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re: Attacks on organic researchers?




I'd like to offer my own experience as a small (but encouraging) 
counterexample to friend Patrick Madden's comment that in "the early years of 
the organic, then the alternative, then the 'sustainable' agriculture 
movement ... all of [his] colleagues and comrades in arms" were on the the 
receiving end of "devious lines of attack" similar to those being aimed at 
the people now raising the alarm about endocrine disrupters. (I am proud to 
number myself among his early "colleagues and comrades in arms," having been 
invited by him to speak on organic farming at his home institution at the 
time, Penn State, in 1978, and coauthoring a paper with him on the subject 
several years later.) 

After I and my colleagues at Washington University, St. Louis, began studying 
commercial organic farmers in 1974, many organic farming supporters -- long 
accustomed to being victimized as kooks by an overbearing, hidebound 
agricultural establishment -- assumed that we had to struggle to get funding 
to do the work at all, to get it published in a respectable journal, and to 
have it accepted by the scientific community. 

Quite the contrary. The research was supported at a very generous level by 
the National Science Foundation, that bastion of scientific legitimacy; 
moreover, NSF gave us completely free rein to pursue the subject as we saw 
fit, even though it was very unconventional at the time. In 1976, the 
American Journal of Agricultural Economics--we're talking deadly serious ag 
research establishment here, folks--actually INVITED an article on our 
research. (Talk about not having to struggle to be published!) And once the 
work was published, even though its findings on the high productivity and 
profitability of organic farms certainly went against prevailing dogma, the 
"attacks" never amounted to more than an occasional wiseacre remark or a few 
ludicrous irrelevancies. To a substantial degree, the scientific community 
took a serious interest in the work, scrutinizing it in the constructively 
skeptical way that any scientific paper reporting a surprising result should 
be scrutinized. (Granted, there were some exceptions, but they just made our 
lives more fun.)

Very likely, our experiences were atypical; Patrick's remarks probably are an 
accurate characterization of many people's experiences. He concludes that 
"it's hard to avoid getting discouraged, or angry, or both" about attacks on 
researchers who report results that (some) people don't want to hear. In 
general, I agree, but I am delighted that at least in our case, it wasn't 
hard at all. I'm not sure why we were so lucky.

William Lockeretz
Tufts University