Designing Spaces for a Thriving Future, Part 1 of 2

Climate change and destructive land use are pushing Earth’s systems beyond safe thresholds. “For context, the Netherlands ranks among the worst in the EU for nitrogen pollution per hectare, about four times the European average. No less than 72% of that agricultural land is used exclusively for the production of animal-people meat and dairy. “We deplete the Earth because we raise cattle and animal-people. Our Earth is collapsing because we eat too much [animal-people] meat, actually. Every year, we cut down forests as big as England just to raise animal-people. So how many rainforests have been destroyed? And this will change the atmosphere, change the rain. That's why our planet's heating up, and then many places are having problems with floods and also drought - long periods. The harmful effect of the meat diet is larger than life.”

In 2022, with support from the Van Eesteren Fluck & Van Lohuizen Foundation, a team of experts set out to reimagine the Dutch landscape. The scenario assumes a Dutch population of 20 million by 2050. In this vision, the entire population adopts a vegan diet, and food is produced as much as possible within national borders The vision is a nature-inclusive agricultural system: no animal-people manure and no chemical pesticides. Despite lower yields per hectare, the efficiency gain from eating plants directly rather than feeding them to animal-people is massive. Here is the most critical takeaway from the land use calculations: To feed 20 million people a healthy, nature-inclusive vegan diet, we need only about 59% of our current agricultural land. This leaves a staggering 41% of agricultural land – roughly 8,810 km² – as “surplus” or “left over.” The “Veganland” experiment proves that the space is there – it is currently occupied by livestock.