June 25, 2005

The Oil We Eat
posted by Jerry Junior 19 years ago
  • This is a great article. Thanks.
  • Great link. On a related note, Michael Polan's Power Steer article gives additional depth to these issues.
  • What a good read. Though I fear it must be filed with my growing collection of 'Why we are completely fucked and there's not a lot we can do about it anymore' articles. I'm sure I have vestigial memories of a previous life where I was sat at tribal council saying 'But see, if we settle here and stick all the grasses in the one field, think of the time the folk will save in gathering'. I'd like to apologise for the bad advice.
  • Harper's one of the very few magazines I still buy. That article haunted me for days. There's another on the latest issue about logging and strip mining that's equally sobering.
  • /shakes fist /beads & feathers
  • I bought my long-lost step-brother a subscripton to Harper's as a gift, when I finally met him, back in the 80s. The INDEX link posted earlier was a great find , so I tip my hat to thee, JJ.
  • Excellent link, JJ, thank you. Scary and depressing as all hell, but excellent. And very noble of you to set yourself up as scapegoat, A_C, it's always good to have a target for one's impotent rage and frustration with the world. *blames Abiezer* *doesn't feel a whole lot better* *sighs*
  • Whenever I talk about finite resources in the world, people tell me I'm being silly and there is no zero sum game. That said, while modern agriculture has severe problems, we have too many people per acre to live without some agriculture. The question is, what kind of agriculture, and what kind of world?
  • One hell of a post JJ. Sincere thanks for posting. I've been in a funk the past few days . . . feeling my "native" roots that tie me to the prairie of South Dakota. Even made a comment, to which no one seemed to take notice. And now, I find myself in a curious bind. The food on my table is paid literally with money generated from Iraqi oil sales. This article makes me want to lick a cane toad and sit alongside a long-forgotten river - with now-alien grasses whispering their song to the water's edge: "take me home... take me home..."
  • Interesting, and it probably is true that the current pattern of agriculture is not sustainable indefinitely. But there were a few assertions that seemed strange to me. Agriculture flourishes by rivers, not because plants need water, but because floods are needed to eliminate other plants from the fields? Greece has been agriculturally barren since the time of Plato? There was a population-depleting famine in Britain every ten years between 500 and 1500, as the result of reliance on wheat? Early agriculture was less efficient than hunting, but was adopted in order to allow the oppressive aristocracy to accumulate wealth (not sure how that works - if I wanted to accumulate wealth, I'd oppress people into adopting the more efficient system). And the solution is that we should all shoot an elk once a year? I'm sure this bloke's heart is in the right place, but I suspect there are some bees in his bonnet, too.
  • Regarding the "agriculture as an early tool of aristocracy," I heard an interview on NPR's Marketplace at least two weeks ago where the counterargument was made. Particularly, that an aristocracy arose as a result of the seperation between those who could read agricultural records and those who could not. Food needed to be stored for future use, as long-term storage for famine times is the basic value proposition of farming. Every family having their own granary lead to inefficency, waste, and poor utilization across a community. Someone decided to make a communal granary to allow the whole group to have better distribution and management. Whammo - a caste of people whose job it is to keep track of what's in the silo rather than adding to its contents. Secondarily, those records need permanent storage so they can be referred to later - suprise! - writing becomes prominent rather neatly thereafter. Those folks who just add things to the silo don't need to read the records, they just have to trust that the one who is reading them does so correctly. I don't know - both explanations are equally plausible. I'm sure Sid Meier has something to say about all this. (ps - good elk is damn tasty)
  • Basically, you have two forms of subsistence - labour light / land extensive labour heavy / land saving Hunting and gathering and swidden acriculture (long fallows) are all much less labour demanding for what you get - but take more land per person. Intensive forms of agriculture take much more labour (until this century, normally human labour, now mostly machine and chemical labour), but produce more per acre. I've heard that the stimulus to agriculure was denser population, and possibly pressure from small towns and cities established at trading places - but it's something which we may never know for sure. Contemporary (aka 20th cen) forms of agriculture can be very destructive to the soil, and take a great deal of energy input (as the article makes clear). It's like our agriculture is strip mining our earth just as much as bad mining practice. The question is - how to feed people, without using quite so much energy and in ways less destructive to the soil. More human labour might be one way, but currently people in agriculture are paid terribly - many not even minimum wage. This is part of what keeps our grocery costs down. There are simple answers to this really serious problem.
  • Great article, JJ, thanks for posting it. I'm going to pass it around.
  • Very thought producing article. So much for my healthy breakfast of All-Bran and strawberries.
  • >So much for my healthy breakfast of All-Bran and strawberries. Fancy a bowl of Elky-O's?
  • I'd just like to add my vote that this was a fascinating, (depressing) thought-invoking post, thank you Jerry Junior. The author clearly does have a bee or two in his bonnet, and I think that is a positive attribute, in that it has energised his presentation of the facts on a subject that could easily have lead to a tedious chore of an article. That said, I would have liked to have seen some citations for the various figures given, but I guess I'll just have to buy one of the author's books, which I am now very much inclined to do.
  • A pretty interesting read apart from a few dubious assertions and some strange logic. On the moral issues, vegetarians claim their habits are kinder to animals, though it is difficult to see how wiping out 99 percent of wildlife’s habitat, as farming has done in Iowa, is a kindness. More than 80% of Iowa farmland is used for cropping and ~80% of grain crops are fed to the livestock (which he even mentions a few paragraphs later) - and he's pointing the blame for habitat destruction at vegetarians??
  • Why are there no citations for the phrase "wheat-beef people", other than this article? My spider-bogosity-sense is tingling.