This Is Why I Don't Take Environmentalists Seriously

It's not often that I see a news report that makes my jaw drop, but this one took the cake.

The Title from Reuters:

In "eat local" movement, Cuba is years ahead

Ahead? A country that struggles to feed itself is ahead of the U.S.?

Salcines says he is hardly sleeping as his 160-member cooperative rushes to plant and harvest a variety of beets that takes just 25 days to grow, among other crops.

As he talks, dirt-stained men and women kneel along the furrows, planting and watering on land next to a complex of Soviet-style buildings. Machete-wielding men chop weeds and clear brush along the periphery of the field.

Life is so great that they are hardly sleeping?

Since they sell directly to their communities, city farms don't depend on transportation and are relatively immune to the volatility of fuel prices, advantages that are only now gaining traction as "eat local" movements in rich countries.

Advantages? Are you serious? Modern civilization thrived because we could trade for food from far off places. What did primitive people do when drought or pestilence attacked their "eat local" lifestyles? They starved to death!

They [urban gardens] sprang from a military plan for Cuba to be self-sufficient in case of war. They were broadened to the general public in response to a food crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's biggest benefactor at the time.

So they planted these gardens because they were having a hard time feeding themselves. We should emulate them why?

In Alamar, the members get a salary and share the garden's profits, so the more they grow, the more they earn. They make an average of about 950 pesos, or $42.75, per month, more than double the national average, Salcines said.

Wow, $42.75 per month, now I'm seeing why Cuba and its "eat-local" plan is the ideal.

The gardens sell their produce directly to the community and, out of necessity, grow their crops organically.

It's a necessity because they are so poor that they can't afford pesticides or fertilizers.

Unlike in developed countries, where organic products are more expensive, in Cuba they are affordable.

Of course they're affordable! These people are only making $42.75 per month!

Some experts fear that rising international food prices along with the destruction of the hurricanes will return Cuba to the path of agrochemicals.

Fear!?! Are they afraid that Cuba's people will rise above subsistence style farming? What is wrong with these people? How divorced from any rational moral system do you have to be to describe the possibility of people rising above $42.75 per month as something to be feared?