Dormant gene of peace, of natural farming, of interconnectedness
Star children, what is it that we are for?
If the heart is free, you stand on ground that is liberated territory. Defend it.
Every one of us is essential.
Why is it that in October, we gave more attention and distracted ourselves with media coverage over a Netflix comedy special than we gave Biden when he failed to deliver on climate related campaign promises resulting in a five-day People vs. Fossil Fuels demonstration in Washington. In his stand-up routine, “The Closer,” Dave Chappelle says, “Go back and listen to everything I have said and judge me by my body of work.” What then is the body of work that we hold accountable to?
The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Acts of 1970, 1972, and 1973 respectively, hasn’t solved our relationship with each other or the planet. We waste precious time. The deeper issues still live, harbored, yet demand that we address them; but, if we chase the religion of media, then we continue to distract ourselves from addressing them. We cancelled precious time. Awakening to racism and social inequality in the 1960s hasn’t transformed our economic system. We squander precious time. If the minimum wage were to have kept up with inflation, shedding light to our current elected officials failed promise to raise it to $15 per hour as yet another political shenanigan, it should be closer to $24.18.1
We devalued precious time.
How do we alongside with an economic system that makes most of us aware of scarcity through inequality, heal our relationships with each other? Forbes estimates that the 2,200 billionaires in the world got collectively $1.9 trillion richer in 2020, a 20% increase from the year before. We can choose to command the change or be commanded by it.
We allowed fear to separate us from hallowed, sacred time.
There are many facets to a few root causes. Addressing the facets don’t address the root and moves the (inward) seeing eye away from the areas asking for consciousness, to be seen, to be settled. What then disturbs our relationship with ourselves, with each other?
I studied economics in college, wrote a senior thesis on the cost-benefit analysis (link to pdf) of university recycling, tried to quantify environmental and social externalities, and wished the data I collected told a different story, with results that still hold true in many places a decade later. Recycling would never become a lucrative way to divert waste. People could not be convinced that it mattered even if the recycling bins were next to the trash-for-landfill bins. Perhaps we subconsciously knew that recycling wasn’t sustainable and that reducing and reusing were far better solutions. In a world of global capitalism, reducing and reusing don’t build industries. They build, however, an immeasurable practice of awareness and connectedness.
I didn’t pursue a career in economics outside the 22-months spent in financial services office space America, after which I thought how uninsightful to model the future based on models of the past. I worked in an office with modular cell-like walls, walls between the upper management and the others, walls between me and the temperature outside, and internal walls, invisible but full of struggle as I tried to locate the essence of transformation. I was trained to look ahead, to save money or make investments, to plan for a future, to value derivatives of financial positions, and that where I was, was in a place of not enough and that I needed more. The walls disconnected me, separated me from myself, others, and the laws of the natural world. The laws of finance and my parent’s childhood of empty bellies taught me of scarcity and the propagandistic American educational system shaped my belief structure. My hidden struggle became that of discerning between natural law and embellished law.
We can imagine a world more beautiful, more meaningful, with more laughter, with more time for transitions, or with more collective utility. We will need to look beyond the current education, food, economic, prison, and social systems, systems without the matriarch, and other systems or models meant to benefit a few. A peaceful existence requires a diversity of thought, economy, language, cosmovision, and culture.
The years of opening my first restaurant were nothing we could forecast so anyone who backed us got useless information in the investor packet for the most part. We spent way less on food, way more on payroll, and overhead wasn’t as much as we imagined as we sacrificed our young bodies at every corner we didn’t cut. We reviewed the balance sheet and income and expense statements, but decisions were often guided by a more intuitive process, a yielding to the present. We had lots of press but not enough cooks. We had plenty farmers, but not enough potatoes. There would be no delivery today. The industry echos the lessons of high spirit of change, of evolution, so historical guidelines were simply that. The present gave me a better sense of the future than the past did. How I perceived the present would impact its usefulness, its constructiveness. The hesitation could lag on or be for an instant. I arrived at a space where I needed the wisdom of those who hadn’t forgotten how to live in the present.
Trapped with certain thought patterns and habits, I saw a world through that lens. I didn’t realize that when I stepped away from each career that much of the time after would be spent examining beliefs I held. I began to uncover and reframe them. It happened more rapidly when I changed my pace of life, surrounded myself with varying environments, philosophies, and cosmovisions. In observation of my own unease, I learned to embrace cultural difference and settled protests amoungst the internal dialogues. I welcomed the challenges to the psyche; however, as the previously held belief systems failed to extend past the lifetime of their usefulness, there arose temporary moments of disassociation. There were moments of varying lengths of time where I felt ungrounded but no longer stuck and accepted notions of an expanded universe, of something larger than myself. This was my evolutionary process. We each have this dormant gene of peace, of natural law, of love, of interconnectedness that indigenous tribes and ancient wisdom teachings helped me unlock.
Challenging the belief system of glyphosate —
When I react emotionally to an idea that contradicts a held belief or beliefs—more often because it threatens my story of the world or my story of self—I create within me a kind of unease. I feel a sense of violation.
Every 15 years, the EPA must re-revaluate registered pesticides, such as glyphosate. Trade names for products containing glyphosate include Gallup, Landmaster, Pondmaster, Prosecutor Swift Acting, Pronto Vegetation Killer, Roundup, Rodeo, and Touchdown.2 Glyphosate acid and its salts are listed in the EPA toxicity class II. Labels for products containing these compounds must bear the Signal Word WARNING. In 2020, in an interim decision, the EPA found no other meaningful risks to human health when the product (glyphosate) is used in accordance with the pesticide label and that the product (glyphosate) is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.3
If the above is true, then why is it that people who apply these registered pesticides must wear a suit from head to toe, rubber gloves, and a face mask to protect themselves from these chemicals? In the 90s, the EPA raised the tolerance levels for glyphosate tenfold.4 Since 2016, The Heartland Health Research Alliance began tracking pregnancy outcomes as well as the health and development of Heartland Study babies to answer questions about potential impacts of herbicides on mother and infant health. The bulk of herbicides are applied in America’s Heartland during the months of April, May, and June. Mothers who conceive during this period have higher incidences of reproductive problems and difficult pregnancies.
Is it possible to sift through studies that seem to contradict each other? Bayer explains how honey bees aren’t affected by glyphosate products.5 A study from the University of Texas at Austin suggests that bees exposed to glyphosate lose some beneficial bacteria in their guts and are more susceptible to infection and death.6 A bee is an animal and so are humans. There’s plenty talk about our microbiome and how this directly affects our immune system and a regenerative movement to heal the soil and microbiome of the planet. (Give Kelly Noonan Gores and Zach Bush, MD a listen on the HEAL Podcast.) In 2018, a jury came to the conclusion that a groundskeeper in California got cancer from repeated exposure to Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller—$289 million is quite a lot in damages.7 Lastly, the University of Washington examined epidemiological studies published between 2001 and 2018 and determined that exposure to glyphosate may increase the risk of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma by as much as 41%.8
Baker’s side bar: Farmers spray glyphosate on wheat just prior to harvesting. This kills the crop and acts as a desiccant, i.e., dries out the crop so that it can be harvested sooner than if the plant were to die naturally. This practice is more common in cooler wheat growing regions such as in the American Midwest and in Canada. General Mills and Kellogg’s have both enacted year targets in which they will no longer accept grains killed with glyphosate before harvest. Perhaps our intolerance to wheat products isn’t the gluten in the modern wheat alone. (Read: 4 potential uses for glyphosate in wheat.)
Even if we could calculate how much glyphosate is applied per acre to how many bushels of grain harvested per acre, to how many pounds of grain, to how many grams of grain per loaf of bread, and to how much glyphosate is in each loaf of bread, we could still miss the remaining glyphosate in the soil (accounting for half-life), water sources, and movement by air. The poorer the soils, the higher the rate of leaching as the sorption power weakens. Follow the contour lines to find the run-off. Even without wind, herbicides can travel far when applied in the mornings as the air mass moves across fields due to air temperature differences. (Kiss the Ground is a great documentary that offers land-tested regenerative solutions.) The world is more interconnected than testing plots isolated from each other.
We weaken the resilient nature of soil and plants with chemical farming. The fewer arbuscular microrrhizal fungi, the less water and soil mineral access for plants (also creating less nutritious grains), and the less drought or pathogen-resistant plants. When we think we know better than plants, we don’t allow them to learn from stressors they face and pass on updated genes to their kin—the seed. We don’t allow the genetic differences between commonly named vegetables and fruits that thrive in varying ecosystems to fully express themselves. We don’t allow them to be more drought resistant or pathogen resistant on their own, with their innate adaptations. Cultivate the seeds of the natural now.
I will not use this space to argue for or against the use of glyphosate. Glyphosate is just one of the many lenses of a story that has been told to us: to teach us about scarcity, to reinforce the notion that we have control over our environment, to persuade us into the continued belief of a heavily-sided argument for the Green Revolution9, to offer the illusion that banana, pineapple, sugar cane, and coffee plantations or more feed for cattle are still better uses for rainforest land, to maintain that prescribed burnings are dangerous for lands that historically require fires to manage the land10, to withdraw us from each other and the spirit of our birth-giving, death-having, species-rich, divine, feminine, mother planet. Still all facets, so where is the root?
Lawns link us into an endless cycle. My father maintained one without much protest and puts minimal energy into it to avoid a letter from the homeowners association. We keep a garden in the back instead, with a childhood swing set as a trellis and catch water from the roof with reclaimed buckets of all sizes. The abstraction of lawns can be traced back to the Victorian era when wealth allowed people to outsource farming of their food. Land didn’t need to be productive for wealthy families, so instead, a model of an endless cycle of doomed ecology was created for us and marketed to us. We water, we add external nutrient sources, we buy (or hire) a trimmer, we trim, we don’t allow the grass to pollinate, and some of us half-heartedly do it again. (We tire of noisy leaf blowers raising blood pressure or waking children from naps, yet we push aside plenty of data to support the harmful effects of picking up particles of pollution from the ground and placing them where our nose might go—the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute would lobby otherwise.)
Derived from a 2005 NASA study using satellite imaging, lawns in America cover 62,500 square miles (or 40 million acres), making lawns the country’s largest irrigated crop.11 Why do we spend wasted energy on keeping nonagricultural land from what it knows to be to what some have indoctrinated us to believe it to be? If species-rich ecosystems are better at sustaining life than species-poor ecosystems, how do we restore suburban food webs? How do we raise the ability of manicured lawns to support life by increasing the amount and diversity of landscape? How many of us live in cities that must import resources created by ecosystems that have not collapsed elsewhere? We have replaced species-rich ecosystems with pavement, steel, and electromagnetic waves.
(photo from the ‘birthing cave’ in Sedona)
I recently camped near Sedona, Arizona. Here’s a view from the hike ending at the ‘birthing cave,’ a blemish of golf ecology in a desert landscape. (Further reading on how many golf courses per square mile of state in 2010, presented by the Golf Channel.)
Einstein famously said, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
We often mention what we are against, but what is it that we are for?
To look at this another way, I eat for interconnectedness. When I think about the people who grow the food I require for nourishment, I do not want them exposed to chemicals that might adversely affect their health. If Natural Grocers can offer 100% organic produce, why hasn’t currency abundant Amazon tried that with Whole Foods? If we make the claim that we cannot afford produce from natural farming, can we afford to have no farmers? If natural farming doesn’t qualify for subsidies and subsidies encourage farmers from not growing, what then should we be funding? If we have a lawn, windowsill, or even concrete driveway, we can shift the asking of others to nourish us and begin here. If we cook meals at home and find ourselves with an abundance of leaves and sticks, we have the inputs to make compost, or soil. Look for ways to close the loop and own our part of the whole.12 We must actively participate in the cycles that nourish us.
While we know that a world more beautiful, more awarely connected, more loving can exist, uncovering the opposite can bring about heaviness in the form of ungroundedness, fatigue, despair, a claim that technology will find a way out for us, or even the notion that further ignorance is an option.
We can live between the two worlds we know and continue to uncover and build the framework needed for the perceivable world to exist for all. We don’t need to throw out all the glyphosate. We need to know how and when to use it. We don’t need to replace what is already in good working condition with something that is sold by a zero-waste store. This would be trying to solve our problem with the same mindset used to create it—that consumer spending drives our economy and without the economy, the value of our country and people is diminished. If farmers markets collect food waste for compost, we can bring our scraps there (with no additional fossil fuel output.) If we live near farmers, our cardboard boxes can be used to suppress weeds. There are many plants that naturally have adapted to pests and don’t need an organic distinction to be pesticide-free. (Here’s an example of an ever-changing list of the dirty dozen and clean 15.) We can learn to save seeds of plants that do well and allow pollinators to diversify the genetic pool.
Aspects of natural farming —
We have allowed ourselves and others to convince us into thinking that nature can be understood by being broken down and analyzed. We are spiritual animals that cannot be fully explained in organic, mechanical, and physiological terms.
When we create chemicals for farming, they are sometimes touted as solutions13. Initially we do not have a clear prediction of what one chemical used on one type or types of insect, plant, or fungi will have on other insects, plants, fungi, and animals. (Insects, too, are animals, but I want to emphasize that humans are also affected and not separate from this equation.) For a solution to be a solution, we need not create more work for ourselves. Solutions do not need to disturb the cycle of something already in its natural rhythm. A solution is not selling more of something in order to concentrate the massing of resources into the hands of a few.
To claim that something does not cause pesticide damage or pollution is to make small distinctions based on minor differences in action. There is no knowing when these minor differences will change or turn against us. Most people are satisfied if a substance poses no immediate threat of damage and may not consider the multi-dimensional impact of its effects. The attitude of ready acceptance complicates and keeps us distanced. How do we learn from past occurrences thought to solve efficiency gaps that have seemingly created new problems?
Let weeds be weeds. Dandelion has value as dandelion. Clover has value as clover.
There exists natural farming methods that offer yields comparable to or higher than what we have accepted as conventional farming. We make more work for ourselves in a quest for control over yields. Told are countless stories of cutting down ecosystems that are already producing higher amounts of caloric, nutrient dense yield and replanting them with corn, bananas, sugar cane, and coffee, yet we continue to do this. Why do we need to shift established diets to be one heavily of a certain few? Do high-yield technologies increase productivity or are they simply attempts to stave off reductions of productivity? Plants need nutrients and when we analyze them chemically, include nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, manganese, magnesium, and so on. A nutrient in short supply decreases yield, but providing a sufficient amount of this nutrient does not increase yield—it prevents a loss in yield. Have we become absorbed in looking at the parts that we have abandoned the sight of the whole? Or is it that an attempt of knowing the parts separated us from the whole?
In Masanobu Fukuoka’s The Natural Way of Farming, he says, “Even when he tries to return to nature, man finds that he no longer knows what nature is, and that, moreover, he has destroyed and forever lost the nature he seeks to return to.”
Emerging into a space of compassion —
The term unlearning does not resonate with me. I would like to offer another way to feel what some of us may be trying to understand. The time I spent in Guatemala and Peru brought me to a space where I could observe indigenous prayer, ceremony, and a transparent state of being. Rather than unravel the past and discard something that could offer a frame of reference for other understandings, we could widen the lens in which we see the world, allowing for a more expanded state. What we once learned can lead to more learning. This is an idea I’m playing with: in order to find a non-dual state, sometimes it’s helpful to flow through the lens of the dual state. Light needs darkness to be light, hot and cold indicate varying degrees of the same thing, what is the difference between high and low, and so on.
Here is an example for those who have camped or hiked in places where it is the person’s responsibility to keep track of their resources. The Leave No Trace principle gives us the pretense that our having been there can have the chance of leaving no trace. My energy, footsteps, shedding hair and skin, possibly clippings of toenails, excretions, sounds, conversations, ash from cooking food, daily water consumption, and biodegradable or wilderness soaps, do leave a trace. Perhaps leave no trace could be more helpful if stated as ‘be mindful of your trace’. Study beyond the immediate reality.
We can pursue a belief system that celebrates all the ways we are connected.
In order to realize outer regeneration, whether it is social or ecological, we can regenerate the inner narrative. It’s something J and I talk about often: changing food habits, altering our attitude on travel, patterns of waste or consumption—all comes from within. The way we perceive the world expands more quickly if we can turn the eye inward. We easily fall into the trap of short-term guided feelings without addressing the root cause: replacing plastic straws (to save the sea turtles), plastic bags are worse than paper bags (although plastic is created from petroleum’s waste stream and if it isn’t made into plastic, would probably get made into something else), electric cars are cleaner than gas-powered cars (except maybe the chemicals to make the batteries plus the chance that the gas-powered car still works). None of the above we need to live, yet we go to great lengths to make a “new” cultural statement, much at the detriment to being. (Humans riding bicycles are more energy-efficient than any other animal and any other form of transportation, just ask Steve Jobs.)
We need boundless amounts of compassion to journey this transition. We must also practice compassion with ourselves. We only know what we know but we can also not unsee what we see. We each have a very unique imprint of the universe to share and when we start letting go of the things that bind us, we can more fully express this. Our paths all differ so measurement is futile. All the energy we have spent (sometimes thought as wasted) has not been lost and is waiting for us to find it, move it, and use it to create in this world. We limit ourselves and others. The opposite is also true. The more expansive our hearts can be, the more beautiful the world also can be.
We often mention what we are against, but what is it that we are for?
I am for a world more beautiful than I have lived and a world more beautiful than I have imagined. I am for a world of more unity, whether it be between people, between sexes, between political parties, between medical lineages, between schools of movement, between how we name plants, between people and other animals, fungi, plants, or celestial beings. I am for holding more compassionate space for myself and for others. I am for a world that shatters my ego, expands my heart, and unites us with its boundless opportunities. I have seen some of the limitations of my mind and welcome any chance to crack it.
Let us not forget we are star children of star dust. Should we remind ourselves, as Xavier Rudd’s has, to Follow the Sun?
Supporting readings:
A Man Apart, by Peter Forbes and Helen Whybrow
Central America’s Forgotten History, by Aviva Chomsky
Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology, edited by Allan Hunt Badiner
Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake
Erosion: Essays of Undoing, by Terry Tempest Williams
Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard
Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, by Toby Hemenway
The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben
The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, by Charles Eisenstein
The Natural Way of Farming, by Masanobu Fukuoka
Sacred Agriculture, by Dennis Klocek
Supporting documentaries: Kiss the Ground (2020), Fantastic Fungi (2019)
Very rarely suggested consumer products:
Sea to Summit Lite Line Clothesline: packs small, no missing clothes in 20-25 mph windstorm (and we use at home)
Sea to Summit Pocket Shower: great for washing hands and moonlit bathing
Goal Zero Nomad 10 solar panel
SWEET POTATO CRACKERS
Inspired by crunchy snacks picked up at Natural Grocers on an annual camping trip with Ange and J.
150g almond flour
50g tapioca flour
100g sweet potato purée
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp pink salt
Fresh or dried herbs or spices, to taste
OR
50g brown rice flour
50g glutinous rice flour
50g tigernut flour
150g sweet potato purée
Half an egg (could try ground flax seeds)
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp pink salt
Fresh or dried herbs or spices, to taste
Mix together the flours. Mix in the sweet potato purée, salt, egg (if using second recipe) and oil. Add water in 10g (2 tsp) increments until a non-crumby dough forms. Dough should be soft enough to roll out between two parchment papers yet not stick to paper. Score with pizza cutter and prick with fork before baking. Bake on parchment.
This amount makes one half sheet tray (13x18”). Bake at 325-350°F for 20-25 minutes until golden and dry. Rotate half way and break apart scored crackers when almost dry to allow for more airflow between crackers. If the crackers at the edge begin to brown before the center ones, exchange places on the sheet pan.
The Center of Economic and Policy Research, with data based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ productivity data, as presented by CNN.
Herbicide and PGR Common and Trade Names http://media.clemson.edu/public/turfgrass/2015%20Pest%20Management/2015_plt_growth_reg_table3.pdf
USDA Herbicides, Trade Names, and Target Species https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fseprd496996.pdf
Further EPA reading: https://www.epa.gov/pesticides/epa-releases-draft-risk-assessments-glyphosate
Tolerances for glyphosate residues in commodities with animal feed (non grass), spearmint and peppermint tops with the most allowed tolerances, and seeds for oil pressing: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2010-title40-vol23/pdf/CFR-2010-title40-vol23-sec180-364.pdf
The EPA in 2014 approved Enlist Duo, a combination of glyphosate and 2,4-D, another chemical herbicide. Why is the EPA exempt from following mandates of the Food Quality Protection Act, which was passed in 1996 to provide special protection for babies and infants?
In addition, the EPA has approved several increases allowed for glyphosate residues in food and routinely allows higher levels of pesticide residues in food than other developed nations. http://usrtk.org/pesticides/fda-analysis-pesticide-residues/
Bayer, who acquired Monsanto over the years 2016-18: https://www.bayer.com/en/glyphosate/glyphosate-environment-biodiversity
Bee deaths: https://www.npr.org/2018/09/25/651618685/study-roundup-weed-killer-could-be-linked-to-widespread-bee-deaths
The only resource I’ve seen claim bee populations are up in the world and not down is Bayer’s website. Read this unlikely feud between Mennonite farmers in Mexico and Maya beekeepers in the Yucatan, published in 2019.
Jury awards $289 million in damages: Jury finds Monsanto liable
Luoping Zhang, Iemaan Rana, Rachel M. Shaffer, Emanuela Taioli, Lianne Sheppard. Exposure to Glyphosate-Based Herbicides and Risk for Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma: A Meta-Analysis and Supporting Evidence. Mutation Research/Reviews in Mutation Research, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.mrrev.2019.02.001 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190214093359.htm
A term coined in 1968 by William S. Gaud of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
For further reading on the ancient art of controlled burning: Undark.org, Nature.org, NPR.org
“The American Obsession with Lawns,” by Scientific American
A great book to learn what is possible with space earmarked for a lawn: The New American Landscape, edited by Christopher Tomas
Most of our recycling, too dirty to recycle, is sitting in other countries in piles or being burned. Coverage in The Atlantic, NPR, and Forbes.
1) a method or process of finding a way around a said problem; 2) an explanation for some said thing; 3) a homogeneous mixture of two or more substances