New article from Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan writes about sustainability and agriculture and the potential for disaster should the system break down (which he believes may already be happening). Read "Our Decrepit Food Factories" from yesterday's New York Times Magazine.

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

And this Washington Post article on global warming would only seem to amplify the impacts of which Pollan warns.

"We are not dealing with a single toxic agent or a single microbe where we can put our finger with certainty on an exposure and the response," said Jonathan A. Patz, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "Climate change affects everything."

Heavy sigh.

(See my previous post on Michael Pollan's excellent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.)