Comment by pixl97
9 hours ago
>“You can’t eat an iPhone,” talking to me on his own.
You can't eat money either, and yet with money you can buy all the food you want since someone somewhere will want to exchange the money for food.
And as much as people complain about technology companies being spoiled, farmers as a whole generally have to be forced to not do things that are extremely dangerous to the environment. Pumping out all the water they have in an aquifer. Continually irrigating until their soil becomes salt. Spraying poisons on monocultures until everything around them looks the same and 3 horrific hard to kill insect types are left plaguing everything. Avoiding crop rotations and plowing early so all their soil blows/washes away. Growing crops that drink 100x the water of native plants, etc, etc, etc.
Yes, we absolutely need food to survive. Does it have to be almonds and cows? Probably not. Don't let farmers as a whole act like they are some pro-ecological force here to save the world either, as everything to keep them from damaging the planet has been forced on them too.
> And as much as people complain about technology companies being spoiled, farmers as a whole generally have to be forced to not do things that are extremely dangerous to the environment.
"Farmers" is doing some work here. You mean corporations.
No, I mean farmers. I come from a family of farmers that have been doing it long before corporations owned the world (yea, even the east India company). When poisons came out and massively increased crop yield they used that because it increased profits. When grain prices were high they'd till marginal land that was at risk of erosion because more money is better than less. Spraying huge amounts of fertilizer was fine because it more than paid for itself at the time, who cares if the rivers turn green.
We get regulations because both individuals and corporations tend to maximize the short term while intentionally neglecting or being ignorant of the long term consequences. Farmers reaped the rewards of the green revolution, but it came at a pretty great cost.
Farmers in Sumeria over-irrigated the land until it was rendered unusable due to oversalination. This was a gradual process occurring over hundreds of years. That occurred before the limited liability corporation was invented.
There's zero contradiction between these two things.