By now everybody knows what we are doing to our environments. At least, everyone could know -- there are hundreds, thousands, millions of reports on the sad state of our planet. Think of what we do to animals, the billions of chickens, cows, pigs, we raise in boxes so small that they cannot move. That makes them fatter. We feed them hormones to speed growth, and antibiotics to protect them from the inevitable diseases that would spread like wild fires in such tightly packed populations. A so-called chicken farm is a building that houses a million chickens in a few thousand square feet. Imagine the chicken sh*t produced by a million chickens. That has to be washed away of course, constantly, 24/7. More than likely flushed into the nearest river. The river severely polluted not only by the chicken manure but by the many chemicals that are mixed in the feed. And add to that, chicken manure (any manure) gives off tons of methane, a gas that is at least twenty times more effective in causing global warming than the carbon dioxide we usually talk about. Growing animals for the fast food we have become addicted to is not only an unbelievable cruelty to animals, but yet another element of the destruction of the atmosphere of our planet. I'm sure the people who own those so-called farms make money, pay taxes, are mostly legal, but the only obligations they can imagine are in our man-made world. There is no thought of owing anything to the planet, Mother Nature. Animals have become meat, plants have become food, we manipulate their very genes, add and subtract pieces, and so, changing what Nature evolved.
The People's Conference going on now demands that we begin to think again of the "Rights" of Mother Nature.
Because there is no reciprocity the artificial world we have made of steel and plastic on top of the Earth, is utterly unsustainable. By removing Nature and the planetary ecology from our awareness we have stepped out of the circle of life. By making everything into objects that we can own, without further obligation, we have killed what nurtures us. And that, in the end, is going to be our fate.
How utterly stupid can we be.
I grew up among what my parents called Natives. Certainly not any different from us. They spoke another language, had different customs, a different religion. Most importantly, they had not lost the relationship with the Earth. I remember once when the gardener allowed me to "help" him. I must have been five or six years old. My mother had told the gardener to make a flower bed more flat on the top, cut off flowers that wanted to grow taller. I noticed that the gardener was very slow, very careful. He looked at every plant before cutting a certain branch. I knew I would not be allowed to use a machete, but I had found some garden shears that I could handle, so I offered to help him. It looked like an easy job, just cut everything the same length. After clicking away for a few minutes, the gardener stopped me, had me look at the last plant I had just cut. He asked me, "Can that plant grow another flower?" I looked at him surprised. Well, of course, don't all plants grow. "Yes," he said, "but plants need to make leaves to grow, the flowers are just to make other plants. Where are the leaves on that plant you just cut?" I looked, saw that that I had cut that plant so that there were no leaves left. "That plant is now dead," he said. He showed me why he had been so careful when he trimmed the plants. "It's quite possible to trim and thin plants, but you must always see to it that the growing tip, the last few leaves, remain to regrow the plant so that it can make more flowers." Later, much later, I learned that all people who know nature have always been careful to cut and prune so that a growing point, usually the top few leaves, are left. Indigenous people all over the world have always known that if you find a plant that has fruit that you like, or you can eat the leaves, or there is a root that is edible, you are careful not to destroy the whole plant. Or certainly be careful never to harvest all the plants where they grow. There was always an exchange, giving and taking. Yes, life eats life, we eat plants and animals. But indigenous people give thanks, respect the plants and animals we eat, and know to give something back to the soil that grows the plants, the plants that grow animals. The most common giving back is excrements.
We, western civilized people have really moved ourselves far, far away from the world of nature. To us, excrements are something dirty, smelling bad, full of bacteria and other bad things; must be hygienically flushed away out of sight. We don't think of it as fertilizer. Forever, for as long as there has been life on this planet, excrements are what life gives back to nature so that more life can grow. There is a reciprocity, a circle, something taken requires giving something back.
That idea is nothing new, but we don't seem to apply it to Nature. If I work for you, you pay me. If you work for me, I pay you. Why would that reciprocity not hold between me and the vegetables I am growing? I put a lot of nurturing into the plants. Plants that caterpillars like to devour I spray with neem oil in water. That keeps the caterpillars mostly away. I have to plant in pots or large containers here because there is no soil, so I see to it that what I put in those containers has lots of mulch (wood chips, dead plants, with an occasional dead animal in it) and some manure. I see to it that they have enough water, even when it does not rain, that they are put where they get the kind of sunshine they like. In other words I invest my energy and my thinking in making the plants happy. And I honor the plants when I eat them. They taste much better than any I could buy in a super market because I know them, I have seen them grow, I have nurtured them, cared for them. I know they have nothing artificial (that means man-made) in them. I make them healthy, they keep me healthy.
Here I cherish the wildness even in a place where there is not much soil, no ground water. The wildness comes from the mix of trees and plants of all kinds growing very close to each other. No flower beds of all the same flowers. Even in pots I usually put a garlic plant next to a vegetable: insects don't like scent, and garlic, peppers, tomatoes, seem to like being close to other plants, and most other plants don't mind (or even like) being close to garlic, pepper and tomatoes.
There are areas even here where the vegetation is now so dense that it is always fairly dark inside these mini forests. An astounding variety of ferns and mosses, a few orchids, like that dark, damp environment. Underneath those trees there is a carpet of fallen leaves. Here in the Tropics trees lose leaves all the time, not only in the Fall. The soil under those trees is soft, spongy, springy, with the most wonderful smell. I'm very careful not to disturb those places. Well, I'm careful everywhere. I don't like to interfere. I am deeply convinced that I do NOT know better than nature.
While in Bolivia the people of the world are talking, there are scientists who are talking to the monster corporations and some of the wealthy countries of the world about "geo-engineering," a new science. There are five or six different ways that some scientists have reasoned may prevent the world from warming much more by "manipulating the planet." Some say we can spray tiny (nano-) reflective particles (sulfur, aluminum, plastic) into the high stratosphere and so reflect some of the sunlight back into space, making the earth cooler. All we know is that some volcanoes have caused such temporary cooling when the ashes were so voluminous and light that they traveled into the stratosphere. Of course the few times that happened it was always for a short time only, because even very small particles without much weight at all nevertheless eventually come down. So this kind of geo-engineering would have to be done every other year or so. What's worse is that nobody has ever done this before, and we have no way of knowing whether it will work, how long it would work, and what the possible side effects might be. One of the people interviewed on Democracy Now, 20 april 2010, was Pat Mooney, who explained what geo-engineering is, that it is being talked about in the UK, the US, Germany, other countries. Summing up: "the very same people who caused the warming now say they will stop it? " I have no trust in untested science." I would add, who gave a few dozen people the authority to mess with our planet?
Global warming, manifesting as climate change, is a consequence of our industrial civilization, a civilization that is more and more based on an idea that we, humans, are different from all other beings, that we own the planet, and that we are so powerful that we can use whatever resources we can find, anywhere on earth, to acquire more wealth. Also a civilization where it is assumed (we rarely talk about it) that I is more important than we. It is accepted without much question that the purpose of an individual life is to get rich, and power. Today's America is becoming all too aware that the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between extreme wealth and extreme poverty is growing exponentially. The same is true on the next level. The difference between rich countries and poor is also getting extreme. The meeting in Copenhagen, last December, soon was dominated by a very few very rich countries, who did not want to know that climate change is already a reality in many parts of the world. The more than a hundred small countries that were represented in Copenhagen were excluded, were kept outside. The conference this week was organized by the smaller, poorer countries -- literally by We the People of Mother Earth.
Nature, an ecology, cannot tolerate for long the domination of one species. And then imagine that a very small minority within one species tries to control and ravish the entire planet. Boggles the mind, right? All ecologies, Nature, are a close interactive web of relationships between not only individuals but between species. If hawks kill too many rabbits in an alpine meadow, the hawks will starve next year because there are not enough rabbits. If grazers overgraze grassland, they will starve the next year. If the very rich steal too much from the poor, they will starve next year because there are not enough poor. These laws of Nature are really quite simple. We, humans, have always known them until we imagined ourselves above and apart from those laws. We think we are so smart we can make our own laws, and our laws say that whatever you can get away with is not to be questioned. If we had not cast off from the earth, we would have known that the extreme kind of wealth distribution our system created is not sustainable. The greater the gap between rich and poor, the more unstable the society. The greater the gap between rich corporations and impoverished indigenous people, the greater the chance of an eruption from below.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
