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April 22, 2020

Earth Day

Filed under: Agroecology, Freedom, Relocalization — Tags: , , , , — Russ @ 2:33 am

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Today on Earth Day, today more than ever, today as almost all among the “civilized” have gone clinically insane in response to a government- and media-driven campaign of mass psychological terrorism, today as almost all people have reacted with extreme fear and loathing toward themselves, toward their fellow human beings, toward the Earth itself, today more than ever it is needful to recall the Earth, remember what we are and where we came from, and commune again outdoors where we belong, with others the way we belong.
 
Spring is blooming, and so far the mass is rejecting it. They’re abdicating such beauty and warmth. They’re abdicating life itself.
 
The Earth is home. For all our human purposes the Earth is the universe. The Earth is our entire home, and our only home. All social ideas are grounded in this truth. All traditional religions agree upon this as well. Attempts to find the heavens in the “up there” are misreadings. The Bible is unequivocal: The New Jerusalem is supposed to descend to this physical Earth, and heaven is nowhere but upon this Earth. The same is true from every secular point of view. The Earth is where Homo sapiens evolved; humanity evolved in tandem with and as an inextricable part of the Earth; in terms of energy, physiology, and psychology it would be impossible to forsake the Earth even if humanity wanted to (but humanity does not want this; only a handful of subhuman psychopaths claim to want this) ; the Earth is our one and only home.
 
Among all religions only scientism consistently despises its home and provider the Earth. Thus, in addition to its many other evils and idiocies, scientism constitutes the most extreme and despicable ingratitude. All human beings agree this is the worst of sins and the most ominous of traits.
 
For the great majority of us home is a particular foodshed. Only a handful of people are born travelers. The vast majority of migrants are those cast adrift by corporate-driven economic coercion, or by the spiritual and cultural homelessness generated by the technocratic civilization. Part of the great and necessary ecological transformation is our return home to the Earth in the most spiritual and practical sense of learning again to be part of our foodsheds. In the end communing with the Earth through our mode of food is the most direct form of our spiritual communion with the Earth and with ourselves as a whole. Only through the Earth can we become human again.
 
It’s a measure of the decadence of the alienated civilization that Earth Day is cordoned off as a discrete holiday. As if we all don’t live at the complete sufferance of the Earth every moment of our lives. As if all the grand towers and fortresses and mausoleums of our civilization, and all our technological self-deification, don’t exist at every moment in an ICU, hooked up and dependent upon every machine while we simultaneously do all we can to pull all the plugs.
 
This self-driven campaign, too, is part of the Earth’s kinesis.
 
The Earth is a fount of great abundance.
 
Human ingenuity can render this fount even more abundant. Agroecology is the supreme example, the greatest human accomplishment. Nature’s bounty augmented by human thought and labor provide all that humanity needs and all it can sanely want.
 
The only problem, ever, is human insanity, human depravity which convinces itself it wants more than the abundant Earth ecologically offers. This has always been the source of almost all human evil and destructiveness. This insanity is pure nihilism, pure loathing of the womb and of oneself.
 
Temporarily aided by the one-off fossil fuel binge, this anti-human loathing of humanity and the Earth has been able to ramify itself in the form of the corporate-technocratic extreme energy civilization. As if their insanity and evil weren’t enough, they even whine that not everyone shows sufficient “gratitude”.
 
On the contrary, it’s these traitors against Gaia and humanity who incarnate the blackest ingratitude, the most capital treason, against all that this wonderful, beautiful, magical Earth has offered us. If only all people had been willing to live in peace, we all could know peace and happiness.
 
Ecological history will prevail, and Gaia shall impose the correction she always does in the end. Humanity can participate by building the living ecological movement dedicated to all possible action against the economic civilization, to help Gaia take it down.
 
We can best live our thanks to Earth by propagating the necessary new ideas and building this movement. This is the great focus of human life for the next two centuries.
 
On this day of thanksgiving we can thank abundant Earth and consecrate our lives to our gratitude. Earth is the basis of life itself. Only those who choose to march with death deny this.
 
There’s nothing left but to reclaim the land, build the soil, and fight for life. This is the only positive action left in the terminus of the extreme energy civilization where Politics is Dead.
 
This action is the expression of thanks, today and every day. This is the way to make every day a thanksgiving, and to prepare a world where humanity finally shall live its great gratitude in faith, every day, in all the peace, prosperity and happiness Earth’s abundance can provide. That’s why I write, in prospective thankfulness for this coming movement and this coming ecological peace.
 
Western myth begins with the image of a woman with child in the heavens, the Greek wisdom Sophia, fertility and wisdom. We find the great wisdom at the roots of creation. Her child and the Earth come into being simultaneously along with various notions of an evil dragon. This monster often has been mistaken as Sophia’s misguided creation. This depicts the primordial vision of dialectical conflict unto creation.
 
Human history is the story of the preparation of the Earth for humanity and humanity for the Earth. Before this preparation is complete the Earth must undergo its time of tribulation, first the ravages of the kamikaze campaign of extreme energy consumption, then the unfathomable volatility and turbulence of this era’s collapse and self-immolation, as all the pent up potential, all the physical and spiritual heat and poison this kamikaze civilization has emitted, reaches Kinesis.
 
The time has reached such an extremity of alienation and confusion that few on Earth can read the signs in history and nature, and so humans have conjured religions to interpret the signs. Few have the vision to recover the lost wisdom of the woman who had to flee into the wilderness. But this wilderness is nothing but the fertile Earth, tending itself and waiting for humanity to end our destructive self-exile and come home to our creative work.
 
The visions of Sophia spangle the heavens with the sun and moon and stars. We project these from Earth. As the final star descends, the morning star, its light shall gather all other cosmic lights in itself and glorify them as they continue to shine upon Earth.
 
Light and sight finally shall be liberated here, as we finally understand the mysteries. The new Gaian communion shall prove with light that the only night was in the benighted minds of men. In the new garden there no longer shall be the day vs. night of the mind. The sun and moon and stars shall shine on Earth as before. This shall be the final end of all artificial hate, greed, lusting for power and control, spiritual homelessness. All that’s ecological shall continue the cycle, now fully in harmony, transcending all distinction of natural and artificial, purging all that is anti-ecological and living as one amid the Earth’s now exalted ecology.
 
Thus the trial of perdition, the final judgement of the fossil-fueled technocratic derangement (veritably a malign ghost, a resurrected fossil of evil, a summoned demon), shall be complete, the mystery shall be solved, and from there all which is, was, and is to become, shall become, and shall be, and shall become forever more. The tree of life cycles forever through the twelve seasons, bearing its twelve fruits, and all human stewardship of Earth shall fruit in harmony. The water of life is a river which flows forever. As Greek wisdom has it no one may step twice into the same stream and yet it remains always the same stream.
 
The great vision comes of the air at break of new day, and all creation sings its new song for the new garden. There still must come tribulation from the air. The air of the day must gather and pressurize the power of the heated winds, heated by the oily bonfires of Babylon. When they shall be loosed, as the fossilized technocratic empire loses control, the Kinesis will rage while the vision of the temples and arks range the sky forecasting the flesh and blood of the new garden which shall sprout. This is the word from air to earth and sea. But there is a tiding of the thunders which shall remain untranslated until the final germination of the garden, whence this too shall resolve to a rainbow.
 
Fire is the great inspiration, fire is the great symbol of tribulation raging as wildfire across the visions, fire is the destructive force Babylon’s bonfires unleash to scourge the world as the empire loses control. Fire shall consume Babylon itself. Fire is the symbol of the ultimate sundering of those who refuse the last call to come home. But as the new garden will flower upon this Earth, so all of hell has been on this Earth and shall continue in the voids within the self-damned. Thus the ultimate fire has been in the minds of men, their raging violence, and so the future lake of fire shall be the soggy ashes in the dead souls of those who refused.
 
The creative fire is the newly transformed light of the new garden. Earth has been cradle and romping ground and home for mind, and now shall resume as home for the soul.
 
The river of life leads the song now sung by all the creatures of creation. The river shall flow forever through the new garden, and throughout the new heaven and Earth. The ocean, primal residue on Earth of the primordial waters before life itself, shall be resumed into these waters. The river still flows on Earth, still flows to the seas that girdle the Earth. All soon shall be cleansed and purified to become as holy water, suffusing Earth as rain and river and sea. These shall bless our crops forever bounteous, shall redeem and restore the ecology of Earth, Garden of Eden, Gaia.
 
But first the age must undergo a great tribulation of water. Babylon sprawls upon many waters and its crimes and poisons surge forth. It shall be destroyed by literal and spiritual tsunami. Humanity must rise up to abolish the poisons and poisoners. The great ecological preparation requires this affirmative act of agency, and Earth shall not forgive the passive.
 
And so humanity and Earth meld, as artist and material, material and artist, to establish the new heaven and new Earth on this very soil. This is the consummation of creation, its transformation. This is the revolution and restoration and renaissance. Humanity and Earth plant the tree of life in this very soil, and secure the trellis of the new garden upon this very rock, the rock of Earth beloved unto all time by all human gods, and our home of humanity unto all time.
 
The only gods are the gods of the Earth. And let it be blasphemy and the mark of evil to say this sacred rock is not home, and that “we”, meaning a handful of mean and stupid boot-lickers and slave-drivers, still seek a new home somewhere beyond this earth.
 
Humanity has a mission throughout this trial. We must work to prepare the Earth and to start planting our new garden. This is our part in the transformation of creation. We must liberate the Earth, for this is preparation and transformation. We who are called to this mission must work and endure in harmony Earth’s power and the human will transmuted to Gaia’s will which shall bring us through to victory.
 
Paradise is of this Earth. It now shall be established in the flesh and stone and spirit of the true community, the Ecotrinity of Gaia and Humanity and Earth. We will finally know how to use mind and soul in harmony to work amid Gaia’s ecology in harmony. The greatest sin was to embrace the primal sundering, the alienation, the exile. This is what Jesus called the sin against the Holy Spirit. This is the sin that cannot be forgiven because only a willfully sundered soul, in all its deluded depravity, can forbid itself to repent, forgive itself and come home. These who willingly bear the mark of the beast refuse to do so, and so cannot return, and must try to prevent all return by force. This is their main political, economic, ideological, and anti-ecological campaign today.
 
Paradise is of this earth. The Ecotrinity, and the ecological state of mind and soul which accompanies it, is the great and rising idea and spirit at this climax and tribulation of the modern fossil-fueled, corporate demon-ridden, propaganda-exhorted derangement. The false idea of “man vs. nature” is dead and dying, and the false “dominionist” religion, in both its traditional and secular forms, dies with it.
 
The tree of life shall extend its redemptive roots throughout the soil of the newly conceived Earth. Its twelve seasons of fruit shall symbolize the great prosperity of humanity and Earth in the new day. The waters of the river of life shall suffuse all the springs and rains and flows and deep blue seas of the new Earth. Our children and crops and all the plants and animals shall drink of these holy waters.
 
According to Christian scripture the new garden shall not contain a temple, for all Earth shall be a temple. And finally we shall understand what it means to say our bodies are temples. Finally we shall resume living as temples, no longer as coffins. And what we build shall be the bowers and wreaths of these temples, no longer tombs.
 
We shall resume our true heritage as our spirit spreads from the new garden’s model point of light to embrace and combine with the light of the entire Earth. That’s the great promise and goal we aspire to on Earth Day. It commands us to make every day Earth Day, and then for this great aspiration simply to be the living work of each and every day.
 
This is the living movement humanity must build. The Earth is calling us home.
 
 
 
 
 

April 2, 2020

Corona of a Sun Eclipsed by the Artificial Object

Filed under: Disaster Capitalism, Freedom, Globalization, Health Racket Bailout, Mainstream Media, Relocalization, Scientism/Technocracy, Sovereignty and Constitution — Tags: — Russ @ 4:23 pm

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No one knows much. Those who know nothing (the vast majority) have no idea where they could get real information.
 
For starters, where did this virus come from? The media and government have done nothing but lie about this. Most likely the direct origin was the US, as a deliberate bioweapon attack during the military games at Wuhan last October, or from an “accident” at Fort Detrick a few months earlier which led to a CDC order to shut down certain operations there, but not before officers became infected and then attended the Wuhan convention. These are possibilities we don’t know now and may never know.
 
Meanwhile, if it did turn out the origin was from China and was by “natural” transmission, that still would be an artificial origin driven by industrial agriculture which destroys all local food economies, drives deforestation, and therefore drives food producers to extremes like hunting for exotic animals in very remote regions in order to market these as a delicacy. The whole process is a machine designed to collect and disseminate every kind of pathogen residing in those remote areas.
 
So no matter what, bioweapon, exotic food market, or anything in between, it’s an artificial US-driven origin.

 
Where does that leave us right now? Certainly we cannot look to any existing “authorities” other than while wearing the same hazmat suit we do when we assess the corporate media in any other case. First, at best they know very little. Second and more importantly, their system, their ideology, their educational background, their mindset is dedicated completely to goals – power and profit – which render it impossible for any of their structures to function effectively toward any other goal. These scientific and medical structures couldn’t act effectively toward the public good, the public health, even if they suddenly wanted to.
 
This society chose to enshrine capitalism its most virulent neoliberal form, to entrench it so deeply that even in a crisis where most people, perhaps even most authorities want to pivot to a goal different from sheer profiteering, they find it impossible. Now America is stuck with this worthless, counter-productive system. When you take a pseudo-medical structure dedicated to maximizing corporate profit and try to use it for such a completely different purpose as to practice medicine, that won’t work. Same when you try to use a profit-seeking “health insurance” system to provide actual health care. It won’t work.
 
Of course almost all “authorities” from top to bottom have the ulterior motives systematically inculcated in them by this psychopathic system. The US government already has seized the opportunity afforded by the mass hysteria to perpetrate yet another monumental crime, a corporate bailout so astronomical as to comprise a corporate coup. By now the Wall Street bailout, permanently ongoing for the duration of the US system, which began with the first $750 billion in 2008 has reached incalculable tens of trillions and the Fed has escalated yet again.
 
America had the chance to eradicate Wall Street and the purely destructive finance sector once and for all in 2008-09 but chose to stand by while the government expended trillions to bail out this purely wasteful and destructive sector. Wall Street executives, major shareholders, propagandists should have been hanged or shot for their Nuremburg-level crimes, all four counts. Instead they were allowed personally to keep the billions they stole while their banks have been bailed out to the tune of tens of trillions by now, and the flood of fake money spewing from the Fed’s collapsing dam only continues to intensify.
 
So no wonder there’s mass hysteria, although even the vacuum of real authority doesn’t explain the mass-hysterical self-abjection and subjection. Never in history has such a vast mass of people sat so passively, in such a state of infantile regression, simply waiting to be told the next thing by what now really is Big Brother.
 
(I don’t expect ever again to hear a word about how the term “sheeple” is in any way unfair. On the contrary, it falls far short of what almost all people, literal domestic livestock with a purely inert mindset, including almost all of our “alternative” internet nabobs and strutters*, now have proven themselves to be.)
 
The science is fairly clear about a few things, and agrees with common sense in each case:
 
1. Prolonged exposure is more dangerous than fleeting exposure.
 
2. Indoor co-presence or casual contact carries some danger of transmission, though it’s not clear how much. Same for extended closeness outdoors.
 
3. Outdoor activity while maintaining a reasonable distance carries zero or almost zero danger.
 
Indeed the economic action around here in northern NJ seems to reflect this: Most indoor businesses are closed, and the ones open have staff wearing masks and have set up various cough barriers and such. But there seems to be no slackening in outdoor work such as construction. If anything that seems stepped-up.
 
That puts in perspective the notion, for which there’s zero evidence, that non-contact outdoor recreation could be a significant transmission vector. On the contrary, medical science does have abundant evidence that outdoor activity is critical for physical and psychological health, especially for boosting the immune system so important to all of us now, while submitting to indoor incarceration is physically and psychologically detrimental and depresses immune function.
 
That tells us what we need to know about those shrieking how all-important and “safest” it is to hunker in a bomb shelter rather than enjoy the outdoors. These people have zero science or reason behind them, and all the evidence is against them. They’re spreading harmful misinformation. The least bad thing we could say about them is that they were stampeded along with the rest of the hysterical sheep herd. Although it’s becoming more and more difficult to give them even this benefit of the doubt.
 
 
 
*It’s been especially enlightening to see how almost all those I’ve seen online as staking claims to be anti-authoritarians, anti-empire, skeptics of power, self-styled “rebels”, always preaching “trust no one” and to research things for yourself since it’s the only way to come close to truth, how almost all of them have regressed to infancy and run home to totalitarian mama the moment there seems to be anything at stake. Turns out most of them were liars and frauds. (Dmitry Orlov has maintained some skepticism about how grotesque the response and mindset are becoming.) The list of those I used to respect on some level but for whom I now have nothing but contempt keeps growing.
 
Can you imagine any of these cowards being able to sustain even a single principle in a time of real crisis?
 
 
 
 

March 14, 2020

Double Down, or Free Ourselves

Filed under: Dance of Death, Disaster Capitalism, Freedom, Globalization, Mainstream Media, Relocalization — Tags: , , , , — Russ @ 3:34 am

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The reaction to the Corona pest, a product of the economic civilization, is becoming a great escalation of the psychological pandemic native to this economy.
 
The great cultural trend of modernity has been to atomize and isolate human beings. Through economic and political processes they are driven to lose all reality of community and solidarity. Through the physical and cultural fact of being gathered into great masses they lose all grounding and are forced to float without anchor amid a featureless sea. Through indoctrination into ideologies of Mammon, productionism and liberal individualism they are induced to see this atomization and universal faithlessness as the god-given way of the world, if not a positive good.
 
Today we reach a milestone on this road toward maximum isolation, as the fear-mongering campaigns of governments and media urge or order people to isolate themselves physically as much as possible. Even inside a house the inhabitants should stick to separate rooms.
 
Reasonable prudence is one thing, and obviously people should avoid mass gatherings. As much as possible we should avoid needless indoor assembly. That includes almost all “jobs”, but then humans always should have avoided being shackled to that system. So the pest changes nothing there in principle, it only gives a special impetus. Those who never cared about psychological and spiritual disease finally show signs of taking some action against the fear of physical disease.
 
 
But beyond this the call to hunker in a personal bunker, a physical and psychological state close to hunkering in a bomb shelter because you fear the missiles are flying, is a great escalation of the whole trend toward isolation, atomization, dehumanization.
 
Contrary to the evolution denial of the whole modern ideology of spiritual atomism, humans evolved over millions of years to live in small, tight-knit communities where each is responsible for all and dependent upon all. This never changed during the period of the dominion of modern economy. On the contrary, the modern campaign of spiritual genocide seeking to eradicate all human communities and replace them with a vast technocratic bureaucracy ruling over a vast mass of atoms has generated a universal pandemic of psychological and spiritual dislocation, confusion, distraction, despair, psychopathy.
 
Today more than ever, as the diverse crises converge toward a great pivot, combine their amplitudes toward the great Kinesis, today more than ever it is critical that we come together to rebuild our communities. The way things are going we may need to put our energies into projects for weathering the storm, extreme adaptation. So be it, this combines the necessary practical action with the necessary renewal of community.
 
Most critically at such a moment, we need to see one another and mutually affirm that we’re not going to be terrorized into hiding from one another. We’re not going to react to this acute crisis of the economic civilization by self-reinforcing the atomized isolation this civilization always has worked to instill in us as second nature, as anti-nature.
 
 
For me personally, my main social activity is to go out on group hikes. I do that several times a week. I’ll be going out again twice this weekend. I’ll keep getting together for as long as others are getting together. These aren’t people I know well from anyplace else in life, they’re casual friends and acquaintances I’ve met and gotten to know through our shared love of hiking. This shared love for the outdoors, including for many of us the wish to relearn so much about nature, knowledge the modern society has worked hard to eradicate in us, could be a seed for a more resilient, self-sufficient, organic and human community. If nothing else it’s still a shared will to continue to live and to enjoy living, and to share this enjoyment in spite of the paranoia against all such sharing which the system is working to instill in everyone.
 
Don’t give in to it. The needful mindset and action remain the same as they always were: Resist the system as much as possible, work to rebuild our human communities, sustain a healthy mind and soul.
 
 
 
 

March 13, 2020

The Economy’s Plague

Filed under: Climate Crisis, Dance of Death, Disaster Capitalism, Globalization, Relocalization, Tower of Babel — Tags: , , , , , , — Russ @ 8:42 am

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As the Corona pest becomes a psychological pandemic as well, many feel panic over how the alleged panic of others is disrupting “the economy”. We see how many even among erstwhile dissidents suddenly want to run home to ecocidal economic mama.
 
But if the economy wasn’t based 100% upon destruction and disaster, including all the just-in-time tightropes it deliberately walks at all times, including all “outsourcing” and deliberate eradication of all regional self-sufficiency, it wouldn’t be so vulnerable even to severe crises.
 
Propagandists and their apes cite FDR’s warning against falling prey to “fear itself.”
 
But the pandemic is causing only a portion of the ambient fear-itself. The great majority of it was already free-floating and now is being concentrated by this pest. That includes all the anxiety constantly generated by the ecocidal commodity economy.
 
Many fear a non-linear totalitarian jump in police state powers stemming from the alleged need for forcible quarantine, lockdown, martial law, a much greater leap even than the government’s cynical manipulation of 9/11 to vastly increase the scope of its aggressive militarism, surveillance state and police regime.
 
Everyone should indeed fear this. But it’s what they all support at every turn, all ultimately for the sake of the commodity Mammon economy.
 
There’s a famous quote from Ben Franklin which is often cited and almost always in a misguided way: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” This is often paraphrased using “freedom” and “security” instead, no matter. The gist is that people are willing to give up real freedom in exchange for a very false sense of safety. This is certainly true as far as it goes.
 
But in reality it doesn’t go far since today neither freedom nor security mean anything compared to economic consumption, producing and consuming worthless junk, being as destructive and wasteful as possible, and the fundamentalist religious worship of “the economy” as such. Almost all Western or Westernized peoples willingly, eagerly throw away all freedom and security for the ecocidal economy’s sake.
 
Nothing is more enslaving and self-enslaving, more antithetical to all freedom (except the Sodom and Gomorrah license of the rich, which isn’t freedom either – none of them ever looks free to stop accumulating, stop at vastly more than Enough, go be happy and enjoy life), than the economic death march.
 
The economy is the source of the Coronavirus pandemic in the first place, and it is the cause of all the death and travail that comes from this pest. The pest and its effects, including any economic disruption up to and including collapse, is a blow purely self-inflicted by a civilization at war with its own biological basis, including waging war on its own people. The pest arose either from a US bioweapon experiment/attack, or it is a pandemic arising from the economics of globalization (deforestation, factory agriculture, cramming masses into slums and shantytowns, the demolition of all public health systems and all decent access to decent health care except for the rich). The system is deploying every kind of scapegoating in its try to cover up its complete culpability while trying to continue with Business As Usual as much as is politically or physically possible.
 
They scapegoat individuals who their system deliberately has deprived of accurate and truthful information (about this pest and about everything else, going back as far as anyone alive can remember), those they deliberately have deprived of all sense of stability and security and community sufficiency and resilience (again going back as far as we can recall), scapegoat them for giving in to fear (which is a manifestation of the ideology of capitalist-liberal individualism into which they all were indoctrinated).
 
They scapegoat people for behaving exactly the way the elites of the economic society normally want them to behave, the elites which long have expended such massive resources to indoctrinate and propagandize the people into exactly such behavior, they scapegoat them now that we’ve reached a crisis where this behavior boomerangs on the slave economy itself.
 
If you must insist on weeping for the plight of the economy, at least put the blame where it belongs, 100% on the elites. No amount of panic (and none of us knows at this early date what really constitutes panic, as opposed to prudence) on the part of the people could exceed the bounds of the mass-psychological atmosphere the elites of the economic civilization deliberately have instilled in these masses, who this economy deliberately atomized in the first place.
 
 
Having said that, people should not panic. The reason is not because this can aggravate the disruption of the economy which is so grossly disrupting itself, but for their own psychological sake and practical resiliency. (The same reason for personal energy conservation – not because this will lower by one BTU’s worth the amount of fossil fuels the economic civilization will extract and burn, or that it will stave off even one part per million of rise in atmospheric carbon concentration, but for reasons of personal psychological health and practical reasons of personal, family, community resiliency.)
 
It’s this social/cultural/economic system which has destroyed community and family, atomized everyone, driven the modern pandemic of anomie, anxiety and despair. People who feel so demoralized in turn are more vulnerable to physical illness, just as people who are part of an intact, mutually responsible and reinforcing social group feel better psychologically and physically are less vulnerable.
 
Now more than ever we need to rebuild real community, relocalize how we produce what we need and truly want, rebuild food sovereignty, community food security, a renewed way of living with and in the land rather than as parasite squatters on its surface.
 
Such squatters are the most vulnerable to every extreme wind, howling from the economy itself such as crashing oil prices, from the climate crisis, from the pandemics driven by the globalization and ecocide inherent to the economic civilization. Those who live by this economy shortly shall die of it. If the Corona pest turns out not to be the Big One, it’s yet another shot across the bow, a last warning before this imminent advent.
 
 
 
 

October 5, 2019

Cause the Problem, Sell the (Fake) Solution

Filed under: Agroecology, Climate Crisis, Disaster Capitalism, GMO Hoaxes, GMOs Cannot "Feed the World", GMOs Don't Increase Yield, Relocalization, Scientism/Technocracy, Tower of Babel — Tags: , , , , , — Russ @ 8:19 am

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GMOs help cause this and cannot help fix it

 
 
As climate chaos worsens, over most of the world drought tolerance will become an ever more critical trait for food crops. Conventional breeding on a regional basis for agroecological horticulture is the great need and is proven to be the only framework which is effective. Industrial agriculture is doomed to collapse for any of all of its many intrinsic fatal flaws: Fossil fuel dependency; fossil water dependency; fossil phosphorus and potassium dependency; soil toxification, malnourishment and physical erosion; the destruction of the genetic base of crops; the rising strength of pests and diminishing possibilities for combatting them; global heating which suppresses more yield for every degree of temperature rise; the general collapse of the ecology upon which monoculture agriculture is completely dependent. Corporate crop varieties geared to commodity production are developed for a system which has no future and offers no guidance for what needs to be done.
 
Even within the industrial commodity framework conventional breeding is proven to be superior to genetic engineering in every way, especially where it comes to agronomic traits like drought tolerance. Here the record has been clear for many years: Conventional breeding works and GM does not.
 
As is typical, most governments have not listened to the facts or conformed to reality, and so subsidies, regulatory approvals and mainstream media propaganda campaigns have emphasized GM drought tolerance as yet another way GMOs are going to “feed the world”, however much of a lie that is in detail and overall.
 
GM-based drought tolerance has been a special feature of the propaganda for the Monsanto-Syngenta-Gates Foundation colonial assault on Africa. Several African governments have approved these corporate products for cultivation in spite of their proven agronomic inferiority and socioeconomic and ecological malignity.
 
So it’s a significant victory for food sovereignty, democracy and deep ecology that the South African government has rejected Monsanto’s application to commercialize one of its so-called “drought tolerant” products:
 
“After more than 10 years of battling Monsanto’s “bogus” drought tolerant maize project, the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) has welcomed the decision by the Minister of Agriculture, Ms Thoko Didiza, upholding the decision by the Executive Council: GMO Act and the appeal board to reject Monsanto’s application for the commercial cultivation of its triple-stacked “drought-tolerant” GM maize seed.
 
This landmark decision is a win for the ACB and other civil society organisations on the continent that have resisted the introduction of these GM varieties in South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
 
The Minister’s decision was made following the failure of the GM varieties to increase yield under drought conditions during repeated field trials in South Africa.”
 
The notion of “drought-resistant GMOs” is one of the most common PR scams found in pro-GMO propaganda. Along with similar hoaxes like golden rice and the GM Kenyan sweet potato, the purpose of the drought-resistant GMO trope is to misdirect attention from the fact that GMOs were created for no reason other than to sell poison. The two kinds of GMOs which actually exist on a significant economic level are those tolerant of herbicides, and those which generate their own Bt insecticidal poison in every plant cell. These also consistently fail in the field.
 
Drought-tolerance, on the other hand, along with traits like real pest and disease resistance, salt tolerance, improved nutrition, and improved nitrogen uptake, is solely the province of non-GM conventional breeding. This breeding, like any other, builds upon the accumulated work of thousands of years of farmer breeding, a collective human heritage. This status was reinforced in the 20th century, as all significant modern crop breeding was done using public money. Anything corporations do with this heritage is at most a minuscule contribution to a monumental and ongoing collective human project. That’s part of the reason it’s morally and rationally impossible for seed patents to have any legitimacy.
 
At best modern commodity breeding is a person standing on the shoulder of a giant. This “at best” is 100% within the realm of non-GM conventional breeding. A “drought-resistant” GMO, on the other hand, is nothing but a drought-resistant conventional variety which has one or more of the poison-enabling transgenes inserted. Thus we have the conventionally drought-resistant variety with an added Roundup Ready and/or Bt trait extraneously added. This then fraudulently is called a “drought-resistant GMO.”
 
The corporate GMO propaganda sounds especially bogus when we take into account the fact that of all economic sectors the industrial agriculture/food system is the primary driver of the climate crisis. Any big corporation, especially an agribusiness concern, which offers any sort of product touted as part of climate mitigation or adaptation, is engaging in straight disaster capitalism, seeking to profit off the crisis they themselves take the lead role in driving and having caused in the first place.
 
They [agribusiness] cause the problem [industrial agriculture is #1 driver of the climate crisis which is driving changing chronic drought and extreme drought events], then want to sell you the solution [drought tolerant maize], which doesn’t even work [the technology fails to produce greater yield under drought conditions] and is harmful in itself [as a typical GMO it drives escalated pesticide use; drives the crisis of antoibiotic resistant bacteria (ABR) through its use of a antibiotic resistance marker in the development process, as well as contributing to herbicide-driven ABR ; GM-driven mutations are never legitimately tested for safety].
 
Such “solutions” based on profit-seeking product and hi-maintenance technology also work to reinforce the technocrat ideology, that drought and farmer dependency aren’t socioeconomic and political problems but purely technical ones to be solved only by technology deployed by technocrats. But again this is precisely the mindset that has caused and driven the crises all along. No part of this framework can ever be anything but counterproductive and destructive, just as there can be no constructive action which doesn’t include rejecting and breaking free of this framework.
 
 
This particular example is typical of the overall economy and civilization which causes the climate crisis and general ecological crisis, then wants to sell you the solution of “green” capitalism, green hi-maintenance tech, technocratic carbon-trading schemes and “carbon neutral”, “offset”, “zero net carbon” regimes. These are solutions which don’t work (for over thirty years they’ve been deployed in various places and invariably are proven to be failures and often scams; overall emissions keep rising and accelerating their rate of rise, atmospheric carbon keeps rising and at increasing rate, deforestation and ecocide continue to rampage, often with the direct encouragement of climate policy as in the case of the Paris accord’s drive to accelerate deforestation by escalating subsidies for burning of wood pellets for electricity, biofuel, and heating*, aka the “biomass” scam/atrocity; plus the whole concept of “industrial renewables” is a fraud in that it remains completely dependent upon a fossil fuel foundation) and are harmful in themselves (industrial fake-renewables directly require massive mining destruction, poisoning of water and the environment, and then the electricity is put to harmful uses; hydroelectric generation is founded upon the enslavement of rivers and massacre of river ecological communities, most notoriously wiping out salmon; the whole concept is designed to prop up the inherently ecocidal economic system).
 
We see the overall recursive pattern. From the grandest “Green New Deal” perspective to the nitty-gritty detail of a particular product like Monsanto thirst-corn, this system offers nothing but malign scams designed to prop up profitable cancer/growth capitalism and herd the sheep away from real ideas and real work for the good.
 
There’s an endless number of such scams. They cause the problem then want to sell you the snake oil, while slandering and where possible forcibly suppressing the real cure. In the case of the climate crisis this means:
 
End all industrial emissions; stop destroying carbon sinks; allow all natural sinks to resume their natural ranges.
 
 
All else is a lie.
 
 
*Heating is done effectively in a low-impact way through passive solar and using the underground as a thermostat. Industrial electricity and fuel are inherently ecocidal, there is no sustainable or “eco-friendly” way to produce or consume them, we don’t need them, and would be better off spiritually and socioeconomically without them.
 
 
 
 
 

January 23, 2019

Earthways

Filed under: Climate Crisis, Dance of Death, Disaster Capitalism, Land Reform, Reformism Can't Work, Relocalization — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Russ @ 2:44 am

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Where I live in northern New Jersey I walk through succession woodlands mostly of beech, birches, several kinds of red and white oak, maples, elms, black cherry and hickory, with scattered groups of conifers – white and pitch pines, red cedars, hemlocks.
 
Currently this is a temperate climate, a place long farmed and later built up, but today with large spaces of resumed woodland. The forest is growing back and restoring old growth ecology given freedom and time.
 
This is life, the natural ecology for this climate and soil, for the natural community and for the human soul. The forest is our home, where we were born and evolved and from whence we once set out on an open road which we chose to make a road to nowhere. In the same way we chose to revile our origin and ancestry, the way so many vagrants do, and to deny the possibility of home by destroying its image everywhere we see it.
 
Against the trees we call the grassland our home and even totemize it with the urban and suburban fetish of lawns. Of course civilization also hates wild grasslands and rampantly destroys these as well but at least gives them fake honors while regarding the trees with horror and contempt.
 
Silvicide, deforestation on every level, from the mass murder of clear-cut logging to mass destruction in order to clear space for agriculture, tree plantations, and pavement, right down to individual suburbanite tree-killing, is a campaign of invasion and total war. It’s every bit as destructive and murderous as the Nazi invasion of Russia but is happening everywhere and nowhere. Therefore it’s not seen the same way by those indoctrinated into official notions of history, which mostly is about human-on-human violence within civilization’s framework. Civilization-on-uncivilized-human violence, and civilization-on-Gaia violence, are regarded as outside history, even as necessary primitive accumulation in order for history to begin.
 
History conceived and written as a sub-discipline of natural history is an educational reform which will have to wait for the great ecological correction and collapse of the production-consumption-technocratic-extreme energy civilization. Then history will see the campaigns of ecocide as they really are, and will place all genocide in this context since the two go together.
 
Today in Brazil the new Bolsonaro government promises to eradicate all remaining indigenous peoples, by forced assimilation if possible, by mass murder if necessary. There are many expressing concern about this in the West. But in spite of the often smug hand-wringing of these Good People of the West, they represent the same campaign of ecocide-genocide Bolsonaro does: The ongoing destruction of the Earth and its peoples for the sake of the Economic Civilization.
 
What’s your position on industrial agriculture? On commodity logging and tree plantations? Your position on these dictates your real positions on everything else, since all else stems from support for or opposition to ecocide and the destruction of habitats, which is nothing less than the destruction of the very basis for life, our own most of all. This includes the ability and space for peoples to live traditionally, to live in peace and freedom and provide their own shelter. This includes food sovereignty and food security, the skills and land and healthy soil, the peace and freedom of a community to grow its own food. This includes the climate, clean air and water, the enhancement or destruction of natural habitat and biodiversity. (Not “conservation”; everything always is in flux of building or tearing down. In the context of total ecocidal war to say one wants to stand still is to concede ecological death, only “more slowly”.)
 
From there this ecological world view, or lack of it, dictates all the mere “politics” of the squatter-vandal civilization. Are yours the politics of squatters on the surface of Earth who want to remain squatters, always taking never giving? Vandals who want to remain vandals? Or are yours the earthways of those who recognize that ecocide and the mass murder-suicide of humanity are inextricably conjoined evils, that this portends total destruction for humanity and the attempted final murder of Gaia, that all the internal human evils of the civilization stem from the basic ecocidal campaign which is the core activity of this civilization.
 
The only way possible is to end all commodity production and consumption (waste and destruction), end all industrial energy generation, and redeem human ways of truly renewable usufruct living amid the truly renewable earthways. Only in this way can humanity physically survive and begin to give back to the Earth which has given literally everything we have. Only in this way can we stop being the destruction (“green” destruction is still destruction) and become part of the ecological renaissance, revolution and restoration. Only in this way can we avert the worst of climate chaos and the sixth mass extinction. Only in this way will we find our long-lost souls again, where after such a prodigal death-marching we once again walk lightly among the forests once again attaining their primeval communities.
 
 
 
 
 

February 23, 2018

Today’s Inversion of Yeats

Filed under: American Revolution, Dance of Death, Disaster Capitalism, Freedom, Peak Oil, Reformism Can't Work, Relocalization, Seed Freedom — Russ @ 8:58 am

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The consummation of civilization

 
 
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
 
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
 
 
– William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
 
 
This poem was written in the context of the turmoil and radicalism of the interwar era in Europe. Yeats saw rational, humanitarian values in full retreat while the will to violence and destruction surged.
 
Today’s good moderates solemnly read this as cry of anguish against the extremes of fascism and communism. I don’t know enough about Yeats to know if that’s exactly what he meant by it, but given the context of the times it’s an obvious reading.
 
The problem is that today the matching of action to the perceived “moderation” or “radicalism” of political positions has flipped completely from that of Yeats’s time.
 
For years I’ve written from the perspective of speaking to those who have some level of anti-corporate consciousness and commitment and sought to heighten, enhance, intensify these. Most specifically I’ve spoken to the anti-GMO/pesticide movement and sought to help it evolve from reformism within a pro-corporate context (a position doomed to failure, as I’ve argued in countless posts) to the agronomically and ecologically necessary position of total abolitionism, a position which would require a broader anti-corporate consciousness.
 
You could say I’m trying to do the same thing King was doing when he realized that the civil rights movement never could win unless it broadened its consciousness and action to a comprehensive position against capitalism and war, and spoke to his people exhorting them to this evolution.
 
Well, my call to build an abolitionist organization, let alone a broader anti-system movement, has met with crickets. The most direct reason for this is that no one who talks radical wants to do any work, while those willing to work are willing to do so only within the system’s officially allowed reform frameworks. It’s a depressing paradox.
 
And when we look at where the real fury is in this society, that’s where it occurred to me that today we have an inversion of Yeats wrote.
 
“The best lack all conviction”: Today there are no MLKs who want to move from particular struggles to the commitment to build a movement to break corporate power and overthrow corporate rule. And there’s no one who would follow them if they did exist.
 
“The worst are full of passionate intensity”: Where’s the only place one finds fire, fury, radical feeling? Only among the Dembots and Trumpbots, only among the most pro-status quo conformists and cheerleaders of kleptocracy who nevertheless really ready to tear one another to shreds over whose team is better. Never in history, not even in Gibbon’s depiction of the Council of Nicaea, has the narcissism of microscopic differences generated such strife. And in this case, the identical twins locked in a mutual death grip are fighting over who gets to be the most mainstream, the most conformist supporters of entrenched power, the most ardent corporate bootlicks, the biggest warmongers, the most loyal (vicarious) followers of warlords and crime bosses.
 
Since civilization has become completely engulfed in the Extreme Energy Civilization, and since this civilization is doomed because by its nature it must violate the limits of resources and ecology until these force its destruction, it follows that for the adherents of civilization there’s nothing left but desperation, insanity, and the final rampage of destruction which will strive to drag down all of humanity and the Earth to extinction with it.
 
It follows that there’s no place left for any kind of “alternative”. No cultural, political movement is going to be built. The proof of this is that no one who in theory wants alternatives is doing anything toward this movement-building work. Politics is Dead. “Leftists”, “radicals”, just as much as your standard glad-handing Republican, care first and foremost about their work life. And just as much, they desperately support the Extreme Energy Civilization and yearn for its permanent continuation with all the ardent faith of the most primitive idolator. What’s the difference between someone who says we need total drilling and fracking to power the hi-tech economy, and someone who says we can power the hi-tech economy with renewable energy? Nothing. It’s the same religion and the same delusion. And in the end even the greenest renewables-touting, Prius-driving Sierra Club member will support drilling the last drop of oil and fracking the last cubic foot of gas in order to keep the city lights on for one more minute. It’s a fundamentalist religious commitment.
 
 
For whatever few of us hate what civilization has done to destroy humanity and the Earth, who can’t wait to see the lights go out and who can only hope there’s something left to rebuild upon, we’re simply the primal mammals hiding in the tree-tops and burrowing under the shrubbery, waiting for the end of the dinosaurs. We know the time will come, and just have to hang on till it does.
 
So it follows that any way we mammals can come together, any kind of actions we can take and groups we can form, must be dedicated to preserving our humanity, our ability to live as human beings, and the feeling of what it is to be human. Certainly this is a hard task amid such a hostile civilization.
 
As for the civilization itself, the masses of furious conformists and inert skeptics, there’s nothing to be done since they’re all committed to the terminal ride, and the only actions they’ll ever take are homicide and suicide.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

January 9, 2018

Japan is Buying at the Peak of the Bubble

Filed under: Agroecology, Climate Crisis, Globalization, GMO Corporate State, GMOs Cannot "Feed the World", Peak Oil, Relocalization, Scientism/Technocracy, Seed Freedom — Tags: , , , , , , — Russ @ 2:38 am

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In spite of the US having temporarily pulled out of the TPP negotiations, Canada, Japan, Australia, and several Asian countries are going ahead (obviously expecting the US to adhere later on).
 
For the sake of tilting at this windmill Japan is scrapping what’s left of its classical public agricultural infrastructure, the same way the US and other Western countries did over the course of the 20th century. In the 1980s globalization’s debt terrorism was used to force most third world countries to scrap their public agriculture systems, as part of the IMF’s “structural adjustments”. India dismantled its system in the 1990s, immediately triggering a suicide epidemic among small commodity farmers which rages to this day. (The US stanched the beginnings of a similar epidemic among American farmers at the same time by greatly increasing Big Ag subsidies, many of which are laundered through the farmers in the form of crop insurance and direct payments. Without this massive planned-economy program of corporate welfare, commodity farming in the US would be economically impossible for the farmers.) Today the corporate “New Alliance” project, spearheaded by the Gates Foundation and USAID for the benefit of Monsanto, DuPont, Cargill, Yara, Unilever and others, is targeting African countries trying to force them to scrap what’s left of their public agricultural systems.
 
 
This a particularly stupid and short-sighted move for Japan at this late date. As the extreme energy civilization enters the era of Peak Oil and energy descent, as climate chaos drives sea-level rise and hyper-destructive Pacific cyclones, and as ecological collapse avalanches, it becomes all the more imperative for every society to wean itself from globalization, especially from commodity industrial agriculture, and to restore its food security on an agroecological basis. This is sanity, while any other course of action is insane.
 
This is especially true for Japan, a country whose classical problem has been to make the most of a small amount of land. The US always has had tremendous leeway to be stupid and wasteful because it was blessed with such a vast abundance of land and resources. Japan has no such cushion. It needs to be smart or perish. So it doesn’t bode well for Japan’s future well-being that it’s choosing now of all times to dismantle its public seed programs and other agricultural programs for the sake of propping up its exports of consumer junk. On the contrary, of all industrialized countries Japan ought to be one of the first to detach its food production from the globalized system and restore it to its natural, rational condition. Food production and distribution naturally and logically is regionally-based, as a rule concurrent with a watershed. Historically only a few luxury imperishables were traded extensively over long distances.
 
The modern era of extreme energy consumption which made it physically possible to globalize food systems has been an ahistorical blip based on the one-time draw-down of the unique, non-renewable fossil fuel hoard. At the same time this era’s obscene insult to the ecology is reaching its breaking point, and wholesale ecological collapse will make all human activities increasingly difficult or impossible.
 
For both these reasons, resource limits and ecological limits, Babylon’s ahistorical binge is coming to an end and soon humanity shall be forced to return to historical patterns whether it wants to or not. That means the relocalization of food production and distribution. At this site I’ve long called for the necessary abolition of industrial agriculture and the transformation to agroecology. This transformation is physically and scientifically possible, right up to the global scale, and lacks only the cultural and political will to do it. Humanity still can choose the agroecological transformation.
 
But there’s no choice as to the ultimate destination. If humanity refuses the route of chosen abolition and transformation, which would be the least hard way, then nature will impose both by force. And this will be the very, very hard way. It looks like Japan is choosing the hardest of all ways, and given its weaker position to begin with, nature’s correction is likely to be hard indeed.
 
 
Propagate the necessary new ideas.
 
 
 
 
 

January 5, 2018

What’s Your Interest?

Filed under: Afghanistan, Freedom, Globalization, Mainstream Media, Relocalization, Sovereignty and Constitution — Tags: — Russ @ 4:12 am

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It’s a lie when you aggressively extend yourself as an empire and then define your imperial interests as national interests. On the contrary, history’s unbroken evidence record proves that imperialism is harmful to the real interests of the home country, if we consider these to be the health, prosperity, security, and freedom of the people.
 
Every time the US political classes chatter about, for example, the Middle East, we hear lots about alleged American interests around the globe. Actually, America has no interest in the Middle East, if by “interest” we mean the well-being of the American people. Nor does America have significant interests around the globe. America’s interest, on the contrary, is to roll back the empire and roll back its insane dependency upon globalization.
 
On the contrary, the original Monroe Doctrine defined the limits, by any rational measure, of American interests. (Of course the Doctrine was imperialistic toward Latin America. This was immoral and by now is rationally obsolete as well. For purposes of this piece we’ll stick with a purely rational, morally dispassionate view of interests.)
 
 
Globalization brought benefits only to US corporate and government elites. All it did was maximize the power of the 1%. Therefore globalization has been a great harm to the American interest as defined by the interest of the American people, since the US elites are the worst enemies of the American people.
 
Stockholm Syndrome sufferers will claim that globalization brought one great benefit to the 99%: It enabled them to buy cheaply a tremendous amount of worthless expensive junk, since this binge could be done on the backs of the global South and by exporting the worst of environmental destruction.
 
As I said, for this piece we’ll leave aside the morality of living as a leech on the backs of slaves, and we’ll even leave aside what it means to purchase a momentary cheap luxury by destroying your grandchildren’s ecological world, dooming them to cancer and famine.
 
 
But was this binge in YOUR interest? Did all this junk make you happy, give you inner peace, cause you to feel more secure financially and physically? If you say Yes, odds are you’re lying. To give the most obvious example, everyone who argues about this, defending the alleged “American way of life”, always is clearly angry, unhappy, most of all very disturbed and scared, in spite of all their material junk. If that weren’t the case, why would they be out there, whether it be in politics or media or just as an internet commenter, expressing such rancor? Why wouldn’t they be off enjoying their utopia, which according to them they have in fact attained? Those who feel safe and at peace don’t go around quarreling.
 
I say it’s killing your soul. And I say the binge of addiction to worthless expensive junk also was never in the American people’s interest, just as it has never been in the interest of anyone else on Earth to imitate this derangement.
 
The fact is that the destruction of the American empire, the destruction of globalization, and the restoration of America’s original scope is in the interest of all the peoples of Earth, including the American people. Only a handful of criminal dinosaurs would be harmed. And this too would be greatly in the interest of humanity and the Earth.
 
 
 
 
 

December 16, 2017

Community Food Movement: Maine’s Food Sovereignty Act

Filed under: Agroecology, American Revolution, Civil Disobedience, Food and Farms, Freedom, GMO Corporate State, Relocalization, Seed Freedom — Tags: , , , , , — Russ @ 6:41 am

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“Certified organic” increasingly becomes a farce as it comes to equal industrial “organic”. The latest degradation: Hydroponics now can be certified “organic”. On its face that’s absurd and Orwellian. What could possibly be called organic about growing vegetables in fortified water? You might as well allow synthetic fertilizer of every sort. The industrial organic sector is industrial first, organic second.
 
The organic certification was never more than a second-best stopgap. The only real solution is the Community Food movement, the relocalization of food production and distribution. As much as possible, buy local from farmers you know. But just buying local as a consumer isn’t enough. Community food is a rising alternative economic sector. We need to continue building and defending this rising economic and agronomic movement.
 
Toward this goal, campaigners in Maine worked for years and finally attained a legislative victory as the state passed its Food Sovereignty Act in 2017. This Act makes Maine the first state in the country to have such an ordinance. The Act frees municipalities to regulate their own local food systems if they choose to pass an ordinance taking on such responsibility. The Act applies only to food produced and sold directly to consumers within the town. Anything produced for wholesale or retail distribution remains subject to state regulation (so Big Ag can’t use this as a loophole to find a corrupt town and set up shop there).
 
Since production and sale must take place within the town, the geographical scope is more narrow than the average farmers’ market. (Although many Maine towns are quite large geographically.) Nevertheless this is an example of the kind of act the Community Food movement must fight to enact in every state, as a way to boost local food production, processing, and distribution.
 
No surprise, the thugs at the USDA insisted that if the state relinquishes authority over meat and poultry to towns, that only means the feds will have direct authority over it. This forced Maine to enact an emergency amendment to the Act stipulating that meat and poultry remain under state regulatory authority. This power play gives a perfect example of what we’re up against.
 
 
It also demonstrates the limits of legislative action.* Campaigning for food sovereignty laws, just like campaigning for GMO labeling and/or GMO/pesticide bans, is at best a supplement to the work of building the affirmative movement. In the case of community food, this includes building the economic and physical infrastructure of relocalized food production and distribution.
 
There’s lots of people already doing good work toward that eventual goal. We need to scale that up, in tandem with escalating the campaign of ideas. As for our personal lives, the Earth’s call to anyone is to commit your life to the cause. That’s a very hard sell in this Mammon theocracy where even among the people who superficially have the right ideas and good intent, most still objectively adhere to Mammon in the way they view the world. Even fellow travelers of the necessary ideas fundamentally don’t understand the concept of subordinating one’s “private” existence and existing fundamentally as a political animal, a public citizen. All we can do for starters is to systematically propagate ideas which are fundamentally against the whole grain of this theocracy and try to find fellow atheists versus the superstitions of Mammon, technocracy, scientism, productionism, who want to work on that propagation project. This is one of the basic building blocks necessary to build a true cultural, spiritual, existential movement dedicated affirmatively to the necessary agroecology/food sovereignty transformation, negatively to the total abolition of poison-based agriculture. This campaign of ideas is the necessary counterpart to the intertwined actions of building agroecological science and food sovereignty practice.
 
That’s the ultimate need. What individuals and small groups can do right now:
 
1. Take on as much of the propagation work as you can.
 
2. Become active building up the community food sector as much as you can. Growing some of your own food in a garden is a good first step, and the actions quickly scale up from there. In my case, in addition to my intermittent market gardening I’ve worked at a farmers’ market, herbal medicine garden, and am director of two community gardens.
 
3. In your personal lifestyle get as independent of the system, as “off-grid” (using that term both literally and metaphorically) as possible.
 
4. To the extent you have to remain enmeshed in the system for the time being, at least be clear in thought and word that this is under duress. I still have to drive a car, but I never think or say anything other than that the car as such has to go. This is contrary to the climate crocodiles who wring their hands and then tout hybrids and electric cars (i.e. fracking cars, nuke cars, coal cars) as some kind of answer. No, that’s just a more pernicious form of climate denialism.
 
5. In general: Do the most good you can and never do evil. I have never once heard of an example of an evil action that was necessary in any way. That’s always a lie.
 
Much of this focuses on ideas and propagating ideas. I’m forced to be a writer since for now I lack any greater scope for action. In Eric Hoffer’s terminology, I’m an activist by nature who’s been forced into the role of the “man of words”. For now there really is no greater scope for action in America, since the necessary movement doesn’t yet exist in any tangible, coherent form. Or, any rudiments which may be cohering are not yet visible to the general culture of dissent.
 
So it follows that the first, prerequisite step toward building this movement is to propagate the necessary ideas for this movement. Not even at first to convince people, but to force the existence of truly alternative and practicable ideas into the public consciousness so that, when the cultural tipping point suddenly comes (history demonstrates that we have no idea when it will come or what proximate cause will trigger it) and lots of people are suddenly looking for a new idea, this set of ideas will be one of the sets laying around ready to be taken up.
 
Toward that great goal, the second necessary preliminary step is to form the skeleton of a future mass movement in the form of coherent organizations, of whatever size attainable, which will undertake whatever wedge actions are possible for the time being but whose primary action will be to propagate the ideas as far and wide as possible.
 
All this must take place in tandem with building up the community food sector. We especially need more local retail producers, and processing infrastructure, and political organization against the state’s repressive campaigns. The community food movement already exists as a vibrant movement with great scope for all the action one could desire. We need for the whole thing, from organic horticulture to market gardening to abolition of pesticides/GMOs to a global agroecology transformation, to evolve into one coherent cultural force.
 
 
Propagate the new and necessary ideas.
 
 
*As a general rule within-the-system action is worthless, especially at the higher levels of government and especially where people seek positive policy, as opposed to resisting bad policy. But there are some wedge issues which cut across the system’s calcified political lines, where especially at lower levels of government dedicated pressure groups can get action. I argue that food is one of these potential wedges, and that organizations dedicated to the right kind and mode of food action can get good results, both directly and in terms of driving a broader cultural wedge. That’s the wager I make with my writing.
 
 
 
 
 
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