It's been my experience that a lot of seeming mysteries are solved only by the person with the mystery talking to the right person. And the right person could be anyone with an observation.

It happens in Engineering all the time too, where you talk to the one user in ten-thousand who happens to have a keen eye for the exact sequence of events on the display, and their careful recitation of the sequence of frames on the display is enough for you to piece together the system state at the time of a failure.

It's rare that engineers talk to users, and it's probably equally rare for environmentalists to talk to individual farmers looking for information.

It's not even "one in ten thousand", I think more often it's just that the people who don't know assume that no one else knows either and don't bother properly asking around.

Or the people that know think the reason is obvious and will probably get fixed soon so don't brother reporting the issue and what they believe is causing it

Or every time we ask users we get "just fix it" and "I click the thing and it breaks" style answers.

That’s exactly right. There are so, so many events in the world never captured in a durable format that only a few people know, and if you don’t ask them in time, that knowledge is simply gone.

This is a microcosm of why the information age has been one crazy miracle after another.

This is a microcosm yes, but I think a darker one of how the complexity of society has increased without a corresponding increase in coordination to manage it.

You can think of there being interaction and coordination graphs with the same nodes. Both are getting bigger (more nodes) and denser (more edges). But the interaction one is getting denser faster.

tl:dr 50/100 years ago it would have been harder to talk to the fisherman, but also way less trash in the ocean to ask about.

Has the guy been sitting on this information without alerting like any environmental agencies or anyone of the sort?

As far as I know, farmers aren't under some duty to report concerning phone mysteries or whatever. Also, a lot of "commoners" aren't exactly deemed credible and may also not know who on earth they should report anything to.

Until this became a big campaign with a point of contact and so forth, he probably had no hope of getting any real action, even if he had put it all together mentally and tried to harangue authorities into checking out his theory.

if he saw this as a young man/child, chances are it was cool and interesting, but informing law enforcement/environmental agencies was not top of mind.. its only when you cross paths with some other bit of information, your memory triggers, and now as an adult, you might think to speak up.