Viewpoint: The ‘assault on science’ and human welfare by eco-activists who reject agricultural technology as ‘corporate subterfuge’

David Zaruk | June 12, 2019

In last year’s excellent book The Wizard and the Prophet, Charles Mann juxtaposed two polemics on the environment in the 1940s during the turning point of agricultural development: Norman Borlaug and William Vogt. Borlaug (the Wizard) took the scientific approach to innovate and develop new tools to solve problems facing agriculture. Vogt (the Prophet and arguably the founder of the modern environmental movement) would see an environmental problem as a reason for man to pull back and let the planet heal itself.

To this day, both approaches (to innovate or to pull back and take precaution) have defined environmental debates. There is no doubt which side I fall on. Borlaug’s scientific route has allowed humanity to thrive over the last 70 years. The Green Revolution in agriculture led to global economic expansions as abundance led to generations of risk-takers being able to leave the land and develop other opportunities for wealth generation. Environmentalists argue that the agri-technologies have led to deeper problems from saturated soil and poisoned water tables to serious human health issues to climate calamity. Social justice theorists are proposing agro-ecology as a Vogtian response in pulling back from seven decades of agricultural development..............

Does the wider public want to pay 60% more for food? Will they accept to no longer have affordable meat and dairy products? Do they want to haul heavier, more expensive glass packaging? How much more are people willing to pay for green energy? What will happen when people in the countryside can no longer afford to keep their cars on the road? It seems that these white, middle-class, cosmopolitan virtue signallers with the Extinction Rebellion flags don’t get how the wider public thinks (but they seem arrogant enough to feel they can make decisions for them).

The wider public does not understand the policy tools these activists have manipulated. The wider public is ignorant of the consequences soon to be imposed on their lifestyle by a small, vocal, self-entitled tribe of eco-fundamentalists. The wider public is just trying to get by and hopefully have a better tomorrow. The wider public is not aware of the benefits that these dogmatic zealots are planning to take away from them.

Maybe someone should tell them...........To Read More.....