The Ecologist: October 2005

Every now and again I go on organizing and cleaning sprees. You know, rifling through old drawers, discarding rarely-used items and just taking a general inventory of everything I own (which isn’t much these days). Whenever I do this, I inevitably find some old magazine or newspaper clippings that I saved for blogging inspiration. That’s what today’s short post is all about.

The source relayed an interesting example that highlights man’s tendency to do bad when he really thinks he’s doing good. The original idea was that pesticides were good. Crops feed people and make money. Bugs kill crops. Pesticides kill bugs. Pesticides save crops. Pesticides are a good thing! That’s how the “logic” and “science” went.

Fast-forward a half-century from 1950 to 2000. Pesticide use in the United States has increased 33-fold. We’re only now beginning to learn of the disastrous health risks posed by many of these pesticides, not to mention the resulting pollution draining into the waterbed. Worse, many pests have become resistant and now we are losing more and more crops. All that “logic” and “rationality” behind the decision to “go pesticide” seems to have utterly failed us. But, science works!

I let my mind wander for a few and thought, What if Deuteronomy prohibited pesticides? If so, and it were still 1950, I imagine we’d inevitably have some smug atheist saying God is an immoral monster and the Bible is “stupid” and “harmful.” They would base this on their own “logic” and “science” and “reason,” thinking it obviously superior to the untrustworthy revelations of a bunch of nomadic goat herders. How wrong they’d be!

Examples like this abound. Yeah, science works, but that’s really a vacuous statement when you get down to it. Lots of things work. That doesn’t mean they’re good, or that we should base our entire civilization around them.

Oh, one last thing: if you care at all about our future, minimize consumption. Avoid supermarkets. Bike, walk or skateboard. Shop locally. Ruralize and learn to farm. You know, all that stuff people have been saying for years. As cheap energy runs out it’s likely to get real ugly in years to come, and that’s just on the physical plane.