I know a farmer who comes up with ingenious designs to solve problems on his small farm, and he adds value every time he adopts someone else's design. But he'll never put that genius to work to solve climate change, or hunger, or housing, because he lives in a culture where humans cannot, or should not, try to solve such problems.
If you look at a political map, there is a huge divide between urban, suburban, and rural areas. It would be much better if we were all pulling in the same direction, but I am not sure how to make it happen.
I live in a rural area of a suburban county. We have twelve acres of hardwood forest (our neighbor, a retired forestry professor, has 70 acres). I joke that we live in a garden with 75 ft plants! I've come to realize that part of our contribution to reversing climate warming is just keeping our small forest healthy. It's not always easy with invasive pests killing trees, but the trees on our land do lock up a heck of a lot of atmospheric carbon.
Perhaps your farmer friend will use his designs to keep his land a little more healthy, or his neighbor's land, or some clever invention will be picked up by his grandchild and spread more widely. It's possible, that human ingenuity can have useful effects, even if not intended. And someday when the political clouds have cleared, the next generation may realize we are all in this together.
I know a farmer who comes up with ingenious designs to solve problems on his small farm, and he adds value every time he adopts someone else's design. But he'll never put that genius to work to solve climate change, or hunger, or housing, because he lives in a culture where humans cannot, or should not, try to solve such problems.
If you look at a political map, there is a huge divide between urban, suburban, and rural areas. It would be much better if we were all pulling in the same direction, but I am not sure how to make it happen.
I live in a rural area of a suburban county. We have twelve acres of hardwood forest (our neighbor, a retired forestry professor, has 70 acres). I joke that we live in a garden with 75 ft plants! I've come to realize that part of our contribution to reversing climate warming is just keeping our small forest healthy. It's not always easy with invasive pests killing trees, but the trees on our land do lock up a heck of a lot of atmospheric carbon.
Perhaps your farmer friend will use his designs to keep his land a little more healthy, or his neighbor's land, or some clever invention will be picked up by his grandchild and spread more widely. It's possible, that human ingenuity can have useful effects, even if not intended. And someday when the political clouds have cleared, the next generation may realize we are all in this together.