Elections Less Than Two Weeks Off

In the good old US of A, we are at a crossroads. There are those among us who have voted in every election since we reached the age that it is allowed and about half who never have. I have been a poll worker for over twenty years and have found that the number of people eligible to vote runs about double the number of those that are registered to vote and that the other half vote at astonishingly low levels. It may astonish the average person to know that this state of affairs used to upset me. The electoral joke is to say that only those who vote have the right to complain, but if that were true, I would only have to hear half the whining and complaining. This crossroads has been on the map since the last time that monopolies were broken up, federal regulators were put in place to oversee corporations, and many of our "safety nets" were put in place.

The FDA, (Food and Drug Administration) for instance, that got started because snake oil salesmen could still sell adulterated products, poison or just about anything for any remedy and no law existed to prevent the sellers from just not telling folks what they were buying. There was quackery beyond belief that people felt as a tax on their health and indeed their lives. People were dying from tainted food and drugs. Now, after years of trying to keep up with rapidly changing food and drug production and distribution systems, there are so many ways around their regulations, and such a massive amount of commerce that they are supposed to be overseeing, that hazardous products and conditions frequently make it past the first line of defense and we have people dying again at an even more alarming rate. Just this week, the FDA released a study that tells people that the label "organic" on produce has no effect on the nutrient content or flavor of agricultural products, in their report they also failed to take stock of the most important fact behind the organic label, it means that fewer toxic compounds are spewed into the environment to produce it.

This is one aspect of the intersecting paths that we must choose from. Sadly, as we have seen from movies, the crossroads are a dangerous place, a desolate place and one that many would want to avoid at all costs. The reason that this is where you go to "make a deal with the Devil" is because choice always requires cleaving off those things that you decide to leave behind, to essentially kill them off. As I often mention, creation and destruction go hand in hand. We could go back, but since so much wealth has flowed into so few hands, we would all be far worse off to try to revert to our old ways of thinking, the old way of doing things,  or the old ways of thinking about them. The world has changed and we need to understand that there is no going back. when we look more closely at our past, we soon realize that the good old days are just as fictional as the worst science fiction. Nearly any time we look at throughout time, there were rich and powerful overlords exploiting others for their enrichment and heartbreaking consequences for the less wealthy and less powerful individuals whose lives were worn away in service to the flow of commerce. This should give pause to those who think that "Happy Days" was anything but a diversion. It would be nice to turn back the clock to a time when we were irresponsible young adults who didn't have rent to pay or dinner to cook, or our own clothes to wash but this is not in the cards.

The path to the left is paved with good intentions and about half of those who seek light at the end of our tunnel of worldwide economic collapse seem to think that moving to the political left will somehow spare us being hit by the train of doom that has entered the other end of the tunnel. Same can be said about those who seek a path to the right. It is becoming harder and harder to ignore the grim situation that we find ourselves in. The only problem is that to the right lie fascism and even more of a free hand for those who exploit out people and rape Mother Earth. Many on the right may have good intentions as well, but their understanding of "free market" economics and the "efficiency" of capitalism to reward good wherever it may be are completely based on five-hundred year old myths. The wealthy, who have been told for generations that they are wealthy and powerful because they are better than the rest of us are beginning to realize that the fact is that they are truly exactly the same. No genetic marker or superior intellect will ever assure your place in the global games of power and control that have resulted in millions of deaths, destroyed lives and the pathetic excuses that pass for humanitarian efforts sponsored by first world loan sharks exploiting poor young populations across the developing world. Evil people do these things for their own purposes and fall back on the centuries old lies that mimic the divine right of kings.

So, our fourth choice is to plow forward, move ahead into the gaping black, hope the train jumps the tracks before running us down and to put the pedal to the metal just a little harder. We will need to choose one of four paths soon, November, sixth will be the end point in the most recent campaign. Perhaps we will make a good choice, perhaps not. What is assured, no matter which direction we choose to go, we will never get back the value of our homes five years ago, we cannot produce our way out of expensive oil, our children will not educate themselves and if we let the spin doctors and lying power brokers get their way, we will be left with more of what we have gotten from them already. I have been called a lot of things by a lot of people, but the one thing I do not want to be called is unimportant. I'm sure it is the same for the gun-toting religious whack-jobs who think that if we just got rid of government entirely, our lives would be better off. The tea party activists who urge businesses to implement a hiring freeze as long as Obama is in office need to be brought up on charges of treason. We need to hold the lying liars' feet tot the fire on so many issues. Human rights, health care, security, the environment, women's issues, education, finance, our food system, energy, all of these areas need to be addressed. We need to look at each one and the whole bunch at once and see that the litany of ills that we are facing today have taken decades to get as far out of hand as they have become. The powerful people who have taught us to stay home on election day in droves need a wake up call. Democracy may be on the ropes, but it refuses to go down easy.

Please, try to learn as much as you can before the election and vote. It may well be the last chance we have to make a difference in the lives of the next seven generations. After the election, the real work starts. The rich and powerful have provided us with a giant sow's ear. They will always leave it to us to try to make it look like a silk purse.

Sacred Agriculture

We are running a special fund raiser to send at least a few people to this conference  Sacred Agriculture The concepts behind much of what we do here (write here and how we support our selves) are in league with our belief that the Earth itself is sacred. In addition to sharing information through our blogs, Permaculture, ECO-Ethics, Trees (on wordpress) and ECO-Tours of Wisocnsin Inc. (here and on facebook), we also use our interactions in daily life to model behavior that honors the cornucopia that nature represents when we treat "her" well. We will be sending at least one of our author/guides to this event and we urge everyone to attend this four-day event.

To donate, to help send our guides to Sacred Agriculture, the conference, go to paypal and enter our account, tnsaladino42@ hotmail. Then, give what you can because what we learn and share there will go a long way to spreading the good news about sustainability. The knowlege we gain through participation in this event will translate into more great insight into how we can effectively transition into ways of life that affirm nature and our dependence upon clean air, soil and water to fully meet our potential. As we have said, it is our birthright to have clean air, water and soil, but getting back to the "Garden of Eden" will be difficult if we wait for the large seed companies and greedy agricultural interests guide our decisions for another generation or two. It is past time for us to wake up and realize that the mega-corporate interests don't have a shred of dignity or compassion for us or the planet. The only quality that they exemplify is self-absorbed greed.

We have begun to see the change that has been afoot for generations. The "new normal" promises to continue to be exacerbated by human activities. We are left to choose between learning as quickly as possible how to be responsible crew upon Starship Earth, or find ways to handle ever more extreme drought, floods, natural disasters and the repercussions of those changes in climate that we do not yet understand fully.

Honoring the sanctity of nature is something that comes naturally to me. If I do not "give back" at least my weight in organic material to the earth each year, I feel like I'm cheating the system that supports me. Composting and aeration of soils allows billions of organisms to thrive, each one holding a bit of water in their cells, stabilizing both the local ecology and worldwide climate. I never met a leaf pile that didn't look like a gold mine of soil nutrition to me. The precious open pollinated seed that has developed a relationship with humans down through the ages is truly sacred because it feeds us well for just a tiny investment of time and consideration. To date, we have not developed a single agricultural "chemical or compound" that has the power to feed us or keep us alive. Our quality of life and perhaps the very survival of our species depends on changing our perception. The Earth was never covered with dirt. It has always been set about with living soil. Even the oceans, the largest part of our planet have been tainted with agricultural chemicals, many of which have not been used for decades, that still wreak havoc upon natural systems.

Little did we know, the "modern age" of organic chemistry would yield products that would be touted as "life-saving" but that would unleash mayhem and suffering on our population. sadly, the giant corporations who hold patents on many of the worst offenders refuse to stop production of chemicals until long after those genies are out of their bottles. We need to consider what we will say when our grandchildren ask, "Grandpa, where were you when they poisoned our water? What were you doing when they turned the air to poison?" Or, "Why did you not put your foot down when they were sterilizing the soil?" Believing that we deserve change is potentially the most radical thing we can do. Acting on that belief is not radical, indeed, it may be the only thing that can save us from the crushing power of corporate big-wigs. 

Fuel For The Fire

Hotbeds of discontent are virtually everywhere around the planet. Faraway, well heeled interests are demanding that the average man sacrifice even more for their ballooning riches. As greater and greater wealth concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, the rich, rather than appreciating where their dollars come from, demand an even greater say in government, use new tools to enhance the types and tools available to wrest subsidy from the rest of us, and more and more frequently design enabling legislation that rewards them for their exploitation of the masses. The ultra-wealthy actually believe that they are wealthy because they are good, that they deserve lop-sided rewards and have faith that as job creators, their endeavors are more important than the undertakings that the rest of us engage in. Populations everywhere on Earth have had their resources polluted, poisoned and robbed by global interests for generations. This is not new. What is new is that there are fewer and fewer voices calling the empire builders to task for their transgressions, fewer and fewer teeth in laws that protect the planet and fewer and fewer ways for the truth to get out to a worldwide audience.

I do have the luxury of speaking to thousands of people from my living room, but the five largest media conglomerates share access to the thousands of newspapers, television news stations and basically guide the public debate, defining terms and making stuff up as it suits them. In television production, we only get to edit down what the cameras have been pointed at. The images we pull from the raw "stock" are a tiny fraction of those images and what makes it to the nightly news is just a wisp of what actually went on.  This is the smoke, repeating the ideas that these images call up is a nearly infinite number of mirrors. As a cameraman, one realizes that they have huge blinders on, as an editor, you try to piece together a semblance of "reality". Like carrying water in a sieve, the technology of television is far more like painting watercolors with a broom than telling the truth.

This week, I became aware of Honey booboo, a popular cable show that had higher ratings than the first Presidential debate.  It is about a young child and her mother, on the pageant circuit, that someone had the idea of following around with a film crew, editing down their lives to provide "entertainment" for the masses. I saw about thirty seconds of the edited version and was both repulsed and confused that they would qualify as worthy of even pointing a camera at. Yesterday, I heard that this little child has become such an icon that she has the power to introduce new words to the language. specifically, "Redneconize". This is used as a substitute for recognize, but investigating further, I was astonished that it is more about reckoning than cognition. In dead reckoning, we use only what is observed to orient ourselves. Cognition requires using more than what meets the eye to make up our minds. In nautical navigation, or aviation, dead reckoning can be used to some extent, but as any of us who have tried to boat or fly without good maps, charts, or navigational aids know, taking everything we "see" at face value is the best way to get in trouble. Without a deeper understanding of the world around us, we court death.

DE-VO De-evolution, Idiocracy And The "Debate"

What we are seeing today are the combined effects resulting from the last gasp of an antiquated worldview. Those who cling to the theory that men, especially rich white men are uniquely suited to rule over the rest of us are feeling that the end of an era is nigh. Death is never easy to deal with, especially for those left behind, but when we clean out some of the hidden crap amassed through generations of living under the falsehood, we may be surprised by what we find. As with any one person, the trinkets and security blankets that the old guard held onto will strike some as useless and others as the height of frivolity. we may never know what was so enamoring about the idiosyncratic collections, the hoarding instincts of those who have remained in charge for centuries have led to some pretty strange collections. Perhaps what will be required is a giant estate sale, but the question then becomes who will buy all this shit?

A report came out last week that reading scores amongst students in the United States are at a forty year low. Students, on average have not been this illiterate since the seventies! Looking back, one can directly attribute this decline to Reagan and his cronies who claimed to believe that if we just got government out of the way of the wealthiest classes that their table scraps would fall down like manna from heaven to enrich the impoverished. Hidden beneath this overtly stated belief was the underlying principles of Calvinism. I know that i speak about this topic far too often, but that is because it drives so much of our politics and culture today. Even the poor themselves believe that they are at fault for their own poverty. Calvin believed that the poor and disenfranchised deserved their station in life because of their own depravity and the fact that they had turned their back on God. Isn't is convenient to blame the victim? The Republicans in the United States of America, have continued to use this belief as their fall back response whenever they have been asked about their "compassionate conservatism" which, in fact, is neither. They have implied it when they wreak a war on drugs, or poverty against minorities while the biggest criminals as well as the morally bankrupt are given a free hand to exploit others and ingratiate themselves at the expense of others. To keep a population ignorant was the first step in Reagan's plan to keep the rich white men in charge in spite of the demographic changes that have been changing the make-up of our population.

By getting more and more people to have to endure greater and greater financial stress, the wealthiest among us are able to have a free hand in their quest to soak up any and all capital, leaving the vast majority with less than they have ever had before. Take my own situation as an example. I currently "own" two homes (in fact I own the debt that looms over my head for another twenty-five years) both are worth about half of what I owe. The "value" crashed with the economy, but my interest is high and by the time I'm through, I will have spent over half a million dollars for the privilege of ownership. Additionally, there are taxes to pay and insurance that is designed to cover the bank's ass if there should be an "act of god" or an accident that damages my property. It should not be assumed that anyone knew the risk of home ownership ten years ago. Everyone who had lived through the last depression has pretty much passed away, or they are old enough as to no longer be taken seriously by the rest of us. This is also the result of our de-evolution. Intact cultures that have the wherewithal to sustain themselves over time revere their elders, honor them and realize that their experiences stretch out over enough time to create a bridge across generations. They are important enough to humanity that they are supposed to be treated as a valued resource. instead, our youth oriented culture would rather infatuate itself with anorexic women and teen idols. The old guard are adept at shape shifting and utilizing smoke and mirrors to distract us, cover their tracks and lead us down a primrose path to our own destruction.

The dramatic rise in a variety of diseases point to a less and less habitable world. Science agrees that is the case, but trying to pin down the poisoners is more difficult than trying to get the rich to pay their fair share for the right to exploit us. My own experience back in the sixties, being told by a doctor that I had "Green Bay Throat" convinced me that intelligent, wealthy men were scared to death of the powers that be. I asked the doctor to write that down. He refused, knowing that I might make a public case over the diagnosis. The toxic cocktail that I breathed each and every day had me in the hospital several to half a dozen times each year. I was one of the costs of our rampant industrialization and lack of meaningful regulation on polluters. The city, in their infinite wisdom did everything in their power to reward said companies to expand and gave them tax free use of our shared resources allowing them to contaminate them and me to dangerous levels. The state was no help either. They too supported the "rights" of corporations to poison the citizens of the state, contaminate the water that I would eventually drink and play in. They even counted the economic activity as a public good in spite of the fact that millions pay the health care costs of the poisoning. The same thing is continuing to happen today. I have moved more than a mile further from the source of much of the contamination and one of the industries has been shuttered, although they left millions of tons of contaminated soil in place that will be hazardous forever. Now, I'm a mile closer to two other industries that routinely spew different toxic compounds into the local air. The biggest difference in real terms is that the prevailing winds usually carry the toxic plume from the closest industries away from our house, but the source that we are a mile further from still floats past, it is just a bit more dilute.

In addition to point sources and fugitive emissions from manufacturing, there are also massive coal piles just over a mile away from my house. When we lived directly across the river from them, there was nearly always a coating of black dust on everything, most likely on our lung tissue as well. Now that we have moved the extra mile further away, we don't see the black dust as much, but this summer, after sweeping the back patio, we got a huge wind event during which coal and coal dust came this far in giant clouds. when I went back outside, after the wind subsided, I found a chunk of coal, just sitting where I had swept earlier in the day. When my trash ends up in the wrong place, it is called littering and I am liable to be fined. When industry lets their shit blow away, it is called economic activity and is entered on the positive side of our ledger books.

What we saw this week that was called a debate was anything but. Debate requires stating positions and giving rationale and arguments that support those positions. Neither candidate seemed to elucidate any hard and fast position. The sickening lack of factual data to support the positions that they hinted at was the most striking thing that stuck in my mind. The speakers were heavy on platitudes, catch phrases and personal attacks, but the issues were mostly window dressing designed to pull at our heart strings rather than inform us about the motivations and direction that these two men were planning on taking our country. The Green candidate for President, Jill Stein, was arrested just trying to enter the campus on which the debate was to be held. She was treated like a criminal even though she is running to serve our country, doing her patriotic duty, representing the vast majority of our interests in clean air and water. The Brownshirts who arrested her were doing the bidding of the ultra-wealthy. Just as our "military interests" serve the wealthiest amongst us through the disproportionate bloodshed of the children who hail from families on the lowest rungs of the "economic ladder".

Not a word was spoken at the "debates" about ecological integrity, climate change or health effects that we all pay for that are caused by the industrialists who our tax policies subsidize. Luckily, many of us are beginning to realize the hollow shell of capitalism is breaking down. The utter emptiness of positions taken by the ultra-wealthy are becoming clear to more and more people each and every day. It is natural and normal to fear the end of an era, but in our time we are poised on the verge of creating something better with which to replace the patriarchal, abusive and greed inspired bigotry, hatred and fear that we have allowed to fester for generations. The time has come for us to look for ways to bring our deeds in line with our words. We say that each of us is of value, yet we poison our neighbors by flicking the switches in our homes or tromping on the gas pedal. We say that anyone can become President, but they really have to have a cock. We say that through education we can achieve our highest calling, yet we refuse to listen to scientists who have devoted their lives to searching for the truth. Instead of debate, we are fed the corporate line, encouraged to bicker amongst ourselves about meaningless "issues" and to top it off we are expected to be happy with a steadily declining quality of life that requires more and more dollars in a contracting economy. We need more people to wake up to the fact that the most powerful classes have been lying to us about everything for generations. Asking them to change will not work. Voting for one millionaire instead of another has not helped. What we need is more ways to free ourselves from the grasp of the greedy, a bit of relief from the long arm of the corporations that reach intro our pockets seemingly with every purchase and some time to rest and recuperate from their relentless assault. Our families need time to heal, our bodies need clean air and fresh water to recuperate and our neighborhoods need the people to come back instead of running away from one another to try to make ends meet.

Don't expect the wealthy to give up their stranglehold on us easily. If we want anything better, we will have to fight for it. Those who have lied to us to pad their own wallets actually believe that we deserve nothing and are happy to make sure that is what we get. We need to stand up with one voice and say no to corporate domination, corporate welfare and inequality under the law that leads to the enrichment of the powerful at the expense of the majority of our population.

Blessed Be from the Deer Park Temple

Looking out from an auspicious spot, we often have an overwhelming level of conviction. It seems to come from embracing a wider perception. When the horizon retreats behind hill after hill, of which you have a commanding view, it would be odd if one did not feel a sense of both awareness of and participation in ones' surroundings. The Deer Park Temple near Madison, Wisconsin is one of these auspicious places. Serene and tranquil, nearly surrounded by nature, the wild is invigorating to visitors and the views of the countryside are amazing. Oddly enough, my brother and sister-in-law drive past this place twice every day on their way to work and back, but had never entered the driveway. It took me being with them, and being intent on visiting, that got them to stop. I saw the Wisconsin Public Television special about the building of the Deer Park Temple and have always wanted to go. This is a truly special place and is worth putting on your list of things to see when in or around the Madison area.

I have been designing on a set of assumptions throughout my entire life. These sets of data regard the rising and setting of the sun, the seasons and ironically, the forms of this temple fit quite well into the template that I worked up. The ratios of south facing overhang and portico could have been designed by my hand. The biggest difference is that I envisioned glazing over the southward aperture and this design is open. Perhaps if there were a weather curtain of sorts that would only be used during inclement weather or after nightfall, it would become more active solar. The intricate beauty of this design is both timeless and cutting edge. Both massive and spare, ornate and simple in equal measure. Again, at this location, the words of Ram Dass rang true in my mind's ear. first he gave us a source of reference by using Ha Fiz's poem. The fish trap exists because of the fish, once you have gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. "Words," Ram Dass continued, "exist because of meaning, once you have the meaning, you can forget the words. Where is the man who has forgotten words, so that I might have a word with him?" Being a young child I had every instinct to throw my hand in the air, (I had been trained well in school.) and run to him just to be in his presence. (I was still a bit wild at heart in the bi-centennial year 1976). Instead some overwhelming pressure to conform kept me from doing either. Instead I sat quietly by my mother's side, not wanting to call attention to one of the few females in the room and wondered why many of the adult men in the audience had nervous giggles and childlike behavior at the remark . Later I surmised that they had been completely unaware of either of these concepts and that they certainly were not sure what they would have to say in the off chance that they did begin to make sense of meaning not requiring words. The whole point seemed to be painfully missed by most there because the truth of the matter is that we just need to BE and it will all happen. Ram Dass claimed that we need to be together, but as my chronic readers will understand, the world has been subjected to the shrink wrap of the internet. Light speed communication exempts us from the need to be proximal. Be the person who makes you the happiest and you will soon find liberation from the lies that bind you to dysfunction. This may sound "finger pointy" but I acknowledge that It goes for me too, I'm guilty, but don't harp on it, continue to punish myself for these digressions and I try not to keep the ruse alive when I notice it.

When we find ourselves in a place...ready to move on, but stymied by our ego, it is well to remember the wise words of my friend Jim Baker, "When every key has failed, it is a good thing there's still the skeleton key." There are times that courting the angel of death is not only good for us, but essential. We all get wrapped up in our fictitious sense of ourselves, some even believe the lies to be true, but the only thing that can allow us to take that one step beyond what we were able to perceive or to do before, is to release the power that the lies have over us to create something in the way of relationship with the world around us. I have personally "executed" at least one "me" that needed to leave this plane of existence, so I can speak with authority that the lies we tell ourselves must die if we are to live.

Wise men and women have said for hundreds of generations that on our deathbed we will never pine for the pennies we squandered, or remember a single transaction made with greedy desire or deceit in our hearts. We will remember the days filled with the happy faces of the people we have loved, the warmth of our brethren and the tears of joy that we have shared in the warmth of one an others company that will make those last moments tolerable. Would it not be best if we would all live a little closer to the angel of death if for nothing else but to feel these sentiments more acutely and more urgently?

We are struggling under a cacophony of lies and deceptions that threaten to rear the world apart at the seams. Surely, there are those among us who have the quiet awareness of time and perception on their side. Can we not take one brief moment to allow ourselves to listen? Simple things, BEing, hearth, home, place. These are all that matter. The economic crash has brought millions of families closer together if only because they cannot afford to live apart. It has reduced travel and allowed a renewed connection to the land that is unprecedented in history. more people returned to the land to farm last year in America than in any year ever, in our history. Things are looking up, let's just hope that those young families will take the time to BE, first and foremost and from there, I have great confidence that they will do the right things as well as leaving the wrong things undone!

Dispatch From The Edge

Half the day yesterday was one of our first shots of winter, just a seeping mass really, but the massive bolus of arctic air brought temperatures which were to go below freezing for the first time. The Earth is still alive and some plants continue to hold on, out of stubbornness, or the luck of a coincidental upwelling of warm moist air. We lost forty degrees Fahrenheit (Twenty C), during the course of an afternoon and night. When the climate is tempered by one of the greatest lakes, that's a big deal. Some of my favorite places, one long day bicycle ride North are fifty per cent water, holding vast reserves of heat much longer than dry areas. Edge is the mystical area that is defined by changeability and flux. In so many ways we are all engaged in riding flux waves between edges, most just have not been defined or delineated yet. This alone is worth it's own post, but I digress.

I have heard the term stress line, roughly girdling the planet along the 45th parallel, used to describe an area where industriousness is not an option. If you are not putting something by at every possible opportunity, you won't make it 'til Spring. Here there is a portion of the curve of the surface that has, or used to have smaller farms, "Fortys", roughly one quarter mile by one quarter mile (402.3m X402.3m) were common and if you had eighty or 160, that was grand. just a short distance north, or at higher elevations, land parcels become larger and farms up to several hundred acres are not only common, but the rule. Beyond this it is forest only and not much is made of agriculture. The combination of soils, or lack of them and growing season create waves and pockets of atmosphere that either favor a farmer or undermine productivity, as small parcels in the North have failed, neighbors bought them out increasing their holdings. Remember, in the North, range and feed in the winter is the rule. This edge is breaking down as more land is put into grass fed meat production. Buying cattle that do not need to be overwintered allow land to survive without grazing pressure, perhaps even without the impacts of hay harvesting equipment.

The edge that I ride may be different than the farmer making decisions about how best to "use" their land, but a giant cadre of individual land owners are realizing that smaller scale and more sustainable practices can save money, reduce fuel and other off farm costs, hone away inputs of chemicals and water/energy, thus increasing profitability. The word culture, in agriculture is a testament to the difficulty that exists in bringing change. Many agricultural sector forces, like Monsanto or Cargill, banks and government agents, sway practices in the direction of doing, mostly what has always been done. The edge right now is occupied by those who take their responsibility to future generations seriously, creating a sacred space for food production, sustainably managed with miniscule inputs of petro-chemically derived inputs. The true steward of land protects the integrity of as many acres as possible, and one look at the way most farmers treat the living organism that supports all life on the planet, tells even the casual observer that they can't tell the difference between soil and dirt.

My garden will remain productive, long after the areas outside my fence have ceased, just because there is so much going on there, so many millions of organisms each full of water and metabolizing. Because my tiny little house sidles up next to a park, what surrounds me is mostly estuary, about 120 acres (48.56ha) lying in a corridor through which water flows both ways. This year, the water is so low, that we are entering new territory. Vast mudflats will be exposed and frozen in a different manner than they are used to for perhaps the first time ever.The edge has shifted so far in this one aspect that the outcome or magnitude of change cannot be calculated. When submerged, mud freezes and thaws very slowly and perhaps only changes phase, from frozen to thawed two times each winter. When exposed, there is the possibility of freezing and thawing daily. This spells the end for many organisms and when they die off, a clean up crew will be fed, perhaps overfed, peak and die off as well, cascading effects will follow. Organisms dependent  on the stability of the environment will either move on or face hunger.

The relative stability of edge, even though it is by definition, the flux between two or more ecotones is necessary to develop species dependent on that specific habitat. The watershed of the Great Lakes is relatively small compared to the size of the lakes themselves, when drought reduces the creeks, streams and rivers to a relative trickle, appropriate habitat often swings wildly, not even allowing migration time for the organisms best suited to inhabit it. The new normal is dislocation and inability to thrive at best. Inevitably, death awaits. This is why, rather than vast monocultures, sustainable approaches favor diversity. Nature never has a sole interest in "mind" God/dess, or whatever you call it designs for exponential increases until climax is achieved. It is most difficult to imagine the concept of climax lasting for hundreds, or perhaps tens of thousands of years, but for a forest, this is the rule, not the exception. What we have done to the face of the Earth is an aberration, facilitated by using up fossil fuels that took millions of years to produce in just 150 years.

When we first looked back at Earth from space, the Great Wall of China was the only man-made object that could be distinguished. That entire edifice was created with human power. Now we have several structures that dwarf both mass and square area disturbance visible from beyond the ecosphere. These newer structures and scars are made possible by burning vast quantities of diesel fuel, and reducing nearly infinitely the amount of brain that has to be trained to do the work. It took over a century after the advent of "modern mining" technology for ecologists to realize that if we stockpile soil at a higher elevation than the mine, covering the scars made later will be easier and at least create the possibility of reclamation. For all of time before that, we just threw soil downhill to choke the streams and leave the site forever.

Our knowledge has increased, but the people who do mountaintop removal just don't care. The line that we are left to follow lies between two regions. One side leads to continued exploitation and despotism, rampant raping of the Mother Earth and listening to her eternal voice and ability to bring forth life with two major differences from the approach of the colonizing exploiters. The earth first creates no waste, all is part of a great redistribution of wealth, of minerals, of nutrients, of oxygen and aerosols that increase health, life and vitality. Second, it is progressively enriching even the most remote areas, making the appearance, strength and interactions between organisms ever more stable and diverse. An exploiter always looks to bigger and better ways of getting something, nature gives everything away, knowing full well that it will be returned many-fold.

Whatever we can do to tip the scales in favor of stability, must be done. It may not be enough to save our species, but if we are lucky, we may be left with a somewhat inhabitable environment. With what we have learned, we can surely see that spewing toxic compounds into the air is not helping anything. The future may require more change in a shorter time than we can fathom, but our development through the ages only proves that this is what we should expect. We must begin to take stock of our environment in ways that may not be easy to calculate or record. Native populations the world over recognize the sacred nature of the environment and it is high time we all learn to see where we are more clearly.

A Brief History Of Wheat

I work hard to provide my readers salient information about topics that mean a lot to me...That makes it even more tragic when someone hijacks my content or spirals my reader's attention out of control, absorbs it into an advertizing loop, or undermining my ability to communicate. This post was about the indigestability of "modern" wheat that has resulted from rapid hybridization and selection for traits that, in turn have led to perverse mimics of the staff of life as well as other grains.
I included a link to a much better researched paper that helped me to understand more clearly, pitfalls of modern "agriculture".

Somehow, my link was overwritten by a gluten-free bake shop, which I do not endorse. Having never heard of this company before, I regret that any one would have been transferred to a bake shop from my blog. The best baker I know, who specializes in gluten free baking is my wife. She is currently not a purveyor of baked goods or baking mixes. If she were, I might consider talking her up a bit. Research on the topic of the changing "face" of grain over the centuries has led to the annihilation of genetic traits that required grain to develop terroir. The whole point of my post, before it was hijacked was to point out the curious possibility that humans have been adapted for centuries to eat local grains and the very diversity of genetic components in our food may also allow our adaptability to stay vital. The somewhat unscientific assumption behind this idea comes from thinking magically, perhaps, but isn't each thing we discover first perceived as novelty? I was talking more about how commercial interests were responsible for reducing biodiversity. On the other hand, they also remove the germ and all parts of the grain that would either attract vermin (by smell) or do anything that could potentially make life possible for the cultures of yeasts that they might introduce. What has become known as "sponge" to bakers today, resembles nothing that would have even been imagined even one hundred years ago.

The true fact that I wished to reveal was that modern loaves, even most that label themselves as whole wheat are more the result of a process that more resembles a chemistry experiment, duplicating endlessly the same exact experiment than eve two loaves baked the same day would have had just a few generations back. There is such a huge reliance on emulsifiers, yeast nutrient, adulterants and preservatives that most bread labels are nearly incomprehensible to anyone outside the corporate food pyramid. In the end, my point was that the corporados in charge of world food supplies are despotic and demonic, sacrificing human health and environmental integrity, once again, for profit.

I wrote much more detail and with much more elegance in my original post. I regret the loss of such a great story. The annotated version is: When I was a child, my grandfather worked at Holsum Bread. He was a union baker. At about age seven,  I asked him how they could use the word Holsum and outright imply that the bread was good for you. He tried to change the subject by saying something prophetic like, "You are gonna be trouble someday." Pasty fluff is not what humans evolved to utilize as a food source. I firmly believe that a huge part of our health crisis is caused by inadequate food, most especially our "grains". What passes for food in that category is corporate treason, terrorism of the worst kind. We get sick from this fake, and genetically very new, component in our food supply, we see allergy increases, ADHD, autism/Asbergers, auto immune diseases and digestive collapse, all increasing at alarming rates. Those who learn about food realize the difference between food and non-food. Twinkies, Wonder Bread, macaroni and sweet rolls are not food in the true sense. The damage and havoc that they create in our bodies are not worth the concentrated calories. Like an adrenaline rush, it may feel great in the short run, but in time has a detrimental impact. Unlike a terrorist, the food industry will never tell us that they are at fault for the attacks.

Talk to anyone you know who has discovered that they are gluten intolerant, it is as if you are held hostage by the bakers who cater to their needs, prices are exorbitant. The type and kind of nutrients, as well as the percentage of them in old world grains has evaporated under the hand of corporate influence. The mute response of our government to this assault on the food supply is suspect only because of the vast amounts of money that we are talking about. If we would charge corporations
for the public health threat that they represent, we would have all farmlands across our nation transformed to small scale organic and bio-dynamic farms within a generation. Again, all that we need is the will and commit to take action against those who would put profit over people.