Ted Nordhaus
Viewpoint: Food activists lobbied for an organic-only, no synthetic pesticide model in Sri Lanka. Here’s why it went so catastrophically wrong
Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of years. The ...
Viewpoint: ‘Slow food’ movement remains an aesthetic model for the elite — and doesn’t produce a sustainable food system
There is something especially sinister about telling people that the way to eat healthfully, morally, and sustainably requires more work — especially ...
‘They offer a magical vision of a better future but not in this world’: In Foreign Policy, social scientists opposed to conventional agriculture spark fierce organic vs intensive farming debate
A recent back and forth has stirred up controversy over at Foregin Policy. Are “Big Ag” and intensive farming destroying ...
Viewpoint: Is our western food system based on ‘intensive agriculture’ broken? Not if the environment and alleviating poverty and hunger matter
In the popular bourgeois imagination, the idealized farm looks something like the ones that sell produce at local farmers markets ...
‘Unforgiving math’: Why intensive agriculture is needed to fight climate change and feed 10 billion people
There is an unforgiving math at the interface of agriculture and the environment ...
Viewpoint: Intensive agriculture is the only way to sustainably feed the world
[In December], the World Resources Institute (WRI) released a comprehensive study embracing agricultural intensification as the only way to simultaneously close what ...
Is the world facing ecological collapse? Not if we ‘engineer our environment’ more productively
In a recent Nature Sustainability paper, a team of scientists concluded that the Earth can sustain, at most, only 7 billion ...
Viewpoint: Green groups reject agricultural technology in embrace of ‘utopian fantasies’
[Editor’s note: Ted Nordhaus is the co-founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and a co-author of the Ecomodernist ...
Making the case for sustainability in ‘industrial agriculture’
Attacks on GMOs are often a proxy for criticisms of globalization, synthetic chemicals and what has come to be called ...
Breakthrough Institute: Outdated romantic notions of farming crippling innovation
Since the dawn of agriculture, humans have been converting forests, grasslands, and other ecosystems to farmland. The long-term conversion of ...
The sustainability case for “industrial agriculture”
Attacks on GMOs is often a proxy for criticisms of globalization, corporate agriculture, synthetic chemicals. But these debates often lose ...
