Dave Colavito

As a recovering technologist, I'm puzzled by the unquestioned faith our culture places in new technology -- as though there is no down-side. And I'm reminded of the biologist E.O. Wilson's cautionary note about mistaking contentment with fulfillment -- in his letter to a Southern Baptist Pastor, soliciting help with saving nature: "It is not the nature of human beings to be cattle in glorified feedlots", he writes. Granting that "many people seem content to live entirely within the synthetic ecosystems", he follows through by remarking, "so are domestic animals content, even in the grotesquely abnormal habitats in which we rear them." I myself have never been fond of feedlots.