Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>]

It is true that the human species behaves like a virus eating through its 
host organism until the latter is killed.  End of story!  But the human 
organism is a little more complex than that of a virus and we do have the 
ability to reflect on what we are doing.  That is part of Nature too.  I 
think most on this list will understand, more or less, what is meant by being 
part of Nature.  The problem really is how can this awareness be sufficiently 
impressed on the majority of the population that lives in the cities happily 
enjoying all the comforts of an industrial society that requires industrial 
farming methods.  People start to get a glimpse of things to come when they 
see the oil gushing forth in the Gulf of Mexico, but that is just the peak of 
the iceberg.  To talk to people about the loss of soil fertility due to 
industrial farming is next to impossible.

Dieter Brand
Portugal


--- On Fri, 6/4/10, Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com> wrote:


The snag in living in tune with nature is we're part of nature, it's part of 
us. We are not separate and apart from it; that's where the problem lies. 

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
I've heard that statement a lot, and tried to understand how it can be 
reconciled with the state of things. We can't have it both ways. Either the 
imagination (including all that we regard as 'human civilization and reason') 
is part of nature's needs, or it is not. If it is a beneficial part of the 
natural world, then it will survive somehow. If it destroys the natural world 
that spawned it, then that will be the end of even the possibility of our 
re-populating the earth with 'kinder, gentler' people.
Humans have rarely been able to control their own physical desires for 'more, 
better, faster', and the arguments about how we should all 'just get along' 
or about how we are 'special' and preserved are all based on anthropocentric 
views. A holistic view doesn't paint humans in any favorable long-term light. 
Our occupation of the Earth is short-lived and self-destructive. The 
evolution of destructiveness is natural. That doesn't mean it has to 
continue, or that it is a sustainable prospect for a species. Any species 
that evolves in such a way that it overcomes its environment goes extinct or 
shrinks in size through attrition and evolution.
Humans use their imagination and ego to prop up an artificial environment 
with long-buried energy and resources that are poisonous to living creatures. 
No, we are not exactly 'separate' from nature in physical form, but we have 
separated ourselves from nature in our minds so that we can justify 
conquering and exploiting everything that we have imagined to be separate 
from us (an imaginary separation to nature, but not to modern human 
conquerculture).
Thus, in the human idea of existence, we created the separation (justified by 
'God's Word, or Manifest Destiny, or Free Markets or Democratic Choice'), yet 
some would use the pre-sapiens connections to nature to 'fix' the artificial 
'civilization' of the human imagination. 
The "civilized" human is insane as far as the uncivilized world's systems are 
concerned.

"Reason's got nuthin' to do with it."  - Mr. Gibbs, "Pirates of the Caribbean"

Dan C.
Belgium, WI


  
Paul wrote: "What is 'living in tune with nature'?"

My semi-scientific, logical answer is that all species produce some kind 
of usefulness for their (nature's) future over and above what they 
consume in resources. Erwin Schroedinger (yes, the guy with the cat in 
the box) called Life the "Anti-Entropy" force. For humans to be 
considered as 'in tune' with nature, they would have to collectively be 
putting more back than they take.
Anyone who believes that some form of capitalism/democracy/humanism is 
going to do that is fooling themselves. Everything about our idea of 
'civilization' is oriented toward taking advantage of nature for the 
profit of humans until nature fails, then trying to 'fix' something up 
just to keep doing the same things.

Lots of people like to say they 'want to live in tune with nature', but 
doing so goes against everything in the human imagination since we 
evolved it. To live in tune with nature requires that humans all get a 
lobotomy and become apes again.

"This will all end in tears. I know it."  -Marvin the Paranoid Android