Hectares Quotes

If we divide up the world’s land area evenly, there’s enough room for each of us to have a little over 2 hectares each, with the nearest person 77 meters away.

As well, they used their B-52 bombers to drop thousands of tons of bombs which included napalm and cluster bombs. In a particularly vile attack, they used poisonous chemicals on our base regions of Xuyen Moc, the Minh Dam and the Nui Thi Vai mountains. They sprayed their defoliants over jungle, and productive farmland alike. They even bull-dozed bare, both sides along the communication routes and more than a kilometre into the jungle adjacent to our base areas. This caused the Ba Ria-Long Khanh Province Unit to send out a directive to D445 and D440 Battalions that as of 01/November/1969, the rations of both battalions would be set at 27 litres of rice per man per month when on operations. And 25 litres when in base or training. So it was that as the American forces withdrew, their arms and lavish base facilities were transferred across to the RVN. The the forces of the South Vietnamese Government were with thereby more resources but this also created any severe maintenance, logistic and training problems. The Australian Army felt that a complete Australian withdrawal was desirable with the departure of the Task Force (1ATF), but the conservative government of Australia thought that there were political advantages in keeping a small force in south Vietnam. Before his election, in 1964, Johnston used a line which promised peace, but also had a policy of war. The very same tactic was used by Nixon. Nixon had as early as 1950 called for direction intervention by American Forces which were to be on the side of the French colonialists. The defoliants were sprayed upon several millions of hectares, and it can best be described as virtual biocide. According to the figure from the Americans themselves, between the years of 1965 to 1973, ten million Vietnamese people were forced to leave their villages ad move to cities because of what the Americans and their allies had done. The Americans intensified the bombing of whole regions of Laos which were controlled by Lao patriotic forces. They used up to six hundred sorties per day with many types of aircraft including B52s. On 07/January/1979, the Vietnamese Army using Russian built T-54 and T-59 tanks, assisted by some Cambodian patriots liberated Phnom Penh while the Pol Pot Government and its agencies fled into the jungle. A new government under Hun Sen was installed and the Khmer Rouge’s navy was sunk nine days later in a battle with the Vietnamese Navy which resulted in twenty-two Kampuchean ships being sunk.

I read not with any particular object in mind, nor really with the intention of retaining any information about the subjects that I chose, but rather because the act of reading was a habit, and because it was soothing and, perhaps, from a lifetime's inculcated faith in the explanatory power of books, the half-held belief that somewhere in those hectares upon hectares of printed pages I might find that fact which would make sense of my growing unhappiness, allowing me to peel back the obscurant layers of myself and lay bare at last the solid structure underneath.

When I’m old and dying, wheezing my guts out, my organs failing, I want to walk out the front door of some old farmhouse on my own land, maybe forty, fifty hectares of it. I want to find a cool place in the woods under some old oak tree and settle down there and die as the sun comes up. I want a death rattle, a final breath, a body intact that can then be torn apart by scavengers, riddled with worms, my limbs dragged off to feed some family of little foxes, my guts teeming with maggots, until I am nothing but a gooey collection of juices that feeds the fungi and the oak seedlings and the wild grasses. I want my bleached bones scatted across my own land, broken and sucked clean of marrow, half buried in snow and finally, finally, covered over in loam and ground to dust by the passage of time, until I am broken into fragments, the pieces of my body returned to where they came. I could give back something to this world instead of taking, taking, taking. That’s the death I want.

This is always always always what she wished a bazaar to be. Demre, proudly claiming to be the birthplace of Santa Claus, was direly lacking in workshops of wonder. Small corner stores, an understocked chain supermarket on the permanent edge of bankruptcy and a huge cash and carry that serviced the farms and the hotels squeezed between the plastic sky and the shingle shore. Russians flew there by the charter load to sun themselves and get wrecked on drink. Drip irrigation equipment and imported vodka, a typical Demre combination. But Istanbul; Istanbul was the magic. Away from home, free from the humid claustrophobia of the greenhouses, hectare after hectare after hectare; a speck of dust in the biggest city in Europe, anonymous yet freed by that anonymity to be foolish, to be frivolous and fabulous, to live fantasies. The Grand Bazaar! This was a name of wonder. This was hectare upon hectare of Cathay silk and Tashkent carpets, bolts of damask and muslin, brass and silver and gold and rare spices that would send the air heady. It was merchants and traders and caravan masters; the cornucopia where the Silk Road finally set down its cargoes. The Grand Bazaar of Istanbul was shit and sharks. Overpriced stuff for tourists, shoddy and glittery. Buy buy buy. The Egyptian Market was no different. In that season she went to every old bazaar in Sultanahmet and Beyoğlu. The magic wasn’t there.

...la Câmpina, acolo unde bătrânul general Grădișteanu cumpărase prin 1880 o foarte frumoasă casă boierească. Țin minte acea casă în paragină care avea totuși șase hectare de grădină, până în Prahova. (...) această grădină care mergea până în Prahova a fost raiul meu, copil fiind. Ne petreceam vacanțele la casa de la Câmpina care avea mult farmec bătrânesc — era o verandă lungă, erau niște geamuri mari...

The jungle bristled with life. There were sloths, pumas, snakes, crocodiles; there were basilisk lizards that could run across the surface of water without sinking. In just a few hectares there lived as many woody plant species as in the whole of Europe. The diversity of the forest was reflected in the rich variety of field biologists who came there to study it. Some climbed trees and observed ants. Some set out at dawn every day to follow the monkeys. Some tracked the lightning that struck trees during tropical storms. Some spent their days suspended from a crane measuring ozone concentrations in the forest canopy. Some warmed up the soil using electrical elements to see how bacteria might respond to global heating. Some studied the way beetles navigate using the stars. Bumblebees, orchids, butterflies—there seemed to be no aspect of life in the forest that someone wasn’t observing.

Spread over what must have been at least a hectare or two was the most beautiful garden he had ever seen. There was an entire miniature forest of cedar, cypress, and other sweet-smelling pines that couldn't normally live in the hot and dry Agrabah. There were formal rows of roses and other delicately petaled flowers. There was a garden just of mountain plants. There was a pool filled with flowering white lilies and their pads, and pink lotuses taller than most men. There was a fountain as big as a house and shaped like an egg. There was a delicate white aviary that looked like a giant's birdcage. Strangely, there were no birds in it. And everywhere, entwined around every tiny building and every balustrade and every topiary ball, was jasmine. White jasmine, pink jasmine, yellow jasmine, night-flowering jasmine... the smell was heady enough to make Aladdin feel a little drunk. Jasmine. This was her garden.

A tree can lift and transpire vast amounts of water. A single tree in the Amazon rain forest lifts hundreds of liters of water every day. The rain forest behaves like a green ocean, transpiring water that rains upward, as though gravity were reversed. These transpired mists then flow across the continent in great rivers of vapor. The water condenses, falls as rain, and is pulled back up again through the trees. It rises and falls on its westward migration an average of six times before finally hitting the physical barrier of the Andes mountains and flowing back across the continent as the mightiest river on Earth. Similarly, Indonesia, with 114 million hectares (280 million acres) of tropical forest (it is the second most forested country in the world after Brazil) is a vital part of the Asian hydrologic cycle. Around the world, forests constantly replenish Earth’s supply of fresh water and play a key role in weather and climate.

Indeed, for those in the West inclined to be critical of China, here are few cautionary facts. With its absolutely massive population (1.33 billion or one-fifth of the world's population) it's obvious that China should have a massive impact on the world. Yet, it's one-child policy, for all the uncomfortable ethical questions it raises and the painful sacrifice made by millions of Chinese families, means that China's annual percentage growth rate is low relative to the global average (0.49 per cent versus 1.13 per cent). Even with a population more than four times that of the United States (1.3 billion versus 0.3 billion), China's ecological footprint is still less than that of the US (2456 million global hectares versus 2730 million global hectares). In 2009, China invested far more than any other country in the clean energy industry – $34.6 billion or 0.39 per cent of its gross domestic product compared to United States' $18.6 billion or 0.13 per cent of GDP. When it comes to reforestation, China punches way above its numerical and geographical weight, with massive initiatives like the NFPP and SLCP helping seed some 4 million hectares of forest every year, which is probably more tree planting than the rest of the world put together.

HISTORICAL NOTE There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century. For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages along with their inhabitants. As a result of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The area of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year. —“Chernobyl.” Belaruskaya entsiklopedia On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world. —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus.” Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it. The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . . Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it’s still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986. —Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996

Drylands account for 41.3 percent of the world’s land-mass, including 44 percent of land under cultivation. Each year upward of twelve million hectares (thirty million acres) of productive land are lost to desertification; this means an area the size of South Africa is slipping away each decade.

The same process is now occurring in the developing world, but much more quickly. The population density of metropolitan Beijing has collapsed since 1970, falling from 425 people per hectare to 65. Indian cities are following; Brazil’s are ahead. And suburbanisation has a long way to run. Beijing is now about as crowded as metropolitan Chicago was at its most closely packed, in the 1920s. Since then Chicago’s density has fallen by almost three-quarters. This is welcome. Romantic notions of sociable, high-density living—notions pushed, for the most part, by people who themselves occupy rather spacious residences—ignore the squalor and lack of privacy to be found in Kinshasa, Mumbai or the other crowded cities of the poor world. Many of them are far too dense for

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have translated various categories of human consumption into areas of productive land needed to support them. They discovered that the ecological footprint of one Canadian is 4.8 hectares (an area 220 meters long by 220 meters wide-roughly comparable to three city blocks). This statistic means that if everyone on Earth lived like the average Canadian, we would need at least three Earths to provide all the material and energy essentials we currently use." The World Wildlife Fund calculates that mankind's ecological footprint is already 1.2 Earths.

Farmed in the way they were farmed at the beginning of the twentieth century, today’s 1.5 billion hectares of cropland would feed about three billion people eating a diet typical of 1900 (which is to say, an insufficient one)

Not seeing that many visitors to the island, my cab driver Harry was only too happy to tell me the story of Napoleon on Saint Helena as he saw it. The way he told me the story I could have believed that it took place just days ago instead of over two hundred years prior. Napoleon had arrived on the island as a prisoner, on October 17, 1815 and lived there until his death resulting from stomach cancer on May 5, 1821. During this time he enjoyed the company of a young teenage girl named ,. Many years later, Napoleon III the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, rewarded Betsy with 500 hectares of land with vineyards in Algeria for the attention and comfort she provided his uncle.

Inextricably linked to the climate emergency is a broader environmental crisis. A third of the Earth’s land is now acutely degraded, with fertile soil being lost at a rate of 24 billion tonnes a year through intensive farming.[19] Generating three centimetres of top soil takes 1,000 years, and, the UN said in 2014, if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years.[20] 95% of our food presently comes from the soil. Unless new approaches are adopted, the global amount of arable and productive land per person in 2050 will be only a quarter of the level in 1960. The equivalent of 30 football pitches of soil are being lost every minute. Heavy tilling, monocropping multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability. Agriculture is actually the number one reason for deforestation. In the past 20 years, agricultural production has increased threefold and the amount of irrigated land has doubled, often leading to land abandonment and desertification. Decreasing productivity has been observed, due to diminished fertility, on 20% of the world’s cropland, 16% of forest land, 19% of grassland, and 27% of rangeland. Furthermore, tropical forests have become a source rather than a sink of carbon.[21] Forest areas in South America, Africa and Asia – which have until recently played a crucial role in absorbing GHG – are now releasing 425 teragrams of carbon annually, more than all the traffic in the US. This is due to the thinning of tree density and culling of biodiversity, reducing biomass by up to 75%. Scientists combined 12 years of satellite data with field studies. They found a net carbon loss on every continent. Latin America – home to the world’s biggest forest, the Amazon, which is responsible for 20% of its oxygen – accounted for nearly 60% of the emissions, while 24% came from Africa and 16% from Asia. Every year about 18 million hectares of forest – an area the size of England and Wales – is felled. In just 40 years, possibly one billion hectares, the equivalent of Europe, has been torn down. Half the world’s rainforests have been razed in a century and they will vanish altogether at current rates within another. Earth’s “sixth mass extinction”[22] is well underway: up to 50% of all individual animals have been lost in recent decades and almost half of land mammals have lost 80% of their range in the last century. Vertebrate populations have fallen by an average of 60% since the 1970s, and in some countries there has been an even faster decline of insects – vital, of course, for aerating the soil, pollinating blossoms, and controlling insect and plant pests.

Pesticides are an increasing potential problem for our microbes and they take many forms. The most popular is called glyphosate (or Roundup), which stops vegetables and fruit sprouting or going mouldy once developed. It was invented by Monsanto in the 1970s and is probably the most commonly used chemical for farming in the world. In 2013 over 1.7 million hectares of land in the UK was sprayed with it, and the majority of non-organic breads (especially wholemeal) tested contain glyphosate residues. Traces of it are found in the blood and urine of cattle and even in humans living in cities. Even at sub-toxic doses it could be adversely affecting human health and, like most chemicals, contains potential carcinogens.4 We know it affects soil microbes, and much less is known about its effects on our gut microbes – but early studies suggest it is not good.5 We may prefer to let our fruit and vegetables deteriorate and change colour after a few days, rather than keep them chemically in suspended animation with adverse effects on our microbes. While there is little solid research on whether eating organic foods is better for us and our microbes, there are studies showing levels of pesticides in our bodies can be dramatically reduced within a week by switching to organic produce.

China is already the world’s largest importer of grain and soya, and its demand is growing exponentially. In the 10 years to 2005, its soya imports from Brazil increased more than a hundredfold, and in 2006, the Brazilian government agreed to add another 90 million hectares to the 63 million already in production.15 Needless to say, the extra land that is to go under the plough isn’t any old scrubland nobody cares about. It is Amazonian rainforest, one of the richest and most ancient natural habitats on earth.

Each gene is a word; each organism a book. Each plant species that dies out contains words that have been written only in that book. If a plant species becomes extinct, one book is lost, and with it the words and messages it carried. We are burning the library of Alexandria every time we destroy a hectare of pristine habitat.

choose each footfall—a twisted ankle was certain death now—and I saw the tread marks before Kolya. I grabbed his sleeve to stop him. We were at the edge of a vast clearing in the woods. The glare of sunlight off the hectares of snow was bright enough that I had to shield my eyes with my hand. The snow had been corrugated by dozens of tank treads, as if an entire Panzer brigade had passed through. I didn’t know treads the way I knew airplane engines, couldn’t tell a German Sturmtiger’s from a Russian T-34’s, but I knew these weren’t our tanks. We would have already broken the blockade if we had this much armor in the woods. Gray and brown heaps lay scattered across the snow. At first I thought they were discarded coats, but I saw a tail on one, an outstretched paw on another, and I realized they were dead dogs, at least a dozen of them. We heard another howl and finally we saw the howler, a black-and-white sheepdog dragging itself off the field, its front legs doing the work its hind legs could not. Behind the wounded animal was a blood-smeared trail more than a hundred meters long, a red brushstroke slapped across a white canvas.

Events specially staged to demonstrate the reality of that which doesn’t exist stand out in the particular detail in which they are described. No one really knows, for example, whether the harvests reported in Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s Russia were ever actually reaped, but the fact that the number of tilled hectares or tons of milled grain was always reported down to the tenth of a percent gave these simulacra the character of hyperreality. [...] In this sense, the ideology was accurate—it was describing itself. And any reality that differed from the ideology simply ceased to exist—it was replaced by hyperreality, which trumpeted its existence by newspaper and loudspeaker and was much more tangible and reliable than anything else. In the Soviet land, “fairy tale became fact,” as in that American paragon of hyperreality, Disneyland, where reality itself is designed as a “land of imagination.

in order to discourage people from missing the annual communal work fest, the border to Uzbekistan is closed to everyone except foreigners. Every autumn. hundreds of thousands of doctors, teachers, nurses, bureaucrats and other public sector employees, as well as students, are called on to pick cotton - an old tradition from Soviet times that has been maintained; the only difference being that in the Soviet Union, the majority of the harvesting was done by machine, whereas now it is done by hand, as non one has troubled to maintain and repair the machines. As the flowering season is so short, the 1.4 million hectares of cotton have to be picked in the space of a few frantic weeks and many people have to sleep under the open sky or on cold, crammed floors. An impressive number of public sector employees and people from other affected groups used to take long family holidays to neighbouring countries during the cotton harvest, but a stop has been put to that now.

Homeric Troy covered a site about one hectare in size, about as large as a school sports field.

Note that when people talk about climate change, they are referring to the frequent droughts that occurred during the last decade in Burundi. Many people talked about lack of land – logical in a country where 57 percent of households have less than one hectare to live off (ibid.: 42). All this demonstrates that even in countries at war, there is more going on than war. War may capture the attention, dominate the political discourse, and its resolution may be a sine qua non for meaningful change, but it is not the full story of life, and people know it.

One day in 1987, the Chairman of a milk cooperative in the Rann of Kutch visited me at Anand and narrated the heart-rending plight of the salt farmers of his region. About 60 per cent of India’s salt is produced in the state of Gujarat and yet most of us here do not know of the harsh lives of the salt workers. Their situation, particularly in the Little Rann of Kutch, is very depressing. The salt workers have settled down in this arid, merciless desert where there is not a tree in sight. The villagers dig a hole in the ground, pump the water up and make a saltpan on some two hectares of land and farm salt. They work there for ten months a year producing salt. But they have to buy water from the merchant, to whom they ultimately sell the salt they produce. To get diesel for their pump they have to again depend on the same merchant. The salt worker finally gets two paise per kilo of salt from the merchant. There are no trees, no shelter for them, no schooling for their children. Long hours of working barefoot in the pans saturates their legs so much with salt that these farmers cannot even have a satisfactory cremation after death because their lower limbs do not burn. It is a miserable existence.

Indeed, in many agricultural regions — including northern China, southern India (as well as the Punjab), Mexico, the western United States, parts of the Middle East, and elsewhere — water may be much more of a constraint to future food production than land, crop yield potential, or most other factors. Developing and distributing technologies and practices that improve water management is critical to sustaining the food production capability we now have, much less increasing it for the future. Water-short Israel is a front-runner in making its agricultural economy more water-efficient. Its current agricultural output could probably not have been achieved without steady advances in water management — including highly efficient drip irrigation, automated systems that apply water only when crops need it, and the setting of water allocations based on predetermined optimum water applications for each crop. The nation’s success is notable: between 1951 and 1990, Israeli farmers reduced the amount of water applied to each hectare of cropland by 36 percent. This allowed the irrigated area to more than triple with only a doubling of irrigation water use.37 Whether

When managers and consultants fail, government frequently responds with legislation, policies, and regulations. In earlier times, the federal government limited its formal influence to national concerns such as the Homestead Act and the Post Office. Now constituents badger elected officials to “do something” about a variety of ills: pollution, dangerous products, hazardous working conditions, and chaotic schools, to name a few. Governing bodies respond by making “policy.” But policymakers often don’t understand the problem well enough to get the solution right, and a sizable body of research records a continuing saga of perverse ways in which the implementation process undermines even good solutions (Bardach, 1977; Elmore, 1978; Freudenberg and Gramling, 1994; Peters, 1999; Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973). Policymakers, for example, have been trying for decades to reform U.S. public schools. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent. The result? About as successful as America’s switch to the metric system. In the 1950s Congress passed legislation mandating adoption of metric standards and measures. More than six decades later, if you know what a hectare is, or can visualize the size of a three-hundred-gram package of crackers, you’re ahead of most Americans. Legislators did not factor into their solution what it would take to get their decision implemented.

Le premier point à prendre en compte est le fait que la production globale actuelle est quantitativement suffisante pour assurer l'alimentation de l'ensemble de la population mondiale. La disponibilité alimentaire mondiale est de 2 790 calories par jour et par personne (données de 2001-2003), ce qui pourrait être suffisant. La sous-alimentation qui affecte aujourd'hui un milliard d'individus pourrait être éradiquée par ure réorganisation de la production, notamment avec une réorientation vers la multiplicité des cultures vivrières et par un rééquilibrage du stock calorique, fort mal distribué (3 490 calories par jour et par personne dans les pays développés, contre 2 254 en Afrique subsaharienne). Quant à la malnutrition (carences en vitamines et minéraux) et à son envers, l'obésité et le surpoids (provoqués essentiellement par la diffusion des habitudes alimentaires promues par le secteur agroalimentaire et la grande distribution), qui affectent chacune un milliard d'individus, ils pourraient être résorbés, sans augmentation quantitative globale, par une réorientation vers une agriculture paysanne développant des pratiques agro-écologiques. Si l'agriculture industrielle actuelle fait valoir de manière tronquée sa supériorité, notamment en termes de productivité par hectare, une évaluation plus globale, incluant l'ensemble des coûts directs et indirects (notamment écologiques), invite à faire pencher la balance de l'efficacité du côté de l'agriculture paysanne. De fait, l'agriculture industrialisée est entraînée dans un cercle vicieux, marqué notamment par l'épuisement et la salinisation des sols, la multiplication des insectes résistant aux pesticides, la hausse des pathologies du bétail ; en outre, elle provoque une baisse du pouvoir nutritif des produits, notamment des fruits et légumes à croissance rapide. Enfin, il faut indiquer que les surfaces agricoles consacrées à des cultures non alimentaires (agrocarburants notamment) doivent être restituées à leur vocation initiale, ce qui offre une marge de manœuvre importante pour assurer à l'ensemble de l'humanité une alimentation quantitativement et qualitativement satisfaisante. On dispose également de deux leviers importants pour atteindre et maintenir cet impératif élémentaire : d'une part, une limitation de l'élevage, particulièrement glouton en énergie et en surfaces (40 % des grains actuellement produits sont destinés à l'alimentation animale) et écologiquement dangereux (importantes émissions de gaz à effet de serre) ; d'autre part, une élimination du gâchis alimentaire (évalué à 30 % au moins dans le système alimentaire industriel mondial, et à 100 milliards de dollars par an uniquement aux États-Unis). (p. 190-192)

As the 2019 elections were approaching, the Modi government felt the need to appear less pro-rich and more pro-poor again. But the union budget passed in February was somewhat a missed opportunity so far as the peasants were concerned. No loan waivers were announced in their favor, simply an enhanced interest subvention on loans and an annual income support of Rs 6,000 (80 USD)—6 percent of a small farmer’s yearly income—to all farmers’ households owning two hectares or fewer.131 In fact, the union budget was once again more geared to pleasing the middle class. The income tax exemption limit jumped from Rs 200,000 (2,667 USD) to 250,000 (3,333 USD), and the income tax rate up to Rs 5 lakh (6,667 USD) was reduced from 10 to 5 percent. The income tax on an income of Rs 10 lakh (13,333 USD) dropped from Rs 110,210 (1,470 USD) to Rs 75,000 (1,000 USD).132 The poor were doubly affected by the fiscal policy of the Modi government in 2014–2019: not only did the tax cuts in favor of the middle class, the abolition of the wealth tax, and, more importantly, the reduction of the corporate tax rates have to be offset by increased indirect taxes, but the stagnation of fiscal resources did not allow the government of India to spend more on public education and public health—all the more so as Narendra Modi wanted to reduce the fiscal deficit. First of all, tax collection diminished. The exchequer “lost” Rs 1.45 lakh crore (1.933 billion USD) in the reduction of the corporate tax, for instance. That was the main reason why gross direct tax collection dipped 4.92 percent133 in 2019–2020, a fiscal year during which gross tax collections were less than those in 2018–2019. Tax collections had never declined on a year-on-year basis since 1961–1962.134 Second, government expenditures diminished. The central government reduced its spending on education from 0.63 percent of GDP in 2013–2014 to 0.47 percent in 2017–2018. The trend was marginally better on the public health front, where the Center’s spending declined from 0.37 percent of GDP in 2013–2014 to 0.34 percent in 2015–2016, before rising again to reach 0.38 percent in 2016–2017.

When I’m old and dying, wheezing my guts out, my organs failing, I want to walk out the front door of some old farmhouse on my own land, maybe forty, fifty hectares of it. I want to find a cool place in the woods under some old oak tree and settle down there and die as the sun comes up. I want a death rattle, a final breath, a body intact that can then be torn apart by scavengers, riddled with worms, my limbs dragged off to feed some family of little foxes, my guts teeming with maggots, until I am nothing but a gooey collection of juices that feeds the fungi and the oak seedlings and the wild grasses. I want my bleached bones scatted across my own land, broken and sucked clean of marrow, half buried in snow and finally, finally, covered over in loam and ground to dust by the passage of time, until I am broken into fragments, the pieces of my body returned to where they came. I could give back something to this world instead of taking, taking, taking. That’s the death I want. The death that means the most to me. That is the good death, the best death, and that is the death I wish not only for myself, but for you, too. Our lives are finite. Our bodies imperfect. We shouldn’t spend it feeding somebody else’s cause.

1.​Textile production produces an estimated 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2e per year, which is more than international flights and maritime shipping combined.47 2.​The average person buys 60 per cent more items of clothing than they did just fifteen years ago, and keeps them for about half as long.48 3.​By 2030, global clothing consumption is projected to rise by 63 per cent, from 62 million tonnes to 102 million tonnes. That’s equivalent to more than 500 billion extra T-shirts.49 4.​By 2050, the equivalent of almost three earths could be required to provide the natural resources it would take to sustain our current lifestyles.50 5.​A polyester shirt has more than double the carbon footprint of a cotton shirt.51 And yet the cotton needed to make a single T-shirt can take 2,700 litres of water to grow – that’s enough drinking water to last a person three years.52 6.​At its current rate, the fashion industry is projected to use 35 per cent more land to grow fibres by 2030. That’s an extra 115 million hectares of land that could otherwise be used to grow food, or left to protect biodiversity.53 7.​Approximately 80 per cent of workers in the global garment industry are women aged 18–35.54 But only 12.5 per cent of clothing companies have a female CEO.55 8.​Among seventy-one leading retailers in the UK, 77 per cent believe there is a likelihood of modern slavery (forced labour) occurring at some stage in their supply chains.56 9.​More than 90 per cent of workers in the global garment industry have no possibility of negotiating their wages and conditions.57 10.​Increasing the price of a garment in the shop by 1 per cent could be enough to pay the workers who made it a living wage.58

Sir Francis Bond Head, who concluded shortly after his arrival in 1835 that the civilization policy was a failure. To him, Aboriginal people were a dying people who should be moved aside for settlers. He proposed relocating them to Manitoulin Island, where he expected them to live their final years in peaceful isolation.89 To achieve his goal, he organized what amounted to a forced surrender of over 670,000 hectares (1.5 million acres) of the Bruce Peninsula in 1836.

If the forest transition in the tropics runs its course, the loss of carbon to the air and species to the history books would be catastrophic for the whole world. We must halt all deforestation across the world now and, with our investment and trade, support those nations who have not yet chopped down their forests to reap the benefits of these resources without losing them. That is easier said than done. Preserving wild lands is a very different prospect to preserving wild seas. The high seas are owned by no one. Domestic waters are owned by nations with governments able to make broad decisions on merit. Land, on the other hand, is where we live. It is portioned into billions of different-sized plots, owned, bought and sold by a host of different commercial, state, community and private parties. Its value is decided by markets. The heart of the problem is that, today, there is no way of calculating the value of the wilderness and environmental services, both global and local, that it provides. One hundred hectares of standing rainforest has less value on paper than an oil palm plantation. Tearing down wilderness is therefore seen as worthwhile. The only practical way to change this situation is to change the meaning of value. The

That historic takeover of rural England is emblematic of the centuries-long global trend of both the state and the market encroaching on common land, at first through colonisation, then through corporate expansion. It is on the rise again today, with renewed international investor interest triggered by the 2007–8 global food price crisis. Since 2000, foreign investors have made over 1,200 large-scale land deals in low- and middle-income countries, acquiring more than 43 million hectares of land—an area bigger than Japan.40 In the majority of cases, those deals were land grabs: signed without the free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous and local communities that had inhabited and collectively stewarded that land for generations. In case after case, investors’ promises to create new jobs, enrich community infrastructure and skill-up local farmers have come to nothing: instead many communities have found themselves dispossessed, dispersed and impoverished.

You might think this messy shambles couldn't possibly make any significant contribution to feeding the world, but you would be wrong. Allotments can be surprisingly productive. In fact studies by the Royal Horticultural Society and Which? magazine, which accord with historical records of food production during the world wars, suggest that a competent allotment holder or gardener can get yields between thirty-one and forty tonnes per hectare. To put this into context, a farmer gets about three and a half tonnes of oilseed rape or eight tonnes of wheat per year from every hectare of land, and will apply about twenty different pesticides plus fertilizers to achieve this. Thus an allotment holder or gardener can grow between four and eleven times the weight of produce that one might get from an intensively farmed arable field...Bear in mind also that only one-third of the UK wheat crop is good enough for human consumption, the remainder going for livestock feed. In contrast, 100 per cent of the allotment food is available for humans to eat.

One-third of the Earth’s land surface is now dedicated to food production – a quarter of this for crops, three-quarters for grazing animals – and farming’s expansion into the wild is continuing (nearly 4 million hectares of tropical rainforest are lost each year).

Mas talvez fosse isso o que todas as vidas eram. Talvez até as que parecem valer a pena ou ser perfeitamente intensas fossem iguais, no fim das contas. Hectares de decepção, monotonia, mágoas e rivalidades, mas com flashes de encanto e beleza. Talvez aquele fosse o único significado que importava. Ser o mundo, testemunhando a si mesmo. Talvez não tenha sido a falta de conquistas que tenha tornado os pais dela infelizes, mas sim a expectativa da conquista,, para começo de conversa. Na verdade, ela não tinha a menor ideia de nada disso. Mas, naquele navio, ela se de conta de uma coisa. Ela havia amado os pais mais do que imaginara, e, ali mesmo, ela os perdoou completamente.

Entre 2300 a.C. e 1800 a.C., Taosi passou por três fases de expansão. Primeiro, uma vila fortificada de sessenta hectares surgiu das ruínas de uma aldeia e, depois, tornou-se uma cidade de trezentos hectares. Nesses períodos inicial e intermediário, há indícios de estratificação social quase tão notáveis quanto a de Shimao, ou inclusive quanto ao que poderíamos esperar de uma capital imperial chinesa de épocas posteriores. Havia muralhas maciças ao redor da cidade, sistemas viários e enormes áreas protegidas para armazenamento, assim como uma rígida separação entre os bairros das pessoas comuns e os da elite, com oficinas diversas e um monumento-calendário agrupados em torno do que provavelmente era uma espécie de palácio. Os sepultamentos na vila inicial de Taosi exibiam uma clara distinção entre as classes sociais. Os túmulos da população comum eram modestos; os da elite estavam repletos de centenas de vasilhas laqueadas, machados de jade cerimoniais e resquícios de extravagantes banquetes com carne de porco. Então, de repente, por volta de 2000 a.C. tudo parece mudar. Nas palavras de um escavador: A muralha da cidade foi demolida e […] as divisões funcionais originais eliminadas, resultando numa falta de regulamentação espacial. As zonas residenciais da população comum passaram a ocupar quase todo o sítio, chegando mesmo a ultrapassar o limite da grande muralha urbana do período intermediário. A zona urbana ampliou-se ainda mais, ocupando uma área de trezentos hectares. Além disso, a área ritual no sul foi abandonada. A antiga área do palácio agora passou a abrigar uma precária fundação de terra compactada com cerca de 2 mil metros quadrados, rodeada por poços de dejetos usados por gente de status relativamente baixo. Oficinas com utensílios de pedra tomaram o lugar das residências da elite de nível mais baixo. A cidade claramente perdera a condição de capital, e vigorava um estado de anarquia.111 Além do mais, há pistas de que foi um processo consciente de transformação, muito provavelmente acompanhado de grande violência. As sepulturas populares multiplicaram-se no cemitério da elite e, na zona do palácio, um sepultamento em massa, com sinais de tortura e grotescas violações dos cadáveres, parece ser evidência do que o escavador definiu como um “ato de represália política”.112 Ora, ainda que seja considerado deselegante questionar o juízo de primeira mão de um escavador, não resistimos a fazer alguns comentários. Primeiro, o ostensivo “estado de anarquia” (descrito em outro trecho como “de colapso e caos”)113 durou um tempo considerável, entre dois e três séculos. Segundo, no período tardio a área total de Taosi na verdade aumentou de 280 para 300 hectares. Isso não parece um colapso, mas uma época de prosperidade generalizada, na sequência da abolição de um rígido sistema de classes. Parece sugerir que, após a destruição do palácio, as pessoas não mergulharam numa “guerra de todos contra todos” nos moldes hobbesianos, e sim que apenas continuaram tocando suas vidas — presumivelmente sob o que consideravam um sistema mais equitativo de autogoverno local.

It’s a well-known statistic that there are 800 burial sites around Chernobyl. He was expecting some sort of amazing engineering structures, but they were just ordinary pits. They were filled with trees from the ‘red forest’ that was cut down in a 150 hectare area around the reactor. In the first two days after the accident, pine trees turned red and then russet. There were thousands of tonnes of iron and steel, pipes, work clothes, concrete structures. He showed me an illustration from an English magazine, panoramic, from the air. Thousands of tractors, aircraft, fire engines and ambulances. The largest burial site was said to be next to the reactor. He wanted to photograph it now, ten years on, and had been promised a lot of money for the image. So there we were, being sent from one senior official to another. One said they needed a location from us, another that we needed a permit. We were just getting the run-around, until it dawned on me that this burial site did not exist. There no longer was a site in reality, only in reports. The machinery had long ago been looted and taken off to markets, to collective farms or people’s homes for spare parts. It was all gone. The Englishman could not understand that. He could not believe it. When I told him the truth, he simply could not believe it!

Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God.” My father chortled. “Hele, my dearest one, God has very little to do with it. This is the work of politicians. I’ve seen their work up close, too close. The result of their work is, in the end, slaughter. And for what? To gain a few more hectares of swamp? Trees? Fields?” This

One hectare of land burned equals the emissions from more than six thousand cars, but they continue to burn more than a billion hectares in Africa per year.

From the farmer who plants on one acre to the companies who produce on hundreds of hectares knows Massey Ferguson by their hearts, it has been people’s first tractor and from their first unit, which was manufactured to the last, one till today it has a lion’s share in the farming industry. They have plants all over the world through which they manufacture their models and cater to the local market according to the buying powe

Colonel Gaddafi was sitting under a tree that I had planted, we had planted several thousand hectares of forest there in Mauritania. He was sitting there under that tree and he was drinking the salted coffee that the Bedouins drink. And he was impressed. He asked me to work out a project with him in Libya as well.

In 1987 De Jonghe founded the company Biobest, which remains today one of the largest commercial producers of bumblebees. In 1988 they produced enough bumblebees to pollinate just forty hectares of tomatoes. By the following year they were exporting to Holland, France and the UK. Others wanted in on the action; the Dutch company Koppert Biological Systems began rearing bumblebees in 1988, followed by Bunting Brinkman Bees, also Dutch, in 1989.

Land belongs to everyone and should be shared with everyone, any family of four or six people is supported well with 12 hectares of land. Any family of more than six people is supported with 25 hectares of land. A single individual can live with 6 hectares, land belongs to everyone, and to work the land we can share it among us, nobody is more than anyone, no one has special privileges.

In the Treatise James made an important new prediction from his electromagnetic theory-that electromagnetic waves exert a radiation pressure. Bright sunlight, he calculated, presses on the earth's surface with a force of around 4 pounds per square mile, equivalen to 7 grams per hectare. This was too tiny a value to be observable in everyday life and its detection posed a challenge to experimenters. Eventually, in 1900, the Russian physicist Pyotr Lebedev succeeded, and confirmed James' prediction. Although small on an earthly scale, radiation pressure is one of the factors that shape the universe. Without it there would be no stars like our sun-it is internal radiation pressure that stops them from collapsing under their own gravity. James' discovery also helped to explain a phebomenon that had puzzled astronomers for centuries-why comets' tails point away from the sun.

Every minute, twenty-three hectares of land are lost to drought and desertification.

The calculations of RNS agronomists suggested that to achieve full self-sufficiency with current technology and at the current standard of living, the Third Reich would need to add 7–8 million empty hectares of farmland to the 34 million hectares currently within its borders.77 It may seem far-fetched to suggest that it was the difficulties of German agriculture that drove the progressive radicalization of Hitler’s regime. But when Hitler did attempt to give concrete meaning to his concept of Lebensraum it was to agriculture that he turned.

Europe has learned to grow more food per hectare and use fewer chemicals in the process. The American choices in biotechnology are causing it to fall behind Europe in productivity and sustainability.

Já logo na vitrine da livraria, identificou a capa com o título que procurava. Seguindo essa pista visual, você abriu caminho na loja, através da densa barreira dos Livros Que Você Não Leu que, das mesas e prateleiras, olham-no de esguelha tentando intimidá-lo. Mas você sabe que não deve deixar-se impressionar, pois estão distribuídos por hectares e mais hectares os Livros Cuja Leitura É Dispensável, os Livros Para Outros Usos Que Não a Leitura, os Livros Já Lidos Sem Que Seja Necessário Abri-los, pertencentes que são à categoria dos Livros Já Lidos Antes Mesmo De Terem Sido Escritos. Assim, após você ter superado a primeira linha de defesas, eis que cai sobre sua pessoa a infantaria dos Livros Que, Se Você Tivesse Mais Vidas Para Viver, Certamente Leria De Boa Vontade, Mas Infelizmente Os Dias Que Lhe Restam Para Viver Não São Tantos Assim. Com movimentos rápidos, você os deixa para trás e atravessa as falanges dos Livros Que Tem A Intenção De Ler Mas Antes Deve Ler Outros, dos Livros Demasiado Caros Que Podem Esperar Para Ser Comprados Quando Forem Revendidos Pela Metade do Preço, dos Livros Idem Quando Forem Reeditados Em Coleções De Bolso, dos Livros Que Poderia Pedir Emprestados A Alguém, dos Livros Que Todo Mundo Leu E É Como Se Você Também Os Tivesse Lido. Esquivando-se de tais assaltos, você alcança as torres do fortim, onde ainda resistem os Livros Que Há Tempos Você Pretende Ler, os Livros Que Procurou Durante Vários Anos Sem Ter Encontrado, os Livros Que Dizem Respeito A Algo Que O Ocupa Neste Momento, os Livros Que Deseja Adquirir Para Ter Por Perto Em Qualquer Circunstância, os Livros Que Gostaria De Separar Para Ler Neste Verão, os Livros Que Lhe Faltam Para Colocar Ao Lado De Outros Em Sua Estante, os Livros Que De Repente Lhe Inspiram Uma Curiosidade Frenética E Não Claramente Justificada.

You’re the hero of your own story. The hero doesn’t die, can’t die, because then the story ends. But I’ve had a long time to sit with death, now. I have stared death in the face. I don’t like it much. I want to choose how this all ends. I don’t just want it taken from me. When I’m old and dying, wheezing my guts out, my organs failing, I want to walk out the front door of some old farmhouse on my own land, maybe forty, fifty hectares of it. I want to find a cool place in the woods under some old oak tree and settle down there and die as the sun comes up. I want a death rattle, a final breath, a body intact that can then be torn apart by scavengers, riddled with worms, my limbs dragged off to feed some family of little foxes, my guts teeming with maggots, until I am nothing but a gooey collection of juices that feeds the fungi and the oak seedlings and the wild grasses. I want my bleached bones scatted across my own land, broken and sucked clean of marrow, half buried in snow and finally, finally, covered over in loam and ground to dust by the passage of time, until I am broken into fragments, the pieces of my body returned to where they came. I could give back something to this world instead of taking, taking, taking. That’s the death I want.

By this time, the early second millennium bce, Ashur extended over about 40 hectares (about 100 acres)