How many ways can we skin this cat called earth? Risks and constraints to the biobased economy

a biobased economy in the twenty-first century — a future in which agriculture and other managed biobased production systems provide society with food, fiber, medicinals, energy, chemicals, and materials. I will evaluate whether the biobased economy is possible and whether it is sustainable, given constraints to the quantity and quality of land, water, nutrients, and energy to propel the system. Human societies already use 50 percent of all solar energy assimilated by plants (Pimentel et al. 1999), which utilize less that 1 percent of the solar energy they intercept. With a biobased economy, we risk negative consequences of asking yet more from the earth. To approach this assessment, I created a very simple needs-based, bottom-up model, using the world as the unit of analysis and the twenty-first century as the time frame. The model develops four scenarios, projecting supply and demand in a biobased society. Absolute precision is not an objective of these simulations. And the projections of the model are not predictions. They are a wake-up call. An underlying assumption of the model is that energy drives all enterprise and is the ultimate constraint. Energy relations — energetics — is the inputoutput accounting system of life. It underlies and orchestrates evolutionary as well as day-to-day processes. In using energy analysis, a tool of systems ecology, to assess human society and systems, I am applying simple arithmetic to illustrate the calculus of my mentors David Pimentel and Charles A. S. Hall, as well as others to whom I owe an intellectual debt, principally Howard Odum, Fred Cottrell, Lester Brown, Herman Daly, Jay Forrester, the Steinharts, and Earl Cook. How Many Ways Can We Skin this Cat Called Earth? Risks and Constraints to the Biobased Economy