[geeks] I really don't get it ...

[Mike Meredith]

On Saturday 26 October 2002 2:34 pm, Mike Hebel wrote:
> wa2egp at att.net wrote:
> >>[flamebait] Oh!  You mean like slash/burn farming. [/flamebait] ;-)
> >>
> > Slash/burn farming is minor. Regular farming is major.  How much


What I always find funny about agriculture is just how many people think 
the resultant landscape is natural ... English people looking at 
rolling green fields. It isn't natural at all as it was originally 
mostly covered in forest.

Just how much "global warming" is due to iron age axes ?

> > biodiversity is in a field.....very little.  One disease can wpe
> > out a crop.
>
> Hmmm...thus the reason for all the gentically engineered crops.  Both
> a good and bad thing IMHO.  Jury's still out on that one from my
> point of view.

What I don't like about GE crops is the lack of diversity ... they've 
engineered them to be immune to the known crop diseases. What happens 
when a new crop disease springs up ?

We know the answer to that one ... an Irish Potatoe famine (yes that's 
at the extreme end of the possibilities).

> > We may have caught the thinning of the ozone in time through.
>
> Maybe.  

I'd go so far as to say probably, but that doesn't mean we should start 
using ozone-depleting chemicals again.

> But I still believe that we don't have enough data to make
> that judgement call.

We never really do.