Thursday 16 April 2015

A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development - NYTimes.com

I like a Farmer's Market as much as the next man. The main reason is the fun of chatting with the purveyors, as I do when I visit our monthly market here in DB, Hong Kong.  There's the "cheese lady" and the "sausage lady",  and the "home-made beer bloke".
But as I chat with and buy from these folks,  I don't kid myself that they're the saviours of our planet. I know that's nonsense. 
Now we have the "Eco-modernist manifest" that aims to use our smarts, not our gut-feelies, to feed our growing population, while reducing our environmental impact. 
A nice quote from the article linked below, in the International New York Times (a left-of-centre paper, let's recall). 
<<This new framework favors a very different set of policies than those now in vogue. Eating the bounty of small-scale, local farming, for example, may be fine for denizens of Berkeley and Brooklyn. But using it to feed a world of nine billion people would consume every acre of the world's surface. Big Agriculture, using synthetic fertilizers and modern production techniques, could feed many more people using much less land and water.>>

Sent from my iPad