Well said! All the research shows that to feed ourselves we cannot use the huge monocrop global farms that are designed to create corporate profit. We need local, adaptable, regenerative farms that grow healthy food for people.

Industrial agriculture, whether Ancient Roman or 21st century, causes disease, collapse and is based on slavery. Farmers and farm workers often eke out a subsistence life while agribusiness giants like Cargill boast record profits and consumers can't afford food. This is what happened in the 2008 food crisis.

I totally agree that we are not living in a rational, scientific or democratic world but that "...medieval and feudal institutions of power are still alive and well. Companies wearing the clothes of economics and science are the new monarchs of governments and societies."

Pollution is bad. Agreed. However, in labelling CO2 a pollutant is 'unscientific', as ascribed by the US E.P.A.. CO2 at 1300 ppm. In the atmosphere would be outstandingly beneficial to the global ecosystem.

This article/bio reveals a type example of the modern parasite and obstacle to humanity - an eco-nitwit given Government power to enforce ideology and prejudice.

Your attempt to misappropriate the word 'ecology' from its holistic conventional meaning to use it as a pin-up for an impossible standard of ideologically pure air water and soil, is badly misconceived and will create harms to the real environment.

The atom bomb is a GOOD example of technology. Its only use in war saved the lives of perhaps 1/4 to 1/2 a million Allied soldiers and countless Japanese and civilians by averting a contested invasion to finish the Japanese war. Its use as a deterrent prevented open war between the evil empires of the USSR and the PRC against the Western nations of NATO and the rest of the free world.

Overall, the rhetoric in this article is just foolish hyperbole. Its time rational people dismissed eco-twaddle with extreme prejudice, and just got on with living.

This piece of pixie dust tells us what is most wrong with the USA.

They let in clowns like this Greek, educate them, then take them into the Environmental Protection Agency, where the beaver away trying to destroy that culture that took them in, educated them, & now supports them.

The USA is far too generous with these clowns for it's own good. They are destroying the foundations of the country, burrowing away unseen in the dark, digging a hole the country may never be able to climb out of.

I wonder why Graham publishes so much of this crap? I assume it is so we bunnies out here in the sunlight, can get some idea & perhaps warning, of the destructive forces unseen beneath our feet.

People like this are probably the most dangerous to us. Much more dangerous than Islamic Jihadists, who only want to kill some of us, not destroy the future for the whole human civilisation.

Lillian. "All the research shows that to feed ourselves we cannot use the huge monocrop global farms". Could you possibly provide a link to support this statement please?
ChrisPer: "an eco-nitwit given Government power". Frighteningly accurate observation sir.
Hasbeen. I do agree that these "Eco-nitwits" (ht. Chris) are indeed more dangerous than IS and their brethren. It is possible to readily identify and neutralise them, as opposed to those buried within the beaurocratic machine with the power to make regulations bypassing the electorate. "Pixie dust".... Brilliant.

I commend Graham for publishing this article, it is an outstanding example of free speech. Unlike 'The Drum', New Matilda' and the ABC. Hasbeen, apart from the frustrated gnashing of teeth I hear in your comment, you must be amused by the doom fairy floss persistency of these deniers surely?

Agree mostly with Chris per.
It's okay to take a holiday in a dream castle in the clouds, but never ever to move in as a permanent resident!

There's another Greek example I'd like to refer to, and that is modern day Greece, brought to its financial knees, by similarly irrational endless money tree thinking.

In his visit to China he missed the fact that modernity has lifted hundreds of millions out of enduring generational poverty!
And broad scale farming, although inefficient, is feeding millions, who would otherwise starve!

Yes there are things we could do much better, (via cooperative capitalism comrade) but not by allowing Ideologues to rule the roost, or putting the inmates in charge of the asylum. (same diff)

Much of the damage done to the reef for example, is that caused by massive storm water runoff!
Much of which along with the reef harming turbidity, could be prevented by the construction of many more dams, and mostly as millions of very small upland ones.

And only prevented as our logical reality, by the moribund minds of we always know best, green Ideologues?

Who as usual, resisted timely calls to assist starving millions in Africa, even as they destroyed whole forests, and turned their humble holdings into a veritable lunar landscape, in their attempts to survive!

Is ecological civilization possible in a modern world?
Yes, but only if we remove the (can't see the forest for the trees) Ideological nitwits preventing just that; or that water, [rather than wild rivers, getting ever wilder], is the basis of all wealth!

Practical people, not pining for the past Ideologues; or witless do-gooders, who invariably do more harm than good!
Rhrosty.

Once again, all you nitwits out there, including the author, are all ignoring the elephant in the room. If we don't do something about getting the burgeoning population under control, we are all doomed, regardless of what form our agriculture takes.

David

Rhrosty the reef is fine, it really is.

It has developed with & lived with huge loads of silt coming down our major rivers, from long before any white men even new the continent existed, let alone affected the place.

It is even probable it needs the nutrients provided by floods for it's fauna to flourish. I could also take you to hundreds of places in the islands, with very few people, where you can't see your feet in knee deep water. Natural does not necessarily mean clear.

If you study the location of the various reefs you can see the distance off shore is governed by river outlets. I have sailed in places where the coastline was still dotted on the charts. By studying the river outlets I could find gaps in the reefs, where I could get through to the shore. You have to appreciate that freshwater is as toxic to coral as any silt.

There was a time when I was worried about fertiliser run off. There was a time of the phosphate bounty, when we were very careless with the use of most fertilisers, but economics have largely fixed that. The stuff is just too expensive today, & agriculture so much less profitable, that such excesses rarely happen today.

I was very vocal about cane farmers when looking at areas where inshore reefs were badly affected by seaweed growth, probably promoted by fertiliser runoff.

That started to diminish even in the 70s, & accelerated into the 90s. The fish & the coral were beating the weed.

There are none so blind as those who cannot see, but that could be surpassed by those who don't want to see.

Regular commentators on this site have been provided insight to daily dumped sewage nutrient pollution flowing northwards from Australian east coast cities into GBR waters, yet comments still follow ABC 'news' media spin blaming farmers.

"Massive" runoff?
I thought Australia was an arid country, so where is this massive runoff coming from?

It is the daily dumped massive and concentrated nutrient loading from sewage that is the major source of nutrients that form the total nutrient loading that is proliferating algae, some of which is devastating GBR coral.

Silt hardly ever reaches the GBR because it is too far offshore.

Unfortunately, this is typical output from someone who has never actually held a real job, but has spent their entire life as an overgrown student in a sheltered-workshop government department or agency, paid for by, but not answerable to, the taxpayer.

And the saddest thing is that it is so easy, to tell other people how they should live, without actually having the moral courage or intellectual rigour to work out what would actually happen, if all their nostrums were applied to our daily life.

>>I visited China in late October 2014. I was full of hope that China would do the right thing by supporting its ancient rural culture<<

Never mind, that half a billion people now have something that resembles a life, having been elevated from the abject poverty that was China's "ancient rural culture".

What overweening, blind arrogance.

Got a lot of experience of the reef have you JF Aus? Lots of experience of our & other countries reefs I suppose. You talk as if you have some idea, but what you say proves you have none.

Talking from a know nothing ideology is a total waste of your time, when you have no actual knowledge.

when the warmist clowns stop flying around the globe and trade in their cars for push bikes we will know they really believe their own rhetoric. Until then we know its just grandstanding.

'Cancer is killing one in two men and one in three women. Cancer and neurological diseases are striking children at alarming rates '

Life expectancy was still rising the last time I looked. People are living longer and their quality of life has improved. Just check out any cruise ship and you will see thousands in their 70's 80's and nineties flourishing

Hasbeen,
My experience of the GBR is underwater, not sipping cocktails or a beer on the surface.

Cope with this GBR experience and knowledge of GBR waters if you can, Hasbeen.

I have been towed about 3 metres deep underwater feet first backwards at 4 to 6 knots for a total of 40 hours inside a giant lure to capture world first scenes of giant black marlin attacking baits, for a film I produced from the marlin's point of view.
That was before fishcam technology that anyway is unable to tell of the face to face experience and see other phenomena.

In other words I have travelled about 200 nautical miles underwater along the outside face of the GBR.
My experience on the GBR began in the 1960's.

A friend said to me just a few years ago, "at least we saw it the way it was".

Now in 2014 I see evidence of the damage and change from various news video. And what a laugh that is.
The ABC even shows GBR coral bleaching in a still picture that also shows a massive invasive algae bloom, but the news people don't see that.
From my point of view that algae bloom has smothered that coral, leading to that coral turning white, bleaching they call it.
Of course all the coral is not gone but there is vast loss and damage, including from COTS is some areas.

Larvae of COTS feed on algae proliferated by sewage and land use nutrient pollution, or maybe you believe the news spin it's all from farmers.

I think ecological civilization is possible in the modern world and I think vast business and employment opportunities could be developed from new industry repairing the water ecosystem environment of this planet, instead of blindly destroying it.

But the knockers and the all ok and blind and don't worry about that merchants, have to wake up first.