Category: Uncategorized

A fly that could be a key part of our future

The quest for sustainable agriculture has discovered a somewhat unlikely partner for our future food chain.  While you and I probably do not compost waste food products from our homes, many in the world do and this commonly found fly has emerged as a natural hero for our quest for sustainability.  It is easy and safe to create your own inexpensive Soldier Fly Farms for your garden and the benefits are truly astounding if you are interested in this lifestyle.  Go ahead and Google the way you can do this for next summer.

The reason I became aware of this was one more article on circularity that came in this morning warning about the unintended consequences of our aquaculture efforts. Read the GreenBiz article here. 

We all know that feeding the planet is extremely difficult to do without creating some kind of environmental challenge.

What I found refreshing about this article was that the quest to be responsible discovered a relatively simple answer that seems to be scalable and have no negative side effects.

It is so nice to see that we can work on worldwide hunger issues and discover scalable, simple answers.

 

If we are intellectually honest, we will all admit there are things we cannot know for certain but we never-the-less indicate that we do.  Making matters worse is we now label things that we don’t know, and can’t know, but by doing so, we create the appearance of knowing!

Psychology sounds so precise, yet it attempts to understand and predict human interactions.  Perhaps that is better than not thinking about it, but once you have an “ology” you get people trying to stand out with their special take on it.

Kant vs. Hume is an excellent example of philosophy.  People go on and on arguing why Kant is wrong and then why Hume is wrong.  It is almost a form of intellectual jousting … there is no real point to it … it is more about appearing smart by finding flaws in someone else’s thinking.   Things like this of course also exist in the sciences, but the spirit of the debate is different.

For example, in physics, we have the Particle vs. Wave Theory of Light.  They sit side-by-side even within the textbooks with rightful arguments on both sides.  Even advocates for one point of view see the truth in the counter-arguments.  And, perhaps one day there will be one “unifying theory” of light.

But, what I like about this unresolved issue is that civil discourse dominates the journals and the ongoing research.  Nobody is trying to prove somebody wrong.  Everyone admits being perplexed.  Both sides see each other’s point of view.  All voices are being heard.

What concerns me lately with our cancel culture and social unrest is that we are losing our ability to tolerate uncertainty.  We want simple answers to our perplexing challenges.  Perhaps we are unwilling to pay for them, but at least we want to know there is a light at the end of the tunnel and it is not an oncoming train!

The title for this blog comes from a part of a phrase many Christians quote about what happens when we die.  The full phrase comes from 1 Corinthians vs. 13: 12 “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”  There is a level of humility here that seems missing in all too many of the arguments I hear today.

Oh, and perhaps you remember the rest of this chapter, which is often read at weddings.  It is often referred to as the “love chapter” since it describes the way loving people relate.

Yep … that seems to be the problem for sure today.

We live in a country that reveres freedoms so when someone tells us what we should be doing, we naturally tend to ignore advice even when the evidence is overwhelmingly clear: exercise, eat wisely and moderately, get a good night’s sleep, etc.

I posted on my Facebook page years ago that I renamed my dog Five Miles so I could claim to walk five miles every morning.

Seriously though, this COVID situation has brought behavior clearly into stark focus.  Bad behaviors have tragic consequences.  I am sure many of you can recount family or friend situations about weddings and other large gatherings where the irresponsible behavior of just one person who “had to come and had symptoms” did so and impacted many others.

I track this each week for a bunch of my friends and associates and have watched how the attitudes toward public health warnings seem to be about as polarized as the most recent election … perhaps even worse.  You can see how some will be strident in their defiance of these warnings.  Some of my friends are in the medical professions and send me journal articles claiming there is no difference in results based upon the recommended behaviors.  When you dig deeper though you can see the experiment itself was set up to get that answer.  They did not want the truth to come out.

Perhaps there is something then to be learned by watching free countries who have done better than others in their response.  I have been tracking Sweden vs. Norway but most recently added Finland to my comparison and you can really see that good behavior matters.  Here are the relative statistics for the recent increases in these three countries:

	Pop Mil	Cases/Day
Finland	5.54	300
Norway	5.42	600
Sweden	10.1	6,000

Go online and you will see that the policies of Norway and Finland are about the same and the size of the countries is also about the same.  But the results are starkly different.  If you google that, you will find countless references to a simple fact: Finlanders listen to authorities and do what they are told.  They don’t have to … they just do what is right.

Behavior matters and we need to stress this in our remaining time before the widespread administration of the vaccines.

It is appropriate that at this time of thanksgiving we consider the story we have accepted about Thanksgiving in an honest update.  Yes, we all grew up with that nice, convenient picture of native Americans peacefully sharing their bounty with the earliest settlers from Europe.  If I were to call them invaders, which they were, you would immediately jump on me.  If I were to recount the terrible things they did and that resulted from their presence in this new world to them, you would declare me a liar.

Yet, when the truth does get told we find we have been fed a convenient myth.  Perhaps this myth was timely and appropriate when initiated, but myths have a way of persisting.  Read the full story in the USA Today for yourself to appreciate just how ugly the story really is.

As we do celebrate this myth please do consider what other things you might accept as truth in your life on faith and search more deeply for understanding.  I did that in my faith journey and found some startling things about the origins of my faith.  But, rather than throw out my faith just because there was mythological roots to it, I dug deeper to see what you can learn with myth blended in with facts.

What I hope you will find is that you can “grow up” and “grow out” of simple explanations as we get older and wiser.  We don’t have to get bitter and become a scrooge yelling “bah humbug” if we are willing to consider broader, deeper, and hopefully higher understandings.

It is funny how the English language is picking up so many new meanings for words we grew up with in common use.  When I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal indicating stooping was now the rage, I thought they were referring to the new lows the media were racing towards in their perpetual political commentaries.  I had no idea that this word described the big city rush to leave for the wide-open spaces of rural society where people just put things they didn’t want to take on the front stoop of their apartments. If any of you are twitter fans or use Instagram you probably have seen this.

Susan and I have tried this here in Georgia by placing things we don’t need any longer on the curb.  But generally, no one will come and pick them up. That is until you place a price tag on them.  After a few days, we will write a large sign indicating you can buy the item for $50 … and it will be gone in minutes!

I grabbed the picture here from Instagram.  These are very nice pieces of furniture.  Sure, the blond wood is no longer in style, but someone in need could certainly value this.

Never the less, I am struck by the perceptions of value we are seeing today as we cope with COVID.  The trend to live in cluster communities … called mixed-use in architectural design … is now dead. Everyone wants to move out.  The inventory of homes for sale is at historic lows.

Maybe stooping is just part of downsizing.  Perhaps it is rightsizing.  Maybe it is more about deciding what is important and truly needed in your life.