Humans have radically altered the evolution of agricultural plants since World War Two, remaking our seed system with industrial agricultural practices to feed a growing population. Yet in the changing climate of decades to come, UVM researchers say, the seeds that will feed the world are in the hands of smallholder farmers.
It is odd how we conflate the relatively small harms of a more harmful (% wise) operation with the large harms of a less harmful (% wise) operation. It’s like we forget the downsides of scaling up to current insane population sizes. There really are ~8,120,000,000 of us, perhaps our brains just aren’t ready to handle the reality of that.