"Creation is groaning for the revealing of the Sons of God"

I just read this article by Michael Pollan in the New York Times magazine. He talks about two seemingly unrelated issues that cropped up in the last year and ties them together under the topic of industrialized agriculture, and the effects of the process of industrialization on the living/natural things involved, pigs for food production in the first case, and bees for almond production in the second. More broadly his argument is about sustainability/unsustainability. He says that what unsustainable "is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends." The mass production of meat involving "raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement" leads to using an enormous amount of antibiotics on these animals (some say 70% of antibiotics consumed in the US), which possibly leads to the development/evolution of lethal, antibiotic-resistant, viruses etc. And the mass production of almonds in California leads to shipping in foreign bees from all over the country and world who are not at a place in their life-cycle to work hard, which could lead to mass sickness among the bees (and therefore less almond crop) every so often... Read the article to get the full stories...

Pollan is not asserting direct cause and effect situations here, he's careful about that. And even if we don't believe the connections he points to, I at least agree with his overall point. He says at the end of his article, "[this] seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines," and points out that this is dangerous. If we keep doing this, and continue trying to solve the problems that inevitably arise in ways that continue to treat them as machines, we are just making more problems. I am all for progress in agriculture, and in production in general, all for innovation. But I believe that we, as sons and daughters of God (creator of all), made in his image and likeness and given dominion over creation, would do well to have a greater respect for all of God's creation, to work with God and with the order within creation to innovate/create systems of agriculture, and society in general. This belief applies to the way we as humans treat humans as well, not just animals/organisms (think the stem-cell issue: embryos mass-produced for the sake of solving certain problems--scary! and probably not fully solving a problem that is actually much deeper than we think!). Pollan's argument and my endorsing it is not solely for the sake of pigs and bees. Ultimately even these agricultural problems have bad effects on us.

One more separate, random thought: there's a line in the article,"the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they've become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along..." When I read that I immediately thought of myself (and Gina) and UofC as an analogous situation and laughed... UofC has killed my immune system (think sudden onslaught then steady increase of allergies)... Really makes me wonder what is so unnatural about studying so hard...