I think most people would like to grown 'organically'. The reason we have all the chemicals now was because organic farming just didn't work as well as it should have. Business attempted to come up with a solution. And now there's a backlash. If someone writes with an wholesale mistrust of the large agri corporations, then his/her protestations don't ring as credulous.
Take the situation with DDT. It was discovered after being used in a myriad of ways, that it weakened birds' eggs. An instant ban worldwide; no discussion. Now that ban is being reconsidered as tens of thousands of people in Africa are dying of malaria because of the ban on DDT in all forms.
Ridiculous.
The dust bowl of the 30's wasn't the first drought and famine endured by the nation. Things have changed because of agribusiness, and we are now the leading exporter of food to other countries. Our country is recognized for its charitable feeding of countless developing countries. Millions of people depend upon our country and agribusiness.
The problem with the U of M's 'study' on organic methods is that it doesn't ring true. The authors are "Catherine Badgley, research scientist in the Museum of Paleontology, is a co-author of the paper along with several current and former graduate and undergraduate students from U-M." Why would a paleontologist have anything to do with a paper on organic farming practices? I don't see anyone on this with actual credentials of someone who has made this his field of study.
Developing countries don't have the luxury of rotating cover crops; this whole premise strikes me as odd. There are no references to what comprised their studies... there's just not any information to read of this 'study'. I would want to read the entire study itself, not just a few paragraphs of someone's synopsis.
And as for nuclear energy (I'm assuming DM meant me when writing that
"Really? Do you believe nuclear energy is an answer? Where do you suggest we store all the waste then? We are talking pollution that won't go away in a time frame that is significant to the survival of our species. Shall we send it in rockets directed at the sun and hope we don't have any Challenger incidents? Shall we bury it and cross our finger that it won't leak into ground water? Shall we dump it in the ocean and continue eating all the fish (which by the way has already happened).
The rhetoric doesn't help to educate.... nobody's sending it in rockets, etc. Nuclear energy is much cleaner than oil based energy. If we had developed our energy along these lines, a myriad of problems would never have arisen. These are a few of the problems....
A study in Utah (during the 80's??) showed that particulates in the air were a main component of pollution and poor lung health. Nuclear energy has no particulates. Nuclear power is NOT going to wipe out 'our species'. Pollution from oil based energy is everywhere ~ air from smokestacks and cars, planes, etc. ~ countless oil spills from ships, pipelines and trucks that foul the waters (the Arizona from Pearl Harbor is still leaking oil after all these decades!), kill fish, oxygen, birds, coral, plantlife from all over the world.
Possibly we would not have been involved in the Middle East with less dependency on their oil; ie, no Kuwaiti war involvement, no Iranian students take-over of the US embassy, no OPEC threats of higher oil prices.
France is 75-80% powered by nuclear energy. European countries use nuclear energy. During the 70's and our first run-in with OPEC, they saw the writing on the wall and took steps to lessen their dependency on oil. We began to do so, and then the anti-nuclear insanity swept the country. There was no logical debate on this.
As a nation, as a world, we cannot go back to simpler times.
This is not black and white. These things need to be weighed carefully and then acted upon. Life is complex and becoming more so. It's just the way it is.
