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Published on Visualizing Ecology (http://www2.evergreen.edu/visecowinter)

shaun libman

“So there are a great my reasons American cattle came off the grass and into the feedlot, and yet all of them finally come down to the same one: Our civilization and, increasingly, our food system are strictly organized on industrial lines. They prize consistency, mechanization, predictability, interchangeability, and economies of scale. Everything about corn meshes smoothly with gears of this great machine; grass doesn’t.”

-          Michael Pollan

 

I find it amazing that the food industry in America has largely picked the industrial method and that this decision seems to be based on a chain of events that happened for so many reasons not all of then good for this country, and not solely on logic. It appears that even the most mechanical, planed out and artificial things are still riddled with human flaws. The only entity that has really created something that seems to  truly consistently work is nature and its only because within nature it is ok for failures to accrue, some things have to end. Humans create thing in stages and try to trump old invention thinking that new advancements in technology are good. We are trying to create the ultimate devices, the most productivity. Its truly sad to see this flaw being “industrial”.  To me that word sounds like something great, efficient and predictable, but it isn’t anymore predictable then nature. We are always working with nature anyway, so we can not escape it. We pretend that we have some how found an alternative, but this honestly seems like some form of insanity and denial. I feel like we get hungry for things to become more efficient, but this efficiency ends up hurting humans and most other species. Meaning that efficiency is diminished in this complicated circle of connections for every advancement in scientific industrial methods we make. So we end up being much closer to where we started, then we would expect to be. I have been realizing that we are much weaker as a human race than I had admitted up until a few weeks ago. Its surprising to realize that the most powerful animal force on the planet is week and flawed. In away I always new this, but I also denied my own wisdom and truly thought we had something figured out. 

‹ Cody Cohan [0]

Source URL:
http://www2.evergreen.edu/visecowinter/visecowinter/shaun-libman-3