Given that no one seems to walk or take the bus, it seems strange to me that the LA MTA is the third largest public transit system by ridership in the country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County_Metropolitan_Transportation_Authority

Granted, the city is the second (+/-1) largest in the country, but it still surprises me.

My guess is that plenty of people do walk, but just not the kind that are likely to be reading Salon and it's also not because they want to.

Sad.

I don't see why everyone's complaining about the article that Andrew Leonard reviewed. Determining what the energy consumption is with food is simply about crunching the right numbers.

This is an extremely important discussion to have.

As environmentalists, we shouldn't advocate doing something (say, eating local) simply because it makes us warm and fuzzy. We need to dispassionately look at what's really going on, determine the costs and benefits of eating what, when, and how.

I know that some people will counter that eating local is not just about the environment and GHG emissions, but also about a local economy, and better quality food. These are important issues, too, but they are separate issues and need to be discussed as such.

I think that the environmental movement as a whole looses credibility when people get caught up in the emotions of what "feels" right, rather than looking at the science. We have to be ready to discard notions that have been proven false (such as "eating local is a panacea and can solve all problems").

I don't know how accurate this report is, but I do know that they are raising questions that few environmentalists are willing to ask (and I'm not necessarily saying that the author's are environmentalists, just that we should listen to what they are saying).

I am looking forward to the day when organic and GMO foods can live together peacefully (albeit far enough away so that the winds can't contaminate). I am sick of the "frankenfood" criers who believe that GMOs are inherently evil, but I also can't believe the hubris of Monsanto et. al. who try to push forward the idea that GMO is all good and will be the savior of humanity.

I think organic and GMO are not inherently at odds. It is the current state of each movement that make them so. The GMO pushers are, by and large in the developed world at least, driven by greed with no thought on how their (business) practices affect the world. The organic movement, on the other hand is far too splintered to really effect change on the way GMOs are pushed on the world. Is the organic movement promoting health, the environment, local farming? Is it anti-big business, or just another big business itself? Is its goal to convert the world to organics, or to preach to the converted? Ask 10 pro-organic people, and you'll get 12 answers.

I appreciate your in depth analysis on this subject.

I really think that the organic movement needs to reconsider its stance on GMOs. Why is the organic movement against the idea of GMO? What exactly about GMOs makes it incongruous with organic? Is it just "scary"? Is it the politics of the word? If we could find a GMO variant of, say, corn that requires no pesticides and *really* is safe for the environment (however you define safe) and is cheap to produce by small farmers, should the organic industry go wild over this?

Before I get too far on this, I have to say that I (almost) completely agree with what jebldmm is saying. Many of the GMO pushers are acting immorally and not in the best interest of the country or the world. They are advocating for crops that are potentially unsafe to the environment. They are advocating for lower regulations on these potentially unsafe crops. They are undermining local economies with monopolistic practices. Etc.

However, GMOs are here to stay. The GMO world of the future will either be one where wild strains of GMO crops run rampant and destroy local ecosystems (this is bad!), or a world where GMO crops are used only after much testing and safety controls are in place and only when they are shown to be substantially better than alternatives (this is good!).

If things continue the way they are going with GMO pushers going full steam ahead, and organic pushers trying for a complete block, we will end up in a bad world. To prevent this, we need more testing of GMOs and this idea has to be adopted by the organics industry.

Maybe the problem is---gasp!---blogs. Or at least part of the problem. The problem is too much information being printed too quickly. Rumors and innuendos that later turn out to be wrong or only half true are too easy to act upon.

Don't get me wrong, blogs and all the other modern mechanisms for getting information to the masses quickly are wonderful inventions, and in most cases beneficial to humanity. But, they also allow the impulsive among us to cause economic downturns based on the comments of one man.