MOOSE JAW, Sask. – Colleen Tigges is on a mission to counteract what she calls the fear industry.
The communication director for the Oregon-based EAT First organization said environmentalists have built a billion-dollar industry on scaring people, especially about agricultural practices and pesticides.
The movement started off with good intentions, she told the annual meeting of independent grain terminal operators here Nov. 1, when it protested things like the Vietnam War and global cooling, an issue in the 70s. But soon millions of jobs began to depend on the belief that there was an environmental crisis, Tigges said.
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A “fix-it” industry was born to clean up all types of environmental messes and to save things.
Schoolchildren can’t find Brazil on a map but they know the rain forest needs to be saved, she said.
Washington state spent $7 billion on salmon recovery and it all went to “professional salmon savers” not the salmon, she said.
“People never question who did the study or if there was a study” that leads to claims of environmental crises, she said.
The result is an industry that generates more than $200 billion in annual revenues and includes more than 70,000 public and private companies and organizations, and one million paid employees.
“It’s a great big green lie,” said Tigges, who doesn’t mind being considered the exact opposite of Canadian activist David Suzuki. “The environment is not getting worse, it’s getting better.”
She said by any environmental measure the world is better off today than it was 40 years ago, and North American agricultural practices are among the reasons.
“High-yield agriculture is what saves the environment,” she said.
That’s because more food can be produced on the same or a smaller number of acres. Yet agriculture always finds itself on the defensive.
Tigges said only people in affluent societies have time to worry about environmental issues, and high-yield agriculture created those societies in the first place.
Increasing production on the land already in use is the only option for feeding an ever-expanding world population.
Tigges said environmentalists should embrace high-yield agriculture because it saves land for wildlife habitat and wetlands. Otherwise farmers would have to develop new farmland to produce the food required.
She also said the fear about pesticide use is overblown.
“There has never been a single documented death from the proper use of synthetic pesticides,” she said.
She called organic production a marketing scheme that won’t work.
“Niche farming for a small affluent market is one thing, but feeding nine billion people is another,” she said. “Eight hundred million poor farmers already farm organically.”
She said it requires more land, water and energy and creates more pollution and erosion.
