Tag: National Turkey Federation
Presentation to the National Turkey Federation: The Moral Challenge of the 21st Century
By admin | February 10, 2004
Presentation to the National Turkey Federation: The Moral Challenge of the 21st Century
Dennis Avery
. . . farms obliterate empty places, ploughed fields vanquish forests, herds drive out wild beasts. . . and there are such great cities where formerly hardly a hut . . . everywhere there is a dwelling, everywhere a multitude. . . . We are burdensome to the world. The resources are scarcely adequate to us . . . already nature does not sustain us. Truly, pestilence and hunger and war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations, like a pruning back of the human race becoming excessive in numbers.
Quintus Septimus Florence Tertillianus, Roman citizen, bout 200 A.D., with a world population about 200 million
“. . . the Western World today is on the verge of the greatest ecological renewal that humankind has known; perhaps the greatest that the Earth has known. Environmentalists deserve the credit for this remarkable turn of events. Yet our political and cultural institutions continue to read from a script of instant doomsday. Environmentalists, who are surely on the right side of history, are increasingly on the wrong side of the present, risking
their credibility by proclaiming emergencies that do not exist.”
Greg Easterbrook, A Moment on Earth, 1995, p. xvi, with the world population 30 times as large and still increasing
“Here’s something for the Greens of the world to ponder: ‘genetic engineering may be the most environmentally beneficial technology to have emerged in decades, or possibly centuries,’ Jonathan Rauch writes in The Atlantic Monthly. . . Noting that ‘world food output will need to at least double and possibly triple over the next several decades,’ the author argues that ‘the great challenge’ is ‘not to feed an additional three billion people (and their pets) but to do so without converting much of the world’s prime [wildlife] habitat into second- or third-rate farmland.’”
New York Times, “Frankenfoods to the Rescue of Mother Earth,” Week in Review, Sept 21, 2003
For the past 40 years, human society has been in a unique anti-human mode. “Saving the planet” has been the watchword. For the first time in human history, kangaroo rats and flowerhead weevils have been deemed more important than people, because humanity had become so carelessly powerful that it threatened the whole environment. A million Africans (mostly children) have been, and still are, allowed to die each year of malaria rather than allow the use of DDT-indoors where it could be no threat to birds.
This orgy of anti-humanity was driven, almost certainly, not by Rachel Carson and her erroneous 1962 book Silent Spring, but by people-phobic Paul Ehrlich and his equally wrong-headed 1968 book, The Population Bomb.
I think people certainly cared about the environment before, and will continue to do so. However, it seems clear now that the real motivating factor in much of our eco-fervor has been an irrational fear that our ways of living would be overwhelmed by 20 or 50 billion poor brown and yellow people who don’t share Western culture or values. (And who might grab all the resources away from us.)
But the same moral codes that say humans are responsible for protecting Nature also say we’re also responsible for helping our fellow men. It doesn’t say we can become Druids, worship trees, and practice human sacrifice.
It would certainly be easier to leave room for wildlife if we eliminated all the humans. But that would be the conservation equivalent of “cheap grace.” Killing off our fellow men or enforcing billions of forced abortions are not moral solutions when we have the intelligence and societal skills to save both people and wildlife.
Fortunately, there’s good news for all in the 21st century. The population surge is nearing its end, and our resource base is increasing, not disappearing. Technological abundance is making it possible for the peak human population that we expect in 2050 (less than 9 billion) to live better than people do today, while doing less and less damage to the environment.
How can I say this?
Richer Means Fewer Wildlife Extinctions
The UN Environmental Program reports that the world lost only half as many species to extinction during the last third of the 20th century (20 among birds, fish, and mammals) as it did during the comparable period of the 19th century. Moreover, the UNEP says our rate of wild species extinctions is now as low as it was 500 years ago, when the world population was less than one-tenth what it is today (about 450 million).
The biggest reasons for the low rate of wildlife extinctions today are high-yield farming and high-efficiency meat production. High-yield farming has tripled the yields of crops on the world’s best farmland in recent decades. High-efficiency meat production has doubled the pounds of meat produced per acre of pasture and cropland in the past 30 years. While some activists rail against confinement feeding, moving the birds and animals indoors has made them more comfortable and increased their feed efficiency by 15-20 percent. It has also prevented the clearing of millions of acres of wildlife habitat for hog and chicken playgrounds.
We tend to forget that man has been using and abusing wildlife for eons. Stone Age man used to hunt birds and animals to extinction. North America lost more than 40 species of huntable birds and animals within a few years after the human hunters arrived from Asia some 14,000 years ago-including North America’s horses, camels, and elephants.
Equally bad, paleontologists tell us that up to 25 percent of the males (and perhaps 15 percent of the females) in primitive communities showed signs of violent death. They were essentially fighting over food: good hunting grounds and good farmland. Even the “peaceful” Anasazi Indians of the Southwest were eventually driven by long-term drought (associated with global cooling) from their scattered farmhouses into fortified cliff dwellings.
Only in the last 100 years, thanks to nitrogen fertilizer taken from the air, plant breeding, and integrated pest management, has man been able to support high populations of both people and wildlife in the same region. Only after World War II, when the Green Revolution extended high-yield farming over most of the world, did human society free itself from “food wars.” (In 1932, Japan invaded Manchuria for oil and soybean fields.)
The World Conservation Union today warns that more than one billion poor people are living in the world’s biodiversity hotspots (particularly tropical and mountain rain forests)-and trying to feed their children by hunting bushmeat and doing slash-and burn farming. We must either give these people high-yield farming or off-farm jobs if we hope to prevent massive wildlife extinctions in the next 50 years.
Yet the eco-movement holds up hunters and gatherers as the environmental models for the future.
Rich Countries Are Better for the Environment
Paul Ehrlich said the affluent people of the First World were: (1) the worst polluters in the history of the world; (2) would destroy half the world’s wildlife species in the next few decades; and, (3) would bring about the ruin of the whole planet. The eco-movement is holding up primitive people and peasant farmers as the models for conserving Nature in the 21st century.
Most of the Third World is already in the most polluting phase of industrialization- burning huge amounts of coal to smelt massive amounts of iron, cooking food with wood from trees that aren’t replanted and caring too little about water pollution.
Meanwhile, in places like Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers are peddling rhinoceros horn (a supposed aphrodisiac) and “bushmeat” from endangered gorillas and rare civet cats-harvested with AK-47s.
Mexico is losing three million acres of forest per year to the expansion of peasant farming. More than half of the forestland cleared in Honduras in recent decades has been “steepland,” with a slope of more than 30 degrees; every few years, a hurricane washes the steeplands into the valleys.
How can the eco-movement present these hunter-gatherers and peasant farmers as the guardians of the world’s environmental future?
But there is hope for humanity and nature, thanks primarily to the affluence generated by knowledge, technology, and trade. A World Bank staff team has documented a bell-shaped curve in environmental protection. In the early years of industrialization, forests die and pollution surges. Rising populations and higher incomes demand more farmland and better diets. But when per capita incomes reach a level of $5,000 to $8,000 (Brazil and Malaysia now) a different set of factors take over. People are already well-fed and birth rates fall rapidly. With better inputs and management, crop yields rise, so less land per capita is needed for food. Diesel fuel, taken from under the land or sea, substitutes for firewood even as forests are replanted. Affluent people want cleaner air and are willing and able to pay for it. They begin to demand clean rivers, for both health and aesthetics.
The World Bank staff finds no hordes of high-pollution industries fleeing to unregulated Third World countries, nor any significant list of governments reducing their environmental regulations.
Richer Means a Cleaner Environment
Pollution trends are declining in virtually every affluent country. In England, air pollution has been declining since the 1920s, long before the “clean air” legislation was passed. In America, public sanitation has been improving since we began phasing out horses (along with horse manure and horse carcasses) in favor of trains and automobiles.
Remarkably, the waste volume from American homes today is one-third less than the waste volume from Mexican homes! This is due in sizeable part to the centralized processing of our food supply. Our broilers, for example, arrive at the store wrapped in sanitary, lightweight plastic-wrapped trays-with the feathers, heads, feet and many of the unwanted internal organs already separated out at the processing plant.
As you know better than anyone else, these poultry waste products are then recycled into livestock feeds, and many other products, far more effectively than they could be handled without the centralized processing and waste management.
The rendering industry is one of the largest and most critically needed recyclers, treating 50 billion pounds per year of waste that urgently needs to be treated, even if it were only going into a landfill. However, it would be a horrible waste if the products from the rendering industry were consigned to a landfill. It would take millions of additional acres of farmland to replace the nutrients salvaged and put to use through rendering.
21st Century Human Society is the Most Sustainable in History
Roman citizens worried about soil erosion and declining farm yields nearly two thousand years ago, with good reason: soil erosion has always been the most vulnerable aspect of human society.
Environmental activists today rely on our long-held and valid fear of soil erosion to undermine our confidence in the sustainability of modern high-yield farming. They tell us that today’s high crop yields give only an illusion of a sustainable food supply because the farmers are “mining the soil.” That’s not the truth.
Thanks to chemical fertilizer, modern farmers no longer need to “wear out” their soils. In the traditional farming of the 19th century, growing crops often took more nutrients out of the soil than farmers could replace with manure. As yields and soil organic matter declined, the farm would be abandoned as “worn out.” (Or the depleted soils combined with drought to give us a “Dust Bowl.”) Today’s farmers use soil testing and industrially supplied nutrients to keep their soils rich and productive.
In addition, modern farmers invented conservation tillage. Sometimes called “no till,” this farming system eliminates plowing by using herbicides to control weeds, planting through the unplowed soil. It cuts erosion by up to 95 percent and encourages far more earthworms and subsoil bacteria. Organic farmers refuse to use conservation tillage because they don’t allow themselves to use herbicides. Organic farmers are still forced to use bare-earth, erosion-inviting weed control techniques like plowing and hoeing.
Industrial fertilizers and conservation tillage are two of the major reasons why the Soil and Water Conservation Society of the U.S. calls modern high-yield farming “the most sustainable in history.”
Richer Means Upgraded Diets - But Less Population Pressure
The absolute best news for the planet is that the world’s recent population surge is nearly over. Since I started my career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1959, the average births per woman in the poor countries of the Third World has dropped from 6.2 to 2.7, and is still declining rapidly. (The rich countries are at 1.7 births and declining too.)
This is apparently the first major change in global birth rates in all history. (The population surge was not caused by higher birth rates, but by lower death rates due to modern medicine.) Paul Ehrlich did not know in 1968 that the world would become so much richer and more urban. Poor farmers always have large families, while affluent urban couples always have small ones. As a result, the current world population of six billion will probably rise to a peak of between eight and nine billion about the year 2035, and then begin a long, very slow decline-as more and more people become rich and urban and have 1.7 children per woman.
The end of the population surge will ease the pressure on agriculture to some degree-but the continued rise of incomes (which has been strong and steady for more than 40 years now) will mean billions of additional high-income consumers. Most of the Third World will emulate Japan, South Korea, and China in the coming decades, industrializing their populations and generating more income and more attractive lifestyle choices. Instead of feeding high-quality diets to only one billion people as we do today, we’ll have to offer high-quality diets to about seven billion people in the future.
There’ll even be a pet challenge. America has 112 million companion cats and dogs today. A rich, urbanized China in 2050 may still have the one-child policy, but it will have no shortage of people with parenting instincts. We expect China to have 500 million companion cats and dogs in 2050, and woe unto the politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food.
In Southern Africa, last winter, environmental activists took their campaign against agricultural biotechnology to famine-stricken countries. They convinced African government leaders not to distribute U.S. corn donated as food aid. America co-mingles corn that is genetically altered with conventional corn, since both are equally nutritious and approved as safe by three U.S. government agencies. However, the president of Zambia said the activists told him the U.S. corn was poison.
People who were boiling poisonous roots because they had nothing else to eat were denied food approved for safety by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The environmental movement has been broadly involved for many years in an even more deadly effort-to ban the use of DDT on the planet. The campaign against DDT has cost at least a million malaria deaths per year in the Third World-and tens of millions of lives ruined by the disease, the suffering it causes, and the disability it inflicts. There is no evidence that DDT harms humans, and only shaky evidence that it harms birds. Nevertheless, the eco-movement has tried to ban even the indoor use of DDT in malarial regions, which could not possibly harm wildlife. On the inside walls of homes, it’s by far the most cost-effective mosquito killer, and also the longest-lasting and most effective mosquito repellent. Fortunately, the World Health Organization has so far blocked the final ban, but just barely.
Does putting Nature above people always lead humans to inhumane behavior? Does nature-worship always push society over that thin line?
The New Surge of Support for High-Yield Technologies
After the success of the Green Revolution became clear in the 1970s, a vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation-that founded the key agricultural research stations in Mexico and the Philippines-spoke of his profound regret. He said that agricultural research had turned humanity into a cancer on the earth.
We know now that he was wrong. We know now that poor rural people always have large families and high death rates-while affluent urban couples have small families because they recognize the low death rates. (And the high cost of raising kids in the city.)
For 30 years, the First World has been terrified of an upward population spiral that never happened. For 30 years, the environmental movement took advantage of overpopulation fears to advance an anti-human agenda. Agriculture was condemned for “producing too much food.” Modern agriculture could get no credit, either for saving billions of people or millions of square miles of wildlife habitat. Now, with the end of the population surge, the activist campaign against biotechnology has brought the issue of high-yield farming to a head- and modern agriculture is at last beginning to get the support it has so long deserved from the intellectual leadership of the First World.
We at the Hudson Institute take some of the credit for the turnaround. In May of 2001, we presented at the National Press Club in Washington two Nobel Peace Prize winners, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the then-latest winner of the World Food Prize, and the British author of the Gaia Hypothesis, as signers of our “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-Yield Farming and Forestry.”
This remarkably broad coalition was led by Dr. Norman Borlaug, Chairman Emeritus of our Center, and the 1970 winner of the Peace Prize for his work on high-yield crops for the Green Revolution. The other Nobel Peace laureate was former Costa Rican president Oscar Arias, directly representing the Third World.
The Declaration didn’t endorse any agricultural technology or system. It simply stated that the world urgently needs higher yields based on sustainable advances in biology, ecology, chemistry, and technology-to save room for wildlife.
At the time of the Press Club event, we feared it had been a failure. The biggest media outlet to feature the event was the American Farm Bureau News. But in the months since that event, the concept of high-yield conservation has been praised by David Ignatius of the Washington Post. The October issue of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly carried an article lavishly praising both high-yield farming and biotech. More startling by far, the editorial page of the New York Times recommended the Atlantic Monthly article to its readers-in a newspaper which has been editorially praising organic food and condemning high-yield farming for decades.
The October 17th issue of the journal Science carries an editorial by Dr. Donald Kennedy, the magazine’s editor. Kennedy states that world hunger is now the overarching issue for world health-and concludes:
“Unless agricultural production is increased on the good lands, population pressures will cause farmers to move upslope and deforest the hillsides. That’s a double whammy: a loss for those families, and a loss for the environment. And on already marginal lands, GM technology may offer the best hope for producing crops that can withstand drought, impoverished soils and disease. For both these reasons, we’d better resolve the GM controversy.”
To understand the importance of this statement, the recently appointed Dr. Kennedy was introduced to the journal’s readers?on its own pages?by his old Stanford colleague, Dr. Paul Ehrlich!
Kennedy is now urgently endorsing the very agricultural research that Dr. Ehrlich has so long blamed for overpopulating his planet.
Canada’s Globe and Mail on Oct. 20 editorialized:
“GM food could be an especial boon to the Third World, where traditional farmers are eating up vast swaths of rain forest and other rich habitats. Just as the Green Revolution of the 1960s, 70s and 80s all but ended famine in the Third World by introducing high-yield crops, GM agriculture could help save what is left of these precious environments. It is odd, then, that the environmental movement has become so fixated on the threat it sees in GM foods. Yes, we need to be careful how and where we introduce them. . . . But we also need to remember the power of good they can do.”
These statements were true 10 years ago, and 30 years ago. But they are only now being made. I think the First World has become more serious about Third World hunger and poverty in the awful aftermath of the World Trade Center’s destruction. I also think the eco-activists damaged themselves severely by carrying their fear campaign against biotech foods to Southern Africa last winter. But the African hunger didn’t attract much media coverage.
I think the underlying factor that has seemingly created a sudden turnaround in the American attitude toward high-yield farming is the visible end of the human population surge.
That means modern farmers and their supporting industries have a better opportunity to tell their positive stories than they’ve had in 30 years. It probably means that animal rights activists and eco-terrorists will face more public approbation and less public tolerance. It should mean that the efforts to strangle high-yield farming and modern meat production with over-regulation can be eased by effective industry presentations to the public.
Half Again As Much Meat Demand in 2025
All of that comes in the nick of time because the worlds’ demand for meat and livestock produce will continue to soar.
Given the still-rising population, we expect that if per capita meat demand simply held steady, meat consumption in 2025 would be 25 percent higher. However, my Hudson colleague Tom Elam (formerly of USDA and Elanco Animal Health) notes that meat consumption has an almost perfect correlation with higher incomes. He projects that per capita world incomes will be 31 percent higher in 2025 than today. Combined with a 28 percent increase in population, Dr. Elam says this would drive meat consumption to an increase of nearly 55 percent by 2025. (He expects a 31 percent increase in beef consumption, a 61 percent increase in pork consumption, and a 73 percent rise in poultry consumption.)
This meat increase will be good for children, since it provides them with high-quality protein and key micronutrients. Without livestock products, children do not reach their full genetic stature, and may lag in cognitive learning. Moreover, the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology says that, thanks to the fact that birds and animals can nourish themselves on things that humans can’t or don’t eat, the resource cost of the meat is just about what it would cost in resources to get the same number of non-meat protein and calorie.
Dr. Elam realizes that such a major meat production increase will require higher grain yields (perhaps 30 percent higher), higher oilseed yields (25 percent higher?) and still-better feed conversion ratios. He says these will only be possible if we continue to invest in research (including biotechnology) and allow it to be adopted. The current regulatory war against farmers, renderers, fertilizer makers and virtually anyone else involved in high-yield farming must stop.
Tom notes than the current “organic agriculture” cannot possible feed high-quality diets to the 21st century. Its yields are at least 20 percent lower, and often 40 percent below those of conventional farmers.
Worse, there’s a global shortage of organic nitrogen. The Danish government in the mid-1990s appointed a high-level technical committee to examine the impact of an all-organic farming mandate. The committee concluded that would cut Danish food production by 47 percent, because most Danish farmland would have to be planted to forage crops, for green-chop delivery to feedlot cattle, so the manure could be slathered thickly over the Danish landscape.
Dr. Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba says America would need the manure from another 1 billion cattle to go all-organic. (We have 200 million now.) Since there are only 2.1 billion acres in the lower 48 states, the United States would have room for its cities, and manure production-but no room for food, forests, or Yellowstone National Park.
It’s hard to see that clearing the earth’s forests for enough forage for another 8 billion cattle is good for the environment-let alone water quality.
If it’s free range chickens and pigs you prefer, understand that their feed conversion is 15-20 percent lower, so they take lots more land for feed crops. And putting the world’s chickens outdoors would take 20 million acres of land just for their playgrounds (at 1200 broilers per acre). Putting the hogs outdoors, even at a crowded 4 hogs per acre, would take 250 million acres. Is that a constructive trade-off for nearly 300 million acres of the world’s wildlife habitat?
More Globalization, Not Less
Obviously, most of the increase in global meat consumption will occur outside of North America. It is also true that much of the meat consumption gain will occur in densely populated countries that will be critically short of land and water to produce their own livestock products cost-effectively.
Liberalization of farm trade remains a strong imperative, despite the recent collapse of the World Trade Organization talks at Cancun. I say this because the world’s big agricultural players will all need farm trade reform in the coming decades:
The EU is now admitting it will have to change its Common Agricultural Policy as it takes in millions of additional farmers and farming acres in 10 new member countries that include Poland and Romania. The EU can be expected to shift from price supports and import barriers to a more trade-friendly farm policy of direct income payments to small farmers.
The United States recently passed a lavish farm bill-but did it during a period of supposed budget surplus. Now the budget surplus has disappeared (economic slump and war on terror). Worse, we are rapidly approaching the time when the federal government must begin to pony up the money for Social Security reform. The Congressional Budget Office says the costs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for the baby boomers’ retirement will force a 36 percent increase in all federal taxes-or a 91 percent increase in the payroll tax and 81 percent increase in the individual income tax. Obviously, the next farm bill will look radically different from the last one.
Meanwhile, China has 20 percent of the world’s population, and 7 percent of its arable land, and its only spare land is thousands of miles from its cities (and beyond the Gobi Desert) in its far-western provinces. Three-fourths of India’s Hindus say they will eat meat when they can afford it, and their GNP is now rising twice as fast as their population. India is urgently short of water and will be short of livestock feed. Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Egypt are other major population centers which are likely to bid happily for farm imports in the decades ahead.
How Agricultural Biotechnology Could Help the Planet
It looks now as though agricultural biotechnology is winning its place in the 21st century. I’m thankful, since I do not know how we would triple the world’s crop yields again in the next 50 years without it. And unless we triple the crop yields again, we risk losing large amounts of wildlife to the expansion of low-yield crops. Fortunately, agricultural biotech is already showing what it can do:
The first blight-proof potato will ensure that neither China nor Bangladesh (increasingly dependent on potatoes because of their high food output per acre) will suffer a modern replay of the Irish potato famine.
Biotech is taking the natural allergens out of such naturally dangerous foods as soybeans and peanuts, so allergenic consumers will no longer have to fear potentially-fatal anaphylactic shock.
Crops that can grow in highly-salty water will ensure that our irrigated land can continue to produce high yields of food into the foreseeable future, instead of lying useless due to high soil salt levels.
Did Farming Destroy the Salmon in the Pacific Northwest?
If you are still reluctant to speak up for modern farming and processing in the face of eco-opposition, please note that last year, the Columbia River had its biggest salmon run in its modern history. It hasn’t been logging, farming or hydroelectric dams that had reduced salmon numbers, but Nature herself responding to a 25-year cycle, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. For 25 years at a time, the Pacific currents take the salmon food to the Gulf of Alaska, while the Oregon/Washington salmon fishery shrinks. Then, for the next 25 years, the Oregon/Washington salmon fishermen flourish, while the Gulf of Alaska shrinks. I’ve seen fishing records that go back a century and the pattern of co-variance is dramatic and clear. The Columbian salmon began to decline in 1977. Now they’re returning, right on schedule.
Did the Sierra Club not know about the 25-year cycle? Or did they know and not tell us?
Is Global Warming A Rich-Country Betrayal of the Planet?
The eco-activists say that the rich countries are about to burn up the planet with fossil fuels, but the ‘man-made warming’ evidence has always been weak. Virtually all of the warming in the past 120 years occurred before 1940, before much greenhouse gas was emitted by human industries and autos. After 1940, the climate stubbornly refused to warm for 40 years, despite huge greenhouse emissions.
The world’s known temperature history includes a Medieval Warming of perhaps 3 degrees Fahrenheit (950 to1300 AD), followed by the much-colder Little Ice Age, from 1300 to 1850 AD. History also tells us about a Roman Warming, from 200 BC to 400 AD, followed by an Ice Age from 400 to 950 AD. The world has been moderately warming and cooling for as far back in history as we have records.
Recently, an elegant and careful analysis of iceberg debris from the floor of the North Atlantic showed that the world has had nine moderate global warmings and nine global coolings in the last 12,000 years-coinciding exactly with a known cycle in the magnetic activity of the sun. By this analysis, we are about 150 years into a mild, natural, global warming that will last another 600 years. The cycle will return us to what history calls the Medieval Climate Optimum-the finest weather humanity can remember.
Why would environmentally concerned activists seize on the global warming issue?
“[Global] warming . . . is capable of realizing the environmentalist’s dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population’s eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.”
Dr. Aaron Wildavsky, Professor of Political Science, University of California/Berkeley
“No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment, as quoted by the Calgary Herald, 1998
Why would European governments aid and abet a global warming scare not supported by science? First, many European governments are run by coalitions including Green parties, and its politicians are anxious to give Green concessions that won’t cost money before the next election. Second, the barrel of Saudi crude that nets the Saudis $25 nets the British government about $150 in taxes-all of it now conveniently justified by the global warming theory.
Make Your Case to the Public
Nothing else humanity does for conservation in the 21st century will be nearly as important to the planet’s wildlands and ecosystems as high-yield farms and high-efficiency meat production. Nothing else will affect so much land.
However, too many in the environmental movement demand we achieve sustainability by massive numbers of forced abortions or by minimizing human consumption. Neither is a valid way to achieve conservation. Neither is likely to occur. What can occur is a technological abundance that will maximize the world’s ability to have people and wildlife thriving economies and thriving ecologies, all at the same time.
You have been and are a vital component in this technological abundance, and co-sponsors of the conservation that has occurred through it.
Now is the time to state this loudly and confidently to the urban public. It is not easy to talk to the public about farming, but the last 30 years had demonstrated that it’s too dangerous to let urbanites get all of their information about farming from its opponents. Greenpeace and the other eco-groups will continue trying to demonize agriculture, and the farming industry we have today of necessity looks little like the traditional red barns and Percheron horses in the Christmas Budweiser commercials.
We must help the whole world finally understand that saving both planet and people are possible, and that our moral challenge in the 21st century is to achieve nothing less.
Posted in Speeches |No Comments »