- 30 Jul 2013 10:21
#14281055
I'd expect this kind of market fundamentalist dogmatism from Eran, but I expected better from you. At some point it will become impossible to pay the cost of continual soil depletion, erosion, fertilizer runoff, colony collapse, and climate change, all of which our industrial agriculture system contributes to. And to answer Eran's predictable non-point, the market is good at responding to short-term shifts in demand. It does not have a good record of averting crises before they happen.
Possibly. I'm not dogmatically opposed to GMOs in principle, though I'm skeptical about how much we really understand about ecological dynamics and our effect on the environment. Under our current capitalist system, GMOs are largely used by Monsanto to make products resistant to their famous Roundup herbicide, so the crops can withstand more toxic chemicals being sprayed on them. They are also a major source of patent-trolling used to intimidate farmers who refuse to use their products and especially third world farmers who try to save seeds.
But the biggest thing that needs to change is monoculture. The reason we need all these fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides in the first place is that we try to plant a bunch of the same plants in straight rows and destroy any other plants that come up -- a very different approach than the way nature does it. Fortunately, permaculture design principles are becoming better understood today, and as mass consumer society gives way to a society built at a human level, food forests within people's own communities can begin to replace the mass industrial fields that are killing the planet as we speak.
Someone5 wrote:I'm not sure it can be characterized as unsustainable, because if people are willing to pay the prices involved it most certainly can persist.
I'd expect this kind of market fundamentalist dogmatism from Eran, but I expected better from you. At some point it will become impossible to pay the cost of continual soil depletion, erosion, fertilizer runoff, colony collapse, and climate change, all of which our industrial agriculture system contributes to. And to answer Eran's predictable non-point, the market is good at responding to short-term shifts in demand. It does not have a good record of averting crises before they happen.
mikema63 wrote:GMO, for example we could drastically reduce fertilizer use by engineering symbiotic fungus (called mychorhizzae) to also include the nitrogen fixation genes of certain bacteria (a single gene, a very simple process).
These fungus actually associate with the walls of the roots and can even go into the roots and associate with plant cells and help with water and nutrient absorption. Nitrogen is also a major reason we use so much fossil fuels in our agricultural process.
Adopting such a GMO universally would cut our fossil fuel use drastically almost overnight.
Possibly. I'm not dogmatically opposed to GMOs in principle, though I'm skeptical about how much we really understand about ecological dynamics and our effect on the environment. Under our current capitalist system, GMOs are largely used by Monsanto to make products resistant to their famous Roundup herbicide, so the crops can withstand more toxic chemicals being sprayed on them. They are also a major source of patent-trolling used to intimidate farmers who refuse to use their products and especially third world farmers who try to save seeds.
But the biggest thing that needs to change is monoculture. The reason we need all these fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides in the first place is that we try to plant a bunch of the same plants in straight rows and destroy any other plants that come up -- a very different approach than the way nature does it. Fortunately, permaculture design principles are becoming better understood today, and as mass consumer society gives way to a society built at a human level, food forests within people's own communities can begin to replace the mass industrial fields that are killing the planet as we speak.
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