Vol. 4 No. 1 (2019): Biodiversity
Opinion

Could humanity’s hoofprint overwhelm nature?

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  • Philip Lymbery
Philip Lymbery
Bio
This image of the cover of this issue of The Journal of Population and Sustainability has the title in block letters on a grey-green background.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.2019.4.1.55

Published 2019-12-01

Keywords

  • agriculture,
  • Anthropocene,
  • biodiversity,
  • climate change,
  • factory farming,
  • food system,
  • mass extinction(s)
    • ...More
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How to Cite

Lymbery, Philip. 2019. “Could humanity’s Hoofprint Overwhelm Nature?”. The Journal of Population and Sustainability 4 (1):55–70. https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.2019.4.1.55.

Copyright (c) 2019 Philip Lymbery

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Abstract

Humanity’s global footprint is greatly affected by food and the way it is produced. Agriculture already occupies nearly half the useable land surface of the planet – 80% of which is devoted to meat and dairy. As an equation, humanity’s footprint has three components: the number of consumers multiplied by the amount consumed multiplied by the way those resources were produced. Future sustainability relies on addressing all three components of humanity’s footprint: population, consumption and method of production. Global action is therefore needed to alleviate poverty, address overconsumption of livestock products and move food systems to regenerative forms of conservation agriculture.

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