The biomass of Earth is shrinking. It is also weakening. Its immune responses are more and more often overwhelmed by lifeless energy – heat, flood, fire, chainsaw… Lifelessness replaces life – accelerating at tipping points for species after species – the intricate web of those dependent interconnections crumpling before human eyes into memory.
.
We fully understand what is happening – and why, yet we treat it as part of the “knowledge” we have and do not connect it to our own lives. We devise sophisticated – we think “educated” excuses – sequestration (a convenient untruth) and also humility – It’s nice to be humble in the face of the power of time and nature – what can one bloke do?
.
Yet it is the sum of singular people who make up the whole of the species. The species can only mutate its behaviour, by the adaption of individuals. One bloke can mutate. Every bloke (sexless term) can mutate the species. There is no other way, because the sensual intelligence of the species, always – I mean always – must pass through the senses of individuals. There are commons of good behaviour, which bind us, but human sensuality is mine and mine alone.
.
Anyway, we face The Great Sickening on two fronts – of nature and of society.
.
All “developed” economies will now collapse – the weight and energy of applied ideas (lifelessness), outweighs the weight and energy of what people do to grow food and distribute it, to build and maintain houses and so on. The energy; the vitality of the verb to do is outweighed and out-forced by the contrary power of status, that is, of the noun, enclosure. The effects of enclosure include rent for the abstract properties of status, land, ideas and money (interest is rent). The abstract outweighs the real and bleeds it.
.
We also have debt-created money – that is debt-created abstract property.
.
Economic collapse is inevitable.
.
Then, to massively add to the power of lifelessness and the sickening of life, we have a second front – the sudden release of millions of years of sequestered photosynthesis, which both thickens the blanket of atmospheric CO.2 and magnifies the destructive powers of human hubris. Great forests fall before it and human ego is so puffed up by that prowess, that it devises poisons – pesticides, fungicides, herbicides to remove every form of life apart from a few selected crop species and a few pretty garden trees and flowers.
.
The collapse – the imploding of life on Earth, is inevitable.
.
How do we restore sickening economies back to health?
.
How do we restrain ourselves from poisoning, felling and suffocating our living Earth? We cannot say, how do we restore the health, mass and vitality of natural systems. Natural systems themselves must achieve that. We can only say, how do we return health to human economies, so that they and their wider ecologies become one – vital, regenerating, healthy?
.
How do we undo what we have done? Of course, we cannot. It was done yesterday. We are not time travellers.
.
We ride the present and cannot jump off. No future ingenuity will save us. In truth, the future will bear our present effect.
.
Plainly we must descend from those abstract, yet destructive ideas of property and so on and inhabit sensual reality of the present. The present is the unknown. Who’s for the ride?
.
That simple idea is heresy to most. It embodies what should be self-evident – economy and ecology are one and indivisible. Even so we walk along the edge of the Garden, looking in dreamily from our fields and towns. We cannot enter. All agriculture disrupts what it has replaced.
.
So, how do we minimise disruption so that at least we maintain the freedom to dreamily gaze? The Garden must massively expand and human effects must massively shrink. Then, the health of the whole may be enough to begin the healing.
.
One lesson is that human economies must collapse. We cannot “green” their current form, because they currently have no form – they have anti-form, like anti-matter. The abstract bleeds the real, sucking it into the hands of property (an idea), leaving the living, breathing species on the edge (it cannot be denied) of oblivion.
.
“The health of soil, plant, animal, man (and the planet) is one and indivisible”. That has been the central principle for organic methods since the days of the early pioneers in the 1940’s. I think that instruction is also much older. Incidentally, organic does not define a state – a noun. It lives in a world of verbs, of what we do. It describes a method.
.
Here is Lawrence Woodward, who has been a rock in the storm of market opportunists, who ship-wrecked the true organic movement thirty years ago. It needs revival.
.
At the moment we cannot be definitive on how to farm for health or how to make health infectious. We do not know what the important transmission factors are or how the “mutuality of actions” work – whether through micro-organisms, bacteria, energy, vitality, self – organisation or something else?
.
However, we do know there are some things which are likely to be important and which farmers should pay attention to; these revolve around managing the soil and above and below ground livestock through biological system management and not through inputs whether these are synthetic or organic.
.
“Whether these are synthetic or organic” – Yes, if we consider the organism of farm, or town, those organic imports diminish the organic mass and vitality of the terrain from which they are imported. How do we maintain the health – the metabolism, of our own farm, village, town… without that social injustice? You see, where ecology and economy become one is our goal. A balance of ecology also requires the equity of social systems.
.
They are one and indivisible.
.
Once again, we return – enclosure (property) defines a state. States do nothing. We lie in state by bleeding the common. The common is dynamic. It defines good behaviour – rations of what we can do and of what we can have and it guides what we do both together and in our terrains.
.
***