Water Wellness

This post is part of a worldwide celebration of blogging brought to you by Blog Action Day. The topic this year is food which is, admittedly, not my main area of focus, but as a frequent food consumer and someone embroiled in a field of work where food issues are inescapable, there are lots of big ideas to be tackled here.

A recent post by the fabulous online magazine GOOD featured an article by this title:

“The Planet Will House 10 Billion People, and We Can Feed Them All”

I clicked on the link instantly. Really? Just like that? It’s in the bag? The skeptic in me awoke; the cynic in me groaned and rolled over.

And with good reason, it turns out. It’s not that the five point plan presented for addressing global food issues is wildly misguided or unambitious. Rather, it is deceptively simple.

The author acknowledges this, but, nevertheless, makes such statements as:

“Scientists have figured out how we can feed a growing world that doesn’t come at the expense of the planet.”

I find this type of statement deeply troubling, for three reasons:

1. Reductionism. Oversimplification is a common bane of the development worker’s existence. The failure to recognize the complexity that arises through the interrelationships of a multifaceted system makes any distillation of change processes into bullet points or log frames immensely challenging – even futile at times – but something that has, nevertheless, become a status quo in the sector. Seeing anything as broad as this subject synthesized into such simplicity suggests that a simplified, reductionist mentality can be used to address some of the most complex, pressing, and immense challenges of our lifetime. It is a dangerous suggestion.
2. Believing that knowing the outcome = knowing what to do. In each of the five points presented in the article, untold layers of complexity and detail exist. For example, point three, knowing that we need to “make better use of water, fertilizers, and chemicals” is great, but that provides little guidance on how:
• Australia should adapt policies to address their rapidly declining groundwater resources
• Malawi should implement the proposed greenbelt irrigation project
• small-scale farmers could minimize fertilizer runoff and the associated potential for eutrophication that will accumulate downstream
3. Certainty of success. Whether intentional or not, my first reaction to the article was: “Great, it’s already taken care of. My participation isn’t needed.” As both a skeptic and someone deeply passionate about the state of the world and the role that my generation has to affect it, I obviously do not subscribe to such a passive – even apathetic – role. However, I wonder what the effect will be on other readers, and what risks lie in broadcasting that the ‘scientists’ have figured out what to do.

The message I leave you with on this Blog Action Day is this: nothing is that simple. We may think we know what needs to be done, think we know what we are doing, and think that our actions are achieving what we think needs to be done. We may be wrong.

Amongst the undoubted plethora of positive, optimistic, and even hilarious posts populating the blogosphere today, my point is not to incite cynicism. Rather it is a call to be vigilant in our critical objection to oversimplification and reductionism. It is a fine line to walk: balancing inspiration and hope with the gravity of the world’s circumstance, and the need for inspirational optimism will persist. We cannot, however, succumb to the temptations of simplicity and assured success when the optimism itself is rooted in reductionist hubris.