New Zealand has some fantastic opportunities in the food production and agricultural technology space. It is one of the few areas that we are recognised as world best. We can make a significant contribution to humanity. We should be proud of this. But rather than celebrate and support that success and champion the exciting opportunities, we have people marching against them. They want to inhibit just the possibility of carefully and environmentally harvesting just some of our resources, inhibit our film production, inhibit our food production. What’s left?
If these marching groups don’t want our fantastic primary exports to be allowed to pay for the country’s lunch, who do they suggest will?
Conor English, Federated Farmers chief executive asks a very good question.
Sustainability is supposed to balance economic, environmental and social considerations.
Too often economic and social factors come a very poor second and third to environmental ones based on emotion rather than science.
Read this somewhere but can’t put a name to it. It is so true.
The Philosophy of Sustainability
“The overriding philosophy of sustainability will be ‘sustainability, which means whatever the greens say it means.”
No problem with the thrust of this post HP. It’s just that those who control the science often have agendas and like to be selective about how much of that science is open to independent examination.
Historically Tobacco companies held knowledge that their product was cancer causing for a time before it was openly acknowledged.
Today companies like Monsanto the sort of independent research that can be done on their seeds which have patented genes.
So I’m always bit a cynical when there is talk of emotion verses science. I want to know what the agenda behind it is.
The real question is not “emotion verses science” but “Whose ‘science’ are we talking about?”
FBB – ggod point.
At the Grasslands dinner last night I was talking to a scientist last night. She’d listened to another scientist give a report on water quality and blame dairying for the deterioration even though the water tested was upriver from any dairy farms.
Ele – what is it you and Connor English are trying to say here?
Are you refering to genetically engineered plants and animals? If so, why are you frightened to say it loud?
As for Enlish’s ‘marching groups’, he’s dog-whistling in a particularly vacuous way. This is drivel from him and veiled fluff from you.
Really, those English boys are just hopeless
“She’d listened to another scientist give a report on water quality and blame dairying for the deterioration even though the water tested was upriver from any dairy farms.”
You could call that a scientific confusion!
It also shows that a sample taken downstream of any dairy farms would have been misleading if it hadn’t been been compared with one taken upstream of those farms. Even then,other possible sources of contamination would need to be ruled out.
I notice I missed a word out of my post at 10.18am.
The word ‘Monsanto’ should have been followed by the word ‘control’.