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).
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Well, I think shag -- who's been reviewing 'Omnivore's Dilemma' this week chapter by chapter -- has done an excellent job of showing how what I'll call subtle McKibben-isms are deeply embedded in Pollan's work. Pollan is a better, calmer writer than McKibben and presents necessary facts in a clearer way. Even so, his works are very much a part of the eco-romance tradition.
Andy wrote:
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.
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The fact that you felt the need to explain this tells me I failed to make my earlier point.
Because of course, I agree with every verified, technical objection Pollan and other critics of artificial fertilizer raise. When I mentioned the use of fertilizer, I wasn't acting as an unpaid spokesman for the farm lobby. I was saying that the rhetoric of naturalness presupposes the cause of problems related to the use of synthetics to be their 'unnatural' essence. So, even if sensible, safe and 'sustainable' methods for their use are found (thus providing us with another tool -- even if only used during emergencies when Pollan's 'solar based farming' techniques have a bad year or two) the naturalists would likely reject them for ideological reasons.
Andy wrote:
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.
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I think that the "Farmer in Chief" article implies -- with a good bit of deftness, really -- that Pollan is indeed rejecting "merely reduced use". But again, the issue isn't so much fertilizer use as it is the *way* determinations of 'appropriate technology' are made.
To use another example, liberated from the Pollan/fertilizer mishigas...
Recently, I had an absurdly serious argument with an old friend. She insisted that the climate would only be 'saved' if all personal vehicles were eliminated. I rebutted that I didn't care if someone drove an Escalade, so long as the manufacturing process was tightly watched for bad outputs and no C02e wafted from the tailpipes. She exploded. Clearly, I was a shill for Exxon (it's remarkable how many unpaid jobs I apparently hold with deep pocketed orgs -- I'm like Michael Clayton, without a paycheck).
Here's where we differed: she sees the vehicles as metallic embodiments of a disdain for nature. Climate, energy and aesthetic issues are the ostensible rationales for wanting them gone but really, the moral condemnation precedes all that. I don't share her view (in fact, I see it as shouty self righteousness masquerading as concern) preferrng to get the machines clean and leave moral judgments out of it. And so, we had an odd sort of argument - as odd as the one we're having onlist.
What made it odd (and hilarious - although, the more I laughed like an evil petrol baron, the redder she got) was that we agreed on nearly every point...except her underlying ideological one: cars and trucks are bad because they take you away from 'Nature'.
This, in a nutshell, sums up my objections to the naturalist genre. I agree with the list of problems cited. But when the time comes to explain why and what to do, it's usually my cue to part company.
.d.