Rev Blair

We don't need the rampant consumerism, the conspicuous consumption, and the waste to make a living though. This is a relatively new phenomenon...something that arguably didn't start until after WWII and certainly wasn't a way of life before the 1950s. My mother's parents didn't engage in it, yet they sent five kids to university. My father's parents didn't engage in it either...three kids there. Their friends and peers didn't engage in it. The rich always did it, but not the rest of society. My grandfather owned three trucks in the 40+ years that I knew him. That's it, three. They were 2 wheel drive pick-ups with vinyl seats. They were purchased when it was no longer economical to repair the one they were replacing. My mother is still using the last one...a 1978 GMC...to haul gardening supplies and garbage. Nobody had ever heard of reduce, reuse, recycle when I was a kid. I learned it from my grandparents who did it as a matter of course. They weren't environmentalists, they just weren't wasteful. You didn't throw things away, you reused them or gave them to somebody who could use them. You didn't hire somebody to something that you could do yourself. If possible, you spent a little extra for quality so you'd save money by not having to replace whatever you were buying. If we had continued to live in that way, but adopted environmental practices as we became aware of them, this world would be in far better shape than it is right now. Instead we were sold a completely unsustainable model of infinite growth supported by infinite greed...all on a finite planet with finite resources. We were told that we could have it all and we could have it right now. The result has been a credit crunch and environmental destruction. We've been told that we are rich, but I bet that most on here carry a credit card balance, a mortgage, and likely a car or consumer loan. We aren't rich, we're debtors.

The facts the court found support what I said though. They didn't find that he had purposely sought to steal Monsanto's seed, just that he was growing it and should have had it tested...sloppy methods, not criminality. There is no place in the law for that though. The law says that Monsanto owns the gene and any plants or seeds that contain the gene. It doesn't address how they got there, just puts the onus on the landowner to either have Monsanto remove the offending plants, or pay Monsanto for their seed. It's not sentimentality though, and trying to belittle it as such shows a complete lack of understanding of the issues. Farms, small scale farms, used to provide most of the world's food. They were small businesses that provided a lot of employment and they were diverse enough that we had food security at home as well as an export market. Large scale agriculture tends, according to studies down in the US and Canada, to be harder on the land and to produce less money for local economies. No actually, it goes back to Droolin' Ronnie Rayguns changing the subsidy regime in the US. Instead of trying to keep prices up and subsidizing food, they pushed prices down and gave subsidies to huge agri-corps. It is far more complex than you present it to be as well and includes WTO policies, increased desertification in the developing world, tied aid programs, suburban sprawl, the demise of the suburban garden, poor farming methods including the loss of mixed farming practices, and a host of other issues.

You'll notice I refer to "our" lifestyles, not "your" lifestyles. I certainly wasn't excluding myself. The truth is that I need to make a living though. On the other hand, I have taken at least some steps to mitigate things, including shunning conspicuous consumption as much as possible.

Do we need one more higher civilization? I'd be pretty happy if we could manage one higher civilization in the first place. I'm not very optimistic. I have many reasons for that, but it's likely best summed up by looking at events since my birth. I was born in 1964. We were still trying to make things better...call it the JFK hangover or a testament to what you Americans call the New Deal. At any rate, the world seemed to be getting better for a while. The development of dwarf wheat and the resulting green revolution did address starvation for a while. We quit killing each other in such large numbers. We invented antbiotics and Led Zeppelin. We quit killing each other in such large numbers because we became too good at it though. We can't have a big war anymore, because there is no chance that we can keep it "over there" where ever we think there might be. As Joe Walsh said, "If they drop the Big One, we'll all live in holes." Don't think all those dirty little wars that replaced the big ones are a whole better, either. Going all the way back to the first 9-11, Chilean torturers began inserting live rats into the vaginas of young women, then sewing their vaginas closed. The rumour is that they learned the technique from the CIA. The School of the Americas was born. The green revolution was great. It brought us multi-national "agricultural" corporations and their wares though. We might have reduced hunger in India, but now they've got farmers offing themselves by drinking agricultural chemicals. In my lifetime we've gone from the hope of being able to make things better for everybody to the cynicism of making ourselves rich at the expense of others. Our dream has gone from Hunter Thompson's vision of paving the streets of Aspen with grass, gobbling peyote, and renaming the place Fat City to selling smack in the schoolyard for a fast buck. We've become a bunch of cheap hustlers in plastic shoes, where all that matters is the bottom line and crushing a person's skull under your heel is okay as long as you make a profit. Make no mistake, this is a dark and brutal ride we're on. It doesn't end in a happy, shining place.

I just wrote a feature on luxury vacation homes. I used to work in a photo studio shooting retail ads. Meanwhile I know single mothers with full time jobs who are forced to use a foodbank to feed their kids and there are a couple billion people on the planet trying to live on a buck a day. Trust me, our lifestyles are twisted, our priorites are bent, and what we like to think of as our humanity is virtually nonexistent. It's okay though, there's always beer.

My concerns are based on what GM crops mean in the real world. We aren't all going to grow another arm or get ass cancer from consuming them or anything like that. Hell, if I thought eating GM crops would grow me another arm, I'd be gobbling them down in buckets. You aren't quite right about Percy Schmeiser though. According to his neighbours, and I've sat in the beer parlour with them, he worked very hard to develop his own Round Up resistant crops for years. He hadn't purchased Monsanto seed for a very long time. What appears to have happened is that some Round Up resistant seed, either from Schmeiser's bins (if you've dealt with canola in the real world, you know that there's always some left in the corners) or from passing trucks (again, if you've dealt with it in the real world, you know how easily it travels on the wind) ended up mixed with with his other seed and, because he was actively promoting anything that showed resistance to Round Up, took over. Sloppy methods? Sure. Criminality? Not a chance. Monsanto won the case not on Schmeiser having actively and purposely done anything wrong, but the simple presence of their gene in his crop. As for Pioneer...so what. The University of Saskatchewan developed the best wheat on the planet (that'd be hard red spring) and they don't get a cut of every seed sale. The CWB helped them develop it and their reward has been constant harrassment from both Washington and the current Canadian government. Those are public institutions though. No corporate profits. The issue of changing the law requires going to court. Under our current system, the most likely way to do that is to break the law, then fight the charges through the court system. There were about six of us who ever heard of Percy Schmeiser before his case hit the Supreme Court of Canada. Of those who pretend to be farmers in the Canadian Parliament, only about a half dozen of them have ever sat in a tractor seat for any length of time, and most of them only did so reluctantly. In the last decade, Canada has lost about 5000 small farmers a year. That used to mean anybody farming less than 1000 acres, now it means anybody farming less than 5000 acres. Many, likely most, small farmers work off the farm in order to help make ends meet. In the US, those numbers are even worse. Look into Willie Nelson's "tax problems" and the reason for the Farm Aid concerts to learn more about that. Have a close look at the current food crisis. Have a look at Paul Bremer's edicts in Iraq. Have a look at aid in the developing world. This all ties into GM crops, the corporations that develop and supply them, WTO policy, subsidy programs, and all the rest. It can't be attributed strictly to GM crops, but they play a large part. It's kind of nebulous, to say the least. It's certainly all interconnected. It's very much a political problem...take away the political influence of the makers of the seed, make them compete on level playing field, and they'd be gone in a year. That doesn't mean that it's not a problem though. Again, science loses its purity the second it even thinks about heading out the lab door.

Well, Hunter Thompson told us the Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved over three decades ago. He was right then, and this sure hasn't changed things. I wonder if Hillary and Bill puke on their white shoes like those rich folks in the Thompson piece? My guess is that they do. Regarding the horse being put down though...that doesn't to a horse like that unless it's what is best for the horse most of the time. At that level of racing, it's even more true. That mare could have turned out prize foals from a variety of stallions for years. That isn't just a direct financial benefit either, it's the kind of thing that build a legacy for a breeder for generations. Those foals have foals, and you keep improving the bloodlines. If they had any reasonable choice at all, that horse would still be alive.

Ah, the Ford V-8. Not what I would call a good example of anything, unless you really enjoy the smell of half-burnt oil and the high cost of repairs. I hear if you take the pistons out and run a chain through the cylinders, they make decent boat anchors though. I agree about the scientific research. It needs way more funding. We also need to step up education...there's nothing wrong with being a ditch digger, or even a corporate shill in a suit, I guess, but we're into the third decade of it being cool to be stupid and it's hurting us pretty badly. We aren't like to start cutting line resistance, building more efficient houses, or making cars that last more than 10 years if we depend on the corporate model though. There is no profit in it. Electrical companies exist to sell power. They have the line loss figured into their models and projections. They don't have the R&D to reduce line loss figured in though, or the likely drop in prices from more abundant electricity being available. They certainly don't want their customers to begin conserving energy.

Given the way that everybody...including China and the US...diddles their figures, I wouldn't make any bets either way. Something to keep in mind though, is that a lot of China's (and India's, and Brazil's, and Indonesia's and Vietnam's etc...) pollution is really the west's pollution. Let's face it, they aren't buying the dancing plastic rats that sing x-mas carols, we are. Their pollution wouldn't be nearly as high if it wasn't for our twisted lifestyle.

Something I'd like to mention to Josh, since he's a journalist, is that the heat-trapping effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the variations of CO2/oxygen mix are pretty much tied up with evolutionary theory as well. I'm not a scientist or any sort of expert...just an interested layman...but it's an area of the discussion where the press has been sadly lacking in making the connections. The greenhouse effect was pretty well established before most people (there was discussion in the scientific community) had ever heard of global warming. I learned about it in grade four or grade six, and I'm 43 now. Whenever I hear people doubting the effects of relatively small shifts in our atmospheric makeup, I find myself wondering where (or if) they went to school.

Saying that GM crops don't lead to a monoculture is like saying that guns don't kill, bullets do. It's technically correct, but ignores the reality. It's the same with blaming economics and/or politics for the way GM crops are developed and used. Hey, economics and politics are the sharp end of the stick. You can't ignore their impact if you intend to allow anything outside of the lab. GM crops carry some very real economic and political problems with them. If had different systems of politics and economics, they would carry other problems with them. Pure science quits being pure the second it even considers heading out of the lab door. Those problems also may or may not be specific to GM crops, but to just shrug and say that the problems exist in other areas as well is to ignore the lessons of history. Are monocultures a problem? Yes. Do GM crops tend to lead to monocultures? Yes. So either Monsanto et al can find a way to address, or at least mitigate, that problem, or their product can remain in the lab. They aren't saviours or some gift from from heaven, they are corporations in search of a profit. Which brings us to patent rights, I suppose. Percy Schmeiser got his ass kicked for saving seeds he grew himself. Terminator technology puts farmers, especially those in the developing world, of having to eat or sell what should be their seed every year. A few years ago, Monsanto tried to keep farmers from making their own tank mixes...an attempt to make them pay Monsanto. Is all of that mostly political? You bet. Is it all related to GM crops? Yup. That, of course, brings up the issue of food security. I'm not sure how comfortable you are with having a few rich guys control what you eat and how much you pay for it, but that's another reality of GM crops. Regarding the heritage seed projects: They are worthwhile projects, and I fully support them, but there aren't enough seeds in those projects to supply food to even a small population for a short while. Instead there are enough seeds to restart a breeding population of plants. It would take 5 to 10 years to produce enough seed from that to produce a viable food crop.

I saw that episode of Frontline...the first time around, I think...and I thought it was a pretty decent analysis. It's not an analysis of the science though, it's a look at the politics around the issue and the implications of that. Expecting politics to be factual, scientific, or based in reality in any significant way is like expecting your dog to become a physicist...ain't gonna happen. I wish Frontline would do a show about that. Pangloss is right, it does take two sides to play politics. Being from outside the US, I'd say that it takes four or five sides to make it interesting. Science isn't even in the game though.

Carbon markets and a carbon tax, as long as it's revenue neutral, both work. I'm also a big believer in credits for carbon reduction credits in the developing world, although we need stricter standards and better measurements. Regulation, especially on building codes, would make a huge difference. Offset stud walls and insulated, unheated porches around doors would reduce emissions hugely in new residential construction. Requiring solar panels and things like in-line water heaters would be huge too. Requiring developers to make a certain number of geothermal homes would be fantastic. In other cases we need less regulation though. There is a program in Canada where you could get some small incentives for doing things like installing new doors and windows, insulating, or putting in an energy efficient furnace. The problem is that you have to pay for an inspector to come out before and after, and finish the work within a specified period of time. So I've been replacing doors and windows and insulating, but I've been doing it a bit at a time. I've also been doing the work myself. As a result, the program doesn't work for me....the inspections would cost more than the the rebate. A lot of working class people are in the same position. Just removing federal and provincial sales taxes on energy efficient goods and services would be a far better incentive. No inspectors required. The other place we need governments to do far better is in public transit. I work from home, but two or three times a week I have to go across the city. We like to go to the bars downtown, but between the drinking and driving issue and the parking problems it's often more hassle than it's worth. I'd take a bus or LRT if one was available to me. We have no light rail here though, and the buses only run in my neighbourhood during rush hour. Finally, we need government to pay for more science and related programs. An example of what I mean: A farmer here in Manitoba invented a device that injects tractor exhaust into the ground as you are seeding. He claims that it increases yields and sequesters carbon, and it sounds like it might. He could get no help from the government though, and no scientists to test the invention to see if it did what he claimed. He's selling it to people through word of mouth. If this device actually works, it would be a major leap forward. Hell, if it only does one of the things he claims at 50% the efficiency he claims, it's still a decent invention. Guys like him need a place to go though. It needs to easy (he farms full-time and doesn't have time to be messing around) and it needs to be government run so that he's not worried about losing his patent rights etc. There are lots of little inventions like that out there, things that may or may not work, that need to be tested.

And beer...I have two vats of wort bubbling away as I type this.

I've read some of his writings, mostly his letters. He excelled in that area as well...not just the technical writing, which he was good at, but the thinking about various issues etc. Plus he could be funnier than hell.

There will always be problems, SkepticLance. The point is that nature has built in ways of addressing those problems through genetic diversity. Evolution is a powerful force. GE crops lack that diversity though, and it takes years to develop and test new GE strains.

So do these rocks work with all music, or just rock? Do you have to feed the rocks LSD if you are listening to acid rock? It's ridiculous. It looks to me like a product a lot of people who play their stereos too loud might buy though.

It is largely a political problem, but until the nuclear industry and pro-nuclear governments take some real steps to both address the concerns raised and explain how things work, it is not politically viable in a lot of areas. Another problem with nuclear is the initial capital expense. It eats up money that could be spent on other technologies.

You can't plan for everything though, SkepticLance. Various diseases, blights etc. will always pop up. In the case of the Irish Potato Famine, resistant potatoes were available back in the Americas. There weren't any in Ireland though. GE crops lead to monocultures, and monocultures are susceptible to attack by unthought of pests, diseases, etc. Considering that there is now a bacteria that specializes in eating nylon...a material that didn't exist less than a century ago...and the various strains of antibiotic resistant diseases that keep popping up, the idea that we can stay ahead of the various bugs is not supported by the evidence. Nature does provide us with protections though. Indigenous people in the Andes have been growing different types of potatoes at different elevations since well before Columbus. The variety provides them protection from shifting growing conditions and a variety of blights and diseases. It isn't economically efficient for the companies that create GE crops to make a wide variety of a single species though. They make one or two varieties, mostly with the same attributes. We have to very careful to preserve other strains of these crops so that we are protected. Efforts are being made to that end right now with heritage seeds, but the numbers are so low that it would take years to rebuild after a blight or disease caused a crop failure.

Capitalism has only cleaned up their act when forced to by government though, SkepticLance. They didn't decide to stop burning coal in London, in fact they fought every attempt to do so. It was a fog that killed a lot of people in the 1950s that caused so much public outrage that the government acted in spite of corporate outcry. The Thames clean-up first began after The Big Stink, when the stench from the river was so bad that Parliament had to rise. It was also driven by cholera epidemics, which led to a proper sewage system being built. Again, capitalists opposed the clean-up as being too expensive. Let's have a little look at the auto industry in North America though. General Motors worked very hard to get rid of public transit in the last century. They were pretty successful too. That's pretty well documented. The industry opposed every safety innovation, saying it would bankrupt them. They had Ralph Nader followed by private investigators in an attempt to discredit and/or blackmail him. Nader's book caused enough public outcry that the government finally had to act. The industry has opposed CAFE standards and emissions controls every step of the way. There is at least some evidence that they have again had environmentalists followed in an attempt to discredit them. They've been dragging their feet on creating clean vehicles for a couple of decades now. They've become very adept at making friends in government and running greenwashing campaigns, but they really haven't done much and what they have done had to be forced on them. You can run a similar scenario through almost every industry, from inefficient homes and buildings to manufacturing to airlines to mining. The reason that nations like China and India are growing so fast now is because of the interests of the corporations being put first. Why don't trade deals include environmental and labour standards? Because Mattel can make a lot more money if Barbie is made in a sweatshop that runs on coal and uses the children of political prisoners for labour. If the rich western/northern countries...the market for the products made in those developing countries...said that the developing world had to clean up their act, they would find support from the people and governments there. The opposition is driven by multi-national corporations.

I see a much wider mix of energy in the future. Bio-fuels, hydrogen, and electric for cars and small motors. Electricity generated by wind, hydro, tidal, geothermal, nuclear etc...whatever works in a given area. A lot of that will be pretty small-scale too, I think. Personal generation that feeds back into the grid at least part of the time. The other thing we're likely to see is a reduction in use per capita. More efficient homes, appliances, transportation and so on.

GM is mostly fueled by money though, not population pressures. That's why so many of the concerns with it are not directly related to the GM crops, but the use of chemicals, who owns the seeds, the development of monocultures and so on. Even if we were addressing the population problem, the same problems would exist. The world has already seen one potato famine though. It was caused by a monoculture...they only grew one or two types of taters in Ireland. When a fungus attacked those types, there were no strains available that were resistant available, even though resistant taters existed.

Getting back to the political side of things: I notice that several on here seem to think that capitalism can and will address emissions problems. Given that the world economy has been oil-based since shortly after WW1, capitalism's poor environmental record, and the fact that most corporations presently externalize the environmental costs they cause by either ignoring the problem or letting government (that'd be you and me paying for it) clean up after them, why would you think for a second that capitalism would even try to clean up the problem? If they have the ability, why have they so far worked so hard to keep us going in the other direction? I also notice that the discussion about why conservatives (paleo, neo...doesn't really matter) tend to deny global warming science never delved into religion. You have a group that doesn't believe in evolution...many of whom believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Global warming science...the entire bit about GHGs...is very much tied up in evolutionary theory and an old earth. The idea of their god creating a perfect earth is shot to hell. Many of these guys can't accept global warming without questioning their own religious beliefs. Then there's the greed/class factor. There has never been a technological shift or advancement in our history that hasn't made us richer in some way and those advancements have generally spread the wealth around. The really serious shifts caused great hardship for the already wealthy and powerful though. What happens to the oil barons and the politicians they own...mostly right-wing politicians if you do the math...if people quit being dependent on them for energy? Do you think your coal company wants you to put up a windmill and solar panels? Do you think Exxon wants people to consider taking public transit instead of driving SUVs? I want to address the claim that the left just wants to introduce new taxes and laws as well. The left, at least in Canada, has been very clear that any carbon tax has to be revenue neutral...the government doesn't get any more money. So anybody who adopts a cleaner lifestyle will see a tax reduction. The left, at least in Canada, has also been the side of the political spectrum that has stood up for individual rights and freedoms. The political right has attempted to trample those things while giving corporations more rights and freedoms. Anyway, that's my two bits. If capitalism and a lack of regulation and/or taxation can solve this problem, then why hasn't it? Now if this site is like so many others, and I hope it isn't, somebody will accuse me of being a communist, thus exhibiting their own ignorance of the political spectrum.

Not a heck of a lot, except that are a lot more of us to feed and our actions have a much more widespread impact.

I'm not sure if this belongs here. If not, it'd be cool if a mod could move it. There is kind of a spectrum of scientific disciplines. On one end you have the hard sciences and on the other the soft. Physics and mathematics are definitely hard sciences. Political science is so soft that it resembles black magic more than anything...free verse poetry is arguably closer to the scientific method. In between you have archaeology, anthropology, biology, psychology, chemistry and so on. Obviously, some are harder sciences than others. All are useful though. Some, especially those with increasingly vague subsets (er, archaeology and Egyptology, for instance) range from being relatively hard sciences to being pretty open to interpretation and even open to charlatanism (Eric von Danniken, anyone?) Then there are the misnamed ones...why doesn't UFOlogy study UFOs instead of alleged alien visitations? I've seen a UFO and really want somebody to be trying to find out what it was. It was likely just a weather balloon or a military jet or something. Hell, maybe it was a Cessna with an inebriated but talented pilot...but I want to know what it was, or at least have a reasonable explanation of what it might have been. I'm pretty sure that a race of advanced aliens with amazing technology didn't traverse half the galaxy to put on a light show for a bunch of Saskatchewan farm boys though, and it'd be cool if there was somebody you could call who didn't use that as a starting point. So is there anyway of reconciling the sciences, or maybe rating them or something? Can we educate the public to the point where real scientists can look into UFOs and Sasquatch or whatever without having to deal with people that think ET and Harry and the Hendersons were documentaries?