A while back, I overdosed on TED talks. All that brilliance and creativity wore thin after a bit, so I took a break. I was lured back recently by a talk given by one of my favorite food writers Mark Bittman. Bittman’s basic premise is that the effects of industrial food production on a worldwide scale, particularly meat “production,” is comparable to the threat of nuclear holocaust… So we should all eat more vegetables. His talk is both scary and annoying. Scary, because you can easily see the validity of his points (except maybe the hyperbole of the nuke analogy), and annoying because it’s really hard to envision anything changing significantly; and Bittman doesn’t offer much hope.

While I was there, I allowed myself two other talks. Both are worth a viewing if you are interested in the role that humanity plays in the global ecosystem.

Michael Pollan argues that human beings are merely pawns, enslaved by our lawns in their fight for global dominance with trees.

Susan Blackmore gives a fascinating and a little alarming talk on memes and genes and temes and replicators… I can’t do it justice but she basically argues (in a way, similar to Pollan) that humans are not the real “actors” on the planet, but that we are being controlled by the technological “advances” that we think we are deliberately creating…

Filed under General. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.