Taking Sustainability Seriously
Writing in the Sunday's NY Times, Michael Pollan warns about two potential epidemics posed by the industrial food system. Bacteria in industrial feed lot operations are developing antibiotic resistance and may well be causing a new strain of staph infection, currently responsible for more deaths in the United States than AIDS. Industrial agriculture cannot persist without the use of antibiotics, though such practices appear to be creating conditions for a public health disaster.
Agricultural monocultures create environmental conditions that make it difficult for bees to reside in production areas, making it necessary to import bees from afar for pollination where they are exposed to pathogens from distant places - a possible cause for the dramatic drops in bee populations last year. This type of agriculture may be killing bees, and without bees, there will be no agriculture.
These two situations are examples of fundamental contradictions within the industrial food system - stressing natural systems to the breaking point, sacrificing biological resilience for "efficiency". Such contradictions will lead to the break down of the current food system. How prepared are we, asks Pollan, to take sustainability seriously?
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