[ChainLegacy]

I think the push for organic farming is just people voting with their wallets. I think it's great. We don't necessarily need to be anti-GMO, but anti artificial pesticide? I think that's probably a pretty rational decision. We live in a world where, despite all the advancements in medicine, cancer in its various forms is increasingly prevalent. People are rightfully paranoid about the affects of all the newly changing ways we produce our food.

I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say that an organic approach would cause more damage to the environment than a modern conventional approach. GMOs, pesticides, etc can vastly increase yield, but there are indeed negative repercussions to the environment from their use. One notable recent example is the "bee epidemic" currently going on. That's not to say we're going to create some chemically-diseased wasteland because of them, but they aren't free of consequences, and I don't understand what you mean when you say they cause less damage than organic.

In regards to GMOs, I've kind of noticed there's a bit of intellectual snobbery going on from armchair or actually reputable scientists regarding the potential health effects from consuming them. What I mean by that is, and I am recalling specifically, among other incidents, a facebook post I saw from what I believe was a pharmacist more or less talking down to a group that was anti-GMO. Their argument is that most people don't understand what GMOs are, which is probably true, and that there's no evidence of them being dangerous.

That's all well and good, but no evidence for them being dangerous, especially given their rather short history on the human plate, means pretty much nothing. Screwing around with the genetic code can have unintended consequences. Creating or enhancing a trait that increases a crop's ability to fight off insects (or the more eyebrow raising - their ability to survive being dumped with pesticides that can kill insects for them), for example, may make it slightly neurotoxic, where it wasn't before. Or you could unintentionally up levels of damaging compounds, whether they be proteins, fats, minerals, acids, etc, that are a long term detriment to health, or provoke allergic reactions, or impairs organ function, or decreases mineral absorption -- the potential list goes on. Even prior to the modern era of genetic modification, we did it the old-fashioned way through artificial domesticated selection. Most of the time we were making barely edible foods edible (the early domestication of corn), or outright toxic ones non-toxic (for example, almonds). There are examples, however, like the breeding of wheat crops in the past few centuries, that have ultimately selected for traits that are harmful to some people (celiac disease, or just non-celiac gluten intolerance). Now that we're leaving the ballpark of what can be achieved through selective breeding, we're in uncharted territory, and while traits in the past were largely selected for taste and edibility with a minor input from crop production, now yield is the primary concern. That's a big shift and could have unintended consequences.

That being said, if it's between eating nothing or eating something that may potentially be harmful over the long term... well yeah, then GMOs, pesticides, etc definitely have their place. It's just, if you have the choice monetarily speaking, then why not take the safer (and more delicious, in many cases) bet?

As for the second caste of environmentalists you mention, yeah, I think there's some element of truth to what they're saying. Humans have driven and are driving many species to extinction. There's no denying that. There's two important things to remember, though: at the end of the day we humans are animals too. Certainly a unique group of animals, but animals nonetheless. In the grand scheme of things, we're a part of this Earth that evolved and developed like every other animal - and living being. The second point is that, while we are driving species to extinction at an alarmingly fast rate in the past few centuries, we've been driving species to extinction for a very long time. One need only look at the Clovis Culture in North America and how they played a hand in wiping out a whole host of species, or what happened when the Maori first reached New Zealand and decimated the Moa, etc. There was a much better balance in the past, true, and I personally am a big fan of hunter-gatherers, simple lifestyles, and the like, but we humans have always been altering our environment... it's just on a different scale, which is now a necessity unless we want massive swaths of the Earth's population to die off.

(By the way, good topic. General chat is sorely lacking in the interesting topics we used to have a few years ago).