Thursday, May 26, 2011

The Earth Path: Chapter 2 - Seeds and Weapons

So I read chapter 2 and it took me a little bit longer to get through just because of all the stuff going on in my life - looking for a job, taking care of the dog, finding time to hang out with my boyfriend and keep my parents happy with housework and such. But I read it and then barreled on to the third chapter. So I'm slowing myself down and getting the chapter 2 review done before I forget about what it was all about.

The chapter starts off with a story about how in 2003, Starhawk and friends were protesting the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and the USDA's plans to promote biotech and industrial agriculture to be used in the third world and developing countries, when they got a call that the cops had swarmed their headquarters and were trying to find weapons and such, assuming that they were hostile protesters. When they got there the cops were circling their parking lot and trying to confiscate their seedballs (clay balls that contained organic fertilizer and seeds from a plethora of bio-diverse plants that would grow well together in whatever area the balls landed), thinking that they were weapons. They tried to explain about how biodiversity was needed in order for a stable ecosystem to occur, and how they were NOT weapons, but merely a unique way to seed and populate abandoned lots or hard to cultivate areas of the city. In the end the police couldn't see them as anything other than weapons because their frame of reference disallowed free thought and they couldn't see outside that box. It then goes on to discuss frameworks that allow our minds to comprehend the world, and how they are different depending on the person, their life experiences, as well as their choices.

The main thing that I got out of this chapter (aside from a want to make seedballs and go lob them over fences of abandoned lots in Windsor) was the issue of biotechnology and genetic manipulation of agriculture. You are what you eat, and if you eat healthy, organic food, grown as nature intended it, then you will be healthy, full of energy and hopefully digesting and living as nature intended. However, just as you never know what will happen when you press the red button on a space ship, any number of possibilities extend from one simple tweak to a genetic code of a plant. Scientific thought has proceeded passed simple cause and effect centuries ago, so it makes no sense, rationally, why scientists in agriculture today are thinking that putting the DNA of a salmon into that of a tomato will ONLY cause the tomato to withstand colder temperatures. It can cause any number of issues, which we wont know until we know them. It's not the known outcomes we have to worry about, but the unknowns and the things we don't even know that we don't know. Which is why I've been crazily against genetically modified foods since I first heard about them!

I don't know if any of you who will read this have ever read any books by Kim Harrison, let alone the Rachel Morrigan series, but it's a fiction series where Kim Harrison writes from a present day perspective, but she's altered the course of events in history so that present day is nothing like what we know it to be today. You see, in the universe of these books, back in the 1940s while striving for biochemical weapons to use during the World Wars, the government was also fiddling with the DNA of tomatoes to try and make the best, most longlasting and freshest tasting tomato just down the laboratory hallway. So when one lab tech walked past the tomato lab while still having the coat on from the biochemical weapons lab, the weapons of mass destruction DNA just happened to float into the lab where the tomato DNA lay about germinating, and popped itself into one of the missing links of the tomato DNA that the scientists had changed. No one noticed this, and they approved, grew and shipped these tomatoes all over the world. So naturally, 2/3 of the world's population died horribly, and then they noticed that of those leftover people, there were witches, vampires, werewolves and elves just hanging out in what used to be the shadows of human civilization. Oops. Anyways the thing to get out of this was that you shouldn't fuck with food.

But that's exactly what we're doing today. We're genetically modifying our plants so that we can get the highest yield, the longest life, the freshest taste even weeks after being picked, and can withstand bugs and chemicals and such. While this is all happening, they are firstly killing the soil bacteria which are needed for a healthy crop, so they have to replace it with chemical fertilizer; secondly, they're getting rid of the natural biodiversity that allows for a balance in the ecosystem of our land - hundreds of different species of corn and wheat and other plants existed all in the same place so if a disease attacked one species, there were still hundreds left to survive and produce food - now they're only having one species of corn, so if a disease comes along, the whole crop could be destroyed, which would leave the soil open to the elements with would (thirdly) cause the soil to erode and all those chemicals and other toxins they put into it, would run off into the rivers (fourthly) polluting our water supply and losing topsoil which takes centuries to be produced naturally. And after all of that, you still don't even know what the genetically modified foods will do to us!

The other thing that this chapter talks about is that we have gotten so much into the world view of humans>nature, to the point where we only see nature as a resource to be used and thrown away, only good to us when we can get a profit from it. What we need to get back to is the natural world view, or the animate worldview where everything in the world has consciousness, where all plants and animals, insects and bugs, water, earth, air, fire... everything in the natural world is part of an interconnected web of consciousness that is a part of us as we are of it. Think of it like a spiderweb, if you cut one string in it, that whole half of the web collapses. It's much like the human body in that if one cell dysfunctions, it throws off the whole tissue, which can shut down the whole organ system which can kill the whole person. We have gotten so disconnected from nature that we forget that we are a part of it! So the whole point of this chapter is that we need to change the way we think and view the world, or we will cause the destruction and death of all that are a part of it - which includes us humans too.

No comments:

Post a Comment