"You're wrong," cried Roger Furse, my grade-school classmate. He shook his spelling test.
"What's wrong?" Our teacher plucked his paper and read it. "No, Roger, you're wrong. That's not how you spell 'vegetable.' It has two 'e's,' not just one."
When Roger insisted he was right, the teacher went to the board, picked a piece of chalk from the tray, and wrote in large letters: vegetable. "That's how you spell vegetable, Roger."
"No you don't!" Roger pounded his desk. "I know how to spell vegetable and it's v-e-g-t-a-b-l-e. Just the way it sounds. Veg - table."
The two argued for a few more rounds, but Roger refused to back down.
"Here." The teacher picked up a dictionary. "Look it up. The dictionary knows how to spell words correctly."
Roger looked, but when he found the word, he declared, "The dictionary's wrong."
The dictionary wrong? I could scarcely believe my ears. But Roger never backed down. He left grade school believing, against knowledge-based evidence, that vegetable is spelled the way it sounds to him.
Roger's method of "reasoning" reminds me of the "reasoning" used by people who don't believe in climate change. So the temperature at the North Pole is—again—fifty degrees warmer than normal, approaching the melting point. "So what!" the disbelievers cry. "That doesn't mean it's caused by humans."
I prefer the logic of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer known for images of industrial projects and their environmental effects. He says,
"What took out the dinosaurs was a meteor impact. We, the human species, are now that impact. Humans are shifting the balance of the planet, and the choice rests within us to destroy it all, or not. It's a huge, complex thing to solve. We are a predator species run amok."
This JoLt is in memory of Jack Loscutoff
