An outbreak of livestock sickness in Europe has unleashed retrograde political impulses not far removed from energy.
Foot-in-mouth disease has joined mad-cow disease to put Europe understandably on edge about farm methods.
Concern focuses on the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Production subsidies central to the CAP encourage high-intensity farming, including practices blamed for the rash of animal sickness.
A movement has gathered momentum to change the CAP, which was created in the 1950s.
Some of the motivation to change is nationalistic. There is no lack of resentment over the EU's grip on agriculture.
But some of the backlash goes beyond jurisdictional quarrels.
Germany's minister of food, farming, and consumer protection, Renate Künast, has been calling for a move away from intensive farming and toward organic and natural methods. A member of the Green Party, she took office in January.
Supporting her are the farm ministers of Sweden, Margareta Winberg, and Denmark, Ritt Bjerregaard, both strong supporters of organic agriculture.
Winberg wants Europe to follow Sweden in requiring that one fifth of farmland be organic by 2005.
What is striking about this is the apparent readiness to discard whole regulatory and agricultural systems when troubles arise.
Europe definitely has problems. They are manifest in instances of human illness and death, the need to slaughter sick animals, and growing surpluses of unaffected meat resulting from consumer fear.
But those problems have solutions that don't involve the discarding of the CAP–much as it may need to be changed–or of modern farm practice–much as parts of it need to be banned.
The farm ministers of Germany, Sweden, and Denmark seem confused about the role of agriculture, which is to feed people in the most efficient way. They are treating it as, at best, a lifestyle issue and, at worst, an experiment in social engineering.
The underlying greenward lurch has obvious parallels with issues involving energy, global warming chief among them. It's how environmentalists too frequently work: identify a problem, incite a social revolution.
Expansion of government inevitably follows. Human progress doesn't have to start that way. Human suffering often does.