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    Re: Um .. are we forgetting evolution. Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on July 17, 2022, 12:35 pm, in reply to "Um .. are we forgetting evolution."

    Finally watched the Monbiot interview on Novara and didn't hate it as much as I was expecting:





    The critique of industrial meat production is well made, if not original, and he's done some good investigation on the insanity of, for example, cutting down rainforest to produce soya to feed chickens in Herefordshire to poison the river Wye. It's when he gets to his proposed solutions that it becomes intolerable. I was going to sit down and write a long rant about lab-grown food but it turns out I already did two years ago on a previous thread when he had just started making these proposals, so I'll just copy paste to save time:

    *****

    https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/archive/1578836052.html

    [Lab grown food] Sounds like a dystopian nightmare, a final complete divorce from lived reality and active participation in real ecosystems. All food growing done by techno-specialists working in lab facilities in the deserts...

    The potential unintended consequences off a drastic move like this are off the scale! Besides which it won't solve population growth, it will exacerbate it. Basic ecology: the population of any species grows in direct relation to the amount of food available to it. Because of the capitalist growth imperative frankenfoods like this, if they ever get off the ground (gods forbid), will just raise the carrying capacity to a new high and the population will spike upwards to meet it in short order, just like it did after the 20thC green revolution. Then we'll be in exactly the same situation, except with even more terrestrial space completely dominated by human biomass and sterile living[sic]-spaces. At least pasture land provides space for some wildlife to live alongside the domesticates - a blessing of that 'inefficiency' he complains about. Surely he can't be dumb enough to believe this take-it-all culture will 'set aside' land for rewilding for any meaningful length of time?? If not agriculture they will expand urban areas or find some minerals to mine or cover it in solar farms or some shit. A child could figure this out, yet Monbiot apparently hasn't during his decades of environmental campaigning.

    Jevons Paradox: any increase in efficiency in the consumption of a resource will result in a still greater consumption of the same. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

    He says he was 'booed to the rafters' speaking on this subject at the Oxford Real Farming Conference recently: https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1215526664282742784

    Several commenters call this out as an exaggeration, saying there were a few scattered boos, but mostly polite listening and some applause. Video footage coming out soon apparently...

    I

    *****

    As with so many other tech-based 'solutions' it comes down to hubris - the idea that you could totally reinvent human subsistence and biological adaptations that have evolved and fine-tuned over millions of years (as Shyaku points out) and everything will work out just fine is just off-the-scale arrogance and stupidity. It was bad enough with veganism, which has never existed in any human culture that I'm aware of (just have some B12 supplements: you'll be fine!) but this is the next level. (Yes, I know that a lot of this also applies to the meat industry and across modern food production, much of which is already designed in labs, but at least the ingredients start out as something recognisable as food to begin with.)

    Finally, all this focus on livestock lets arable farming off the hook, so I'll leave this here for balance:

    https://www.wesjones.com/oilweeat.htm

    Pasture grazing may be inefficient and destructive of prior ecologies like prairie, wetland, forest etc but at least other species can live there too, albeit drastically reduced from their previous abundance and often harrassed and killed by ranchers. Nothing lives in fields of wheat or maize grown with modern machinery and chemical toxins.

    cheers,
    I

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