Look to the Weeds in Saving the World before Breakfast
For thousands of years, farmers have wailed on weeds with hoes and plucked bugs off their plants. They have fought back much more powerfully in the 1900s and 2000s with power weeders, pesticides, and herbicides. But, the pests and weeds need not be problems. Sometimes, they can be part of the solution in developing a more efficient food-producing system. That better food production is something humanity will need to feed a bigger population coming and for doing that despite serious global warming that might also be coming. Hello, I’m Roger Carlson. I wrote the books, Saving the World Before Breakfast: A Better Green New Deal , and Saving the World Before Breakfast: The Earth Alone Can Save Us. A key theme in those books is transforming problems into parts of the solution. Let’s start with the so-called weeds and pests that become contributors when associated with one particular tiny fern, azolla. For centuries, East Asian farme...