Matt Ridley's article in the Times (£) this morning looks at the continuing growth of grain harvests around the world and contrasts this good news with the weasel-worded claims of disaster from environmentalists and scientivists.
The whole thing is worth a read if you have access to it, but I want to pick up on one particular point. It turns out that harvests are not actually increasing everywhere. Th main exception is of course Europe and the reasons are plain:
The fault lies in European officialdom’s perpetual war on innovation in agriculture — its precautionary and bureaucratic de facto opposition, at the behest of what the former environment secretary Owen Paterson calls the Green Blob, to safer pesticides and genetic modification, both of which demonstrably boost yields, save inputs and spare land elsewhere in the world.
So once again it is the campaigns of environmental activists that are causing problems for mankind. And, counterintuitively, the result of the greens' efforts is to increase the pressure to convert wild land into farmland:
Jesse Ausubel, of Rockefeller University in New York, calculates that if we continue raising average yields at the current rate, stop putting 40 per cent of America’s maize into cars in the form of ethanol, and reduce food wastage, then, despite the rising population, an area the size of India could be released from agriculture over the next 50 years and handed back to Mother Nature.
But in the future that the greens want the opposite to happen. Farming in a green-run world will be less intense, more "organic" with the inevitable result that marginal lands will continue to fall to the plough.
There is a pattern here isn't there? The greens' campaigns against modern agriculture are leading to wild places being ploughed up for farmland. Their campaigns for "renewable" energy are leading to wild places disappearing under carpets of wind turbines and farmland being covered in solar panels. This represents an all out assault on the wildernesses that so many people cherish and leads to one clear conclusion.
If we want to keep our wild places we have to ditch the environmentalists.