Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>]

>
> What it's all about:
>
> [It was, always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are 
> all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting 
> tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your 
> consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with 
> something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative 
> cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie crap no one 
> believes in anymore. Right?]
>
>
> -Mark Nagel
Well, in a way, this is true. In Nature's grand scheme, however,
"connectedness" is just the term hippies use for being consumers of
beauty and nature. The hippies are still missing the point. What makes
us worthwhile to Mother Nature is our contribution of usefulness and the
things we can add to the structure of the universe, over and above what
we consume in resources; our Net Creativity. If we simply live to exist
in concert with nature, and balance out what we consume (which would be
a hell of a lot better than what we do now), then eventually, Nature
will come up with another species that contributes MORE than they
consume to replace us. At the present rate of our behavior, we are going
extinct as a species pretty quickly, with no thought of what would or
should come afterward.
The Hippies would have liked everything to be a beautiful redwood forest
with berries and nuts (not counting the hippies) to live on.
Unfortunately, that avoids the responsibility which nature gave us to be
stewards of the other species, and to help the planet cope with
disasters if we can. While the hippies want to ignore our aggressiveness
and our creative engineering through Total Conservation, the
corporations want to profit from those things through perpetual growth
without any conservation responsibility at all (it's in the corporate
charter of psychopathy).

Charles Reich ("The Greening of America") covered it very well back in
the '70's, but he eventually decided it was easier to join 'em than to
beat 'em, and his later work focused on the lawyerly options of fighting
corporatism. His earlier writings about dropping out of the System of
Systems in order to fight the exploitation of humans and resources is
largely forgotten. We all want to hear about the lovely writings of
Wendell Berry and others which touch our hearts and prod us into caring
about our communities and farms, but few are willing to quit their day
jobs and drop out of the perceived responsibilities of public schools,
soccer livery, corporate travel, and pizza delivery in order to scrape
along on soil-based living with a gun in their hand to defend against
the government and corporations with their hormones and microchips. Few
are willing to risk their "lives and fortunes" as our forefathers did in
order to fight corruption and exploitation of the planet. The System is
too big and the risk outweighs the comfort of 'civilization', even
though civilization is gradually eating away at the comforts in order to
maintain itself. We have to decide where we draw the line and decide if
the societal system is holding up its end of the bargain for our loss of
independence, and we have to eventually decide what we are willing to do
about it. It's easy to start a hippie commune in Californika, but that's
no threat to the consumption masters of New York or Washington. They'll
just advertise and sell tickets to the circus, or use it for an excuse
to buy more SWAT gear, and confiscate everything the Hippies build or
own under the premise of protection.

Dan