“Common
sense is that which tells us the world is flat.”
-Stuart
Chase
Any time a
politician tells you something is “just common sense” it’s time to lock up your
daughters and hide the chickens, because the drivel that is about to follow
will invariably place your personal safety at risk in a multiplicity of ways,
from your economic welfare to your very physical wellbeing.
What part of this is "Common Sense" and what part requires someone to have made an observation not readily seen from the road? |
The world is a complex place, home to myriad interlocking processes about which our five senses (six, if you foolishly include the “common” one) provide almost no direct information. We seek simplicity, “straight talking” and “unmuddled answers” but the truth is that any simple answers are based on fable, and “straight talking” hardly ever has any evidentiary basis. As for “unmuddled answers” the reality is this – honest answers to most questions seldom accomplish anything more concrete and settled than yet more questions.
E.M. Forster
once quipped “beware of muddle” and, while he is one of our favorite authors,
the fact remains that his advice is worthless outside the context of personal
relationships, and even then relates only to the question of personal
commitment. In terms of certainty of
knowledge? Embrace muddle – it is the
only refuge of truth. Yes, we should
rather betray our country than our friends… but we cannot say that we know with
certainty anything for which there is not a verifiable testing framework, a way
to validate the hypothesis. When those
hypotheses have been tested, however, for
God’s sake, don’t ignore the results.
We are
wading into these philosophical waters for a particular reason, naturally, and
that is to attempt to bridge the gap between “common sensers” (climate change
denialists, lawn care specialists, monocropping agriculturalists, etc.) and
cold hard truth.
Merely
presenting evidence frequently makes no impact upon the opinion of those who
cling to the notion that truth should be “plain and simple”; the claims, for
example, that global warming is a hoax (!) fly square in the face of
overwhelming mounds of not only theoretical reasoning, but actual verifiable
empirical measurements of air and (more significantly) ocean temperatures which
are virtually incontrovertible evidence of the idea that global temperatures
are not only rising, but rising at a rate never before seen at any point in the
paleometeorological record. Essentially,
if you are politically conservative, you are statistically highly likely to
ignore this evidence, regardless of your education level, and truth be damned.
Another
excellent example of proponents of “common sense” ignoring the myriad complex
processes around them involves anoxic waters, the so-called “Dead Zones” in our
lakes, streams and oceans where a lack of oxygen causes nothing at all to live. First reported by shrimp fishermen in the
Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the phenomenon has grown dramatically over the
years, such that in places like Lake Erie, there are only tiny slivers of water
in which any fish at all live.
The
phenomenon of an algal bloom, of course, can occur naturally due to dramatic
changes in wind and ocean currents, floods or droughts upstream at the origin
of freshwater streams which discharge into saltwater bodies, and a host of
other variables. However, these natural
sources of eutrophication (the rapid increase in the nutrients on which algae
thrive, which in turn depletes the water of oxygen) do not account for the
massive increases in dead zones throughout the world, nor do they explain why
the Gulf of Mexico has seen the occasional hypoxic area transform from a
some-time and highly localized event to a permanent description of a vast area
ranging from the Texas coast just south of the Brazos River discharge eastward
to Mississippi and Alabama.
Vast sums of
research dollars, hundreds and thousands of experiments, and a wide ranging
array of analysts have been applied to the problem over the last fifty years,
and the causes of the problem are now more than obvious. There are numerous factors contributing to
the creation of dead zones throughout
the world, but far and away the most noxious is fertilizer runoff. The Mississippi River is the drainage zone
for a little over 40% of the continental United States; much of that area is
the so-called “corn belt” – and corn production is dependent almost entirely
upon the presence of nitrogen in high concentrations in soil, a state which
cannot exist in monocropped agriculture without constant yearly application of
high quantities of industrial fertilizer, the very sort which is most likely to
wash away disproportionately.
Corn
production in the central U.S. has been increasing dramatically since the
1950s; nearly all the forested regions in the Missouri Valley, for example,
have been stripped of trees and converted to corn fields, and thanks to the
ill-conceived “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007” still more will be
converted to corn production for the purposes of ethanol production. Even before this stupidity was foist upon us,
1.7 million tons of potassium and nitrogen were being delivered to the Gulf of
Mexico via the Mississippi River every year.
The size of the Gulf dead zone has essentially doubled since the late
1980s; it is not likely to shrink any time soon, absent permanent and
devastating drought conditions throughout the Midwest.
This is not a thermal picture; it is a picture of areas where no fish or shellfish or coral reefs, etc. can live -- red means dead. |
Meanwhile,
there is ample empirical evidence suggesting how dead zones may be
reversed. The collapse of the Soviet
Union and the demise of centrally planned economies in the former communist
states of Eastern Europe caused fertilizer use in the nations bordering the
Black Sea to drop to virtually zero. The
Black Sea dead zone had, prior to the 1990s, been the biggest in the
world. It shrank to practically nothing
between 1991 and 2001. Fishing – which
had completely disappeared from the
Black Sea in the latter half of the 20th century (you can’t catch
fish who don’t exist) is once again becoming a way of life in the region. Likewise, the North Sea dead zone has
decreased by about a third since nitrogen and other industrial emissions along
the Rhine River have been cut.
Similar
progress is not likely in the United States any time soon, however, for the
simple reason that any attempt to salvage our ecology is met with incredulity
and vitriol about how environmentalists are “out to destroy the economy”. It is hard to see how it is “common sense” to
argue that the economy of a dead region is much of an economy, but so it
goes. The Scots aphorism is perhaps
apropos here: “’tis an ill bird wha’
fouls its ain nest.”
In any
event, the fishing economy of the Gulf of Mexico is on the order of at least
$10 billion dollars. Absent appropriate
management of environmental policy (meaning banning
fertilizer) all $10 billion of those dollars (and by all means, feel free
to adjust for inflation) will simply disappear in coming decades. Not trying to be hyperbolic here – just
extrapolating from the data. Science
passes no judgments, it merely provides the tools for analysis, and very few of
those studying the data have come to any other conclusion than this: we ignore natural processes at our own peril.
The scope
and scale of our impact on the world around us has always exceeded our ability
to visualize and conceptualize, and that reality is becoming increasingly
apparent any time we step back and attempt to understand any particular
phenomenon. There is a simple reason
people used to believe that the world was flat – when you look from horizon to
horizon, it seems flat. Indeed, without the evidence provided by
mathematical analysis of a series of observations and experiments, one would
have to be a buffoon to believe anything other than that the world was a vast
disk, immense perhaps, but certainly not round.
The truth
was, is, and ever shall be much greater than what we can take in first hand.
Because of
that “simple” reality, we have an obligation to toss common sense on the dung
heap of no-longer-respectable notions, and take a long hard look at the impact
we are having on the world around us.
What we eat, how and where we live, what we wear, it all matters.
We at
Myrtle’s place have railed against lawns for a while now, because they are bad
for us all (killing bees, destroying soil tilth, causing nitrogen runoff,
generally looking icky) but that’s really just a jumping-off point. We are well aware that the vast majority of
Americans think lawns are not only “okay” but that they are essential. The same holds true for all sorts of other
things that most folk take for granted, and giving up those harmful things will
not at all seem like “common sense” to most people. But it’s the only kind of sense that matters,
if we want to continue living lives worth living.
And on that
happy note…
Happy
farming!
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