Environmentalism is a hustle - entertainment at best, parasitism at worst . . . like politics. Here's a pathology of natural resource advocacy.

Michael Pollan article The Vegetable-Industrial Complex in the October 15th New York Times describes an example of Holling’s pathology of natural resource management in agriculture.

Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution, however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the first problem — chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there is no good fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from spinach. All of these solutions treat E. coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life rather than what it is: a fact of industrial agriculture.

Bunk. Taking animals off farms did not create a fertility problem. We've had that forever, done all manner of things to cope with it, and fought wars of conquest to get at land not yet exhausted. Rome conquered Egypt in part to get at the ever-fertile Nile delta, rejuvenated by sediments in yearly floods, and the wheat crops produced there. Classic literature from Greeks and Romans has many laments about the exhaustion of land by farming, even with animals.

Before learning to produce nitrates from methane every turd on the planet was hauled to just a few fields. Fossil turds from islands were shipped to those few fields, mainly in Europe, and natural fossil nitrates from S. America were imported as well. Potash, the residue of the burned forests of N. America, was hauled in by the shipload. Phosphorous, the residue of bones and blood - even fossil bones - was hauled in from every corner. Graves were robbed to get bones.

In the overwhelming majority of places where animals were kept they were kept in confinement much of the time. They had to be since to leave them out in the ice and snow would kill them. They were in stables and barns being fed stored forages.

In spite off all the turds, bones and tree ashes the end of civilization due to starvation was predicted. Indeed, periodic famine was a scourge of humanity and chronic famine was the norm for many. There never was some idyllic period where crops and animals sustained one another in a closed loop. There were short periods in the Americas where that illusion was possible, but only by ignoring the fact that lands built over eons were being mined for their fossil fertility.

E. coli 0157:H7 is an unavoidable fact of life. Every mammal and bird carries it. Flocks of migrating geese can not only slime your ponds and lakes, they can infect the region with 0157:H7. Your kids can get it from playing in the grass, or going to an urban petting zoo, or shaking hands with someone.

The problem with the spinach and burger outbreaks is that a single source can infect so many due to mass packing and handling. Instead of the rare infection here and there, people are felled in great swathes. And that gets noticed. Politicized wankers trot out their hobby horses and take a star turn for their adoring fans. They do it for pay, to promote their books and paraphernalia, to keep alive faltering careers, but not for the good of society. They are neither honest nor ethical, not to mention tasteless. Blech.

Update:

For more detail see Secret Ingredients, which discusses potash (potassium); Rock Fertilizer, which discusses phosphorus; Fossil Fertilizer, which discusses nitrogen; and Petroleum Fertilizer, which discusses nitrate manufacture.