The 11th Hour, Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me -- God's Superior Design

The 11th hour is a documentary narrated and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio about modern industrialization's environment abuses. Fast Food Nation is a documentary-esque story about the fast food industry and its abuse of both human and animal life. Super Size Me is the famous documentary exposing the unhealthy effects of eating too much fast food (McDonald's in particular).

According to these movies, we should to imitate the intelligent design we see nature in our eating, manufacturing and energy consumption.

One of 11th Hour's special features, "Nature's Operating Instructions," includes an interview with Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry. She points out a few ways that we should mimic the ingenuity we see in nature. Mollusks (clams and muscles), for example, use a combination of sea water and basic proteins to make an extremely hard inner shell, twice as tough as high-tech manmade ceramics. She mentions photosysthesis as well, which is the phenomenon by which plants turn sunlight into food. Spiders produce web from an organic liquid that, on a larger scale, would be much stronger than steel. While it is true that we humans have advanced our technologies significantly, this has almost always been at the expense of the environment. While natural technologies complement their surrounding ecosystems, our technologies tend to pollute and destroy the surrounding ecosystems. In particular, we depend on oil and coal to fuel our technological endeavors.

Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me expose how industrialized food production destroys both human and animal life. Fast food chains have developed ultra-efficient ways of producing meat that throw out most if not all of God's natural design. Animals are stacked on top of each other in meat factories. They are given heavy doses of antibiotics to stay alive as well as steriods so they grow "meatier." Such bio-engineering is not only inhumane, it is causing all kinds of health problems for those who eat fast food on a regular basis. These and a variety of other factors should point us toward the same conclusion: If we stay consistent with God's natural design, both we as well as our surrounding ecosystems will enjoy the highest possible quality of life.

The general consensus is: We should re-evaluate our ideas of "advancement" by taking our cues from the ingenuity that drives natural creation.

1 comment:

mikeo75 said...

I think it's an interesting point how much nature has to tell us about these things.

I did really enjoy Super Size Me, but haven't seen the other two yet.