Fifty Million Farmers

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.​

It is high time that the discussion of peak oil includes a solution to the decline in supply. Richard Heinberg conveys to us the urgency of converting our current agricultural system while options for doing so are still available. There is something highly dysfunctional and ultimately destructive about a system of food production that requires ten kilocalories of energy to produce one kilocalorie of food. His solution is a decentralized agriculture system relying on the productive capacity of regions, not long-distance transport of products. Small-scale, organic farming would decrease our current dependence on fossil fuels and prepare us for the inevitable end of cheap oil.