Growing food absolutely harms the environment. Maybe not one potato, but modern agriculture is a leading cause of climate change (mostly animal ag, but the point remains).
This is not nihilism. This is what capitalism is by definition. Says Rob Urie:
> Economic production that produces toxic externalities like global warming, dead oceans, undrinkable water, unbreathable air, etc, depends on assigning little or no value to these. To make this very clear, Western economic ‘accounting’ places no value on these, on the most fundamental necessities of living beings, by design. As Oscar Wilde put it, a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This is in fact a summation of Western economics; circumscription of the ‘knowable’ world by what has had a price tag put on it. The externalized costs of capitalist production are real— more real than the stuff in stores that is only ‘cheap’ because the true costs were lobbed off on people who haven’t yet fought back.
Sure there are things that you can do while growing food that do harm the environment, and certainly modern agriculture could be improved.
But since we’ve found an example inconsistent with your blanket statement (which starts with “all”) it is now disproven.
There’s a lot of other examples besides one potato.
And let’s not even talk about the ludicrous idea that any change to the environment equals harm. By that definition all living things harm the environment.
This is not nihilism. This is what capitalism is by definition. Says Rob Urie:
> Economic production that produces toxic externalities like global warming, dead oceans, undrinkable water, unbreathable air, etc, depends on assigning little or no value to these. To make this very clear, Western economic ‘accounting’ places no value on these, on the most fundamental necessities of living beings, by design. As Oscar Wilde put it, a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This is in fact a summation of Western economics; circumscription of the ‘knowable’ world by what has had a price tag put on it. The externalized costs of capitalist production are real— more real than the stuff in stores that is only ‘cheap’ because the true costs were lobbed off on people who haven’t yet fought back.
- https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/09/global-warming-is-ec...