Sustainability in a Highly Interconnected World

Abstract

Even more basic than data streams and transportation, the global terrestrial land is interconnected by the network of its ecological systems. Among them, large natural forests play the most important role due to the immense impact of their ecosystem services, such as provision of materials and food, oxygen production and carbon sequestration, and more subtle and equally important services such as climate regulation and health, including dangerous infections. Deforestation and forest fragmentation and degradation are the dominant factors that narrow the road to ecological, economic, social, and human sustainability with every passing day, requiring an extraordinary and immediate collective effort as the only means to escape a dire future. However, such effort is complicated by critically concurrent factors, such as the competition of forest land with expanding infrastructures and, more important, with the pressure on agriculture in the effort to feed the expanding global population. In this chapter, it is argued that, parallel to restoring natural forests, starting from coastal ones, considerable reduction of farming land could be achieved mainly by shifting as much as possible the global dietary habits from animal-source to plant-source food, besides urgently adopting the most effective, efficient, and green methods and technologies for food processing.