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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] The Way We Live Now - Our Decrepit Food Factories -By MICHAEL POLLAN

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  • From: "Healing Hawk" <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: "'permaculture'" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] The Way We Live Now - Our Decrepit Food Factories -By MICHAEL POLLAN
  • Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2007 14:15:47 -0600

What Pollan doesn't say here is that when resilience breaks down, a
threshold is crossed and a new regime is entered. This regime may not
support life. This is a textbook look at how industrialism's lust for
profit kills life on Earth. Profit, then, is biological resiliency
converted into money. Who thinks this is a good trade? Who has the power
to prevent such a trade? Are they the short-term beneficiaries of this
trade?

The "later" that some thought would be the time to deal with human-caused
ecological disasters evaporated. Now we live, so to speak, on the threshold
between a planetary life support regime that supports human life and a new
(to us) regime that is unknown.

Who made the decision to squander this biological resiliency? Where are
they now? What allowed them to proceed with this decision?

In _The Great Transformation_, Karl Polanyi wrote that the US Constitution
left US citizens powerless over their own economic lives. As a result of
this powerlessness, US citizens were set up to be kept ignorant of their
responsibility for their ecological lives. In college in the US, Ecology is
open only to science students after they have passed through several
gateways. It is not taught in public school. Environmental topics of one
sort or another may be, but environmental topics are not Ecology, and they
don't even have to have any basis in Ecology. Ecology is called the
subversive science. It has been under withering attack in academia for
three decades because it breaks down the rationale for "disciplines," which
are a false division, as are all divisions.

There are no divisions in life. No division withstands critical
ecologically literate inquiry. Yet we live profoundly diminished lives
under the thumbs of ecological parasites that are stuck in an ecologically
ignorant paradigm. Divisions are arbitrary, meant to keep the parasites in
power, and, ultimately, ecocidal, if the new regime does not support life.

Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX



-----Original Message-----
From: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Lawrence F.
London, Jr.
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 10:45 AM
To: permaculture
Subject: [permaculture] The Way We Live Now - Our Decrepit Food Factories
-By MICHAEL POLLAN


The Way We Live Now
Our Decrepit Food Factories
By MICHAEL POLLAN

From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the
story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables
about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to
rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory,
whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond
trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in
biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this
brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do,
we'll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as
something more than a nice word.





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