The Green Revolution 1 – Cure or Kill?

I have read over your post several times now Lash to get my head around it, so hopefully I can provide some inputs of relevance. Like anything achieved in life, there are always byproducts of activity. Yes, the intentions are honourable, but in order to give, there are many things that must be taken also in order to give it. Bio-fuel is another example. Sure, its ability to lessen environmental impact from an emissions perspective is a positive; but the impact on the environment and economy in other areas was not forseen. In a sense, crops are no different from some diseases. They feed off their surrounding environments and eventually can become hungry for more than what is available so will either consume vital entities in order to survive, or will wither away and die. Earth nutrients are of course not inexhaustible and a these crops may start off as boon's, but it will always only be a matter of time before they sap the very life out of everything around them and even the land itself can become a virtual wasteland with no future potential on any level at all. From the little I know about these areas, in my opinion, the key is to be more holistic and longer-term aware. Efforts also need to be made to seek complimentary crop combinations can co-exist in a fashion where they are more able to feed off each other. These achievments are not possible at just plant level either. Insects, animals, birds, fish...... All contribute equally to provide a sustainable ecosytem with longevity. Growing a crop for the sake of growing a crop is a temporary fix! What is drawn out of the earth must be somehow put back in and it has to be cyclical. Third World countries may benefit in the short term, but without the all encompassing approaches I have vaguely mentioned, the longer term outcomes can actually make them worse off. On another level, there has been significant advancement in plant gene manipulation and maybe there should be more of a focus on creating new "super crops" that are in a sense sustainable recyclers of themselves that rely on multiple sources of nutrients that are also self-sustainable and reliable on the plants in return. I have crapped on and hope I am on track! lol. Anyways, this is an interesting area of knowledge that I need to read some more about once I have the time. Thanks for giving my brain such a work-out for the first day of 2009!

As always Lash, you have posted a discussion that required some thought before answering. Here were my immediate thoughts after reading your initial posting. The Green Revolution, which in essence, tries to artificially increase or inflate a crops yield, may have short term benefits, but perhaps disastrous consequences. Consequences that science, is not able to predict. In everything that we do, there is a "ripple effect", if you will. One drop of water, into a bucket will reverberate throughout the whole bucket. This same is true for our environments and our ecosystems. What may seem to be a wonderful solution, made turn out to have unimaginable effects, science has yet to even fathom. The Green Revolution, in my mind, has many similarities, with Western societies, exaggerated reliance on science and technology as "proof". Western philosophies, and in particular Western scientific theory, relies on evidence that we can "see" with our own eyes, if one can not see it, it must not exist, or is simply not yet been proven. Eastern philosophy, is much more open to embracing ideas that do not have a concrete scientific basis. Although, I have not spent a large amount of time, thinking, of the impact of science and technology on the environment, I have spent some time pondering science, and how relates to medicine, and ethics ETC. When it comes to medicine, I have generally come to the conclusion, that just because we can , it does not necessarily mean that we should! This is because of that ripple effect I referred to earlier, and the fact that our current human intelligence does not allow us to predict with any accuracy, every foreseeable consequence to our action. Thus, scientific exploration can be beneficial, but needs to be approached with caution, and given a respect, which I have yet to see. Scientific Exploration needs to be given our utmost respect, because one false conclusion may result in our own demise. That's just my 2¢ worth, if this sparks, any further thoughts, please do share. I would much rather, post to an intelligent discussion, rather than fluff. Although, under the right circumstances fluff can be fun!

I think I have grasped what you were talking about. Tell me if I am wrong but it seems that you are saying that monocropping is destructive of the environment and that before the GR we grew many different crops in the same area to keep bugs at bay etc. I thought we had been using single crops for a long time. My understanding of the history of farm technology was that by inventing machines that made harvesting easier and used less labour the farmer had to have huge fields of the one crop. So we must have already known about the problems before we exported it to the third world. That means that they exported a known problem and just closed their eyes to the poisons and all the problems that came with them. I cannot comprehend the mind that puts money above all moral considerations. That is able to devalue humans as being worth less than a chemical etc. I do not think that science has any answers at all. Science funding comes from vested interests who only fund research into finding new chemicals not solving problems or not using chemicals. The big chemical companies do not want to know about non chemical solutions. Just as the automotive industries bought and shelved any non petrol engines so that they could go on producing cars that no one wanted.

At least we're trying! As time goes on, those things that don't work well will be supplanted by better ideas. We've made a horrible mess of things, and we have to do all we can to get things back to safety. Of course, there's more than one way to accomplish almost everything, so as we continue seeking ways to get our planet back together, I think we're bound to mess up here and there, but we'll end up with the best of all possibilities given time. Obviously, we forgot the gas lines of the 70s and the hold over us that the OPEC nations have. Did we learn from it? We'll find out as we continue to bring green back.

I think they may have partial solutions. The problem I see with many of them is, like with pharmaceutical testing, they only do relatively short term tests. The theories work, but somehow they don't see far enough ahead to see the shortcomings of the theory.