Michael Pollan on What Sustainability is Really About
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12.16.07
Michael Pollan writes in the New York Times about how the word sustainability is losing its meaning.
"When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”
Read full New York Times article "::Our Decrepit Food Factories" We give a lot of space to Michael Pollan; read also ::Michael Pollan: The Government Makes You Fat and ::The Silence of the Yams. Read also Collin's new review of The Omnivore's Dilemma over at ::Planet Green in our new :Build a Green Library section.
Excellent article by Pollen!
What is not mentioned in this post is that the article does an amazing job using two examples to show how factory farming and monocultures are unsustainable.
1. Antibiotics in pigs are most likely causing MRSA, "the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005"
"...at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases."
2. A 600,000-acre Almond monoculture in California (80% of the world's crop) is stressing the army of bees that are now imported from far distances to the annual pollination. There are more than a million hives housing as many as 40 billion bees in all. This is likely leading to Colony Collapse Disorder.
"California’s almond orchards have become “one big brothel” — a place where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever pathogens they may have picked up. Add to this their routine exposure to agricultural pesticides and you have a bee population ripe for an epidemic national in scope."
He ends with:
"...whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word."