Perhaps the most crucial idea for understanding our species’ future on this planet boils down to two boring words: land use.

To mitigate climate change, humans will need to extract critical minerals to build vast numbers of photovoltaic cells and wind turbines. We’ll need millions of tons of copper to wire continent-spanning power grids. But the most immutable resource constraint we face — the one we can’t mine more of — is land.

Although many of us don’t see it, because most humans now live in urban areas, the story of land constraints is really a story about agriculture, which devours nearly half of our planet’s habitable land; urban and suburban areas take up only a tiny fraction.

We’re not using all that farmland very wisely. Beef farming, for example, occupies “nearly half the worl

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