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Kneejerk reactions
Every so often you come across something that makes you really conscious of how easily manipulated the human race is (and how little most people actually think before they react, if at all).
I was confused by an online rant about how "the nutters in england are blaming allotment and garden owners for the ozone layer being diminished"; it turned out that this was based on a headline in the "Telegraph" which read Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than those grown conventionally and which, if you read the actual article, referred to a study published by an American university discussing the relative efficiency of short-lived 'urban farms' compared to established 'conventional agriculture'. In other words, the cost of building raised beds, wheelchair-accessible paths, fencing, erecting sheds, compost bins, and so on, as versus the cost of running an existing giant prairie field system. Unsurprisingly, the 'carbon footprint' of building a whole lot of infrastructure (and then abandoning the whole thing to repurpose the area a few years down the line) is a lot higher than that of not building it... from which the journalist obtains the conclusion that "vegetables were 5.8 times better for the environment when left to the professionals", via the standard reporter's procedure of quoting shock figures from a scientific study devoid of their original context :-p
Other reporting of the same study points out that its authors are actually in favour of urban agriculture.... https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/a-new-study-highlights-the-challenges-to-the-carbon-footprint-faced-by-urban-agriculture/172734/
But the scary thing is not the text of the actual "Telegraph" article, but the fact that somebody -- probably many somebodies -- instantly drew from a single rather sloppy headline, evidently without even reading the content, an ensuing rant about "the nutters in the tree huggers and ozone categories who want to stop you [in the UK] from growing your food. I live in the USA where we can built anything where and when we want, plant what we want and not subject to people like you"...
In other words culture wars par excellence from the Land of the Free, based on a complete misunderstanding ("the ozone layer" has nothing to do with "the carbon footprint" in any case) and then a kneejerk attribution of this to "nutters" abroad, when it was simply a foreign paper reporting on a story that came out of the USA in the first place :-(
The scale of routine human stupidity (not at all limited to the US) is terrifying -- and makes you understand why our forebears thought that universal suffrage was manifestly a bad idea, given that these are the people who are doing the voting :-O
I was confused by an online rant about how "the nutters in england are blaming allotment and garden owners for the ozone layer being diminished"; it turned out that this was based on a headline in the "Telegraph" which read Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than those grown conventionally and which, if you read the actual article, referred to a study published by an American university discussing the relative efficiency of short-lived 'urban farms' compared to established 'conventional agriculture'. In other words, the cost of building raised beds, wheelchair-accessible paths, fencing, erecting sheds, compost bins, and so on, as versus the cost of running an existing giant prairie field system. Unsurprisingly, the 'carbon footprint' of building a whole lot of infrastructure (and then abandoning the whole thing to repurpose the area a few years down the line) is a lot higher than that of not building it... from which the journalist obtains the conclusion that "vegetables were 5.8 times better for the environment when left to the professionals", via the standard reporter's procedure of quoting shock figures from a scientific study devoid of their original context :-p
Other reporting of the same study points out that its authors are actually in favour of urban agriculture.... https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/a-new-study-highlights-the-challenges-to-the-carbon-footprint-faced-by-urban-agriculture/172734/
But the scary thing is not the text of the actual "Telegraph" article, but the fact that somebody -- probably many somebodies -- instantly drew from a single rather sloppy headline, evidently without even reading the content, an ensuing rant about "the nutters in the tree huggers and ozone categories who want to stop you [in the UK] from growing your food. I live in the USA where we can built anything where and when we want, plant what we want and not subject to people like you"...
In other words culture wars par excellence from the Land of the Free, based on a complete misunderstanding ("the ozone layer" has nothing to do with "the carbon footprint" in any case) and then a kneejerk attribution of this to "nutters" abroad, when it was simply a foreign paper reporting on a story that came out of the USA in the first place :-(
The scale of routine human stupidity (not at all limited to the US) is terrifying -- and makes you understand why our forebears thought that universal suffrage was manifestly a bad idea, given that these are the people who are doing the voting :-O