Ruminations on the "Green Bubble"

[billcoe]

People in Africa are not starving because they are somehow incapable of growing their own food, or because the land is recently unfit for agriculture. It's a policy problem of how their governments are run. They are kept in extreme poverty by warlord dictators, by Western trade policies that force them to grow cash crops rather than their own food and then prevent them from making a sustainable amount of money doing so (see: coffee, cacao), and by their constant refugee status as inter-tribal wars force them to flee from their homes.

 

I find it strange that if what you say is true, they don't just "change policies". God forbid Monsanto try and get food production to increase and they make a buck on it in the process....better they just starve I suppose....

 

My brother and sister in law did the peace corp over there, and what you say really only applies to some of the countries, Africa is surprisingly, you may come to learn, a huge continent, with surprisingly, you may come to learn, many many country's as it turns out. All different.

[Fairweather]

JayB - While I enjoyed and agree with much of the piece you presented and I haven't read Pollan's "In Defense of Food", I did recently read his book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and I have to say it was impressive. The guy is not a veggie-head and explains the advent of our corn-based agriculture and its consequences. He pulls no punches about the hypocrisy of the "Whole Foods" crowd either and the fact that their meals are just as "awash in petroleum" as the industrial diet. IMO, he fails to reconcile his disdain for the feedlot with Abbey's raw hatred of rampant grazing, but he makes no judgements about meat and presents all sides fairly. The book is not a "Fast Food Nation" or "The Jungle" type read--Pollan treats his reader with respect. I recommend his book. .02

 

 

[Bosterson]

JayB - While I enjoyed and agree with much of the piece you presented, and I haven't read Pollan's "In Defense of Food", I did recently read his book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and I have to say it was impressive. The guy is not a veggie-head and explains the advent of our corn-based agriculture and its consequences. He pulls no punches about the hypocrisy of the "Whole Foods" crowd either and the fact that their meals are just as "awash in petroleum" as the industrial diet. IMO, he fails to reconcile his disdain for the feedlot with Abbey's raw hatred of rampant grazing, but he makes no judgements about meat and presents all sides fairly. The book is not a "Fast Food Nation" or "The Jungle" type read--Pollan treats his reader with respect. I recommend his book. .02

 

Wow! I'm impressed.

 

I haven't read Omnivore's Dilemma, but I have read In Defense of Food. I gather that IDoF is sort of like OD-lite - streamlined for a more everyday audience. He also outlines his guidelines of what to eat (eg, don't eat anything containing chemicals you can't pronounce, don't eat anything your grandma wouldn't recognize as food, etc.). I don't know if OD has that. The best bit in IDoF is where he dissects the ingredients of a loaf of Sara Lee wheat bread (there's something like 35 of them) and then pronounces it "not food."

[Bosterson]

I find it strange that if what you say is true, they don't just "change policies". God forbid Monsanto try and get food production to increase and they make a buck on it in the process....better they just starve I suppose....

 

I don't think anyone is presuming that all of Africa is homogeneous, poor, and starving, and I don't really think you think we think that.

 

As for "changing policies," the ones in question are ours. I don't think war-torn West Africa has enough clout with the World Bank to effect a lot of change in how much it gets paid for its exports. I should said that it was a "government and policy" problem, though: extra aid/wealth/food doesn't help when it goes to warlords...

 

And I can't believe you'd actually suppose Monsanto would be doing something out of the "goodness of their hearts" (they don't have hearts): GMOs are patented and are worth money, money impoverished African countries doesn't have. Using patented seeds also limits farmers' future self-determination since they can't save their own seeds and get locked into a system of buying the expensive patented ones.

[ivan]

isn't this all a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the proverbial titantic? what does it matter what the fuck we eat? in a geological blink of an eye, the cockroaches will be eating all of us. and how much power do we really have to effect any of this? the illusion over control over one's life is a very modern phenomona, no? i don't think too many sumerian slaves and farmers were wondering, "hmm, i wonder what impact eating these figs is having on the global environment" nor capable of doing a damn thing about it if they could even formulate an answer to that question in the first place.

[Fairweather]

We are putting the cart before the horse in that we subsidize the production of corn we can't use, so we stuff it into the rumen of cows that aren't meant to consume it, pump it into our gas tanks at a net loss, and fail to properly rotate our crops to the detriment of the soil upon which we scatter enormous quantities of synthetic Nitrogen--which itself, requires tremendous amounts of oil to fix (from the atmosphere).

[j_b]

isn't this all a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the proverbial titantic? what does it matter what the fuck we eat? in a geological blink of an eye, the cockroaches will be eating all of us. and how much power do we really have to effect any of this? the illusion over control over one's life is a very modern phenomona, no? i don't think too many sumerian slaves and farmers were wondering, "hmm, i wonder what impact eating these figs is having on the global environment" nor capable of doing a damn thing about it if they could even formulate an answer to that question in the first place.

 

The sumerians were around much before the industrial revolution when the population of the earth wasn't 6.75 billion; their methods weren't as damaging to the environment as are ours. In other words, resource and ecosystem service limits were still a long ways away, whihc is very different from today (peak oil, depletion of biotic resources, species extinctions, ..). The other part of the answer is the chemical industry and productivism have introduced over 50,000 new molecules since the 2nd world war for which we have no track record and the toxicity of which has never been studied. Whereas sumerians were mostly in quasi-equilibrium with their environment , we are clearly not. According to Paul Crutzen (of CFC/nobel prize fame) and many other scientists, we have entered the Anthropocene, when humans have become a significant global geophysical force capable of altering the planetary environment in a most significant way.

[PhöQ]

To be is to do -Socrates

 

To do is to be -Sartre

 

Do Be Do Be Do -Sinatra

 

Scooby Dooby Do -Scooby Do

 

Yaba Daba Doo! -Fred Flintstone

 

[j_b]

"the green bubble"

 

Never have conservatives been so on top of a so-called "bubble". It took them market crashes, economies tanking and systemic fraud to acknowledge the speculative bubbles of the last 30 years but this one they claim to have it figured out from the get go. What a bunch of charlatans.

[erden]

Anyone else starting to think that Prius drivers are replacing BMW drivers as the biggest a-holes on the road? I feel like those two are now in a dead heat in terms of which drivers get upset about being stuck behind a bicyclist and end up driving into oncoming traffic to try to get around them.

 

Pathetic attitude above.

I drive a Prius.

I also ride a bicycle.

 

Erden.

[denalidave]

Don't leave Jetta drivers out of this thread!

 

[Doug Smith]

We are putting the cart before the horse in that we subsidize the production of corn we can't use, so we stuff it into the rumen of cows that aren't meant to consume it, pump it into our gas tanks at a net loss, and fail to properly rotate our crops to the detriment of the soil upon which we scatter enormous quantities of synthetic Nitrogen--which itself, requires tremendous amounts of oil to fix (from the atmosphere).

 

 

You make a very good point.