Why Are We Tampering With Nature?
July 13, 2001
…Because Otherwise Many Of Us Would Starve To Death,
As ABC Reporter John Stossel Points Out
CHURCHVILLE, Va.–Every farmer who’s ever complained about modern agriculture being trashed by the media should get a tape of ABC reporter John Stossel’s recent television special “Tampering with Nature.”
Stossel spent an hour of national network time laying out the politically incorrect truth on high-yield farming, biotech crops and global warming. He kicked off the show by saying, “Being at one with nature means running around naked and hungry, maybe killing a rabbit with a rock…and dying young.” He noted that the Indians in Washington’s Potomac Valley lived an average of 21 years.
“We never had it so good because we are tampering with nature,” Stossel added. “Millions of us are not starving to death only because we tamper with the land reshaping it, bringing water to it, putting chemical fertilizer on it.”
To drive home the point, Stossel took us to a reenactment of the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving. He noted that half of the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock died the first year, mostly of hunger and exposure. Most of the Jamestown colonists also died during their first year or two in the wilderness.
Stossel also took us to a lush tropical valley in Hawaii now nearly deserted because growing taro for food takes long hours of backbreaking work in mud up to your knees. The farmer Stossel interviewed said his son moved to California.
Thanks to modern farming, said Stossel, America not only has abundant food, but also has just about as much forest today as in 1920. “Technology allows farmers to feed us on less land, so millions of acres that were farmland are now forest again. About one-third of America is forest because of the very technology and chemistry that Greenpeace criticizes.”
Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace founder, told Stossel the environmental movement has been hijacked by people who don’t care much about ecology. He also told Stossel how Greenpeace gets scary numbers on forest decline: “Every time a tree is cut, they subtract it but they never add the ones that grow back.”
Moore said he was less worried about genetically modified foods than about an environmental movement that is “anti-science, anti-reason and is scaring people about their…food when there isn’t one shred of evidence that genetically modified foods have had a single negative health impact.”
Stossel showed African famine victims, and told us: “In Africa, many scientists are angry that well-fed activists want (biotechnology) stopped.” One of the Africans ironically labeled the rich-country activists “forces of superstition and ignorance.”
Stossel also tackled global warming. He showed us Robert Kennedy Jr. ranting to an activist rally in Washington, “This is Armageddon; this is the last battle. We all know that global warming is happening. All the mainstream scientists in the world know that global warming is happening.”
Then Stossel interviewed four prominent, reputable scientists– professors from Harvard, MIT, University of Virginia and the guy who monitors earth’s temperature for NASA.
All four are members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has gained so much publicity by predicting horrendous global warming. All four doubt that human activity is warming the planet. Stossel then noted that 17,000 other scientists have signed a petition denying that there is evidence that human activity is warming the planet.
Kennedy’s scientific consensus on global warming does not exist, but it should be an urgent issue for First World farmers. The Kyoto Protocol would impose heavy added costs on First World farmers, handing the world’s farm export markets to countries like Argentina and Turkey.
Stossel showed us profoundly disturbing interviews with kids. One little girl said, “The more you breathe the air, the more you get sick.” A little boy said that because of global warming, there wouldn’t be any air to breathe and people would become extinct.
Stossel asked a panel of primary-schoolers whether America’s air and water were getting more polluted. The kids loudly agreed that they were.
When Stossel told the kids that Environmental Protection Agency monitoring shows the air and water getting rapidly cleaner, they shouted “No!” One little boy yelled “They lie!”
A pretty young woman from Green Power said she gives “nonpartisan” school presentations about the dangers to wildlife of oil drilling in the Arctic. Stossel asked if she tells the kids that caribou herds have increased fivefold around Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay oil field. She said she was unaware of that critically important fact.
The activists did lots of singing, dancing, chanting and asserting, but Stossel said he’d like them better if they told the truth.
I take some small credit for the Stossel special. We met at a 4-H Club conference in St. Louis about eight years ago, and I’ve been sending him stuff on high-yield conservation since. (I do the same with many other newspeople, but to far less effect.)
“Tampering With Nature” is by far the most powerful visual presentation I’ve seen on the merits of high-tech agriculture and our whole high-tech society. All American farmers should make sure that their families, local school youth groups and service clubs see it.
DENNIS T. AVERY is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis. His views are not necessarily those of BridgeNews, whose ventures include the Internet site www.bridge.com.
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Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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