Energies

If everything is energy based, is energy wrapped in different ways, then what kinds are of interest in the current spoiling world, where even grasping for the ability to exist damns people at outset to pollute further ?

Brushwood or Soya : An Arbitrary Example

People collecting brushwood in Nepal are a long way from cattle ranches and soya plantations in the former Amazonian rainforest lands. Both produce deforestation and desertification.

USA

Soybean production in Brazil, USA and Argentina is 4 times that of the rest of the world put together.  In the USA soya is produced courtesy of the Mississippi river system, all in the eastern half of the country. That is from Minnesota to Louisiana, from New Orleans through St Louis, Des Moines, Sioux Falls, Fargo and crossing the border to Winnipeg. For sure, you won't see the stuff growing in town, but you won't have to go far either. All of this production is in displaced lands under the gaze of the Dakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Sioux, Cherokee, Choctaw, and many other nations. Many first nations' reservations are useful in showing where soya is not. Soya is a hungry mega-industry.  It is well developed, it is firmly entrenched and of huge economic significance, but...

If all it means, and that is a lot, is that all it takes to industrialise a food product is the continued historic displacement of "some people", then that is arguably not bad, and we can argue a lot here, in some sort of fundamental way. Nothing to like, but not bad. If however that production involves the destruction of environment, then we are in a different ball game. A huge use of soya is for meat production as feed. The worry is that as the evermore chicken, pigs and cattle eats the evermore soya, the soya bearing land won't bear any more soya.  So the question here is, is this an environmental impact by a feedback system that is out of control and doomed to disaster of itself as well as everything else around it? Was this system actually doomed to failure from the start. It is a strong logical argument that soya production is not sustainable.

Argentina

In Argentina production in the last few years has been invading the Gran Chaco ecoregion. Areas on the order of 100, 000km^2 of woodland are forever gone. 100,000km^2 equates to 10 million hectares and is huge. About 70% of production is not for Argentina it is solely for China and courtesy of river systems, the processing and transport of product is readily manageable. So that is a lot of production that seems to have little to do with any concept of local sustainability when considering the land and the planet. 

Brazil

In Brazil, soya, total about 55MHa , Million Hectares, of plantation, has in the last few years eaten about 5MHa of Amazonian rainforest. If you look at the soya plantation map of Brazil, it is almost exactly like looking at an X-ray of diseased lungs.  5 million hectares is less arable land than the top 40 countries on the planet, but it is more than any of the other roughly 150 countries and more than the bottom 67 producers all added together, starting with Botswana. But still, who cares about Brazil ? Well... Brazil is the country with the 5th most arable land. That is in descending order, USA, India, Russia, China and then Brazil. Brazil has about 60Mha of arable land and 55MHa of that is soya. That could be a good example of extreme monoculture. Again and similarly to Argentina about 75% of Brazils soya production goes to China, mainly as raw beans, thereby cutting out the middle person. Brazil produces on the order of 140 million tons annually and is worth 50 billion US dollars. China in turn consumes some soya nationally and exports finished products. 

50 billion dollars may sound a lot, but is it really ? It would buy you about 2 aircraft carriers, or perhaps 1 nuclear power station in modern money. Those are replaceable, but the damage done by deforestation is not undone in any useful way for this level of money. While deforestation can nibble away at land areas, the associated pollution done to the water systems is far huger and far more costly. You don't need to pour a lot of ink into a bath of water to get a bathful of paint, even if it is dilute paint. When you throw industrial chemicals into the water instead of ink, you are in a whole new league of contamination. You won't come out of that bath merely painted, you probably won't come out at all. Water contamination distributes widely and seeps through fish, plants and people. You get back what you put in. 

Did we mention Palm Oil ?

There are many other crops to consider and there are no easy answers as to which are being sustainably grown. The factors that make an item sustainable can be complex and it is an art to develop a clear vision. Economies and world trading and the statistics involved are highly dynamic. The interconnectivity of the factors involved however all rest on being open to analysis in terms of energy. It would be interesting to examine the equation E= MC^2 where E = energy, M = money and C = connectivity.  To have a chance of doing that, we need firstly to examine aspects of where energy interfaces with people.