Pacific Views

The Curious Case of David Pimentel

David Pimentel recently came to my attention at the AAAS* conference, where some of his work was presented by a colleague of his. He was unable to attend himself due to family and health concerns. The presentation at a soil symposium talked a great deal about how petrochemicals become part of our food supply, as fertilizers and fuel for farm machinery. This is the abstract given at the AAAS site:

The challenges facing modern agriculture are enormous. Worldwide soil is being lost from land areas 10- to 40-times faster than the rate of soil renewal , imperiling future human food security and environmental quality. The World Health Organization reports that more than 3 billion people are malnourished. This is the largest number ever in history. Despite biotechnology and all the other agricultural technologies available during the last two decades, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN reports that per capita food (cereal grains) availability for the past 20 years has been decreasing steadily. Impacting world food production have been per capita declines of 20% in cropland, 10% in irrigation, and 17% in fertilizer. In addition, malnourished people are more susceptible to a wide array of diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, and numerous other diseases.

A full tape of the symposium, covering all the lectures, can be purchased here. (If you're interested in science, note that the link goes to a page allowing you to purchase tapes of all the sessions held at the conference, which may be too tempting for some readers.) It's under the topic heading "Investigating Our Ancestors", item designation "AS470 From the Ground Up: The Importance of Soil in Sustaining Civilization."

When I got home that evening, I found a post on the topic entitled the oil we eat over at How to Save the World, and thought that maybe I'd write about the subject soon. It referenced an article (offline) written by Richard Manning for Harper's, and I finally went looking for something related. A piece on the topic, but probably shorter than the Harper's article is published online at Counterpunch, the Land Institute, and Crop Choice. Another article found on Counterpunch, discussing the topic of urban sprawl, mentioned his work at greater length than Manning's piece online:

...With this loss and population growth helping to drive it, farmland available to feed each person will fall. Cornell University agricultural and food scientists David and Marcia Pimentel, and Mario Giampietro of the National Institute of Nutrition in Rome, have suggested that by about 2025 the United States, once breadbasket to the world, could cease to be a food exporter. ...

But it took a bit before it connected that Pimentel is one of the individuals Mary mentioned earlier in a post on a push by anti-immigration activists trying to take over the Sierra Club. He is, in fact, running for a board position with the club. And I expect that what most Sierra Club members would find out about him on a casual web search is that he's a tenured faculty member at Cornell University with a history of work in the field of land use and the impact of agriculture on the ecological health of the planet.

He sounds academically respectable, and is generally referenced in publications that wouldn't strike anyone as being associated with racist xenophobia. If anything, left of center sites are often accused of liking foreigners and immigrants just a bit too much.

But this article reveals that he sat (no longer listed as doing so) on the Advisory Board of the Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America, and is a Director of the Carrying Capacity Network. Both have the fairly obvious theme that we need to keep people from continuing to move to this country.

Among a spate of reasonable seeming platitudes, DASA includes these two items in its mission statement:

• Non-citizen legal immigrants should be denied all welfare benefits, cash and non-cash, except emergency medical care. ...
  
• All illegal aliens should be denied all public services except emergency medical care ...

These two items are fairly pernicious, while trying to sound nice by including an 'if you're bleeding to death' clause. The first sounds like it would deny refugee benefits to asylum seekers, unemployment or school assistance to permanent residents, as well as food stamp assistance to either category. The second would prevent the children of illegal immigrants from attending school if they get their other wish of preventing children who are born here from attaining automatic citizenship. Now maybe automatic citizenship should be re-evaluated, but I think we're all better off when children who live in this country spend their days in school.

The CCN on why limiting immigration is necessary:

...We need to focus attention on the fact that legal immigration is three times as great as illegal immigration and accounts for 55%-75% of the multibillion dollar annual costs. The most current data show that his wave of legal immigrants is far more likely to use welfare, receive higher direct cash assistance, and use taxpayer funded social services. Our country is already burdened by underfunded schools, overcrowded prisons, persistent unemployment, increasingly violent crime, accelerating resource depletion, an ever-growing budget deficit and a rapidly decreasing quality of life. Adding over one million immigrants to our country each year only makes there problems much more difficult to solve. ...

That sounds both alarmist and vague. Then this CCN page summarizes many of the ecological points made at the symposium, and they jive with my notes, so it's probably taken from the same data. It makes a compelling case for using resources more wisely, but I also remember the comment that the natural carrying capacity of the earth without fossil fuel additives hovers at around 2 billion people. Was that number a serious estimate, or a worst case thrown out to further an agenda?

I'm left with a dilemma, then. On a personal level, my interest in soil conservation has grown as my interest in botany has grown, and Pimentel seems at first glance to be a respected expert. The question remains, however, of whether or not what seem to be ties to racist anti-immigration groups has been interfering with the objectivity of his work. I'll likely continue to run into it, but how seriously should I take it? This is probably a main reason for having peer review in the first place, but it does leave me wondering what could get slipped past the system by someone with an axe to grind.

If any of this ends up tarring the Sierra Club or the discipline of environmental studies, I'll be hopping mad.

* The AAAS is the scientific society that publishes the US peer-reviewed journal, Science.