If you are a regular consumer of environmental news and commentary, you are familiar with the narrative of humanity’s downfall. The story, we are told, looks like this. If we continue to ignore the danger signs while exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity, the future may get ugly. For the time being, we are on…Continue Reading…
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) describes itself as America’s “most effective environmental health research and advocacy organization.” Like many green groups (and health-conscious foodies), EWG has an organic fetish. Michael Specter has a great chapter on this syndrome in his 2009 book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives. The organic…Continue Reading…
This open letter to President Obama from Maria Rodale is the sort of low-hanging fruit that I try to avoid. But I give in to temptation every now and again when the author is someone widely admired within the U.S. food movement and a prominent environmental voice. (In the letter, Rodale identifies herself as “the…Continue Reading…
When I was a boy growing up on suburban Long Island in the 1970s, my grandfather had a chicken coop enclosed behind a mesh wire fence in his West Babylon backyard. Like many of his generation seared by the 1930s depression, he developed a self-reliance and waste-not ethic (dare I leave food on my dinner…Continue Reading…
Well, this is fun. Carl Zimmer has a piece on the biology of weeds in the New York Times. One of my go-to sources in this field tweeted his reaction: Perhaps the best (non-sensationalized) article about herbicide resistant weeds I’ve read: http://t.co/l2RQZiVPd3 by @carlzimmer — Andrew Kniss (@WyoWeeds) July 15, 2013 I say this is fun…Continue Reading…
In this space, I’ve frequently shown how GMO fear mongering plays out in the media. The latest frightful example aired Monday on CNN. It was a piece about the mysterious genetically modified (GM) wheat recently found in an Oregon farm field. First, some quick background: In the early to mid-2000s, Monsanto field tested GM wheat in…Continue Reading…
There are two kinds of people who write about genetically modified foods: Those who believe that GMOs are bad and those who don’t. In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m in the latter group. Unfortunately, the simplistic debate between these two camps has devolved into a Three Stooges slapfest: More specifically, one group shrieks…Continue Reading…
Guest post by Cami Ryan, a Canadian agricultural researcher: Last week, an executive with a biotech trade group asserted in an interview that it wasn’t too late to win the hearts and minds of consumers suspicious of genetically modified foods. Biotech advocates just need to do a better job of explaining the technology and its…Continue Reading…
Mark Bittman, the popular food writer for the New York Times, has written a column that is almost beyond parody for its unintentional irony. The only way to fully appreciate his lack of self-awareness is to stop and marvel at numerous passages. Let’s start at the top: Things are bad enough in the food world…Continue Reading…
By now it has become clear, as British environmental writer Mark Lynas said in a speech this week at Cornell University, that controversy over GMOs represents one of the greatest science communications failures of the past half-century. Millions, possibly billions, of people have come to believe what is essentially a conspiracy theory, generating fear and…Continue Reading…