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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] From Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty
  • Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2011 21:39:17 -0000

Hi Pego,
did you get your history in an Irish school? What is not mentioned there is the following story.
The son of Brian Boru who died in the Battle of Clontarf was the high king in Ireland after his father. He also got wounded in battle and lost an arm if my memory is correct. With such an handicap he could no longer remain Hard Rich for a king had to be sound in body and soul. So he fled Ireland for Rome where he gave the Pope the Sword and Scepter of Ireland in exchange for a villa at Lake Como.
And the Pope gave those to the then English King in the hope that the man would change Ireland's Christianity from the "Columban" doctrine to the "Roman" doctrine. Imo the Columban way was much more enlightened than Rome in those days.
 
The English only really started exploiting Ireland after the threat of theSpanish Armada had gone. And being Flemish myself that period has special meaning for me. The Spanish Army after the start of the reformation wanted to bring Rome rule back everywhere and they wanted to invade England. In those days the Spanish army was the most powerful in the world and if they had been able to land in England, England would have fallen. Instead they "wasted" about 50 years in the Low Countries (now Flanders and the Netherlands) trying to turn the reformist tide. A few hundreds of thousands of Flemish people got killed gruesomely. Most of the citizens of Antwerp fled North before their city was taken by the Spanish and they ended up making Amsterdam what it became. If you don't believe "gruesome"...pregnant women where burned at the stake at the exact moment of giving birth.
 
What is also seldom mentioned in Irish history lessons is that there where whole battalions of Irish mercenaries in this the Spanish army while committing atrocities in Flanders. A fact commemorated in a series of Irish Postal stamps that An Post brought out in 1990. What the English did in Ireland afterwards was in part reprisal for that.
 
Just to show that history is often not that simple.
A few more comments interspersed with your text below
 
I am comfortable with that John
 
 << Why do you think colonisation of America, Africa and Australia happened? >>
 
To my mind, it was not the suffering of lack, but the addiction of the wealthy and powerful to excess that drove colonization.  The Pope wrote a Bull allowing Catholic England to exploit Ireland ad nauseum and all of Europe took note that the consequences of rapacious exploitation could be exported to another country and that their own citizenry would become malleable and complicit in that, if they saw the carrot of getting out from under the feudal yoke for themselves.  It was for this exploitation that India's frequency of famine went up by a factor of x20 while England glutted on their crops.
 
<<<I agree with that of course and nothing has changed England and Europe as a whole are still importing at least 60% of all their nutrients from abroad. Without that there would be famine here now.
 
I sometimes think you don't read my commentary, John, since I NEVER said that overpopulation was and is not a serious problem. However, overpopulation is a symptom of that extracted wealth.  Famine happened in Ireland and India while overpopulation happened due to cheap Indian/Irish imports, in England.   This makes England dependant on the exploitation of other countries to prevent famine amongst the lower classes of Great Britain.  When Britain is blockaded, as it was during WWII, that particular population issue starts coming home to roost, but the last peacetime famine to touch England was in 1623.  I am picking overmuch on England but all the countries that shaped their economies around foreign exploitations.
 
It is in the normal order of things that negligent overpopulation in good times creates conditions for famine in times of drought or disaster.  You and I seem to respect those traditional subsistence farmers who could flex their growing patterns around needier times and would starve rather than consume their basic stock. This is true of India and other places but not true of Europe and Britain, whose traditional farmers gave way to feudalism and imperialism long ago. Indeed, with the exception of the causes for modern famines and colonialism, we agree on much.
 
<<< again I basically agree with this Pego but I am afraid I look more to the ecological impacts of even "fair trade". Many countries export food or timber for money. What they don't realise is that by doing that they export their mineral supplies which will never be replenished.  Eventually massive global trade will prove to be completely unsustainable and the "sellers" will end up severely impoverished. You don't need imperialism to create ecological problems.
 
John 
 
Yours, Pego
 
<<All these factors work together. Climate change is on it's own capable of sinking our boat. Combine this with overpopulation and colonial take overs and catastrophe is assured.
I don't think "primitive" farming methods are to blame for anything in this list. Often they are the only sustainable methods. Green revolution methods have made it possible to grow more food of a much lower quality but they have also polluted and lost us soil and nearly killed the oceans. In short they can be compared with an enormous mortgage on our future.

To my mind there is nothing more sure than that we are in for an enormous crash. And also that the longer we keep going as we are the deeper we are going to fall.>>john>>



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