Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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I will not stipulate that "the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance", because I don't even know what that means. The Precautionary Principle works well in some places and not in others. In this case: you're pretending that the policy you're advocating doesn't have an embedded tradeoff, but it does. If you use less neonicotinoid pesticide, which you're hyperfixated on because of what seems to be a BS media trend story about bees, you will use more of other pesticides (or, worse, more land, which destroys habitat for all animals) which may be more harmful in the aggregate.

Honey bees are not a natural part of our ecology. They are a livestock animal. Worrying about their population and the energy it takes to sustain them is a lot like worrying about the population of dairy cows.

>If you use less neonicotinoid pesticide, you will use more land

If you think that the only possible way to grow food is monoculture fields sprayed with poison and fertilizer (aka the "green revolution"), then you'd be right.

But is that really true? Is that the only possible way to grow food?

I ask because forests seem to grow lots of food (an unmanaged forest generates many times more biomass per hectare than a farm field), without requiring nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, neonicotinoids, glycophosphates, diesel fuel...

But surely there's no way to design a system that operates with no inputs like a forest, and also turns much of that biomass into food for humans, right?

Oh wait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_forest

Any agricultural system that won't support near total automation of the harvesting of staples will not be sustainable for a planet with over 7 billion people. A food forest sounds great, but there's no way to drive a combine over it and feed a hundred thousand people with the labor of one.

(an unmanaged forest generates many times more biomass per hectare than a farm field)

Biomass is not the same thing as food. Are food forests actually capable of growing more calories (or fewer calories with enough compensating micronutrients) per unit area over an extended time compared to industrialized fields?

Ah but it isn't true. What is true is that industrial agriculture is the product of pecuniary exploit, not economy of scale, and definitely not the quest for the greater good.

Just because the forest has more mass does not mean it produces more food. Trees produce tons of mass in an evolutionary war to be taller than all the other trees and get more sunlight. None of it is edible though.

All of them are in a highly competitive war for resources. Plants produced poisons to kill other plants. They try to spread their seeds faster. They try to grow taller and faster and steal sunlight. They grow bigger roots to steal water.

No plant wants to be eaten, and so many produce poisons and thorns other deterrents. Few of them keep all their calories in one place, and require highly specialized digestive systems which humans don't have.

The exception is fruit plants of course, but they only produce the minimal amount of food necessary. The fruit you buy in a store has been extensively bred by humans to be so large - and this domestication has a massive energy cost that makes them uncompetitive in the wild.

Anyway the point is that the wild is not optimized for humans at all. It's an incredibly inefficient way to produce food. The plants are spending most of their resources fighting each other, and insects, and everything else. The winner of this game is whatever plants reproduce the most, not the ones humans want. Permaculture is really cool, but you are never going to get anywhere near as many calories per unit of land.

You post is great until the last sentence:

Permaculture is really cool, but you are never going to get anywhere near as many calories per unit of land.

Permaculture means living such that we don't go extinct. Having a great portion of our workforce return to bucolic agrarian pursuits is one way to get there! As they say: it beats flipping burgers.

The point of a food forest is that it has been carefully cultivated to maximize your human edibles, without needing energy expensive, oil based, or otherwise negatively impactful external inputs. When you subtract the non renewable energy expenditure, you certainly will get as many calories per unit of land!

If you are optimizing towards energy use, we could theoretically make robots or tractors that are solar powered.

But this isn't an issue at all. Farm equipment does not consume that much fuel, and fuel isn't that expensive.

The energy costs of fertilizer and pesticides are the problem not the cost of robots/tractors.

All fossil fuels are going to be gone within 5k years. Humans are several times that old and presumably humans will want to survive that. Sure, we can kick the can on this one, but it is a long term problem.

In 5-20 years we will be able to grow food 30x cheaper in highly efficient bacteria and algae tanks: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/31zo1r/a_future...

Who knows what we will be able to do in 5,000 years. I wouldn't worry about it.

You not knowing what that means is a good thing. That's where you and all the industrial production chain should start PRIOR to deciding that one toxic chemical really ought to be used in place of ten others, etc. A proper foundation for any use of industrial, planet scale chemistry is: I don't know what the effect will be.

That's why I'm not narrowly focused on neonicotinoids at all, and didn't mention them in my post. I'm focused on the entire supply chain, from legos to legumes. It should all be looked at with a big dose of critical skepticism.

From there, understanding the difference between growing beans and dumping weird plastic molecules into the ecosystem is pretty fundamental to knowing what is and isn't a natural party of our ecology. That's the wisdom that should sit at the top of our supply chain.

"PRIOR to deciding that one toxic chemical really ought to be used in place of ten others"

Points 1 and 2 from "5 Simple Chemistry Facts That Everyone Should Understand Before Talking About Science[1]" apply here.

1) Everything is made of chemicals, and

2) There is no such thing as a toxic chemical, there are only toxic doses. Let me say that again: all chemicals are safe at a low enough dose, and all chemicals are toxic at a high enough dose.

The idea that we can live in a world in which humans do no harm is untenable. Almost every single action we perform does some harm to some thing, and picking and choosing which things we can harm and which we cannot is rather arbitrary. Further, the idea that proving that "my chemical" does no harm is quite an impossible task, no matter how noble the chemical. H2O is responsible for innumerable floods, drownings, mudslides, erosion, etc. If your test fails for water, I think it's safe to say that your test is broken.

[1] - http://thelogicofscience.com/2015/05/27/5-simple-chemistry-f...

The argument is duplicitous! :}

If you and I are responsible for a man who is exposed to doses of radiation everyday and I stand up and say, you know, we shouldn't have this guy exposed to radiation because it could be lethal, and you say, hoooold on, there's no such thing as lethal radiation, just lethal doses of radiation ... then I gotta wonder who you are working for!

Because both our points are that you gotta know how much radiation he is getting, and not according to some chart generated by someone who is benefitting from the labor from a distance, but actually what the effect of the dose is over the course of the guy's life.

We agreed about dose, but you don't tell me that I'm in the wrong for saying "halt work", by saying " but it's a question of dosage " and let the guy keep working while you do a 20 year study! You protect him first!

I disagree. The point isn't that no research should be done, but that nothing is safe. Your point was

"So we can also stipulate that the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance."

That is an impossible task. Water is not safe. Oxygen is flammable. The number of things we can do that are not harmful to anyone or anything is closer to zero than you think.

If you set the bar at impossible, and I lower it to something achievable, it is bad form to evaluate my reasonableness as duplicitous.

Oxygen is not flammable (neither is fluorine... every other element is, in the sense that it forms stable compounds in exothermic reactions with oxygen.)

Oxygen is, however, fairly toxic (2 atmospheres partial pressure starts to get pretty dangerous after relatively short times.)

You are indeed correct, and had I taken more care, I would have stated that oxygen encourages flammability... which is still not entirely correct, but closer.

Thank you for the correction.

But you destroy your own point. Everyone on earth is exposed to "doses of radiation" every single second. It's just a small enough amount of radiation as to be benign.

Not at all! It's a leading cause of death and we certainly do what we can to minimize our exposure.

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