Title: What Would Watney Do?
The Choice Is Ours
The movie “The Martian” features Matt Damon as Dr. Mark Watney, we witnessed a glimpse of remarkable, albeit possibly unrealistic, human ingenuity and determination, particularly concerning a hole in a spacesuit. The film projected a narrative highlighting one human’s ability to adapt, innovate, and overcome the direst of circumstances. While growing potatoes in the harshest conditions might seem like science fiction, it underscores a fundamental truth about our existence: resilience and adaptation are woven into the fabric of humanity.
As a farmer and a steward of nutrients for human sustenance, I focus on uncovering the truth about growing food for a healthy human life on our planet. However, I’m not interested in simply growing food to sustain a growing global population; that path leads to quantity at the expense of quality. Instead, my mission is to discover how to cultivate nutritious, healthy food directly in the biosphere — minimizing the influence of the technosphere — under the ever-escalating environmental challenges we face.
Over billions of spheres of Earth (time), we’ve developed the capacity to record and interpret events as they unfold from the past that informs our future. We speculate, imagine, and game the possibilities, calling it consciousness. We only grasp the true nature of reality when it unravels, leaving us with speculation and a retrospective view of the past, while we continue our journey around the potential futures we are collectively shaping.
The Wisdom of Earth’s Spheres
As a concept, time is detritus from the two-dimensional flat world we once inhabited. Its code lives on inside our very understanding of reality. But, fellow Earthlings, we can no longer afford to live inside this crumbling architecture of thought. Instead, I refer to “Spheres of Earth,” the stacking of days that constitute our existence since the first day. We are becoming acutely aware that the decisions of past Spheres have set us on a collision course with a hotter and less habitable future.
As humans, we now number over 8 billion souls on this planet. Science aims to feed this growing population by prioritizing producing unhealthy, wheat-based foods. This industrialized approach to food production results from past decisions, putting quantity ahead of quality. It’s a fodder system — meant to keep the cattle churning out. The consequences are dire, with obesity rates predicted to soar even higher than they are now and off into the stratosphere.
Why have we reached this point? Our history is marked by a pattern of “othering,” exploiting, and destroying what came before us. Be it taking from those with darker skin or the youth (raised with poor diets and then sent off to war), the code of the other — this destructive, colonial mentality has become ingrained in our societal and cultural food concepts, leading us down a dangerous path.
The Code of Unity
However, there’s hope in recognizing that we are, in essence, “the Other” to our own past. We have inherited a legacy of violence, exploitation, and shortsightedness. Yet, our emerging consciousness allows us to change these patterns through empathy, understanding, and a commitment to facing our past head-on.
Native cultures possessed invaluable codes for sustainable living on Earth. The arrival of conquerors, driven by the concept of “the Other,” ultimately led to the near-total destruction of these ancient pearls of wisdom. Unfortunately, they — the other — lacked the necessary fear to bind them together before annihilation arrived. Our shared history is a lesson that what goes around always comes around.
We now stand within our shared destiny as humans, where our capacity to write the code of unity is pivotal. Climate disasters and global challenges remind us that we are fundamentally One Another. It’s time to prioritize life over lifestyle to cultivate courage, wisdom, and love for our planet. We must protect what we hold dear, even if it requires sacrifices and changes to our way of life.
The path forward demands a harmonious partnership with Earth, not further exploitation. We have the knowledge, imagination, and intelligence to act swiftly and correct the mistakes of the past. Let us remember that we are on Earth, a planet with its own needs, which we must address before it can continue to support us.
As we navigate these turbulent times, it’s worth asking ourselves, “What would Watney do?” The choice is ours.
(So that you know, he pushed against entropy — against fear, and repurposed his shit to make a human food system…immediately… before becoming hungry).
