301–310 of 342 posts
France probably shows the way forward: "France is the first country to ban all 5 pesticides linked to bee deaths" https://inhabitat.com/france-is-the-first-country-to-ban-all...
Unfortunately, this will just increase imports from countries that don't ban them and make life harder for local farmers. It's the blessing of free trade based on lowest common denominators.
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I don't know how to respond to this. It makes no sense to me, so I'll agree to disagree.
What I'm saying is that you would have to convince people that red meat is bad for them before they'd be willing to pass a law against it. If they're not convinced of that then they'll just buy it from whoever sells it and it doesn't matter if one seller here or there carries it or not as long as somebody does, which somebody will as long as people want it. But if you successfully convince them that it's so bad for t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The status quo is we keep doing what we are currently doing for decades. The risks of doing that are far greater in my opinion. Still a hard no. It's precisely this attitude that got us where we are today. 50 years ago, the response would have been 'the status quo is we're headed towards mass starvation as we become unable to feed the giant post-war population boom using traditional agricultural techniques'. Now we…
Of course the future is uncertain. I don't know that if my going to work tomorrow is not going to rip a hole in the space time continuum, but I'll risk it anyway. I know that's being facetious, but the point remains. There are clear and obvious dangers with current practices. They are not sustainable. One can never say for certainty that any change may not have unintended consequences, but in this case, they are bein…
https://grist.org/industrial-agriculture/2011-04-13-big-ag-w...
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Poe's Law is strong with this one. I can't tell if you're serious or if this is advanced snarkasm.
Totally serious. The anti-Roundup fervor is of a kind with anti-GMO fervor. The goal of it is to provide a pretext to exclude cheaper US agricultural products from Europe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/business/monsantos-sway-o...
https://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/toxic-tort-law/monsanto-round...
Doesn't sound completely cut-and-dried to me.
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the agriculture shills keep pushing this notion that their way of growing with chemicals is the the most productive way when I've yet to see a study that indicates that any of what they've done has increased crop yields.
Steady on my friend. I'm an ecology nut but you have to give credit where credit is due: e.g. artificial nitrogen fertilizer really has been an incredible advance, to the point where we have literally been turning oil into people ever since it was invented. The "Green Revolution", pesticides, and even GMOs work , it has to be admitted. Here is the rub though: For how long? The final verdict on agriculture is yet to b…
I'd say that's not valid, because what happened for millions of years is a far cry from what modern agriculture is (mostly) accomplishing: (a) actually establishing food security, and (b) for a freakishly large number of one particular species.
When you say "every single one of your ancestors got enough to eat" you fall victim to survivor bias; we know that many, many of our ancestors' siblings didn't get enough to eat. In fact, humanity nearly died out on one or two occasions, though I'm not sure it was for lack of nutrition.
I also feel that natural, historic ecologic agriculture isn't readily analogous to a model of agriculture that would be feasible today. Consider that part of the historic model was a pyramid of natural predation, i.e. animals that lived off the land and each other, fertilizing the "agriculture" both with their droppings and often their corpses, with humanity skimming off parts of that food chain. Again, I don't think a faithful replication of that model could effectively nourish anything near the world's current population of humans.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that a model of agriculture strongly similar to "historic ecological food production" might only work for a significantly smaller human population.
France probably shows the way forward: "France is the first country to ban all 5 pesticides linked to bee deaths" https://inhabitat.com/france-is-the-first-country-to-ban-all...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course the future is uncertain. I don't know that if my going to work tomorrow is not going to rip a hole in the space time continuum, but I'll risk it anyway. I know that's being facetious, but the point remains. There are clear and obvious dangers with current practices. They are not sustainable. One can never say for certainty that any change may not have unintended consequences, but in this case, they are bein…
Not that we do nothing. We can ban pesticides, return back to heuristic based agriculture where mistakes are localized and inventions are robust and of limited scale. Pesticides are mostly used for crops that humans do not eat directly. Food safety was never about beans or sweet potato or other efficient plant sources of protein and calories, it was about wheat, soybean and corn. Their introduction, just like the int…
I'm part of a group developing RNAi-based pesticides which are topically applied (so non-GM). They are extremely species specific; when designed properly they can avoid even close relatives of the target insect, and the by-product of the active ingredient is degraded RNA, which is harmless. The OECD had a meeting on it recently to help develop a regulatory framework - link here if interested ( https://www.oecd.org/ch…
What potential risks can you think of for this approach?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the agriculture shills keep pushing this notion that their way of growing with chemicals is the the most productive way when I've yet to see a study that indicates that any of what they've done has increased crop yields.
Steady on my friend. I'm an ecology nut but you have to give credit where credit is due: e.g. artificial nitrogen fertilizer really has been an incredible advance, to the point where we have literally been turning oil into people ever since it was invented. The "Green Revolution", pesticides, and even GMOs work , it has to be admitted. Here is the rub though: For how long? The final verdict on agriculture is yet to b…
Broadly speaking, we cannot see or act in a way that optimises outcomes over multiple generations, at the population scale the planet now carries. Evolution hasn't been able to optimise our reward pathways for preventing pollution or over-population, which both carry a risk of collapsing our ecosystems over time. Another significant risk that is yet to emerge is hacking evolution itself - runaway genetic engineering could have disastrous results.
While the Haber–Bosch process of extracting Nitrogen from the atmosphere into a soluble form was a revolution in farming, it was also responsible for much of today's overpopulation. Probably the most impactful invention of the 20th century, if measured by population growth. Ironically, Haber was also the inventor chemical warfare (he developed chlorine gas, mustard gas, Zyklon B).
France probably shows the way forward: "France is the first country to ban all 5 pesticides linked to bee deaths" https://inhabitat.com/france-is-the-first-country-to-ban-all...
afaik neonicotinoids are banned in EU and the US is trying to force them to unban it
(I'm a beekeeper btw).