First, as one might notice from my few previous postings I am very interested in the frameworks of people who understand large moves and wonderments of historic and epochal flux. Sterling's work very unintentionally details the progressions that WI Thompson has spiraled forth. The shifts from continental/industrial toward a planetary understanding are very carefully and accurately illustrated here. We all know, we all, regardless of race, screed, gender orientation or what we eat for lunch, that this poor planet is groaning under the weight of our bad habits, of our short sight, our myopia into dystopia, Cyclops grinning, feasting steadily on our decadence and stupidity, monocular. We all know this, realized or not, in our bones. What we grasp to shore up our beliefs is killing us more than just pausing to notice, to use the great good instinct of reflection beyond the pool, to suspend our fight and flight so that we can focus more clearly on our ublopian bumbling, thinking to go with our instincts, but at the right time, synchronically, symphonically tuned in to what we need to keep and not. Everyone of us has a piece of parochial baggage to carry forth, each a piece of the puzzle, gifts from our hearts to protect and share. Yet the technosociety in which we dwell hosts the daily things with which we have found enough about ourselves to see ourselves beyond the local. And it is toxic and failing quickly to hold us. We have gone beyond several Lines of No Return and as well, as many Lines of Empire as Sterling points out:
We know there has been a revolution in technoculture when that technoculture cannot voluntarily return to the previous technological condition. A sailor cannot be a farmer, but if the sailors from the machine era of iron and steam return to the earlier artifact era of wood and sail, millions will starve to death. The technosociety will collapse, so it is no longer an option. That's the Line of No Return.
We need to grab these machines and products, gizmos and spimes as they come up, tossing them into the right bins to be recycled, the right pile to encourage particular microbs to chew on what to change it, like we do with cabbages, carrots and turnips into sauerkraut to maintain our body ecologies. Feeding this important matter back to the industrial maw is much better than asking more of the grown world in extraction. We need mature processes of separating the biological from the chemical and keeping them cycling in their own spheres. On the ground, we need to repair the fungal foodwebs which we blithely plow up time and time again discounting the immense amount of nutrients that plants can assimilate from these hyphae, spaghetti-like surrounding roots protection, trapping suckers, feeding those roots with their makings, saving us the oily tasks of import and its wasting consequence running off. We need the bacteria and fungi to help make our fertilizers again. Any corporation dealing with food is looking into these possibilities be it a company, householder, farmer and developer scoping out, scraping and scaping this land which carries us all.
We have the technological capacity to do this. The landscapers and larger farmers are retooling fresh pesticide equipment to spray beneficials around carefully. With the skills and help of good tea brewers crafting to the highest standards, we can work on ANY scale, from garage and backpack sprayers on our home lots to 500 gal units mounted on tractors, dripped and sprayed thru irrigation, gently shot out thru pumps onto our courses and fields, our playgrounds and parks. If I were a corporation who cares for its own life and the lives my people, I would call up Sustainable Growth Inc hire them to show you how they care for their lands, find the best brewers and have them teach and mentor in those interested . I would make it so sexy to not poison ourselves that people would want to work here, would make the place live up to the idea that because we do now know that our children are harmed by our practices, we can now change our ways to hand them generative places, put in renewed and attached standard operating procedures to maintenance so that entropy will not lead us in to otivion, the heartbreaking prelude to oblivion.
And this leads into the materials with which to make these lively teas. Good aerobic compost is possible on any and all scales. Few places are in a position to offer it with confidence. Training and mentoring are necessary to prepare people for this maintaining this craft, especially when taken to an industrial scale. Since the future composts the past, let us become painfully aware from whence our food grows. Let not a food CEO arise who does not know about basic biological processes. This man is clueless....although he is trying to grasp something beyond his reach of knowledge and I respect him for that.
We do need to notice which kinds of composts to use when and how to go about finding definitions and standards that set the mark for others to follow. Let us go for orientation to the soil foodweb approach for help. Dr Elaine Ingham is a person to follow here. Her stories of how composting works are in plain language that can be understood by all. She is a respected scientist and teacher. Her work can help us understand how the soil works to feed and nourish us in a more careful and intense way than we have in the past. Play around in the information here. It is geared to anyone from greenskeepers to householders, anybody, you, me, business, corps, anyone who knows we are on a slippery slide from descent maintenance to anaerobic soil and into entropy.
We do need to
tear into the world of artiface in the way that our ancestors tore into the natural world. We need to rip root and branch into the previous industrial base and reinvent it, rebuild it. While we have the good fortune to be living, we should invent and apply ways of life that expand the options of our decendents rather than causing irreparable damage to their heritage,
as Sterling suggests. I would add that we have a moral obligation to do this, especially those who still understand and experience directly connections between well-being and food. We have reached very high to find out what we have about ourselves. We have built food systems that are not secure, not maintained wisely. In our reaching, we can redirect and sense emerging sustainable best practices.
This is a small intro to this work.
Comments