> I'm saying: 'you're right to investigate, dissect and propose
> solutions to what ails industrial farming but, your proposals are
> shaped by the ideas and opinions you bring with you. One of these
> opinions is a disdain for artificial fertilizer use, which is
> described as a mostly bad thing (it powered industrial farming which
> led to bad foods, furthering our 'alienation' from 'Nature').
>
> As I wrote earlier, the *desire* to see the synthetics gone *precedes* the
> formation of the argument about the consequences of the end of cheap
> hydrocarbons.
>
> That being the case, if it turned out that a method could be found to
> preserve widespread artificial fertilizer use even after petrol became
> consistently very expensive, I suspect it would be harshly criticized
> because that would enable the continuation of large-scale industrial
> farming in the 'post peak' world.
>
> Thus spoiling the longed for renewal of 'natural rhythms'.
>
>
> It's this desire preceding the argument which most interests me.
I don't deny this deep-seated imagining of alienation from Nature, nor it's influence on arguments of this type. I also think it finds expression in the various millennialisms that have clustered around anticipated breaks in our technological civilization (then Y2K, now peak oil). There is a kind of fantasy that once this fucker burns down we can build the one we want on its ashes, whether it means holing up in our exurban compound with lots of guns being able to fend off an emasculated gummint and anybody not just like us, or riding our city bike down traffic-minimal roads to the organic farmer's market. And to be sure, Pollan's work no doubt finds fans in at least the latter set of Chaco-shod goateed smoothie-drinkers. Of course, so do writings on climate change and policy, a morass of wonkery if there ever was one.
My concern is that knowledge of this tendency colors the judgment of well-argued critiques of technologies. I focus on Pollan precisely because I think he has good and careful arguments, and yet attracts suspicion of romanticism -- in this case in the form of (however unconscious) feeling alienation from Nature, or thinking that artificial fertilizers are bad because their artificial. Again, this is not to say that there aren't authors who embrace this line of thinking explicitly (Bill McKibben comes to mind).
To address the examples you note, there are in fact longstanding problems with artificial fertilizers quite independent of peak oil. In the essay at the beginning of this thread he touches on a couple of them, one of them being denying a place to put all the animal waste. Other ones include runoff creating nitrate levels that spawn problems ranging from "dead zones" in the ocean to toxic concentrations of nitrate in the local drinking water -- the latter being a topical issue when I lived in rural Iowa in the late 80's. Now, perhaps it's possible to create such problems by using enough animal waste as fertilizer. It may be possible that such problems did in fact exist before the widespread use of artificial fertilizer and weren't recognized. I'm not aware of any research in this direction. It may be possible that reducing the amount of artificial fertilizer used would ameliorate these problems, but then I'm not aware of Pollan rejecting merely reduced use.
Regarding an "alienation from Nature", his avoidance and examination of this notion is one of the joys of reading his work. I haven't read _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ in a year, so it's possible that my memory is mistaken, but I recall going into it with my antennae out in anticipation of a McKibbenesque argument and being delightedly disappointed.
You may say that what you have in mind are unconscious motivations, a priori judgments of industry and chemicals and whatnot. Do the conscious motivations not suffice? We're confronted every day with concrete first-order reasons to wonder what might be wrong with how we work with food -- how hard should we dig for nebulous second-order motivations? Mind you, I'm not one to insist that an argument be demolished before investigating the psychological impetus for it, but I do think that it has to be done very carefully, and that is rarely the case.
I should note that this discussion slots into some earlier observations I've made:
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2007/2007-June/011982.html> <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2007/2007-June/011991.html>
-- Andy