, biogeochemical flows, novel entities, and freshwater use. Each article examines how food production and consumption have driven us past these critical limits, and how reimagining our food system can help bring human activity back within a safe operating space for life on earth. To follow the series and read more about Food for a Sustainable Future, subscribe to stay up to date with the latest articles.

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For most of human history, survival depended not on ownership but on relationship. Water was drawn from shared wells. Forests were tended collectively. Fisheries were governed by seasons, customs, and restraint. Pastures were grazed according to norms that balanced use with renewal. These shared systems on which we all rely, what we call the commons, were not ownerless, chaotic spaces. They were carefully managed living agreements between people and the land, shaped by necessity, memory, and mutual dependence.

A commons is not simply a resource. It is a relationship. It exists wherever communities recognize that certain things—like air, water, soil, forests, seeds, and knowledge—are essential to life itself and therefore cannot be reduced to commodities without consequence. Commons matter because they sustain the conditions that make all other economic activity possible. No market can function without breathable air. No civilization can endure without fertile soil or a stable climate. Commons are the quiet infrastructure of life.

In the past, commons took many forms. In medieval Europe, villagers held rights to graze animals, gather firewood, and cultivate strips of land within open-field systems. Indigenous societies across the world governed watersheds, forests, and hunting grounds through deeply embedded cultural laws. These systems were not perfect, but they were adaptive, place-based, and oriented toward continuity rather than extraction. Crucially, they were rooted in the understanding that humans were participants in nature, not masters standing apart from it.

Today, that understanding is reemerging through science rather than tradition. Ecology, earth system science, and the growing awareness of biosphere interdependence have revealed something ancient cultures long knew: the earth functions as one integrated system. Forests regulate rainfall thousands of miles away. Phytoplankton produce much of the oxygen we breathe (roughly half of all earth’s oxygen). Soil microbes influence the climate in miraculous ways. Human economies, and human survival, are not external to these systems; they are embedded within them.

A simple definition of the commons is land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community. Whether we like it or not, the earth already operates as a commons through marvelous interactions, including the examples already given, which bind humanity to the larger forces of life. The only question is whether we acknowledge this reality or continue to act as though we are exempt from it.

Somewhere along the way, we began to dismantle the shared foundations of life. Beginning in earnest with the enclosure movements in Europe, we took lands that had been held collectively for centuries and fenced, privatized, and transformed them into sources of rent and profit. The commons, once governed by custom and mutual obligation, were redefined as inefficient, backward, and wasteful. “Property,” reformers argued, would bring order. Markets would bring productivity. Privatization would bring progress.

The justifications were moral as much as economic. Enclosure advocates claimed that common land encouraged laziness and overuse. They claimed that without private ownership, people would take as much as they could, leaving nothing behind. They portrayed the commons as degraded by mismanagement and neglect, asserting that shared access invited abuse rather than care. Only by fencing, privatizing, and developing the land, they argued, could it be properly stewarded and aligned with the broader interests of productivity, economic progress, and social order. This argument was given further cover by philosophical thinkers, including John Locke, who in 1689 published his Second Treatise of Government, in which he argued that “God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational (and labour was to be his title to it).” This argument framed improvement through labor as the moral basis of ownership and helped legitimize the enclosure of common lands as both natural and socially beneficial.

This logic hardened into what later became known as the “tragedy of the commons.” In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin gave the idea its modern formulation in an article published in Science magazine, describing a hypothetical pasture open to all, where each herder, acting in rational self-interest, adds more animals until the land is destroyed. Hardin’s conclusion was stark: “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” Only privatization or top-down control, he argued, could prevent collapse.

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What Hardin presented as ecological law was, in fact, an assumption about human nature. His model imagined individuals stripped of culture, communication, memory, and responsibility—individuals without rules, norms, or shared values. It bore little resemblance to how real commons had ever functioned. Yet the simplicity of the story made it powerful. It was easily taught, easily repeated, and deeply compatible with an economic system already inclined toward enclosure. This same thinking led Hardin to commit suicide and espouse nativist views while promoting coercive constraints on reproduction to limit the growth of humanity and prevent overpopulation, which he viewed as the root cause of every ecological problem.

The tragedy of the commons was weaponized to justify the fencing of fields, the commodification of water, the patenting of seeds, and the extraction of minerals, forests, and fossil fuels. It echoed earlier rationales used during colonial expansion, when Indigenous lands were declared empty, unused, and wasted because they did not conform to European notions of property. The same logic underpinned the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny: land was valuable only when subordinated to profit, and ecosystems mattered only insofar as they could be converted into wealth. That the lands were governed by rights of occupancy and not fully cultivated or owned by Christians justified subordination and colonization.

After centuries of enclosure and privatization, we are now living with the results. The experiment has been run at planetary scale, and the outcomes are increasingly undeniable. Inequality has reached historic extremes, with wealth concentrated in the hands of those who control land, capital, and resources. The biosphere itself is approaching collapse, with global wildlife populations declining on average by 73% since 1970. Humanity has pushed beyond seven of nine planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for life. Half of the world’s coral reefs are now dead, marking the passage of earth’s first environmental tipping point, while populations of sharks and rays have plummeted 71% over fifty years. A third of earth’s forests have been erased, mainly replaced by agricultural monocultures more akin to deserts than working ecosystems.

Remember, the narrative and outcomes of the tragedy of the commons were meant to prevent environmental ruin. Where is the evidence that privatization succeeded? The greatest ecological destruction in history has occurred not in shared systems, but under regimes of extraction driven by profit, shielded by legal ownership, and insulated from responsibility through externalization of harm. What we are witnessing today is not the tragedy of the commons; it is the tragedy of enclosure.

Long before these consequences became so visible, one political economist chose to question the foundational myth itself. Elinor Ostrom did not accept Hardin’s parable as destiny. Instead, she asked a simple but radical question: how do people actually manage shared resources in the real world?

Ostrom devoted her career to studying fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, and grazing lands managed by communities worldwide. She chose these cases precisely because they were supposed to fail. According to the prevailing theory, these community-managed systems should have collapsed under the weight of self-interest. Instead, Ostrom found something remarkable. Many commons had been sustainably managed for centuries, sometimes millennia, without privatization or centralized control.

Far from the portrayal of the commons as a Wild West governed by self-interest and lawlessness, she found successful commons distinguished by the presence of rules. Communities developed clear boundaries, shared norms, systems of monitoring, graduated sanctions, and mechanisms for resolving conflict. Resource users were not faceless competitors; they were neighbors with reputations, histories, and futures intertwined with the health of the system itself. Rather than being driven solely by short-term gain, people acted as stewards because their survival and identity depended on it.

Ostrom’s work dismantled the inevitability at the heart of the tragedy narrative. Overuse was not a law of nature; it was a failure of governance. When communities had the right to organize, participate in rule-making, and adapt those rules to local conditions, commons often outperformed both private markets and state control.

In 2009, Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for this work, becoming the first woman to win that prize. Yet despite this recognition, her findings remain far less widely known than Hardin’s bleak parable. The idea that humans are incapable of cooperation continues to dominate the societal imagination, even as contradicting evidence mounts.

We have allowed the experiment of enclosure to continue long past the point where its damage became clear. We have mistaken extraction for efficiency, growth for progress, and ownership for care. Today’s tragedy of the commons is not caused by shared use, but by unfettered capitalism and systems that reward those who profit from depletion while distributing the costs across society, future generations, and the living world itself.

What we need now is not nostalgia, but a shift in mindset. To see ourselves as participants in a living system capable of repair, rather than parasites on the planet. To recognize that potential stewardship through shared cooperation is not naïve—it is a critical necessity. Ostrom showed us that cooperation is not an anomaly; it is a latent capacity waiting to be cultivated. She showed that resources held in common can be and often are properly stewarded. We just have to first recognize that we are all tied to their well-being and operate as such.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are bound to one another through air, water, soil, and climate. The biosphere, that thin layer surrounding this precious blue planet where all life lives, connects us all to the commons. We must choose whether to align ourselves with it consciously, drawing on the best of human cooperation, or allow the myth of inevitable overexploitation to continue guiding us toward collapse. Life on earth depends on that choice.

Elinor Ostrom’s Eight Principles for Governing the Commons

1. Clearly defined boundaries
   Communities must know who has rights to use a resource and where those boundaries lie.

2. Rules adapted to local conditions
   Use and stewardship rules should reflect local ecological and cultural realities, not one-size-fits-all solutions.

3. Collective decision-making
   Those affected by the rules should have a meaningful role in shaping and modifying them.

4. Monitoring
   Resource conditions and user behavior are monitored by accountable members of the community.

5. Graduated sanctions
   Violations are met with proportionate, escalating responses rather than immediate punishment.

6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms
   Accessible, low-cost ways to resolve disputes prevent breakdowns in trust.

7. Recognition of the right to self-organize
   External authorities must respect the community’s right to govern its own commons.

8. Nested enterprises (for large systems)
   When commons span large scales, governance should be organized across interconnected layers.

This article is the first in a series that will examine how the commons have been enclosed and the impacts of that enclosure, as well as how they have been successfully stewarded when communities follow Ostrom’s principles for governing shared resources. The series will explore examples where the so-called tragedy of the commons unfolded and what went wrong, alongside cases where stewardship thrived. It will also look forward to the possibility of a world in which we reclaim our role as responsible stewards of life on earth. Through these examples, I hope to highlight ways we might align ourselves with the living world and open ourselves to greater cooperation and care for the commons, of which we are all a part.

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Modern food production has driven us beyond planetary boundaries, yet it also holds one of the most immediate pathways to repair. The very landscapes shaped by extraction are capable of regeneration. Food, when grown with the right intentions, can become a bridge between ecological collapse and ecological renewal.

This publication exists to honor that connection. We explore how food and farming have pushed us past the seven breached planetary boundaries and how food-based solutions can help bring humanity back into a safe operating space. We also share practical ways individuals and communities can participate in this transformation, from daily choices to collective efforts rooted in the understanding that the environment is a shared commons.

As the publication evolves, our goal is to cultivate a community driven by collaboration, curiosity, and meaningful action. We aim to highlight food’s extraordinary power to heal ecosystems and honor life in all its forms. At this moment, food places humanity at a crossroads: one path leads toward mass extinction, climate instability, and deeper breaches of planetary boundaries; the other toward rewilding, restoration, and regenerative stewardship. We seek to support the latter path and invite you to participate by commenting, sharing, collaborating, and subscribing to help this space grow.

Moving forward, we will explore the ways food systems, collective action, and regenerative practices intersect with the health of our planet and communities. We’ll dive into planetary boundaries and how food drives environmental change, examine examples of thriving commons and shared stewardship from around the world, and uncover principles that make these systems successful. We will also explore hands-on strategies for growing perennials, pollinator-friendly plants, fruit tree guilds, mini-oases, and larger orchards and agroforestry systems. Finally, we will investigate collective efforts—from the plant-based city movements to policy advocacy—and the structures behind our food system, revealing pathways toward life-affirming, equitable, and regenerative ways of producing and consuming food.

We welcome your suggestions, questions, and feedback as we continue to explore these critical topics. Your input helps shape the conversation and ensures this publication remains a dynamic, community-driven space. If you are interested in republishing content, partnering on educational initiatives, or exploring collaborative projects, we would love to hear from you. Together, we can amplify the impact of regenerative food systems, strengthen the vital connections between food, people, and the planet, and work toward co-creating a more life-affirming future.

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This publication is sponsored by two non-profits, the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies (CNS) and Global Roots. CNS has a mission statement to promote optimal nutrition through science-based education, advocacy, and research. The organization works to empower individuals and health professionals to improve personal, public, and environmental health. Global Roots has a mission statement to promote regenerative, equitable, and nutritious plant-based food systems around the world by modeling agricultural conservation projects, partnering with organizations around the world to implement whole systems change, and providing on the ground education programs.

CNS was founded in 2008 to honor Dr. Campbell’s legacy by preserving his teachings in online formats. Originally launched to deliver his Cornell University nutrition course online, now completed by over 24,000 students, CNS has expanded to offer a certificate program on the relationship between food and sustainability, featuring more than 15 expert-led lectures. These lectures examine topics such as food’s impact on land and water ecosystems, the structure and policy implications of the modern food system, and the ways it externalizes environmental and social harms, while also highlighting individuals and groups working to build vibrant, regenerative, and equitable food systems. Global Roots was created to expand these offerings through in-person educational events and publications like this, enabling CNS to focus more directly on online education and nutrition research. Together, the organizations reinforce the vital connections between food, personal health, and planetary health.

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Our future food security depends as much on what we eat as on the seeds we choose to protect. A diverse diet generally promotes better human health, while crop diversity strengthens the resilience of farms and ecosystems. Yet, over the past century, we have lost the vast majority of our seed varieties, leaving the global food system more vulnerable to disease, climate extremes, and collapse. Preserving and reintroducing heirloom and traditional seeds is not just about nostalgia or flavor—it is about ensuring we have the genetic tools to feed a growing population in a rapidly changing world.

What we eat largely determines both short- and long-term health outcomes. A diverse plant-based diet, rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts, and seeds, provides a broader spectrum of vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals that support optimal nutrition. Research shows that individuals who consume a wider variety of plant foods per week have significantly greater gut microbiome diversity than those who consume less variety; microbiome diversity, in turn, is linked to reduced risk of obesity, heart disease, and inflammatory disorders.

Dietary diversity is also a safeguard against hidden hunger (micronutrient deficiencies that can arise when diets rely too heavily on a small number of staples, such as corn, wheat, or rice). By diversifying our plates, we strengthen our bodies, bolster our microbiomes, and reduce our vulnerability to chronic disease.

What is true for our bodies is also true for the land: agricultural systems thrive on diversity. Farms that integrate multiple crops, rather than focusing on monocultures, build resilience into their soil and ecosystems. Diverse root systems improve soil structure, increase organic matter, and enhance water retention, making fields less prone to erosion and drought.

Crop diversity also serves as a natural shield against pests and disease. A farm with multiple species creates ecological checks and balances. Pests that thrive on one crop are less likely to spread uncontrollably if other crops are present. Studies confirm these benefits: “Compared with conventional farming systems, diversified farming systems support substantially greater biodiversity, soil quality, carbon sequestration, and water-holding capacity in surface soils, energy-use efficiency, and resistance and resilience to climate change.”

In an era of increasing climate volatility, crop diversity is not just an ecological ideal. It is a survival strategy.

Despite the benefits of diversity, our food system has moved in the opposite direction. The number of seed varieties available to farmers and consumers has narrowed dramatically. Between 1903 and 1983, the US lost an estimated 93 percent of its unique seed varieties in commercial operations, according to the Rural Advancement Foundation International. This trend has continued since 1983, meaning that the vast majority of the genetic legacy behind fruits and vegetables once grown across the country has vanished in commercial operations.

More recently, public breeding programs, long the backbone of agricultural innovation, have declined substantially. According to a report from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, over a third of US public plant breeding programs disappeared between 1994 and 2014, with more recent reports substantiating this precipitous decline. In place of these public breeding programs, commercial seed companies increasingly dominate the market, often prioritizing high-yield, uniform varieties suited for global distribution over locally adapted and diverse strains. The result is a global food system that is both nutritionally and ecologically impoverished.

Every seed carries unique traits that may be vital for the future of agriculture. Some varieties thrive in drought conditions; others resist particular pests or diseases. As the climate warms and extreme weather events become more common, these genetic differences could determine whether crops survive or fail. When we lose seed varieties, we also lose their potentially crucial traits. While popular commercial varieties might perform the best under ideal conditions with the help of additional fertilization and irrigation, heirloom varieties may adapt better during times of inclement weather, broader climate shifts, or prolonged flooding or drought.

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Seeds That Could Save the Future

Oaxacan Green Dent Corn (Mexico)
This heirloom corn has an extraordinary ability to thrive in drought conditions and poor soils, where modern hybrids often fail. Its resilience makes it invaluable for breeding programs that aim to protect staple grains against water scarcity in a warming climate.

Swarna-Sub1 Rice (India)
By incorporating a single gene from a traditional landrace, scientists developed a rice variety that can survive two weeks of complete submergence. This innovation is already protecting millions of smallholder farmers from catastrophic flood losses, showing how old genetics can provide new lifelines.

Matt’s Wild Cherry Tomato (Mexico)
This small wild-type tomato naturally resists many devastating diseases, including blight. It has also been used in breeding programs to improve the disease resistance of commercial tomato lines, helping safeguard one of the world’s most popular crops.

Andean Potatoes (Peru and Bolivia)
High-altitude farmers in the Andes still cultivate thousands of potato varieties, many capable of enduring freezing nights, intense UV radiation, and nutrient-poor soils. These diverse landraces offer traits that could prove critical for global potato security as climates shift toward harsher extremes.

Cowpeas (Africa and Southern US)
Cowpeas have been a survival crop for centuries, thriving in heat and drought while enriching soils through nitrogen fixation. Their reliability in marginal environments makes them a crucial food security crop in regions where climate change is shrinking options for farmers.

Why These Seeds Matter

Together, these examples illustrate a powerful truth: the genetic traits hidden in traditional, heirloom, and wild seeds are our best insurance policy against an uncertain climate future. Preserving and cultivating them ensures that we have the tools to adapt our food system to droughts, floods, pests, and extreme weather events.

History offers cautionary tales. The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s was caused by overreliance on just a handful of potato varieties; when blight struck, mass starvation followed. Today, vast fields of genetically uniform wheat, corn, and soy create a similar vulnerability. If one disease evolves to exploit these uniform crops, the consequences could ripple through global food supplies.

Seed diversity is therefore not a luxury. Rather, it is an insurance policy against the uncertainties of the future.

The good news is that biodiversity still exists, even if it isn’t found in large-scale commercial operations, and we have the power to protect it. Heirloom seeds, passed down for generations, embody both cultural heritage and genetic resilience. Unlike hybrid or patented seeds, heirlooms can be saved and replanted, ensuring their survival across time.

We can contribute by growing heirloom varieties in home gardens, supporting local farmers who cultivate diverse crops, or participating in seed exchange networks such as Seed Savers Exchange or community seed libraries. These efforts not only safeguard genetic diversity but also reintroduce flavors, textures, and nutrients that have been lost in standardized commercial produce. A Cherokee Purple tomato or a Moon & Stars watermelon offers not just taste but a living, personal connection to biodiversity and resilience.

Our health and the planet’s health are deeply intertwined through the diversity of the foods we grow and eat. By expanding the variety on our plates, we nurture our microbiomes and prevent disease. By safeguarding crop diversity, we build agricultural systems capable of withstanding pests, disease, and climate disruption.

The erosion of seed biodiversity is a global challenge, but it is also an opportunity. Every garden planted with heirloom seeds, every meal that embraces variety, is an act of resilience and renewal. The future of food security lies not in fewer crops grown on ever-larger fields, but in restoring the abundance of seeds and foods that once flourished.

The next time you plant a garden, shop at a farmers’ market, or choose seeds to grow, remember: every seed you support is a vote for resilience, flavor, and a thriving future.

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Planetary boundaries are a set of scientifically defined environmental limits within which humanity can sustainably survive. These thresholds establish a “safe operating space” for human development, ensuring that the earth’s systems remain stable and resilient. Crossing these boundaries increases the risk of triggering large-scale, potentially irreversible environmental changes.

The concept was introduced in 2009 by a team of twenty-eight leading earth system and environmental scientists, led by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Will Steffen of the Australian National University. Their pioneering framework identified nine critical earth system processes and proposed measurable boundaries for each to safeguard planetary stability.

The primary goal of this framework was to shift the global conversation away from a purely economic or human-centered model of progress and toward one that recognizes the physical and ecological limits of the earth. It offers a clear scientific foundation for sustainability that could inform policy, reshape economic systems, and guide human activities to ensure the long-term viability of life on earth.

Before this framework, environmental challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and deforestation were typically studied in isolation and treated as separate issues. The planetary boundaries approach introduced a systems-level perspective, emphasizing how these processes are deeply interconnected. Pressure on one boundary can cascade into others, compounding risks across the earth system. This wholistic understanding has helped scientists, decision-makers, and the public grasp how human activity is destabilizing the planet on multiple fronts.

The framework has evolved alongside advances in earth system science and the collection of more comprehensive data. Boundaries have been refined, and new methodologies have been developed for measuring planetary pressure. For example, the original boundary of “biodiversity loss” was reconceptualized as “biosphere integrity” to capture not just species extinction but also the degradation of ecosystem functions. In 2015, scientists reported that four of the nine boundaries had already been crossed. By 2023, that number had grown to six, and as of 2025, a seventh has now been breached.

Image from https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html

The planetary boundaries framework has profoundly influenced new economic thinking. It has inspired alternative models that reject the assumption of infinite growth on a finite planet. One of the most influential economic models to incorporate the planetary boundaries framework is Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics,” which integrates planetary boundaries (which she calls environmental ceilings) with social foundations (basic human needs) to define a safe and just space for humanity. The planetary boundaries framework has also energized movements advocating for degrowth, circular economies, and wellbeing-oriented development, all of which aim to decouple prosperity from unchecked resource use.

Image from About Doughnut Economics | DEAL

Traditional economic models often treat the environment as an externality to be exploited without limit. The planetary boundaries framework disrupts that view, insisting that economic activity must remain within earth’s physical limits. It challenges us to fundamentally rethink what we value, how we grow, and what kind of future we are building.

According to current scientific consensus, we have breached seven of the nine planetary boundaries.

1. Biosphere integrity: breached between the 1950s and ’60s

2. Biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus cycles): breached since the 1900s

3. Land-system change: breached in the early 2000s

4. Climate change: breached between the 1990s and the early 2000s

5. Novel entities: breached in 2022

6. Freshwater change: recently found to be breached

7. Ocean acidification: breached in 2025

The remaining boundaries have either not been fully breached (atmospheric aerosol loading) or are recovering (stratospheric ozone depletion).

How Food and Livestock Impact the Planetary Boundaries

The global food system, particularly industrial livestock production, is a dominant force behind the transgression of multiple planetary boundaries. Below is a breakdown of how food and livestock impact each of the seven breached boundaries.

1. Land-System Change
Humanity has significantly altered over 75 percent of earth’s land surface, and land-use change is now four times greater than previously estimated. Agriculture dominates this transformation.

• Livestock is responsible for 65 percent of land-use change since 1960.

• Agriculture occupies about half of all habitable land, and livestock uses around 80 percent of this agricultural land while providing only 17 percent of global calories.

• Cattle ranching causes 80 percent of Amazon deforestation and agriculture drives nearly 90 percent of global deforestation.

• The land footprint required to produce just 1 kilogram (kg) of beef could instead produce 86 kg of bread, 94 kg of tofu, or 45 kg of split peas.

The planetary boundary for land-system change has long been breached, with catastrophic consequences for biodiversity, climate regulation, and Indigenous land rights.

2. Biosphere Integrity
This boundary is considered one of the two “core” planetary boundaries (along with climate change) whose breach could lead to irreversible earth system shifts. Biosphere integrity has been deeply undermined by the expansion of animal agriculture.

• Wildlife populations have declined by 73 percent since 1970, and over one million species are at risk of extinction.

• Threats include habitat destruction, pollution, and climate change, but agriculture is the top driver. Agriculture is the primary threat to 86 percent of species at risk of extinction, and livestock alone has caused 60 percent of biodiversity loss due to land conversion.

• Wild mammals make up only 4 percent of global mammal biomass today. In contrast, livestock makes up 62 percent and humans 34 percent. For birds, poultry represents 71 percent of avian biomass, while wild birds account for just 29 percent.

3. Freshwater Change
The freshwater boundary has recently been added to the breached list, recognizing that both blue water (surface and groundwater) and green water (soil moisture) systems are under extreme stress.

• Agriculture accounts for 92 percent of the global freshwater footprint, and one-third relates to animal products.

• 70 percent of all freshwater withdrawals come from agriculture.

  • Livestock production is especially water intensive. One pound of beef requires 1,799 gallons of water; one pound of cheese, 382 gallons; and one pound of bread, 240 gallons.

• The water footprint of pork is double that of pulses (e.g., peas, lentils, and beans) and four times that of grains.

With aquifers depleting and rivers drying up, reducing freshwater stress is essential; transitioning to plant-based agriculture could help achieve that.

4. Climate Change
The climate boundary, set at atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 350 parts per million (ppm), was breached decades ago. We are now beyond 420 ppm and locked into a future of warming, extreme weather, and ecosystem upheaval.

• Livestock contributes between 12 and 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Differences between these estimations come from how methane emissions are calculated, how indirect emissions from land use changes and related deforestation are accounted for, and whether livestock respiration is counted.

  • Key contributors include methane from enteric fermentation (a part of the digestive process of livestock), land use change (especially deforestation), manure management, and feed production.

• Livestock’s emissions exceed those of the entire transportation sector, including all cars, planes, trains, and ships combined. Shockingly, it is estimated that livestock alone will use 49 percent of the emissions budget needed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030.

Plant-based diets offer a powerful mitigation tool for reducing methane and deforestation-linked carbon dioxide emissions.

5. Ocean Acidification
About 30 percent of carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed by oceans, where they form carbonic acid and lower the pH of seawater.

• Oceans are now 30 percent more acidic than during preindustrial times.

• Acidification threatens key organisms in marine food chains—for example, corals, shellfish, and plankton.

• Emissions from animal agriculture contribute to the overall carbon load.

6. Biogeochemical Flows (Nitrogen and Phosphorus Cycles)
This boundary has been massively exceeded due to industrial fertilizer use and manure overload from concentrated animal feeding operations.

• Two-thirds of applied nitrogen (75/115 million tons) and over half of phosphorus (14/25 million tons) are not used by crops.

• This excess leads to runoff into waterways, causing toxic algal blooms and creating over 415 oceanic dead zones globally, which now extend further into open oceans.

• The largest dead zone worldwide, which is in the Gulf of Mexico, expands seasonally to 22,000 square kilometers.

• Fertilizer-related emissions, particularly nitrous oxide, surpass those of the entire commercial aviation sector.

Reducing livestock feed production would drastically decrease nitrogen and phosphorus use and mitigate these toxic impacts.

7. Novel Entities
This boundary encompasses synthetic chemicals, plastics, pesticides, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It was breached in 2022.

• Global production of synthetic chemicals is rising faster than we can assess their safety.

• Over 12 percent of global cropland, and more than half of US cropland, is devoted to GMO cultivation. In the US, GMO usage is ubiquitous: 94 percent of soybeans, 96 percent of cotton, and 92 percent of corn are GMOs.

• 95 percent of livestock consume GMO crops.

• Pesticide use has doubled since 1990, with over 7.8 billion pounds applied in 2021, much of it to glyphosate-resistant GMO crops.

The livestock industry is deeply entwined with chemical-intensive monocultures of corn and soy, driving novel entity proliferation

The planetary boundaries framework makes one thing abundantly clear: we are living far beyond the safe operating limits of earth’s life-support systems. And at the heart of this transgression is the global food system, particularly industrial livestock production.

From land and freshwater degradation to climate destabilization, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution, the food we eat is shaping the future of life on earth. Transitioning to plant-based diets is not just a personal health choice—it is an urgent planetary necessity.

We are approaching a precipice. The longer we delay, the more life systems will unravel. But we still have time to shift course. By reimagining our food system and embracing sustainable, plant-centered alternatives, we can begin to pull back from the boundaries we’ve crossed and create a future that respects the limits of our only home.

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Monarch butterflies have long captured the hearts of millions. Their delicate orange-and-black wings, extraordinary migration spanning thousands of miles from Canada to Mexico, and symbolic connection to transformation make them one of nature’s most beloved creatures. Monarchs are more than just insects: they’re a miracle of evolution and a source of wonder.

But beneath their beauty and grace lies a troubling truth. Monarch butterflies are among the species most threatened by modern agricultural practices, and one chemical stands out as a major culprit—glyphosate.

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in many herbicides, most notably Roundup. It is used extensively in industrial agriculture to control weeds. The problem is that it doesn’t discriminate; it eliminates nearly all vegetation it touches, including milkweed, the sole plant that monarch caterpillars rely on for survival.

Over the last two decades, milkweed has been decimated across the American Midwest, the monarch’s critical breeding grounds, largely due to the widespread adoption of crops genetically modified to allow for increased applications of glyphosate. As milkweed disappears from the landscape, monarch populations plummet. Once numbering in the hundreds of millions, the eastern monarch population has declined by more than 80 percent since the 1990s, while the total number of butterflies of all species in America decreased by 22 percent from 2000 to 2020.

Without milkweed, monarchs have nowhere to lay their eggs. Without caterpillars, there are no butterflies. It’s a sobering and direct chain of cause and effect.

To lose the monarch would not just be an ecological tragedy—it would be a cultural and spiritual loss. Monarchs have long inspired artists, scientists, poets, and schoolchildren. Their migration is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the natural world. Requiring no GPS or roadmap, monarchs that have never made the journey before find their way each fall to the exact same forest groves in central Mexico, guided only by instinct and celestial cues.

Their beauty, resilience, and grace are reminders of nature’s brilliance.

Saving the monarchs requires rethinking how we grow our food and manage our landscapes. We can support organic and regenerative agriculture, plant native milkweed and nectar flowers, and advocate for pesticide reform. Awareness is the first step—but action must follow.

The plight of the monarch butterfly mirrors our own struggles with industrial systems that value short-term gain over long-term balance. Their fragile wings carry a heavy message. When we harm the natural world, we ultimately harm ourselves.

Will we listen

?

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Industrial agriculture is turning the entire planet into a sacrifice zone, and we must act now to rectify the environmental impacts of food production.

The term sacrifice zone was coined during the Cold War to articulate the impact of nuclear testing. These were areas so damaged and devastated by nuclear radiation that they were deemed unfit for life. As time progressed, the term began to take on new meanings; by and large, it has referred to areas cataclysmically altered by human actions, including the production of nuclear weapons, fossil fuels, mining operations, and other industrial processes with high pollution rates.

Though we do not see or discuss them as often, the outsized environmental impacts of industrialized agriculture belong in the same category, producing sacrifice zones at such a large scale that they dwarf all other industries. That is because of industrialized agriculture’s ever-expanding economies of scale, which require large-scale monocultures to stay relevant on the world stage. These monocultures lack biodiversity and leave soils in a weakened state, creating a reliance on artificial fertilizers. In turn, monocultures built on weakened soils are more vulnerable to pests and diseases, and therefore they require poisonous pesticides that further weaken the soil food web.

This is a self-reinforcing loop of death: agricultural zones (and those downstream and downwind) become sacrifice zones.

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Global changes in land use reflect the impact of agriculture on the environment. Worldwide, agriculture accounts for 45 percent of all habitable land usage. Over 51 million square kilometers have been transitioned from natural habitat to agricultural land. This has fueled nearly 90 percent of deforestation worldwide and remains the leading cause of deforestation in the Amazon.

This habitat loss has led to the near collapse of many ecosystems. Globally, monitored wildlife populations have dropped by 73% on average since 1970—a catastrophic decline with potentially huge ramifications—and agriculture alone being the identified threat to 24,000 of the 28,000 (86%) species at risk of extinction.

This devastation is not limited to terrestrial ecosystems. Fertilizer runoff has contributed to ballooning oceanic dead zones—perhaps the aptest example of sacrifice zones. Nearly 80 percent of eutrophication-causing water pollution is due to agricultural runoff, which creates low-oxygen environments in which life cannot survive. There are some 700 dead zones worldwide, the largest as of 2021 being 6,334 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico.

And dead zones are only one example of how industrialized agriculture threatens ocean ecosystems. Of the 500 fish stocks monitored by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 35 percent are considered overfished today compared to only 10 percent in 1974. The number of wild-caught fish plateaued in the mid-1980s, with increased fish production coming from aquaculture.

Transitioning From Sacrifice to Regeneration

Though the threats posed to the environment by industrialized agriculture are daunting in their scale and implications, agricultural sacrifice zones need not exist, and we can return most agricultural land to its natural habitat without diminishing our capacity to feed the world’s growing population. We need to redefine agriculture, transitioning from agriculture as an act of extraction to agriculture as an act of conservation.

Agroecological practices that nurture plant and soil biodiversity can produce comparable yields without dangerous pesticides and toxic fertilizers. By incorporating long-living perennials and practicing no-till agriculture, we can rebuild soil diversity while sequestering atmospheric carbon.

We can also greatly reduce the land use requirements (currently 45 percent of all habitable land) by eliminating the inefficiencies at the heart of the food system, allowing for the reemergence of natural ecosystems. These inefficiencies are predominantly driven by livestock production. Although livestock accounts for only 17 percent of the global calorie supply, 80 percent of all land in agricultural production is used for grazing or growing livestock feed. That is over 38 million square kilometers for livestock alone, and it has an outsized contribution to climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation.

Image from Our World in Data.

If we change nothing—if we continue on the path of destruction wrought by industrialized agriculture—we ensure a sixth mass extinction. Humanity would be incapable of surviving this. As former NASA researcher and professor of mathematics, Dave Pruett recently observed, environmental degradation is so pervasive that, “we’re all in the sacrifice zone now.” Although it may not always gain as much attention as other industries, agriculture is at the heart of our slow march toward a global sacrifice zone. Unlike in the energy sector, where technological innovations will be required to transform how we power societies, the path for transitioning agricultural systems to be more efficient and in line with natural processes is clear-cut. We do not need to wait for innovations. We can begin this transition today. We, and our collective institutions, are the only obstacles.

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If you ask people what they can do about their diet to become more sustainable, most will talk about eating locally sourced food. But how much do food miles matter? What portion of our food’s environmental footprint comes from transportation? And more importantly, how do food miles compare with broader diet and lifestyle changes?

These questions become critically important as we weigh the most impactful changes we can make to our diet and our lifestyles moving forward. After all, knowing which decisions have the largest impacts will provide the clearest path forward as we begin to minimize our own environmental impacts both individually and as a society.

The notion that food miles account for a significant portion of food’s environmental footprint perhaps comes from our conflated mental associations between the tailpipe and emissions more broadly. These associations may lead us to overemphasize food miles above food choices. Choosing to eat locally sourced foods would make a big difference if transportation accounted for a substantial portion of food’s environmental footprint. But for most foods, transportation is responsible for only a small fraction of that footprint.

To understand where the emissions from our food come from, a study published in Science in 2018 analyzed data from one of the largest meta-analyses of the global food system and tabulated the relative sources of greenhouse emissions. The dataset represents roughly 38,000 commercially viable farms and 40 different agricultural products from 119 countries, accounting for nearly 90% of global protein and calorie consumption worldwide. A visual representation of their findings is shown below.

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Image from Our World in Data.

What we eat has a vastly larger impact on our contribution to climate change than where the food comes from.

Looking closely, the most important takeaway is that there are enormous variances between greenhouse emissions among foods, with animal-based foods contributing much more heavily to climate change. Eating a locally sourced diet has minimal impact on reducing greenhouse emissions if that diet is laden with animal products. In fact, with only 4% of overall food production emissions coming from transportation, substituting meat with plant-based foods totaling less than one day’s worth of calories once per week reduces emissions more than buying all your food from local sources. In other words, adopting Meatless Monday is more environmentally impactful than eating exclusively local food. By extension, going completely plant-based results in monumental reductions in greenhouse emissions.

This is not to say that there are no reasons to support local food systems. From the quality and freshness of foods harvested while ripe and in season, to shunning industrialized systems in favor of supporting local food producers, and yes, reductions in greenhouse emissions, there are many benefits to buying local foods. But at the end of the day, what we eat has a vastly larger impact on our contribution to climate change than where the food comes from. So if you are interested in reducing your own environmental footprint, consider the changes with the largest proportionate impacts—in this case, going whole food plant-based.

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For some time now scientists tracing fish populations have been raising the alarm with warnings of a global collapse of all fisheries by 2050 if we continue along our current trajectory. A study published in July 2020 analyzing fish biomass found that 82% of fisheries are below levels allowable for sustainable yields. Earlier reports found similar trends, with a 49% drop in fish populations between 1970 and 2012, with nearly 90% of the world’s marine fish stocks now fully exploited, overexploited, or depleted.

Yet scientists studying the oceans and ocean reserves specifically have shown that marine ecosystems are simultaneously more resilient than previously assumed. Fish populations have the incredible ability to rebound at fast rates, yet there’s a catch. The rate at which fish populations rebound depends on the type of reserve.

We must come to the realization that oceans don’t exist in isolation.

In no-take reserves where fishing was not permitted year-round, fish populations have shown incredible resiliency. A study from Mexico showed a 463% increase in fish biomass in just 12 years, a massive increase. Notably, predatory species increased dramatically and fish behaviors changed unexpectedly. The proliferation of fish has also been beneficial for local people who have profited from ecotourism and the increased fishing capacity in areas around the reserve. These numbers were especially striking in comparison to other reserves where fishing was limited yet not outright banned. In these reserves, scant growth in fish populations occurred.

With the success of no-take marine protected areas, it is apparent that more reserves are necessary. That is why the United Nations set a goal for the creation of marine reserves around the world, aiming to have 10% of the global ocean protected by the year 2020. As of 2017, only 3.6% of the ocean was designated a marine protected area, with only 2% in protected areas with access restrictions. We still have a long way to go to ensure the protection of aquatic ecosystems, and the stakes are far too high for inaction.

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In truth, oceans across the world are experiencing a multitude of confounding pressures, whether it be from climate change and ocean acidification, nitrogen pollution and dead zones, plastic pollution, losing coastal habitats, or rampant overfishing leading to ecosystem collapse. As individuals, we can opt to not support overfishing and the related bykill by simply choosing to not eat fish, wild caught or farmed.

We live on a blue planet, and life above water is but a small sliver of our incredible world. Considering that 99% of space available for life on Earth is underwater and that our collective understanding of aquatic environments remains relatively simplistic, with many shortcomings, we must come to the realization that oceans don’t exist in isolation. Losing these ecosystems would be disastrous for life everywhere, and there must be more of a public movement toward the establishment of no-take protected reserves and removing subsidies for overfishing.

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The United Nations biodiversity summit, known as COP15, ended in December 2022 with the nearly 200 participant nations pledging to protect at least 30% of Earth’s land and oceans for wildlife by 2030. This year 44 countries submitted revised national biodiversity strategies and action plans, and 119 parties uploaded their national targets. These plans will be the basis for the first national reports due in 2026. This commitment is part of an effort to combat the ongoing biodiversity crisis, which has led many to conclude we are currently entering and experiencing Earth’s sixth mass extinction event. Unlike the previous five extinction events, the current one (known as the Holocene or Anthropocene extinction) is caused by the activity of a single species—humans.

This landmark agreement is the largest to date and will require large-scale land use changes and increased efforts to protect biodiverse regions around the world.

Global species assessments paint a dreary picture of biodiversity loss, a crisis that is only beginning to gain more widespread attention. Globally, there has been a roughly 73 percent reduction in the average size of monitored global wildlife populations in less than 50 years; this is a catastrophic decline with potentially huge ramifications. A further 40.7 percent of amphibians, 25.4 percent of mammals, 13.6 percent of birds, and 21.1 percent of reptile species are threatened with extinction globally. This biodiversity loss is a consequence of large-scale land use changes as we have transitioned natural ecosystems to serve human needs and desires. Already humans have significantly altered roughly 75 percent of Earth’s ice-free land, polluting the majority of its oceans and waterways in the process^, and destroying more than 85 percent of wetlands worldwide. Biodiversity is in a precarious state. If we are going to protect areas in which wildlife can thrive again, urgent action is required.

How has life on Earth reached such a state, and what can we do to increase biodiversity and reverse these trends? The famous naturalist E.O. Wilson noted that biodiversity was directly related to the size of the accessible habitat. When reserves grow, diversity increases, and vice versa. This correlation can be mathematically modeled to a predictable degree. When 90 percent of the habitat is removed, biodiversity is halved. This is the case in many species-rich locations where we are quickly removing habitat, thereby lowering the number of species that can persist. Conversely, if we were to conserve half the planet for wild habitats, it would protect over 85 percent of species worldwide. This has led many scientists to advocate that half of the Earth should be protected and conserved for wildlife. While the goals outlined recently at the UN Biodiversity Summit fall short of these targets, they are an important step in that direction, and they recognize that humanity must urgently work to protect biodiversity and the habitat they require.

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Agriculture-Fueled Land Use Changes

To better understand how to reach these goals, scientists have been attempting to quantify how land is currently used to find inefficiencies. By minimizing these inefficiencies, we can theoretically return the land to more wild and natural states where biodiversity can thrive.

When it comes to reducing land use inefficiencies, agriculture is the perfect place to start. Agriculture occupies 45 percent of all habitable land around the world. Of the 48 million square kilometers used for agricultural production, 80 percent is for the production of livestock, with the remainder occupied by crops grown for direct human consumption. In turn, the 38 million square kilometers used for meat and dairy production supplies only a meager 17 percent of the global calorie supply, with the remaining calories coming from plant-based sources.

Image from Our World in Data.

Said another way, less than 12 percent of habitable land supplies 82 percent of the global calorie supply. This means if there was a transition to entirely plant-based diets, we could conserve roughly a third of all habitable land, promoting wildlife and biodiversity without reducing our ability to feed the world. Better yet, whole food, plant-based (WFPB) diets promote healthier outcomes while reducing the incidence of chronic diseases and lifestyle-related illnesses affecting more than half of Americans today.

These ratios of land use and production represent staggering inefficiency, which results in the needless destruction of habitats. As agriculture expanded and encroached into wildlife habitats, the number of wild mammals shrunk rapidly. Today, only 2 percent of terrestrial mammals are wild, and livestock are so prevalent that they outweigh all wild mammals on Earth by a ratio of 15 to 1. These agricultural land use changes are responsible for roughly 70 percent of biodiversity loss and 90 percent of global deforestation.

We cannot continue to produce livestock at these scales if we want to preserve biodiversity. Without changing food consumption patterns to favor sustainable plant-based diets, half of the habitable terrestrial planet will be continually relegated to agricultural production.

Agriculture-Fueled Oceanic Destruction

Agriculture is also one of the leading causes of destruction for oceanic ecosystems. Recent reports show that over ⅓ of all marine mammals and ⅓ of shark species and reef-forming corals are threatened with extinction, with the main causes related to fishing and aquaculture. Meanwhile, the number of wild-caught fish has plateaued since the early 1990s and the vast majority of the expanding fish production comes from aquaculture (fish farming), which has been the fastest-growing area of food production worldwide for decades. Today, more than half the fish consumed worldwide are raised in artificial environments. The oceans cannot support humanity’s growing global appetite for seafood, so fish are now more commonly farmed than wild-caught.

Aquaculture and terrestrial agriculture fuel the growth of hypoxic dead zones—areas where oxygen levels are so low that virtually no complex life can survive. There were only around 50 identified dead zones in the 1960s; today, as a consequence of nutrient pollution, there are over 700 of these zones around the world. The largest dead zone (6,334 square miles) lies in the Gulf of Mexico and is fed by the confluence of agricultural pollution from the Mississippi River.

With the proliferation of aquaculture and dead zones, scientists have been attempting to study the impact of ocean conservation to better understand the capacity for aquatic ecosystems to rebound in protected environments. Reports demonstrate that marine ecosystems are more resilient than previously assumed. Fish populations rebound at fast rates, but there is an important caveat—the capacity for aquatic ecosystems to recover depends on the type of reserve. Not all marine protected areas are equal. Some are open to fishing during certain parts of the year, while other no-take areas permit no fishing at all.

In no-take marine reserves where no extractive activities are permitted, fish populations have shown incredible resiliency, rebounding and growing rapidly to levels not found anywhere else where fishing is allowed. A study from Mexico showed a 463 percent increase in fish biomass in just 12 years, a massive increase that few ever believed possible. Notably, predatory species increased dramatically and fish behaviors changed unexpectedly. This is in contrast to reserves where some fishing was allowed and fish biomass showed no significant increases. Another meta-analysis found that no-take marine reserves resulted in increases in biomass at a rate 670 percent greater than in adjacent unprotected areas and 343 percent greater than in partially protected areas.

With the success of no-take marine protected areas, it is apparent that more reserves are necessary. Today, only seven percent of the ocean is designated as “Marine Protected Areas,” with just 2.7 percent in strongly protected no-take areas.

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Why Free-Range Meat is Not the Answer

As more people have become aware of the damaging environmental effects of producing livestock and animal products, many have made a concerted effort to brand free-range livestock products as more healthful and sustainable.

This argument often centers around holistic grazing practices, which can reduce the net carbon emissions from free-range livestock production. However, there are several flaws with this reasoning, especially when you compare the benefits of free-range livestock to the benefits of rewilding agricultural lands.

More important for biodiversity, free-range livestock requires even more land than the already-inefficient livestock production described above. To supply the current amount of animal protein from free-range sources would require an estimated 2.5 times the current landmass utilized for livestock. This is simply impossible. There is not enough land on this planet to support current consumption rates if we transition to free-range systems.

I’ve written previously on the subject of free-range meat. You can read that article here to learn more.

Agricultural Conservation

Agriculture is one of the most impactful activities humans have ever undertaken. The land use changes resulting from agricultural expansion have fueled habitat loss and environmental degradation on mind-numbing scales. Yet the same qualities which have made agriculture so environmentally destructive could be rethought and reimagined. The same logic driving agriculture’s outsized contribution to environmental degradation can be turned on its head, making food production an act of conservation benefiting the world.

To reach the goals laid out by scientists like E.O. Wilson—to have half of the Earth’s surface under conservation—there will have to be a concerted effort to integrate conservation into agriculture more tangibly. Fortunately, many visionaries are working on rekindling agricultural practices that work in tandem with natural processes to grow food in ways that foster soil regeneration and habitat growth while requiring no dangerous pesticides or fertilizers. Many of these practices are grounded in indigenous knowledge and have sadly been lost or forcibly repressed. Today, only 5 percent of people are considered indigenous, yet they steward and protect over 80% of the world’s biodiversity. Integrating these voices and protecting indigenous rights will be critical to conserving the remaining biodiversity and transitioning agriculture to be more sustainable.

The regenerative agricultural movement will continue to grow and thrive, but we must take a broad, holistic approach. We must recognize the importance of integrating conservation and agriculture while also recognizing the connections between animal consumption and the related land use changes which have fueled climate change and the ongoing biodiversity crisis.

Based on archeological records, scientists estimate that it takes roughly 100 million years for biodiversity to return and thrive following a mass extinction event. Humans have only been around for roughly 200,000 years, so it’s beyond difficult to imagine the world in 100 million years. While life will eventually return in some form or another, issues related to biodiversity loss today are critical to our existence. Agriculture will be central to our response, but can we implement changes fast enough to save the planet’s biodiversity and ultimately ourselves?

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