Breathing

Man has travelled to outer Space

and plumbed the deep blue sea,

but I am happiest here on land,

breathing strong and full and free.

Challenging The Ecomodernist Dystopia

From Chapter IX of Colin Todhunter's profound exploration of Sickening Profits, The Global Food System's Poisoned Food & Toxic Wealth:

"A cartel of seed, chemical and food manufacturing and processing companies with total control over the food production and supply chain in India and throughout the globe.

And it will be total. As previously mentioned, big global biotech corporations like Bayer and Corteva are extensively patenting plants. Such patents on plants would restrict farmers’ access to seeds and impede breeders from developing new plants as both would have to ask for consent and pay fees to the biotech companies.

This is ‘ecomodernism’ in action. It goes hand-in-hand with elite interests who will rake in enormous profit as they seek to control every aspect of food, farming and, indeed, life.

In India, we see various tactics at work to bring this about — the deliberate strategy to make smallholder farming financially nonviable, attempts to dismantle public distribution systems and minimum support prices, the relentless drive to get GM food crops cultivated, the data-gathering Agristack initiative overseen by Microsoft and the increasing capture of the retail sector by Walmart, Amazon, Facebook and Google (all described in the 2022 e-book Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order).

The Indian government is trying to establish a system of ‘conclusive titling’ of all land in the country, so that ownership can be identified and land can then be bought or taken away. As farmers lose access to land or can be identified as legal owners, predatory institutional investors and large agribusinesses will buy up and amalgamate holdings, facilitating the further roll out of industrial agriculture.

In this brave new world, notions of food sovereignty and seed sovereignty have no place. A case of you will own nothing, be happy and eat a diet of genetically and biochemically engineered ‘food’ — junk food to complement existing junk food that claims hundreds of thousands of lives across the globe annually.

‘Food’ courtesy of giant ‘fermentation’ vats and farms manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be engineered, processed and constituted into something edible. An AI-driven, corporate-controlled, ‘solyent green’ dystopia where the marketplace has been eradicated and a handful of companies and e-commerce platforms control the global economy.

However, none of this is a given. The farmers’ protest in India led to the repeal of corporate-backed legislation that would have accelerated the trends described above, and, as Vandana Shiva notes, more than 150 community seed banks have been established in the country — local seeds, adapted to local cultures which provide better nutrition and are more resilient to climate change.

Shiva says:

“At the Navdanya Farm and Earth University, we have trained more than one million farmers who now practice organic agriculture based on biodiversity and without the use of synthetic chemicals. The shift from globalisation driven by multinational corporations to a progressive localisation of our economies has become an ecological and social imperative, essential for food sovereignty.”

She concludes:

“Food sovereignty means feeding ourselves real, genuine, biodiverse food and freeing ourselves from the false promises of artificial food.”

Of course, the agri biotech sector are dismissive of the ability of organic agriculture to feed the world and of a world described by Shiva, which rejects corporate dominance and new forms of imperialism.

Their anti-organic, pro-synthetic food stance should be seen for what it is — fearmongering (the world will starve without GM agriculture), pro-corporate ideology and an adherence to centralised power, which flies in the face of firm evidence that indicates organic supported by an appropriate policy framework is more than capable of addressing the challenges ahead."

Poppies, White As The Driven Snow

Letter to the Children of Gaza

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/letter-to-the-children-of-gaza

"Dear child. 

It is past midnight. I am flying at hundreds of miles an hour in the darkness, thousands of feet over the Atlantic Ocean. I am traveling to Egypt. I will go to the border of Gaza at Rafah. I go because of you....

We have failed you. This is the awful guilt we carry. We tried. But we did not try hard enough. We will go to Rafah.  Many of us. Reporters. We will stand outside the border with Gaza in protest. We will write and film. This is what we do. It is not much. But it is something. We will tell your story again. 

Maybe it will be enough to earn the right to ask for your forgiveness."

Heading Towards Existential Chaos

Fishers and farmers around the world will attest to the fact that weather patterns are topsy-turvy. Unpredictable and shifted seasons, together with extreme, calamitous storms, floods, droughts, crop die-offs and failures have upset their traditional way of farming and harvesting food. Glaciers and ice-sheet melt have accelerated and industrial deforestation and soil degradation continues apace.

It seems that weather events - wildfires, floods, droughts, hurricanes, heat waves and domes - are becoming more extreme and more frequent. Is this all in our imagination? Is it all planned and engineered? What else are we to make of weather warfare via geo-engineering; poisoned skies; dimming of the sun; solar radiation management; heavy metals, nano-particles, polymers, graphene, aluminum spraying; atmospheric high pressure heat domes; named heat waves; static energy build-up; dry lightning; forest fires used as a military weapon?

Grand technological plans to control our climate are now acknowledged by governments to be afoot and have been for a decade and a half. Like plans to control pandemics, public health, the industrial food system, Big Agriculture, and introduce Central Banking Digital Currency, they have been in development - through such nefarious over-reaching organizations as the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Gates Foundation, and implemented by trade blocs and nations unified by the United Nations. When you have gained control of public health, food, farming, banking, commerce, government, the climate, and personal freedoms, you have laid the groundwork for authoritarian control of the entire populace. For what purpose? So that a small coterie of the super-empowered in their pampered enclaves can live out fantasies by suppressing and controlling a mass of humanity that has been rendered dispensable?To cover their asses as their debt-ballooning fiscal policies create runaway inflation and soaring economic hardship for the masses? Such short-term, egotistical thinking cannot be sustained and must, like everything else, collapse under its own dead weight.

Why the single-minded obsession with carbon and decarbonization? This is misguided and delusional and has only come to bear because of its capacity to be monetized. Carbon credits, carbon taxes, carbon sequestration. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Blackrock, Pfizer, Moderna and more are on a roll.

Much more vital are efforts to conserve water, nature, soils, trees, wetlands, grasslands, and biodiversity; regenerate land, forests, rivers, lakes and oceans; and detoxify polluted air, water, soils, bodies, minds, spirits. The climate and human health will regulate themselves by swinging back into balance and harmony if only natural processes are left to their own all-powerful devices. 

As Charles Eisenstein noted in his brilliant essay "How The Environmentalist Movement Can Find Its Way Again": 

"... we have made a scientific, strategic, rhetorical, and political error by reducing the ecological crisis to climate, and the climate crisis to carbon. Earth is best understood as a living being with a complex physiology, whose health depends on the health of her constituent organs. Her organs are the forests, the wetlands, the grasslands, the estuaries, the reefs, the apex predators, the keystone species, the soil, the insects, and indeed every intact ecosystem and every species on earth. If we continue to degrade them, drain them, cut them, poison them, pave them, and kill them, earth will die a death of a million cuts. She will die of organ failure—regardless of the levels of greenhouse gases.

That is why, if I may be so bold as to make a prediction, that we will see increasingly dramatic derangement of weather patterns over the next few years. Indeed it has already begun. Floods, droughts, fires, anomalous heat, cold, wet, and dry at the wrong time of year will intensify - even in the absence of significant global warming. Such is already the case. I’m sure you’ve noticed. The weather has been weird the last few years; in some places, devastatingly so. Yet, global temperatures (according to the most reliable measure, satellite measurements of the lower troposphere) are about what they were in 2016. The overall trend since measurements began is definitely a warming trend (about 0.13 degrees per decade), but it has not been accelerating.

Herein lies the strategic error. Having hitched the environmental wagon to the global warming horse, what happens if the horse stops running? It won’t mean that our environmental problems will have been solved. It won’t mean the crisis has been averted, if temperatures stop rising. That is because the core of the crisis is not warming, it is ecocide—the killing of ecosystems, the killing of life...."

"I am afraid that we can continue to lay waste to the living earth, indefinitely, ending up on a concrete world, so chronically ill physically and mentally that we must incorporate technological assistance into our very brains and bodies. I am afraid we will compensate for the lost connection to a living world with a burgeoning array of virtual substitutes, digital realities, and online adventures, tragically seeking something that we come to forget we ever had. Do you remember how loud the frogs were? Do you remember flocks of birds extending from horizon to horizon? Do you remember the clouds of fireflies that lit up the nights of my father’s youth? I am afraid we will forget we ever lived in such wealth and make do instead with Mario Cart. We are already far down this path to a concrete world, and far down the path of learning to cope with it. American doctors write every year around 120 million prescriptions for SSRIs, 118 million prescriptions for Adderall, Ritalin, and other ADHD medications, and 120 million for benzodiazepines. That’s more than one psychiatric drug prescription per capita! No wonder people have never been unhappier.

The inner desolation mirrors the outer. The ecological crisis and the spiritual crisis that we call “mental health” share a common source: denial of earth as a living being, worthy of love, worthy of service. The conservationist draws from a well of truth: that the purpose of a human being is to participate in the flourishing of life. To serve with. Sundered from that purpose, we inevitably become sick. That inner sickness, that soul sickness, reflects the outer sickness of ecosystems. Could there ultimately be any doubt that the global climate reflects the social climate, the political climate, the economic climate, and the psychic climate?

The three priorities I listed above (conservationism, regeneration, detoxification) are no mere technical tweaks to the project of engineering earth. They occur naturally to anyone who beholds earth as a living being with a complex physiology. Beholding earth as a being, a magnificent being, a gorgeous being, a sacred being, we fall ever deeper in love. Here is where to find again the soul of the environmental movement and fulfill its destiny to transform civilization."

Handfuls Of Dust And Splinters Of Bone

Recently, closing out 2022, on his Substack, Charles Eisenstein published his long essay "Handfuls Of Dust And Splinters Of Bone" in a series of six Parts, a sober contemplation around a discussion of George Orwell's seminal, prophetic work, "1984".

By way of introduction he writes:

"I wrote the bulk of this essay in 2010, and returned to it sporadically over the years since. I have spent the last week shaping it into publishable form, but I have scrupulously avoided updating it with examples from the Covid era. Why? Because I want to make it clear that despite the Orwellian dimensions of the Covid response, the phenomenon I describe far transcends that issue. “Evil” did not start in 2019."

In Part 1, he begins bleakly:

"Looking at the state of the planet today, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that evil is running the world. Everywhere, it seems, vast impersonal forces conspire to destroy all that is good and beautiful. Green spaces and living soil are paved over, made into parking lots and strip malls. Rain forests are cut down, fisheries exhausted, soil washed into the sea, wetlands drained, lakes polluted, the atmosphere poisoned, all to feed a money machine that serves no authentic human happiness. People disappear into secret prisons, walls and fences go up everywhere, indigenous tribes are forced off their land, coups depose leaders who would return power to the people. Wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, whole nations and peoples devote their productive lives to debt service. Every night a billion people go to bed hungry. And all of this happens through the actions of human beings. We cannot blame any agency external to ourselves."

By Part 5, he describes the search for truth and warns:

"When Orwell wrote 1984 in the late 1940s, the technology to alter records of the past was in its infancy: airbrushed photographs and so forth. Today, when nearly all records are electronic, this alteration can happen with a few keystrokes. Entire events can be rewritten or erased. We are entering an era of intensifying confusion as to what is real. Struggles for power are escalating into struggles to control reality itself, via the control of words and minds."

As I see it, the times we are living through are beset by risk and danger as powerful political systems attempt to exercise control over the personal and private spheres.

By the conclusion of Part 6, Charles's tone is positive, hopeful, transforming:

"...each human soul, eventually, will return to its divine nature: love. We hold open that possibility, naively if need be, for everyone. Even if it happens not in our lifetimes, not in ten thousand years, still we hold it open. We hold it open for each person and, therefore, hold it open for all people, foreseeing a future built on a new story of the human being. Only if we give up on it does that possibility vanish. Maybe indeed we will participate in such a future only as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. The timeline does not much matter; our work is the same.

Looking at the machinations of power today, it appears that we are very very far from the Revolution of Love I have described. Yet maybe we are closer than it seems. Awakenings are happening, invisible to us. The Inner Party is full of incipient defectors. A new and ancient consciousness is seeping up through the earth. Perhaps the long, lonely work of our ancestors, whose dust and bones became the earth, and whose tears watered it, is reaching fruition in our time."

The last three years have been hard, throwing up immense challenges on global, societal, community, and personal levels. As a society we have regressed into the patterning of fearful behaviours. My hope is that can move forward by pivoting on all these levels to a much more positive energy and vibration as we move from fear and deception to truth and love. 

Planting Peace

A vital, energizing message from Ronnie Cummins and the Organic Consumers Association:

"As we approach the end of 2022, OCA and our family of organizations want to thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for your loyalty and support. In this part of Minnesota, at the edge of Lake Superior and the Boundary Waters Wilderness, the traditional Finnish term for the state of mind you need in order to survive and thrive in hard times is Sisu. The internet says that "Sisu” means “determination and courage in the face of great adversity," but around here the old-timers will add that real Sisu requires “stubborn determination” and “wild optimism.”

OCA, and myself in particular, have often been dissed as “impractical,” “utopian,” and “overly optimistic.” Saying that we are going to make organic and regenerative food and farming, and natural herbs, supplements, and medicines the norm, rather than just the alternative, requires Sisu. It requires that we stubbornly nurture and strengthen the positive solutions emerging in our communities and regions, even as we expose and fight back against the evil deeds, addictive temptations, and daily threats of “business as usual.” Saying that we are not only going to mitigate, but actually reverse environmental destruction and global warming, demands that we seek out and magnify the Big Change best practices of regenerative agriculture, land use, renewable energy, and conservation, instead of just settling for small change, too little, too late.

Planting peace, regenerating health, reversing the global epidemic of diet and environmentally-caused chronic disease, abolishing nuclear weapons, eliminating poverty and forced migration, bringing genetically engineered food and the weaponizing of pathogens to a halt, stopping the next pandemic before it starts. All of this will require “stubborn determination” as well as “wild optimism.”

The last few years certainly meet the definition of “great adversity.” OCA and our closest allies, as well as myself personally, have come under vicious attack again in 2022, slandered, censored, and threatened. Despite intense pressure we have refused to back down on the muckraking and truth-telling in Organic Bytes, and have maintained our 300,000-strong network of loyal subscribers. We promise you we will continue to expose, and struggle against the corporados, mad scientists, war-mongers, and would-be dictators. But we will also do our best to publicize, support, and campaign for the organic and natural health practices that we know will someday be the norm.

If you can afford it, please send OCA an end of year tax-deductible donation. Several generous donors have agreed to match all donations that come in before January 31, 2023."