Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

This line jumped out at me:
   The System of systems works very hard to convince people they have 
to buy everything they need using money.

Reminds me of the Joan Baez song All My Trials:
"if living were a thing that money could buy,
you know the rich would live and the poor would die..."

Few realize that, for most of the earlier part of our history, it was 
almost unheard of for people to work for someone else for pay. It was 
demeaning. People mostly did for themselves, one way or another. There 
were tradesmen with skills for barter like wheelwrights or gunsmiths. 
With exceptions they lived in small, close communities with support of 
family or neighbors. I don't know about social arrangements in other 
cultures, then or now. Now it has to be corporate jobs, corporate 
credit, corporate consumer goods. Debt bondage requires money. Send out 
resumes. Get a job! Actual self sufficiency all illusion. Our standard 
of living (read possessions) is dictated not so much by our own efforts 
but by loyalty to a system beyond our control. What's wrong with this 
picture?

I hear grandkids planning for college and just try to get them to be 
realistic about costs. Youth is understandably reluctant to process the 
whole coming cliff; an awful future is hard to deal with. Meantime we 
can all learn more useful skills and hope for companionship & community 
of some kind in harsher times. A little bit of land & water might help 
too. It's hard to accept but these links give some context:

The World After Industrial Civilization Goes, Usher in the "new" 
economics of local self-sufficiency
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/785/1/

We will go kicking and screaming down the path to the new Middle Ages as 
fossil fuels desert us
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/05/new-middle-ages.html

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On 3/28/2014 6:22 AM, Dan Conine wrote:
> New Scientist had an article last week about Evolutionary Traps: where 
> a species adapts to something that is killing it.
>
> Humanity has adapted to perpetual growth and perpetually lowering 
> prices (Consumerism as religion, action and addiction).
> The stories say that a raccoon will stick its hand into a jar if it 
> sees a shiny object, but won't let go of the shiny rock to get its 
> hand out of the jar. The more clever the raccoon, the more places it 
> can find jars to reach into, but they just don't let go. Humanity 
> isn't really any smarter. We just write more stories about ourselves 
> and turn the idiotic behavior into a tragedy or a comedy.
>
> As a general rule, the people who have enough money to buy good food 
> will buy the most convenient good food, and the people without enough 
> money are forced to buy what they can get, and few are lucky (or 
> unlucky..;) enough to have access to the resources for producing their 
> own. The System of systems works very hard to convince people they 
> have to buy everything they need using money.
> The money flows uphill to the people who manipulate the money, and the 
> violence flows downhill from them to keep it that way.
>
> The rest is timing and circumstance unless one is locked out of the 
> mechanism or leaves it, but most of the coming and going is 
> manipulated by the Economic Hit Men who buy and sell countries in 
> accordance with the money's wishes.
>
> The two dominant species on the planet are cars and banks. People are 
> just the raccoons that scavenge for food among them, trying not to get 
> run over. If we're very lucky, there will be enough of us building 
> nests in the machinery that it stops from the corrosion or collapses 
> under its own weight.