Get Real

Colin Austin © 6th December 2021 Creative commons this document may be reproduced but the source should be acknowledged. Information may be used for private use but commercial use requires a license.

Introduction

Recent heavy rains, and the accompanying crop damage, has shown us the need to modify our growing systems to adapt to extreme weather, possibly influenced by climate change.

This may appear to be purely a technical problem and certainly we have to refine our technology, which we can surely do. Given the chance – we are smart and cooperative creatures that achieves wonders.

A much more serious issue is that in the midst of the saturation bombing of the digital and social media era we seem to think that we can happily live in a world of virtual reality divorced from actual reality.

How do we stop ourselves from going brain dead from data saturation so we are able to analyse all that data so we actually understand what it actually going on so we can take action before actually reality sweeps aside our pleasant, but temporary, reside in virtual reality?

Rain

About three weeks ago it started to rain after a long dry period. At first it was nice gentle rain may be 20mm one day then 50mm the next and the soil just soaked it up. But it kept on raining and soon the soil was saturated. Then overnight I recorded 180mm – now that is serious rain.

Up here in Bundaberg latitude 24 degrees (the desert belt) we are used to long period of dry broken by the tail end of a cyclone which can easily dump 200mm over a few days but then it just stops.

This was very different – it broke all records and did damage to my garden and many commercial growers in the area who had their crops destroyed. I have no formal proof but it seemed likely that climate change was a major factor so I decided I had better start a project to work out how to make beds better able to cope with these extreme weather events.

No spectacular technology, just getting the details right, reducing the width of the beds, digging out the soil just above the Ag pipe and filling with food waste to ensure better drainage, making the beds into ridges with a trench either side so the water can get away and above all making sure that the soil is covered with leaf mulch to avoid the soil getting compacted from the battering rain.

Nothing new – but every engineer knows that however brilliant the concept, getting the boring details right is the difference between success and failure. That is why you see far more Toyota Corollas than Lamborghinis in the shopping centre car parks.

If the rain continues I can test the modifications which will make an excellent article which I may call something like ‘Preparing our growing systems for climate change’.

But here lies the problems. In this digital age just mention climate change, Covid or vaccinations you are immediately and viciously attacked as some half witted zombie under the control of some unspecified ‘they’ who want to control the world.

I am told by these purveyors of wisdom that climate change is a load of rubbish and as evidence they say that the Antarctic ice shelf is actually growing.

As a data point they may be correct – and there is chorus of ‘show us the data’. But data points in themselves are useless until they have been analysed so we have an understanding of what is happening.

The antarctic is a massive store of ice and snow which is gradually melting with huge quantities of fresh water flowing into the surrounding sea. Fresh water freezes at 0ºC – salty sea water freezes at about -2ºC so the increase in the size of the sea ice does not show that climate change is a load of rubbish but that the increase in temperature is causing massive flows of fresh water into the sea so it freezes at a warmer temperature.

Putting things in perspective

But how is it, in this digital age, with the power of search engines at our finger tips, that we seem to be living in an age where we are saturated with facts but our ability to analyse and understand the facts is declining.

This must be one of the most critical things we need to understand. So lets invite an attack from the Covid deniers and put Covid and other illnesses in perspective.

Despite what the Covid deniers say Covid is real and kills people. Just taking a purely mathematical approach some 0.1% of the global population have died from Covid.

Without appearing to be heartless, compared with the Black death where death rates varied between 30 to 50% of the population that is small and does not pose a threat to the continued existence of our species.

But the Black death was a long time ago and there are other modern diseases which are far more concerning.

I am not a heartless arsehole but we do need to not just look at the facts and analyse and try to understand them.

For every person that dies from Covid there are 100 people who suffer from diabetes, not a spectacular as gasping for breath when dyeing from Covid but equally devastating for the quality of life, with the risk of amputation of limbs, going blind and the near certainty of premature death.

Then there is a large number of people who will die from a heart attack – currently the commonest cause of death and let us not overlook the people who will end their lives with dementia with all the heart ache it causes their loved ones.

All these have a common cause – we eat too much of the wrong sort of fat. Which raises the question – why?

Evolution

As we were evolving we were short of sugar and fats so we naturally love them but we also evolved a gut brain which told us when we were full and should stop eating so our energy intake was automatically in balance. But then in one of the great calamities for our species we stopped feeding our gut brain so it no longer tells us when we are full.

The solution is so blindingly simple and so easy to test that is seems incredible that we don’t do it – start feeding our gut brain and test this by noting if we get the messages to stop eating.

So how – in this wondrous digital age, where we have access to the worlds information at our finger tips, can we miss something so simple and obvious?

No that is not a trivia game question – it is one of the most important question facing our species.

Virtual reality

The digital age has giving us a wondrous new tool – virtual reality. Actual reality is a pretty miserable state of affairs – whether it is minor issues like the hoons that do wheelies at 2 am in the morning, weeds that blow in and take over your veggie patch, rain that either does not come or comes in excess and ruins your plants, grand daughters that expect you to provide a free Uber service or more serious things like Covid, diabetes and dementia – the real world can be a pretty miserable place.

But virtual reality enables us to escape all that. We don’t have to spend time and energy working out what is true – all we have to do is decide what we would like to believe and we can search the web to provide the evidence that that is true. Just type in ‘Is xxx good’ or ‘Is xxx bad’ and you will get all the evidence you need to support your chosen view point.

And even better you can use social media to find other people with the same views – and it is much nicer to be in a group with the same views.

And this is the way the digital world works. Using virtual reality we can climb to the top of a tall building and just leap off and fly around to visit all the roof top parties in the near by buildings. We can just pop in and listen to the music and join in the dancing and if we like it stay and make friends or we can just fly along to the next building until we find a group where we fit it.

You must admit this is far more pleasant than reality where you end up a splodge on the concrete below.

So what can we do?

Join the Gbiota local community food movement

Well you can join the Gbiota local community food movement. It won’t stop politician favouring big companies who give them a lot of money, it won’t stop big companies manipulating the truth to convince you that their processed foods is healthy when it is just full of fats and sugars and flavourings to make it irresistible – but it will help people who actually want to eat fresh healthy food and it may lead to you making friends in your community who live in the real world and share your views.

Just read all the articles at www.gbiota.com

Colin Austin