Where Will We Grow Food in the Future?

In 1998, Whitley Strieber had never heard about climate change, but the Master of the Key burst into his hotel room in Toronto and told him all about it (The NEW, revised edition of The Key, with a foreword that talks about how many of his statements later turned out to be true, will be in bookstores May 12). When it comes to climate change, one of the things we OUGHT to be worrying about is where we can grow food in the future because just like people, plants experience stress.
 
Adverse environmental conditions, such as drought, flood, heat and other stresses, affect yield more than crop pests and diseases. Finding a way to maintain high yields for plants under stress is a goal of plant breeders and other agriculture stakeholders. Geneticist Stephen Howell says, "These are environmental stresses that the farmers can’t control. They are acts of nature. And now seed companies are interested in trying to equip plants with the ability to tolerate stress. "As it turns out, responses that are activated under stress conditions actually inhibit the growth of plants. This allows them to conserve their energy to survive the stress conditions." For plants in the wild, this response is a survival tactic, but for agriculture crops, these responses reduce yields."You don’t want crop plants to [stop growing," Howell says. "You want them to continue to grow and produce even though they are under stress."

When Whitley first learned about climate change from The Master of the Key, he wrote "The Coming Global Superstorm," which became the hit movie "The Day After Tomorrow." Pick up the NEW, REVISED edition of The Key at your bookstore on May 12! Whitley has written a new foreword to the book that tells about how so many of the predictions by the Master of the Key were later validated by scientific discoveries, including (and especially) climate change. If you want to make sure WE’LL still be here tomorrow, the ONLY way to do that is to subscribe today!