Verbatim
Of all things this week, it seems esoteric to be worrying about food security and the scalability of organic farming practices. But the biggest fights remain ahead of us. As farmer Chris Newman argues at NewCo Shift (an occasionally interesting Medium magazine in the social enterprise/entrepreneurship space), the long-term answers are more complex than simple economics or homespun wisdom.
There are a lot of problems to address when it comes to sustainability. But the difference between proposing solutions and implementing them is the difference between campaigning and governing. It’s easy to demand reductions in population growth, global adoption of vegetarian diets, or the proliferation of permaculture farms if, after so doing, you just drop the mic and excuse yourself from the hard part: designing a solution to make it happen and mitigate — or absorb — the consequences. In designing and implementing our ideas, there’s a real chance that we’ll be wrong, or look foolish, or otherwise open ourselves up to ridicule, derision, or accusations of “selling out” if we have the unmitigated gall to alter course on the basis of evidence. But, with the lives of every human being on Earth at stake, there’s little time for vanity; I’m looking forward to looking very, very stupid for at long as I’m lucky enough to be alive.
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