91 comments on How Might We Be Fed? Part One
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
91 comments on How Might We Be Fed? Part One
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
TOD:Europe
- Carbon Capture and Storage
- Oilwatch Monthly November 2009
- Some predictions on the forthcoming Russian-Ukrainian gas 'crisis'
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- International Energy Agency calls 'Peak' on OECD Oil Demand
- Australian Senate: Peak Oil motion defeated 31:6
- The Bullroarer - Friday 20th November 2009
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- Early Warning
- The Energy Blog
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground.”
—George Carlin
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
Just as a reality check, phosphorus is potentially renewable. Not only is phosphate rock being actively laid down in a few places around the world, anadromous fish such as salmon take up phosphorus from oceanic sources as they grow and bring it upstream when they return to their home streams to breed.
This is one more reason we should remove water diversions and other threats to salmon runs. They are far more important than this year's crops.
Like many I like the idea of giving wild salmon better odds every chance we get (I've netted a 'few' reds leaving the Bering Sea over the years myself). Just curious though, what percentage of the phosphorus salmon gather could be actually mined without tearing up the salmon habitat? A related second question, how much phosphorus would be the maximum anadromous fish could put into our system a year and how does that compare to what we take out? I wouldn't be surprised if most of those numbers are tough to find.
I'm guessing catching the fish and eating them doesn't help the phosphorus to build up either. The big runs are spectacular, but we are not going to just leave the fish alone even if by some miracle we start to manage a whole lot more of the world's waterways in ways which allow full wild runs to return. I have a feeling we will never manage fish for maximum phosphorus production, but I could be wrong.
I'm guessing phosphate rock isn't being laid down near as fast as we are tearing it up, but I could be wrong there too. Just a reality check.
A lot of the salmon already go to feed mammals and birds (both before and after spawning). Bears and such remove the nutrients from the streams and deposit them on land; they eventually wash back out again, but that's part of a loop, not a one-way traffic.
If we caught the fish, ate them and cycled the nutrients back to fields, we could build phosphorus stores on land. Our biggest problem at this time may be keeping the oceans productive enough to have the salmon return.
The health of the oceans is a huge concern, right now it looks pretty grim, but not hopeless. I'm all for the return loops you mention, the more the better that is for sure. What I was pointing up was that it is very unlikely we could use the sources you indicated to replace the accessible phosphorus stores at near the rate we are now depleting them.