Fire and Knowledge

With the so-called bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century, there was a gradual elimination of aristocratic privilege in Europe and, above all, in the United States. But rather than abolishing class domination altogether, the effect of these revolutions was primarily to replace one ruling class with another. Instead of being peasants, ruled by an aristocracy that had control of all the land, the masses were gradually transformed into workers, ruled by capitalists who controlled the factories and machines. As the nascent market economy began producing wealth on an unparalleled scale, money quickly become more important than either land or lineage as the basis for privilege.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 19

I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!

–Charles Lamb (1775–1834), “A Chapter on Ears,” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 167

Every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it—or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every calorie of energy invested. From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum directly.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 46

There are 10 billion viruses in every quart of seawater.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 213

Catalog Choice is “a free service that allows you to decide what gets in your mailbox. Use it to reduce your mailbox clutter, while helping save natural resources.” Sounds like a good idea to me.

I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never has such cleverness been used to show that we are all stupid. One longs, upon reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I go off in search of the savages of Canada, because the illness to which I am condemned render a European doctor necessary to me.

–Voltaire to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quoted in Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 17

I found the op-ed “Nice Shot” by Jessica Snyder Sachs very informative. But I still don’t plan on getting a flu shot. Excerpt:

In 1989, an epidemiologist in Britain, David Strachan, observed that babies born into households with lots of siblings were less likely than other babies to develop allergies and asthma. The same proved true of babies who spent significant time in day care. Dr. Strachan hypothesized that the protection came from experiencing an abundance of childhood illnesses.

Dr. Strachan’s original hygiene hypothesis got a lot of press, not only in the news media but in serious medical journals. Less publicized was the decade-long string of follow-up studies that disproved a link between illnesses and protection from inflammatory disorders like allergies and asthma. If anything, studies showed, early illness made matters worse.

Moreover, studies now show that the more infections a person has during childhood, the greater his or her chance of premature death from scourges of old age like heart disease and cancer. The link appears to be chronic inflammation, a kind of lingering collateral damage from the body’s disease-fighting response.

Still, Dr. Strachan’s original observation was confirmed — as a group, babies in large families and day care are less likely to develop allergies and asthma than are children born into smaller families and kept at home. The same protective effect can be seen in children born on farms and in areas without public sanitation.

But the link isn’t disease-causing germs. It’s early and ample exposure to harmless bacteria — especially the kinds encountered living close to the land and around livestock and other young children. In other words, dirt, dung and diapers. Just as disease-causing microbes clearly bring on inflammation, harmless microorganisms appear to exert a calming effect on the immune system.

The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. We do need a “new economy,” but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.

–Wendell Berry, “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 22