Agriculture A Global Environmental And Humanitarian Issue

Agriculture uses the domestication and cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms to produce food, fiber, biofuel, medicinal and other products to help sustain and enhance human life. Agriculture has existed for over the last 10,000 years and is credited into propelling our civilization into the modern cultures and technologies we see today. Without the ability to store and domesticate plants and animals it is unlikely that we would have been able to evolve beyond our hunting and gathering ancestors, advancing in both the arts and sciences. Modern agricultural though has developed into a global environmental and humanitarian issue. With the ever growing human population, our ability to sustain arable land is posing a†¦show more content†¦If the population continues to grow, so will our methods of production. Helping to save the planet is the ultimate goal, but in order to do so we will first need to save ourselves. Thomas Malthus was one of the first scientists to investigate the principles of population growth and the concept of carrying capacity. Malthus came to realize that the growth of a population relied upon, and was directly related to the amount of available resources needed to survive. Malthus acknowledged that if a population became too large, surpassing its carrying capacity, it would eventually be checked by what is known as a Malthusian catastrophe (i.e. famine and disease). We can induce this concept when observing a culture of bacteria, or more simply a pasture of farming sheep, first observed as the tragedy of the commons. Today we are already seeing symptoms of overpopulation, as a significant number of our population dies every day because of malnutrition, starvation and disease. So have we already surpassed our carrying capacity? Or are these issues of food security merely a result of affluent nations tipping the scale in their favor? Many people say that we have enough food to feed the current world population, so the issue then becomes how this food is distributed. When considering the amount of food that gets thrown away each year and the rising obesity rates in the United States, it’s hard to argue. Aldo