Tag: Ecopragmatism

Major NGO gets it right. Global agriculture faces a challenge. But with will and goodwill we can freeze the footprint of food.

At last the Pundit is seeing a major NGO (namely the WWF) say many of the things that he has been trying to popularise for several years at GMO Pundit and elsewhere. As we peer into the future of this planet, globally farm management faces an immense challenge. Indeed we do. The mindless chants by…

Syndicated

Real leadership leaves Friends of the Earth. Unfortunately, they still need it.

Finally, accept certain campaigns are not winnable, and simply drain resources. Absolutist positions do not hold up for the majority. Because of climate change, this probably includes total opposition to nuclear power and GM products globally. Focus instead on the conditions where these technologies become acceptable: safe, economic, free of patent control by a few…

Syndicated

Nature and human activity are inextricably intertwined — in the Anthropocene

Nothing affects global food security as much as synthetic nitrogen fertiliser. Nothing underlines the inadequacy of organic farming for meeting current food and feed demand while sparing forests as much as the global accounts on the nitrogen cycle that is an essential part of all life on the planet. These facts of life are captured succinctly by…

Syndicated

The Future of Food and Farming Priority 6: Promote sustainable intensification.

The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and choices for global sustainabilityUK Government Office for Science 2011Executive Summary From the IntroductionProject aim: to explore the pressures on the global food system between now and 2050 and identify the decisions that policy makers need to take today, and in the years ahead, to ensure that a global…

Syndicated

Moore ecopragmatism

Confessions of a Greenpeace founderNew book describes environmental group’s descent into extremism, author’s conversion to reasonBy Patrick Moore, Special To The Sun January 7, 2011, Vancouver The main purpose of my new book is to establish a new approach to environmentalism and to define sustainability as the key to achieving environmental goals. This requires embracing humans as…

Growing of transgenic crops can contribute in all three traditional pillars of sustainability — economic, environmental and social.

Review article The role of transgenic crops in sustainable development Julian Raymond Park, Ian McFarlane, Richard Hartley Phipps and Graziano Ceddia School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AR, UK Summary The concept of sustainable development forms the basis for a wide variety of international and national policy making. World population…

Syndicated

Group-think in action: Greens who don’t toe the party line vilified by traditional sections of the environmental movement.

In the Pundit’s opinion, serious difficulty with solving global environmental problems is lack of open-minded and objective evaluation of all of the options on the table. Another difficulty is that without full knowledge about how the world works, without practical engagement with the challenges of findingsolutions to real world problems, it’s easy to regard distant…

Syndicated

Biodiversity world tour event at Nagoya Japan –save forest for nature by working from the ground up not top-down

GMO Pundit participated in a session running in parallel with the conference of parties (COP) biodiversity discussions that occurred last week in Nagoya, Japan. He had an opportunity to frame some points to make to the delegates who are interested in conserving biodiversity, an issue the Pundit is passionate about too. He does worry that…

Syndicated