If Dr. King were alive today, there is a good chance the 83-year-old civil rights icon would be standing side-by-side with the African American Harry Holt family in Dickson County, Tennessee, located just 160 miles east of Memphis, whose 150-acre farmland and well were poisoned with the deadly trichloroethylene (TCE) chemical from the leaky Dickson County Landfill.  The landfill is located just 54 feet from the Holt family’s property line.

In 2003, the Holt family and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) sued the city and county of Dickson, the state of Tennessee, and the company that dumped the TCE. And in 2008, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Sheila Holt Orsted and her mother Beatrice Holt filed a lawsuit against Dickson City and County governments seeking cleanup of alleged water contamination.  And after more than eight years of litigation, on December 7, 2011, a settlement agreement was finally worked out with the Dickson City and County governments. The county spent more than $3 million and the city almost $1.9 million fighting the black family.  However, the family’s legal battle did not end in December since the state of Tennessee, a defendant in the Holts’ civil rights case, did not settle. The case is scheduled to go to trial later this year.

Here are five reasons why on this MLK Day we should demand eco-justice for the black landowners in Tennessee.

The treatment of the Holt family is a clear civil rights violation of equal protection under the law. The discriminatory and differential treatment of the Holts at the hands of the state of Tennessee is a violation of their civil rights guaranteed under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Clearly, the U.S. is not yet in a post-racial era. Race still matters.

The right to clean water is a basic human right.  The poisoning of the Holt family’s well water and the failure of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) to protect them from environmental harm are clear human rights violations. On July 28, 2010, the United Nations, through Resolution 64/292, recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights.

The Holts’ toxic nightmare on Eno Road is the “poster child” for environmental racism. The United Church of Christ 2007 Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty report describes the poisoning of the Holts’ well and the government response as the “poster child” for environmental racism.  The Dickson case conforms to the national trend in which African Americans and other people of color make up the majority (56%) of the residents living in neighborhoods within two miles of the nation’s commercial hazardous waste facilities, nearly double the percentage in areas beyond two miles (30%).  They also make up more than two-thirds (69%) of the residents in neighborhoods with two or more clustered facilities. Nationally, African Americans are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger.

Toxic racism steals black health.  Harry Holt died of cancer in January 2007.  His daughter, Sheila Holt Orsted is recovering from breast cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, even though Caucasian women are slightly more likely to develop breast cancer than African-Americans, African-American women are more likely to die of the disease. The industrial solvent TCE is widely known to be harmful to humans. A 2011 EPA study found that TCE is even more dangerous to people’s health than previously thought—causing kidney and liver cancer, lymphoma and other health problems. This new EPA study lays the groundwork to re-evaluate the federal drinking-water standard for TCE:  5 parts per billion in water, and 1 microgram per cubic meter in air.

Toxic racism robs black wealth.  Poisoning of black land with toxic chemicals robs blacks of their wealth and widens the wealth gap between blacks and whites. Today, the typical white family has 20 times the wealth of the typical black family. That’s the largest gap in 25 years. This theft has robbed African American landowners of wealth that would normally be passed down to their offspring. This phenomenon is not unique to Tennessee. The world learned of this stolen legacy in the discriminatory treatment of black farmers at the hands of the USDA and their long wait for justice. And in December 2010, President Barack Obama signed a bill authorizing $1.25 billion dollars in appropriations for the Pigford II lawsuit after Congress approved the legislation in November 2010. According to the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, from emancipation to 1910, blacks amassed 15 million acres of land of which 218,000 black farmers are full or part owners.  A steady decline of black land ownership began after 1910 through theft, intimidation, discrimination, back taxes, and economic loss.

Finally, in the spirit of Dr. King, it is fitting that we lift up the Dickson, Tennessee case, a struggle that epitomizes the civil rights leader’s final campaign in Memphis involving garbage and human rights.

The Occupy Movement, fueled by the indignation of vast numbers of people who are increasingly disenfranchised and displaced by the modern marketplace economy, recognizes the primacy of place in social change that moves us toward a just and sustainable future. This aspect of the movement is articulated by the physical occupation of public spaces, and more recently of homes that have been foreclosed with their occupants evicted by a corrupt banking system.

The primacy of place in the movement reminds us that when people are denied access to the primary productivity of the land and the seas, they are relegated to a status of enforced dependency on an abstract marketplace primarily constructed to serve the interests of the rich and the powerful. The Movement’s emphasis on space also reminds us that we cannot live entirely within the realm of the abstract idea of the marketplace. We need real food, non-virtual water, wearable clothing, and shelter — all made available to us through the natural processes of the earth, captured and molded by human effort.

In what is perhaps a first step in (re)connecting with place in a world where the fantasy of an endlessly growing and satisfying marketplace is crumbling, the Occupy Movement articulates vital needs for human dignity: the need for efficacy — to be heard and to have one’s welfare and voice taken seriously within collective processes of decision making and action — and the need for dignified and adequate means to obtain physical sustenance to satisfy one’s basic needs. Both of these needs converge in the concept and construct of place.

Reviving place as a focal point of human life and community is essential to social justice and sustainability. When I invoke place in this context, I conceptualize it as a nexus of physical space (both the natural world and the built environment) and community life (that includes economic activity, interpersonal relationships between people and between people and environments, cultural identity and expression, and governance processes). We make our places, and our places make us. Place is a reciprocal relationship that continually emerges through the forces of nature and human activity.

In the techno-world of modern industrial societies, many of us have lost sight of place as an organizing principle in our lives. We find that virtual spaces may indeed satisfy many of our needs as environments for building social bonds and friendships and for purchasing just about anything we might need or want (as long as we have the money to do so, of course), but we still rely physically upon tangible places that provide the necessities of life, even if our needs are mediated and obscured by the modern phenomenon of the marketplace.

Whether we recognize it or not, we are intimately connected to places, though in the globalized world, the reciprocal bonds between people and place, once paramount to the processes of community prosperity and health, have largely been broken. We abuse the land and the sea, sometimes without even knowing it, but because we need nature, we cannot completely sever our ties to places.

Take, for example, our water. It comes to us through processes of the earth that occur in some particular place, even though most of us know little of the detail of how water appears in our taps. Food offers another example. Since we, as yet, only metaphorically eat words, our food must be raised, cultivated, hunted, or gathered from particular places with particular environmental characteristics, and most often it must be cared for and harvested by people living in those environments. Both food and water derive from particular social and ecological contexts. They are not abstractions, and their concreteness bonds us with natural and social processes that are hidden behind the facades of grocery store shelves and Internet shopping malls — the “places” where we make the purchases that support the way we live and provide the things we need to stay alive.

We live a paradox in which intimate physical relationships to nature and social processes of production are juxtaposed with ignorance and neglect of the places and people who sustain us. Our very lives are in the hands of people and ecologies that may be entirely foreign to us intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. We may never see the face of one person who has picked the bananas we eat throughout our lives, but we are connected to the banana pickers and to the ecology of the banana fields from which the fruit comes. Through our bodily existence and our own internal ecologies, we are connected to others and nature. In many ways, we are others and nature, for without them we would cease to exist.

And as human-caused depletion and damage of the natural world continues, the threat has become ever present: we may indeed cease to exist without a radical (re)conceptualization of, and (re)connection to, place.

Many indigenous societies have conceptualized the fundamental relationship between humans and nature as reciprocal, believing that people must respect and care for nature if nature is to provide for people. We cannot allow the continued plunder of the land and the sea to take place in our name, masked behind images of clean and orderly grocery store shelves, spotless storefront windows, and online shopping centers. I’m also convinced that we won’t protect that which we don’t know, and consequently don’t value. It takes years of paying attention and continual, mutual interaction to know a place, both the human community that is part of the place and the natural world within which that community is embedded. Growing into a place is a long term process of relationship building, and to do it well, we will need to learn to stay in place. In a world where careerists are rewarded for their willingness to relocate, this is no small challenge.

But we will have to stay put if we are to learn what we need to know to live sustainably on the land. To recover the health of our damaged places, we will need to learn what can and can’t be done sustainably within particular environments, and we will have to end the process of robbing that which we need from other places because as we deplete distant places, we threaten the survival of other people and the health of the biosphere — we behave as tyrants, and we threaten both nature and our own existence. We will need to (re)learn the art of neighborliness and of working together in spite of our differences, and we will need to make decisions embedded in a context of our love for each other and for place — and rooted in a desire to sustain that which we love beyond our short lifetimes. It’s time to rejoin the community of life, to belong in mutually sustaining ways. We need to (re)construct places in ways that bring to an end this era of loneliness.

The process will not be easy, especially because so much social power has been concentrated for so long in so few hands. But at least people around the world are recognizing this reality and working to change it. People are seeing the concentration of power and wealth itself as perhaps the central driver for social injustice in the globalized world. This recognition is a huge step in the right direction. It’s also important to recognize that virtually all of the processes that contribute to (re)building healthy places also serve to devolve social power to local contexts.

The (re)conceptualization and (re)construction of place can be both challenging and exhilarating. It’s an endeavor that can take many forms that coalesce in a long term process of articulating who we are in place — community gardens; potluck dinners with neighbors; bioregional resource management; reading, study, and discussion circles; governance work in local politics or in community organizations; farmers markets; community art and theater projects, formal and informal education; developing and using local currencies; localized production, retail, and banking; localized renewable energy generation; and simply authentic listening among friends and neighbors – any activity that helps to build a sense of community and to increase the provision of basic needs from localized sources. Community building and (re)localization of our economies will help us build the resiliency that we will need to weather the converging crises of climate change, peak oil production, and economic instability.

The Occupy Movement may well be the introduction to a new story about who we are in place. The plot line for this story will be grounded in communities and bioregions, not in the marketplace. And it’s a story for which there is no final draft. Chapters will be written and rewritten over time, and if we can write them in ways that continually deepen our efficacy, improve the health of our environment, and strengthen reciprocal ties between ourselves and our places, we just might come to occupy a place called home.

•  This article initially appeared in New Clear Vision.

On November 14th, two water wells were demolished in Baqa’a, east of Tammun, robbing hundreds of families of the ability to irrigate their land. On October 13, farmers received demolition orders on several water wells in Kufr al-Deek, a village in the town of Salfit near Nablus. In September, Israeli military forces demolished 6 water wells belonging to Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley, and have threatened to demolish six more. In all these cases, the unilateral IOF actions are explicitly illegal because these wells were built with full permission from the Palestinian Authority, in areas of the Valley supposedly under exclusive Palestinian civil and military control.

The injustice is especially pronounced in the Jordan Valley. On the 8th of September, 50 military jeeps, trucks and bulldozers sealed off Al Nasarayah as a closed military zone, and proceeded to illegally destroy 3 water wells and confiscate the attached water systems, the pumps of which cost $40,000 each to install. Five days later, the IOF returned to Al Nasarayah to demolish 2 more wells, stopping along the way to destroy another well east of Tamoun. The next day, IOF soldiers entered the village of Al- Fa’ara, near Nablus, to photograph and record the GPS coordinates of 6 more wells intended for demolition.

The IOF’s actions are illegal under Israeli, Palestinian and international law because these 6 water wells had permits from the Palestinian Authority, and operated in the 5% of the Jordan Valley designated after the 1994 Oslo Accords Area A, under full Palestinian civil and military control. The motives behind Israel’s actions on the ground, however, emerge into the light of day when seen in the context of other recent Israeli policy resolutions — a plan announced in September to uproot and transfer some 27,000 Bedouin out of Israel-controlled Area C in the West Bank (most Area C Bedouin live in the Jordan Valley), and a decision by the Settlement Division in early July to increase by 130% the land given to settlers for farming in the Jordan Valley, and to increase from 42 to 51 cubic meters per year the amount of water given to settlers to irrigate such farmland.

What do the destruction of Palestinian Bedouin water wells in the Jordan Valley, the transfer of Palestinian Bedouin citizens out of the Jordan Valley, and the expansion of land and water given to settlers in the Jordan Valley, all have in common? Together, they highlight the oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley that has typified Israeli policy since the Valley became occupied territory in 1967.

A focal point of this oppression — and a crucial locus of the Palestinian Bedouin struggle to resist the occupation and remain in their homeland — is the issue of water. For as Israel has seized absolute control over allocation and distribution of the resources of the 3 water aquifers under the West Bank for use on both sides of the Green Line, the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, and especially the Bedouin population of the Jordan Valley, have seen the steady drying-up of the once-flowing springs around which they have built their villages, have found themselves unable to dig sufficient wells of their own because of crippling Israeli regulations, and have watched themselves become dependent on the exorbitant prices of their oppressor for access to so basic and indispensable a human right.

Far more than in the rest of the West Bank, the struggle over water for the Jordan Valley Bedouin is a struggle between life and death. The ‘draining away’ of Palestinian water rights in the Jordan Valley — to borrow the title of a 2010 report by Ma’an Development Center — has a long and tumultuous history. When the West Bank became occupied territory in 1967, the Israeli army established a military order to the effect that all West Bank water came under control of the state, and Israel’s national water carrier, Mekorot, seized water aquifers and developed wells throughout the West Bank to serve Israel and its newly expanding settlements. Between 1967 and the 1994 Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Bedouin in the Jordan Valley saw first their land, and then their water, disappear behind the heavily-guarded gates of settlements, where settlers were granted ample supplies of the latter in order to make the former bloom.

The situation grew increasingly dire until a brief ray of hope in 1995, when Article 40 of the Oslo II agreements set an interim agreement, designed to be revised within five years (but still in effect to this day), whereby approximately one quarter of West Bank water resources would come under Palestinian Authority control, and a Joint Water Committee would be established, in the words of the 2009 World Bank report ‘Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Development: West Bank and Gaza’, “to oversee management of the aquifers, with decisions to be based on consensus between the two parties.”

However, Oslo brought with it new institutionalized systems of oppression. Since Oslo 1 in 1993 consigned 95% of the Jordan Valley to Area C status (under full Israeli and military control), neither the Area C Bedouin communities themselves, nor the Palestinian Authority, nor the constant swarm of international NGOs, can commence with unregulated construction of their own initiative, because, in the words of Jordan Valley Solidarity, a grassroots movement, “across Area C, access to basic services such as water is restricted through the debilitating permit system which is regulated by the Israeli Civil Administration. Obtaining a permit for any form of construction –even for water- is notoriously difficult, nay impossible. This prevents Palestinians from building new infrastructure, or from making improvements to existing facilities.”

Atop this blanket layer of oppression, which effectively and intentionally squelches all trace of community autonomy, the Palestinian Bedouin in the 95% of the Jordan Valley which is Area C are deprived of the ability to improve their access to water resources through three interlocking buereacratic systems of control — the Joint Water Committee, where a group of Israeli and Palestinian decision-makers permits or denies water access or rehabilitation projects proposed by the Palestinian Water Authority (for Areas A, B and C); the Israeli Civil Administration, which, if an Area C project is permitted by the Joint Water Committee, pulls that project through a thicket of bureaucratic, technical limitations and scrutinies, effectively crippling its implementation if not grinding it to a halt completely; and, last but not least, the Israeli army, which ceaselessly continues, as it sees fit and irregardless of law, to demolish water wells, tankers, and infrastructure on the ground in Bedouin communities across Areas A, B and C, even if the proper permits are possessed.

Thus, what was promised under Oslo II to be consensus decision-making regarding water resources is in reality institutionalized unilateral control of the oppressor over the oppressed, and due to this matrix of Israeli control, it becomes nearly impossible for the Palestinian Authority, as well as most NGOs, to commit themselves to meaningful, sustainable infrastructural development in Area C of the West Bank.

At the level of the Joint Water Committee, details Ma’an’s ‘Draining Away’, “the fact that decisions are arrived at through consensus effectively means that Israel can veto Palestinian projects… [also], the PWA is not consulted regarding extractions from the aquifer for Israeli use (settlers or otherwise), which is not in accordance with the governance rules under Article 40. Nor does the Palestinian Authority have the right to access data on Israeli use of water resources, whereas Israel reserves the right for continual access to water resource data in the West Bank… around 150 water and sanitation projects are still pending JWC approval for “technical and security reasons”, while only one new Palestinian well project for the Western aquifer has been approved since 1993. In contrast, Israel is able to construct pipelines to its illegal settlements without going through the mechanism of the JWC. Thus Israel effectively has full control of water resources in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

The World Bank’s 2009 report confirms the non-consensual reality of the Joint Water Committee’s supposed ‘consensus decision-making’ — “[the] JWC has not fulfilled its role of providing a supportive governance framework for joint resource management and investment… politics and policy issues have limited the number of project approvals…fundamental asymmetries — of power, of capacity, of information — put into question the role of JWC as a “joint” institution…Israel takes unilateral water-related actions outside the JWC… only one third (by value) of projects presented to the JWC 2001-8 have been implemented… (1) the process is in general slow; (2) the rate of rejection of PA projects is high; (3) the PWA has almost never sought to reject Israeli projects (only one has not been approved); and (4) well drilling projects and — until very recently -wastewater projects have had very low rates of approval… in order to solicit approvals on vital emergency water needs, the PA is forced into positions that compromise its basic policy principles. Such an asymmetrical power balance (one party, Israel, has virtually all the power and is not driven by emergencies), together with the observed track record of the JWC, have contributed to a loss of trust and confidence and to very poor outcomes (for Palestinians) that undermine the rationale for the committee as a de facto “joint” approach to water sector management.”

Deeb Abdelghafar, Director of Water Resources for the Palestinian Water Authority, relates how “we submitted our application two years ago to build two new production wells in the northern part of the Jordan Valley, [to supply] water for domestic and agricultural purposes, and we know that they have reviewed it, but up to now we have not gotten any response, and we are not optimistic… we have more than 80 agricultural wells that need to be rehabilitated in Jordan Valley, and we have had these wells in the JWC for more than 4 years, but unfortunately we could not get final approval from Joint Water Committee.”

Even if the Joint Water Committee approves a project, its effective implementation is crippled by the red tape of the Israeli Civil Administration. Abdelghafar continues: “the most difficult step in the process for us is the Civil Administration because there are more than 14 departments, and each department must approve on the project. So we can never get a project through the civil administration, because some departments approve and some do not.” Ayman Rabi, Assistant Director of the Palestinian Hydrology Group for Water and Environmental Resources Development, an NGO working to improve access to water and sanitation services in the Occupied Palestinian territories. echoes Abdelghafar’s frustrations that “there is a big problem now in implementing anything in Area C, and that is one of the major hindrances right now to our work in that area….we have to ask [for a] permit and this generally we do through Palestinian Authority, and then they are applying through the Joint Water Committee… [but] even if the Joint Water Committee approves any intervention or project, the Israeli Civil Administration requests more documentation procedures, the process is longer, they put more conditions for implementation in Area C, so you might end up not implementing any activity because of this long and complicated procedure.” The World Bank report quotes an anonymous donor who reports the same difficulties- “first thing we request is a letter from PWA approving the project. Then we go to the JWC. But then we have to go to the Civil Administration – and there delays of 2-3 years are normal. In fact, we have no positive outcomes for Area C.”

Since nearly every proposal for the construction of water infrastructure in Area C is shut down by the twin juggernauts of the Joint Water Committee and the Israeli Civil Administration, NGOs must focus their efforts, to quote Abdelghafar, on “civil emergency intervention — by delivering small water tankers, by supplying them with water tanks, by constructing rainwater cisterns — it’s emergency humanitarian relief.” While important, this small-scale aid is carried out in lieu of large-scale, long-term projects that would strike at the root of the problem, rather than merely seeking to alleviate its effects. Says the World Bank report, “in the light of the difficulty of implementing major projects, the reasonable response has been short term emergency projects, often small projects with NGOs, and these smaller projects have become a very large part of water sector development… however, the multiplicity of small donors and multiple projects are more difficult to fit within a planning framework… NGOs have a comparative advantage in a grass roots field presence and a certain demand-driven character…[they are] nimble… but are small scale and short term” (p.63).

In the village of Hamsa, near the Hamra checkpoint in the Jordan Valley, Abu Riyad, who has been living in Hamsa with his family for thirty years, must now travel long distances to get water for drinking and irrigation, after two huge water wells constructed for nearby settlements have dried up the springs upon which for generations the community of Hamsa has relied. Says Ma’an’s report ‘Draining Away’: “unconnected to the water network, Abu Riyad must now travel to Ein Shibleh for his water. Nor does the family know the quality of the water and if it has been treated. While he is fortunate not to have to pay for this supply, it costs 200 shekels to transport 10 cubic metres of water. As the water covers all of the family’s needs, from drinking, washing and drinking water for the animals, Abu Riyad must transport this amount every four days. With the price of fuel rising, this means that water represents an increasing financial drain for the family…the community receives little support. While several tanks and water coupons have been donated from local and international NGOs, this is only ever for limited amounts of time, and thus provides only temporary relief.”

Indeed, Abu Riyad is fortunate to receive water for free. Ayman Rabi of the Palestinian Hydrology Group laments that, regarding many of his organization’s aid initiatives, “[the recipients of water] are asked to contribute, unfortunately. Although we do not like this, it is something that has been agreed on by the [Palestinian] Water Authority. They have been asked to contribute by 10 shekels, though we are not happy with this arrangement, for each cubic meter. and then we refill them whenever they ask us to.”

Many organizations, instead of delivering water, deliver water tanks to imperiled communities, so that Bedouin may transport water from filling points. However, by delivering water tanks, instead of connecting communities to water networks, these NGOs, though well-intentioned, often compound the problem by forcing the Bedouin to drive long distances, through a myriad of checkpoints, to filling points in Areas A or B, in order to maintain a constant water supply. The World Bank report decries that “occupation checkpoints and curfews severely limit tanker access to communities… there are 36 fixed checkpoints across the West Bank, including the gates of the Separation Barrier, that seriously affect access of water tankers and maintenance teams to communities…. Given the risks faced by drivers for their physical safety coupled with the longer routes, the price of water through tankers has increased exponentially”.

The case of Abu Riyad illustrates how expensive this practice can become for Bedouin faced with no alternative. According to Fathy Khdirat of Jordan Valley Solidarity, “to use water tankers in this way costs the Bedouin 30 shekels per cubic meter of water, while their neighbors in Areas A or B pay on average between ½ and 3 shekels per cubic meter of water.” The perpetuation of this inequality works in the occupation’s favor, by encouraging Bedouin to move out of Area C into Areas A or B.

In addition, mobilizing short-term emergency relief is much more expensive for the NGOs than would be a project to install permanent pipelines linking the Bedouin to water sources. Fathy Khdirat estimates that a recent $700,000 initiative to accomplish the former could have achieved the latter with 10% of the budget. Between the Joint Water Committee, the Israeli Civil Administration and the IOF, however, the possibility of installing permanent water infrastructure for the Bedouin is practically foreclosed from the beginning, so that aid initiatives are forced to work within the restricting, oppressive parameters of Israeli law. Says the World Bank report, “at best, the PA role is reduced to improving water and sanitation services to Palestinian communities within the constraints laid down…stakeholders recognize the inefficiency and high costs of such fragmented and contingency development but see no alternative.”

The bueraucratic matrix of corruption and control, in which both Israeli and Palestinian political and civil organizations are enmeshed, causes on-the-ground human rights abuses in clear violation of The Right To Water, enshrined in General Comment no. 15 of articles 11 and 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights by the United Nations Economic and Social Council in Geneva, in November 2002. The document stipulates that “the right to water contains both freedoms and entitlements. The freedoms include the right to maintain access to existing water supplies necessary for the right to water, and the right to be free from interference… by contrast, the entitlements include the right to a system of water supply and management that provides equality of opportunity for people to enjoy the right to water.” The covenant goes on to list specific water entitlements — the right of “physical accessibility: water, and adequate water facilities and services, must be within safe physical reach for all sections of the population. Sufficient, safe and acceptable water must be accessible… within, or in the immediate vicinity, of each household, educational institution and workplace…”; the right of “economic accessibility: water, and water facilities and services, must be affordable for all. The direct and indirect costs and charges associated with securing water must be affordable…”; and the right of “non-discrimination: water and water facilities and services must be accessible to all, including the most vulnerable or marginalized sections of the population, in law and in fact, without discrimination”.

Ma’an’s report, ‘Draining Away’, clarifies that, in regards to the Right to Water enshrined in this document, that “while this right does not entitle people to unlimited use of free water or to household connection, it does mean that water and sanitation services should be affordable, that water and sanitation facilities should be in the immediate vicinity of the household, and that water should be used in a sustainable manner. This right exists irrespective of an individual’s ethnicity, gender, age, religious or political beliefs… it also stipulates that individuals and communities can participate in, and influence, decision making relating to water and sanitation services on national and local levels.”

Here are some quick facts taken from ‘Draining Away’, which should be measured against the UN-enshrined Right to Water-

In October 2009 Amnesty International noted that “180,000-200,000 Palestinians living in rural communities have no access to running water, and even in towns and villages which are connected to the water network, the taps often run dry.”

According to the WASH monitoring project, the cost of private tankered water in 290 communities in the West Bank has increased between 100-200% for one cubic meter since the start of the intifada.

40% of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley consume less water than the minimum global standard set by the World Health Organization, which is set at 100 liters cubed per day.

56,000 Palestinians in the Jordan Valley consume an average of 37 Million Cubic Meters (MCM) of water per year, as compared to an average of 41 MCM for only 9,400 settlers.

Palestinians are charged more than their counterparts in Israel for water: Mekorot charges Israelis NIS 1.8 per cubic metre, compared to an average of NIS 2.5 per cubic metre for Palestinians.

There is near-universal consensus that there exists in the Jordan Valley a systematic policy of oppression and ethnic cleansing, touching upon not only water but all aspects of life for the 15,000 Bedouin who are unconnected to any water network in the 95% of the Valley designated Area C. Says Deeb Abdelghafar of the Palestinian Water Authority, “the Jordan Valley is a unique area from the Israeli point of view. They are trying to [establish] control over this area, and they are trying to prevent any permanent water infrastructure in order to prevent the people to be there… they don’t want to support the existence of these people, they want to immigrate the people outside of this area.”

Advocates like Fathy Khdirat of Jordan Valley Solidarity, a grassroots movement that works to build infrastructure for the Bedouin of the Valley, are determined to encourage those under occupation to resist the oppression, and remain in their native land. “I spent all my life under the Occupation,” insists Fathy, “and I want to see a better future for my children. I am from there, and I will not shut up.”

In June, Pfizer announced it was ending arsenic-containing chicken feed which no one realized they were eating anyway but its arsenic-containing Histostat, fed to turkeys, continues. Poultry growers use inorganic arsenic, a recognized carcinogen, for “growth promotion, feed efficiency and improved pigmentation,” says the FDA. Yum.

And in August, Cargill Value Added Meats, the nation’s third-largest turkey processor, recalled 36 million pounds of ground turkey because of a salmonella outbreak, linked to one death and 107 illnesses in 31 states. Even as it closed its Springdale, Arkansas plant, steam cleaned its machinery and added “two additional anti-bacterial washes” to its processing operations, 185,000 more pounds were recalled the next month from the same plant.

Since the mad cow and Chinese melamine scandals of the mid 2000′s, a lot more people think about the food their food ate than before. But fewer people think about the drugs their food ingested. Food animal drugs seldom rate Capitol Hill hearings which is just fine with Big Pharma animals divisions since if people knew the antibiotics, heavy metals, growth promotants, vaccines, anti-parasite drugs and feed additives used on the farm, they would lose their appetite. Besides, people aren’t Animal Pharma’s primary customers anyway and the long term safety of animals drugs isn’t an issue, since patients are supposed to die.

One of the late Sen.Ted Kennedy’s last legislative fights was about the overuse of livestock antibiotics. “It seems scarcely believable that these precious medications could be fed by the ton to chickens and pigs,” he wrote in a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2007 (PAMTA) which has yet to pass. “These precious drugs aren’t even used to treat sick animals. They are used to fatten pigs and speed the growth of chickens. The result of this rampant overuse is clear: meat contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria sits on supermarket shelves all over America,” said Kennedy.

Because antibiotics make animals use feed more efficiently so they eat less and control disease in confinement farming’s packed conditions at the same time, they are practically the fifth food group. On a turkey farm with five million hens, antibiotics would save almost 2,000 tons of feed a year says an article in a poultry journal.

And when the FDA tried to ban cephalosporins in 2008, one type of antibiotic crucial for treating salmonella in children, it became apparent just what Kennedy was up against. Two months after the FDA announced a hearing about a cephalosporin “Order of Prohibition” in agriculture, the regulatory action had morphed into a “Hearing to Review the Advances In Animal Health Within The Livestock Industry” thanks to lobbyists from the egg, chicken, turkey, milk, pork and cattle industries.

“Order of Prohibition”… “Hearing to Review the Advances In Animal Health Within The Livestock Industry,” same idea, right?

At the House Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry hearings, the National Turkey Federation’s Michael Rybolt defended antibiotics as a cost savings to consumers. “The increased costs to raise turkeys without antibiotics is real,” he said. “Today at retail outlets here in the D.C. market, a conventionally raised turkey costs $1.29 per pound. A similar whole turkey that was produced without antibiotics costs $2.29 per pound. With the average consumer purchasing a 15 pound whole turkey, that would mean there would be $15 tacked on to their grocery bill.”

Conventionally grown turkeys are even a better deal when you consider the cost of antibiotics!

And antibiotic-based turkey farming is downright green, said Rybolt, calling 227 acre turkey operations, “small family farms.” Without them, more land would be needed to grow crops and house the animals because of the “decrease in density.” And, with 175,550 more tons of feed needed, there would be “an increase in manure.”

When the FDA capitulated to industry and turned the cephalosporin prohibition into a salute to animal “advances,” former Kansas governor and former dairyman John Carlin, asked, “What changed in less than five months? Certainly the problem hasn’t gone away.”

This month, the FDA also rejected petitions to ban human antibiotics like penicillins, tetracyclines and sulfonamides in livestock filed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Environmental Defense, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT), and the Union of Concerned scientists, some filed over 12 years ago. Why?  “FDA cannot withdraw approval of a new animal drug until the legally-mandated process,” said an FDA spokesman. The process includes an “evidentiary hearing,” perhaps like the cephalosporin advances.

Of course. germs in turkey and other meat, even antibiotic resistant germs, are neutralized by cooking–but drug residues are not. A report last year from the USDA’s inspector general accuses U.S. slaughter houses of releasing products to the public with excessive drug levels in them and charges that, “The effects of these residues on human beings who consume such meat are a growing concern.”

Nor are the antibiotics just in the meat! Scientists at the University of Minnesota found antibiotic residues in corn, green onions and cabbage after growing them on soil fertilized with livestock manure. The drugs siphoned right up from the soil in just six weeks.

A quick look at the Code of Federal Regulations for turkey drugs does not whet you appetite for Thanksgiving. There are several arsenic turkey drugs approved to provide an, “increased rate of weight gain and improved feed efficiency,” say the official guidelines. But they are also “dangerous for ducks, geese, and dogs,” and must be discontinued,  “5 days before slaughtering animals for human consumption to allow elimination of the drug from edible tissues.” Whew.

Halofuginone, another drug given to turkeys to kill pathogens, “is toxic to fish and aquatic life” and “an irritant to eyes and skin,” says the Federal Code. “Avoid contact with skin, eyes, or clothing” and “Keep out of lakes, ponds, and streams.” Bon appetit.

Drug-based farming has cut the time to “grow” an animal almost in half while doubling the market size of the animal itself.  For example, chickens were once slaughtered at fourteen weeks, weighing two pounds and are now slaughtered at seven weeks, weighing four and six pounds.

But the brave new food techniques come at a price because the animals’ organs can not always keep up with the metabolic frenzy. Birds “fed and managed in such a way that they are growing rapidly,” are at risk of sudden death from cardiac problems and aortic rupture, say poultry scientists.

Growth drugs in turkeys may also “result in leg weakness or paralysis,” says the Federal Code, a side effect that a turkey slaughter house worker reports firsthand. Many turkeys arrive at the House of Raeford, in Raeford, NC with legs broken or dislocated, he told me in an interview and, “When you try to remove them from their crates, their legs twist completely around, limp and offering no resistance.” The turkeys, “must have been in a lot of pain,” says the worker, but they don’t cry out. “In fact the only sound as you hang them, he says, is the “trucks being washed out to go back and get a new load.”

The undercover employee’s reports of the “live hanger” culture at the House of Raeford, in which workers pulled the heads and legs off turkeys when they were stuck in crates and worse, led to Denny’s suspending its business from Raeford, the nation’s seventh largest turkey producer. The slaughter house is also infamous for a chlorine spill that killed a worker in 2003, an ammonia spill that evacuated  two towns the next year and a murdered worker in 2006.

Still, the mother of all turkey drugs is the asthma-like drug ractopamine, marketed as the “Medicated Tom Turkey Feed” Topmax. Approved for turkeys only two years ago, figures for Topmax use in turkeys are not yet available but the same drug is now used in 45 percent of U.S. pigs and 30 percent of ration-fed cattle.

There are two reasons ractopamine has raised safety questions. One is that its label reads:

WARNING: The active ingredient in Topmax, ractopamine hydrochloride, is a beta-adrenergic agonist. Individuals with cardiovascular disease should exercise special caution to avoid exposure. Not for use in humans. Keep out of the reach of children. The Topmax 9 formulation (Type A Medicated Article) poses a low dust potential under usual conditions of handling and mixing. When mixing and handling Topmax, use protective clothing, impervious gloves, protective eye wear, and a NIOSH-approved dust mask. Operators should wash thoroughly with soap and water after handling. If accidental eye contact occurs, immediately rinse eyes thoroughly with water. If irritation persists, seek medical attention. The material safety data sheet contains more detailed occupational safety information. To report adverse effects, access medical information, or obtain additional product information, call 1-800-428-4441.

The other reason is that ractopamine is not withdrawn at slaughter. In fact, it is begun as the animals near slaughter and started during turkeys’ last 14 days. It is actually pumping through their systems as they arrive on the killing floor.

Like antibiotics and arsenic, ractopamine is given to turkeys to make them grow faster. It is similar to clenbuterol, a performance enhancing sports drug that is banned in the US, for both humans and livestock, and elsewhere. But ractopamine is also banned in Europe, Taiwan and China, where 1,700 ractopamine “poisonings” were reported and ractopamine-produced pork was seized in 2007. (You have to worry when China calls a food unsafe.)

Ractopamine caused actual riots in Taiwan in 2007 when 3,500 Tawainese pig farmers, some carrying pigs, threw dung and rotten eggs at police and military soldiers over the rumor that a ractopamine ban would be lifted.  “Get out, USA pork” and “We refuse to eat pork that contains poisonous ractopamine,” they chanted for hours according to Taiwan News.

Reports of ractopamine’s lack of safety are not hard to find.  In 2009, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) termed ractopamine a cardiac stimulator. Ractopamine residues “represent a genuine risk to consumers,” wrote a medical  journal article, citing “long plasma half-lives, and relatively slow rates of elimination.” And a report from Ottawa’s Bureau of Veterinary Drugs says that rats fed ractopamine developed a constellation of birth defects like cleft palate, protruding tongue, short limbs, missing digits, open eyelids and enlarged heart.

The FDA is well aware of ractopamine’s downside. In 2003, three years after the drug was approved for use in U.S. pigs, the FDA accused its manufacturer, Elanco, of withholding information about ractopamine’s “safety and effectiveness” and “adverse animal drug experiences” in a fourteen-page warning letter.

Elanco, said the FDA, failed to report furious pig farmers phoning the company about “dying animals,” “downer pigs,” animals “down and shaking,” “hyperactivity” and “vomiting after eating feed with Paylean,” and also suppressed clinical trial information. But, thanks to same probable lobbying that reversed the cephalosporin ban, the FDA approved ractopamine for cattle the following year and for use in turkeys in 2009! Last year, the FDA enlarged the approval for cattle.

Turkey meat produced with ractopamine is not the same as normal meat by Elanco’s own admission! “Alterations” in muscle were seen in turkeys fed ractopamine like an increase in “mononuclear cell infiltrate and myofiber degeneration,” says its 2008 new drug application documents. There was “an increase in the incidence of cysts,” and differences, some “significant,” in the weight of organs like hearts, kidneys and livers. (“Enlarged hearts” had been seen in test rats feed ractopamine in the Canadian studies.)

Still, ractopamine, like antibiotics, is being hailed as “green” and for lowering the carbon footprint. It has “positive environmental benefits for livestock producers in terms of decreased nitrogen and phosphorus excretions,” extols one journal article. It results in a “reduced amount of total animal waste,” unless, of course, you count the manure coming from Big Pharma.

An example: During a meeting of environmentalists about shaping the public conversation on our most pressing ecological crises, folks were wrestling with how to present an honest analysis in accessible language — how to talk about the bad news and the need for radical responses, without turning people off. During the discussion about the effects of climate change, Wright offered a simple suggestion for a slogan: “No more water, the fire next time.”

Those words from a black spiritual, made famous by James Baldwin’s borrowing for his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, are usually invoked metaphorically. Wright was suggesting that we might want to consider the phrase literally. After a summer of drought and forest fires in Texas where I live, Wright’s comment reminded me that climate disruption isn’t part of some science-fiction future, but is unfolding around us in ways that are both complex and hard to predict, but devastating simple: We’re in deep trouble, ecologically and culturally, as we try to face up to unprecedented planetary problems in a society in denial.

Wright is one of our most astute observers of these troubles. His willingness to face these issues, and his ability to grasp the interplay of complex systems, is no surprise to readers of his book The Death of Ramon Gonzalez: The Modern Agricultural Dilemma, first published in 1990 and revised for a 2005 edition. Looking at one region in Mexico, Wright explains how political and economic power, combined with the arrogance of experts who believe they have all the answers, have radically changed people, communities, and land — mostly for the worse.

Though Wright speaks bluntly about these grim realities, he hasn’t given up trying to change the trajectory of a society that so often denies or minimizes the threat. A retired professor of environmental studies at California State University, Sacramento, Wright is the chair of the board of The Land Institute, which is committed to the research and organizing necessary for a truly sustainable agriculture. His writing also focuses on those issues — he is co-author of To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement in the Struggle for a New Brazil (with Wendy Wolford) and Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation, and Food Sovereignty (with Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer).

Because Wright has a knack for presenting complex ideas in plain language, I asked him to respond to some crucial questions about how to understand our predicament and options. Can we face reality honestly without feeling overwhelmed? Wright suggests we can.

Robert Jensen: Your invocation of “the fire next time,” with its Biblical roots, suggests a moral warning and the potential catastrophe if we are not up to the moral task. Before we get to questions of politics and science, what do you think is the right moral framework for understanding the ecological crises?

Angus Wright: There certainly is a moral question, but I think we in the environmental movement have wasted a lot of time dealing with it at the wrong level. I get frustrated with the deep tendency of so many Americans to be more worried about the task of saving their souls rather than solving the problem. I am not as interested in the purity of intention or personal practice as I am concerned about correctly identifying the nature of problems and getting to work in an organized way to solve them.

The emphasis, for example, on whether individuals are hypocritical when their personal consumption is out of sync with their political/ecological views has been a diversion. It undermines effective organization and helps to maintain the myth that it is personal rather than collective action that really matters. When we think we are saving ourselves, we tend to become self-righteous in ways that separate us from the other people we need to work with in order to effect societal change. The important moral question is social, not individual. How do we collectively figure out ways to live that don’t require that we destroy the planet’s capacity to sustain life?

RJ: What are the two or three most important things we need to understand about humans, psychologically and politically, if we are to avoid that destruction?

AW: Humans are capable of immense creativity and sacrifice, which has been demonstrated in crisis situations such as wars, famines, migrations, and in the building and defense of homes and communities. In my work, I have been frequently reminded of the incredible sacrifices Mexican immigrants make to earn a little money to send back to their families over years, sacrifices that have both an individual and a community aspect. Many of us know how hard and how creatively our parents and ancestors worked to provide us with the lives we now take for granted. Of course, such effort can have negative as well as positive aspects — for example, the creation of the majority European culture of the Americas at the expense of Native Americans and Africans. People are also capable of stunning complacency, greed, and divisiveness.

The secret we seek is what inspires humans to act positively and creatively in the face of huge challenges. As humanity faces the environmental crisis, this is its greatest challenge: How do we elicit the kind of collective and individual action and creativity that will be needed? I think previous experience implies that it cannot be fear alone, nor opportunity alone, nor persuasion alone, nor organization alone, but a blend of these elements, with much else. We have been able to lump these things together successfully in the past in something called patriotism — a powerful force for good and ill — and now we need something like a planetary patriotism. But no planetary patriotism can be built without acknowledging and dealing with the major things that divide us as well as the challenge that must unite us. Putting on a happy face won’t cut it.

RJ: If we have a considerable body of knowledge concerning the seriousness of the ecological crises and we have the capacity to respond to threats, what are the key impediments to change? Is the problem in the political leadership of recent decades? The economic system? Something we can’t yet identify?

AW: One problem is an economic system that impels each company within it to pursue growth — each company must seek new investment funds by demonstrating greater growth potential than its competitors. Another problem is a political system that is so heavily corrupted by corporate cash, exacerbated by the absurd legal fiction that a corporation is a person with constitutional rights to free speech. Without those problems, we could have the kind of largely publicly funded campaigns adopted by other countries. I also think that for all its virtues, the constitutional checks and balances built into our system have brought us to gridlock — we really might want to consider the advantages of a parliamentary system in which the executive branch is headed by the leader of the majority party, as in England and many other parliamentary democracies.

We have to be enlightened enough to take aggressive and expensive actions primarily for the benefit of our children and grandchildren. While individuals and families have been able to do this throughout history, it has proven very difficult for whole societies to do so. All these barriers are so daunting that we become overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it all. Here we face fundamental philosophical and psychological problems at both the individual and collective levels.

RJ: You said the solutions aren’t going to be individual. But how do you evaluate the efforts of people who focus on their everyday lives? That can range from being diligent about recycling, to buying “green,” to biking to work, to planting a vegetable garden. If we don’t naively believe those things can solve all our problems, are they worth doing?

AW: Our most important problems can only be solved by collective action — new policies and laws taken by government. That requires that we act, above all, as citizens. I have watched over the past 40 years as nearly every important institution in our society has gradually shifted to encouraging us to see ourselves as individuals and consumers as opposed to group participants and citizens. We are all aware of this in advertising, but it has also become a powerful trend in education and in government itself. We are encouraged to believe that we can bring the changes we need by exercising our “consumer vote” in the marketplace more effectively than by exercising our citizenship — not just in voting, but also in public debate, in participating in political parties, in the exercise of our professional judgment, in educating our children, in participation in labor unions and professional associations, in speaking out in our communities. Our “vote” through marketplace purchases can only bring about very limited change, and by thinking of ourselves more as consumers than as citizens we diminish our very dignity as human beings. We become a mouth that eats rather than a voice that speaks.

That said, I am all for making the changes at the individual level that can help to create a culture of frugality, help us realize that we don’t really need the great quantity of junk our civilization produces, help us understand that we can make major social changes while actually improving our lives. Most of us want sociability and conviviality more than we want consumer goods. We can set a good example for others by showing that we can live more happily by consuming less. All of this can also help us live within a discipline of conscious choice rather than of allowing advertising to manipulate us.

RJ: In my experience, academics tend to focus on narrow questions they think they can answer. You seem to gravitate toward big questions that defy definitive conclusions. I wonder if that’s because of your training and teaching — you’re a historian who taught environmental studies. We might say that the object of your inquiry has been everything that happened before today, and the interconnectedness of everything happening today. What lessons have you learned about intellectual life from your career?

AW: When Wes Jackson (president of The Land Institute) recruited me to help him create an environmental studies program at Cal State-Sacramento, I was the all-purpose humanities and social science person in a small core faculty. I learned all I could from Wes about biology and genetics, and from other colleagues about oil and mineral depletion, nuclear power, city and regional planning, environmental law. It was a wonderful kind of second graduate school experience that lasted through an entire career.

I had always been attracted academically to what might be called the “pan-disciplines” such as geography, anthropology, and history, disciplines that can reasonably take on almost any topic in human affairs. Salina, our small Kansas city, was known nationally for having one of the best public libraries of its size, and I spent a lot of time camped out in its stacks. My parents — intensely intellectual people who were too poor to go to college — assumed that any reasonable and moral person would be interested in nearly everything, and they hadn’t been beaten into submission by professors to think differently. They were good models who were eager for knowledge of all kinds. They were looking for clear words and straightforward thinking, and they assumed that good thinking led to social responsibility and political action, to which they were dedicated.

RJ: Thinking about that need for clarity, one last question. As an environmentalist, you can’t ignore the stark reality of the data about our ecological crises. As a historian, you can’t ignore the record of human successes and failures. When you weigh all that up, what advice do you have for how we should face the future? Many people find it hard to face the changes that are likely coming, which I once heard you describe as “dramatic and potentially highly unpleasant.” Are we facing “the fire next time”? Is there a way out of the trap we’ve set for ourselves?

AW: I don’t know if there is a way out, but we have to try. My own expectations are pessimistic because I don’t see enough people having sufficient awareness, understanding, and determination to bring about the major changes we need.

And of course, contradicting what I just said, we don’t really have to try. We only really have to try if we want to maintain our self-respect. If we want to stumble forward drunk while whistling in the dark, we could choose that. I maintain a certain faith that many people are going to make the right choices, and we can hope that is enough. I think Gramsci had it right when he said that he lived with “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” And you have to take that seriously from a guy who wrote while in prison for his political beliefs.

Through the museum, community projects, fairs, workshops and media, CEDICAM educates the public and campesinos, or small scale farmers, about the history of the Mixteca’s land, belief systems, traditions, architecture and agriculture and how they can help remedy current problems. They promote the use of traditional and appropriate technologies (sustainable and affordable tech) such as reforestation, development of corn seeds through selective breeding, sustainable water and soil preservation techniques, green composting, and milpas, an organic agricultural system that produces large yields and mixes a variety of crops, usually including maize (corn), beans and squash. CEDICAM also works with groups such as Witness for Peace to share knowledge with visitors that can benefit communities in other parts of the world.

For 10 days in September I was a member of one of the delegations to Oaxaca organized by Witness for Peace (WfP). Our itinerary was loaded with experiences like our meeting at CEDICAM, focusing on global trade, food sovereignty, migration, indigenous rights and agro-ecology (the application of ecological principles to agricultural techniques). WfP is an international grassroots organization founded in 1983 in response to U.S. Government-supported violence in Nicaragua perpetrated by Contra soldiers. They advocate peace, justice and sustainable economies by changing harmful U.S. Government and corporate policies. The WfP Oaxaca office opened in the Summer of 2006. During this period state violence against striking teachers seeking living wages and improved working conditions led to many deaths and human rights abuses.

Carlin Christy and Tony Macias, our delegation’s WfP guides and interpreters, also shared a wealth of information about the histories of Mexico, WfP and corporate globalization as well as practical skills to improve our group’s cohesion and functionality such as anti-oppressive practice and consensus decision making. All of the delegates also had much knowledge and a diversity of experience to contribute to these discussions and to our conversations with Oaxacan farmers and activists.

As explained by Eleazar, Mixteca means “place of clouds” because long ago it was an environment with regular rainfall and lush vegetation. Today it’s one of the poorest regions in Mexico and one of the most eroded areas in the world. The importation of goats, sheep, pigs and construction methods by the Spanish led to mass deforestation and soil erosion. More recently, some farmers use chemical fertilizers, pesticides and machinery that damages and compacts soil leading to increased crop failures, water runoff and worsened erosion. Besides the ecological damage, a devastated local economy made worse by unjust free trade policies has forced many young farmers to emigrate. Eleazar and CEDICAM’s goal is to provide the community with hopeful alternatives to preserve the land and natural resources so that people don’t have to leave for the U.S. and elsewhere to support themselves and their families.

Before our arrival at CEDICAM we met with a variety of allied groups based in Oaxaca doing equally important and beneficial work on related issues but with differences in focus and approach. The first organization we visited was an NGO called Services for an Alternative Education (EDUCA). According to Miguel Angel Vasquez de la Rosa, a founding member of EDUCA, their focus is on two main goals, democratization of Oaxacan communities and the defense of rights of disenfranchised Oaxacans. One of their projects is “Our Rights Are Born From Our Roots” a campaign to train and organize communities through forums and media on the issue of rights; namely, self-determination, rights to land and resources, political rights of women and rights to education.

Another project, “The Initiative for Peace and Justice”, is a partnership with allied groups to create a truth commission for state-sanctioned crimes against activists. Miguel also shared recent data about Oaxaca State: its population is about 3.8 million people, it has over 500 municipalities, 16 indigenous groups and 8 major geographical regions. It’s the second poorest Mexican state after Chiapas with high child malnutrition and maternal death rates and approximately 76% living in poverty. The majority of work in Oaxaca is connected to agriculture and many farmers lost their livelihoods after the implementation of NAFTA in the 90s. He estimates that today about 60% of youth entering the job market are unemployed, forcing many to emigrate or enter the black market.

The next morning we visited Zaira de la Rosa Jiminez, Martha Miranda and Pete Noll of Puente a la Salud Comunitaria, a group promoting food sovereignty through cultivation and distribution of amaranto, or amaranth crops. Amaranth is a plant related to quinoa and is indigenous to Asia and Mesoamerica (in fact, it is one of Mesoamerica’s oldest crops). Puente views amaranth as an ideal crop to help overcome the problem of malnutrition. It’s higher in protein than rice, wheat and corn, contains more fiber and less carbohydrates and is gluten-free. Amaranth is a practical and affordable crop because it’s highly drought-resistant, easily harvested, grows quickly and is easy to cook. After having had a chance to try amaranth in the forms of breakfast cereals, snack bars, and drinks, I would add that it’s also delicious.

That afternoon we met with farmers in the milpa system where the amaranth plants are grown with corn, zucchini, and pata de leon, a type of red flower used in Day of the Dead celebrations. At the end of the day we travelled to the library in Mazaltepec to meet with town authorities, campesinos, mothers, and their families. We discussed our respective backgrounds and their struggles as a community including protecting crops from GMOs, inability to compete with cheap subsidized corn from the U.S., and how that has contributed to economic problems forcing people in the community to emigrate.

Following Puente, we joined a large contingent from Red Autonoma para la Soberania Alimentaria (RASA), an autonomous network of people working for food sovereignty through training workshops, urban gardening and sharing of knowledge and resources. Representatives including Aerin Dunford, Lydia Zarate Ubieta and Jorge Narvaes Perez showed us some of the current projects of RASA members such as mushroom cultivation, a rooftop garden, a cornfield and apricot orchard on the city outskirts, and even invited us into the home of some of the RASA members where we had a feast featuring some of the best tortillas and oyster mushrooms I’ve ever tasted.

From there we returned to the central district of Oaxaca City where we met with Wilfred Mendoza, a member of the board of directors of the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez, Oaxaca (UNOSJO). They’re a prominent social organization which promotes sustainable economies, self-determination and respect for indigenous culture through media, technical assistance, fairs, educational workshops and conflict resolution for rural landowners. Wilfred sees agro-ecology as an ancient technology whose resurgence is essential for food sovereignty and a fundamental part of defending indigenous rights, a view shared by Beatriz Salinas and Esperanza Pilar Chagoya Minguer of the Center for Indigenous Rights Flor y Canto, whom we visited the next day.

Flor y Canto is a human rights center that promotes indigenous rights with a focus on women’s empowerment and the protection of natural resources through education, denouncement of rights violations, legal defense, and support of allied groups such as the People’s Committee for the Defense of Water. They see an extreme polarity between indigenous cultures that care for the earth and a capitalist system that commodifies and destroys the earth. Many laws are dictated by money and capital so one of Flor y Canto’s roles is to create spaces where solidarity and humanity are respected. By helping indigenous communities obtain water through well construction projects and legal defense of water rights, they’re also addressing the problem of emigration. The national water commission ConAgua charges for water at price levels beyond what many campesinos can afford. During drought years such as in 2006, waves of migrations occurred because farmers couldn’t access enough water to irrigate crops.

After our delegation’s meeting with CEDICAM, we travelled further out to the countryside to San Pedro Coxcaltepec where we had an opportunity to stay with a local family of subsistence farmers dealing with many of the issues we learned about throughout the previous week. While there we had an opportunity to speak to town elders, learn about different aspects of the local culture, learn more about the work involved in managing a milpa, as well as participate in the work by shoveling and mixing green compost. This was an especially valuable segment of the delegation because it gave us a glimpse into the daily experience of Oaxacan campesinos, revealed a sense of the beauty and challenges of life in the Mixteca, and gave us time to bond with the family. It’s one thing to read about struggles of farmers or even hear about them through allied advocacy groups, but to meet campesinos who express their concerns directly while sharing their hospitality (as we also did with Puente and RASA) is an empathic experience creating a personal connection to the issues we came to Oaxaca to learn about. This will undoubtedly inspire all of us in the delegation to make use of the knowledge passed on to us in our own lives and to share it with others. Given the current political and economic situation in America and most of the world, strategies for food sovereignty, education and community organizing will be increasingly important for all of us.

Two weeks after returning from the delegation I was at the Occupy Seattle demonstration where I had a chance encounter with a protester attending the rally because he was “tired of getting screwed by government.” I told him I was tired of everyone getting screwed by transnational corporations and financial institutions backed up by corrupt governments. He went on to say “Obama cares more about Mexicans than the American people,” to which I replied “I recently got back from Mexico where I heard firsthand accounts of how our government and Wall Street harms Mexican workers as much as American workers if not more. They wouldn’t need to migrate if they could support their families back home.” Rather than argue, he muttered “Well, they’ve been screwing all of us in the 99%…” before wandering back into the crowd, which wasn’t a bad outcome but sort of a letdown. I was ready to help him understand in greater detail how and why immigration and mass unemployment are both symptoms of neo-liberal policies at the core of economic crises in America, Mexico and around the world. It’s possible he simply didn’t feel like debating, but perhaps someone with a common but erroneous view that Mexicans (presumably immigrants) are a source of their problems was, in fact, with a few words and widened context, able to accept that they’re as much victims of an unjust system as ourselves.

Amidst the masses in Westlake Park, consisting of a diversity of ages, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds, I visualized the Occupation Movement strengthening their solidarity, not only within separate communities but with the global 99% uniting against the wealthiest 1% who benefit most from the current system and are the true source of the most pressing social-economic-environmental problems of our time. If this were to happen we might stand a chance to ensure a better world for future generations. La lucha sigue! (The struggle continues!)

Under this plan, 7 million acres (or 11,000 square miles) of land in the southeast corner of Colorado, and 60 million acres of air space (or 94,000 square miles) over Colorado and New Mexico would be given over to special forces testing and training in the use of remote-controlled flying murder machines. The full state of Colorado is itself 104,000 square miles. Rhode Island is 1,000 square miles. Virginia, where I live, is 43,000 square miles.

The U.S. military (including Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines) is proceeding with this plan in violation of the public will, new state legislation on private property rights, an exceptionally strong federal court order, and a funding ban passed by the United States Congress, and in the absence of any approved Environmental Impact Statement. Public pressure has successfully put the law on the right side of this issue, and the military is disregarding the law.

I spoke with Jean Aguerre, whose organization “Not 1 More Acre“  is leading the pushback against this madness. Jean told me she grew up, during the 1960s, on the vast grasslands of southeast Colorado, where the Comanche National Grasslands makes up part of a system of grasslands put in place to help the prairie recover from the dust bowl. The dust bowl, Aguerre says, was the worst environmental disaster in the United States until BP filled the Gulf of Mexico with oil. The dust bowl had been brought on by the government’s policy of requiring homesteaders to plow the prairie. The recovery programs created large tracts of land, of 100,000 acres and more, owned by “generational ranchers,” that is families that would hand the ranches off to their children.

Aguerre said she grew up on a ranch of incredible beauty and natural wealth, with a 165-million-year-old dinosaur track way and petroglyphs from 12,000 years back. Grasslands are the most threatened ecosystems in the world because they are so accessible, Aguerre says, and the only intact short grassland left in this country is the one being targeted for the “51st state.”

Round One began in the 1980s. Fort Carson, an Army base in Colorado Springs, had been kept open after World War II and now began looking for more land. The people of the area were opposed. The U.S. Congressman representing the area agreed to oppose any land grab. But Senator Gary Hart took the opposite position. As a result, during the early 1980s, the Army Corps of Engineers started telling ranchers to sell out or risk seeing their land condemned and taken from them.

The ranch next to Aguerre’s is called Wine Glass Rourke. It was sold to a shill, as Aguerre describes the buyer. He ran the place into the ground with too many cattle, she says, and then sold it to the military, “And they were off and running!” With condemnations the military put together 250 thousand acres. Ranchers, along with their cattle, were moved off their own land by federal marshals. “We didn’t know when we’d be next,” Aguerre says of her own family.

Luckily for the people of Colorado and New Mexico, and all of us, Aguerre got involved in politics. She became a political director for Congressman Tim Werth who later became a U.S. senator. Aguerre took him to see the Wine Glass Rourke ranch and told him “Let’s take it back.” Werth dedicated his staff to the effort for three years, resulting in the transfer to the Forest Service of 17,000 key acres.

The Army used its new land less than twice a year for maneuvers, but caused horrible environmental damage whenever it did. That was the case for about 30 years, until the activity of recent years made everything that came before look sensitive and sustainable.

In the meantime, people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were theorizing the transformation of the U.S. military into a force for robotic warfare. Aguerre believes it was in 1996 that a decision was made that the military would need a robotic warfare center. Around 1999 the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement was created. This precedes the more specific Site Environmental Impact Statements. The U.S. public, just like the public of any foreign nation where new U.S. bases are being planned, was told nothing.

In 2006, Aguerre was working in Oregon when friends started asking her to come home and help because something big was happening. An Army land expansion map had been leaked that showed plans for taking over 6.9 million acres, the whole southeast corner of the state. Aguerre thought she would come home for two weeks but has never left. An Environmental Impact Statement for the site was about to be released, and Aguerre knew that meant the project was pretty far along. She formed organizations and found a lawyer in Colorado Springs named Steve Harris to help. The two of them, she says, were absolutely dedicated to NEPA and FOIA. NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. FOIA is the Freedom of Information Act of 1966. “NEPA is intended to prevent our government taking our world apart piece by piece without our knowing it,” explains Aguerre.

Aguerre and others persuaded the area’s county commissioners to vote against the military’s plans in 2006, and the state legislature to pass a private property rights bill in January 2007 — a bill that required approval of such plans by the state legislature.

Ken Salazar was the military’s hired servant. He had been Attorney General of Colorado from 1999 to 2005. He was a U.S. Senator from 2005 to 2009. President Barack Obama has made him Secretary of the Interior. Around 2007, Jean Aguerre recounts, Salazar held a public meeting in Pueblo, Col., with about 300 ranchers packing the room. He turned his palms up to the ceiling and announced: “I will lift the golden curtain that falls at the end of El Paso county so that prosperity can flow onto the eastern plains.” This meant that military spending was economically beneficial. Military expansion, people were being told, was good for them — even if it stole their families’ land, and regardless of what momentum it created for the launching and continuing of wars.

“Instead of putting together frameworks for nonproliferation,” says Aguerre, “Ken Salazar worked to destroy the last intact short grass prairie because the money was too good.”

Senators Wayne Allard, who would join the military lobbyist company, the Livingston Group, within weeks of leaving the Senate, and Ken Salazar passed an authorization for taking land as part of the 2007 John Warner Defense Authorization Act. “None of the ranchers knew they were in line to be condemned for the second damn time,” says Aguerre.

John Salazar, Ken’s brother, at this time represented Colorado’s third congressional district, while Republican Marilyn Musgrave represented the fourth. Musgrave was persuaded by ranchers that there was no need for the government to take their land. Aguerre worked with Musgrave’s staff to draft a one-sentence funding ban. Aguerre and her allies then organized massive public pressure to recruit John Salazar as a Democratic co-sponsor. Ken Salazar failed in his effort to block this measure in the Senate. The ban passed both houses and became law, but it must be renewed every year.

In 2009, Aguerre and her allies won a federal court ruling throwing out the military’s Environmental Impact Statement with harsh and unequivocal language — “one of the strongest court orders under NEPA,” says Aguerre. By 2008, the military had begun using its land a lot more, and the court ruling did not stop them.

The funding ban, too, is not stopping increased activity. This past year, the funding ban was missing from a committee chairman’s markup in which it had appeared in previous years. Not 1 More Acre and its allies pressured Third-District Congressman Scott Tipton. People from all over the country phoned his office. They were told that as non-constituents their views did not matter. Aguerre advised people to reply: “When you pick my pocket you don’t ask what district I’m from.” Tipton was won over, and the funding ban, for what it’s worth, remains for now.

Nonetheless, says Aguerre, the military is proceeding with and increasing trainings and environmental destruction daily .

Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado and Tom Udall of New Mexico don’t receive high marks from Jean Aguerre. “Mark Udall on Armed Services and Michael Bennet on Agriculture sit with their thumbs in their pie. Udall has never once come to southeastern Colorado and looked young ranchers in the eye and said ‘this is why we need this military takeover of your lands.’”

Aguerre continues: “And Tom Udall puts out this pap the other day, mumbo jumbo about the Air Force. It’s not Air Force; it’s Special Operations. Aguerre said that her group and others are preparing a comment letter seeking legal standing to challenge the Air Force, and potentially to pry loose more information from the iron grip of our “transparent” government. Aguerre points out that the Air Force Special Operations Command Environmental Assessment was written by SAIC, a global military contractor that also makes voting machines.

“We found out that the state national guard is completely involved in UAV warfare,” says Aguerre. “So when your house floods and you don’t have the national guard there, they may be remotely piloting something somewhere else.”

Aguerre says that in 2006 she knew of four countries that were manufacturing armed UAVs, and that now she knows of 56. So the argument that drones keep “people” out of harm’s way (with people redefined to mean U.S. citizens) doesn’t hold up very solidly. We have also already had a suicide bomb attack on a drone piloting location and had drone pilots commit suicide, not to mention the risks of long-term blowback, the damage being done to the rule of law, and all the human beings killed and injured from among the non-U.S. 95% of humanity.

Aguerre asks scientists who love unarmed UAVs to consider the full effect of supporting such technology. I would ask environmentalists to consider the full effect of not resisting the destruction of what Not 1 More Acre describes as:

• unique bioregions of canyon lands, forested mesas, grasslands and riparian systems providing habitat for diverse flora and fauna found nowhere else on Earth and the largest block of native prairie remaining on the High Plains;
• restored Dust Bowl lands – Comanche, Kiowa and Rita Blanca National Grasslands — offering robust safe haven to threatened and endangered species of plants and animals, including rare insects and reptiles yet to be named;
• wild rivers and complex wetlands vital to native fish, migrating birds, unique wildlife and environmental health.

I would ask opponents of drone warfare to consider the likely impact of setting aside 60 million acres of air space for testing drones.

“We cannot allow the sacrifice of our democracy to politicians who are bought by military contractors,” says Aguerre. “If they are able to get this 51st state for robotic warfare, I think the economy will be irretrievably lost. These are unbelievably beautiful and pristine lands. Our rural areas are where the genetically modified seeds are being planted, where the lands and mountains are being mined, and where the military is going to destroy an area the size of a state, because the rural people are so few. Gary Hart was able to attack the last short grass prairie without political cost.”

Why is there no political cost? Because “we can’t get the word out.”

After all, we don’t just give such things away in today’s society — everyone’s supposed to make their own living and pay for their own things, including shelter. We exist in contradiction. Many of the values we hold dear and try to instill in our children, such as the value of sharing, are devalued in the way we actually live. We remind our children to share their toys while, at the same time, we demonstrate with our actions that “greed is good;” that we highly value private, guarded cocoons nestled away from the troubles of others; and that individual accumulation of material wealth is the mark of success. A natural world of plenty made this ethic of greed possible — but this world is changing.

Resource depletion and scarcity may drive us closer to cooperative ways of living and away from the cultural impulse to compete with each other. We may have to share our tools and our toys, our knowledge and our time — our very lives may depend on it. We’ll need each other to provide shelter from the environmental and economic storms that are brewing. This notion is a frightening prospect to many of us, but if we face coming challenges together, we may have more to gain than to lose.

Sustainability as Relationship

Environmental economist James Pittman defines sustainability as “the long-term equilibrium of health and integrity maintained dynamically within any individual system (organism, organization, ecosystem, community, etc.) through a diversity of relationships with other systems.” In other words, sustainability is about healthy, long-term relationships that are mutually beneficial, among people and between people and nature. Seeing sustainability this way makes a lot of sense and gives us a solid foundation for action.

In a world of rapidly depleting fossil fuels and other resources, we won’t have the luxury to go it alone. We’re going to have to learn to share. Every household won’t be able to have its own extension ladder, its own snow blower, its own truck for hauling, its own mower, and many other tools marketed to individual families. In the shrinking economy that fossil fuel depletion will bring, some of us will be moving in with relatives and friends, as is already happening as a result of the Great Recession, an economic event driven at least in part by high fossil fuel prices.

In our hyper-individualized world, we’re taught not to depend on anyone. Having to do so means we’re somehow inadequate when, in actuality, community interdependence is the heritage of all people everywhere. We would not have survived and thrived in communities and as a species without it. Community interdependence is human. It also forms a crucial foundation for relationships that can and must be maintained over the long haul — if we are to survive and prosper in an age of material limits.

Humans aren’t meant to go it alone anyway. We’re highly social creatures, a trait that is fundamental to the meaning of our lives and our success as a species. Without powerful social learning processes, we wouldn’t have been able to develop the technologically advanced societies we have today — ironically, societies that have come to use technologies in ways destructive to the natural world that is the basis for our very survival.

But our sociality hasn’t always been, and currently isn’t always, turned toward destructive ends. In many traditional and indigenous cultures, selfishness and hoarding are not considered pathways to a prosperous and fulfilling life. One’s livelihood and wellbeing are intimately tied to the livelihood and wellbeing of everyone within the community. A diffuse reciprocity is the currency of the community. People give to others and know that they can count on the community in times of need. The relationships that grow from this interdependence embody a form of social security not based on money. In this time of great economic and monetary instability, we may come to find sooner rather than later that our relationships of interdependence are our most stable and immediately available form of social security.

And this change could bring us good things. We know that the relentless drive for economic growth is quite literally devouring the natural world and leaving behind a long term legacy of poison and waste. If we can find security and fulfillment through healthy, reciprocating relationships with one another and the places we call home, we just might avert the worst of the disasters that surely await us if we stay the present course.

We also might find that we don’t feel so alone and empty. We might live more meaningful lives because everyone’s efforts, knowledge, and talents will be needed as we collectively move through a period of great turmoil into an era of natural limits. In a future where our relationships truly matter, we can belong and we can matter in profound and immediate ways simply through playing our humble parts in our families and communities.

I don’t wish to imply, however, that relationships are easy, especially given our social training in the modern age. Insecurity and neuroses are consciously and continually instilled within us by powerful business interests that see us primarily as consumers to be targeted with advertising. We’re told over and over again in the barrage of corporate messages we receive that we’re not lovable and that we need ever more products to overcome our inadequacies. We’re also taught to consume shallow forms of entertainment that divert our time and attention from our important relationships. Radical individualism, rampant personal insecurities, and defensiveness will prove to be very challenging obstacles to community building.

What’s more, in today’s world, we gain our security primarily through making money rather than forming lasting bonds with others. Our attachments are often purely emotional and highly changeable. If we have a conflict with a person, we can simply write that person off because we don’t perceive him/her as crucial in some way to continuing our way of life. We can find other friends. Our relationships tend to be transitory and shallow. We feel we don’t have to put up with anything from anyone, and our cultivated intolerance keeps us from getting to know others deeply in both their positive and negative aspects, a requisite process for intimacy. It seems the shelter we won’t give — or get — is not only physical, but emotional and spiritual as well.

We currently face, therefore, not only the extremely pressing challenges of environmental damage and destruction, but the social challenges of rebuilding community. Still, I believe that rebuilding community is not only possible but required for sustainability. I believe that, through rebuilding community, we can individually and collectively come into our own. If ever there were a time to shine a light on what is humane in ourselves and to bring those values into the work of community building, that time is now.

But we will need to develop relationships that go beyond our human communities if we are to live sustainably. We will need to repair our relationship with nature.

The Realm of Sustainability: Community, Nature, and Place

If there’s one relationship that’s suffered perhaps more than most in the modern world, it’s our relationship with nature. And yet, we depend on nature for literally everything necessary to our physical wellbeing. Nature gives us fresh water to drink, we engage with nature to obtain our food, and we breathe the air that nature provides.

We also draw emotional and spiritual sustenance from our relationships with animals (perhaps most notably from our relationships with our pets) and from the time we spend in our gardens and parks, near streams and rivers, and gazing at the stars or a summer sunset. I would be hard pressed to find a single person who has not perceived him- or herself as having a deeply meaningful relationship with at least one aspect of nature: a farm, a trail, a city park. I include these “human” spaces within our discussion of nature because we, like all living creatures, are part of nature. It is with nature that we co-create the spaces in which we live and produce our food.

If we are part of nature and nature is within us, we imperil ourselves in our neglect and abuse of the environment. It is in healthy, reciprocating partnership with nature that we must rebuild and reinvigorate our communities, especially if we are to live in a world with much reduced and much slower travel options, a world in which going elsewhere and shipping in abundance from afar simply are not options.

In his insightful book Community and the Politics of Place, political scientist Daniel Kemmis reminds us that even people who have lived in challenging environments have often been able to maintain healthy, long-term relationships with nature without extensive monetary resources. These societies have developed effective social learning and support networks that have allowed them to survive — and even at times thrive.

According to Kemmis, people who are rooted in a place for cultural or economic reasons — people who must survive where they are — don’t have the luxury of separateness or simply moving on to greener pastures. In such a community, if a good barn is necessary to survival and someone needs a new barn, everyone in the community must help build it, whether or not all parties “like” one another. They have to help because mutual aid is quite literally required for their survival. If the networks of mutual aid and assistance are not carefully and consciously maintained, all will suffer, and the consequences could be devastating or even fatal.

These requisite networks of mutual aid and assistance, according to Kemmis, are the basis for what he calls “public values” — a set of beliefs and practices for living well in a place that is shared among all community members regardless of their personality differences or their minor grudges and gripes. These values, according to Kemmis, also form a foundation for building deep and abiding relationships across difference. They can also help prepare a community to address social and environmental challenges.

Strengthening social learning and support networks is therefore a vital strategy for community resiliency. And when the notion of community is contextualized to our places and extended to nature more generally, strengthening these networks is also a highly appropriate strategy for sustainability in challenging times.

We should aim to create a stewardship of intimacy with each other, the land, and nature with reciprocity as our grounding principle. If we do, we just might build the shelter we need.

• This article initially appeared in New Clear Vision.

The farmers used to assure us of the quality, giving a little history of how the grains had been improved by knowledge sharing between farmers, with the best quality seed being adopted.  The system had an in-built informal ability to improve the quality of the wheat grain.  This method of sharing expertise and the use of knowledge passed through the generations were applied to every aspect of farming and fruit orchards to improve the quality and quantity of the produce.

An article on GRAIN website entitled “Iraq’s new patent law: a declaration of war against farmers” gives the origin of this law and its detrimental effect on agriculture in Iraq thus:

When former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) administrator L. Paul Bremer III left Baghdad after the so-called “transfer of sovereignty” in June 2004, he left behind the 100 orders he enacted as chief of the occupation authority in Iraq. Among them was Order 81 on “Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety.”  This order amends Iraq’s original patent law of 1970 and unless and until it is revised or repealed by a new Iraqi government, it now has the status and force of a binding law.  With important implications for farmers and the future of agriculture in Iraq…The purpose of the law is to facilitate the establishment of a new seed market in Iraq, where transnational corporations can sell their seeds-genetically modified or not, which farmers would have to purchase afresh every single cropping season.

For generations, small farmers in Iraq operated in an essentially unregulated, informal seed supply system. Farm-saved seed and the free innovation with an exchange of planting materials among farming communities has long been the basis of agricultural practice.  This is now history. The CPA has made it illegal for Iraqi farmers to re-use seeds harvested from new varieties registered under the law.

This patenting law, in many instances, involves the pirating of knowledge gained by farmers sharing their knowledge and experience through generations:

Such kind of “biopiracy” is fuelled by an Intellectual Property Right (IPR) regime that ignores the prior art of the farmer, and grants rights to a breeder who claims to have created something new from the material and knowledge of the very farmer.

The article concludes with the following words:

While political sovereignty remains an illusion, food sovereignty for the Iraqi people has already been made near impossible by these new regulations. Iraq’s freedom and sovereignty will remain questionable for as long as Iraqis do not have control over what they sow, grow, reap and eat.

Is there no end to the suffering of the country of my birth, Iraq, and its people?

A leading figure in the sustainable agriculture movement, Jackson has been pursuing the science and tweaking the strategy for more than three decades, building an impressive body of knowledge with his colleagues at “The Land,” as it’s known to everyone there. (The group also has produced an impressive full-bodied bread that was on the dinner table during the festival, made from an intermediate wheatgrass grain they’ve developed and dubbed “Kernza.”)

But, perhaps ironically, my faith in Jackson’s vision deepens not when he speaks from the depth of his knowledge (or when people happily bite into the bread) but when he emphasizes the uncertainty of what he knows. More on that, after some background.

Jackson, who co-founded the research center in 1976 after leaving his job as an environmental studies professor at California State University-Sacramento, believes that shifting from fragile annual monocultures to more hearty perennial grains grown in a mixture of plants (polycultures) is the key to a truly sustainable agriculture. Instead of a brittle industrial agriculture dependent on fossil fuels, Jackson’s research team is working to build a resilient agriculture modeled on natural ecosystems.

A plant geneticist who grew up farming, Jackson’s experiences in the fields and the laboratory give him the credentials to talk authoritatively about how to develop agricultural practices capable of producing healthful food without the soil erosion and contamination that comes with today’s highly toxic conventional agriculture. Delivering that message with a style that hybridizes the prairie pulpit and the graduate seminar, Jackson inspired the Prairie Festival audience in Salina, KS, with his sketch of the next step — taking The Land’s work international in the coming decades.

When he gets revved up in front of an audience, Jackson is eager to share all that he knows, but one of the things he knows is the danger that comes with being sure you have the answers.

After the festival ended, Jackson made the rounds of the lunch tables to chat up folks informally. Leaning into one group, the topic turned to the problem of arrogance and certainty, and Jackson suggested an important first step to solving big problems such as agriculture is recognizing that sometimes “we’ve got to give up on what we know.”

If there was one sign he could hang above everyone’s desk, Jackson said, it would be this daily affirmation: “This day I will do everything I can to fight the problem of reassertion.” Reasserting, over and over again, what we think we know is trouble, especially in the sciences, he said.

Don’t mistake Jackson’s warning for the anti-science, know-nothing rhetoric that is popular in some conservative circles. He’s trying to bolster, not undermine, faith in science by encouraging scientists not to get stuck in comfortable approaches. In agriculture, such inertia has led researchers to assume that the so-called “Green Revolution” emphasis on chemicals is the only way to maintain high yields. Research in initiatives such as perennial polyculture grains, Jackson argues, may well reveal the conventional wisdom to be conventional foolhardiness.

With the health of our soils and our own bodies at stake, Jackson says, we can’t afford to assume old approaches can cope with coming crises. Because humans like to resolve ambiguity, we reward researchers who appear to do that within existing systems — such research may be right but irrelevant, if the real problem is at the level of the whole system. Solving individual problems within a system that can’t be sustained actually creates problems.

Jackson believes that’s the trap of much of contemporary research into agriculture, and that’s why he’s hoping to find support for an ambitious program to fund new research into The Land Institute’s approach to sustainability in partnership with other researchers and institutions around the world. He’s confident in the basics but recognizes how much work in the lab and the research plots remains.

He also recognizes that science alone won’t solve the problem; serious changes are necessary in economic, political, and social systems. He diagnoses a large part of the problem of those systems to be their love of abstraction. In contemporary financial capitalism, for example, countless decisions about money are based on abstraction, not on the reality of economics rooted in ecosystems.

“Milton and Blake both acknowledged that the demonic is the abstraction without the particular,” said Jackson, who’s as likely to quote poets and philosophers as scientists.

The particular is the reality, and science helps us understand it only when it remains rooted in that particularity. Farmers work the land in a specific place within a specific ecosystem, where they must attend to the uniqueness of place, Jackson said. That means an idea such as perennial polycultures is valuable not as a monolithic answer in the abstract, but as an idea tested out in specific places, whether that be wheat fields in Kansas or rice paddies in the Philippines. Jackson is not out to make The Land Institute the center of sustainable agriculture, but instead wants to see the ideas developed in as many places as it is sensible.

Jackson also cautions that our specific places must be understood as part of larger systems. To experience our place in that larger living world, sometimes we have to step outside of science.

Jackson offered an example. We know the earth revolves around the sun, but our daily experience is of standing on ground that doesn’t move. To correct that, he said we should take the time to feel the earth move. Jackson was off and running:

“I have actually felt the earth turn. I can tell you how to do that. I’ve gone out there and laid down on the hill when the moon is full, and if you will look when the moon is coming up in the east and the sun is setting in the west — you’ve got to live in Kansas to do that, or Nebraska, someplace flat — and you can actually feel the earth turn. Do that sometime. It’s a great moment. You’ve got to do that extra exercise to experience reality. Otherwise we live with the illusion,” Jackson said, pausing before adding, “which is fun enough.”

Jackson took a moment to delight both in his memory of the experience and the smiles on the faces of the people at the table. Then he smiled and, before moving on to the next table, said, “I suppose that in order to experience reality, you have to be a mystic.”

Ours is a truly complex world — with interlocking systems of finance and debt, globalized supply chains for commodities and products, highly specialized social roles and professions, and multiple technologies that tightly interface with and depend upon one another. For people living in modern societies, there is virtually no escape from dependency — technology dependency, food dependency, oil dependency — you name it. What’s more, we actively participate in maintaining and expanding social systems that circumscribe our potential. These systems limit our autonomy, our choices, our development, and our authentic engagement with others and the world.

So what is this dependency that is enforced upon us, and who is doing the enforcing?

Let’s start with the first part of the question. At the heart of the issue is the fact that huge numbers of us globally no longer have direct access to the earth’s productive capacities in ways that would allow us to meet our essential needs in localized, self governed ways as families and communities. We don’t have the land and the water to grow our own food, and if we do, we probably don’t have the knowledge to earn our entire living directly from the land. Virtually all of us are heavily dependent on earning wages as a means to provide ourselves and our loved ones with what we need to live.

We also can’t fix most of the machines upon which we rely. We need computers to build the computers that we use at work and in our day-to-day lives. We require the services of lawyers who defend our legal interests and speak for us amid the complex web of laws that surround our business relationships, our physical and spiritual unions — and the dissolution of these unions.

We need specialists of all kinds to do complex work for us, and many of us have undergone extensive training in order to perform highly complex work for others. While learning and doing this complex work, we often don’t have time to care for our own children, let alone grow gardens and care for farm animals.

But, you might ask, haven’t people always depended on one another? Yes, of course. In fact, our social nature has been an essential factor in our ability to live in diverse, challenging environments, and most of us would agree that relationships with those we count on are at the heart of the joy of being human through love and friendship.

And, you might ask, doesn’t our ability to specialize form a foundation for technological advancement? Absolutely. But as we all know, technological advancement isn’t an unqualified good. It has its costs. We all can think of some of these costs to our health, to nature, and to our relationships.

The point I am making is that most of us are almost entirely dependent on the money system for our very survival, and this dependence has proven to be extremely profitable for industries of all kinds.

Take the food industry for example. If you can, through economic and land policy, effectively remove vast numbers of money-poor but mostly self-sufficient subsistence farmers from the land and make them dependent upon purchased food — even if their purchases are small on an individual basis — the sum of these millions of new food consumers presents a huge opportunity for money making in agribusiness. Similarly, if you can privatize and monopolize the water supply and force everyone including the poor to purchase their water — even if each pays very little — again, you’ve created a huge money making opportunity for water services corporations.

Dependency feeds the money-based economic system. Self-sufficiency does not. Therefore, creating dependency quite literally pays — at least for some — and those in a position to create money making opportunities by enforcing dependency use their economic and political influence to do so. Their actions dispossess vast numbers of people worldwide and simultaneously concentrate global wealth and power. Here we also see part of the answer to the question of who is enforcing dependency.

Debt as Enforced Dependency

Debt also enforces subservience and dependence. Anyone who has struggled to service credit card debt or make a regular car or house payment knows this. When you’re in debt, your time is not your own. You must sell your time in the wage marketplace so that you can service your debts. Debt, in fact, is one of the foremost mechanisms for enforcing the dependency of both individuals and entire nations.

Debt is also the very currency of our economic system. The money that we struggle to earn comes into existence through debt. Commercial banks create money out of nothing when they credit the account of an individual or business with borrowed money. Only a small portion of the lent money came to the bank through deposits. Without debt, money would not exist in its current form. And so, as we create the substance that sustains us in the globalized, industrial world, we simultaneously create the conditions for our own enslavement. It’s important to understand, though, that money can be created in other ways besides through debt. That just isn’t done now in the current economic system. Having the power to create money out of nothing and the right to confiscate real property (collateral) in the case of a debt default gives banks an incredible amount of power in modern economies and societies.

In taking out a loan, a business, an individual, or a nation also expresses faith in a growing economy — more products and services sold to more people at prices that allow repayment of the debt plus the interest incurred. This faith has been well placed in many cases in a world with plenty of energy in the form of fossil fuels, but global oil supplies appear to have peaked, and fossil fueled economic growth is coming to an end.

For many nations in the Global South, however, due to a combination of factors, their bets on future economic growth didn’t work out so well with regard to repayment of their external debts. Globally, debt has enforced the subservience of economically and politically weak nations to relatively powerful industrialized nations, foremost among these being the United States, the world’s only remaining superpower.

One problem debtor nations in the Global South face is that their debts are often dollar-denominated. They can’t be repaid in their national currency, so in order to repay, debtor nations must export raw materials and other products to earn the dollars needed to service their debts.

Furthermore, following the oil price shocks in the 1970s and much as a result of the declining value of the dollar at that same time, interest rates were raised sharply in the United States. A global recession ensued, and the adjustable rate loans of debtor nations in the Global South ratcheted up sharply, precipitating a debt crisis.

As a result of the defaults, the International Monetary Fund required structural adjustment programs (SAPs) as a condition for the reorganization of external debt in the Global South. The austerity measures and free trade regimes of SAPs tended to open up domestic markets to outside competition. Banks, farms, businesses of all kinds often found that they could not survive in steep competition with large and sophisticated global corporations, and many folded. Furthermore, taxes that might have been collected from domestic businesses were lost as the profits of global corporations were repatriated abroad.

Furthermore, as part of an SAP, a country was usually required by the IMF to raise its domestic interest rates far above those of banks located in more stable economies. This meant that people trying to start businesses, purchase homes, or borrow money for any other purpose within their own nations in the Global South were placed at a distinct disadvantage to those able to borrow money elsewhere in order to bring their business into a new market. Global corporations found great money making opportunities in these debt-ridden countries. They could expand their global market share while domestic economies faltered.

To make matters even worse for the Global South, they have to deal with the petrodollar standard. Most people in the U.S. know nothing about this standard, but it has a huge effect globally. Every individual, company, or nation wanting to purchase oil from OPEC must do so using U.S. dollars. This standard heightens demand for the dollar and, therefore, supports its value. It also means that all nations who import oil from OPEC nations must export commodities and products to the U.S. in order to obtain the dollars needed for these purchases.

SAPs and the petrodollar standard virtually ensure that nations in the Global South will export their natural wealth in the form of trees, minerals, agricultural products, and more. It’s basically colonialism all over again, but without the need for dominant nations to plant any flags.

Recognizing Enforced Dependency: A Starting Point for a Better Future

Those of us in the industrialized world, in many cases, would rather not know the extent to which we, too, have been colonized. We want to feel like our future is bright and we’re in charge of our own destiny. And we’ve assimilated cultural myths that support this notion into the very fiber of our being. One such myth is the notion of progress — the idea that we in industrialized societies have more choices and more opportunities than people of any other civilization or “primitive” society, past or present. If this story is true, it follows that we have little to complain about.

We’re also told that the cream always rises to the top, an explanation of the world as we experience it that diffuses resistance to hierarchical control in schools, the workplace, political structures — everywhere. This myth also provides a convenient explanation for the relative dominance of industrialized countries in the world economy and the inability of the Global South to solve its vast social problems.

We might be more comfortable, in a sense, limiting our vision to internalized myths. Seeing past these myths requires us to apply our energies to learning about systemic biases built into the global economy. It also requires us to develop empathy for others caught in the webs of global economic and political structures. Perhaps the part that is most difficult, though, is that this project requires a willingness to critique oneself and one’s culture — and a healthy measure of humility.

But I believe learning to recognize enforced dependency as an organizing principle in the modern, globalized world is well worth it because this knowledge truly is power. And I think most of us would agree that we need the power to make big changes. Understanding enforced dependency is a powerful starting point for a new clear vision that can see through cultural myths and the mystification of manipulators who benefit from all of us quietly playing their game of business as usual.

Recognizing how we and others have been colonized within the globalized world helps us see behind the divide-and-conquer strategies of many leaders, strategies that divert our attention to casting blame on other victims of systemic problems instead of paying attention to the systemic problems themselves. Knowing that forces beyond our control have left millions with very limited choices in attempting to better their lives provides fertile ground in which to cultivate empathy and solidarity rather than hatred and blame as we move through difficult times that promise to prove increasingly challenging as climate change, fossil fuel depletion, and other crises converge in often mutually reinforcing ways. This knowledge can help us build solidarity among all of those whose positions are slipping dangerously toward poverty and powerlessness as the global economic crisis deepens.

In a truly globalized world like the one in which we live, there really is nowhere to run or hide that will allow us to escape all of the ravages of rapidly converging crises. And so, we must face each other. In crisis, will we face each other as enemies or as partners? I hope it will be increasingly as partners. And if we are to be partners, we need to know each other and our respective histories.

That’s where learning about how and why dependency is enforced on diverse people globally comes into play. The specific manifestations vary regarding how people worldwide experience enforced dependency, but understanding the organizing principles of this phenomenon that affect us all allows us to see how our individual stories are living variations on a theme.

Breaking Free from Enforced Dependency

The global economy upon which most of us depend for our very survival isn’t sustainable. We simply can’t maintain a debt-and-interest-based money system that requires infinite growth within the bounds of a limited Earth.

So who is this system of enforced dependency serving anyway? Well, it serves all of us who participate in it in some ways, but it’s proving to be less and less reliable in satisfying our needs, and the system is sure to become increasingly unstable as the oil supply crisis deepens and as other crises including climate change continue to unfold. The system is already failing millions who realize they must emigrate from their homes for a chance at living life with some measure of material wellbeing.

Where can we go from here? The rest of this series on “Living and Learning Sustainability” offers a response to this question. For now, we can start by considering how we can reduce our dependency and become more resilient with regard to the basics of life — our food, our water, our energy. How can we produce these things more locally? What do we need to learn to do so? There are many actions that we can take, and all of our actions must match the possibilities inherent in the places we live: our ecosystems and our communities.

What is sustainability anyway? We’ll focus on this last question in next month’s segment. Doing so will help us prepare for a future in which we not only survive, but maintain and advance the best of our humanness within an increasingly unstable world.

•  This article initially appeared in New Clear Vision.

The European Court of Justice ruled that all food products containing GMOs – whether intentional or not – must undergo an approval process.

This marks a much stricter view than that being pushed by European Union Commissioner for health and consumer affairs, John Dalli,  who wants no regulation of foods genetically contaminated “by accident,” a ludicrous idea given that coexistence ensures genetic contamination.

At the center of the dispute is Bavarian beekeeper Karl Heinz Bablok who joined with several others in suing the state when its research plots of Monsanto’s GM corn, MON 810, contaminated his honey.

In 2008, an administrative court banned Bablok from selling or giving away that honey.  But in a bizarre turn, the Augsburg court also ruled that beekeepers have no claim to protection against the growing of GM crops. They immediately filed a new lawsuit.

Discussing today’s ruling, attorneys for the beekeepers noted that they may now have “a claim for damages against a farmer if MON 810 pollen from his cultivation gets into their honey.”

Attorneys Dr Achim Willand and Dr Georg Buchholz explained:

If the beekeeper can no longer sell his honey, this is considered a major impairment causing a claim for damage.  If the beekeeper moves his bees in order to prevent this impairment, it is also possible that the cultivator is liable for the additional work and expense of the beekeeper.

They added that the “decision is important not only for beekeeping, but in general for the production of food and feed, as well as for trade.”

The new ruling will also apply to “imports containing traces of material from genetically modified crops that don’t have sufficient approval within the EU,” they said.

The European Court of Justice only “interprets EU law and does not settle the dispute itself,” notes Inf’OGM, a French group that maintains a neutral position on GMOs.  Member states like Germany, France and Spain can apply the ruling however they deem fit in particular cases of genetic contamination.

In describing the questions before the court, Inf’OGM explained that Monsanto failed to seek approval for genetically modified pollen.  Instead, MON 810 approval only covers flour, gluten, semolina, starch, glucose and corn oil.

MON 810 approval is currently under reconsideration.  It has been linked to organ damage in test animals  and its approval may be withdrawn.  Until last year, it was the only GM crop approved for cultivation in the EU, although a total of 40 GMO food and feed products have been approved for sale.

One of Commissioner Dalli’s first acts after taking office in 2010 was to lift the 13-year ban on BASF’s GM potato, Amflora.  Sweden, Germany and the Czech Republic took the bait and immediately suffered from 47 contamination events.

Today’s ruling also overturns the court’s Advocate General recommendation this February which found that genetic material inadvertently transferred from GM corn to other living organisms “is no longer viable and is thus infertile, is not a living organism and, therefore, cannot be regarded as a GMO.”

In that same recommendation, however, the AG maintained that any products containing GMOs should be regulated.

Thijs Etty, a transnational environmental lawyer specializing in biotechnology and EU law, told Food Freedom, “The Court’s ruling underscores the EU’s zero-tolerance stance towards non-authorized GMOs, and signals a sensitive loss for Monsanto and the EU Commission.”

Etty explained that the EU Commission “has been working hard to loosen if not abandon the zero-tolerance policy,” citing a recent regulation “allowing ‘low level presence’ of non-authorized GMOs in feed imports.”

Today’s ruling puts that new regulation into question.

GMO opponents won a brief reprieve last year when Commissioner Dalli’s initial proposal to radically overhaul existing GM approval rules was later rebuked. The controversial proposal was dropped after the European Commission’s legal counsel determined the new rules violated EU and international trade laws.

Of note, the European Food Safety Authority, which rules on GMO safety, has been under fire for hiring members with financial interests in the biotech industry.  EFSA chair Diana Banati resigned last year after it was revealed she served as a consultant to biotech corporations including Monsanto, Bayer and BASF.

Four other EFSA board members also have substantial ties to the food industry. One has financial interests in the GM seed industry (Piet Vanthemsche) and another is a chief lobbyist for the German food industry (Matthias Horst).  Milan Kovác and Jirí Ruprich both have links to food industry bodies, EFSA admitted.

“Today’s decision is an important victory for beekeepers, but also GMO-opponents and environmental NGOs,” concluded Etty.

But it’s not a complete victory. Though not as bad as in the U.S., GMO label laws still leave European consumers in the dark since meat, milk and eggs from animals fed GM feed are exempt, which bulldozes consumers into supporting the biotech industry.

Used in formulations by Monsanto, Bayer, Dow and others, glyphosate has been linked to spontaneous abortions in livestock, birth defects in humans, insect resistance, and weed resistance.

Worse, regulators have known for years of these links, Earth Open Source reported.

In early August, Dr. Mercola reported:

The first report was recently issued on ambient levels of glyphosate and its major degradation product, aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA), in air and rain. Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the U.S.

Weekly air particle and rain samples were collected during two growing seasons in agricultural areas in Mississippi and Iowa. Rain was also collected in Indiana. The frequency of glyphosate detection ranged from 60 to 100 percent in both air and rain.

Weeks after Mercola’s report, the USGS just issued a press release:

Glyphosate is used in almost all agricultural and urban areas of the United States. The greatest glyphosate use is in the Mississippi River basin, where most applications are for weed control on genetically-modified corn, soybeans and cotton. Overall, agricultural use of glyphosate has increased from less than 11,000 tons in 1992 to more than 88,000 tons in 2007.

Though glyphosate is the mostly widely used herbicide in the world, we know very little about its long term effects to the environment,” says Paul Capel, USGS chemist and an author on this study. “This study is one of the first to document the consistent occurrence of this chemical in streams, rain and air throughout the growing season. This is crucial information for understanding where management efforts for this chemical would best be focused.”

The Environmental Protection Agency, the USDA and FDA continue to permit our land, air and waters to be polluted by this highly toxic agrochemical, despite a growing body of scientific evidence of its lethality to the biosphere.

Mercola explains:

A couple of years ago, a French court found Monsanto guilty of falsely advertising its herbicide as “biodegradable,” “environmentally friendly” and claiming it “left the soil clean.” The truth is that Roundup is anything BUT environmentally friendly. Monsanto’s own tests showed that only two percent of the herbicide broke down after 28 days, which means it readily persists in the environment!

Glyphosate is the most commonly reported cause of pesticide illness among landscape maintenance workers in California, and researchers have now linked it to Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS), a serious plant disease, in many fields around the world. Numerous studies have also shown that glyphosate is contributing not only to the huge increase in SDS, but also to the outbreak of some 40 different plant and crop diseases! It weakens plants and promotes disease in a number of ways, including:

• Acting as a chelator of vital nutrients, depriving plants of the nutrients necessary for healthy plant function
• Destroying beneficial soil organisms that suppress disease-causing organisms and help plants absorb nutrients
• Interfering with photosynthesis, reducing water use efficiency, shortening root systems and causing plants to release sugars, which changes soil pH
• Stunting and weakening plant growth

The herbicide doesn’t destroy plants directly; instead, it creates a unique “perfect storm” of conditions that activates disease-causing organisms in the soil, while at the same time wiping out plant defenses against those diseases. So the glyphosate not only weakens plants, it actually changes the makeup of the soil and boosts the number of disease-causing organisms, which is becoming a deadly recipe for crops around the globe.

Another problem with aerial application of herbicides is aerial drift. Citing a Canadian report from 1998 on the environmental fate of glyphosate, Mercola quotes:

Aerial drift of the herbicide will cause injury to nontarget plants… Minute quantities of mist, drip, drift or splash of glyphosate onto nontarget vegetation can cause severe damage or destruction to the plants or other areas on which treatment was not intended.

Indeed, earlier this year, Food Freedom reported that the Mississippi Rice Council (MRC) sounded a national alarm over damage caused by aerial drift of glyphosate, calling for severely restricted aerial application:

MRC president Mike Wagner recently told crop dusters at this year’s Mississippi Agricultural Aviation Association annual meeting that glyphosate is wreaking havoc on the natural rice industry….

Wagner reported that, “Rice specialists noticed that rice that had no obvious damage through the growing season would yield and mill poorly and would exhibit the classic trait associated with late glyphosate drift — the kernel would be shaped like a parrot beak instead of its normally elongated, symmetrical shape.”

Field studies run in 2007 and 2008 by the University of Arkansas showed reduced rice yield by up to 80% from glyphosate, as well as glufosinate, a herbicide produced by Bayer. On top of reduced yield, both herbicides burned the leaves and stunted the growth of rice plants.

Glyphosate needs to be banned outright and the industrial monoculture system needs to be converted to mixed farms that work with nature instead of against it.

1. Feng-Chih Chang, Matt F. Simcik, and Paul D. Capel, “Occurrence and Fate of the Herbicide Glyphosate and Its Degradate Aminomethylphosphonic Acid in the Atmosphere,” Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 548–555, 2011
2. 2 Richard H Coupe, Stephen J Kalkhoff, Paul D Capel, and Caroline Gregoire, “Fate and transport of glyphosate and aminomethylphosphonic acid in surface waters of agricultural basins,” Pest Manag Sci 2011

Farmers from several Midwest states began reporting root damage to corn that was specifically engineered with a toxin to kill the rootworm.  Iowa State University entomologist Aaron Gassmann recently confirmed that the beetle, Diabrotica virgifera virgifera, has developed resistance to the Bt protein, Cry3Bb1.

Bacillus thuringiensis – Bt – is a bacterium that kills insects.  Different proteins are engineered into cotton as well as corn plants.

Two-thirds of all US corn is genetically modified per the USDA, and the bulk of that is Bt-corn. Monsanto has the biggest market share in the US, reporting about 35% in 2009.

In response to the July 2011 study, Monsanto said only the “YieldGard® VT Triple and Genuity® VT Triple PRO™ corn products” are affected.

“It appears he has demonstrated a difference in survival in the lab, but it is too early to tell whether there are implications for growers in the field.”

However, Kansas State researchers summarized the study, indicating that the specimens tested came from fields suffering severe rootworm damage and compared them to those from unaffected fields.  In other words, it was a field study.

Resistance developed where the same Bt corn had been grown at least three years in a row.  Gassmann found “a significant positive correlation between the number of years Cry3Bb1 maize had been grown in a field and the survival of rootworm populations on Cry3Bb1 maize in bioassays.”

Ag Professional’s Colleen Scherer explains that “the Cry3Bb1 toxin is the major one deployed against rootworms. There is no ‘putting the genie back in the bottle,’ and resistance in these areas is a problem that won’t go away.”

Monsanto urges farmers to try their “stacked” GM products where more than one trait is engineered and to employ integrated pest management (IPM) techniques.

Kind of like getting on a treadmill of ever increasing DNA manipulation and chemicals to maintain monocultures, instead of reverting to time-honored mixed farms that use companion plants (including weeds) for pest control. IPM does not have to include toxic chemicals or genetic manipulation for success.  (See, e.g., Sepp Holzer’s Permaculture).

This year, Monsanto launched a “triple-stack” sweet corn which it envisions being sold at Farmers Markets.  The FDA’s GMO label ban will certainly help, since most people who buy local are specifically trying to avoid genetically engineered foods.

In line with Monsanto’s goal to enter farmers markets, the Union of Concerned Scientists just came out with a report urging federal financial support in order to create jobs. The report notes that the number of farmers markets has doubled in the past ten years.

But, as we watch the feds target natural producers with raids and product seizure, while leaving Cargill’s 36 million pounds of tainted turkey alone until someone died, we can expect that any federal money put toward farmers markets will be used to support only that produce which is genetically modified, chemically doused and/or irradiated.

On August 9, police shot nine farmers, killing three, who were part of a mass protest against a water pipeline project in Baur Village, 50 miles east of Mumbai, India.  Police also smashed cars, fired tear gas and threw rocks at farmers as they fled the violence.  This was all caught on video.

Kantabai Thakar (age 40), Moreshwar Sathe (40) and Shyam Tupe (29) were fatally shot by police.  Over 100 others were injured, and nine vehicles damaged in the lethal attack on protesters, report several news outlets in India.

The next day, the Pune police “registered a case of attempt to murder and rioting against 1,200 to 1,400 protesters,” although no one has yet been arrested.  None of the officers involved in murder and excessive use of force have been charged or suspended.

Farmers from over 60 villages in Pune District in the state of Maharashtra have protested the pipeline project since its announcement in 2008, objecting to land takings and the potential for pollution of their water source.  Around 4,500 hectares (over 11,000 acres) of farmland are threatened by the project.

The pipeline would draw 140 million gallons of water a day (525 million liters) from the Pavana Dam to be used for industry and a growing urban center.

Overseeing the project are three government agencies: Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC), Talegaon Municipal Council and Dehu Road Cantonment.

The MIDC has long promoted industrialization of this primarily agricultural state.  Its main objective is to “rapidly develop … the underdeveloped parts of the state,” by redistributing land and providing infrastructure like roads, lighting, water treatment and supply, communication, and police and fire services.

Lands seized are then leased or sold to industry.

Though the MIDC promises to compensate those displaced by the pipeline project, it has been 40 years since the Pavana Dam was built and 75% of those displaced still have not been compensated, reports Times of India.  For those lucky 300 who were given other lands, their name is not on the titled deed.  Nor have promised jobs materialized for displaced villagers.

Providing water to industry is “a unique specialty of the MIDC,” which also manages the toxic liquid waste from industry.

But locals don’t trust the government, and for good reason.

Lack of effective oversight of industrial pollutants has led to soaring cancer rates and other health problems in Bathinda, located in the northern state of Punjab.  Forty percent of that population requires medicinal inhalers in order to breathe.  Many of the waters are so toxic that no life survives.

State-sanctioned violence directed at farmers and tribes is common for India, including murder, torture and destruction of villages.

India’s state governments “have signed hundreds of [Memoranda of Understanding] with corporate houses, worth several billion dollars, all of them secret, for steel plants, sponge-iron factories, power plants, aluminium refineries, dams and mines,” explains activist Arundhati Roy.   “In order for the MoUs to translate into real money, tribal people must be moved.”

Maharashtra is the second largest state in India both in population (115 million) and land (308 lakh sq. km, or about 120,000 sq. mi.).  Forty-two percent of the population is urbanized. The ‘scheduled castes’ and ‘scheduled tribes’ – officially recognized populations seen as “historically disadvantaged” – make up another quarter in the state.

Maharashtra farmers cultivate cereals, pulses, sugarcane, soy, cotton, oilseeds and onions, as well as mangoes, grapes, bananas, pomegranates and oranges.

The Pune District is one of several major industrial sectors planned by the MIDC, which has so far developed 233 industrial parks on 160,000 acres, with another 80,000 acres planned.

Deregulated sectors now open to foreign investment include the biotech seed industry, mining, pharmaceuticals, chemicals & fertilizers, construction, and oil & gas.

Driving the destruction of tribal and agricultural lands is trade liberalization that began in earnest since 2000.  As a result, foreign direct investment (FDI) in India ranks third in the world, with Maharashtra bagging a quarter of all of India’s FDIs.

Officially, the Republic of Mauritius is the largest foreign investor in India, but a closer look reveals that through an indirect investment scheme, the U.S. is actually the top foreign investor.  Advisors explain that because the India-Mauritius tax treaty removed capital gains tax, it’s more lucrative for foreign firms to invest in India indirectly through Mauritius.

As part of the G20, the World Trade Organization, and a signatory to international trade agreements including GATT and TRIPS, India ranks 51 in overall “competitiveness” in a field of 139 nations, according to the World Economic Forum.

State-sanctioned violence increases as resistance to globalization grows.  People are left landless, jobless and sickened by industrial destruction of the biosphere. Episodes like these confirm Derrick Jensen’s “20 premises” from his book, Endgame.

Industrial civilization “destroys landbases. That’s what it does,” writes Jensen in his new book, Deep Green Resistance. “And it won’t stop because we ask it nicely.”

First, I realize that the term “radical political theology” may be annoying. Some people will dislike “radical” and prefer a more pragmatic approach. Others will argue that theology shouldn’t be political. Still others will want nothing to do with theology of any kind. At various times in my life, I would have offered all of those objections. Today I think a politics without a theology is dangerous, a theology without a politics is irrelevant, and radical is realistic.

By politics I don’t mean we need to pretend to have worked out a traditional political program that will lead us to the land of milk and honey; instead, I’m merely suggesting that we always foreground the basic struggle for power in whatever work we do at whatever level. By theology, I don’t mean that we need to believe in supernatural forces that will lead us to a land of milk and honey; instead, I’m merely pointing out that we all construct a world view that is not reducible to evidence and logic. In politics and theology, it’s important to be clear about what we know, and even more important to recognize what we don’t know, what we can’t know, what is instinct and emotion.

And all this needs to be radical — not in the self-indulgent “more radical than thou” style that crops up now and then on the left — but rather in the sense of an unflinching honesty about that unjust and unsustainable nature of the systems in which we live. Whatever pragmatic steps we may decide to take in the world, they should be based on radical analysis if they are to be realistic.

Revolution

I’m not interested in speculating about future revolutions. I don’t take seriously anyone who predicts a coming revolution in the United States, and I doubt that the traditional concept of a revolution is even relevant today — the dramatic changes that lie ahead likely won’t arrive that way. Rather than dream of revolutions to come, it’s more productive to think about the revolutions that brought us to this moment.

Ask an audience to name the three most important revolutions in human history, and the most common answers are the American, French, and Russian. But to understand our current situation, the better answer is the agricultural, industrial, and delusional revolutions. While those national revolutions had dramatic effects, not only on those nations but on the course of the history of the past two centuries, these other revolutions not only reshaped the lives of every human but remade the world in ways that may spell the end of human history as we know it. The agricultural, industrial, and delusional revolutions were — to use a current political cliché — real game-changers.

The agricultural revolution started about 10,000 years ago when a gathering-hunting species discovered how to cultivate plants for food and domesticate animals. Two crucial things resulted, one political and one ecological. Politically, the ability to stockpile food made possible concentrations of power and resulting hierarchies that were foreign to band-level gathering-hunting societies, which were highly egalitarian and based on cooperation. This is not to say that humans were not capable of doing bad things to each other prior to agriculture, but only that large-scale institutionalized oppression has its roots in agriculture. We need not romanticize pre-agricultural life but simply recognize that it was organized in far more egalitarian fashion than what we call “civilization.”

Ecologically, the invention of agriculture kicked off an intensive human assault on natural systems. While gathering-hunting humans were capable of damaging a local ecosystem in limited ways, the large-scale destruction we cope with today has its origins in agriculture, in the way humans started exhausting the energy-rich carbon of the planet, first in soil. Human agricultural practices have varied over time and place but have never been sustainable over the long term. There are better and worse farming practices, but soil erosion has been a consistent feature of agriculture, which makes it the first step in the entrenchment of an unsustainable human economy based on extraction.

We are trained to think that advances in technology constitute progress, but the post-World War II “advances” in oil-based industrial agriculture have accelerated the ecological destruction. Soil from large monoculture fields drenched in petrochemicals not only continues to erode but also threatens groundwater supplies and contributes to dead zones in oceans. While it’s true that this industrial agriculture has produced tremendous yield increases during the last century, no one has come up with a sustainable system for perpetuating that kind of agricultural productivity. Those high yields mask what Wes Jackson has called “the failure of success”: Production remains high while the health of the soil continues to decline dramatically.¹ That kind of “success” guarantees the inevitable collapse of the system. We have less soil that is more degraded, with no technological substitute for healthy soil; we are exhausting and contaminating groundwater; and we are dependent on an agriculture tied to a fuel source that is running out.

That industrialization of agriculture was made possible, of course, by the larger industrial revolution that began in the last half of the 18th century in Great Britain, which intensified the magnitude of the human assault on ecosystems and humans assaults on each other. This revolution unleashed the concentrated energy of coal, oil, and natural gas to run the new steam engine and machines in textile manufacturing that dramatically increased productivity. That energy — harnessed by the predatory capitalist economic system that was beginning to dominate the planet — not only eventually transformed all manufacturing, transportation, and communication, but disrupted social relations. People were pushed off the land, out of communities, and into cities that grew rapidly, often without planning. Traditional ways of knowing and living were destroyed, by force or by the allure of affluence. World population soared from about 1 billion in 1800 to the current 7 billion, far beyond the long-term carrying capacity of the planet.

This move from a sun-powered and muscle-based world to a fossil fuel-powered and machine-based world has produced unparalleled material comfort for some. Whatever one thinks of the effect of such levels of comfort on human well-being — in my view, the effect has been mixed at best² — the processes that produce the comfort are destroying the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain human life as we know it into the future, and in the present those comforts are not distributed in a fashion that is consistent with any meaningful conception of justice. In short, our world is unsustainable and unjust — the way we live is in direct conflict with common sense and the ethical principles on which we claim to base our lives. How is that possible? Enter the third revolution.

The delusional revolution is my term for the development of sophisticated propaganda techniques in the 20th century (especially a highly emotive, image-based advertising/marketing system) that have produced in the bulk of the population (especially in First World societies) a distinctly delusional state of being. Although any person or group can employ these techniques, wealthy individuals and corporations — and their representatives in government — take advantage of their disproportionate share of resources to flood the culture with their stories that reinforce their dominance. Journalism and education, idealized as spaces for rationally based truth-telling, sometimes provide a counter to those propaganda systems, but just as often are co-opted by the powerful forces behind them.

Perhaps the most stunning example of this is that during the 2000s, as the evidence for human-caused climate disruption became more compelling, the percentage of the population that rejects that science increased. Why would people who, in most every other aspect of life accept without question the results of peer-reviewed science, reject the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists in this case? Some have theological reasons, and for others perhaps it is simply easier to disbelieve than to face the implications. But it’s clear that the well-funded media campaigns using these propaganda techniques to create doubt have been effective.³

Even those of us who try to resist it often can’t help but be drawn into parts of the delusion; it’s difficult to keep track of, let alone understand, all of the fronts on which we are facing serious challenges to a just and sustainable future. As a culture, these delusions leave us acting as if unsustainable systems can be sustained simply because we want them to be. Much of the culture’s story-telling — particularly that which comes through almost all of the mass media — remains committed to maintaining this delusional state. In such a culture, it becomes hard to extract oneself from that story. Singer/songwriter Greg Brown captures the trajectory of this delusional revolution when he speculates that one day, “There’ll be one corporation selling one little box/it’ll do what you want and tell you what you want and cost whatever you got.”⁴

In summary: The agricultural revolution set us on a road to destruction. The industrial revolution ramped up our speed. The delusional revolution has prevented us from coming to terms with the reality of where we are and where we are heading.

Resistance

Even if a revolutionary program is not viable at the moment, strategies and tactics for resistance are crucial. To acknowledge that the social, economic, and political systems that have produced this death spiral can’t be overthrown from the revolutionary playbooks of the past does not mean there are no ways to affirm life. We face planetary problems that seem to defy solutions, but the U.S. empire and predatory corporate capitalism remain immediate threats and should be resisted. An honest, radical assessment of our situation doesn’t mean giving up, but it requires us to be tough-minded. We need to understand which resistance strategies and tactics are likely to be most productive at this moment in history.

To advance that discussion, let’s think back to February 15, 2003. Many of us on that Saturday participated in actions in opposition to the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was an exhilarating day, the largest coordinated political protest in the history of the world. At least 10 million people participated across the globe, with a clear message for U.S. policy makers: The invasion being planned is illegal and immoral, and we reject not only this war but your right to use violence to achieve your political and economic goals. I was the emcee of the event in Austin, and I remember being amazed at the thousands who gathered at the Texas Capitol, stretching back so far that our loudspeakers couldn’t reach the entire crowd.

We had a compelling message, rooted in international law, political principles, and moral values. We had huge numbers of people. We had an international presence. And none of it mattered; the war came. Why could U.S. policy makers ignore us without consequence? First, those elites knew that a large segment of the public either actively supported the war or would passively support almost any war that was out of sight/out of mind. Second, they knew that when that day of protest was over, most of the people in the streets would go home, satisfied with their public statement and unlikely to go beyond that polite expression of dissent. Political movements are most potent when people are willing to take risks; without a large number of such people, the powerful know they can wait out protests.

For most people, attending an anti-war rally posed no risk. Immigrants and people in targeted groups (Arabs, South Asians, Muslims) had reason to feel threatened, but people who look like me — with only rare exceptions — don’t face serious repression in the United States today for engaging in peaceful political activity, though that can change quickly. What were most of us willing to do beyond attending a rally in opposition to a war being planned? A month later, when the war came, we got a partial answer. The crowd for the standing call to come to the Capitol when the bombs fell was at best one-fourth of the pre-war rally. Most of the people who came on February 15 weren’t willing to come out in public once the nation was at war; even that trivial a risk was too much.

I could be cocky and say that in 2003 I was willing to risk my job, my physical safety, even my life to stop the war. It might be true; I certainly felt the urgency of the moment. But the question is moot, because at that time there was no strategy for taking such risks. These decisions about risk are made by individuals but in the context of options developed collectively, and the movement I was part of had not discussed such options.

So when certain resistance tactics don’t work as part of a strategy that’s not clearly articulated, it’s time to rethink. I have no grand strategy to offer, and I am skeptical about anyone who claims they have worked out such a strategy. But I am reasonably confident that this is not a mass-movement moment, not a time in which large numbers of Americans are likely to engage in political activity that challenges basic systems of power and wealth. I believe we are in a period in which the most important work is creating the organizations and networks that will be important in the future, when the political conditions change, for better or worse. Whatever is coming, we need sharper analysis, stronger vehicles for action, and more resilient connections among people. In short, this is a cadre-building moment.

Although for some people the phrase “cadre-building” may invoke the worst of the left’s revolutionary dogmatism, I have something different in mind. For me, “cadre” doesn’t mean “vanguard” or “self-appointed bearers of truth.” It signals commitment, but with an openness to rethinking theory and practice. I see this kind of organizing in some groups in Austin, TX, where I live. Not surprisingly, they are groups led by younger people who are drawing on longstanding radical ideas, updating as needed to fit a changing world. These organizers don’t have all the answers, and I don’t agree with some of the answers they do have, but I am drawn to them because they recognize the need to dig in.

Revelation

Most discussions of revelation and apocalypse in contemporary America focus on the Book of Revelation, also known as The Apocalypse of John, the final book of the Christian New Testament. The two terms are synonymous in their original meaning — “revelation” from Latin and “apocalypse” from Greek both mean a lifting of the veil, a disclosure of something hidden from most people, a coming to clarity. What is the nature of this unveiling today? What is being revealed to us?

A reactionary end-times theology turns that particular book of the Bible into the handbook for a death cult, fantasizing about an easy way out. That isn’t the direction I will be heading. Rather than thinking of revelation as divine delivery of a clear message about some fantastic future above, we can think of it as a process that requires tremendous effort on our part about our very real struggles on this planet. That notion of revelation doesn’t offer a one-way ticket to a better place, but reminds us that there are no tickets available to any other place; we humans live and die on this planet, and we have a lot of work to do if, as a species, we want to keep living.

That process begins with an honest analysis of where we stand. There is a growing realization that we have disrupted natural forces in ways we cannot control and do not fully understand. We need not adopt an end-times theology to recognize that on our current trajectory, there will come a point when the ecosphere cannot sustain human life as we know it. As Bill McKibben puts it, “The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has — even if we don’t quite know it yet.”⁵

McKibben, the first popular writer to alert the world to the threat of climate change, argues that humans have so dramatically changed the planet’s ecosystems that we should rename the Earth, call it Eaarth:

The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished; epic changes have begun. We may, with commitment and luck, yet be able to maintain a planet that will sustain some kind of civilization, but it won’t be the same planet, and hence it won’t be the same civilization. The earth that we knew — the only earth that we ever knew — is gone.⁶

If McKibben is accurate — and I think the evidence clearly supports his assessment — then we can’t pretend all that’s needed is tinkering with existing systems to fix a few environmental problems; massive changes in how we live are required, what McKibben characterizes as a new kind of civilization. No matter where any one of us sits in the social and economic hierarchies, there is no escape from the dislocations of such changes. Money and power might insulate some from the most wrenching consequences of these shifts, but there is no escape. We do not live in stable societies and no longer live on a stable planet. We may feel safe and secure in specific places at specific times, but it’s hard to believe in any safety and security in a collective sense.

This is a revelation not of a coming rapture but of a deepening rupture. The end times are not coming. They are unfolding now.

Redemption

Just as revelation can be about more than explosions during the end times, redemption can be understood as about more than a savior’s blood washing away our sin. In a world in which so many decent people have been psychologically and theologically abused by being called “sinner” by jealous and judgmental scolds, sin and redemption are tricky terms. But we shouldn’t give up on the concept of sin, for we are, in fact, all sinners — we all do things that fall short of the principles on which we claim to base our lives. Everyone I know has at some point lied to avoid accountability, failed to offer help to someone in need, taken more than their fair share. Given that we all sin, we all should seek redemption, understood as the struggle to come back into right relation with those we have injured. If we are to live up to our own moral standards, we must deepen our understanding of sin and its causes so that we can understand the path to redemption.

For Christians, sin traditionally has been marked as original and individual — we are born with it, and we can deal with it through an individual profession of faith. In some sense, of course, sin is obviously original. At some point in our lives we all do things that violate our own principles, which suggests the capacity to do nasty things is a part of normal human psychology. Equally obvious is that even though we live interdependently and our actions are conditioned by how we are socialized, we are distinct moral agents and we make choices. Responsibility for those choices must in part be ours as individuals.

But an individual focus isn’t going to solve our most pressing problems, which is why it is crucial to focus on the sins we commit that are created, not original, and solutions that are collective, not individual. These sins, which do much greater damage, are the result of — we might say, created by — political, economic, and social systems. Those systems create war and poverty, discrimination and oppression, not simply through the freely chosen actions of individuals but because of the nature of these systems of empire and capitalism, rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy. Humans’ ordinary capacity to sin is intensified, reaching a different order of magnitude, and responsibility for the resulting sins is shared.

There is a politics to sin, and therefore there has to be a politics to redemption. That desire to return to right relation with others in our personal lives is not enough; collectively we have to struggle for the same thing, which requires us to always be working to dismantle those hierarchical systems that define our lives. Within hierarchy, right relation is impossible; assertions of dominance and concentrations of power create domination and abuses of power. That includes the most abusive of all hierarchies: The human claim to a right to dominate everything else. Our most important struggle for redemption concerns our most profound sin: Our willingness to destroy the larger living world of which we are a part.

The first step in redemption is to not turn away from that lifting of the veil, to face honestly what we have done, to contest the culture’s delusions wherever possible. Then we can face what we must do to enhance justice and build sustainable living arrangements.

What does this kind of redemption look like in practice? I think we should proceed along two basic tracks. First, we should commit some of our energy to the familiar movements that focus on the question of justice in this world, such as anti-war struggles. We redeem ourselves — especially those of us with privilege that is rooted in that injustice — through that commitment to fighting empire, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

But I also think there is important work to be done in experiments to prepare for what will come in this new future we can’t yet describe in detail. Whatever the limits of our predictive capacity, we can be pretty sure we will need ways of organizing ourselves to help us live in a world with less energy and fewer material goods. We have to all develop the skills needed for that world (such as gardening with fewer inputs, food preparation and storage, and basic tinkering), and we will need to recover a deep sense of community that has disappeared from many of our lives. McKibben puts this in terms of a new scale for our work:

The project we’re now undertaking — maintenance, graceful decline, hunkering down, holding on against the storm — requires a different scale. Instead of continents and vast nations, we need to think about states, about town, about neighborhoods, about blocks. … We need to scale back, to go to ground. We need to take what wealth we have left and figure out how we’re going to use it, not to spin the wheel one more time but to slow the wheel down. … We need, as it were, to trade in the big house for something that suits our circumstances on this new Eaarth. We need to feel our vulnerability.⁷

Nature Bats Last

The phrase “nature bats last” circulates these days among people who have their eye on the multiple, cascading ecological crises. The metaphor reminds us that nature is the home team and has the final word.  We humans may be particularly impressed with our own achievements — all of the spectacular home runs we have hit with science and technology — but when those achievements are at odds with how nature operates, then nature is going to bring in the ultimate designated hitter and knock the human race out of the ball park. OK, let’s not try to stretch this too far — no single metaphor can work at every level needed. The point is simple: We are not as powerful as the forces that govern that larger living world.

The metaphor offers one other crucial lesson, in this case because of its limitations. When we say “nature bats last,” it implies we are one team and nature is on another, as if it were possible for us to compete with nature. But we are, of course, simply part of nature, one species in an indescribably diverse living world. To imagine ourselves as competing with nature would be like our lungs competing with our heart — either those organs work together, or an individual human dies.

Unfortunately, the architects of modern science didn’t see the world that way. One of the most often-quoted, Francis Bacon, believed that modern science and technology “have the power to conquer and subdue [nature], to shake her to her foundations.” Rene Descartes, another of these founding fathers, believed humans could achieve the knowledge and develop the means to know:

the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we might also apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.

These thinkers also contributed to our understanding of the workings and power of the natural world. But this language of domination — to conquer and subdue, becoming lords and possessors — is the language not of a baseball game but of war, which brings us to the relevance of this to Veterans for Peace. VFP members have seen through, and gone beyond, the egotistical rhetoric of our national fundamentalism — with all its fraudulent claims about “fighting for freedom” — to reject the U.S. wars of empire and stake out an audacious goal: “To abolish war as an instrument of national policy.”

We also need to see beyond the egotistical rhetoric of our technological fundamentalism — the claims that infinitely clever humans will solve all problems with gadgets — and stake out an even more audacious goal: To end the human war on the rest of living world.

Life is Hard

If all this seems too much to ask of ourselves, that’s because it is. We live in a time when we must face honestly the whole truth, but to do that is too much to bear. We struggle to claim our power at the moment when we are more powerless than ever, and find hope where there is no hope.

On power: Those of us in dissident movements understand we face difficult odds, fighting entrenched forces of the state and corporation. We know the keys to prevailing: Fight organized money with organized people; compromise to build a power base but never abandon core principles; find ways to delegitimize authority; raise the social costs for elites to pursue unjust policies; hang in for the long haul. Those organizing basics don’t change, though the application of them must constantly adapt to changes in the structure of power. But the ecological crises change the big picture.

First, we should not assume the long haul is as long as we’ve always imagined. No one can predict the rate of collapse if we stay on this trajectory, and we don’t know if we can change the trajectory. There is much we don’t know, but everything I see suggests that the world in which we will pursue political goals will change dramatically in the next decade or two, almost certainly for the worse. Organizing has to adapt not only to changes in societies but to these fundamental changes in the ecosphere. We are organizing in a period of contraction, not expansion.

Second, we can’t be satisfied with contesting imperialism in the nation-state and the concentration of wealth in corporate capitalism, but also must change the human relationship to the living world. Dissident movements have an advantage, given that a larger percentage of people involved in left/radical politics have less of a commitment to maintaining the dominant culture’s delusions. Radicals don’t have the wealth and power that can appear to insulate us from collapse, which means we have more room to think about what living arrangements are consistent with reality. Elites, who typically mistake temporary domination for real power, have a harder time recognizing that humans are powerless in the face of the forces we have been trying to conquer and subdue. In the end, we can never be the lords and possessors of something larger and more enduring in time. Many traditions recognize this basic reality: We don’t own the earth, the earth owns us. Our power comes in recognizing our powerlessness and adapting to the world as it is, not the world as we imagine it to be.

How does this approach give people hope? It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t, because hope is not something you give to people. The political organizers on the liberal/left who are always touting a new way to restore the American Dream are peddlers of false hope, offering allegedly exciting opportunities to allegedly new movements that are stuck in the same old failed ideology of the dominant culture, steadfastly ignoring the depth and scope of the ecological crises. Real hope comes with abandoning the false prophets and moving on to accomplish something. Authentic hope comes when we honestly confront our condition and dig in to create new, or revive old, forms of community. Hope comes from proving to ourselves that we are competent to manage our own lives. Hope doesn’t fall from the sky but rather is built from the ground up.

That hope doesn’t ask for guarantees that our movements will prevail. That hope doesn’t require us to pretend we know whether the human experiment will go on forever. That hope comes from the understanding that while we did not choose to live in a desecrated world, such is the world into which we were born. All we can do is act out of respect for ourselves, for each other, and for nature, in the hope that we can restore the sacredness of the individual, the human community in which individuals find meaning, and the living world of which human communities are a part.

Organizers have long said that the key to successful organizing is making it easy for people to do the right thing. Today, our task is to be honest about how difficult it is to do the right thing. Anyone who thinks it can be easy to do the right thing is part of the delusional culture. Rather than delude ourselves, let’s face the truth and recognize the difficulty of the path that lies ahead. Other social movements have prevailed in the face of great difficulty, but no social movement has had to face this simple but profound reality: We have to become the first species on the planet to practice restraint in the scramble for energy-rich carbon. All life on this planet is based on that scramble, but if we continue on the path unchecked, the planet will be incapable of sustaining human life as we know it. That is a brand new organizing challenge. In facing it, we need to leave the platitudes at home.

The radical political theology I believe we need for this moment in history would acknowledge, rather than try to mask, our confusion and uncertainty. We know we are in deep trouble; beyond that, it’s guess work. Facing that takes a new kind of courage. We usually think of courage as rooted in clarity and certainty — we act with courage when we are sure of what we know. Today, the courage we need must be rooted in the limits of what we can know and trust in something beyond human knowledge. In many times and places, that something has gone by the name “God.”

Religious fundamentalism offers a God who will protect us if we follow orders. Technological fundamentalism gives us the illusion that we are God and can arrange the world as we like it. A radical political theology leaves behind fear-based protection rackets and arrogance-driven control fantasies.

The God for our journey is neither above us nor inside us but around us, a reminder of the sacredness of the living world of which we are a part. That God shares the anxiety and anguish of life in a desecrated world. With such a God we can be at peace with our powerlessness and alive in hope. With such a God, we can live in peace.

1. Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), chapter 2. Many of my points in this talk were greatly influence by the work of Jackson and The Land Institute.
2. Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
3. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
4. Greg Brown, “Where Is Maria?” from the CD “Further In,” Red House Records, 1996.
5. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010), p. 2.
6. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 25.
7. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 123.

“How do we get our reputation back?”  That’s what Tommy and Carolyn Adkins asked the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. (FTCLDF)

Without a retraction at the web page, they can’t.

Contrast the actions of FDA with those of the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), the agency that has the hands-on responsibility for insuring that Tucker Adkins Dairy produces a safe product.  The department could have suspended the dairy’s license or suspended raw milk sales if it suspected the dairy was responsible for making people sick; it did not,” FTCLDF said in a statement to Food Freedom.

The department took two milk samples on its own, each of which tested negative for campylobacter.  DHEC has found that the dairy has done nothing wrong.  In its seven years of operating as a licensed dairy, Tucker Adkins Dairy has never been cited for a violation by the department nor has a complaint ever been made against the dairy for the raw milk it produces.

This further shows the FDA’s war on natural food producers, as we see with their continual raids, like Wednesday’s assault on Rawesome Foods and Sharon Palmer’s Healthy Family Farms.

As an update, Palmer’s employee, Eugenie Victoria Bloch, was released in today’s arraignment. The court set bail at $30,000 for Rawesome Foods operator, James Stewart.

What struck me most about the recent Rawesome raid was the absolute inaction by those who witnessed it. No one tried to stop the cops or protect their food supply. They complained, yes; but no one actually tried to stop the unconstitutional seizure and destruction of safe and healthy food products.

One woman even said, “We should have a citizen’s arrest here.”  Well, why didn’t she?

Another woman said, “Welcome to America, where it’s a crime to eat organic.” It’s as if those witnesses believe they have no rights other than to complain, or to protest the next day in an organized fashion.

More likely, though, they are thoroughly convinced that law supersedes human rights. Heaven forbid they should actually have to get physically involved when protecting their natural and inalienable rights. Have none of them read A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn?

Merely complaining doesn’t get the job done. Tyranny is brutal and resistance is messy, and the meeting of those two ideologies is often bloody.

Meanwhile, the FDA continues to falsely assert that pasteurization makes milk safer, though the Centers for Disease Control has shown that only six-millionths of a percent of raw milk drinkers become ill, according to an analysis by pathologist Ted Beals.

FDA-approved milk, on the other hand, contains genetically modified ingredients which have been linked to cancer, organ damage and infertility. The milk produced at factory farms, in fact, is so contaminated that it must be pasteurized. When a factory farmer’s relative surreptitiously took some milk from one of his factory cows to a school, several children became ill.

Raw milk intended for direct human consumption is raised in a much cleaner environment. It needs no pasteurization – it’s what humans have been doing for thousands of years.

None of this matters to the government. Its goal is to remove all natural, unadulterated foods from the market, to enable corporate control of all food. The food being forced on to us in the US is banned in several countries because of all the adulterants permitted by the FDA, to wit:  chlorinated chicken, arsenic chicken, GMOs, antibiotic overuse, etc.

Recently, University of Minnesota researchers discovered a natural food preservative that kills food-borne bacteria, and, you guessed it, they patented it. In order to get the patent, the naturally occurring lantibiotic had to be genetically modified.

They want to add this to “meats, processed cheeses, egg and dairy products, canned foods, seafood, salad dressing, fermented beverages and many other foods,” researchers Daniel O’Sullivan and Ju-Hoon Lee told Food Freedom in a statement.

Rather than further adulterating the food supply with DNA-modifications, wouldn’t it be safer to clean up how food is produced?  Even Louis Pasteur understood, at the end of his life, that a germ can only cause problems if the host terrain is compromised, an idea promoted by Antoine Bechamp.

In other words, germs don’t cause disease; rather, a weakened immune system facilities germ proliferation.

Holding a protest the next day is all fine and nice and fits well within actions authorized by this criminal government. But the time to take action is when the cops are raiding your food stores.  Even dogs know this, as does most of the animal kingdom.

I am certain that many of those people witnessing the Rawesome raid would have no problem getting physically involved if they were witnessing a gang rape.  Is your right to healthy food any less important?

Despite laws claiming the unconstitutional power to enter your home without a warrant, would you let that happen?

King and Gandhi lost, remember?  The USA and India are wholly corporate-owned, and those corporations are forcing farmers off their lands, which they are then polluting with their toxic mining, toxic factories, and toxic agriculture.  Both nations have forced genetically modified foods adulterated with a host of other ingredients on the populace.

Both nations use state-sanctioned violence to promote corporate aims. Complaining and protesting hasn’t stopped them.

Maybe next time goons show up to seize and destroy food that has sickened no one, people will assert their Second Amendment rights and protect their food supply. This is exactly why that right was written into the US Constitution – to protect us from tyranny.

Yeah, some of us will get arrested and some of us might get shot if we confront armed raiders. But eating factory foods is killing most of us anyway – a slow, painful, expensive death that enriches the pharmaceutical industry and FDA coffers.

Should we die on subservient knees complaining, while allowing these raids to proceed? Or should we stand up and risk being arrested or shot for defending our inalienable right to eat the foods with which we evolved?

It’s all still phrased as a temporary down-turn; they have to call it that or fundamental questions would be asked. Even so, the most optimistic among us realize something is wildly wrong, even if they dare not give the feeling words.

We are the ones who will witness breathtaking change. Every history buff has an era they would like to have been witness to. Would anyone wish to observe our moment? Ours may be the most profound and rapid unraveling to ever color this globe.

We have so many crises converging upon us, like several flood-swollen rivers finding a confluence. It’s conceivable that our problems can be dealt with in a piecemeal fashion, but it’s the sheer number and severity of all the factors together which point to a very different world emerging. A dark synergy.

We have built a consumer-driven economy that relies on infinite growth. The folly of this is that it was implemented on a finite planet! Growth is needed in this system; new bubbles have to be inflated. It’s the way of things until the very system devours all that can be had.

The steroid for all this growth has been that of Peak Oil. No longer in the realm of oddball conjecture, respected entities like the International Energy Agency consider that we reached the peak of easily available oil in 2006, and that we are now on the downhill slope. That is not to say that we are going to be out of oil rapidly. It’s that we now are left with oil that is more difficult and dangerous to slurp up.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster is a perfect example of this. You don’t drill 35,000 feet into the seabed (for comparison Mount Everest is 29,029 feet) if the easy stuff is still to be had. On the opposite end of availability, the Seneca would utilize oil that was available at the surface long ago. They used it for medicinal purposes as they scooped it up with baskets. Babylon was even said to have an asphalt type material within its walls.

We have to drill halfway to hell for it now. No adequate response has been formulated to transition to anything else in quantity, so issues such as food distribution, petro-chemical agriculture techniques, they are all going to become increasingly costly. This puts all of the population at risk. This is what happens when the oil industry is the government (or can at least buy it when necessary).

The easy energy available in the form of petroleum had many branching repercussions in the last century. New inventions arrived at an exponential pace. The problem is that we are now reaching an effect known as the Law of Diminished Returns.

A common example of this effect is that of antibiotic usage. When penicillin became widely available, it was nothing short of a miracle. This happy time has passed, and now due to the promiscuous quality inherent to bacteria, there is ever emerging resistance that we cannot adequately treat. We have a few Gorillacillins that try to thwart these newly outfitted germs, but every year brings us closer to a moment when the return on antibiotics is diminished to the point that we will be essentially back to the era prior to them. This was anticipated and warned against, but we still let it occur. It’s continuing as we speak, especially in the agricultural sector.

Animals are given “maintenance” doses of antibiotics to enable squalid conditions that would normally not be feasible. This is a perfect breeding ground for new resistant qualities to emerge. We will have to maneuver in this new environment with a sense of being part of the natural world, including the microbial. Perhaps this new vulnerable role will mark Peak Hubris, but I doubt it.

Of course, the monster of all shattered future scenarios comes via climate change. If you are still stubborn enough to dispute that this is in play, please just speak to some of your local gardeners. You can bet they have noticed the shifts and the strangeness. People can fight all they want about the causes, but it won’t stop them from having to deal with the reality of it. Climate change has happened in the past, and it’s instructive to look at the human cost of those incidents.  Our changes look to be more drastic than the historical precedents we can study, however.

Around 985 the Norse branched out, settling in southern Greenland. They did this during a relatively warm era, and for a time their colony prospered. But the “Little Ice Age” period began a few hundred years later, causing the colony to dwindle and ultimately fail. The unfortunate souls watched their world become colder and more hostile and unfortunately they did not adapt as the Inuit did. They completely vanished, most likely due to clinging to a way of life that only worked during warmer times.

We are looking at an even more radical change in weather stability with our overall warming trend. If we don’t respond in a nimble manner (as did the Inuit) our fate will likely resemble the Norse colonists.

A very bizarre theory (but frankly plausible) is that the witchcraft hysteria of those centuries was exacerbated by the climate change. Women were considered to be tied to nature more than men (and obviously this was not viewed in a positive sense during these times) and single women were often accused of using their witchcraft to play havoc with the weather. Cold spells and hail decreased crop yields and it was common to place blame in strange places. Hard times and erratic weather are not “crucibles” for enlightened societal behavior.

As if climate change, peak oil, and diminished returns weren’t enough to deal with, we are entering these dangerous times with some of the most venal characters in history leading the way. Political discourse has been relegated to nonsense as the uber-wealthy continue to solidify a new divine right.

It’s difficult to imagine our present day leaders taking on the moral imperative to solve these problems. It’s a reign of narcissism with little eye to the future. Can you picture Bush and Obama conversing by letters in their old age, exploring topics like Adams and Jefferson? I can’t either.

This is to say that we have danger and fright stalking our futures. That damn “may you live in interesting times” curse from an ancient Chinese passive aggressive — well, that’s the fortune for each and every one of us.

The problems are daunting and to be certain, there aren’t going to be easy answers. But one thing is clear; if we make no attempt to steer the collapse in the most equitable way possible, we could very well be looking at a return to something that resembles a feudal society, one with walled off enclaves for the very wealthy and misery for the great majority. They haven’t the right to cause this to happen. We must be focused and know that the upheavals are pending. We can’t be distracted by the short term ploys and the nonsensical behavior that passes for leadership.

The complexity of the issues should not frighten us into submission. It simply means that the status quo cannot continue and a time of collapse and failure of the old ideas opens the possibility for something different. We can try for a system a little less corrosive to the environment and the soul. Tolerating anything less may herald an extinction level event for our kind.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

— Oscar Wilde

We are facing terrible monsters and hard choices in the near future, but we must never think that we only deserve the gutter.

2…   Immediately discontinue the manufacture, export, and use of drones.  Cut the military budget by 99%. Cut the State Department budget by 90%.  Eliminate the Black Budget which was authorized by the 1947 National Security Act of President Truman.  Even if all uniformed members of the military were brought home, the killing would not end. It is clear that  the State Department, CIA, and private contractors are more dangerous than the military. The uniformed military is only the tip of the iceberg. The real danger is with US forces that operate in secret.

3…   Encourage the dissemination of information from whistleblowers such as Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.  Any possibility of a democratic nation died with the adoption of the Black Budget which prevented citizens from having access to information; therefore, no informed vote has been cast in the USA since 1947. If you can’t follow the money, you don’t know what your government is doing. More whisleblowers are needed so that voters will have the information necessary to cast informed ballots.

4…   Place a 100% tax on all income above $88,000 – all income, earned and unearned.

5…   Aim to close all nuclear power plants.  Encourage green power - solar power – water power – wind power.   A ridgeline with windmills is preferable to a ridgeline that has been contaminated.

6…   Support small, local, organic family farms.  End all subsidies to large industrial farms.

7…   End all secret boards.  This can be accomplished by withholding public funds from organizations that use secret boards for decision-making purposes.

Hospital ‘Ethics’ Boards meet in secret and make life and death decisions.  Any decision to ‘pull the plug’ should be made in the open. Patient confidentiality would not be violated if the identity of the patient was not disclosed.

Library boards sometimes meet behind closed doors and censor political books that could be considered ‘unpatriotic’.  (Yes, it is now happening in the USA.)

When fascism came, it was not at the point of a gun, it was not brought by government troops, it was not even imposed by the Corporate CEO or the Hedge Fund manager.  Fascism quietly came in the guise of a misinformed teacher, a celebrity celebrating assassination, and a bespectacled librarian banning books.

8…   The problems with the legal system could fill volumes but there are some simple improvements that could be made.

Limit the use of expert witnesses.  With enough money testimony can be designed to fit any goal desired – no matter how unjust. Juries should always be told when testimony is purchased.  Now is the perfect time to examine the way juries work.   Secret deliberations foster unjust verdicts.  The deliberations should be open -  the identities of the jurors could be withheld till after the verdict is rendered.   Group deliberations are a problem.   Anytime more than one person is in a room, one person will be dominant.   A pecking order contaminates the process and can prevent a fair verdict.  Is unanimity really a sacred concept – or should there be room for dissenting views within a jury?    Even the Supreme Court allows for dissenting opinion.

End the death penalty. The State should never have the power to kill its citizens or anyone else. In addition, the death penalty can be a deterrent to justice.  The first juror to speak publicly after the Casey Anthony trial stated that it was the death penalty that affected her verdict vote.

9…   Adopt a national policy which assures food, shelter, and medical/dental care for all – with no regard to race, creed, citizenship, economic status, place of birth, or any other dehumanizing judgment.

10…  Send a formal apology with an offer of reparations to all individual victims of unjust US imprisonment and torture.  Also to all countries that have been victims of USA foreign policy. Start with the former inhabitants of Diego Garcia. The Chagossians were forcibly removed so that the island could be transformed into a military base for the US. It can be debated that the forced expulsion of the native population is evidence of genocide by the USA.

In the most general sense, it could be truth that scares elite the most; however, listed above are four things offering simpler and more specific details—and let’s save hemp for last since its prohibition cuts so deeply into the other three.

Democracy

Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest. But that was simply elite window dressing from a long line of strategic liars.

The term democracy has become an American pacifier, a cozy inaccuracy, idiom that even people who know better are forced to use just to be heard. Democracy sounds nice, power to the people, consent of the governed and all that. How many times this week have you heard official bluster about “spreading freedom and democracy”? But elections have been so corrupted throughout that democracy seems irrelevant; as a term used by federal officials or wannabes its most important function appears to be its demonstration of what suckers and chumps officials think we Americans are.

W.C. Fields said, “Never smarten up a chump, and never give a sucker an even break.” Sounds right out of the feds’ playbook.

And please excuse my mention of this hackneyed old saw—it just seems one of those immortal truisms: How do you know when a politician is lying? Their lips move….

America’s Founding Fathers rejected democracy, or, “tyranny of the majority”, and their reasoning is highly defensible.

John Adams warned that Democracy would soon degenerate into anarchy. He also said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” And, “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

James Madison said that democracies are always a spectacle of turbulence and contention.

Benjamin Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”

Liberty, and property rights were most important to the Founding Fathers, so they gave us a constitutional republic with elected leaders—and further insulated us from democracy with the electoral vote system.

Frankly, current abundant abuse and misuse use of the term democracy by elected officials is insulting…it’s just not clear who should feel the most insulted, abusers or their targets.

Freedom

Many languages draw no distinction between “freedom”, and “liberty”. Where distinctions do exist, freedom is the more general term, implying simple exemption from control or influence by another person or agency; whereas liberty implies laws, behavior within a system of order and restraint, its character solidly political.

Governments tend to use fear to increase their power. Keep the fear pressure on citizens with threats via color-coded terrorist alerts and such—then scare the scat of them with things like 9/11 and wha-la! More powerful government. More war. Americans have been duped into cowering for protection from mysterious, crazed foreigners hating us for our “freedom and democracy”; hating us for something we don’t even have. Weird? You know, there might be something a little deeper… something about “blowback”?

But we do still have liberty, though terminally threatened from within. And our constitutional republic is well-defended from democracy—especially now by various means such as e-voting and unlimited corporate cash controlling elections…many means that surely would make our Founding Fathers squirm.

Sweet talk about freedom—politicians emit it like camels emit methane. Despite that, freedom (they mean liberty) is an endangered species. Benjamin Franklin had such a knack: “Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” He must have said it before our freedom had been institutionalized into liberties?

Peace

Remember Woodstock, 1969? People took many liberties, even enjoyed shocking freedom, entwining music, mud, sacrifice, camaraderie, joy and peace together with eternity. There were plenty of problems, but so much sharing and caring…and plenty of peace.

Today’s police state would never allow Woodstock to happen again, but if it did, 500,000 people under similar circumstances… would peace play such a part? Cell phones alone could power widespread antagonism and conflict, and the police presence.

Might American imperial war profiteering seem any less disgraceful if war mongers publicly crusaded about there being no money in peace—that war is what grows fortunes? They have an enormous amount of disgrace to conceal, not even considering the humanitarian euphemisms they use as cover for killing citizens, mangling their countries, installing tyrants beholden to Washington, and stealing their resources.

Civil War Union general Tecumseh Sherman, said, “War is all Hell.”

For anyone directly exposed to war, that has to be precisely true. But for the war profiteers, who cultivate the bravery of being out of range, more truth might be found in: “War is all Gravy.”

When Smedley Butler died a retired Major General in 1940, he was the most decorated Marine in history. He’d written scathingly about the military industrial complex in his book, War is a Racket. This passage is from an issue of Common Sense magazine in 1935:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

In George Orwell’s prophetic novel, 1984, the three slogans of The Party led by Big Brother are:

WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Perpetual war gripped the world in 1984. Now we have “perpetual war for perpetual peace” (from American historian Charles Beard [1874–1948], famous for his outspoken criticisms of American interventionism abroad).

War has become America’s number one export. We spend nearly as much on war as the rest of the world combined, while selling over half of the world’s implements of war. We have armed forces deployed in 130 countries, and more than 1000 overseas military bases that have nothing to do with “peace”.

America is far and away the world’s preeminent war profiteer, annually spending more than $1 trillion (vastly more when “black budget spending” is considered), while cutting to the bone any spending that directly benefits Americans. It’s conceivable that nobody really knows how much we spend on war…bottom line is it’s simply shameful.

And to soften up the idea of war, to make “…all Hell” more publicly palatable, we declare war on all kinds of things: war on drugs; war on terror; war on poverty; war on …

Meanwhile, in the “land of the free and home of the brave”, for 73 years and counting it has been a federal crime to farm the most useful crop in the history of the world.

Hemp

Oligarchy, follow the money, protection of power and profit explain how hemp was effectively banned in 1937, and why industrial hemp farming remains smothered today.

In 1992, George H.W. Bush characterized the fundamental ideology of America this way: “The continuous consolidation of money and power into higher, tighter, and righter hands.”

Perpetual war and globalization are main engines powering this ideology from hell. Hemp is the premiere antidote for globalization, the ideal means of spreading the wealth where it belongs by empowering self-sustaining regional economies. That is why hemp remains an illegal crop—hemp prohibition has never realistically had anything to do with “reefer madness”.

Destroying the competition, that’s what American hemp prohibition is all about; hemp is too great of a competitor, it’s wondrous record spanning nearly 120 centuries.

Benefits of hemp farming are actually difficult to overstate. Food, fuel, fiber, paper, textiles, plastics, an estimated 50,000 superior products that, totally unlike entrenched petrochemical products (with gravy-train patents—that’s huge), have a place in a living system. And as far as hemp reflecting exactly how and why America has gone so wrong, could there be a better reflector—or anything even close? Hemp could power a breakout, perhaps even an epidemic, of peace. Instead of pirating so many other nations’ resources, America could grow her own! But …

Elite families in America’s oligarchy have become obscenely wealthy and powerful via enforcement of a global fossil-energy economy, and myriad synthetic products of petrochemical alchemy. To say the world runs on oil is largely a rude truth—the human world anyway, civilization. It certainly does not have to be that way, should not be that way regarding a viable future of humanity and Earth’s biosphere. The reason it is that way points to the very heart of darkness.

Widespread belief that there is no alternative to our destructive, suicidal, biocidal status quo has long been cultivated by those our terminal status quo enriches most (Screw the Future could serve as their motto). The elite not only own the government, they own mainstream media, along with …frankly, it’s getting difficult to point out what they don’t own, ultimately. Such concentration of “…money and power into higher, tighter, and righter hands” is chiefly perpetuated via the elite destroying any and all competition beyond their control. With hemp they’ve come as close as they can by making it an illegal crop, then hammering into the American psyche that hemp, farmers—even educated people (as opposed to indoctrinated) might, somehow, be dangerous.

To go with the class war boiling in America, the elite have cooked up a crass war. Evidence of who is winning gets more frightening every day. Multi-billionaire Koch brothers and their “tea party”, Michele Bachmann …our Founding Fathers wouldn’t just squirm, they would be almost as mortified as if they knew that in America, hemp farming has been a federal crime for 73 years.

So what about “states’ rights”? Twenty-eight states have introduced legislation, and sixteen of them now have pro-hemp laws on the books. North Dakota is suing the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) for the RIGHT! to grow hemp—have even been selling state licenses to grow hemp since 2007. However, farmers in North Dakota know that if they plant hemp, feds will arrest them, fine them, seize their property and throw them in prison. If this sounds insane, that’s because it is insane.

North Dakota is doing a number of things correctly or, against the grain as it were. After nearly 100 years of public banking (Bank of North Dakota), the state has the nation’s lowest unemployment (about 4%), and not only has no debt to service, but is the lone state to avoid a budget deficit over the last two years (they actually have a billion-dollar surplus).

Any talk of freedom, democracy, liberty and justice for all, government by the consent of the governed—generally, all the platitudes politicians and officials croon about being handed down to us by our Founding Fathers, it tends to ring rather hollow in a nation that for 73 years has criminalized the growing of the most valuable crop handed down to us by Mother Nature.

America, and Americans: we need jobs that can’t be offshored, now.

We need Mother Nature on our side: need to work with, not against, her.

We need peace, liberty, and a brighter future involving the creation of value. Hemp is ready to go back to work for us. The US hemp industry is currently ringing up $400 million in annual retail sales—all of it with imported raw materials!

Hemp will never be given back to the people, we must take it back, now.