Richard Waite

Sorry for your loss.

And the feeling of helplessness of hearing leaders say “we are going to do this bad thing” and a bunch of us marching in the streets of NYC to say “no stop that would be bad & have obvious consequences” and then them doing the bad thing and everyone has to just deal with the predictable fallout. Ugh

This captures it well. I have rose-tinted memories of being a teenager in the 90s not so much bc everything was great then (thinking eg of more intolerance and bullying vs schools today) but the optimism and hope for the future. Which crashed starting in 2000-01 & by 2004 I knew folks dying in Iraq

Cropland is expanding on both a gross & net basis. Often the places where it is expanding lead to higher carbon losses per hectare (tropical) & have lower yields per ton of crop. As you allude to, regrowth if it happens in abandoned areas takes decades. And crop-based biofuels add to that expansion.

In a hotel room, a brick wall that has obviously had a huge hole repaired

Pretty sure the Kool-Aid man stayed in this hotel room once

I think the thing that really slammed xennials/ elder millenials is they were raised on optimism. The idea that things were getting better. This is the generation that signed up for ROTC to pay for college under the guise of it being "peace" got shipped to Iraq came home and died by suicide.

And a coda: bsky.app/profile/wait...

That thread got long. Here’s a summary: bsky.app/profile/wait...

Historical illustration shows three colorful, stylized fish labeled with scientific notes. The top fish is elongated with a red body, yellow markings, blue spots, and green-striped fins. The middle fish, associated with the keyword "porcupine," has a rounded, red body with black dots and yellow bands, resembling a porcupine’s spines. The bottom fish features large, fan-like, spotted pectoral fins in pale green and pink hues, a long pointed snout with teeth, and a scaled greenish-blue body. The artwork is detailed with vibrant colors and patterns, typical of 18th-century natural history illustrations.

🪡 Poissons, ecrevisses et crabes, de diverses couleurs et figures extraordinaires, .
A Amsterdam, Chez Reinier & Josué Ottens, 1754..

[Source]

Interesting and relevant thread about biofuel production:

hey look, it’s my entire 2025 blueberry harvest #growyourown

I was 20

A bit like the many “wow emissions and air pollution are way down, nature is healing” takes when COVID was ripping through the unvaccinated population and everyone who could was staying home in 2020

Yes, we certainly need to use fertilizer more efficiently and reduce emissions from the production process. Worth noting demand-side measures like minimizing food waste, eating more plants and less meat, and cutting back on biofuels all help too as that would make more efficient use of crops.

Said the elder millennial, for the 7463638594873th time in his adult life,,,

Well, at least all of this was completely unnecessary and avoidable

RFK Jr.’s Junk Science Diet His MAHA ideas about food are built on some of the same lies as his antivax campaign.

"While Kennedy’s progressive-sounding ideas about unhealthy food and industrial agriculture are more popular than his retrograde theories about lifesaving vaccines, many of them are just as pseudoscientific, conspiratorial, and wrong."

@mikegrunwald.bsky.social in The Bulwark:

Anyway, rather than discoursing about it at 7pm on a Sunday, I invite you to check out some of the quotes/replies to the OP about what farming was like in the US in the first half of the 1900s.

I didn’t say agriculture & food systems were perfect now, and if you’ve followed me for any length of time you know I usually post about agriculture’s environmental impacts on land, water, biodiversity, carbon pollution.

But if we went back to early 1900s agriculture now, those would be even worse.

It’s 6pm on a weekend so I might just leave it here, but I think you need to engage with my question, and I suspect the answer to yours looks quite different in different places and has a lot to do with how soils are managed over time as soil fertility can be maintained for centuries.

Another fun thing I learned yesterday is that global vegetable oil prices and crude oil prices are themselves much more correlated than they used to be due to 21st century biofuel policies

Food spending and share of after-tax income spent on food across U.S. households, 2023 % by quintile: 33%, 17%, 13%, 11%, 8% Amount $: 5K, 7K, 9K, 12K, 17K Note: U.S. households were sorted from lowest to highest after-tax income, and then divided into 5 equal groups, or quintiles. Source: USDA, Economic Research Service using data from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey, 2023.

It’s true that it does differ a lot by income level. Average is a bit over 10%, but in the lowest 20% of incomes, it is over 30%.

Still, even that is quite a bit lower than average person in the US in 1901 (42.5%). Food is a lot more affordable today.

Source USDA www.ers.usda.gov/data-product...

What do you think would happen to biodiversity and carbon if the United States went back to 1900-style farming?

Source for 1901 food spending stat: BLS www.bls.gov/opub/100-yea...

Source for today food spending stat: USDA www.ers.usda.gov/data-product...

Farming fed less than 2 billion people in 1900 and 76 million Americans. It feeds more than 8 billion people today and about 350 million Americans.

In the US, people spend about 10% of their incomes on food now, vs more than 40% of their incomes in 1901.

Seems better now 👍🏼

like to think I lead complex emotional life but then the sun comes out and i am happy. i am functionally no different from a big leaf

I think about this a lot

If we must keep doing the clocks forward thing, why not do it at like 4pm on a Friday going forward

Yes there are tradeoffs and complexities, and yes big transitions take time

But these need to be among our big societal goals and leaders need to move us toward those goals not away from them

Build energy and food systems that don’t require burning things and cutting trees down

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