This is the first part of a series of essays that explore the impact of food systems through four key territories: oceans, forests, countryside, and city, reflecting on the research behind Schmidt Hammer Lassen’s 6-part publication The Hacktivist Guide to Food Security first published during the UIA World Congress of Architecture in 2023.
Introduction: Climate is biology
It’s late spring. Copenhagen represents a pin-up city for the neatly packaged merger between a globalised talent market and the welfare society. Colonnades of trees are in bloom, and the skinny-dipping season has kicked off without a cloud in the sky. It takes a perverse mentality to harbour angst over the state of the environment at such moments. Yet tractors and harvesters have encircled parliament house, food prices have jumped, and forest fires erupt in locations unaccustomed to heat waves.
Our biological allies, harboured in forests, meadows and oceans, are losing a territorial battle to our food systems. As our cities and societies developed beyond the biosphere’s capacity to self-regulate, our habit of conflating what we consider ‘normal’ with ‘reasonable’ has allowed daily life to displace the Holocene. Every five years we deliver the equivalent of the world's forests1 in carbon2 to the atmosphere, subsumed imperceptibly into the fossil fuel engines that propel our economies (FAO, 2020; World in Data, 2023). The Earths’s seasons took 66 million3 years to stabilise, but that stability has collapsed within a human lifetime (Lenton, 2008). Agriculture and fishing practices are responsible for the majority of planetary boundaries exceeded including a third of our greenhouse emissions.4
There appears to be some polarity on how to address these issues. The conservation approach promoted by the half-earth theory asks us to retract our negative footprint to a level that can be counterbalanced by the ecosystem services of ‘wild-nature’, while others look toward ‘congenial’ production and consumption that seek to provide a net benefit to the ecosystem in their operation. There are inherent concerns with both perspectives, and the effects of globalised trade make coordinated action complex and difficult. If we consider that the world’s food supply is contingent on climate, and climate on biology, we might ask ourselves how food production managed to depart from the basic rules of the earth’s ecosystem?
Oceans
The world’s oceans absorb around a quarter of the CO2 we produce and return half of the earth’s oxygen to the biosphere. In these unsupervised ex-terrestrial zones, phytoplankton photosynthesise carbon from nutrients and sunlight. Their role in the food chain is to convert energy and carbon dioxide into aquatic bodies that become living matter in the ocean. Exoskeletons of radiolaria - abandoned shells of tiny creatures constructed from calcium carbonate, dissolve in acidic ocean water as they balance it’s PH and permit more CO2 to be absorbed. These bodies blended with upwelling nutrients delivered to the surface of the sea, trigger a surge of life catalysed by sunlight which is then consumed by a host of other creatures in the sea, thereby locking carbon dioxide into aquatic life-forms.
Deprived of life, the sea only breathes out.
Threats to the ocean's ecosystems are unambiguous. Nutrient runoff from agriculture starves the water of oxygen. At the coasts, hypoxic dead-zones are created, laced with pesticides that mutate the bodies they encounter as they drift to the sea floor. A novel soup of synthetics have created environments toxic to those who feed from them. As fish populations decline from overfishing and ocean temperatures rise, the once active churn5 of nutrients from the seafloor to the sunlit surface begins to stagnate. Sedentary aqueous strata slow the ocean currents, and the acidic top layer begins to expunge its carbon dioxide like a warm soda. Deprived of life, the sea only breathes out.
Farewell to the Holocene
If we consider the precarity of our current food systems, it becomes clear that a multitude of approaches are required to establish food resilience and security. What is less apparent are the opportunities to enhance our daily lives. The Hacktivist Guide to Food Security is conceived as a tool to stimulate new conversations and insights of how food systems might be recomposed to transform cities, landscapes and oceans for mutual benefit.
Enlai Hooi is the head of innovation at Schmidt Hammer Lassen. Since 2021, he has led the firm’s research into the impact of architecture and urban systems on the ecology.
1 the world's forests contain 296 gigatons (Gt) of carbon in their biomass, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: FAO. 2020. Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020: Main report. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/ca9825en
2 Including land-use change, humans currently emit around 54 Gigatons of CO2 equivalent per year: Our World in Data based on the Global Carbon Project (2023). https://ourworldindata.org/co2-dataset-sources
3 The Holocene is a geological period of remarkable stability, permitting the advent of agriculture and civic societies. Starting during the most recent Milankovitch cycle, a phenomenon that triggered warmer conditions on earth, biological activity stabilised the earth's bio-geochemical cycles, settling the earths climate into regular seasons.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0705414105 Lenton, Timothy M., et al. “Tipping Elements in the Earth’s Climate System | PNAS.” Tipping Elements in the Earth’s Climate System, 2008, www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0705414105
4 Crippa, M., Solazzo, E., Guizzardi, D. et al. Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions. Nat Food 2, 198–209 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00225-9
5 Katija, K. (2012). Biogenic inputs to ocean mixing. The Journal of Experimental Biology, 215(6), 1040–1049. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.059279
