What sort of world are we leaving for our children? That is the question that has sent us on a journey of educating ourselves about the state of the planet and researching ways to make our farming business more sustainable.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the big picture when we are living on such a beautiful farm in the best country in the world. My wife Rachel and our three children aged 5 and 4 year old twins live on Mangarara Station in Central Hawke’s Bay. It is a 610ha sheep and beef property we have been fortunate to take over from my parents. We live in a small 104 year old cottage beside 30ha Horseshoe Lake, so as you can tell we are pretty passionate about our little slice of paradise!!
So what have I learned and what do I think the future holds?

The first realization is the phenomenal growth that has occurred over the last 100 years. The twentieth century was the century of oil. In 1900 the world produced 150 million barrels of oil. In 2000, it produced 28 billion barrels, an increase of more than 180-fold.
The fast growing supply of cheap oil led to an explosive worldwide growth in food production, population, urbanization and human mobility. In 1900 the population was around 1.5 billion today we have about 6.8 billion. Population is growing at 79 million people per year, that’s almost 20 more New Zealand’s added to the planet each year and each person is consuming more each year. All anyone alive on the planet today knows is growth. (with the occasional hiccup along the way!)

Professor Albert Bartlett said “The greatest failing of mankind is the inability to understand the exponential function” another of his quotes is: “Sustainable growth is an oxymoron, because if you just look at the arithmetic of steady growth, the numbers become astronomically large in modest periods of time, so you can't have steady growth." But the economic model we live by is absolutely dependant on growth to enable us to find the extra capital to pay our interest!

Today we are an oil based civilization, one that is totally dependent on a resource whose production will soon be falling. Since 1981, the quantity of oil extracted has exceeded new discoveries by an ever-widening margin, in fact oil discoveries peaked in 1964. Of the top 48 oil producing countries in the world 33 have declining production. Without the continued increasing supply of this cheap energy our economy will not be able to grow making the current model similar to a Ponzi scheme.
But it is not just oil that is being over consumed. A 2002 study published by the US National Academy of Sciences, concluded that humanity’s demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. As of 2009 global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield capacity by nearly 30percent. This means we are meeting current demands in part by consuming the earths natural assets.

I believe we have been given a warning shot over the last year about the unsustainable economic system. What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.” Well thanks to trillions of dollars of bailout money we have put the mortally wounded economic dinosaur back on it’s feet again but we don’t know how long the “bailout bandaid” will hold back the bleeding.
Paul Hawkin author of “Blessed Unrest”, puts it well: “At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation.”

Obviously the other big issue the world now has to face up to is climate change. The upcoming meeting in Copenhagen marks a major crossroads for the planet. It is not merely a matter about arguing whether the earths temperature is going to rise by 2degrees C or 5C or whether we set emission reduction targets of 10% or 40% It is the effect this will have on food security as glaciers retreat in the Andes, the Rocky Mountains, the Alps and throughout the mountain ranges of Asia.
It is the disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau that are of most concern, because their ice melt sustains the flow of the major rivers of India and China.
Yao Tandong, one of Chinas leading glaciologists, predicts that two thirds of Chinas glaciers could be gone by 2050

As well as the ecological catastrophe a human catastrophe would result. China is the worlds leading producer of wheat. India is number two. (United States is third) In contrast to USA, most wheat grown in China and India is irrigated. With rice these two countries totally dominate the world harvest. The projected melting of glaciers in Asia represents the most massive threat to food security the world has ever seen.

SO this is where we connect the dots. None of the challenges facing the planet today can be looked at in isolation. The economy our energy consumption, environmental and resource issues and population growth are all connected.

The solutions are all available. There are models of a sustainable economy that accounts for not only our manufactured capital and human capital but also natural and social capital.
There are wonderful examples of renewable energy like bio diesel produced by algae and many energy saving devices.
With environmental issues we need to move back inside the boundaries nature sets for us, and live within the sustainable yield of the planet.
There are also examples of developing nations around the world controlling population growth through education and birth control
Agriculture, and how we produce our food will be key to a sustainable future. Farmers control the ability to sequest carbon into soils which as well as reducing emissions will be integral to mitigating climate change.

It is all “do-able”, it just means making changes and one way or the other change is coming anyway!

Simply the solution is to break our addictions to the "growth at all costs" economic model, to fossil fuels, and to over-consumption and to create a more sustainable and desirable future that focuses on quality of life rather than merely quantity of consumption and recognizes the contributions of natural and social capital

It will require a new vision, new measures, new institutions and new technologies. It will require a redesign of our entire society. But it is not a sacrifice of quality of life to break this addiction. Quite the contrary, it is a sacrifice not to.

Another great quote by Paul Hawken says:
“The great thing about the dilemma we’re in is that we get to reimagine every single thing we do… There isn’t a single thing that doesn’t require a complete remake. There are two ways of looking at that. One is: Oh my gosh, what a big burden. The other way, which I prefer, is: What a great time to be born! What a great time to be alive! Because this generation gets to essentially completely change this world.”

The awareness of these issues and the desire to leave a healthy world to the children has lead us to make some significant changes to the way we farm. I will discuss these changes in future articles but we are excited about the benefits we are seeing from a change to biological/ holistic soil management. Changes are being made to grazing management and with the help of the Air New Zealand Environment Trust we are planting lots of trees. All of these changes are satisfying and will make it an even more beautiful place to live and work in the future.

“We did not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”

(many of the statistics quoted in this article come from Leicester Brown at www.earthpolicy.org