Hope for a sustainable system?

Food comes from sunlight, soil, plants, and animals, right? So how has our food and the system we rely on to produce it become so complex? We keep striving for more and more food from the same area of land, and the only way we know how is to break the process down into controllable parts and increase each one. This is how we gain control over our surroundings, isn't it? We break things into parts that we can control and then re-arrange them to suit our needs. We build houses, computers, roads, and cars this way. Unfortunately, when we think on such a closeup scale to what we are doing, we fail to see how this approach changes everything else. Houses and roads take the place of natural environments, cars send gases into the atmosphere that may be altering the climate, and computers use massive amounts of energy to build, transport, and use. When we produce food in this same way we simplify the equation as much as possible, and deal with the setbacks as part of the process. We have now simplified the genetic makeup of our food sources to match the mechanized harvesting and simplified inputs of chemical fertilizers (and vice versa) and we use pesticides to mitigate the damage that these changes to our food have wrought. Each of these changes has consequences, but one of the problems with working to change the system is that nobody knows the full extent of those consequences. We take as given that there are some trade-offs to be made with this kind of system, but we really have little idea of what they are. If we can agree that there are consequences to manipulating our surroundings to suit our wants and needs as a species, however, then we need to turn our attention and energies to finding out what they are. How will we do this without a widespread incentive to do so? We have, hardwired in, a self-preservation and species-propagating logic that is difficult to deny. So what is to be done?

Football

I took this a couple of weeks ago on the football field at Carleton College. Of course, it didn't look like this when I took it. Photoshop allows me to saturate, sharpen, and alter the original until it's something else. So what is it? It's mostly a picture, I'd say, but it has been dramaticized. I've heard that the real test should be fidelity to the truth expressed in the original, but that seems just about as subjective as 'whatever seems right.' I still like Google's informal slogan: "Don't be evil." I'll stick with that. It's hard to be evil when taking pictures of footballs.

In the beginning

I think I'll start blogging. About what? Who knows. Maybe politics. Maybe psychology. Maybe photography. Maybe all of the above. All I know is that once I blog, I become legitimate. Feels nice.