I was ruminating this afternoon that evolution deniers often face a real challenge when it comes to transitioning to accepting evolution as true:
Evolution is imperceptible to the unaided human senses, and thus intuition.
We’re not equipped to observe, say, a semi-aquatic species equipped with legs evolve over hundreds of thousands of years or more into the legless blue whale species, say. It’s just not possible with our current biological equipment and lifespan. We didn’t evolve that capability because knowing about evolution wasn’t important for our species’ survival for the first 200,000 years – or, really, any other creature.
And some people really need to be able to reach out and touch something in order to believe it.
But imperceptibility is a problem in many realms. WaPo recently published a profile of Britain’s most famous shepherd:
[James] Rebanks represents one possible future for farming, which is set to be transformed in the promise of a post-Brexit, zero-carbon world. The British government plans to strip away all traditional farm subsidies and replace those payments with an alien system of “public money for public goods.”
What are these public goods? Not food. Bees! In 21st-century Britain, the goods will be clean water, biodiversity, habitat restoration, hedgerows, pretty landscapes, wildflowers, flood mitigation and adaptation to climate change. All the stuff the public wants, according to the pollsters.
While I was fascinated by Rebanks and how a small farmer with a degree in history and an inherited farm has somehow captured a lead position when it comes to returning to what he hopes is sustainable farming, it was the riff on industrial farming which is truly important:
He wrote two books about all this, both international bestsellers. The latest, published to stellar reviews this month in the United States, is “Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey.”
On one level, the book is about how cheap food culture, globalization and super-efficient, hyper-mechanized, highly productive modern farms (giant monocultures of beets, wheat, corn) are terrible for nature (insects, rivers, climate) and our health (obesity, diabetes) and our farmers (indebted, pesticide-dependent, stressed).
To me, part of the reason for industrial farming not being abandoned in horror is that we do not perceive the troubles it’s causing, and even deny them when they are revealed. From not being big enough to cause a substantial problem in terms of pollution, to health problems not being obvious in large societies, and the imperceptibility caused by latency in negative effects, along with more traditional explanations such as sheer greed, it all works together to deny that there’s a problem – or, at least, a problem worthy of mass disruption of the industry.
After all, we have this population to feed, don’t we?
The solution? Regulation, and not by “captured” agencies. Perhaps roughly on a model provided by the Amish, in which social cohesion is considered to be more important than profit.
Because otherwise we face more ecological degradation, all in the name of profits. An old, old message, I know, but I enjoyed the article of Rebanks and wanted to share it.
