Comments on: Is organic necessarily good?

By: Galen

Galen — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:14:07 +0000

Give me a mutated tomatoe the size of a grapefruit anyday! )

By: Galen

Galen — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:14:07 +0000

Give me a mutated tomatoe the size of a grapefruit anyday! )

By: Eating local doesn’t help the environment much | alistair.pott

Eating local doesn’t help the environment much | alistair.pott — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:45:39 +0000

[...] their efforts don’t make the most sense. For instance in the past I have blogged that organic food is not necessarily good for the [...]

By: alistair

alistair — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 07:26:37 +0000

Humans are indeed bad for the environment (in general)! It all comes down to how you define what is good/bad for the environment.

I still believe that in general (using most broader definitions of good/bad) farming is detrimental to the environment.

Besides, this isn’t the point of the blog article. Even if farming is not necessarily bad for the environment (I still say that in general it is), organic farming is not necessarily good, and in fact in the long run is probably bad (depends on definitions of good/bad).

By: Len

Len — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 13:49:30 +0000

You assume (probably erroneously) that ‘altering’ is equivalent to ‘bad’. If that is your definition of ‘bad’ then obviously you must be correct. If however, environmentally bad is defined in terms of nett CO2, or soil nutrition or some other method, then my original criticism still stands….it is not a given. Incidentally, all humans also chew up resources (space, nutrients, etc) so are all humans also bad?

By: alistair

alistair — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 07:21:44 +0000

You could argue that by altering (in most cases significantly) the environment farming is bad for it.

There may be “certain farming practices, under specific conditions” where farming may aid some parts of the environment (still questionable), but in general farming chews up environmental resources (space, nutrients, etc).

Converting veld to farmland is bad for the environment.

By: Len

Len — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:01:40 +0000

How can it be considered a “given” that farming is bad for the environment? Perhaps certain farming practices, under specific conditions, may be detrimental to the environment, but most certainly not “farming”.