Many of the people who decide to try cloudbusting are farmers or if not farmers themselves, they cite "helping farmers" and "producing more food" as one of their main reasons for cloudbusting. But so far, to the best of my information, not one of them has ever been active in any effort to reduce demand for food by reducing the population, something that could reduce the need they think exists for interfering with the functioning of the atmosphere to grow more food.
Several vegans have suggested there would be less land needed to grow grain if people gave up eating meat. The reasoning seems to be that since cattle are fed grain, and eat more than humans would, the grain saved by not feeding them could be eaten by humans.
That thinking overlooks the fact that it is only in the United States, with 5% of the world population, and a few other first-world countries, mainly in Northern Europe, all with small populations, that cattle are fed on grain. In most of the world, cattle are raised only on grass, and the land used to graze them is marginal land not good for growing crops, which is why it is used for grazing.
So if that land was no longer used for grazing, other land, now in a more or less natural state, not in use, would have to be cleared to grow the extra crops that would be needed to feed the people that portion of their diet that now comes from grass via cattle. This is shown in Brazil, where a lot of rain forest has been cleared to grow soybeans to export to Europe and America to be eaten by people who have been convinced to take up a vegan diet.
It can also be seen in Southeast Asia, where large tracts of rain forest have been cleared to grow palms to provide vegetable oil for export to Europe and North America for vegetatrians and vegans to use in cooking. So, instead of killing cows, these well-meaning but uninformed people are indirectly killing elephants and orangutans by depriving them of their habitat.
One recent correspondent sent me an article that claims the earth could grow enough food for twice the current population on the same amount of land by improved farming methods.
I replied:
"An interesting article. But it has a number of flaws. It does not even touch on the immense damage done to the natural plant life by modern methods of farming, such as genetic modification of plants used for crops. Animal life also is harmed by modern farming methods like that, as in the case of bees needed to pollenate plants being killed by GM plants they feed from, and lab rats being rendered sterile by eating GM foods.
Growing more crops is not the answer. It is only the answer Monsanto and other purveyors of agricultural chemicals and GM seeds want to sell as the answer.
If only safe and ecologically sound farming methods were used, only a small fraction of what is grown today could be grown. It is true that modern cattle raising is a very harmfull practice, but if the best replacement for it is to grow more crops with modern agricultural methods, that could be even worse.
To really do any good, it is not enough to replace one evil with another, and posibly worse one. We need to solve the root problem, too many people on this planet, not just switch them from one form of destruction to another by changing their diets. The problem is not what these people eat. It is that there are too many of them that are eating anything.
And feeding them with imports from Mars would not solve the problem either because the total human ecological footprint on the earth is far, far greater than just what is done to provide food. If there were more people, there would be more demand for electricity, fuel oil, highways, forest products, more urban sprawl, more pollution, more rivers damed, more nuclear reactors built, and a long list of other demands on the earth, "
I am still awaiting a reply.
Now, if someone is really concerned about how well people eat, and also about protecting the environment, I would expect that person to already, before even ever having heard of cloudbusting, to be active in the movement to reduce population, and in combating the evil, criminally insane religions that oppose doing anything to solve the population problem.
If someone who has never tried to work on that issue says he wants to intervene in the functioning of the atmosphere to "help farmers" or "prevent famine", he is probably guilty of self-deception and I would suspect him of being more interested in power-tripping and the emotional satisfaction and feeling of power from being in control of the weather than in helping anyone. After all, if he has never tried to help solve a problem until he hears of cloudbusting, why should he suddenly want to solve it with a cloudbuster when he never was too concerned about it before?
Cloudbusting can and should be used to restore normal atmospheric functioning in cases where the atmosphere is not functioning naturally and needs help to recover. But cloudbusting is not a solution to the problem of too many people all wanting to eat and too much land being needed to feed tham all.
The cloudbuster is not a way to add the deserts of the world to the farms of the world. In places where deserts are the result of human activity, such as deforestation or over-grazing of livestock, simply increasing rainfall would not help much. The rain would soon stop again if the reason the landscape became a desert in the first place was human use, unless it was allowed to regain its' original vegetation cover and remain undisturbed as a natural ecosystem and not be ploughed up and cultivated as soon as possible. .
Cloudbuster-aided recovery of lands that have been deserts for ages due to some ancient catastrophe, could be done eventually, but it would take many years, possibly even centuries after the return of full atmosphericpulsation and normal weather, for the ecosystems of those lands to fully recover. Creating rain in a desert area without first removing the DOR barriers that obstruct approching weather fronts, and then ploughing the newly irrigated land, would be adding additional vandalism to the damage already done by desertification, and would delay recovery of the ecosystem by many more years if an attempt at real recovery was ever made at some later date.
Altering normal or seasonal weather in an ecosystem that is functioning well already, but not suitable for commercially valued crops, would be a willful destruction of a properly functioning ecosystem merely to change it into farmlands, useless for anything except growing food for an ever-growing human population that can never be satisfied.
So cloudbusting should not be thought of as a panacea to enable unrestrained population growth by irrigating deserts to turn them into farms. The cloudbuster is not just another method of irrigation. It is not a farm tool.
Properly speaking, the cloudbuster is a form of medical treatment, on a landscape scale. And it should be used in the spirit of a medical treatment, for the health of the patient, the earth. It is the only means by which an injured and dying ecosystem can be restored to health. And that is its' only legitimate purpose.