Just skimmed the President’s Executive Order 13693: Planning for Federal Sustainability in the Next Decade

Boo!!! Not a single mention of agriculture, biodiversity, or the messed up nitrogen/phosphorus cycles. We mostly see this obsession with the carbon cycle and the insane idea that if we reduce emissions we can avoid catastrophic climate change (to be fair water gets a good amount of attention too, but the thinking around it is still all wrong). If we radically changed our agricultural system we could, dare I say, easily sequester enough carbon to get us to pre-1990 levels, while staving off mass extinction, and bringing all the nutrient cycles back into alignment. If Big Oil got their heads out of their asses (or rather their mile deep geologic CO2 injection wells) long enough to realize this and get behind it, they could give themselves a few more decades of pumping without the public hating their guts.

See Mark Shepard’s New Forest Farm, and Grant Shultz’s Versaland Farm for examples of how we should be doing agriculture. We need to slow, spread, and sink water on a watershed scale. We need to let animals out of the factories and graze them over the land in dense packs rotating them through smaller pastures for shorter periods of time.

Here’s a link to the Executive Order