Are systems improving or degrading? What criteria do we use to answer the question?
I will attempt to answer the above questions, using modern and traditional agriculture for food production as an example. To that end, the accepted agricultural practice of striving for maximum yields without much regard to the impact on soil seems to provide an intriguing thought experiment.
The key driver in this example seems to be economic competition. If a food producer is to compete in the free market, they are forced to use every technology available to maximize yield, even though they know it is degrading the soil! Is soil an important factor in agriculture? Ask a farmer. So why is this continuing? Economic competition. A farm that doesn't compete in the capitalist market doesn't produce a profit, which means, like any business, it will eventually fail.
Small farmers understand this conflict and some have come up with impressive ways to achieve the (seemingly impossible) goal of competing even while improving the soil. Problem solved? There's at least one problem with that solution. What is happening to small farms? Are they on the increase or are they going the way of the dinosaur? The answer for most of my lifetime has been the latter. Large corporations have been forcing many small farmers out of business for a couple of generations.
Recently there appears to be a countertrend that is small but rapidly growing. Counter-intuitive though it may seem, the answer seems to lie in getting smaller. We're talking really small here. Somewhere between the huge corporate mega-farms and the traditional small commercial farm a new paradigm is emerging. The new systems are often overlooked simply because they are almost ridiculously small. How on earth can a farm that is less than an acre in size be economically feasible? The answer is a bit beyond the scope of this thought experiment but one name comes to mind. Curtis Stone, urban farmer, is teaching people how to produce a decent income by producing crops on as little as a quarter acre of land. This means that the "farm" can be a patch of green that used to be called a yard. I'll provide a link below for those who want to explore this further.
I never said it was easy. There is some investment required, less than $10,000 if land is available (Stone used his own yard and other yards nearby). The point is, the system is already profitable and it can be replicated. Enough people are applying themselves to improving methods and tools that the system is becoming more and more efficient. This business model for vegetable production gives me hope because it not only grows abundant food, it does so in a way that improves the soil, rather than degrading it.
The video I selected is one in which Curtis is visiting one of his students who farmed part time on less than a quarter acre of land for the past two years. He is now farming full time, still on less than a quarter acre of land. Key point: Rather than increase the amount of land under cultivation, the emphasis is on making the system more efficient. With this video we are skipping past most the basics because I think it's important to hear them discuss some of the mistakes made and some of the steps that are being taken to improve the process. The basics are thoroughly covered in Curtis Stone's book (not a sales pitch, just access to information) and in a ton of other videos on his channel and many others.
Video: Crushing it solo on less than one quarter acre!