As of this posting, the global human population is approaching 8.25 billion people. One single thing that unites everyone of us is the need for sustenance – food – and by that, I mean healthy, nutritious food. The food produced through our global corporate (Big Ag) system is for the main part ‘corrupted’ food – that is, it is artificially nurtured with manufactured chemicals, that disrupt ecological systems. To heal ourselves and the planet we must heal the ecosystems. It’s not about food per se, but about growing food in a way that allows the natural systems to sustainably regenerate themselves, thus allowing humanity to heal and thrive in a way that benefits the whole biosphere.
This is the message by many of us advocating for a true sustainable future. As Jane Goodall says: “We have become caught up in a materialistic and greedy world, so many of us. This has dire consequences for the future. It seems that there has been some disconnect between the clever mind and the human heart, love and compassion. And instead of making a major decision based on, ‘How will this affect generations ahead? How will this affect the world in the future when we’re not here?’ The criteria today are, ‘How will this decision affect me now, me and my family now? How will it affect the next shareholders meeting? How will it affect my next political campaign?’”
Being clever and profitable is the path that currently drives this dystopian world, when what we need is the intelligent and wise path for a healthy sustainable world. I believe we are on the cusp of this transformation. But, as Goodall says, as a global population we are too fixated on the immediate and disregard the future, assuming that somehow it will fix itself. One aspect of indigenous thinking, that was even practiced by many ‘civilized’ cultures until the Middle Ages, was the now popularized idea of ‘Seventh Generational Thinking.’ Those that acted on behalf of future generations survived, those that could not think beyond the immediate failed.
Jared Diamond’s (Collapse) example of the Nordic colonization of Greenland shows this well. In Greenland, the Nordics failed to adapt to changing conditions and died, unlike their indigenous Inuit neighbors that thrived. While we don’t know exactly what the Nordics were thinking, we know from organic remains of the colonies, and stories from the Inuit’s, the paths that both cultures on the shores of western Greenland followed in thriving or dying in that time of climatic change that disrupted their habitats.
We have global climatic changes, and yet we still fail to effectively adapt, and to compound it all think only of the immediate financial ‘now’ with little real thought to how future generations might have to deal with our global lack of wisdom to ecological disruptions. We have lots of wonderful solutions already, but persist in letting unethical and short-sighted economically focused hierarchical systems make our decisions for us, even letting them destroy or hide the solutions from us. As I have endlessly said (annoyingly so, I’m sure) we need to localize our thinking and do it for ourselves. I saw a wonderful metaphor that emphasizes how we will be sovereign individuals but living in coherent communities – flocking starlings. We are not starlings, but the idea that in one of their flocks, all the birds fly in unison yet retain their own unique space without colliding – at least no one has ever recorded a stunned starling below a flock. A “Three Musketeers’ kind of living – ‘All for one and one for all.’ Now include seventh generation thinking in that and we have a basic thriving community model.
Organic Farmers and Gardeners all recognize good, healthy soil. I’m sure that Big Ag farmers do as well, but they are caught up in the inorganic chemical and economic treadmill that in 1973, the US Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz encouraged – “Get Big or Get Out.” This was the slogan for the chemical industry to build its agricultural empire while creating ecological mayhem. You can grow crops in vermiculite if you give them enough balanced ratio of nitrogen, phosphorus, and a little sulfur, and then enough pesticides to kill off the all the pesky weeds and insects.
For a short while I was a plant biochemist, and I used to start seedings in trays of vermiculite. They grew from their seeds at which point I harvested the shoots for biochemical experiments. The nutrients in the seed provided the nutrient for the plant to sprout, but once spouted, the shoots would soon die if extra nutrient was not applied. That’s modern Big Ag farming. The soil is as devoid of healthy nutrient as is vermiculite. Decades of pouring poisons onto the fields have killed off all the organic life that makes soil naturally viable and full of nutrients that get incorporated into our food. It’s one of the reasons that Big Ag food and food processing causes ‘malnutrition’ even in people that are obese and eat thousands of calories a day. They’re only getting low quality food, not nutritious food with its natural abundance of micronutrients. Yes, you can take nutritional supplements, but that’s guesswork in replacing what is missing from non-organically grown food in life-depleted dirt.
Healthy soil contains Billions of organisms per Table spoon, from the microscopic bacteria, fungi, protozoa to the larger nematodes, and the even larger insects. All serve vital functions in soil ecosystems from decomposition of organic matter, nutrient recycling, plant disease suppression, carbon sequestration, nitrogen fixation, mineral breakdown, and as co-symbionts in a complex food web that all creates resilient system from all manner of longer climatic and shorter-term yearly weather variations. But even a resilient soil cannot tolerate continual and systemic poisoning – remember pesticides are poisons we apply to our food! When you mess too much with the soil instead of working with it you get negative consequences of interconnected ecosystem failures. The trouble is that most people do not realize what is happening because they cannot see it and are unaware of how the systems are being systematically destroyed for economic efficiency.
The Great American Dust Bowl of the 1930s started as a recurring – and common – ten-year drought. What made this one so dramatically different was the systematic demolition of enormous areas of the American Great Plains, such that when the drought next occurred, the prairie soils were prone to drying out (instead of holding the moisture as before) perpetuating the extermination of most of the top soil organisms. It is estimated that billions of tons of top-soil were blown away by the wind or washed away by the rains after that decade of drought. And to add injury to insult, after WWII, we added increasing amounts of pesticide poisons to ensure the soil would never recover with Big Ag industrial farming techniques.
I have been quite blunt to this point – we need soil, not because it is pretty, but because it is crucial for all larger forms of life (like us) and the continuation of functional ecosystems globally. It is literally easier and healthier to grow food in soil, even if it can be grown in good artificial conditions such as in aqua-culture, hydroponics, and supplemented soils in vertical gardens.
In the Amazonian Rain-Forest, the soils ae typically poor because the nutrient uptake by the dense canopy growth barely allows nutrients to remain in the soil. That’s why farming or ranching in the Amazonian cleared areas has only a 3-5 year-life before the soils are depleted (no nutrient cycling). The extensive clearing of the Amazonian Rain Forests, however, has revealed that the Amazon, rather than being a huge pristine ecosystem, does in fact contain large groupings of human developed areas within the Amazon Basin. Indigenous inhabitants had built sizable cities of over 20,000 people with sustainable agricultural systems to continually support them. What scientists have found is that where humans had their cities, the ground was cultivated with a kind of Biochar called Terre Preta, that even today centuries after the inhabitants died off (probably from conquistador introduced infections), the soil is still vibrantly alive and rich in nutrients.
To Be Continued ………….
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