When was the last time you took – for lack of a better term – an inventory of your opinions and ideologies: what they are, why you hold them and what shapes them? If you’re like most people, you likely haven’t. These things typically go down to the roots of our very beings; our values, our experiences, our traditions. They’re the lenses through which we see the world, and just like a pair of glasses, we don’t pay them much thought until they no longer translate images into our brains effectively.
It can be a worthwhile experience, however. By scratching the surface, one quickly discovers that many of our beliefs have been bought and paid for by someone, somewhere, at one time or another. In the modern world, you can almost count on the fact that common beliefs have been shaped by think tanks, sold in ideological packages, diffused through media and, in some cases, reshaped into law and policy.
In that spirit, let’s talk about science for a moment. Science is the eternal search for truth through continual controlled observation and comparison. It never represents the truth itself; however, the more-or-less established science we have is typically the closest we have to truth. In theory, science is supposed to bypass all of the innate prejudices of ideology, media and the human mind in general. However, it rarely works that way.
Case in point: an article published in Western Producer (“Is glyphosate really dangerous?” March 31, 2016) a few months ago featured a “go-to” expert in the field of glyphosate. And indeed, the credentials of John Giesy are exceptional. He is a professor and Canada research chair in environmental toxicology at the University of Saskatchewan, a professor or honourary professor at six other universities and – according to the article – the most cited author in the combined fields of ecology and environmental science.
The Producer lists a number of compelling scientific arguments Giesy makes in favour of glyphosate as a relatively benign substance in the kind of doses present in food. Then why are we not hearing that side of the story in the mainstream media? Anti-GMO advocates are using research to confuse the public, says Giesy. Environmental groups and lawyers hire “like minded” scientists to produce favourable research with the hopes of filing class action lawsuits. Papers are then published in “second rate” journals and proceed to cloud the valid science.
If this seems awfully close to the same kind of claims anti-GMO groups make about the big GMO corporations, you’re absolutely right. My question to all parties involved is how the average person is supposed to differentiate between a first and second rate journal. How many producers do you know that subscribe to academic journals? They may have to start doing so, because the mainstream media middleman is not entirely filling its mandate in this respect.
The communications arm of science is broken, with its messages cherry picked based on ideology and economics – the two things you don’t want to place anywhere near a scientific discussion. The problem isn’t too much messaging; if anything, it’s too much with too much self interest.
And this is the ideological battlefield the modern farmer fights on every day. Trade disabilities with countries that have banned GMOs, the legitimacy of manmade climate change, hormones vs. hormone-free, “organic” versus “inorganic” – all are the symptoms of this mass communication atmosphere where noisy dissension clouds consensus science with both sides claiming the moral and scientific high ground.
It’s such a different world from the one my dad farmed in back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Other than the actual act of farming itself, all he had to do was watch the market (mainly by reading the Western Producer), mind the weather, know what would thrive in his soil and hope crop insurance would kick in when he had a wreck. The last thing he had to worry about was governments in Europe banning his product based on faulty (or not so faulty – who can tell?) science.
But that’s just sentimentality talking. Blithering of Donald Trump aside, globalization isn’t going away. In order for it to work, however, we either need better messaging (not likely to happen) or better critical thinking skills in order to think through the miasma of corporate and ideological self interest preventing the ag industry from doing what is best for themselves and the world.
It can be a worthwhile experience, however. By scratching the surface, one quickly discovers that many of our beliefs have been bought and paid for by someone, somewhere, at one time or another. In the modern world, you can almost count on the fact that common beliefs have been shaped by think tanks, sold in ideological packages, diffused through media and, in some cases, reshaped into law and policy.
In that spirit, let’s talk about science for a moment. Science is the eternal search for truth through continual controlled observation and comparison. It never represents the truth itself; however, the more-or-less established science we have is typically the closest we have to truth. In theory, science is supposed to bypass all of the innate prejudices of ideology, media and the human mind in general. However, it rarely works that way.
Case in point: an article published in Western Producer (“Is glyphosate really dangerous?” March 31, 2016) a few months ago featured a “go-to” expert in the field of glyphosate. And indeed, the credentials of John Giesy are exceptional. He is a professor and Canada research chair in environmental toxicology at the University of Saskatchewan, a professor or honourary professor at six other universities and – according to the article – the most cited author in the combined fields of ecology and environmental science.
The Producer lists a number of compelling scientific arguments Giesy makes in favour of glyphosate as a relatively benign substance in the kind of doses present in food. Then why are we not hearing that side of the story in the mainstream media? Anti-GMO advocates are using research to confuse the public, says Giesy. Environmental groups and lawyers hire “like minded” scientists to produce favourable research with the hopes of filing class action lawsuits. Papers are then published in “second rate” journals and proceed to cloud the valid science.
If this seems awfully close to the same kind of claims anti-GMO groups make about the big GMO corporations, you’re absolutely right. My question to all parties involved is how the average person is supposed to differentiate between a first and second rate journal. How many producers do you know that subscribe to academic journals? They may have to start doing so, because the mainstream media middleman is not entirely filling its mandate in this respect.
The communications arm of science is broken, with its messages cherry picked based on ideology and economics – the two things you don’t want to place anywhere near a scientific discussion. The problem isn’t too much messaging; if anything, it’s too much with too much self interest.
And this is the ideological battlefield the modern farmer fights on every day. Trade disabilities with countries that have banned GMOs, the legitimacy of manmade climate change, hormones vs. hormone-free, “organic” versus “inorganic” – all are the symptoms of this mass communication atmosphere where noisy dissension clouds consensus science with both sides claiming the moral and scientific high ground.
It’s such a different world from the one my dad farmed in back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Other than the actual act of farming itself, all he had to do was watch the market (mainly by reading the Western Producer), mind the weather, know what would thrive in his soil and hope crop insurance would kick in when he had a wreck. The last thing he had to worry about was governments in Europe banning his product based on faulty (or not so faulty – who can tell?) science.
But that’s just sentimentality talking. Blithering of Donald Trump aside, globalization isn’t going away. In order for it to work, however, we either need better messaging (not likely to happen) or better critical thinking skills in order to think through the miasma of corporate and ideological self interest preventing the ag industry from doing what is best for themselves and the world.