A lost Amazon world just reappeared in Bolivia
93 points
3 days ago
| 2 comments
| frontiersin.org
| HN
fwipsy
8 hours ago
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Amazing and humbling to read about technological marvels from 1400 years ago. It really puts our modern achievements in a new light. It's tempting sometimes to think of innovation as a recent phenomen, but people have been innovating and solving the same problems for thousands of years. To be honest, I didn't even know they HAD e-commerce back then!
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anon84873628
4 hours ago
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People seem to take for granted that since agriculture is one of the oldest technologies, it must be a "solved problem" and our modern approach is optimal.

When in reality, modern industrial agriculture is one of the most ham fisted and naive approached to the problem: just bulldoze, fertilize, irrigate, and spray everything into submission. With many negative consequences of course, which we generally refer to as "unsustainable".

Because understanding all the complex relationships within an ecosystem, and then how to engineer it to yield surplus material for human use without intolerable negative consequences, is in fact a cutting edge and poorly grasped science.

The "biocultural legacy" is an empirical approach to this problem refined over milenia, which we would do well to understand and appreciate.

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Tarq0n
3 hours ago
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I'd hardly call the solution to Malthusian traps "ham fisted". Modern industrial agriculture, or at least fertilizer use, has let us escape from constant famine.
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anon84873628
2 hours ago
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If you believe in Malthusian traps then at best we've just kicked the can down the road and set ourselves up for an even greater collapse. When it's not just that humans are starving, but the topsoil is gone, the pollinators are dead, the oceans have warmed and the ice caps melted, etc etc.

The "green revolution" (a misnomer with our current use of the word) sure was effective; the point is that it was also unsustainable.

Of course the land has a finite carrying capacity. And I'm not anti-ag-tech either. In fact I believe higher precision and intelligence is the answer. We need to create highly diverse and cohesive ecosystems tailored to the local environment, which requires lots of observation and iteration.

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Retric
51 minutes ago
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You’re missing a critical step in your analysis, birth rates.

The exit for Malthusian traps is to temporarily have enough abundance to reduce the birth rate dramatically not simply to steadily increase food production. Being unsustainable isn’t actually a problem if the total population starts dropping.

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mikey_p
3 hours ago
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Yeah, it's a weird catch-22 for modern ag: don't use aggressive chemical herbicide and pesticides, but mechanical weed control has it's downsides too: with compacting that ground or erosion or use too much fuel.
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ChrisArchitect
3 days ago
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