Gardening For Life

The country continues to remain divided on issues across the board, yet as Americans from all sides of the political spectrum struggle to take care of their families and maintain their freedoms, there is something that people with any political viewpoint should consider. That is the practice of growing your own food.

It is clear that we are living in a volatile world, and the threats we face are numerous and complex. Yet the act of growing food in one's own backyard, balcony, rooftop garden, apartment complex common area, jointly purchased land cooperative, or community garden, can serve as a much needed pressure release valve in these uncertain times. Understand that this is not necessarily a simple solution, in that it will take time, money, and work to do it, but the experience is rewarding, health promoting, educational, family strengthening, money saving in the long term, security enhancing, and let's not forget, tasty. It is probably one of the most important things that we in America can do today.

The agricultural world has changed drastically over the last century. Whereas America was once an agrarian society, now the bulk of agriculture is done by a handful of multinational corporations. One example of this, the modern invention of factory farms implemented for the efficient slaughter of animals, as most people know, is terribly inhumane. Yet many people don't realize that the overuse of antibiotics coupled with the filthy conditions create a nasty breeding ground for the antibiotic resistant swine and bird flu pandemics of the future. Consider the notion that by supporting the factory farmed meat industry, relied upon by most restaurants and grocery stores, Americans are potentially funding super viruses that will plague humanity in the coming years.

The new model of industrial agriculture has allowed individuals to get involved in other sectors of society, so that they no longer feel "tied to the land" and are able to maintain the perception of potential upward mobility, without having to get their hands dirty. Yet generally speaking, Americans stay in the same economic class in which they were born, and today, that trend does not appear to be changing. Meanwhile as industrial agriculture has spread, far fewer individuals are growing their own food than during the Great Depression, meaning a serious calamity, economic or otherwise, could have dire consequences for those who are relying solely on supply chains and the volatile marketplace to deliver their sustenance.

Whether or not you believe global warming is real and is man made, the debate, (which primarily exists in the US as most other nations accept the existence of manmade climate change) has revealed something undeniable. Americans do not understand how the natural world operates. Either climate change is human caused, signifying our general ignorance of the natural world for over a century, and our continued ignorance as we struggle to understand what we have done and are globally still doing at an accelerated rate, or it is not human caused and the vast number of scientists we rely on for understanding of the world are way off track, also meaning we are truly out of touch. As we learn to grow our own food, we begin to reforge the connection between ourselves and the land that has always nourished us, and we begin to be more aware individually of changes in the seasons, insect and bird populations, and shifts in precipitation. In this way, we take back knowledge as well as food.

Regaining this knowledge is especially important in the wake of the collapse of the bee population, the decline of the bird population, the prevalence of invasive weeds, and the looming potential of annihilation of the bat population due to the spreading white nose syndrome (which wipes out nearly 100% of infected bats.) These combined factors have left our agricultural sector bracing for reduced crop yields due to uncontrolled pests and decreased pollination, and a likely increase in food costs as the use of more pesticides becomes necessary. Such was the case in 2009, when a significantly increased grasshopper population wiped out crops in the United States and will likely force national wide scale pesticide spraying in 2010. It's becoming even more evident that as individuals we all need to begin to act now.

Corporations such as Monsanto are consolidating the genetic variety of seed stocks through buying up smaller seed companies, driving US and foreign farmers out of business with unethical lawsuits, patenting the genes of crops and establishing ownership of life, and pulling certain "intellectual property," patented seeds off of the market making fewer crops available to individuals. Why is continued genetic diversity necessary? It is because throughout human history crops have adapted to the pests, diseases, soil conditions, temperature ranges, and other factors of specific locales. As companies like Monsanto eliminate diversity by usurping or forcing the extinction of native crops, not only are we as consumers faced with a huge reduction of selection in the market place, agricultural crops world wide become more vulnerable to pests, disease, and drought, which means that Monsanto will likely be called upon in the future to respond to a crop disaster with a newly genetically engineered crop. Such a response might not allow time for safety testing, as even today the safety reports done on GM crops often rely on faulty data or ignore the warnings of experts.

Just as disturbing is Monsanto's attempted genetic takeover that has come in the form of their own seed cross pollinating with the crops of farmers who have not bought their seed from Monsanto. This has threatened the purity of crops across the world and as a result will likely compromise the ability for farmers to grow their unique varieties. Farmers will find it necessary to buy Monsanto seeds since it is illegal to save seeds for the next planting (as is the traditional root to agriculture) containing Monsanto's transgenic material, even if that genetic material arrived through uncontrollable pollination. Additionally, fertilizers and pesticides such as Monsanto's Roundup, that once were unnecessary, will be a required expense for successful production, making indigenous farmers further dependent on Monsanto. Such practices have resulted in the suicides of tens of thousands of impoverished farmers in India who can no longer make a living doing what they have done for generations.

Because Monsanto sees their patented seed as their own property, when their seed shows up in the crops of neighboring farmers due to natural pollination vectors such as wind and insects, Monsanto views it as patent infringement or theft. Monsanto has taken farmers to court on these grounds and won, sending farmers into economic and psychological turmoil, even bankruptcy. Even countries such as Mexico which have banned GMO's are finding transgenic material in their crops, due to widespread and uncontrollable genetic drift. Some people believe that Monsanto may be deliberately seeding the world with their genetic material in order to further leverage their control over the food supply.

In addition, by allowing Monsanto to patent life, to put other farms out of business, to consolidate to the point that they produce the vast majority of our crops in the US, while at the same time US citizens no longer know how to produce their own food, we have essentially handed over the fundamentals of life to a self interested body which has been known to be deceitful and unethical in the past on many occasions. Mankind is putting itself in serious jeopardy by doing so, and this threat combines with our environmental and economic threats, to create a situation where the freedom and dignity of humanity may be facing a time of great peril, as the world food supply is literally being bought up by a handful of corporations who even now have billions of starving people in the world under their boot.