Toxic Corporations Are Destroying the Planet’s Soil
Colin Todhunter
A newly published analysis in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science argues that a toxic soup of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides is causing havoc beneath fields covered in corn, soybeans, wheat and other monoculture crops. The research is the most comprehensive review ever conducted on how pesticides affect soil health.
The study is discussed by two of the report’s authors, Nathan Donley and Tari Gunstone, in a recent article appearing on the Scientific American website.
The authors state that the findings should bring about immediate changes in how regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assess the risks posed by the nearly 850 pesticide ingredients approved for use in the USA.
Conducted by the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth and the University of Maryland, the research looked at almost 400 published studies that together had carried out more than 2800 experiments on how pesticides affect soil organisms. The review encompassed 275 unique species or types of soil organisms and 284 different pesticides or pesticide mixtures.
Pesticides were found to harm organisms that are critical to maintaining healthy soils in over 70 per cent of cases. But Donley and Gunstone say this type of harm is not considered in the EPA’s safety reviews, which ignore pesticide harm to earthworms, springtails, beetles and thousands of other subterranean species.
The EPA uses a single test species to estimate risk to all soil organisms, the European honeybee, which spends its entire life above ground in artificial boxes. But 50-100 per cent of all pesticides end up in soil.
The researchers conclude that the ongoing escalation of pesticide-intensive agriculture and pollution are major driving factors in the decline of soil organisms. By carrying out wholly inadequate reviews, the regulatory system serves to protect the pesticide industry.
The study comes in the wake of other recent findings that indicate high levels of the weedkiller chemical glyphosate and its toxic breakdown product AMPA have been found in topsoil samples from no-till fields in Brazil.
Writing on the GMWatch website, Claire Robinson and Jonathan Matthews note that, despite this, the agrochemical companies seeking the renewal of the authorisation of glyphosate by the European Union in 2022 are saying that one of the greatest benefits of glyphosate is its ability to foster healthier soils by reducing the need for tillage (or ploughing).
This in itself is misleading because farmers are resorting to ploughing given increasing weed resistance to glyphosate and organic agriculture also incorporates no till methods. At the same time, proponents of glyphosate conveniently ignore or deny its toxicity to soils, water, humans and wildlife.
With that in mind, it is noteworthy that GMWatch also refers to another recent study which says that glyphosate is responsible for a five per cent increase in infant mortality in Brazil.
The new study, ‘Pesticides in a case study on no-tillage farming systems and surrounding forest patches in Brazil’ in the journal Scientific Reports, leads the researchers to conclude that glyphosate-contaminated soil can adversely impact food quality and human health and ecological processes for ecosystem services maintenance. They argue that glyphosate and AMPA presence in soil may promote toxicity to key species for biodiversity conservation, which are fundamental for maintaining functioning ecological systems.
These studies reiterate the need to shift away from increasingly discredited ‘green revolution’ ideology and practices. This chemical-intensive model has helped the drive towards greater monocropping and has resulted in less diverse diets and less nutritious foods. Its long-term impact has led to soil degradation and mineral imbalances, which in turn have adversely affected human health.
If we turn to India, for instance, that country is losing 5334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion and degradation, much of which is attributed to the indiscreet and excessive use of synthetic agrochemicals. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research reports that soil is becoming deficient in nutrients and fertility.
India is not unique in this respect. Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization stated back in 2014 that if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s topsoil could be gone within 60 years. She noted that about a third of the world’s soil had already been degraded. There is general agreement that chemical-heavy farming techniques are a major cause.
It can take 500 years to generate an inch of soil yet just a few generations to destroy. When you drench soil with proprietary synthetic agrochemicals as part of a model of chemical-dependent farming, you harm essential micro-organisms and end up feeding soil a limited doughnut diet of toxic inputs.
Armed with their multi-billion-dollar money-spinning synthetic biocides, this is what the agrochemical companies have been doing for decades. In their arrogance, these companies claim to have knowledge that they do not possess and then attempt to get the public and co-opted agencies and politicians to bow before the altar of corporate ‘science’ and its bought-and-paid-for scientific priesthood.
The damaging impacts of their products on health and the environment have been widely reported for decades, starting with Rachel Carson’s ground-breaking 1962 book Silent Spring.
These latest studies underscore the need to shift towards organic farming and agroecology and invest in indigenous models of agriculture – as has been consistently advocated by various high-level international agencies, not least the United Nations, and numerous official reports.
Colin Todhunter is an independent journalist who writes on development, environmental issues, politics, food and agriculture. In August 2018 he was named as one of 400 Living Peace and Justice Leaders and Models by Transcend Media Services, in recognition of his journalism.
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But this is just big ag you say? My wife and I were just talking about the hypocrisy inherent in the “green movement” as pushed by morons like Congressdope Cortez. One of the worst things America has environmentally speaking is the idea everyone should have a lawn. Zillions of gallons of potable water poured out every year on a “crop” that is only cut, bagged, and thrown into a landfill. Untold gallons and pounds of artificial fertilizers and pesticides poured on the ground around your house–which then washes off into your water supply. The large industries that produce vast amounts of power equipment for this useless endeavor. How much petroleum is wasted just on lawn care? How much of your precious time do you waste mowing your yard? Oh too lazy? Just look at how an entire industry has sprung up in the US just to mow your grass because of how lazy people are now. Xeriscape at least your front yard.
I never understood it. Sure, it looks nice, but a lot of time and effort if you do it yourself, and a lot of money if you hire it done. I mow mine to keep the critters and bugs at bay, but I don’t give a damn what kind of grass it is, nor do weeds bother me. In fact, I would prefer the whole thing was dandelions. They don’t grow any faster than grass, and they have flowers. I suspect that more pesticides per acre are used on lawns than on crops. They aren’t a big expense for a home owner, who wouldn’t even notice the cost of using twice or three times as much as needed. They are for an agriculture operation.
Mr Todhunter should start to co-ordinate a global decade of ‘Operation Restore Soil Health’.
I and others have proven small scale that you can totally transform unhealthy soil into healthy soil over 7-10 years using no-till, organic methods and self-generated composting.
If you can enlist 100 million people to tend to 100sqm each for a decade, then you will create 1 million hectares of high quality organic topsoil.
That’s just the start: in the end you will need 1 billion people each tending to a hectare. That would be 1 billion hectares restored.
Don’t expect the corporations to initiate change. Ignore them and initiate change ourselves. Start small but have huge long-term ambitions.
I’ve read at Robert Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense Fund that EVEN those bags of “organic soil, fertilizer” are filled with toxic plastics.
How about “organic seeds” – where do you find truly “organic seeds?” The word is that Billy Gates have bought every seed known to man.
Is there any company or store in the US that sells authentic non-toxic seeds and fertilizer?
While the green movement is hysterical over climate change, they don’t seem to care about the chemical poisoning of the planet. By design? How much support to climate change hysteria do DuPont and Bayer/Monsanto give? Many of the poisons being fed to us are not regulated at all. No civilization outlives its top soil.
DuPont and Bayer/Monsanto BP, Shell, Pentagon etc all now have a green logo (brought and paid for) and use terms like sustainability on the first page of their website and our helping the planet.
Many company’s now use recycled paper how sweeet.
They forget to mention the huge chemical process that goes into that.
It helps you forget and ignore the the destruction they do so you the customer carrys on buying their products with a healthy clear conscious.
Meanwhile, climate change costs them almost nothing.
A short list of published articles regarding the use of glyphosate and other agricultural chemicals: >
Stephanie Seneff’s Home Page (mit.edu)
“Man joined the eternal abyss
When food became a commodity”
– Paul Vonharnish –
January 2, 2020
It’s NOT Science it’s scientism. It atomizes reality into bits, life is seen as cells, the environment as habitats, farms as separate crop fields, animals as species, nature as chemicals. It’s a corruption of reality. It is disintegrating our reality. Corporate (false) biologists and (false) chemists have profited from this delusion. The cure is wholesomeness. Everything must be seen as a whole. Start with yourself. If you suffer illness, it is not a problem with the part (particle) but a malfunction of the whole.
Scientism reduces everything to information in the form of algorithms and loops . A direct result of the philosophy of materialism based on empirical if tentative proofs becoming religion , bases on wish thinking and hysteria.
I think a more accurate description would be tautologising science with technology. After all, capitalism presents the progression of mechanisation and technology, both in forms of producing and consuming, as progression of society.
beautifully put !
I call it “pixelized thinking” and you see it everywhere. The world is like a photo mosaic made up of millions of individual pictures (pixels)–people only see what is in front of them they rarely step back to see where their “pixel” fits into the big picture. And the list of problems both personal and corporate, that we face caused by this type of thinking is probably endless.
Excellent article Colin. The “Green Revolution” has been likened to “strip mining.” Which starts as soon as you resort to synthetic fertilisers and artificial nutrients – the biotechnological genetic improvements to replave the natural resilience lost by resorting to toxic chemical industrial agriculture – themselves hydrocarbon based (the notorious Haber-Bosch process: 80% of our structural proteins are synthetic in origin; lord only knows what is going on between the gut and the brain, but immunocompromised and cognitively impaired just about sums it up.) Then there is the bioenergetics of 10 fuel calories to 1 food calorie, just to grow. 20 fuel calories to process, distribute, and bury the waste (never less than 15%, sometimes a lot more – from farm to tip to meet quotas is a good example) ….Compromised biodiversity (including “bugpocalypse” and “where did all the bees go?”) ….eutrophication, drained watertables, farmer suicides ….all adding up to compromised planetary boundaries for nitrogen and phosphorous usage.
Which begs the deep ecological question: Why? To which the answer seems to be configured as “toxic corporations” serving ‘the cabal’ or ‘shadowy elite’ that control the world through a bunch of acronyms: or “alphabeticity ego-syntony” as I shall now refer to it. Which if nothing else, actually obscures the deeper self-propagational and longterm development of the ego, a particular kind of subjective solipsistic ego formerly known as the ‘western mind.’ Now, through genocidal pire-violence (the worst of violence) and imperial ego projection and supervenience of its insatiable coloniality of power-knowledge ….which is now the global mind (intellectus globus or cogitatio natura universalis) ….Or that which is convened as a dominant and hegemonic worldview by this very discourse.
Which seems to be incomprehensible to most language users who believe that their language competency is a personal possession and privatised proprietary configuration ….true, if you think that a proper configuration of predetermined, predestined, and preowned concepts is “individual, unique, and personally privatised” ….and not a cultural artifact modelled, modulated, and in-formed by culturally determined and socially and consensually agreed conceptual concatenations of identity. Cultural identity. Proper of the cultural being.
This needn’t even be stigmatised. After all, there must be a certain ontological agreement in the £form of life£ [sic] if we are going to live together. This is basic morality, ties that bind, codes of conduct, normativity, cultural mores extending to normalisation and “technologies of identity” and “techniques of subjectivity.” None of which is intrinsically bad or even negative or nihilistic. It is basic social contract theory: omnes et singulatum ….the cavalier “all for one and one for all” (not an exact translation, but good enough.) Or “e pluribus unum” if you prefer.
The process has been likened to the formation of a superego or particular kind of being – or Superself – from which the little individual self is both a constituent ‘stem cell’ and a particularised copy – a self-constituted, self-ruled, and self-governed ‘project’ of the culturally approved superego ….being qua Being: the primary capitalist metaphysics.
The socially approved ego, in concordance and communion with its reinforced co-operantancy with all cultural ‘individual’ egos (the habitus of having) ….configured via a shared use of concepts and logic and grammar ….automatically configuring “being qua Being” repetetively across centuries. So much so: the mechanism is hidden in plain sight. Only, never over there ==>
“Look, some toxic corporations” “Where?” “Next to the alphabeticity cabal and rebus of acronyms ….”
Never ->here<- ….configured from the background collective cognitive unconscious and narratised automatically and non-consciously. Which is a part of what cognition does: automatically recognise patterns, Whether they refer to anything objective and real is a matter of much speculation, dissimilitude, and determination. It goes bad, if not mad, when the process becomes so deeply ingrained, as an autonomous “second nature” controlled by cultural processes beyond personal control or modulation.
The language is an automatic configuration of a certain and particular kind of being: replete with its own linear-sequential and automatically repetitive reification apparatuses and grammatical mechanisms. Platonic-Augustinian-Cartesian dogmas and absolute dualisms refer to nothing; apart from the automatic repetition of co-conditioning and co-operantancy; grammatically co-ordinated and logically extended to an inexistent invisible ‘being’ made real by intense and previolent repetition. Not toxic corporations, but toxic incorporation in language.
The only out is a total dissolution of this particular form of being. Look for it “out there” and die looking. This involves dissolving and disidentifying with all Cartesian dualisms. The universe is not split in two, and neither is cognition. All automatic self/other determinations are automatically false. In fact: the whole basis of determination, configuration, and knowledge can be likened to the PCR test: set by over repetitive cycles in such a way that linguistically amplify letters that can only determine objective false-positives. Entering language is entering a parallel pseudoworld and anything you find there ->here<- is likely to be a chimeric configuration and consubstantiation of rebuses and alphabets and “alphabeticity acronyms” thrown about by linguistic entities ….previolently.
The universe is not split in two, not dualistic, not ordered and controlled by a causal and causative superhuman being, which is not ordered and controlled by a causal and causative substance of unification ….the One, the “Plenum of the Unum”.
Sense experience is ‘uncaused’ and holistic and unified before a single concept corrupts the unity: as a self-imposed ontological toxic pathology. Anyone that can see that thought itself, if not violence, is a previolence, is condemned to isolation from the communion of being thought ….by the very being-of-being-thought ….less the incorporation into the currency and alphabeticity of the corruption be interrupted.
It couldn’t possibly be that the entire basic construction theory of dogmatic dualisms is entirely wrong and entirely falsifying ‘reality’ with every corrupt determination? That Thich Nhat Hanh was wrong to conclude that ‘nirvana’ was the elimination of all “concepts and ideas”; and all ego “me/not me” determinations? Which are in fact terminations – creating a solid, substantial, personal, privatised ego domain. No, it must be the ‘bad’ ego determinations. as so deemed by the ‘good’: creating a real oppositional binary determination that really fixes reality. Or is it just another hallucinatory spectacle?
It seems fairly obvious that the current communitarian “image of thought” is itself psychopathological: and not just the “aspect seeing” of individuality. Individuality, as currently configured itself. Metaphysically ‘being qua Being’ as a pandemic “onto-oncology” [pan ‘all’ + dēmos ‘people; ontos ‘being’ + logos ‘study of, discussion of: lit. ‘I speak, I say”.] Making it known through language that language is in itself the medium of culture and the vector of toxicity – source and substrate of the pandemic – might seem a fucking futility, but someone might agree. In the meantime: the pandemic alphabeticity goes on.
We may use language creatively rather than as hierarchically received.
This whole thing is transpiring by way of unconscious symbolism. We can take this force back by creating our own.
Some potential causes of global famine:
:- dud strains of plants/animals
:- weeds, fungi or pests due to destroyed biomes or industrial farming itself
:- the soil destroyed by erosion and agro-chemicals
:- cheating of farmers; though the majority are ageing, the exploitation dissuades younger people from taking over
:- climate collapse, e.g., extremes or excessive variability
“…glyphosate is responsible for a five per cent increase in infant mortality in Brazil” – not very widely known, in comparison we read headlines about Convid chaos in Brazil (Brasil) where the mortality rate to ‘case’ is 2.8%, the same as in the UK for deaths to ‘cases’ 3/1/20-11/6/21, according to WHO. Obviously some deaths are more noteworthy than others…
Update. UK rate down from 2.8% to 2.7% – today’s WHO Dashboard – no wonder schlockdown has been extended…
Ironic really, ‘case’ numbers inflated while attributed deaths remain very low. WTF would you get tested? Not relevant to this discussion but thought people might want to know…
It should be astonishing that so litle is known about the toxicity of many chemicals. According to Dr Devra Davis, “in 1998, the National Academy of Science confirmed that we have no public record of the toxicity of 3 out of every 4 of the top 3,000 chemicals in use today”. Regulators and corporations appear to think it is the other’s responsibility to find out. They also hide behind the “large dose” fallacy but the human endocrine system can be disrupted by very low levels of toxicity.
Organophosphates are one family of chemicals used in pesticides. They work by inhibiting the enzyme cholinesterase in the nervous system of insects. Unfortunately the human nervous system uses the same enzyme. Organophosphates are used as neurotoxins in nerve gas.
Of course it isn’t only pesticides that are drowning us in toxicity. Mining is another important source of pollutants and there’s the growing threat of electro-magnetic pollution. Oh look over there, there’s some carbon….
Many pesticides work based on neuro-toxicity.
Hormone disruption occurs at doses as low as parts per trillion.
most of these corporations (financialist control grid/dystopic mercantilism) are really purveyors of poison and weaponry.. in fact many of their products began as weapons…
‘repurposed’ for ‘profit’..
I am sure the financial carrion are aware of the ‘dangers’.. no doubt viewing them as ‘benefits’..
Very true, especially if we say it is US voters, to whom “little is known.” US govt/corporations withhold facts needed for informed voter debate. For example, voters have never been told of 1880s–1940 US corporate and govt operations in Viet Nam, enabled by French invasion force, #VietnamWarOrigin. We are told that we entered around 1954.
But trying to resume the early decades of profit by French killings, US leaders paid a devastated France to re-invade after WW2. But Viet Nam defeated that, so US corporate/govt leaders took over the invasion during 1954–75. They said not one word of the early presence. The point for this discussion on chemicals is that corporations cannot be expected to give voters the needed information.
Sorry, a citation for the 1880s–1940 activity in my prior reply is:
Sales of US goods in the 1890s held “great favor.” Consul to Secy State Elihu Root (1905, Sept. 29). United States Consulate (1957). Despatches from United States consuls in Saigon, 1886–1906. Washington: National Archives and Records Service, Central Service Administration, Reel 1, No. 13, p. 2. (US National Archives).
OP is a bit one sided and doom ridden for me.
I’m sure it can, however, topsoil can also be regenerated at 1″ per year, Joel Salatin (polyface farms) increased his topsoil 6″ in 6 years, pictures of his fenceline showing the neighbours soil 6″ below his are quite remarkable.
Regerative agriculture is really farm scale Permaculture, keyline ploughing increases soil water retention, introducing ‘actively aerated compost tea’ restores the soil biota (see Elaine Ingram soil food web for methods). Holistic management (specifiically controlled rotational grazing) also grows topsoil, herds are coralled onto a controlled area of fresh grass at peak sugar content (as wild roming herds would have done) the animals eat, trample, fertilise, then are moved on to a fresh patch while the previous area is left to regenerate, imagine a cartwheel style fencing, the herd is moved between the spokes. This is taken a step further by Joel Salatin, the grazed area is followed up with “chicken tractors” that scratch up the surface, spread the dung, eat bugs, fertilse some more, then they’re moved on to the next patch, chicken tractors are followed by duck tractors that repeat the same cycle.
Mixed farming (animals and crops, rotated) following these methods, intercropped between tree crops planted in lanes N-S) , seems to be the most efficient, ecologically positive, economical, profitable, method of organic agriculture, producing soil regeneration that defies the doom laden research of globalist captured green/eco organisations.
If you’re into farming and get chance to attend a course for regerative agriculture (RegenAg), and/or soil food web compost tea seminar, take it, you will not look back.
another thing I thought of…
says people who never had to clean out their temperate household gutters 🙂 My gutters grow at least an inch of topsoil in ~3 yrs with no effort at all (lol)
Thanks for all that info. RegenAg and Permaculture are such positive solutions-there’s amazing, innovative work happening all over the world in their fields.
You’re welcome Esmeralda 🙂
AACT can be also used even on garden/allotment scale, the key is learning to make good seeding compost for it with the correct thermophillic composting techniques. AACT seed compost is available comercially (soil food web connected labs) you can brew AACT in a 5 gal bucket if you have a good large fishtank/pond air pump. Farm scale you can use a 1000ltr IBC container to brew it tho you’ll need a proper large air pump (rotary vain pump is good) AACT feeds are available off the shelf, or you can research your own (liquidized fish guts and a bit of dextrose). Commercial AACT brewers are also available.
It’s best to use a good microscope to test/monitor your brews, you can often find something like a 1960’s/70’s olympus dark field microscope for a couple of hundred pounds on auction sites, tho small scale I think you could wing it without if you’ve done your research, as long as you have good seed compost, don’t over feed, and the mix is not left to go anaerobic, I can’t see as you’d do any harm.
Laverstoke Park Farm has a soil food web lab (Hampshire) they do farm tours and maybe still do AACT courses, it’s a great day out if this stuff interests you, their Water Buffalo Mozarella and Ice Cream is worth the visit on it own! 🙂
“The new study, ‘Pesticides in a case study on no-tillage farming systems and surrounding forest patches in Brazil’ in the journal Scientific Reports, leads the researchers to conclude that glyphosate-contaminated soil can adversely impact food quality and human health and ecological processes for ecosystem services maintenance.”
While beneficial—because it builds or maintains carbon in the soil—- without the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc, the use of no-tillage farming with these harmful chemicals is integral to the bullshit “carbon neutral” future the psychopath globalists want to impose. When the soil is tilled oxygen is introduced which bonds with the carbon in the soil and some is released into the air as CO2. This big ag no-tillage proposal while saving the carbon in the ground kills the bacteria, fungi, insects, birds, mammals, etc, creating biological deserts as any large scale monoculture will do. Saving the carbon in the soil while destroying everything else is like protecting people with a dangerous “vaccine” for an imaginary virus. Its devastating to the environment on a whole.
Organic agriculture remedies the carbon loss from tillage with the growth of cover crops which add carbon to and build the soil, thereby increasing the carbon in the soil. Large scale organic agriculture monoculture tend to create biological deserts as well. And some of the organically approved pesticides, fungicides, etc are harmful to the ecology as well. Biodiverse multiculture small scale organic agriculture especially when trees and shrubs are introduced helps to increase biodiversity of the farm and the surrounding area.
Permaculture is another form of agriculture to build and maintain carbon in the soil structure and the use of trees and shrubs intermixed with annual plants is highly beneficial to the ecology of an area.
Fukuoka’s “Natural Farming” is another form of no-tillage agriculture which builds carbon in the soil and can increase biodiversity.
There exist numerous other productive and healthy unnamed methods of agriculture which have been used for centuries by small scale agriculture communities throughout the world. The psychopath global techno-agriculturalists are hellbent on destroying these small scale systems, enslaving the farmers with debt and chemicals, and stealing and disappearing the seeds that have been produced by the system.
Save some seeds in your garden and watch the biology flourish.
Go to https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/ for info on aluminum, barium, strontium,etc in soils and air, and other “nefarities” re: our health.
Why would Monsanto come up with GMO aluminum resistant seeds? Why the explosion of Alzheimers cases?
This has been going on for some time now, I noticed back in the mid 90’s the coordinated aerosol dispersions, frequent perfect X’s in the sky, the perfect blue sky turned into a soupy mess after the planes went by…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x2peZqGIlQc
Hello skizex: Shhhhhh! The children are asleep…
Moderna rep tells “vaccine” effects victim that all people who take the shot are part of a clinical trial.
The Stew Peters Show
http://thephaser.com/2021/06/stew-peters-show-moderna-admits-masses-are-experiment/
Also consider cross combinant effects, as spraying a lawn with mildicide one week, fungicide the next, fertilizer the next, and having a kid play on it the next. We authorize individual chemical’s use but do not study overlapping use of 100,000 synthetic toxins in current use.
I know at least 2 people who sprayed their lawns or rugs with chemical products, and whose dogs had cancer.
RoundUp / glyphosate has killed 80% of US Monarch butterflies by killing their farm adjacent Milkweed nesting habitat.
Mom & I both grow Milkweed and have not seen a Monarch in 2+ years.
If we could just reduce human population by 4-6B with a – – – maybe we could overcome said sad problems ?
(or teach science to sheep?)
Malthus
We proved Malthus wrong by appropriating 3 continents, wiping out their inhabitants, deforesting the world, destroying biodiversity completely, and using a vast variety of toxic fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and heaven knows what else. All this required vast quantities of energy and raw materials from petroleum and coal, the mining and transportation of which cause enormous environmental damage.
Once I read we use 10,000 calories of oil to shelve 1000 calories of food.
There may be a limit to planetary phosphate for fertilizer as well?
I have quarterd my driving to 7K miles a year, flown jets once in 12 years, my water use at 20 gallons per day pre food garden, yet seems for naught as my co Californians are wasteful slobs.
The Natural Capitalism theory of taxing resources instead of labor to promote conservation seems due a try.
Or maybe tax the robots replacing us?
“Natural Capitalism theory of taxing”
There’s nothing Natural about Capitalism: it’s all trickle up; especially our taxes, which trickle up to provide “austerity for the Proles and socialism for the Plutocrats”.
The solutions require research, education and critique (in the media). All 3 are in the hands of Globo-cap.
phosphate deficiency could be addressed by grinding bones (body recycling) instead of filling graveyards! there’s some research out there to that effect, just saying, not endorsing.
More precisely, people temporarily put off the outcomes predicted by malthus by those desperate measures which, in the long run, will make matters far, far worse.
Malthus’ central point was that, sooner or later, an exponential curve will overtake any linear increase – no matter how steep. Not to mention that, on a finite planet with fi nite resources, linear increase is impossible for very long.
“RoundUp killed 80% of US Monarch butterflies by killing their Milkweed nesting habitat.”
The only garden I ever saw display a spectacular patch of nettles 6 feet high by 10 foot square, was cultivated by that keen gardener Prof.Robert Harkness. I asked him why, and he said, “For the butterflies”.
“RoundUp / glyphosate has killed 80% of US Monarch butterflies”.
The Monarch butterfly gave its name to one of the CIA’s mind control projects (Kubrick clearly knew about it because there’s a ‘Monarch’ poster on the wall in ‘The Shining’ when Danny sees the twins).
Monarch butterflies migrate but not in every generation so this has been taken as proof that behaviour can be encoded at the DNA level.
Thats interesting! I believe “genetic memory” is also evidence in canines, every canine pack uses the exact same communication system too, even domestic dogs.
‘perhaps’ the dna isn’t encoded at all but responds to etheric instructions, more an antennae, than thumb-drive, somewhat like the two slit experiment with light…and observation… requiring egg heads to hypothesize quantum realms..
‘perhaps’ all that cosmic chatter is ‘data’, ‘perhaps’ the hollow men ‘know’ something….
sometimes one can be persuaded by the simulacrum…
overlooking the sacred..
Wouldn’t it be nice if farmers did the actual farming of their farms, while the monstrous toxic chemical fertilizer/pesticide/genocide corporations had nothing to do but to join the ranks of the unemployed…
Yes. That would be nice. It would also be nice if farmers would quit poisoning everything in sight. The dumb fuckers.
I agree, but putting oneself in the farmer’s shoes, most of them probably see the choice as:
“Buy our poisons and gain the benefits of very short-term prosperity and the illusion of success, while we make huge profits, eventually let your farm go under, and move on to the next victim.”
or,
“Don’t buy our poisons, and go under tomorrow morning.”
It isn’t just stupidity. It’s a lose-lose choice.
The farmers didn’t make the poisons, or put them on the stock market.
Those non-choices are offered by cynical vultures who have lobbied the Government successfully.
Hello wardropper: I happen to live in an agricultural area. There are literally hundreds of defunct and fallow farms within a 50 mile radius. Many small towns once thrived on cooperative sales of produce in local stores. Nearly every small town boosted a local dairy and farm implement dealer.
This began to radically change in the 1950’s, and by the late 80’s farms were dropping out of production like flies. The town banks had been either closed or taken over by large corporate cartels. It’s much the same everywhere in the American Midwest.
Agriculture has been completely hijacked by the usual methods of corporate extortion… That’s why persons such as Bill Gates can easily afford to buy thousands of acres of land dirt cheap.
Taken from Marx’s ten planks (Communist Manifesto)
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
We call it the Planning Reorganization Act of 1949, zoning (Title 17 1910-1990) …
None of this is an accident.
What you describe was the destruction of of small-scale agriculture and consequent migration to towns. Marx was proposing to reverse this.
Or was his plan to industrialize every thing together, and scatter labor around to facilitate it. There was no such thing as industrial farming during his life. Was that his goal?
Farmers aren’t given much of a choice, since they have to compete with industrial farming that CERTAINLY doesn’t give a damn. Sustainable farming doesn’t cost a lot more than chemical farming, once you get it up an running. But it takes a lot of time and money to get started.
Hello JWK: 100 years ago, All farming was organic, and most methods were sustainable. My point was that the introduction of corporate agriculture destroyed the viability of independent farms. This is what created the desert-like landscapes of 5000 acre mono-cultures.
The world’s populations are poisoning one another (and their children) with industrial filth, because they can’t fathom the sick moralities of corporate finance.
I am not surprised by anything in this article and don’t have the knowledge or experience to properly argue with any of its assertions, assuming I thought what was written was in error. I am definitely not a fan of Monsanto or any large corporations, especially Google and Amazon.
However, on the weekends I help my girlfriend’s family with their small farm where they grow hay, corn, soybeans, wheat, and oats. I don’t know much about any of that either except I am able to drive a tractor and do simple things like ted and rake hay.
I can tell you though, that without glyphosate and the GMO crops that are resistant to it, their farm would go out of business. It’s bad enough that deer eat about a third of the corn and soybeans. If they were not to use glyphosate, weeds would simply take over everything and make any attempts at a reasonable harvest futile. There are no easy answers.
How ever did farming families get enough to eat before Monsanto?
I’m no expert but I think the following is true:
Back in the day, there were many more farmers per capita than there are today so farmers didn’t need to produce as much per farm as they do today to keep everybody fed. It simply didn’t matter if each acre wasn’t as productive as it could be because there wasn’t as much food needed because the country’s population was smaller.
Those farming families were bigger then so there were unpaid workers available to work the fields. Today people don’t have big families like they used to, even farmers, because living costs are higher than they were. Therefore help has to be hired which raises the costs of production and lowers profits.
As time went on and technology brought more non farm employment opportunities, people chose not to go into farming because farming is very difficult. Even farmers’ children decide not to continue the farms.
Since the 1950s or thereabouts the costs of running any household increased so single income households were not financially as feasible. Those same costs affected farming families who generally didn’t make as much as families involved in other professions.
If the number of farmers is decreasing, and the population is increasing, those who continue to farm have to be much more productive, and if you can eliminate weeds and bugs that lessen yields, you do it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the use of any herbicides or insecticides. I only help out on the farm because they need it, I would never choose farming as a career. But I know from what I see that if it weren’t for those chemicals that they couldn’t survive as farmers. And they’re not alone. Obviously tens of thousands of farmers are purchasing chemicals and GMO crops because it’s what they need to do to survive. Where I live, there are no wealthy farmers, trust me, all of the farms are 200 acres or less. Everybody is just making enough to get by.
Todays yuppster doofises define farming as owning about 5 acres, a large home, with a horse , a few chickens , a vegetable patch and a small commercial marketing stand usually advertised as organic. . The majority of these “farms” are liberally dosed with pesticides and petrochemical based fertilizers ? An echo of the Fabian 3 acres and a cow ideal. The notion that many thousands of Brits , Americans , or Canadians own 200+ acres is simply nostalgia.
A big part of the reason your farm has to use them to survive is because their competitors do. And the bigger their competitor the more of them they use per acre.
Farms have not been really viable for decades….many farms now have one working off farm to survive….while the romantic notion remains that they are doing fine…just like the small businesses they struggle to survive….
the big acreage mob do better as they can exploit labor and use extensive other cost savings….well they do around here…
and I always ask…..just who drives the desire for cheap food….this notion that food must be cheap existed long before the big farms…watch behaviour at any supermarket…very few go for the dearer safer produced food…nothing changes…just dreams.
There are modern sustainable methods to get away from chemical dependency, but it takes a lot of time, effort, and of course money to get it started. Once up and running they don’t cost much more than chemical farming to operate. Todays farmer simply knows no other way.
There is an easy answer which is to improve the ability of the soil to produce protein (That’s what I mean when I say “soil fertility”). While improving the soil fertility will solve problems such as weeds taking over everything, it doesn’t mean the farm would not go out of business.
Growing crops and taking them to market is a mining operation on the soil. What is being mined are the minerals required in the soil for amino acid creation, the constituents of protein. Since the primary goal of the farmer is to make money, the object is to replace as little as possible of what was taken out of the soil in order to produce the next crop. That maximizes profit, but minimizes nutrition and results in declining soil fertility.
William Albrecht, Ph.D., explains that “Biotic strata other than man are gifted in assaying their food intake according to different plant species and different degrees of rock development into soil on which plants grow.” The way I explain the statement is to say that, when it comes to nutrition, there is only one dumb species.
Improving the soil fertility will solve problems like weeds, insect damaged crops, diseased crops and soil erosion. In addition it will allow better penetration of rainwater into tight clay soils, retaining the water in the soil for periods of little or no rainfall.
The customer in the grocery store, however, has no ability to determine the nutritional value of the food being purchased. As a result, only price matters and the farmer will not be paid a premium for the superior nutritional value of a crop grown in a soil which has had the soil fertility raised. So to spend money on improving soil fertility of the farm without increasing the revenue for the farm could lead to the farm going out of business.
If people are not willing to pay for superior nutrition, then let them enjoy their hospitals, doctors, chemotherapy, vaccinations and covid-19.
There are some very easy, natural and practical ways of producing protein from the soil.
Cows, sheep, pigs, chickens…
… beans, nuts…
Sad to see a sincere enough comment get nothing but downvotes, but there is something you’re just not getting here, my friend…
It’s like most things today. We have allowed ourselves to become dependent upon corporations and the corporations like that very much. So much so, that they have a list of other poisons that they intend to use upon us in the future – just to see how much we, and the planet can take, you understand…
How did farmers manage to feed their local communities all over the world, during the 15 thousand years before global petrochemicals giant Monsanto arrived to “feed the world” with GMO and Glyphosphate?
“The farmer is a businessman. The professor is a manager.” Those phrases came into currency under Maggie Snatcher with her Gospel of Greed. There are no easy answers but I think that measuring everything in money and “staying in business” is the main problem that ought to be addressed today. Not that it was not foreseen by writers before the war; read The Grapes of Wrath, it begins with a “farm going out of business” when a bank forecloses on a loan. In fact, many a U$ melodrama of the early 1900s featured an evil mortgage holder threatening the virtue of the farmer’s daughter. That was the start of the current plague of Global Capitalism which degrades not only our social fabric but the very soil that nourishes us.
Hello NickM: Excellent comment. Many (American) farms were put out of business through tax liens and lopsided subsidies that favored larger and larger acreage. None of it was accidental, and all of it was due to corporate monopoly.
They are caught in the cycle, as the overlords intended. Fortunately, many small-scale farmers are rediscovering traditional farming. It takes a few years before such techniques heal the devastated soil, insects, streams, etc.
labour. mechanisation and chemicals. All went downhill after the clearances/enclosures in the spirit of improvement, then the tractor appeared. Bear in mind all this is happening at the same time as serious industrialisation took off (labour once again).
Farming today has no bearing at all on the organic sustenance farming of 300-400 years ago, nor even our grandparents to be honest.
farming became agribusiness, before it was peasants on their land feeding themselves, with many generations of lore and many many hands.
Don’t regard glyphosate or its ilk as some hero!!
I use to live a county where we tried to ban gmos. The larger farmers and the farm bureau were against the measure and the measure failed. A couple years later the local dairy turned organic, the farmers had to stop growing the gmo corn and alfalfa and grow it as organic feed. The dairy industry boomed and all the farmers were better off. A ban on gmos in the county was soon passed the only opposition was the corrupt administration of the university. Its pure bullshit and propaganda that gmos will do anything other than harming the farmer in the long term, making us and the environment sick.
If the human race disapeared tomorrow the plants would take over. Within maybe 50 years it would start to be hard to find any signs that humans had existed on Earth.
100 to 1,000 years out you’d be hard pushed to find any evidence that humans had once existed on Earth.
Concrete lasts longer than 50 years, even with plants trying to break it apart.
Hello RobG: If humans disappeared tomorrow, they’d be leaving behind millions of tons of highly radioactive effluent. It would take somewhere around 30 million years for the residues to decompose to back ground noise…
It is 35 years since Chernobyl and it’s town Pripyat were abandoned. They are still intact.
If humans were to disappear there would be 500 reactor meltdowns that would end life on Earth.
“It’s not so delicately poised”, as the weather man said to the lady who was worried about nuclear explosions affecting climate. Life started around the mouths of undersea volcanic vents, as protobacteria in an environment of superheated water loaded with radioctivity and heavy metals. Life is a lot tougher than modern affluent liberal democratic Western man. Most people on earth are tougher than modern affluent democratic liberal Western man. Botanists say that most life on Earth is vegetation; we animals are a mere faint smear on the surface of the vegetable world. Homo sapiens sapiens, as usual, vastly overestimates his constructive or destructive capacities.
On the other hand……https://big-lies.org/nuke-lies/www.nukelies.com/forum/
Yay.b
Bring it!
I saw a t-shirt once:’‘Save the planet.Kill yourself.”
Just the conclusion the Club of Rome wanted everybody to draw.
This work has already been done for us.
“The World Without US”, by Alan Weisman
https://www.amazon.co.uk/World-Without-Us-Alan-Weisman/dp/0753513579/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+world+without+us&qid=1624528582&sr=8-1
Forget about CO2 (fake “Global Warming”) toxicity is one of the greatest threats to all living things right behind the maniacal satanic cabal that proliferates them in their bid to poison off the masses. If it’s not poison being administered through your veins (aka the jabs) it’s the poison in the air, water and foodchain that has been reducing the population for decades now.
I suspect climate change is being run for cover of chemical poisoning. I wonder how much support Dupont and Bayer/Monsanto give to the climate change movement.
I wish our future cavemen and ditch squatting wildmen luck and happiness.
Amen. The same luck and happiness which our ancestors have been enjoying for at least 30,000 years. And which a few fortunate hunter-gatherers and small cultivators still enjoy — and would continue to enjoy if only those greedy global grabbing corporations would stop sending men with guns to drive the aboriginal people off their land.
Were the world to go keto, we’d need primarily animals and healthy pastures, along with a few organic, ancient grains for feed stock. Obesity would disappear with the normalization of bodily ghrelin, insulin and leptin cycles. Agricultural demands would then decline significantly. The use of chemicals for the most efficient means to feed (and poison) billions has decimated the soils of their nutrients and diseased the human population – so goes a natural resource exploited for the present rather than nurtured for the future. Capricious industry excels for a brevity while visionless for futurity.
We hardly ever make a sound. In fact cats are noiser, when they are it. Dogs are normally pretty quiet about when they are actually on the job, which is not to wake us all up barking.
I am getting pretty deaf, was listening to some bloke I’d never heard of and this Horrendous NOISE was going on Outside.
Everyone thinks it’s their Car Alarms going off.
But its just foxes shagging.
Tony
If your ‘wife’ hardly ever makes a sound she can’t be having much fun. Have you checked she’s awake? Or maybe she’s just made of plastic?
Ouch, gratuitously mean.
Not at all. He’s been asked numerous times to stop posting OT and sometimes creepy stuff. He also has attempted to stalk me by googling my name and making public refs to things he thinks he’s found out about me. Most sites would have banned him for that alone.
Now, that’s very funny.
Tony’s wife hasn’t spoken to him for 8 months – she doesn’t want to interrupt him..
As Mr Todhunter’s article makes clear, pesticides alone are slowly destroying the ability to grow food. Added to that, the aluminum and polymers filtering down from the incessant spraying of nano-particulates into the atmosphere, and you end up with a genuine doomsday scenario.
Added to that, the destruction of the ozone layer by the same geoengineering processes, and you have a double whammy.
Humanity is hell bent on extinction. And it won’t take no for an answer.
It’s not humanity that’s doing or wanting this. Like the author says, it’s the corporations in cahoots with governments, not to mention the armed forces who leave toxic destruction in their wake all over the world.
But we, the people, are being blamed for environmental concerns, for the overblown sickness industry budget, etc.
Corporations have customers: humanity are the customers.
We as individuals also have a lot of responsibility in what we allow corporations or governments to do, or even support their decisions with our actions. Plenty of people I know could afford to buy organic produce but they don’t. “We” in the 1st world throw away an obscene amount of food, either right at the farm or in the restaurant or grocery store. Overall, we produce and consume way too much (and then return a good portion of that, for Amazon or any other large company to (mostly) add that to a landfill). There is a price to pay for cheap products and cheap food.
And the armed forces that scorch the earth, are often manned by volunteering humans.
“How to protect yourself from exploitation by Con-men: Watch your morals” — Readers Digest.
Indeed, humanity lost control of its worst instincts – mostly greed, jealousy and megalomania – and that loss of control is now growing exponentially.
I would say these things you mention are our “weeds” – except I don’t wish to insult weeds. So many people have such a skewed notion of weeds.
Many weeds have edible portions; most grass does not. Yet it’s grass people wish to cover their lawns with. Kill the weeds! they demand.
Yet if food becomes scarce, a good garden of weeds will sustain a person.
The European parliament and european commission are circumventing decades old legislature concerning GMOs, as synthetic mRNA platforms fall under their provisions.
If anybody would just listen.
Permaculture is the answer. Biodiversity over mono cash cropping.
It’s so hard to know what meaning to assign to words these days. I imagine you and I mean the same thing by biodiversity but in general parlance it seems to mean almost anything, like green. The new green deal means factory farming, artificial fertilisers, pesticides, GMO and who knows what else. I used to see TV adverts for carbon neutral electricity from BP of all people. It turns out that they were buying carbon credits or some in your dreams thing. No doubt they bought them from some corporation owned by the same people that owned them via a few shell companies. Another thing, Howard says that humanity is hell bent on destruction. Who is humanity, it doesn’t include me because I’m not.
Probably part of the cognition dissonance program.
What I generally refer to as being “perma culture” – is the all underlying understanding and recognition of the soil itself being an Organism. Like the entire line up or down, where is the end of the micro – where the beginning of the macro organism?
Viktor Schauberger had it all figured out and others like him, too. Observe Nature, Understand Nature – Copy Nature. It is all so obvious and yet, there is this “The Discreet Charme of the Burgeoisie” style vibe surrounding it.
If You promote a healthy and holistic lifestyle – and that’s what “permaculture” above all else is – it often feels like talking to someone that is going to eat into the bathroom and to take a dump at the dinner table.
Yes, I would even extend the line- macro, micro, nano etc. The harder you look, the more you discover, world without end.
Absolutely. The point you make about “looking” here is very important. Because it really only matters how deep people are willing to look. How many connections and correlations they are willing to accept. The real awakening about true human potential – not just who has amassed the most stuff.
The Paris Climate Summit accepted organic farming – “permaculture” – as vital. I suppose Globo-cap nixed that.
Yes, and there is consensus rising about the fact that “permaculture” constitutes so much more than a way to grow food. It is healing and sustaining this health. It offers myriads of ways to look into life. That’s why it is like life itself versus the toxic, greed and powerhungry dark side that aims to suffocate life wherever it can.
Now even available as “Alien” theory…
Sealed perma culture greenhouses are the way to go. People need to band together and create what one person cannot achieve alone. Workwise and moneywise. Whereas the “money” part might soon be history. All the better for everybody not to be depending on the elites.
They don’t exactly nix things just ignore them as being for someone else. Rules are for others. Unkind people might call them narcissistic hypocrites, I might go further.
Two words, horse and shit.
I think just maybe people took your comment the wrong way. I’ve practiced horse-drawn agriculture and, while a bit more physical than driving a tractor, is a lot more agreeable.
And my Uncle John used to say, apropos of betting, that the only way to make money by following the horses is to carry a shovel.
Great anecdote. I worked on ranches in Wyoming and Montana (sometimes riding, sometimes lots of other stuff) where horse shit and straw were collected religiously and piled up for use later. Much later in life, we had a “cour de ferme” that had an old stable or small barn where we found a couple of meters worth of “purin” that had been there for probably more than fifty years. Talk about good fertilizer! I needed a pick to break it up then a shovel to reduce it even further before wheel barrowing it out to the vegetable gardens. Needless to say, the gardens were abundant.
Since the beginning of this covid charade, we’ve been at my wife’s mother’s house in SW France. There’s a pigeonnier that hadn’t been cleaned out in recent memory. We gathered up all the pigeon shit and use that for winter fertilizer in our garden here. Plus, for any of you interested, we planted the tomatoes sideways, laying them down with just the tops protruding. Great results.
Three words, what the fuck?
Horse and cow manure with hay, when decomposed, is extremely potent fertiliser.
Symbiosis between grass and creatures who eat grass to make fertilizer that nourishes the next crop of grass — created great fertile grasslands which humankind is rapidly degrading toxic Glypho-riddled GMO-dependent mineral sand, as Colin describes above.
If one would not know different, one could get the impression that the destruction of the soil biome is their only goal. Leaving a dead planet that will only be green using gmo and toxic chemicals. Einstein missed the other part of the equation about stupidity:
Three things are infinite: human stupidity, human psychopathy and the Universe.
Like Einstein, I am unsure about the Universe.
…dick and head?