There will be seasons turn turn turn.

This Thursday I went to the 'Living in the Anthropocene' Consortia hosted by the Smithsonian Institution's Grand Challenges Consortia. The last speaker was Thomas Friedman, whos article 'Too Many Americans?' we read earlier this semester. Friedman's speech compared nature and politics, for example he compared ISIS to a monoculture in the plant world, and the carbon debt to the financial debt. These comparisons between the natural world and the political and economic world, the market and mother nature, are things I've been trying to express and dig out myself. The readings this week only futher supported my suspicions about the deep parallels between the natural world and everything else on earth.

I believe there is some kind of underlying natural law, natural law can be defined in many different ways from the philosophical to the ecological. I will avoid discussion for the philosophical for the moment, to focus on the ecological and physical. The earth clearly operates following some sort of law, for example the laws of physics, and thermodynamics. The neverending patterns and cycles of nature clearly point to some sort of plan. I realize I'm walking a fine line here talking about a 'plan' and 'natural law' but I'm not refering to a source, or a divine being conducting the symphony of the web of life, I'm talking about only what I can see and what I have learned from life and science. There are undeniable similarities between the operation of the natural world and politcs and the market. The parallels Friedman drew in his speech illustrate exactly what I'm talking about, as do this weeks readings albeit less explicitly (and I'm going to get to that in just a minute)

I am passionate and fascinated by food on many levels, every thing from food and culture to food and corporations interests me. I believe that by solving the multitude of food problems in the world we will simultaneously solve a huge number of the other issues of the world from the socioeconomic, to the policial. So we're back to connections and parallels. In Patel's article 'Can the World Feed 10 Billion People?' he discussed the use of fertilizer in Malawi, turns out that the over use of fertilizer while increasing the crop yeild had detrimental effects in other areas including nutrition and soil fertility. I could have told them this wouldn't work. Humans are always looking for quick fixes to things and celebrate their inguinutity then act shocked when it causes more problems. This is shown time and again in nature, in literature, in film, humans know this on a fundamental level but we try again and again to use these cure-alls. In 'The Oil We Eat: Following the food back to Iraq' Manning mentions that vegetarian foods such as 'soy burgers' and soy milk may be just as bad for the environment as meat. On a level of nutrition and production this is also common sense. Taking something full of vitamins and running it through a huge series of processes and mixing it with other processed things is bound to create by products and to have an out put of something that is simple much less nutritionally beneficial than what originally went in. What I'm getting at here is that it is no surprise that mass use of fertilizer causes more problems than it solves, and over processing food provides causes health problems. 

There are no quick fixes, the earth operates in cycles, like Friedman said in his talk the Market and Mother Nature are two of the most powerful and unmerciful forces on earth. Why we think we can out smart them, I simply don't understand.