Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>]

Yes Dan, the analogy goes that far: pesticides, herbicides and so

on for the soil; antibiotics etc. for the body. Anything, as long as

it will kill life, apparently competing with our own life. One day we

will wake up to find that we cannot sustain our own life on this

planet without all these other life forms we are so busily killing

off.

 

Dieter

Daniel Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com> wrote:

Ironically, Dieter, I read a book called "Our Second Brain" which describes our gut as analagous to holding an ecosystem outside of our actual bodies because it is isolated by another skin which forms the alimentary canal, and that our intestines draw nutrients from the foods and activity of the gut like plants draw nutrients from the soil. We should treat the gut like we take care of a garden, in other words. Dumping poisons (alcohol, antibiotics) or indigestible stuff or too much of any one thing isn't good. We could go into a whole book of analogies about meat alone....(attracting pests, etc.)

Things to make you go "huh".

Dan C.
Belgium,WI



>From: Dieter Brand
>Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Early Roots of the Organic Movement
>To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing
>
>Message-ID: <409773.73881.qm@web63407.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>Thanks Paul, that is pretty exhaustive as far as thinking
> on soil and plant nutrition is concerned.
>
> There is one item, though, that particularly appeals to me
> that isn't included here.
>
> According to a text I read recently, Aristotle considered that
> _soil is the stomach of plants_ in the sense that soil performs
> many function like the mechanical and chemical breakdown of
> organic materials which needs to occur before plants can access
> these materials as food. These functions are performed in the
> body by the teeth, the digestive tract and other body organs.
> In fact, it is possible to see the root system of plants as a
> digestive tract turned inside out. Both are colonized by
> bacteria needed for processing food.
>
> This, to me sounds like an explanation of plant nutrition as
> intelligent as any provided by modern science.
>
> I don't know were Aristotle is supposed to have said this and
> the text from which I cite is in German.


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