Monocultures

This is a Ag meets Tech meets Culture thought. I was reading and article talking about monocultures in the Tech world, referring mainly to MS. I had never thought of it that way. Yes, I grudgingly admit that programs like Opera and FireFox have just as many bugs (security and otherwise) as IE but they aren’t nearly as obvious because they are the minority and minority flaws aren’t noticed as much/often because there just aren’t as many people using/hacking them.

The monoculture being “bad” (though cases can be made for it being good, personally think it is more bad than good but whatever) carries over into Agriculture as well. The huge animal production farms or crop places have problems with infections. If an infection sets in it spreads like wild fire because there are all [insert ag commodity] close together, it’s a pathogenic dream/nightmare (depending on if you are the farmer or the pathogen), if polycultures are done then the spread of infections are stemmed, and if some loss takes place there is still the other commodity (in polyculture systems) to fall back on.

And then there are cultures, or societies. I am probably a bit biased having grown up in the US but I was always amazed (much more in developing countries) at how culturally ignorant many people were, many times they were (for example) racist, basing their ideologies on movies. They absolutely would not accept any other foods and being tolerable (palatable) all of this made them less accepting of change (coming from outside influences); and to me change is inevitable, if you don’t learn how to accept/embrace it you will drown.