Dicamba Crisis Part 3: Bottleneck

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Parts one and two.

 

The common contrast of “natural” and “unnatural” is not untrue but is hard to define. Like with “terrorism”, everyone agrees it exists but finds it hard to give a definition which isn’t to some extent arbitrary. Almost all definitions of terrorism are fraudulent since each bogusly excludes things which by all rights ought to be included and includes things that ought to be excluded. So it is often with the natural-unnatural contrast.

 

As I’ve written before, a more fruitful distinction is ecological as opposed to anti-ecological because this gives us a clear criterion: Are accumulation and waste building up? Whether or not a process generates waste, defined here as a by-product the ecological system cannot readily assimilate, distinguishes ecological and anti-ecological processes. Any such build-up indicates an anti-ecological bottleneck. In a healthy ecology accumulation is rare and quickly generates the means to put it back in motion. Real bottlenecks almost always are man-made; offhand I can’t think of any species which can generate a bottleneck on its own. (Under man-made bottleneck conditions other species can participate, such as the algae which directly generate dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere. These dead zones are man-made, driven by nitrogen run-off from massive overuse of synthetic fertilizer in industrial agriculture.)

 

Anti-ecological bottlenecks often boil down to a simple equation: Wealth and power accumulation, itself an emitter of noxious political, social, cultural pollution, must be accompanied by an equal level of physical/ecological destruction.

 

The primary reason industrial agriculture (especially its GMO model) is unsustainable and must be abolished isn’t because it’s unnatural, though it is this too, but because it’s radically anti-ecological in all the bottlenecks it generates and the way its accumulations and waste poison the Earth.

 

This is the fundamental paradigm of industrial agriculture. It denudes the soil and renders it near-sterile, imports artificial fertility and poisons (the corporations accumulate the pollution of concentrated wealth and power), and exports the combination of these inputs with sunlight as a form of pollution (commodities in order to accumulate and concentrate more wealth, cheap food for biologically and ecologically worthless parasites). The great majority of the synthetic nitrogen runs off or leaches. The pesticides pollute the crop, the soil, the water, and the air. In the case of dicamba the air becomes the most acute crisis point. The nitrogen is transferred into groundwater as a form of poison and down the rivers into the gulfs and bays in order to generate dead zones. Every step of the industrial agricultural process burns vast amounts of fossil fuels and further destroys carbon and nitrogen sinks. The warmer air in turn aggravates the volatilization of dicamba, the quintessential anti-ecological, anti-agronomic disaster capitalist pesticide.

 

The herbicide tolerant GMO model is perhaps the most extreme distillation of the industrial paradigm. It’s designed directly to accelerate human and ecological harm, job destruction, farm consolidation, and the evolution of pest resistance driving the pesticide treadmill ever faster and most intensely.

 

We see another extreme example of the participants in man-made anti-ecological bottlenecks: The pesticide treadmill, and monoculture cultivation in general, provide the best terrain for the most aggressive and hardy weeds, insect pests, and disease organisms.

 

Dicamba’s intrinsic volatility renders it the most potent driver of these phenomena. Most directly, dicamba’s volatile drift is destroying all other soy crops, vegetables, fruits, and many trees, thus generating an intense wastage. The more herbicide volatilization, the more drift, the more atmospheric loading, the faster Palmer amaranth and other potent weeds will develop resistance. We see the Strict Intent of Monsanto and the EPA and USDA to drive the pesticide resistance treadmill as hard as they can. In general monoculture cultivation, as a simple application of plowing and poison, provides the best terrain for pests compared to the complexity of agroecological pest control based on biodiversity and a diversity of tactics. The model of herbicide tolerant GMOs is the most pure manifestation of this weed-maximizing terrain.

 

Therefore in addition to the great accumulations and waste inherent to industrial agriculture we have the build-up of pest resistance to pesticides which drives further escalations of the poison paradigm and all its bottlenecks. Dicamba’s volatility and suffusion of the regional atmosphere comprise an acute poisoning crisis, an acute crisis of waste buildup. The land is condemned to sterile production of commodity soybeans. This really is designed to be a waste dump for surplus fertilizer and pesticide, which are generated in the first place as a by-product and weapon of the system whose real action is to generate money and power for those who control it. By striving to force all soy farmers to buy Xtend seeds if only in self-defense against the deliberate toxic suffusion of the poison, Monsanto and the US government are trying to further strangle the already threadbare diversity of soybean varieties and farming diversity in general, thus further intensifying the genetic bottleneck the monoculture commodity system has been ruthlessly imposing for decades.

 

The land is condemned, fossil fuels pointlessly are extracted and burned, generating carbon and nitrogen pollution in the air and fertilizer and pesticide waste to be dumped into the soil, dumped in the water, dumped in the air, driven into our bodies.

 

Dicamba is designed to suffuse the air and resettle on all broad-leaf crops and other plants as destructively as possible. This is an extreme anti-ecological bottleneck. Look at all it destroys: Food production, human and animal health from wholesome food, the spiritual and cultural work of growers, the aesthetic love of trees and flowers. All these already are bottled up by the corporate-technocratic civilization. Specific extreme outbreaks like the dicamba crisis make these bottlenecks even worse.

 

The entire system of poison-based agriculture is designed to bottle up and destroy the entire ecology replacing it with a technologically controlled monoculture. In this way the biotech/agrochemical cartel joins the finance sector and other core corporate sectors working to bottle up all elements of nature and the real economy, replacing these with the purely fake economy of money, corporate personhood, finance, and patents. The corporate-technocratic accumulation of wealth and power directly corresponds with the technosphere’s physical poisoning and destruction of the Earth. Accumulation naturally indicates an ecological bottleneck. Accumulation equals waste. It is pollution. Those who manipulate such wastes are merely using poison as a weapon. The modern agrochemical onslaught is the latest, worst, most literal use of poison to destroy the Earth in order to hoard power.

 

And this goes with the legal and physical condemnation of the land. The corporate agricultural campaign ultimately is a campaign of land seizure, forcing all human beings off the land and enclosing it within a system of a few big corporate-controlled robot-managed plantations. As I said earlier, herbicide tolerant GMOs are a milestone in the corporate enclosure program, designed directly to eliminate all hand-weeding jobs while enabling farmers to manage much greater acreage, thus accelerating farm consolidation and the forced exodus of humans from the land. By rendering impossible all competing forms of soybean farming and many other kinds of farming, Monsanto’s Xtend-dicamba system is designed to escalate this totalitarian process. The systematic refusal of government and private insurers to cover drift damage, a massive consumer fraud, is another example proving that this is economic warfare against all but the biggest farmers. As is the concurrent campaign, even among the same state governments and weed scientists who deplore the dicamba crisis, to force 2,4-D tolerant crops upon agriculture. The clear goal is an agriculture where no crop (or any other plant) not resistant to both dicamba and 2,4-D will be able to exist at all.

 

The industrial monoculture and land enclosure system also is meant to render food production as tenuous as possible by forcing all people into a condition of complete dependency upon money and the corporate system, while deliberately rendering food production as vulnerable as possible to drought, erosion, pest ravages, soil degradation, intrinsic crop failure, and ultimately the guaranteed shortages of necessary fossil fuels. The corporate food system already systematically generates hunger; it is also preparing famine.

 

As Howard Vlieger points out, the worst part of the dicamba GMO system is how it’s destroying actual food production at fruit orchards and vegetable farms and gardens, rendering anything but commodity soybean production more and more difficult. This is a case study in the real goal of poison agriculture. The will to continue this onslaught, on the part of the corporations, the US and state governments, academia and the media proves their Strict Intent to reach an outcome of total destruction.

 

Here we have the full consummation of the inherently destructive character of industrial soybean production in general. All land planted to commodity soybeans is condemned, lost to us. Soybeans aren’t food; they’re used only destructively, for CAFOs, biodiesel, and processing; a diet loaded with processed soy is hormonally unhealthy even leaving aside the soybeans’ GM character and high pesticide residues; a soy-based economy is a plunder economy which offers nothing to the people but only ravages the countryside for the benefit of the corporate criminals. Soybean cultivation is ground zero for all the pathologies, and dicamba-tolerant Xtend soybeans are most extreme. The land is bottlenecked; the economy is bottlenecked. Industrial soy itself must go. (And as for so many other reasons here too we see the critical need to abolish CAFOs.)

 

 

The extreme energy civilization, having bottlenecked all human potential and driven humanity into a socioeconomic and political dead end, now drives itself into its own terminal bottleneck.

 

Do you feel ill, or your children or pets? Do you fear sickness? Do you feel financially secure? Secure in your job? Are you optimistic things will change for the better? Do you know who has destroyed all security? Do you know what’s making us sick? Do you feel safe when you look at the news from America and around the world? Do you know why the world is going insane?

 

You’re feeling the great bottleneck. Our health, our security, our peace of mind, our work, our culture, our spirit, our freedom, all are bottled up. You feel the fear, you sense our psychological, spiritual, cultural, economic bottleneck.

 

To anyone who feels bottlenecked, whatever the surface reason seems to be, you must understand that yours is a symptom of a global ecological crisis. You cannot solve your crisis within the bottleneck which causes it any more than the civilization can pull itself out of its own bottleneck.

 

All of this civilization’s bottlenecks boil down to the simple equation: Wealth and power accumulation must be accompanied by an equal level of physical, economic, spiritual, cultural, and ecological destruction. The elites’ wealth and power equals your destruction.

 

 

Propagate the necessary new ideas.