I've been reading Brad Allenby again. I once recommended that you just blow off my stuff and read Prometheus on science policy issues. And for soil science skip this drivel and read Transect Points. etc., you get the idea, there are better places to read competent and focused writings on these issues than here. I have another to add to that list of better reads: for analysis of the defects of paleo-environmentalism and prescriptions for more useful approaches read Brad Allenby. I'm comfortable directing you to my betters. Farmers aren't specialists, they are jacks-of-many-trades and masters of none, though perhaps still useful since some of the more interesting insights of life span disciplines or nestle in the cracks between them, and farmers are some of the ones who may notice and call out.

Allenby has an interesting cv.

Brad Allenby is professor of civil and environmental engineering at Arizona State University, a fellow at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business, and previously was AT&T's vice president of environment, health, and safety.

He's a bit of a jack too, though he probably has very clean finger nails and very few callouses: an office-jack so to speak. Consider the blend of trades in Phoenix Environmentalism: Part I and Part II.

Classic, ideological environmentalism, born of the 1960's, is not just in trouble; as the Nietzschean "The Death of Environmentalism" notes, it is deceased as a viable mainstream public policy discourse. With notable exceptions, the environmental community has not adjusted to this reality, instead huddling in an ever shrinking self-selected band of true believers waiting for the rest of the world to recover its senses and return to the alter. This can be seen in the unchanging negativity of the rhetoric of most environmental organizations; in the tendency to cling to the Kyoto Treaty as if it were the only talisman capable of granting safe passage to the future; in continued efforts to halt rather than appropriately shape powerful technological waves such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). . .

For most Americans, environmental issues have always been only one good among many, and in general as the most obvious environmental problems have been addressed, they have switched their priorities to other good they also value, such as jobs. For classic environmentalists, on the other hand, the environment is a transcendent value, and thus cannot be balanced away in such a risk/benefit calculus. . .

perhaps most fundamentally, phoenix environmentalism rejects Edenic teleologies and static utopianism and accepts complex adaptive systems as preferable models of our current reality. This is a difficult step, for it cuts strongly against powerful existing emotions. It means accepting that humans will continue to impact evolutionary biodiversity, while creating designed biodiversity in companies and laboratories; that the world's ecosystems will change profoundly as a result of human activity; that more technology, not less, will characterize the world. It means accepting accelerating change in all human systems, which, in an age that scientists have already entitled “the Anthropocene,” or the Age of Man, includes most “natural” systems as well. Indeed, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, material flows of all kinds, the biosphere, oceanic and atmospheric systems -- these are increasingly shaped by human design and human culture, and to deny this is simply to blink reality. In such a period of rapid technological, cultural, and economic evolution, ossified mental models based on unthinking attachment to past patterns will inevitably fail.

The solution is not to deny ethical responsibility for outcomes, or to retreat to irrelevancy, no matter how romantic. Rather, the challenge is to develop a phoenix environmentalism that enables us to ride turbulent waves of change while guiding them as best as possible to be ethical, rational, and responsible.

I wish I'd said that. I tried, but never achieved the density and polish.

[T]he long term water supply curve is governed by money and technology, not “nature”. Desalinization plants are expensive, but can produce unlimited amounts of fresh water (as well as salts requiring proper management). Thus, for example, the possibility of Arizona building desalinization capacity for San Diego or Los Angeles in exchange for additional Colorado River water rights for Phoenix has already been discussed. In the American West, in other words, water is a human system, and its long term availability is gated by culture, technology and economics, not rain or river flow.

This has several implications for environmentalism. First, it challenges the focus of many environmentalists on the “natural” dimension of resources such as water, with concomitant systemic underestimation of the importance of human components (especially technology) of resource cycles. This tendency leads to an over-emphasis on resource depletion in environmental discourse. Second, it reaffirms the tension between ideological environmentalism, ineffective in a culture such as Phoenix’s, and an effective environmentalism that understands, and works within, the delicate but powerful structure of its indigenous culture.

I may go back through the archives here and update the awkward attempts to make points with pointers to the Allenby column that succeeds in making them. This is for my benefit. You can just go read his archives.