Today is the American holiday Thanksgiving.   It’s a day for family and to give thanks for what we have, especially for food and other basic needs.   Normally, it is God who is cited as the one to give thanks to, but I’d like to thank some others.

Although the following individuals are no longer with us, I still would like to offer thanks, if only to their memory and legacy.  Although they may not be here to appreciate it, others can:

John Deere, who revolutionized agriculture with the invention of the cast steel plow and the mass production of steel agricultural implements, something whose revolutionary improvements in effeciency are lost on most today.

Fritz Haber, whose development of synthetic ammonia and thus the establishment of the modern fertilizer industry has so improved life and saved so many that it far eclipses his work on chemical warfare.

Carl Bosch, whose work with Haber and with BASF turned Haber’s laboratory process into a viable industrial scale system for producing large amounts of fertilizer.

Paul Hermann Müller, Who first discovered the insecticidal properties of DDT and promoted its use.  Although DDT has since fallen from favor, it was the first “modern” insecticide in many respects and paved the way to the widespread use of organochlorides in pest control.

Norman Borlaug, for his tireless promotion of modern agriculture, including synthetic fertilizer and genetic engineering.  His contributions are felt more in the poorest areas of the world than the richest, where his work is credited with saving hundreds of millions, if not over a billion lives.

Seawell Wright, for not only helping to establish modern evolutionary genetics, but for enormous contributions to the understanding of domestic crop and animal genetics and breeding, helping to turn selective breeding and inbreeding into a true science and paving the way for genetic modification of crops and livestock.

To all others who helped establish and improve modern agriculture, including the “Factory Farm,” something most see as a negative term, ignoring the fact that factories the method of producing lots of product at a low cost.   Today the quality, bounty, reliability and economics of our food supply are greater than ever in human history.   Even those just a few generations back would be stunned by the great progress made.  What remains is the hope of extending this progress and bounty to all people of the world.

Final note:  I realize that all those named above are men.  I’m not trying to be sexist, but the fact of the matter is that few prominent scientists and industrialists were women until fairly recently in Western history.  There certainly have been women who have contributed, although their names may have been lost to history, in some circumstances.   However, I should also thank my mom and aunt, who have slaved over a hot stove for most of today and much of yesterday!

If you happen to be a farmer who grows sugar beets, you could be in for some trouble if you plan on doing so on public land.   On the other hand, if you’re a company like ADM that makes sweeteners from corn, you might be hearing some very sweet news.

Via the Associated Press:

BOULDER, Colo. — Famuer Rasmussen Jr. and five other farmers filed what they thought was a routine request to grow genetically modified sugar beets on public land in Colorado’s Boulder County. The county already had allowed genetically altered corn.

But the farmers got an earful.

Complaints from residents and organic food activists concerned about the crops’ safety and local businesses hoping to maintain Boulder as a center for natural and organic products prompted county commissioners to reassess their genetically modified crops policy.

…

Aurora Organic Dairy Chairman Mark Retzloff opposed the altered corn six years ago, but said a lack of public awareness may have led the county to allow it.

“Many of us decided this time we needed to be proactive,” he said. “Last time, it wasn’t made an issue to the public.”

…

“This is all theater for opposition to biotech,” Markwart said.

In September, a federal judge in San Francisco overturned regulatory approval of Roundup Ready sugar beets and ordered a U.S. Department of Agriculture agency to study their environmental impact after the Port Townsend, Wash.-based Organic Seed Alliance and others filed a lawsuit.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White found the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service violated environmental law by failing to take a hard look at whether the beets could share their genes with other crops through cross-pollination. The agency is reviewing the ruling.

…

Organic food interests plan to ask White at an Oct. 30 hearing to bar new plantings of the crop, but Boulder County commissioners are thinking beyond sugar beets.

“Our questions are bigger,” county commissioner Ben Pearlman said. “Do we allow GMO at all? If so, under what circumstances and what do we want grown?”

….

Local farmers say they’ve been waiting for Roundup Ready sugar beets for decades, after having to yank rope-like weeds from sugar beet fields by hand.

“When we were kids, I remember pulling weeds. Sometimes we were glad to go back to school,” joked 54-year-old Boulder County farmer Paul Schlagel, whose family is in its 100th year of harvesting sugar beets.

Though farmers might pay Monsanto $50 an acre on technology fees for Roundup Ready beets, they can save on herbicide and labor while boosting yields, Schlagel said.

“To us, it’s a no-brainer,” he said. “You use less chemicals, less fuel.”

County commissioners now hope to craft a new policy for any GMO in time for the 2011 growing season.

“We want to make sure our open space land is farmed to help us deal with weeds and overall stewardship of the land,” Pearlman said. “We also want management of open space land to be consistent with our environmental stewardship values, which we hold close to our hearts.”

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We have lost one of greatest figures in the history of humanitarianism and science.   Norman Borlaug can be credited with saving the lives of upward of one billion people, a number so high that it’s hard to step back and really appreciate the significance of his contributions.   Although Borlaug certainly did not do this all by himself, his tireless work in the promotion of modern agriculture can’t be underestimated in its effects.

Borlaug won a number of prestigious awards during his lifetime, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and numerous high awards from countries including India, Mexico and several African countries.   He is best known as the single most influential figure in the Green Revolution, which should not be confused with “Green” as in “Green Party” or “Green Energy.”

Borlaug was educated in plant pathology and genetics at the University of Minnesota.   He began his work at Dupont, in the 1940’s, where he worked on agricultural chemistry and microbiology, developing fungicides and other agricultural technologies to protect crops from pests and disease.   In 1944 he began work on the “Cooperative Wheat Research Production Program,” a program intended to research and develop better wheat production methods and higher crop yields in Mexico.   At the time, Mexico was a net importer of wheat and had suffered from a number of disastrously low seasonal harvests.    This began a decades-long career of research and promotion of agricultural science throughout the world.
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Tell me something I didn’t already know!

If you’ve been reading this site for any period of time, you probably are aware that there is no scientific evidence that so-called “organic” food is any better for you than conventional food.  The products are very difficult to distinguish at all, resulting in testing as extreme as stable isotope analysis in order to try to differentiate true “organic” products.

Now what we already knew has been re-confirmed by a recent study that has been making the rounds in the news media.

Via Reuters:

Organic food not healthier, study finds

LONDON (Reuters) – Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over conventionally produced food, according to a major study published on Wednesday.

Its conclusions were challenged by organic food campaigners.

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers paid higher prices for organic food in part because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.

A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference.

“A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance,” said Alan Dangour, one of the report’s authors.

“Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority.”

This really should not be news to anyone.   There has never been any hard science produced to show that “organic food” is any better than conventionally produced food.   Despite a lot of discussion over the composition of the foods, when you get down to it, they’re made of the same stuff.   Organic crops are composed of things like water, cellulose, salt, sugars, plant lipids and so on.   This is exactly the same thing that conventional crops are composed of.   There’s no reason to presume that organic foods would be higher in any vitamin or mineral content and, as confirmed by analysis, they’re not!

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Fresh water is one of the most overlooked resources on earth, especially given that supplies of fresh water are increasingly strained by development in areas where adequate water reserves do not exist.  As development of urban areas and agriculture expands, water is becoming more of a limiting factor.  Wells are being pumped to the point of endangering the sustainability of aquifers and entire rivers are now diverted to provide for both irrigation and water for cities.

One solution to this problem is desalination.   Currently, it is used primarily in areas where water is simply not avaliable by other means.   It is expensive due to the large amounts of energy needed to extract fresh water from sea water, however, it also offers the only source of water that is effectively unlimited and avaliable anywhere within reasonable distance of the coastline.

There is, thus far, only one example of a reactor which was operated primarily for the purpose of fresh water production:

The BN350 Reactor in Kazakhstan produced about 1000 MW of thermal power.   The reactor was used to generate 150 megawatts of electricity, but most of the thermal energy was used for process heat at a desalination plant, resulting in the production of 120,000 cubic meters of fresh water per day.

Larger generation III+ reactors produce about four times as much thermal power, with the USAPWR producing about 4,451 MWt and the European Pressurized Reactor producing about 4,500 MWt.  A common nuclear power plant layout has two such reactors operating in tandem, thus having a total thermal output of about eight to nine gigawatts.

Assuming that the same effeciency as the BN350 setup were achieved in a conventional regenerative steam distillation plant, such a two-reactor driven desalination plant could therefore deliver about one million cubic meters of water per day (over one quarter of a billion US gallons), as well as more than half a gigawatt of electricity – more than enough for all plant operations as well as activities like pumping water, operating equipment and other internal activities.

To put this another way, since one acre-foot  is equal to 1234 cubic meters, such a desalination plant could produce 810 acre-feet of water per day or about 283,500 acre-feet per year.

What that equates to:

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The following video was found on the site Panearth, which was posted on a comment by Steven Earl Milroy.   While it may seem benign on the surface, I honestly can say it is one of the most chilling videos I have seen in a long time.  What is so chilling is that people would support this philosophy.  I just hope that any support for this belief is out of ignorance of history and the implications of such lifestyle.   Those who would stand behind this, even aware of the historical context really take things to another level of cruelty and anti-humanism.

This video was made by Danian Quinn.

First the big question:  Did we really go “wrong”?   Modern society certainly gets plenty of criticism for its impacts on the enviornment and the fact that people no longer live “simple” and “natural” lives.   There may be something to the claim that people have more complex lives with more to worry about.  Of course, there’s a need to qualify the word “simple” in this context.   If a “simple” life is one where one need not worry about things like bills to be paid, getting to their apointments on time and picking up the dry cleaning because they only have one daily task, namely backbreaking work in the fields and if their only worry is whether they’ll live much longer then one could call that simple, although I’ll take the complex hustle and bustle of modern life over that any day.

Of course, it is certainly true that there has been some impact on resources and environments due to industrialization.   Humans cut down old growth forests, and dug up land for minerals.   The other side, of course is that a person living in a modern society can reasonably expect to live into their 70’s.   Numerous causes of death and misery have been avoided.  In industrial societies people rarely die of bacterial infections, which were once the leading cause of death.   Those with physical disabilities can lead productive, fulfilling lives, food is plentiful and the common person can even do things like travel to distant parts of the world, experience culture and scientific discoveries and communicate with their family.

And while net consumption of society may have increased, the per-capita impact has not necessarily risen so greatly, especially in light of greater effeciency in resource utilization.  Maintaining the current population, or anything near it would not simply be unsustainable, it would be downright impossible – even at an extremely low standard of living.   Deindustrialization can result in one and only circumstance:  most people die.

It is not simply an issue of modern people having the means to go experience the Grand Canyon, Stonehenge or the ruins of ancient Rome.  The very fact that people in modern societies have time to enjoy a movie, a Broadway show or even read a book is a distinct difference from centuries past when the very notion of entertainment, leisure and activities for enjoyment and personal fulfillment were the domain of the extravagantly wealthy.

The Industrial Revolution saw the largest jump in life expectancy and general health of the common person in human history.   It also produced a mass migration toward cities and toward unified national societies.   In countries where industrialization took root, it killed the last vestiges of tribalism and community isolation.   In modern times, the Industrial Revolution has often been cast in an extremely negative light by those like Quinn, who will be quick to point out that industrialization often involved workers who lived in deplorable conditions as well as industries that polluted and consumed resources.   While there may be some truth to these claims, they do not tell the full story of the social impacts of industrialization.    To us, the tenements of Manhattan and the sweat shops of London may seem like a meager existence, but to those who lived in more primitive conditions, they were far more desirable than a life of digging potatoes in the countryside of Ireland or Poland.   The masses of immigrants fled subsistence life to carve out a better existence in an industrial society, but few if any fled factories to find a better life toiling in the fields.

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Given that there have been a number of high profile food recalls and forborne illness outbreaks in North America, it’s not surprising that the US government is looking to revamp food safety regulations.   Since the turn of the 20th century, food safety has only improved in the US as time has gone on and inspection and safety standards have become more rigorous.  That is, until recently.   The CDC has found that the past three years have seen an increase in foodborne illness and a general reduction in food safety.  This is an alarming reversal of the long standing trend of improvements in food safety.

Thus the US congress is mulling new legislation intended to improve food safety standards and inspection of agricultural products.  I can honestly say that I don’t know enough about the bill to know whether or not it has any potential for improving things, but it is certainly an area that needs some action taken.   But many in the “organic food” cult don’t seem to think so.

Here’s what one “letter to the editor” has to say:

Food Safety Modernization Act would ruin agriculture

Tricia Trenary, Culpeper
Published: April 9, 2009

The destruction of our natural farming system has not only contributed to disease in this country but has in many cases made it impossible for our immune systems to remain healthy.

We must take action to prevent HR 875 (the Food Safety Modernization Act) and ones like it from passing. This bill is put up by Monsanto and other monolithic corporations trying to seize totalitarian control over all agriculture. It was introduced by Rosa DeLauro, and is ultimately about one thing, defining only their own GMO (Genetically Mutated Organism) products as “safe.”

What makes the bill so dangerous is that it is heavy on penalties, including prison time, while at the same time being incredibly vague about what would actually trigger those sanctions. HR 875 is nothing but a Trojan horse, with an invading army to be designated later, in the form of a bureaucratic administrator (most likely a corporate lobbyist shill) with the lawmaking power to make up their own definitions so that all competitors are either driven into bankruptcy or locked up.

There are problems with food safety we can talk about, but HR 875 is not going to make us safer. It must be stopped.

Tricia Trenary
Culpeper

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Right now, we as humans, have a choice to make:  Keep doing things the old way that got us into an enviornmental mess or start changing how we live, how society works and the basics of human behavior and social dynamics.   It’s clear that the planet is in truely dire straights.   With global warming getting worse every day and nuclear waste piling up, it’s clear that doomsday is right around the corner.   Unless, of course, we change.

What does this change mean?   It means no more use of energy in non-essential ways, with a focus on effeciency.  We have to stop living shameful lives of travel and entertainment and go back to small communal living, where local trade and modest living will lead to happiness.   We must stop lusting for things like big screen televisions, shopping malls, automobiles, airliners, spacecraft, science laboratories, hospitals other energy hungry items.   Living naturally means living in harmony with the earth so that our lives make the earth healthy.  In turn, we can trust the earth to make us healthy.

Most modern diseases are due to artificial things.   Organic agriculture and organic living can rid us of these bad chemicals, bad radiation and bad emotions that poison the world around us and our bodies.

Make the right choice!

Here’s a video I made about this important issue:

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Well, of course, all food is organic, but when it comes to the arbitrary label that is stuck on the trendy foods, how the hell do you tell what is organic and what isn’t?   After all, the food itself is not really altered by whether the nitrates or phosphates it absorbes came from exotic bat sh*t from Chile or some standard phosphate fertilizer.   Much of the time, the chemicals that are put on the plants are also identical, even if one is synthetic and the other “natural.”     And some fear that “organic” companies may have been spiking their fertalizer with a little bit of the synthetic stuff, which has happened before.

It would seem that milk would be even more difficult, given the degrees of separation between fertilizer, plant, cattle feed, cow and milk.  So how do you verify it?   Is it possible.

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In a recent post I expressed some of my frustrations and feelings about those who have been active in the anti-nuclear movement, especially in the context of the recent coal waste issues that the TVA has been experiencing.   It is my contention that those who have been so active in opposing the TVA’s plans to operate nuclear reactors at Watts Bar, Bellafonte and other locations are in a way responsible for these coal disasters.  This is because the anti-nuclear movement’s efforts in making it as difficult and expensive to build nuclear power plants is responsible for many plants not being built and therefore the continued operation of coal power plants.

I make no bones about the fact that I’m really losing patience with this movement, especially when it comes to claims of having the ethical high ground.   I’m pro-nuke and proud of it and I’m tired of having to deal with attacks on my credibility or motives and I’d like to turn the tables.

Professor Ross McCluney was one named in the post and he responded with a comment.   I’d like to thank Dr. McCulney for coming up an defending his position.  Obviously I disagree with Dr. McCulney in a variety of ways, but I appreciate his response. Energy policy and environmental issues are always going to be contentious and I have no problem with all sides having their fair say. It is healthy and appropriate that both sides in such issues be vetted and debated publicly, as the choices our society makes in this area will ultimately affect not only us all, but future generations as well.

Therefore, I’d like to respond to the comment piece by piece and issue by issue:

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