On Fri, 10 Oct 2008, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
> Like so much of Pollan's work (see his very uneven book, 'In Defense of
> Food') this article makes lovely points but suffers from a distracting,
> big-ass flaw. In this case, it's Pollan's belief (common in
> neo-naturale-foodie and peak oil doomer circles) that the loss of 'cheap
> oil' will mean the loss of nitrogen fertilizer and, consequently, an
> inevitable move into a new age of 'post petrol', 'solar based' farming.
<snip>
> Of course, during the oil age we've heavily used hydrocarbons to provide
> the energy part of the mix -- after all, it's a powerful and versatile
> fuel -- but that's far from essential.
>
> More about this here -
>
> <http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/000302.html>
I'm not sure I follow your objection here. I don't think Pollan claims anywhere that you can only get nitrogen fertilizer from natural gas. The claim is rather that this kind of fertilizer replaced manure because it was cheaper than manure. And when energy ceases to be cheap, that will no longer be true. Pointing out that you can make it with alternative energy doesn't undercut that argument since alternative energy is more expensive, not less expensive.
So the economic argument would still hold. For greenhouse purposes, clearly either one would do. But given a choice, you'd choose the cheaper. And the argument about manure being pollution when it's not used as fertilizer would still hold. So this objection doesn't seem to affect the argument at all. Perhaps I'm missing something?
> I'd prefer to just re-do the food system in sensible ways, without all
> the hot air.
Chacun sa gout. But it's hard to persuade people without rhetoric. And powerful rhetoric, the kind people can remember and internalize and reproduce on their own spontaneously -- the kind of the Repugs have flooded this country with -- depends on having a few simple images in the middle of it that you connect everything too.
It is true he's pitched this article in terms of nature and rurual life. But it could just as easily be pitched in the terms of alternative science and technology and human inventiveness in which you are more at home. If you liked the plan, that would be your job, to put in terms that would persuade people like you. You could call it the polyculture system rather than the sun system, and emphasize all the scientific experimentation that the successful implementation of such a system would require. For it to work, we would have to learn things we don't yet know how to do. And I think Pollan is unusually clear about that. He's not a prelapsarian. And there's nothing inherently anti-technology about the phrase solar power.
If you don't like the plan, then the stylistic clash between the rhetoric he's using and the kind you prefer seems is kind of besides the point and obvious. Nobody who knew you even virtually would ever think of you as a nature boy.
> Oh and one other thing...
>
> Reading Pollan, you'd think that petrol had such such a massive role in
> modern farming, that every element of the process was handled by
> machine. And yet, we have all those migrant workers -- the unhappy
> targets of anti-immigrant attention -- working American fields and meat
> processing facilities. Clearly, farming is still very human labor
> intensive, despite the invention of the internal combustion engine.
>
> Apparently missing this element of modern farming, Pollan writes:
>
> > To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require
> > more people growing food -- millions more.
This is very nasty I think completely unjustified. Do you really think Pollan is unaware of the role migrant laborers play in farming? His home state of observation is California. I think he probably has the statistics on that subject readier to hand than you or I.
It's true he doesn't talk about it in this already very long piece. And when he says his proposal will require increasing the number of "farmers" from the present 2 million to millions more, he's talking about what the BLS calls "farm managers." Migrant workers, who were here in in large numbers back in the days of grass fed beef, and are here in large numbers now, are kind of a wheel that doens't turn the mechanism in this particular argument. I personally am not sure whether their relative manhours per acre have gone up, down or stayed the same over the last 60 years. But no matter which it is, it wouldn't change the argument about farm managers. It would require millions more of those.
And while I will easily grant that you could write an entirely new article considering the effect of this on migrant workers and whether it would be a net boon or bane for them, I don't see how leaving it out leads to a logical flaw of some sort. Indeed, his emphasis on how his proposed system will be more labor intensive is already more honest than most proponents of this sort of thing.
But the implication that it's never occured to him that human workers are involved just seems, like I said, nasty and factually untrue. If you have an argument that his "sun system" would be inherently worse than the present "oil system" for workers, I'm sure he would take that objection seriously. I certainly would. Do you?
Michael