Last Thursday was Blog Action Day: Climate Change.  Thousands of bloggers from around the world, across countries and across topics, took a day to blog about climate change.  It was a profound example of the power of collected action — nearly 32,000 posts reached an estimated 17 million people.

But as I was skimming through some of the posts, I noticed something.  It’s something I’ve also noticed in almost every article I’ve read about sustainable agriculture.

There’s a big pink elephant in the room, and it’s growing exponentially each year.

Meet My Elephant.  I call him “Population.”

There is much to read about fighting climate change, from the very small (eat less meat, turn off the lights) to the very large (complete overhaul of the transportation and energy infrastructure).  The same goes for sustainable agriculture, where it seems that battle lines are now being drawn between advocates of old techniques and those that trust in new technology.  In many of these debates, the elephant is mentioned offhand.

feed a population of 10 billion people…

mitigate increasing carbon emissions – rapid development, rapidly growing populations…

The wording changes, but underneath all these conversations is the knowledge that  in the future, we will have to address the same problems we have now, but for many more people.

I’m not advocating government population control policy or saying that everyone should stop having children immediately.  But I do wonder why we’re not talking about this more.  Especially when there is one easy and affordable thing we can do that will make a dramatic difference.

Educate Girls

If we want to reduce our population growth, the easiest thing we can do is educate girls.  This means that if we want to fight climate change, if we want to reduce poverty, if we want to be able to feed our population more effectively – we need to educate girls.

I’m not really sure why we can’t seem to talk about the elephant in the room.  (Do any of you know?)  But it seems like even if we can’t talk about the problem, we should at least be able to start talking about one of the solutions.

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Farming is not adapted to large-scale operations because of the following reasons: Farming is concerned with plants and animals that live, grow, and die.  – “Ancient” agricultural textbook (Cornell University, 1942)

Social systems are not adapted to large-scale operations, because social systems are concerned with humans that live, grow, and die.

Part of the problem with society today is that we have gotten too big.  Our social systems are designed with the end result in mind, and then reverse engineered to find the starting point.  Macro level goals are broken down into micro level steps ill-suited to meeting the needs of the living building blocks that make up the system.  We see this problem across the board, from education to health care to agriculture.

We consistently see education failing, in spite of increased emphasis on results-based standardized testing.  Ask any teacher why.  They are living it every day.  Every child is an individual.  Every child learns differently.  Teaching to the tests takes time away from real learning, which is a matter of meeting individual needs on a micro basis.

Health care is the same situation.  Ever person is different.  Our health does not benefit from top-down management.  Actual health care and treatment is lost in a sea of diagnostic coding, frivolous testing, preexisting conditions – insurance paperwork.  That is, if you have access to health care at all.

And agriculture.  Nutritional, environmental, and ethical issues.  Large-scale agriculture is failing us.  (For those that say it is the only way to feed the world, please note: We have more than enough food to feed the world.  Hunger is a result of other failing social systems.)

In spite of Malthusian warnings, the world’s population is still growing.  We’re getting bigger.  So we are going to need to reevaluate our systems.  Because the ones we have now aren’t gonna cut it.

Take a close look.  If the building blocks that make up the system live, grow, and die, it is likely that that system is already failing.

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