Renewable foods offer survival and peace

July 15, 2025

Julian Cribb’s article details the threat that our changing climate poses to global peace. His charts, showing forecast water stress and degraded soils, depict this intensifying crisis with devastating clarity.

The issue underlying this crisis is our ever-growing population. Jenny Goldie has recently outlined this challenge; David Shearman too. Our ever-growing global population will experience increasing desperation to grow food in ever more depleted soils and with insufficient water. This will herald intensified exploitation – plans for future sustainability will be forgotten in the face of immediate needs.

Cribb highlights the potential of renewable foods. Transitioning to these might overcome these issues, but would require major cultural and agricultural changes across the developed world. These would inevitably take time, when the time for change is becoming short, and our population continues to grow. Until that transition is made, too many will continue to degrade our planet, expanding those activities which serve our immediate needs (eg industrial farming) while shrinking, possibly to extinction, the wilds of nature.

Our environment, and humanity, will only become sustainable in the long term if we can balance our population numbers and ways of life within our environmental limits. That way lies peace.