Subject: Indus International School - Bangalore, India

Posted by Sarah Boyar on 3/4/2010
In Reply To:Indus International School - Bangalore, India Posted by Niall Palfreyman on 2/22/2010

Message:

Wendell Berry speaks about the centralization of intelligence through the university system in regards to farming. Crops are designed in laboratories- often university laboratories- to have a certain character – pest-resilience, durability for travel, vibrant color…
Like cooking oil, crops also have a character that’s undesigned, latent. What’s interesting to me is that some aspects of character are not explicitly engineered or intentional; for example, the effect that a certain crop might have on the watershed, on another species in the area, on the soil quality. These aspects of character can be observed by rural people living in the agricultural area. The designers, engineers and producers are often physically, geographically distanced from these observations. But the rural dwellers do not have the scientific expertise, training, to incorporate the information feedback they observe into scientific debate. Rigorous debate and theory falsification is a critical element of the scientific method. Theories must be both challenged and defended, rigorously. (Karl Popper) I think that a disjunction of information, of cause and effect, the separation of crucial information feedback from science factories ruptures this debate. Scientists do no observe and then design further based on observation. The field of observation is often the marketplace and not the field. And instead of a better, healthier corn syrup or non intrusive GMO, we become people of activism and reactivism, ultimately hostility, as people begin to feel controlled rather than participative.
Attached: dynamic hypothesis of overshoot (+'s) and collapse (-) dynamic related to contextualizing information / regurgitating 'facts'

Regards,
Sarah

Follow Ups:

Indus International School - Bangalore, India - Michael Skelly 3/4/2010