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The Folly of Big Agriculture: Why Nature Always Wins
Instead of urging farmers away from uniformity and toward greater diversity, the USDA is helping them do the same old wrong thing faster
In its short, shameless history, big agriculture has had only one big idea: uniformity. The obvious example is corn. The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts that American farmers — big farmers — will plant 94 million acres of corn this year. That’s the equivalent of planting corn on every inch of Montana. To do that you’d have to make sure that every inch of Montana fell within corn-growing parameters. That would mean leveling the high spots, irrigating the dry spots, draining the wet spots, fertilizing the infertile spots, and so on. Corn is usually grown where the terrain is less rigorous than it is in Montana. But even in Iowa that has meant leveling, irrigating, draining, fertilizing, and, of course, spraying.
US agricultural policy: A mistake as far as the eye can see.
You can argue whether uniformity is the result of efficiency or vice versa. But let’s suppose that efficiency is merely the economic expression of uniformity. The point is this: When you see a Midwestern cornfield, you know you’re looking at nature with one idea superimposed upon it. This is far less confusing, less tangled in variation than the nature you find even in the roadside ditches beside a cornfield or in a last scrap of native prairie growing in a graveyard or along an abandoned railroad right-of-way. Nature is puzzling. Corn is stupefying.
Humans have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the big idea behind nature is. It’s hard to tell, because we live at nature’s pace and within the orb of human abstraction. We barely notice the large-scale differences from year to year, much less the minute ones. But if we could speed up time a little and become a lot more perceptive, we would see that nature’s big idea is to try out life wherever and however it can be tried, which means everywhere and anyhow. The result — over time and at this instant — is diversity, complexity, particularity, and inventiveness to an extent our minds are almost unfitted to conceive.
"Nature... explores every possibility. It never lacks funding. It is never demoralized by failed experiments. It cannot be lobbied."
A reasonable agriculture would do its best to emulate nature. Rather than change the earth to suit a crop — which is what we do with corn and soybeans and a handful of other agricultural commodities — it would diversify its crops to suit the earth. This is not going to happen in big agriculture, because big agriculture is irrational. It’s where we expose — at unimaginable expense — our failure to grasp how nature works. It’s where uniformity is always defeated eventually by diversity and where big agriculture’s ideas of diversity are revealed to be as uniform as ever.
To a uniform crop like corn, farmers have been encouraged to apply a uniform herbicide to kill weeds. Modern corn is genetically engineered to not be killed by the herbicide in ubiquitous use. Mostly, that herbicide has been glyphosate, marketed under the Monsanto trade name Roundup. Farmers have sprayed and over-sprayed billions of gallons of Roundup thanks to an economic and moral premise: corn good, weeds bad. And yet you can’t help noticing that it has done nothing to stop the endless inventiveness of nature.
To broadleaf weeds and soil microorganisms, Roundup is not the apocalypse. It is simply a modest, temporal challenge, which is why, 15 years after genetically-engineered, Roundup-tolerant crops were widely introduced, it’s no longer working against spontaneous new generations of Roundup-tolerant weeds, especially in cotton fields. This is because research, in nature’s laboratory, never stops. It explores every possibility. It never lacks funding. It is never demoralized by failed experiments. It cannot be lobbied.
To fix the problem of glyphosate-tolerant weeds, Dow Chemical is hoping to introduce crop varieties that will withstand being sprayed with an herbicide called 2,4-D. When it was first released to farmers in 1946, 2,4-D was a breakthrough — a herbicide that killed only certain kinds of plants instead of killing them all. It’s less safe than glyphosate, especially because it’s sometimes contaminated with dioxin. But it’s not an indiscriminate, lethal killer, despite the fact that it was one of the chemicals in Agent Orange, the notorious defoliant used during the Vietnam War. (The dioxin in Agent Orange came from another component chemical called 2,4,5-T.)
"Instead of urging farmers away from uniformity and toward greater diversity, the USDA is helping them do the same old wrong thing faster."
Still, this is backward-engineering of a sort, like trying to breed birds that will tolerate DDT. And while the USDA hasn’t decided whether to approve Dow’s 2,4-D-tolerant soybeans yet, it has decided to speed up the process of reviewing genetically-engineered crops, mainly to help deal with the spread of so-called superweeds caused by the nearly universal application of glyphosate for the last decade and a half. According to Dow’s numbers, superweeds affected some 60 million acres of crops last year. If things go right, bureaucratically, that is just so much cash in Dow’s pocket.
"Farmers needs technology right now to help them with issues such as weed resistance,” a Dow official said last month. Translation? Farmers need technology right now to help them with issues created by right-now technology introduced 15 years ago. Instead of urging farmers away from uniformity and toward greater diversity, the USDA is helping them do the same old wrong thing faster. When an idea goes bad, the USDA seems to think, the way to fix it is to speed up the introduction of ideas that will go bad for exactly the same reason. And it’s always, somehow, the same bad idea: the uniform application of an anti-biological agent, whether it’s a pesticide in crops or an antibiotic on factory farms. The result is always the same. Nature finds a way around it, and quickly.
This is the irrationality of agriculture as it’s practiced in the United States and now all over the world. It has one big idea, and it will never give it up, because it has invested everything in that one big idea. Against uniformity and abstraction — embodied in millions of acres of genetically-modified crops — nature will always win. Whether it can ever win against the uniformity and abstraction embodied in the human brain is very much in doubt.
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44 Comments so far
Show AllNot to worry, any sustainable farming will be done in by the chemtrails.
Consequently, the only crops resistance to aluminum and barium will be the GMOs.
Look up and question what you see.
War on nature is not a folly. It's a crime, the most monumental crime, next to war on people. The difference affects our reaction. Why would someone wish to cast such an inaccuracy? Simple: In order to elicit a different reaction.
Nobody should expect a NY Times editor to honor the difference between folly and crime. That editor is a liberal. And liberals are dedicated to enslaving the people to elites, through the propaganda of confusion, hidden behind a vicious facade of pretend good. The classic trojan horse. Notice how we fail to use the classic lessons to recognize modern evil. This is because we are taught to not apply the wisdom of the ages. We are taught to fail. Taught by the liberals.
Notice how the liberals claim intellectual superiority, then fail to provide the people clarity in these fundamental areas. So it's clear that the liberals' agenda is one of evil. Utmost evil. Their theatrical "opponents", the konservsatives, are actually the liberals' bed-mates, and lunatic charges. The liberals deflect criticism onto them, encouraging them to run amok and wreak havok, perpetrating the more blatantly obvious crimes decreed by the master elites.
And by re-publishing such an article, Common Dreams is perpetrating its little war on people, by helping the elites to confuse the people. But this is ok. Because the people are reading through the lines of all media accounts and commentary. Bring on more liberal pundits and monsters, CD. We can use them an Exhibit A in our evidentiary war on evil, our war on the elite ego run amok. We know that caging the little bugger, the human ego, is fundamental to our emancipation.
The people don't need "allies" (such as this editor) in the tiers of the elite enterprise, the klass hierarchy. Been there, done that, fails miserably. The big news of the day is the people are rapidly coming to realize that we need not compromise our principles with some kind of fake solidarity with liberals, who perpetrate evil behind facades of good. We don't need it, because we are far stronger without the compromise, the confusion, the paralysis. FAR STRONGER when we embrace the holistic sphere of good, and leave the bad stuff behind.
The people do not need liberals to tell them about big-ag. Liberals have been building giant industrial monsters, to enslave or marginalize the people, for several hundred years now (particularly in the past two hundred). The people are learning to reject liberal confusion, and listen only to their hearts. The people know the path to their nirvana now. We are walking there, and there's nothing the elites can do.
Man v nature---there are those who'll claim authority by virtue of of their divine dominion.
There's the rub---self-righteous hubris. Within the Cosmic court there must be some recognition of conversion. In law, Conversion is the wrongful exercise of dominion over the property of another. What temporal creature may claim superiority over Nature, let alone that which is in, and of, Nature?
You've completely lost your mind. Not that it hasn't been evident for a long time. You totally ignore what this article says because of your inane obsession that if a "liberal" is saying it, it must be a tissue of lies meant to misguide and confuse "the people," whom you alone truly represent.
Klinkenborg is on the editorial board of the Times, which doesn't mean he directs its liberal policy. He lives in upstate NY on a farm, not in dreadfully liberal New York City. He's been a close student of NATURE for decades, not some fawning sychophant lurking around liberal elite institutions. But since he is in any way associated with the NY Times, he's as evil as Paul Ryan, Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney. And even worse, he's foolishly committed to keeping The People from walking like hypnotized robots to their inevitable Nirvana.
Do you have any idea how crazy you are? You literally sound like some would-be cult leader, believing yourself to be the Revelator in the New Church of The People, who are shaking off the yoke of the Liberal Elites, already making policies that will usher in the Kingdom of Heaven under Pope rtdrury. Your posts really do get flakier every day. Seek help.
Ditto. I suspect that rtdrury's "nirvana" is a psychomimetic drug and he's trippin' the light fandango.
Flakier despite insight.
Seek help.
Sad but true.
Not hard to claim intellectual superiority if it should come to that, ignoramus. Conservatives (if we have to abide by labels) are 'by nature' only capable of manipulating information to serve their own ends... hard to admire such misuse of intellect.
I actually think I know what you are railing about here, but you are duped into using the limited framework that is the American experience of history. This is indeed a VERY limited interpretation of trends, conservative or liberal, and a very faulty way to proceed with one's inquiry.
The only true confusion is that sown by double-think and topsy-turvy logic such as you serve up. While any ideology has major flaws, right or left, it can be shown on balance that hard right thinking is really behind most violent and disruptive trends that have effected us globally for the last 150 years. The Right apologists make the most noise about the villains standing opposite them, but studiously avoid talking about Franco, Pinochet, Suharto, Saudi princes, or any such *anomalies*. This is easy because they have near total control of all major information networks.
As far as big-ag, everything about it stems from a world view that is based in cherished beliefs that go contrary to nature. That is a distinct characteristic of conservatism; humanism runs the same risk, but doesn't draw as deeply from the same 'sacred' traditions. Perhaps you can hate hippies for their naivety, but one thing you can't accuse them of is proseletyzing nature. You don't have to market something that obviously speaks for itself.
At the end of it all, your opinion is just more sophistry and chicanery.
Agriculture has two purposes that serve the drives of two organisms.
1) Agriculture supplies surplus food to humans who practice Civilization, requiring greater and greater areas to be stolen from surrounding people, and either enslaving them or co-opting them. More people means more land, and more grains that are needed to be under production to support them. It's a vicious positive feedback loop.
2) Every 'Civilization' that practices agriculture uses it's local grass variant as a food stock. Wheat for the Middle East, oats for Europe, rice for Asia, maize for the Pre-Columbians of what is now Central and South America, etc. We are in a parasitic/symbiotic relationship that is allowing grass to become the dominant form of plant life on the planet, while we are dependent as a species on those same grasses for the bulk of our food supply to keep Civilization operating.
Agriculture and 'Civilization' both spread from the same parts of the world at the same time. Co-incidence? Not bloody likely.
You missed the most fundamental purpose of what passes for modern agriculture, or more accurately agribusiness: the bottom line.
And it's for this reason that the author's assertion that "agriculture isn't rational" is incorrect. From an economic perspective, it rationalizes everything for the sake of the maximization of profit. It doesn't really care if it grows fancy grass or pink slime, as long as there's a market for it.
I didn't miss it. I chose to explain the why's and where's of how agriculture came to be a driver of human development and environmental destruction.
And to your argument, 'The Market' is a penultimate expression of 'Civilization' isn't it?
I love the phrase that.."Nature will always win". It is so true, and its so true that man in his ego-maniacal state refuses to work with Nature in any way, or accept her power, thinking he is God-endowed with superiority over this world. That is just bullcrap-Nature will wipe her backside with us if we aren't careful. And oooops, looks like we haven't been too careful, have we?
There is no such thing as a man-vs-nature dichotomy. Man is part of nature. Everything, then, that man does is natural. This has nothing to do with whether it is desirable, attractive or conducive to one's sense of moral superiority.
As Reg Morisson has said:
"...the degree of disillusionment we feel in response to any particular human behaviour is the precise measure of our ignorance of its evolutionary and genetic origins."
Humans will continue to act according to their evolutionary imperatives. This means feeding 7 billion people by any means necessary.
"This means feeding 7 billion people by any means necessary."
That's gonna be a neat trick to pull off as the agricultural regions of the world dry up and blow away under the effects of Anthropocene Climate Change, as the 'valuable' fisheries of the oceans collapse due to overfishing and sexual imbalance, and hundreds of GMO crops fail in Corporate monocultures due to natural evolving diseases and species considered 'pests', as world-wide shipping is massively disrupted due to rising sea-levels closing ports and the massive Diesel-powered truck and train fleets rust because petrochemical based fuels become too expensive to burn in non-military applications.
But hey, living in the techno-fetishist cargo-cult will be great. They supply these really cool rose-colored sunglasses.
Here you are, typing away on your sophisticate computer on the internet, railing against "techno-fetishism."
The irony is supreme.
I am utterly aware of the irony, thank you.
But I also know how to garden.
What Klinkenborg is saying has nothing to do with his or anyone's "sense of moral superiority." It has to do with paying attention to nature, regardless of "man" being part of nature. If it's as you say, that there's nothing man can do that isn't natural, then you wouldn't have any trouble either with blowing up the world with nuclear weapons, or deliberately poisoning the earth's water supplies, or working feverishly to create a more toxic environment so virtually everyone would contract cancer as quickly as possible. All that would be part of the natural process, right? Since we can't do anything that ISN'T natural.
The precise measure of your ignorance is to be found in your cavalier disregard for sanity and reason. One wonders which agribusiness mega-behemoth you work or shill for. Monsanto? Cargill? ADM? Come on, out with it.
I've read some low-rung pabulum dreamt up by Koch Brothers' think tanks, but this may qualify as the greatest idiocy and deceit of them all:
"There is no such thing as a man-vs-nature dichotomy. Man is part of nature. Everything, then, that man does is natural."
By your way of thinking, slavery is natural; and the atom bomb is natural.
Sorry, pal! When man alienates himself from nature by twisting the Great Mother into unrecognizable form, like an angry adolescent boy who stabs his own mother, he ceases from being PART of nature.
Splitting the atom and forcing, at high tech gunpoint, DNA combinations never intended do not fit the standard definition of what's natural.
To the extent MAN distorts, destroys, and discombobulates ecosystems is the degree to which he loses his tie to nature, and all that is natural. The early Christian church elites understood that the best way to control the masses was to deny them access to their own instincts... and sexuality. By conflating these NATURAL expressions with sin, the seeds of disassociation from the natural world were planted.
From an ecological perspective, it's been largely downhill since.
Respect for nature and the wisdom built into all of Her designs is the first step in healing the dis-ease that causes the impulses that crash and burn the natural world... to the extent of our imminent demise, it would seem.
Bravissima, Siouxrose. Take a bow.
The downhill slide of humanity's separation from nature hardly started with the advent of the Christian religion, which is just one more manifestation of a much older alienation from the Garden that originated with sedentary agriculture - the first rape of mother earth.
Read carefully next time: Just because something is "natural" has nothing to do with whether it is "desirable or attractive." "Natural" versus "unnatural" is perfectly meaningless. That which is "unnatural" doesn't exist because it can't exist.
For example, resurrection from the dead, virgin birth, homeopathy are unnatural. They don't exist and they can't exist.
Just because atom bombs are natural (they exist) doesn't mean they are "good" or desirable. But now that they do exist you have to deal with them.
Humans have always managed nature. There is nothing "unnatural" about that.
And, frankly, your human self-hatred is rather repellent.
This can be added to the list of your inanities:
"And, frankly, your human self-hatred is rather repellent."
Usually you repugnant morons accuse me of being "merely" a man-hater. My self-esteem is fine, thank you. I challenge the patriarchal, MALE centered view of creation and all that came thereafter. That is hardly the same thing as "human hatred." Of course to an incurious automoton such as yourself, to question the patriarchal ethos that's been inculcated into Western culture for many generations is tantamount to entertaining a dangerous heresy.
Thank you, Galen.
To you, BENDZ, anything a MAN does = natural. But that ain't necessarily so. Sugar existing in nature is not the same thing as nutra-sweet. One is real, and the other engineered to SIMULATE the genuine article.
And to the poster equating agriculture with the beginnings of the Dominator Culture, your position is based on more false assumptions. Try reading, "The Chalice and the Blade." Not every society (think Matrilineal and/or "Partnership" oriented) forced the land into violent submission. A far more symbiotic relationship existed before the onset of the JUDEO-CHRISTIAN (man holds dominion OVER nature) ethos of destruction and despair.
Man IS supposed to be part of the natural environment, but modern man operating from a western, capitalist, globalized, Neo-Liberal [ala laisse' faire] mindset & paradigm has become antithetical to nature! Some how this mindset has convinced those under the influence of the westernized power-elites that they can continuously assault & defile nature w out blow-back effects to themselves- as well as everyone else! This is not just folly but INSANITY masquerading as 'Innovative modernized sound' BIZ practice!
Big Agra use of petro chem- fertilizers / herbicides / insecticides = Insanity! And GMO mono-cropping = Insanity! And CAFO Animal factory farms = Insanity! - The Nuke PowerIindustry's Fukushima, Chernobyl, 3Mile Island disasters = Insanity. Gulf's Deep-sea Oil drilling disaster = Insanity!
PS: Monsanto was a chemical corp which brought us such wonderful products as the notoriously toxic Agent Orange, PCBs & DDT! And now it's trying to dominate our crop-seed & food supply. Again- INSANITY!
Good argument, Nixakliel. I was pretty much saying the same thing, but I think you crystallized the point very aptly.
These apologists for for the 'modern' westernized technocratic so-called 'innovative' [for Corps not really so much for people] agra-biz, [ & nuke power industry, etc], love making the specious argument that man has always tried to control nature since the advent of civilization based on agriculture. And That So-called 'modernized' [= westernized] corporate technocratic innovations that are based on so-called 'free'-market capitalism [= for profit$ motives rather altruistic motives] has simply made this alleged 'evolutionary' process far more efficient. BUT They ignore the fact that beginning w the so-called industrial revolution- BUT most especially in the post WWII era- the agra-biz has taken a quantum leap away from both nature & more natural [yet effective] methodologies- during the so-called {un}Green- Revolution! Never before in history had agriculture been dominated [controlled] by heavy mechanization, petro-chem fertilizers-herbicides-insecticides, mono-cropping & now CAFO animal factory farms & GMO food crops. Which is leading to the extinction of small family farms as BIG Agra-BIZ is taking over!
The over-reliance of heavy machinery was based on cheap oil & has lead to a strong tendency toward mono-cropping, [big machines can't distinguish between rows of corn vs wheat vs soy vs cabbage vs tomatoes vs melons vs berries, etc in close proximity to each other] w has lead to increasing reliance on petro-chem fertilizers-herbicides-insecticides which wear out the soil, poison & throw off the natural balance of the environment & produce increasingly resistant pests & blight. So why did the so-called 'innovation' of petro-chem fertilizer-herbicides-insecticides grow in leaps & bounds post WWII??? Because petro Chemical corps which were previously munitions & bomb makers got into the Agra-biz big-time post WWII! Because they had large stock piles of bomb-making chemicals which they wanted to some-how market rather than discard- thus they came up w these so-called petro-chem 'innovations' [NOTE: That's why Tim McViegh could literally blow a large 9 story concrete steel reinforced bldg in half w just 'fertilizer mixed w diesel fuel - he in effect reversed the process!]!
This paradigm set the stage for GMO crops- which is an overt attempt of Agra-biz Monsanto types to Patently Own our food crops & seeds! YET No-one knows what will be the long-term ill effects of releasing GMO's into the eco-sphere, let alone forcing people & animals to eat it [I say force because Agra-biz & the FAO refuses to label the stuff & let the people make their choice.]!
CAFO animal factory farms have cruelly [but efficiently] de-naturized animals for the sake of {in}Human over-consumption. This has been driven by the unhealthy meat centered SAD diet in which Americans- due to the post WWII 'innovation' of the fast-food industry [IE: McDonalds, Burger-King, Kentucky Fried, Taco-Bell & Pizza-Hut, et] eat 4 - 8Xs as much meat [& fat & sugar & salt] as did their parents & grandparents, etc. The wonderful effects of this innovation can be seen by the fact that Americans are now the fattest people in the World w at-least 1/2 of them being over-weight or obese! And by the dead zone around the mouth of the Mississippi, due to so much toxic waste & spilling into it from CAFO's & mono-cropping industrialized farms! And by all of the deadly out-breaks of Salmonella, E-Coli, swine-flu, bird-flu, etc.
And needless to say the 'innovation' of the nuke power industry is a spin off of the 'wonderful' innovation of the development of nuclear weapons. Throw in the 'innovation' of Deep-sea oil drilling leading to BP's Gulf oil disaster & also Fukushima- With all of these ill effects of these modern so-called 'innovations'- it seems God & Mother Nature are trying to tell us something that folks can't seem to get into their so-called 'modernized' [= westernized] thick-heads! That We need to STOP & Walk-back from the Brink- NOT Rush Headlong into the ABYSS in the name of so-called 'modernized' techno 'innovation'!
What is being explained here through the actions of the USDA is called by Sustainable Ag Consultants as "Moron" a little is good more is better.
When applied to fertilizer applications and soils amendments it creates the very inbalances that weeds are trying to correct. Jigging around a resistance problem for the weeds is easy. If we would understand what they are trying to tell us we would balance the soil and they would disapear or significantly be reduced in numbers.
The only weed that does not recess is lambsquarters and that is an indication of two much nutrients, which can easily be handled with cover crops over winter between your main crops which turn excess nutrients into plant food and you get better effeciency of the fertilizer you used.
Of course no one makes money on this regime, except the farmer, and anyone down stream.
Lambs-quarter is delicious, so I'm told.
So are lamb chops.
Lamb's wool leaves the animal alive, doesn't it. What's your point?
Uniformity has nothing to do with feeding a population. That is not what the modern agribusiness is about. It is about maximizing PROFIT and doing so on the back of nature itself.
It is DESTRUCTIVE.
This is not about feeding 7 billion humans. it has been demonstrated time and time again that one can raise more calories off a given piece of land using nature as a model then by planting it all in corn.
These other methods produce more FOOD but less PROFITS and that is why they are not followed.
I quite agree that profit is the raison d'etre of agribusiness.
But, as with almost all modern economic life, it is a gross distortion of, but not different in kind from, the earliest forms of human agriculture.
As hunter-gatherers, we had no choice but to respect the natural world which freely gave us gifts of food, fiber and mineral, and to care for it lest we rob it of its gifting ability. In fact, it was not even possible to think of ourselves abstracted from nature's web.
But, as soon as we learned how to tear up the earth to force it to give us food, we found that we could grow more than we could consume. This was not only the beginning and the template for all extractive and exploitive economic activity, but the birth of "profit" or surplus.
It also required that we fence off "wild" nature and enclose ourselves behind the wall of domesticity, thereby not so much isolating nature as imprisoning ourselves within a cage of our own minds.
The only thing that's really changed in the last 10,000 years is that we've learned how to extract surplus far more effectively (if not efficiently) and infinitely more aggressively.
Interesting nature vs. culture debate. It is real. It is the underlying truth in the Myth of the Aesir vs Vanir War, which I intuit to mean the Gods of Culture (Aesir) vs the Gods of Nature (Vanir). They signed a truce and became allies. Humanity has some kind of role to play as partners-in-management of Mother's Nature (culture applied to nature). That role is NOT to seperate ourselves from nature (civilisation depraved & twisted), NOR to seperate ourselves from culture (naked apes in nature). This much I get. I'm awaiting further understanding.
Once again I challenge this distorted view of human antiquity:
"But, as soon as we learned how to tear up the earth to force it to give us food, we found that we could grow more than we could consume."
Who IS this ubiquitous "WE"?
A statement like that is essentially a hybrid between Ayn Rand and a distortion of Charles Darwin's theories (Survival of the Fittest/natural competition). What it does is JUSTIFY a theme of domination, as if it's always been thus and so, and therefore reflects a symptom of some purportedly unchanging "Human Naure."
I've recommended that you read works by Feminist authors, works that use vast supplies of evidence & historical data, to refute these macho claims.
Here's another equally UNFOUNDED allegation that supports the ways of violence, aggression, and patriarchy as if there were no historical models of anything else, anything in the way of more evolved earlier societies:
"The only thing that's really changed in the last 10,000 years is that we've learned how to extract surplus far more effectively (if not efficiently) and infinitely more aggressively."
You're full of it. The WE you speak of reflects the narrow legacy of warrior clans. It does not not speak for all humanity. The only reason this ilk held onto dominance was due to its singular investment in one thing above all others: the development of efficient weaponry. On moral and spiritual scales, it is RETARDED; and its lack of respect for the Earth Mother (along with most sentient living beings) has taken the world to the edge of both sanity and survival.
You're granting witness to this effete horrific worldview is a testament to both your lack of scholarship and an exaggerated need to identify with your evidently wounded sense of maleness (or inner power).
I like what he has to say and, further, I live it to the best of my ability. I live surrounded by trees and ponds, frogs and minnows, lichen and toads, bees and mosquitoes, bats and bears. It is remote and somewhat inconvenient at times, yet I would not trade it for any city in the world. In an odd way, it is comforting to think that nature's experimentation will continue long after our societies have crumbled to dust because I find more beauty wandering through my property than I have ever found in any city.
But by calling your natural paradise "my property", you are feeding the alienation paradigm. We can no more own land than we can own the sky or the sea. There is nothing "proper" about "property".
This agricultural madness is mimicked by the same approach to medicine. Because we perceive germs as "the enemy", we invent more clever ways to selectively kill or weaken them. But they, being far more clever than we, continue to outsmart our best efforts.
__________________________________________________________________
Antibiotic Resistance Could Bring 'End of Modern Medicine'
By Katie Moisse | ABC News | 3/16/2012
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/03/16/antibiotic-resistance-could-bring-end-of-modern-medicine/
As bacteria evolve to evade antibiotics, common infections could become deadly, according to Dr. Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization.
Speaking at a conference in Copenhagen, Chan said antibiotic resistance could bring about "the end of modern medicine as we know it."
"We are losing our first-line antimicrobials," she said Wednesday in her keynote address at the conference on combating antimicrobial resistance. "Replacement treatments are more costly, more toxic, need much longer durations of treatment, and may require treatment in intensive care units."
Chan said hospitals have become "hotbeds for highly-resistant pathogens" like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), "increasing the risk that hospitalization kills instead of cures."
_________________________________________________________________
Of course, a 2003 meta-study already established that "A definitive review and close reading of medical peer-review journals, and government health statistics shows that American medicine frequently causes more harm than good…It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States."
http://www.webdc.com/pdfs/deathbymedicine.pdf
Monsanto, Dow, and ADM, may well do what it can to irradicate life on the planet, for whatever reason, but we all know that nature has been here for hundreds of thousands of years. It can not be irradicated, though it can have disappearances. Mankind on the other hand doesn't have so much to fall back on. We are sort of the most recent specie and the most fragile. Those who claim to have our health at interest are lying sacks of crap.
"nature has been here for hundreds of thousands of years"
Well, that's a bit more accurate than the Biblical version, but life has been on this planet for 3.5 billion years - about 350,000 times the lifespan of human civilization.
Neat little fact backed up by evidence: Some of the earliest examples of multi-cellular life have been found in what is now Newfoundland, Canada. The fossil evidence shows trails of some of the earliest animals, some 565 million years old.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100203085914.htm
It's eradicated... not irradicated. Your mistake resembles irradiated... i.e. exposed to radiation damage.
The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka
www.onestrawrevolution.net/
Masanobu Fukuoka Makes Seed Balls - YouTube
www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4-bwW8PWI0
The mechanism whereby nature wins is genetic mutation. Mutants occur at random, and sooner or later a new mutant will confer resistance to whatever Monsanto devises.The data now show that Roundup is not cost-effective and is no longer effective for a corn root disease.The sooner farmers go organic and stop rewarding the corporate denizens of Monsanto and their stockholders, the richer the farmers will be and the healthier we as a society will be.
This man is an excellent writer, a breath of fresh air amongst many stagnant voices here on CD and other sites. He turns some very nice phrases that ring true. (Reminds me of that line from "Jurassic Park": "Nature finds a way" ) Our whole American civilization is built on a lie, fueled by impossible dreams. Time to gather a vision of what a sustainable and humane culture looks like. I have seen the future. It looks nothing like the America of today, but more like rural Russia of the 40's-60's and even today in certain remote parts. Villages comprised of small, 3/4 acre plots, enough to grow all the food a family of six could eat, and more. Everyone helping each other and trading by barter for the things they need. A simple, quiet and peaceful lifestyle. Time to grow your own food, America, and take from Big Ag all their power. Get connected with the Earth and the sacred lifeforce, as only a farmer can. An organic farmer. So much to learn; so little time!
bingo
"To broadleaf weeds and soil microorganisms, Roundup is not the apocalypse."
The author doesn't understand that weeds loves sterile, crappy soil. And that for soil microorganisms, it most certainly IS the apocalypse.
Read Organic Manifesto by Maria Rodale. Or read Rodales' Book on Composting. There you will learn that the soil is living organism, and that soil organisms do the actual feeding of plant roots, that beneficial bacteria in the soil facilitates the communication needed to feed that plants.
So Roundup is the apocalypse. And soil organisms are a higher life form that humans: we don't exist without them.
Instead of `nature`, use the word `soil` instead! We have a choice to make: soil or oil. So far, the choice has been made for us in favor of oil. All fertilizers and -cides are petroleum based. We're killing the soil with oil.