Lark and a group of colleagues recently jolted this debate back to life. But government agencies, relying on the results of economic models, concluded that those costs would be modest, and that replacing gasoline with ethanol or biodiesel would help to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals. Scientists have long warned that biofuel production on this scale involves costs: It claims land that otherwise could grow food or, alternatively, grass and trees that capture carbon from the air and provide a home for birds and other wildlife. In addition, more than 4 million metric tons of soybean oil is turned into diesel fuel annually, and that number is growing fast. ![]() It’s about a third of the country’s total corn harvest, and growing that corn requires more than 100,000 square kilometers of land. Ethanol factories now consume about 130 million metric tons of corn every year. Lark carries professional scars from recently stumbling into one of the fiercest of these fights: the debate over growing crops that are used to make fuel for cars and trucks.Ībout 15 years ago, government incentives helped to launch a biofuel boom in the United States. He decided to study how farmers transform landscapes through their collective decisions to plow up grasslands, clear trees or drain wetlands-decisions that lie at the heart of some of the planet’s greatest environmental challenges, and also provoke controversy. “I think it was that experience that told me, ‘Hey, land use is important,’” he says. As an engineering student working on water projects in Haiti, he saw an extreme version of that conflict: forests cleared for firewood or to grow crops, producing soil erosion, environmental denudation and worsening poverty. Tyler Lark, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, grew up among farms, working on a neighbor’s dairy, vaguely aware of the tension between clearing land to grow food and preserving nature.
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