shark fin soup and hope

If the Chinese are back peddling on shark fin soup, so ubiquitous at all festive banquets of the past, there is hope for changes in our attitude about a lot of other things as well.  I am thinking of idling stances on such pressing issues as climate change, pollution, animal welfare, GMOs, child prostitution, and many other ugly realities.  It seems to me that ultimately our collective indecisiveness on these issues boils down to the hesitance of wrestling ourselves away from the profit-first model.  If we only realized that the wellbeing-first model benefits us all around. Bonnie Tsui wrote this week-end in the NY Times about the changing attitude of the Chinese on serving shark fin soup at important banquets, previously a sign of "honoring (and impressing) your guest."  I was served shark fin soup at several banquets in my company's honor in the late 1980s when we lived in Hong Kong, and was oblivious of the gruesome practice (which I can't bear to describe here, but you can look it up).    Because it has been such an inherent component of Chinese food culture I was really quite amazed to read that "last summer, the Chinese government announced that it would stop serving the dish at official state banquets."

Here's to change for the better, change towards wellbeing, change towards respect of nature and all living beings. 

food forests

Permaculture, although around since the 1970s in Australia, is still a fairly new idea over here.  The word is a contraction of the words permanent, agriculture, and culture (interesting that agriculture, which means cultivation of the land, is so tightly tied to culture - without agriculture there is no culture!).  The idea of permaculture is a completely sustainable agriculture, and more so culture.  Sustainable means that there is no "garbage," that everything we need to live on comes and goes in a permanent, circular, mutually beneficial and dependent, and therefore WASTELESS cycle.  The principle of agricultural permaculture is planting crops together that complement one another in a wildly complex and diverse composition that emulates nature, although it is man-made.  These food forests work at every stratum of the vegetation, from low down mushrooms, herbs and flowers, to the next level of berry and hazelnut bushes, to higher up fruit and nut trees.

This is not a new concept, though.  But then - sometimes we need to revisit old ideas from a fresh perspective and a higher perch.  Thanks to the suggestion of a friend, I recently read the book 1491 by Charles Mann and learned about milpas.  Milpas are South American planting compositions that comprise up to a dozen crops (maize, avocados, squashes and beans, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potatoes, jicama, amaranth, and mucuna), which all "complement one another nutritionally and environmentally."  Some milpas, I learned, have been in existence for four thousand years without depleting the soil!!!

One of the problems of our conventional farming methods, which is exacerbated in monocultures, is the lack of diversity in crops, because a lack of diversity in the insect/grub/bird population follows it.  This disconnect between agriculture and nature then depletes the soil on top of it all.

I am never advocating a return to the past!  However, new for the sake of new is often short sighted.  In this case we have two inspirational and sustainable agricultural models whose principles are worthwhile knowing about.  (please also visit a previous post on "spiritual farming.")

don't frack our future

Instead of digging into our earth, chopping it up, fracking it and injecting chemically laced water into it, carving some out of it, plundering it, hollowing it out, throwing our trash onto it and burying trash into it,

making a mess of it, plundering and raping it,

let's respect our earth, appreciate it for what it gives us, honor it, cooperate with it, and understand it.

happy earth day

It does look like “…the economy provides us with all of our products…,” as environmentalist David Suzuki writes.  However, that is simply a belief, and an erroneous one at that. Suzuki clarifies that “This is nonsense, of course.  Everything we depend on….comes from the earth and will eventually end up going back to it.”   Whether it is paper, glass, steel, fiber, or even plastic, it helps to remember that those are all made from natural materials.  But we have lost the connection to where those things really come from because our lives have become so abstract, so removed from nature. Because of the separation in our mind between man and nature, we separate ourselves literally from nature altogether, we eliminate it downright from our lives (and we tend to forget that our garbage ends up there as well - see my recent post on that subject). So here is my Earth Day thought-of-the-day:

spiritual farming

Huh, you might ask?  Yes, there is such a thing, and it is called biodynamic farming.  The Biodynamic Farming & Gardening Association’s website defines it as a “spiritual-ethical-ecological approach to agriculture, food production and nutrition.”  Fred Kirschenmann, author of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience, explained in his 2010 keynote address at the conference of the association, that the present big-ag paradigm of maximum efficiency is geared towards short-term gain, and is only possible through specialization and simplification (the small picture, immediate gratification).  However, he says, farms need to be run more like organisms (the Gaia principle), in sync with nature.

We need a new agricultural paradigm, what with the bees dying, crop varieties diminishing (Tom Standage reports that “of the 7,100 types of apple (!!!) that were being grown in America in the 19th century…6,800 are now extinct.”  WOW!), monocultures that discourage insect and bird variety and promote disease, and GMOs and pesticides as misguided solutions to increasing production with short-minded profit in mind.  While there is so much more to say about the deficiencies of the present paradigm, I’d rather look towards the future and better solutions.

Organic agriculture, sustainable agriculture,permaculture, and biodynamics are all promising alternatives, of which the first is the most profit and least nature oriented (yep).  The term permaculture comes from the contraction of permanent and culture and agriculture (there is indeed no culture without agriculture).  Permaculture is a completely sustainable agri/culture practiced in symbiosis with local nature and without waste.  Biodynamics incorporates more lofty principles.  Just like permaculture it works with the farm in a symbiotic wasteless cyclical organism-like relationship.  In addition, though, it takes into account our embeddedness in the larger cosmic picture, and considers the planetary influences on seeds, crops and soil, and works with “homeopathic” soil enhancements since the health of the soil is first and foremost in growing minerally rich produce, the ultimate aim of agriculture.

healthy soil = healthy food = healthy body

poor bees

Whether Einstein really said that mankind would perish within four years if all the bees died is less important than the realization that bees are crucially important to our food chain and they are indeed dying at an alarming rate.  It is, however, true that Rudolf Steiner predicted 100 years ago that the bee population would be damaged or might die out if we kept raising and treating the bees in an industrial way – and this is exactly what is happening right now.  It is also a fact that our crops will decline by about 40% if the bees died out because there are not enough other pollinators out there. While big agri farmers and big agri beekeepers still talk about the “mysterious” colony collapse syndrome, and some scientists still remain vague about the cause (“it’s the mites” – no, the bees’ genetic make-up is weak and they can’t stand up to the mites any longer!), the cause is eminently clear to holistic beekeepers and all who are in tune with nature.  The bees’ genetic material and immune system have been weakened by the industrial approach to both beekeeping and farming.  Monocultures deprive the bees of variety in their food, the poor things feed on a diet of poisons (all the –icides we spray on crops and gardens), industrial beekeepers take their honey away and feed them diluted sugar water instead, and they wake them up in February from their winter slumber, pack the hives by the hundreds onto trucks, and shuttle them up the coast to a different orchard every six weeks.  This treatment is worse than what peasant endured in the Middle Ages.  No wonder they die of mistreatment and weakness.

What to do?  It is so encouraging that backyard and rooftop beekeeping are becoming so popular.  It is also very encouraging that more women, who are naturally more nurturing, are becoming beekeepers.  But you don’t have to become a beekeeper to help the situation.  Just stop spraying your lawn (what’s wrong with dandelions and clover?  the bees love them), stop spraying your roses (find more natural and gentle ways to interact with your garden), buy more organic produce, and simply become more informed.

spring has sprung

…at least inside my house (it’s still so cold outside and it looks so barren because Easter is early this year).  I love Easter for its pagan symbols and meanings, eggs and rabbits for fertility and renewal, greenery in vases for new growth, young tender green vegetables and lamb for Easter dinner for the lambs that are born in the spring and the vegetables that begin to sprout (inside in our latitude).  A German Easter custom is to blow chicken eggs out, paint or dye them, and hang them from branches; pussy willows are customary, but any branches cut from the garden will begin to sprout little green leaves during the weeks leading up to Easter.  Ahhhhhh – green!  So nice after all the browngrey and white.  Each year I also buy one hyacinth.  As it unfolds during the pre-Easter weeks its strong fragrance begins to permeate the entire house – hmmmm, the smell of Easter, the smell of spring.  

As a matter-of-fact, I like all festivities that connect us to nature and the seasons, and life in general.  It is grounding and reassuring and meaningful.  It reminds us of our deep connection to nature.

cheap seeds or not?

I used to buy cheap seeds on sale at the end of the season, the cheaper the better, and non-organic of course.  I didn’t think it mattered whether seeds were grown organically or not.  My somewhat limited belief was that if the vegetables grew without chemicals and in my own healthy soil that was enough.  But that is a narrow perspective.  Then I learned that poor soil (the depleted kind that needs to be sprayed chemically) makes poor seeds with poor genetic material, which in turn will make poor plants (and poor food).  Or the other way round, mineral rich soil makes genetically complex seeds and plants that make for good food.

More recently, I read an article by Margaret Roach, which opened my mind to two more implications of buying non-organic seeds.  First, “growing vegetables for their seed often involves more chemical use than growing those same crops for food" (didn’t know that).  Second, plants grown from non-organically grown seeds adapted over many seed generations to existing in a chemically enhanced soil, and thus may not do as well in mineral rich and chemical free soil (didn’t know that one either).  Tom Stearns, founder of High Mowing Organic Seeds, says that "organic gardeners are using a dull tool when they use seeds from conventional agriculture."

sacred agriculture

Agriculture is only about 10,000 years old and it has shaped today’s cultures fundamentally.  Agriculture enabled population growth and the population explosion of the past 50 years.  Agriculture is also what has brought forth culture as we understand it; it is specifically agriculture that enabled the development of the first great cultures in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Agriculture was a new concept then, as we moved from a nomadic lifestyle and collecting our food through hunting and gathering, to settling down and harvesting food from the same surrounding area year-in and year-out.  The hunter-gatherer lifestyle permits nature to renew itself naturally, while agriculture, if not practiced wisely and in tune with nature, depletes the soil – and then what?

Agriculture is the unification of nature and man.  We exhibit our current disconnection from nature through the type of agriculture we have created – soil-depleting monocultures that require outside chemical input to produce food at the expense of environmental and human health.  However, the significant growth of the organic (funny -  until about 150 years ago all agriculture was organic), sustainable (better than organic), and  biodynamic (the best) agricultural movements demonstrates an emerging awareness of the deep connection between ourselves, nature and our food supply.  We exist as part of nature, not apart from nature, and strictly on the basis of light and water.  Without nature we do not exist. Sacred agriculture!

the power of the positive

I was very saddened this morning by a short video that was circulated on Facebook on the far reaching (literally and pun intended) consequences of our garbage culture.

We create our reality through all the thoughts and beliefs we generate, either the fear-based ones about everything we don’t want, or alternately the ones that were not thought out carefully enough, such as  "more and more stuff."

Watch the video: the situation is the result of a culture that keeps wanting more and more in disassociation with nature and our fellow men.  I had to remind myself of the power of positive thinking.  Only when we begin to formulate in our minds the kind of world we actually do want to create, and when it is formulated in cocreation with nature, can we turn this ship around.  The thing is that it starts within each of us.