Re:Bill Gates: My Plan to Improve Our World, and How You Can...
by contingencies on Tuesday November 12, 2013 @06:58PM
(#6722344)
Couldn't agree more. Fertilizer has been a major accelerator of unsustainable agricultural practices which, on the whole, have acted to centralize food production and agricultural land ownership in to the hands of industry, disempowering the world population and removing social and long term environmental sustainability concerns from the act of food production. Aside from poisoning vital and irreplaceable freshwater systems, the closely related practice of unsustainable water use has created salination poisoning agricultural land itself, and agricultural poisons further decay the remnants of the naturally sustainable and verdant ecosystems the industrial food factories supplant.
Given this situation, to then turn around and claim that GM is the answer is ludicrous. Modern civilization has clearly lost its way by diverging too far from nature, which abhors a monoculture. The obvious and sustainable path is a move towards heterogeneous planting patterns, and ideally toward greater decentralization in land ownership, production and the re-recognition of longer term concepts such as sustainability, social and environmental concern.
A simple example: I have read that many farms in the US are actually energy-negative, ie. they cannot produce enough calories in agricultural output to offset the oil they burn.
For those here wanting to improve the world through agricultural change, please consider reading some of the philosophy behind permaculture and the short but thought-provoking book The One Straw Revolution then applying technical knowledge to building robots that can efficiently harvest densely interplanted crops from potentially reformed large-scale agricultural operations that may accept a high variety of species and thus embrace natural methods for pest control and moisture retention, eliminating most agricultural overhead in existing operations. New operations should be smaller and decentralized, because we need exercise, nature is nice, and robots aren't free.
Tangentially, last night I met a guy who has spent three years trying to find ways to save coral reefs and said that on a global scale we're screwed - they're all going to be gone within less than a generation. I spent a few weeks in Sumatra last month and the rainforests for which it was once famed are almost gone. Meanwhile in many Asian population centers (I'm in Bangkok at the moment), a view from above confirms that concrete dominates a landscape of air conditioning and energy-inefficient floor to ceiling glass, pockmarked only by the nervous system of fossil fuel burning transportation infrastructure, the odd plane flying overhead about a brown haze, and the glimmer of thousands of unnatural lights feeding on the same fossils, while themselves produced through an alchemy poisonous chemicals. The virus that scarred the landscape this way, humans, potter at all hours throughout, concerning themselves with alcohol, fashion, colosseums of sports on television, and reproduction.
Given this situation, to then turn around and claim that GM is the answer is ludicrous. Modern civilization has clearly lost its way by diverging too far from nature, which abhors a monoculture. The obvious and sustainable path is a move towards heterogeneous planting patterns, and ideally toward greater decentralization in land ownership, production and the re-recognition of longer term concepts such as sustainability, social and environmental concern.
A simple example: I have read that many farms in the US are actually energy-negative, ie. they cannot produce enough calories in agricultural output to offset the oil they burn.
For those here wanting to improve the world through agricultural change, please consider reading some of the philosophy behind permaculture and the short but thought-provoking book The One Straw Revolution then applying technical knowledge to building robots that can efficiently harvest densely interplanted crops from potentially reformed large-scale agricultural operations that may accept a high variety of species and thus embrace natural methods for pest control and moisture retention, eliminating most agricultural overhead in existing operations. New operations should be smaller and decentralized, because we need exercise, nature is nice, and robots aren't free.
Tangentially, last night I met a guy who has spent three years trying to find ways to save coral reefs and said that on a global scale we're screwed - they're all going to be gone within less than a generation. I spent a few weeks in Sumatra last month and the rainforests for which it was once famed are almost gone. Meanwhile in many Asian population centers (I'm in Bangkok at the moment), a view from above confirms that concrete dominates a landscape of air conditioning and energy-inefficient floor to ceiling glass, pockmarked only by the nervous system of fossil fuel burning transportation infrastructure, the odd plane flying overhead about a brown haze, and the glimmer of thousands of unnatural lights feeding on the same fossils, while themselves produced through an alchemy poisonous chemicals. The virus that scarred the landscape this way, humans, potter at all hours throughout, concerning themselves with alcohol, fashion, colosseums of sports on television, and reproduction.