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We depend utterly on fossil fuels, especially to grow our food. From natural gas comes the millions of tons of fertilizers. Oil provides herbicides and pesticides. All is planted and harvested with oil power, driven, shipped or flown to your table.

For now. Until fossil fuels become too expensive, too rare, too polluting to use. We only have a short time to find other ways.

Wes Jackson offers some answers, for our food supply during peak oil and climate change. Raised on a Kansas farm, Jackson is a biologist, a geneticist, and botanist. In 1976 he left university life to found “The Land Institute”, which he still heads. He’s going to explain “natural systems agriculture”, in a powerful speech given to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil USA. Recorded in Washington D.C. November 4th, 2011 by Gerri Williams for Radio Ecoshock (available nowhere else).

Then we’ll hear a different assessment of the potential for sequestering carbon in the soil, and biochar, from the Australian carbon cycle expert Dr. Michael Raupach.

This Radio Ecoshock program is part of our “Big Picture” solutions series.