Year 9-16
Is nothing sacred anymore? Is everything to be challenged? A doctor-friend told us years ago that since plants today are grown in poorer soil, they contain fewer vitamins, fewer minerals and fewer anti-toxins, so he advised us to supplement our diet with all these health aids. Now I read that swallowing these supplements is basically useless, a waste of money since several responsible studies have shown that extra vitamins, at least in pill form, don’t prevent chronic disease or prolong life.
Of course everyone needs essential nutrients that the body can’t produce on their own. Due to lack of Vitamin C sailors in their wind-driven ships got scurvy and the Royal Navy fed them limes: hence the name Limeys for Brits. A lack of vitamin D can cause rickets and all sorts of diseases can be prevented, apparently, by chewing or swallowing D, the sudden wonder drug. It is now claimed that high doses of it could lower risk for cancer and other chronic diseases. So do we need some vitamins but not others?
I was reminded of all this when last week I saw CBC’s Peter Mansbridge interview President Obama in the White House. You may wonder what the connection is between Obama and vitamins. Well, my brain is a jolly jumper: it was something that Obama said that triggered this train of thought. When Peter Mansbrige asked him about the obnoxious Oil Sands his simple reply was: “Technology will find an answer.” “AHA”, I thought, “there’s where Obama comes from.”
Most of us see the world and our bodies sometimes as well, as a sort of machine we can manipulate so that it will keep on functioning. There’s no doubt that Technology rules our world. And here is where the vitamin connection comes in: it flashed through my mind whether the use of technology too could backfire just as the use of vitamin tablets, also a product of technology, suffered a setback. Maybe there too we are wrong to place all our bets in technology.
When in Ottawa, both Harper and Obama sang from the same song sheet, aspiring to device ‘clean technology’, fully convinced that sequestering the CO2 and burying it is possible: technology will save us. But will it?
Things out there aren’t so simple: for every freight car of coal gone up in smoke – the biggest source of carbon dioxide- CO2 – and the main fuel for electricity in the world and the main source of Green House Gases – three freight cars of CO2 are released, which then must be captured and transported to a safe place underground. Can it be done? Would it not be a lot easier if we reduced energy use? No, that’s apparently not an option because “our way of life may not be compromised,” Obama said during his election campaign.
Back to vitamin pills. A much better way to robust bodies is to go back to our grandparents’ diets: lots of nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables, which will lower rates of heart disease and cancer. The catch: their produce was grown on organic soil. Simple solution: go home-grown: produce your own 100 feet diet. Michael Pollan, starts his “In Defense of Food” with: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer what we should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”
But how about technology? I know, it has its benefits. I love my computer. I spent more time with my laptop than with any other tool, but it also has drawbacks. The current financial disasters can directly be blamed on computer technology gone amok. The hedge funds, the disastrous derivatives, the fatal financial fakeries were only possible because of the World-Wide-Web and the simulations suggested by enhanced computer power. What we see at work today is an aspect of what Joseph Tainter describes in his 1988 book, “The Collapse of Complex Societies.”
There are other downsides to technology as well. The immense population growth is owed primarily to the growth of carbon-based technology. Also, for all its blessings technology has accelerated the disappearance of social taboos and globally caused the demise of native cultures and rural communities and has spread pornography everywhere. Also, due to its indiscriminate use of technology, China has become one of the world’s largest polluters.
The direct result of the current collapse of the financial system has been the rise of government influence. The State is now the Banker of last resort. If the past is any indication, this new phenomenon could have disastrous consequences as it will boost bureaucracy, introduce stifling regulations and halt creative innovation. It certainly will lead to greater complexity, exponentially increasing the dangers of societal collapse.
The word ‘vitamin’ has as its root the Latin word ‘vita’ which means ‘life’. We must use ‘technology’ wisely so that it does not endanger ‘vita’, ‘life’ the source of all that lives because it is beyond challenge that all life is sacred.