A new thing

For some reason, I have been idly surveying hundreds of videos, by or about the late Charlie Kirk, over the last few days. My interest has not been always political. In fact, Mr Kirk was a broadly (self-) educated man, and usefully observed the highest journalistic standards. He not only told the “gospel” truth, but would correct himself whenever he discovered that he was in error; he was assiduously fair, even when this was painful. In other words, he was the opposite of what we are used to in the “legacy media.”

I found myself frequently reminded of “things I used to know,” and informed about things that I did not know yet — in agriculture, for instance.

Did you know that carrots are much less nutritious than they were more than a century ago, as well perhaps as most other crops? Or that this was the consequence of modern industrial production, including especially the Green Revolution, that radically increased our food supplies? For, like everything else, it was a trade-off, and people getting fat and diabetic on surplus carbohydrates was probably an improvement on people starving to death.

Or that there are more than ten thousand micro-organisms to be found in a single tablespoon of arable soil? and up to 50 billion according to another estimate, in up to 50,000 distinct species? No one can count that high, or even imagine such complexity.

Because I was once scandalously involved in “developmental economics,” and because even before that, in childhood, I discovered minute pond creatures with a cheap microscope, this topic brought back many happy memories. Indeed, one of the wonderful things about Mr Kirk, is that his youthful interests coincided with mine, and included Austrian economic sages like von Hayek and von Mises. I rather wish I could have met him, when he was still alive.

But anyway, his pro-life views extended to the billions upon billions of life forms that are tiny and benign. Through them we investigate the nature that God has created, and continues to create. In the words of Isaiah, who was apparently looking at our planet from outer space, “Look! … there is life in it.”

And, to the square of living forms, possibilities.