Has anyone noticed that the war of words over organic food has become nearly as ritualized as a high-school debate-team practice session?

First, there will be a provocation. For example, a few weeks ago scientists at Stanford University published a meta-analysis of food-policy research that concluded that organic foods have no more nutritional value than nonorganic food, if slightly less pesticide residue. Next, organic food advocates will rise to make what forensics professors call the appeal to nature, arguing that nutrition is not the point; the point is to protect plants and animals, including ourselves, from factory farming and toxic chemicals. Then the opposing side (professional contrarians, developmental economists) will stand up. Their counterarguments may be ad hominem, as when New York Times columnist Roger Cohen called the organic food movement “an elitist, pseudoscientific indulgence shot through with hype,” but are usually ad misericordium, that is, based on compassion: Organic farming takes place on too small a scale and won’t solve world hunger any time soon. Resolved: we can save the planet or feed its people.

Is there a less polarized way to think about the future of farming? Jesse H. Ausubel, an environmental scientist who directs the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, thinks he’s found one. You might say he argues from nature as well as compassion. His claim is that high-yield farming, that is, high-tech, non-organic agricultural practices that produce more crops per square foot, is actually kinder to the environment than lower-tech, organic farming. Ausubel insists that his politics are green, but he’s “habitat-oriented,” he told me. “What I’m concerned about is releasing more land from agriculture and letting it revert to nature.”

When Ausubel says revert to nature, he mainly means revert to forest. As he put in a 2006 paper, forests have benefits that are obvious to the eye—a forest “harbors biodiversity, beautifies landscape, and bestows solitude”—but also do things the environment desperately needs. For instance, a forest “anchors soil, slows erosion, and tempers stream flow.” A forest’s most important job, though, at least in the face of global warming, is to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it as plant tissue. (As journalist Jim Robbins writes in his splendid new book on forests, The Man Who Planted Trees, “If the right tree...is planted in the right place, it will store four to five thousand pounds of carbon over its life.”) “We need a lot more regrowth in many more parts of the world,” Ausubel continues, “and for that to happen yields need to continue to rise.”

To talk to or read Ausubel is to experience unexpected uplift, at least if you’re used to the depressive affect perceptible in most environmentalist literature. Ausubel and his collaborators—the most frequent are Paul E Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and Iddo K. Wernick, also of Rockefeller--are fond of cheerful catch phrases like “the Great Reversal” and “the Great Restoration.” The Great Reversal refers to their theory that the worst pressures on our overtaxed planet are actually easing up. As they like to point out, world population growth peaked at about 2 percent between 1965-1970, and has dropped steadily since then. Fertility rates in much of the world have fallen. Around 1980s, the United States used more water per person than ever before, but consumption has lessened since then. “By about 1950,” Ausubel, Waggoner, and Wernick write, “by rapidly lifting the specific productivity of land, the world’s farmers stopped plowing up nature, and the worldwide area of cropland per person began dropping steeply”—from about half a hectare, or roughly half the size of a 400-meter running track, in 1950, to about a quarter hectare in 2000.