[FLPERMACULTURE] MICHAEL POLLAN: Our Decrepit Food Factories

[Michael Burns]

full article available at:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/17/5857/
or
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16wwln-lede-t.html

The Way We Live Now
Our Decrepit Food Factories
By MICHAEL POLLAN

The word "sustainability" has gotten such a workout lately that the
whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of
inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever "it" means.
On a recent visit to a land-grant university's spanking-new
sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school's
faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out
asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that
rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice
surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in
agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of
endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability?
When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the
term, you have to wonder if we haven't succeeded in defining
sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if
it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like
"natural" or "green" or "nice."

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the
world, we had best start with the "rectification of the names." The
corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their
proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the
reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what
about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

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.

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