| DENIALISM How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives Michael Specter New York: The Penguin Press, October 2009 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-59420-230-8 | ||||
| ISBN 1-59420-230-3 | 294pp. | HC | $27.95 | |
"It would be hard to question the judgment of people who have no desire to eat hormone-infused meat or foods that have been processed and glued together by little more than a variety of sugars and fat. One has to wonder though, about that idea, so commonly espoused by environmental organizations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Organic Consumers Association, of a shared sense of fate. Exactly whose fate do these people think we are sharing? If it is the other billion or so residents of the rich world—the relative few who can afford to shop at greenmarkets, eat tomatoes that still cling to the vine, and would rather dine at a restaurant that has been cited by the local health department for rodent infestations than at one that serves food trucked in from an industrial farm—then sure, our fate is shared. I have seen how most American chickens spend their lives, and nobody should help inflict that kind of misery on any living creature by buying battery-raised poultry or eggs."
"It doesn't take a visionary, however, to understand that the other five billion or so residents of this world, more than half of whom live on less than two dollars a day, can't afford organic products, and lack the land it would take to grow them. Farmers in developing countries often see their crops rot in the fields long before they can be eaten or rushed across rutted dirt roads to market many hours away. To these people, the Western cult of organic food is nothing more than a glorious fetish of the rich world—one with the power to kill them."
This argument by Specter, made on pages 109 & 110, has some merit. Certainly animals raised on factory farms are often treated with antibiotics or hormones to promote growth. Indiscriminate use of antibiotics leads to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the hormones are not healthy for the animals or the people who eat their meat. Also, as he implies, industrial farms raise food animals like chickens in harsh conditions that foster the spread of disease — one reason for those antibiotics. And if non-organic food from overseas cannot enter the U.S., it obviously harms the livelihood of small farmers who produce it — just as the high cost of organic food puts it out of reach of consumers in the developing world. Large-scale agriculture and genetically modified crops have been a boon there. (And, as he says, "genetically modified" does not necessarily mean biotechnology; humans have been modifying the genes of plants and animals by selective breeding for millennia.)
However, there are valid reasons for the growth of the organic food movement in this country. If some environmentalists have treated it as a "healthier-than-thou" fad, it has also been co-opted by the large food producers who induced Congress to water down the regulations. When farmers in developing countries can't get their produce to market in a timely fashion, it matters not whether that produce is grown organically. Specter is raising straw-man arguments here. Finally, that bit about preferring to eat in restaurants the health department has cited is just a cheap shot.
| Page 9: | "Supplements and vitamins have never been more popular even though a growing stack of evidence suggests that they are almost entirely worthless." |
| Almost entirely worthless, Dr. Specter? I think the proper answer is, "That has been found not to be the case." |
| Page 10: | "In 1589, Queen Elizabeth refused to fund a project to make a knitting machine..." |
| S/B "Queen Elizabeth I". |
| Page 37: | "Thirty years ago nobody discussed the principal motive behind scientific research: nobody needed to. It was a quest for knowledge." |
| Punctuation: S/B "research. Nobody needed to; it was". |
| Page 111: | "Once again, technology—and human imagination—interceded (as it has for hundreds of thousands of years..." |
| Number error: S/B "as they have". |
| Page 112: | "...the freshwater dwindles, and that leaves people with just one choice: dig. drill too deep, though, and saltwater and arsenic will begin to seep into the ground, and when that happens nothing will grow on that land again." |
| This is poorly expressed. I think what Specter means is that in lands near the sea, drilling deep can bring up seawater or brackish water, polluting the land with salt. This does kill crops, but it's not necessarily permanent. |
| Page 117: | "Evolution [...] does essentially the same thing: selects for desired traits." |
| Usage: Normally S/B "it selects for". |
| Page 124: | "At this point she showed a slide of a generically happy family sitting over a meal at a table in Tuscany." |
| Usage: S/B "a generic happy family" in the sense of "typical". Also, if the family was generic, how does he know they were Tuscans? |
| Page 125: | "Agriculture has always been—and remains today—humanity's principal occupation." |
| Contradictory: See page 114, where he talks about people moving away from farms in China and India and the consequent rise in consumption of meat. This trend follows the developed nations, where a tiny fraction of employment is in agriculture. |
| Page 127: | "Vitamins are good for you." |
| Seems to contradict page 9, where he says: "Supplements and vitamins have never been more popular even though a growing stack of evidence suggests that they are almost entirely worthless." |
| Page 128: | "If customers are willing to pay twice as much for foods cultivated without synthetic pesticides or that lack genetically modified ingredients, Kellogg and General Mills will be only too happy to sell it to them." |
| Number error: S/B "to sell them". |
| Page 129: | "Caution is simply a different kind of risk, one that is even more likely to kill people." |
| As the saying has it, there are old pilots and there are bold pilots; but there are very few old, bold pilots. In other words, he doesn't make his case with this statement. |
| Page 131: | "...a process that allows scientists to insert DNA into the walls of cells with a gene gun." |
| Accuracy: S/B "through the walls of cells", or better yet, "into the nuclei of cells". |
| Page 136: | "Does organic food carry a lower environmental footprint than food grown with synthetic pesticides? The answer to that is complicated but it certainly isn't yes." |
| Then it must be "no", no? |
| Page 146: | "The earth isn't utopia and never will be..." |
| Capitalization: S/B "Earth" (and also "Utopia".) |
| Page 152: | "(high doses of which, the information said, may provide additional protection..." |
| The word "may" is emphasized several times here. I'm sure he added the emphasis, but he never says so. |
| Page 163: | "In their testimony, however, each did battle with a series of straw men, arguing..." |
| Contradictory: He lists three arguments, affirming after each one that it is valid. So where are the straw men? |
| Page 183: | "...which was directed by the husband of Christine Maggiore, one of America's more prominent AIDS denialists who, in 2008, died of AIDS)." |
| That's what I want to know: Who, in 2008, died of AIDS? Was it Christine Maggiore, or her husband? |
| Page 258: | Drew Endy: "It's because the capacity of the tools have expanded." |
| Number error: S/B "has". |
| Page 274: | "Scientists are often accused of ignoring the ethical implications of their work. It is worth nothing, then, that Craig Venter—the genomic world's brashest brand name—embarked on a yearlong study of the ethical and scientific issues in synthetic biology before stepping into the lab." |
| One of those embarrassing typos: S/B "worth noting". |
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