Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Obama on Pollan. Pollan on Summarizing.

Rarely is anything or done in the last few weeks leading up to the election that effects my vote and this is no exception - but I found it worthy of a post.

In a recent NPR interview Michaeal Pollan talked about how he was approached by a staffer from the Democratic party and asked to summarize his NY Times article, Farmer-in-Chief, into one or two pages so that he/she could get it into Barack Obama's hands. Pollan declined and said that if he could have said everything he needed to say in two pages he wouldn't have written the 8,000ish words to begin with. Go Pollan!

However, it turns out that Obama read the article after all. In a recent interview, the Senator said:

"I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our health care costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in health care costs. That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board."

I'd love to link to some articles about where each candidate stands on climate change but unfortunately all the ones I am finding are pretty biased. Ugh. Wish I knew more about McKinney.

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