Abstract

© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Thursday, September 21, 2000

Hotrod Earth

Kinunity—true unity, with the inner dimension of the universe—is a beautiful and enticing discovery. Feelings of communion, union with the whole, or oneness, are no longer just the idealistic notions of poets. They are true. Poets and dreamers were right!

The universe not only has a physical dimension, but also has an inner dimension, as an evolving entity. In the Judaeao-Christian cosmology, time was linear, and the universe fixed and static except insofar as it was led by the nose by God. Earlier cosmologies were cyclic, time manifesting itself through the cycles of the seasons, the sun and the moon. Now the universe is expanding, unfolding, emerging, neither linearly nor cyclically but spirally and branchiately. What was is for what is, and what is is for what will be. Every species is maiden, mother and crone. Time is the forgotten dimension despite the theory of relativity. Relativity makes us think of time mechanically, just as Newtonian mechanics made us think of space mechanically. Evolution makes us think inwardly, to the substance of life that unites us like a perpetual umbilical chord, uniting us all spiritually—kinunity.

Being aware of kinunity lets us know what we need to live in the natural world naturally, that is without destroying it simultaneously. Scientific knowledge has been a disaster for the natural world—not because science is wrong in itself (it is part of Nature) but because it has been applied without regard to kinunity, our interconnectedness. How many pieces can you cut a worm into and let it still live? How many limbs can be pulled off a fly while it is still alive? That is what we are doing to the earth. Eventually one cut will be too many, interconnectedness will fail—and that is the end of us.

Business has treated the earth as a spaceship earth to be messed about with like a hotrod car. We are all riding it whether we like the drivers or not, but now some of us are yelling that the vehicle is out of control, but most are playing Monopoly, some are singing hymns, some are asleep and some are pointing at us and laughing.

Do not Push the Goddess!

The Goddess responds against damaging things. She will respond to the damage done by modern agriculture. She will do the same against coal machines that chew up the Earth. But it probably is a long-term response, maybe acid rain or loss of the ozone layer. So, when you push the Goddess, eventually she pushes back. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, according to mechanics, but the Goddess is liable to anger and will react harder. Her reaction is often lethal.

If you put fish and a set of algae in a pond, and one of those algae is particularly delicious, the fish eat the delicious algae until there are none of those left. Meanwhile, the other algae, not palatable to the fish, multiply. The fish eventually starve even though there seems to be a lot of algae.

Cattle graze on a hillside and the hillside responds. The cattle eat plants that they like and leave plants they do not like, plants that are poisonous to cattle. That closes the landscape to cattle. Time and time and time again, we see that the landscape responds.

Humiliate a proud lover and she might respond disproportionately. Frankie shot Albert. He should have been more observant, less selfish and arrogant. Albert is the name of the human race. Frankie is Nature.

The Climatic Crisis

Our neurology evolved to deal with immediate, short range threats, such as predators. We have trouble with global crises that take place over decades. What good is a “fight or flight response” in the face of invisible gases changing the weather? Soon, we can expect:

1. more severe heat waves, droughts, floods, forest fires, and crop failures;
2. melting glaciers and ice caps lifting sea levels and inundating coastal areas, low-lying deltas, and marshlands, along with salt-water intrusion into fresh water supplies;
3. changes in ocean currents, displaced monsoons and agricultural zones, and increased desertification;
4. more frequent and worsening storms with winds up to 225 mph;
5. difficulty with photosynthesis in plants, the death of forests and coral reefs, disruption of the food chain in the oceans, and massive species death as habitats disappear.

The likely social consequences include:

1. social disruption and disintegration as more and more sustainability barriers are breached;
2. mass unemployment and poverty as economic systems deteriorate;
3. hundreds of millions of environmental refugees as desertification and sea-level rise force populations from their homes;
4. chronic undernutrition and famine as food stocks plummet while overpopulation continues;
5. health crises as water supplies are depleted and contaminated, and as insect pests, bacteria, and viruses increase and mutate in the warmer weather;
6. civil strife, resource wars, and the decline of democracy as government infrastructures strain to cope with the deepening crises.

If those lists aren’t impressive enough, consider several of the climatologists’ nightmare scenarios, rarely mentioned, but nonetheless possible:

1. ozone-layer depletion irradiating and killing the phytoplankton in the ocean, thus destroying the ocean food chain and releasing gigatons of C02 into the atmosphere;
2. climate change-induced forest death adding more gigatons of CO₂ to the air;
3. global warming releasing massive quantities of methane trapped in permafrost and tundra in the northern latitudes.

Each could double the greenhouse effect, thus doubling (at least) the severity of our list of woes. The scale of possible changes are unprecedented in human cultural history, and in the history of human evolution. Global changes this severe should be telling us something. If we want a real chance to change our world, we ought to learn to listen and respond, instead of stupidly sticking to the economics of yore when the earth seemed infinite. The climatic crisis will affect all human and most ecological systems. All governments and transnational corporations, especially the international cartels, must change their policies. Policy changes must be made quickly.

Addicted to the Market God

Our economic system needs constant growth, even though the planet is obviously not infinite in extent. So, we are encouraged to think human desire is insatiable by Nature, unlimited appetite is good for employment and satisfaction, and useless items called luxuries are both necessary. Despite the teaching of the man revered as the God of Christianity, we are hypocritically taught that humanity is only fulfilled through accumulating wealth, and few ministers of the many Christian churches are willing to offend a politician or employer by saying otherwise. The marketing of wasteful and unnecessary products has made us into spoiled children demanding everything we see, even if it is harmful to us and to the world we live in. We are encouraged to believe that driving a particular car, smoking a particular brand of cigarettes or eating particular grated gristle-burgers makes a statement about ourselves. By such means we prove that we are people of substance equal to our neighbours or better than them.

The Market is our true god. It makes us in its own image. It values trinkets made for instant consumption and instant discarding. It places no value on Nature or human variety and local tradition. It conditions people to value hardwood furniture and ivory inlays and gas-guzzling cars and beefburgers without thinking of what happened in Nature so that they could have them. Humanity and the earth itself are just the means for the rich to get richer.

Getting rich does not make people happy. Yet, the rich are no happier than the poor. Americans “feel” poorer now than they did thirty years ago despite the growth in real incomes. Then, while the rich could believe they shared the American dream, only one poor American in twenty felt they had a part in it. The ratio is the same today. Neither rich nor poor feel better off.

The market encourages the fear of scarcity. There will not be enough to go around. People feel they have to snatch what they can while they can. People that can afford a £100,000 lorry complain that the price of petrol goes up 1 penny. People that eat too much meat already buy in extra because there is a crisis, and doubtless finish up giving it to the dog. Competition is the ideal of market driven society even though cooperation is more important in building the sophisticated world we want.

Our economic system was launched in those Christian cultures that saw the material world as the realm of the devil. Life was a Vale of Woe that had to be crossed to reach the better place beyond, so exploitation of the world and transient life did not matter. If the passage was easier for the rich, it was a sign of God’s blessing. As long as good capitalists went to church to pray for forgiveness, they could do as they liked in the world of the devil.

Humans need tranquil and affectionate contact with other people. Regarding human relations as merely ones of money weakens bonding between us leading to envy and aggression. The baby perpetually distracted by TV instead of being cuddled at its mother’s breast will learn necrophilous comforts—material and mechanical ones—rather than rejoicing in human contact. Then despite the material wealth they might gain, they will remain forever starved of their real and unappreciated need, for human touch and love. That is why we are addicts of material toys and trappings, and fail to see the danger we are in.

The aim of industrialists seems to be to destroy Nature and replace it with something manufactured. That would be just fine for the manufactory owners. They will be able to charge what they like. They will be manufacturing the very air we breathe. Yet 1000 years ago, almost, S Francis, a great man even in the Christian tradition, knew how to find a compromise bewtween the needs of people and Nature. At Gubbio in Italy, a wolf who was afflicting the peasants, eating their livestock and threatening their children. The townspeople wanted to kill it, but S Francis restrained them saying, “No, I will go and talk to the wolf.” S Francis found that the wolf was injured and hungry, and simply sought enough to eat. So the saint made a pact. He would undertake to see that the people would leave out food for the wolf, so long as the wolf did not trouble them. Nature and humanity’s needs were both met. Why are we unable to take this little fable seriously today? Because Yehouah is Mammon.

A Better Marketplace

Poverty is a state of mind only measured by a bank balance when we can no longer afford to live. Wealth is the state of mind we have when we no longer need to worry that we cannot live on our income. With five percent of the world’s people, Americans consume around 30 percent of the world’s resources. Every day each one consumes their body weight in basic raw materials. One American uses energy at an average rate that equals six Mexicans, 14 Chinese, or 38 Indians. Americans are not thinking about how much is enough but about how much more can they get.

Yet, American patterns of consumption are not natural. They were devised in the 1920s to boost US markets by conditioning people to want things they did not need. Herbert Hoover’s “Committee on Recent Economic Changes” reported, in 1929, the American economy depended on “optional consumption,” a ceaseless increase of demand beyond need. The means to effect this is cosily called the “market place” and the method is marketing. The US since 1929 has been the world’s richest nation and the economic powerhouse of the world. Now the world is suffering for this demented policy that no one knows how to stop. It will stop!

Though few are willing to acknowledge it, the market has deeply troubling flaws. It is not democratic as it claims, because it is weighted by bucks not by people. People with more dollars have more power in the market place. In Third World countries local people go hungry while cash crops are grown for export to industrialized countries that can afford them, thus distorting the local market. No one frets about those who have no access to the market place because they have not yet been born! While we demand and waste cheap petrol, our children might well be left with none. The market serves those able to pay while others are denied. There is no sign that the market can correct this error.

The market supplies some kinds of needs better than others—products or services that provide a direct benefit to individual buyers. Needs that are diffuse in time, space or population are not well supplied. Trains crash with 30 deaths and governments react immediately, but no one bothers that thousands die on the roads each year.

The western mind set is on individual business from sole proprietors to corporations, but central planning is communistic and so forbidden—except for the military—and propaganda has it that the whole field is covered by these choices. Yet a perfectly good but neglected half way house is the co-operative. Where they have been tried in the west, they have had to compete on an unequal footing with capitalist business in a world designed for them. Yet some have done creditably well. The people who work in co-operatives share in its wellbeing, so have every incentive to work effectively. Owners of companies often spend their time in jet set lives leaving the running to professional managers while creaming off luxury profits for doing nothing.

The Mondragon Cooperatives, over 160 employee-owned and democratically run businesses in the Basque region of Spain, have been successful cooperatives and successful examples of grassroots community development. Their success was partly due to forming service cooperatives: the bank, the research institute, the business development group, and various schools and training centers. Traditional institutes would probably not have supported such “socialistic” experiments, yet these service cooperatives let the manufacturing cooperatives survive for over 30 years, even when Spain had over 25 percent unemployment!

The private enterprise economy is set up to favour corporate profit making at the expense of others or society as a whole. Industries burn fossil fuels but others, perhaps in the rest of the world have to pick up the tab. Oil companies ship oil in tankers that all too frequently go aground and destroy a local environment. The costs if any to the comapany cannot begin to pay for the irreversible damage to species. These companies are stealing from us and from future generations, but no government has the courage to stop it.

Companies buy land to “develop,” a euphemism for “destroy” because they intend to dig everything out of it that is valuable and leave behind a mountain of waste. Yet who made the wealth within the land that the corporations want? Even patriarchal religions will not concede that they have any right to it. It is God’s. No, it is everyone’s, yet everyone will not benefit from it. If a land speculator buys land on the outskirts of a growing town, holds it for a few years while its value rises, then sells it at a profit, he is rewarded for doing nothing at all. He is taking advantage of the growth of population making land scarcer and so more valuable, yet the local people who are building the community get nothing. The same is true of stock market speculation.

Humans are not set apart from reality, but too often business is. It is unfairly protected from its own disruptive actions, while the rest of us have to pay the bill, or suffer the discomfort. The trouble is that powerful businesses beguile us. They tell us they are giving us cheap food or gasoline or manufactured goods, and they are—but only if the direct cost is charged. We, the taxpayers, have to pay the cleaning up costs, and our children have to pay with miserable lives on a spent wasteheap. Is it worth it?

Business must be made to live with the results of its own selfishness and lack of responsibility. Laws must be passed to bring it into harmony with the rest of life. Governments of affected countries must start to sue in international courts when individual corporations cause environmental nuisance. If profit is to be made at the expense of the rest of the world, the rest of the world has a right to protest. It is an old truism that businessmen can only be controlled through their wallets. That then is how we should control them initially while we devise better rules for the marketplace that take into account the suffering of the world.

Some people accuse environmentalists of being elitists. The environmental elite is putting loggers, fishermen, factory workers out of jobs for fancy environmental reasons. The exact opposite is the truth. The environmentalists are trying to preserve these jobs by urging people to sustainable practices. In the UK, Scottish North Sea Fishermen are always up in arms that various do-gooders or EEC bureaucrats are taking away their jobs. They mean they are telling them to restrict fishing to preserve their jobs! They refuse to see that in 5 or 10 years time the fish will be gone and they will have no jobs unless they restrict fishing now.

The cause of the environmental damage in the world is wasteful over-consumption in the industrialized world. The US is, sadly, the prime culprit, and because it is the most advanced country in the world should be giving the lead, not glorying in its own waste. The real elite are the people doing the exploiting—the elite who control the corporations, trying to appear altruistic to their employees and to consumers.

Economic and political institutions have become dysfunctional—maladapted. Humans have to adopt a new approach to the use of the earth’s natural resources: petroleum, water, soil, air, minerals. Waste and toxins of modern industrial society have to be controlled. A transformation of culture is occurring on a global scale, and is rooted in a commitment to the interrelatedness of all things and will challenge the type of materialism and competition for resources that had underpinned industrial progress during the last two hundred years.

Yet, a black activist bleats about environmental elitism. Paul Ruffins, complains in “Context Magazine” that environmentalists do not campaign for black children dying of asthma in polluted city centres, but do campaign for whales and dolphins. The man is a fool. He cannot see that the whole human race, black or white is in the same boat. Cleaning up air pollution will benefit black dwellers in the inner cities, so why is this activist not recruiting black people to the cause of planetary preservation instead of bleating about environmental elitism—implied to be white? If posh middle class employees of the transnational corporations dump their wastes in black suburbs to avoid having it in their own back garden, then he has a legitimate complaint, but why is that a complaint against environmentalists and not the corporate elite?

Adelphiasophists are not racialists. Anyone who accepts the principle of not offending the earth directly or indirectly is welcome to join. And we are against those who neglect this principle whether black or pink. Racism is an offence to the earth. To black activists trying to get some sort of favour from their own community by attacking us we say, form a black branch in your neighbourhood and start doing something constructive instead of bleating divisively. We are utterly not racialist in despising anyone of whatever ethnicity that joins the ranks of those willing to see the world destroyed whether for private gain or blind prejudice. Our black critic says: “Outrage is best when used judiciously and directed at one’s true adversaries.” Quite so. Then join us and direct it.

Our communities often condone if not encourage over-consumption. Western, and especially American, consumerism is weighted toward the idea that you can buy love, success, health, adventure and even mystery, seductively hinted at by advertising.

• The economy does not depend on more consumption. More savings are the way to prosper.
• New technology will not save us from having to cut back. Energy efficient cars are useless if they mean more two and three car families and more polluting miles driven.
• Recycling will not save us. The savings are minuscule, and much of what we use cannot be recycled, it is just garbage. We have to retrain ourselves to avoid wasteful consumption in the first place?

The growth of consumerism has accompanied the decline of community, the decline of human relationships, the decline of proper concern for children as opposed to pandering to their advertising-led demands, the decline of concern for their future, the decline of environmental quality, and the decline of morality.

We benefit personally by saving money for a decent retirement. So does the economy and the planet, because to save we have to consume less voluntarily. Or, we can work harder to have more to spend, harming the planet more and making ourselves neurotic and exhausted. Standard of living—having more money—is not the same as quality of life—being able to enjoy it. More buying power means more debt, more maintenance, more insurance, more worry. Yet no one stops to think how much they actually need. Cutting out excess does not lead to deprivation but to freedom.

Activist, Vicki Robin, is right when she says we need a worldwide citizens’ movement:

• to start exploring together the links between personal happiness, consumption, global problems, and a healthy future for everyone;
• to decide what are genuine needs and what are merely desires;
• to find out what things really cost in terms of time on the job, resource depletion, pollution?

We can shift to lifestyles that are lower in consumption and higher in fulfillment. Millions of Americans are doing it, many voluntarily—in search of time for family and friends, or for greater meaning, or out of concern for the environment. Others are being forced into it because of economic hard times. And this is the real rub. We are up against a global class of exploiters who will not cease their mad power play easily. That is why the people must unite for relief from their mania.

Get involved with your community. Though at the very heart of the process, it is where we can be directly involved. We must forget middle class respectability when it comes to the future of our children and the planet itself. We must be angry. We must organize and demonstrate. Who cares if we look foolish to people who are more foolish than us. Even if the world continues to die, let us be able to say to our grandchildren, “Sorry, dearest. I tried. It just was not enough.”

Plans for our communities, our future and our lives must be made on valuing and respecting diversity, symbiosis, limits, and renewing and restoring Nature’s resources and processes when we have to use them, and accepting that our plans must be flexible enough to accommodate Nature’s quality of constant change, and springing surprises on us.

Belden Paulsen of Wisconsin reports that the poor villages in Italy seemed incapable of organizing themselves to solve their problems. Reasons for their chronic poverty were rooted in history, class structure, political corruption and lack of social conscience in the leadership class, in the nature of the village government, in the school system, the family and the capitalistic system. People waited for “miracles” as a main cause of change. The easiest way for anyone to break out from this morass was simply to emigrate to the nearest big city or to another country.

Yet, the civilization of the village is not obsolete. It offers a marked departure from much of what ails the modern world. The lack of specialized roles in the village serves individual and community self- sufficiency. The village can virtually stand on its own, with little dependence on outside market and political systems. The village has internal sustenance. Among its advantages are the following.

1. Spirit of the land. The land is not merely a means of production, it is a sacred living organism. It is the natural order, with all of its unfathomed mysteries. It may be considered even more dear than a member of one’s own family. Ill treatment of the land can be worse than maltreating another human being. The villager who migrates to the city is still considered a villager as long as they retain this attitude about the land.
2. Family cohesion. The basis of security in the village is not primarily a governmental social security system, or some employer, but the members of one’s family. For people dependent on agriculture this has often meant large families—the family work force. However, as technology and health care improve, chronic overpopulation has lessened. Economic, social and political interrelationships begin with the family as the core. Thus breakdown of family life, as happened with mass emigration, is a major vehicle of undermining village life.
3. Sense of community. The village taken as a whole is, much like the land and the family, a living organism. The lines are unclear between the natural world of the flora and fauna and the human world, or between families and government, or between the household subsistence economy and the external commercial economy. The village is a holistic enterprise, which can be seen as “primitive” by social scientists who judge only in terms of efficiency considered to indicate modernity. In actuality, the village may be the apex of complexity.
4. Craftsmanship. The tradition of the village is to make things for eternity, not for the market. Value derives from the intrinsic quality of the product, not from the commercial laws of supply and demand. Village craftsmen who erect buildings, make tools and do artisan work have motivations that are not primarily commercial, although monetary gain obviously has its place. A small farmer views work on the land as an artist does a painting—something apart from the net product. This reduces the potential gross revenue of the village, but it is part of the village spirit.
5. Self-sufficiency. The village has low expectations of any outside assistance, be it from government or the private market economy. There is a turning inward—to the family and the community itself. Food production and essential crafts and accompanying services are the anchor of the village economy. Frugality and husbanding of resources are given great importance. Renewable energy resources, such as use of sun, wood, mud, wind are basic. A self-sustaining economy, designed to last for generations, is the goal.
6. Small scale. The village is a small enterprise, usually only a few thousand people or less, with modest resources. Some villages have a wide disparity of wealth and land ownership, with “bigness” at one end of the spectrum and “smallness” at the other end, but the totality is small compared to the prevailing scale of urban industrial systems. Villagers recognize the finiteness of their material world. It can accommodate only so many people and so much land. The infinite world is that of the natural order, with all of its mysteries in the realm of the spiritual and the unknown.

Respectful and reverential relationships with Nature—and sensible treatment of the air, soil, water on this small planet—must be built when our children begin learning about them in their houses, backyards, streets, schools and villages. People must set out on life thinking they are a seedling of a heavenly earth. They must therefore be encouraged from childhood to have a sense that their duty is to build heaven not hell. If they do not think this when they get married then they are hardly likely to be suitable as parents to continue the chain of being. Every family must be encouraged to see themselves as a small plot in the cosmic garden. Human beings must be pointed that way from their earliest memories.

Sometimes we procrastinate, thinking excessively before we act, waiting for others, feeling overwhelmed, hopeless, and helpless. Do not be. Start a study convene, go on an eco-march, send off letters to politicians… Provide products or services that help the process. Whether through a business or as part of a nonprofit organization, whether locally or on a broader scale, orient your work or your volunteer efforts to community change. Support organizations that are working for it. Be Adelphiasophist!

Hunger. What can we do about it?

A lot of propaganda is spread about hunger, often by companies and governments with something to gain by it. Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza, in “World Hunger: 12 Myths,” have revealed all.

Not enough food to go around. Food in the world is not scarce but abundant. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are grown for everyone to have 3,500 calories a day. Vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish and not even included! Everyone could eat 4.3 pounds of food a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs. Most people should be fat not starving! The problem is political and economic. People in hungry countries are too poor to buy the food their own country grows because they are grown as cash crops for export. Hungry countries are like the Ireland of the Famine—they are net exporters of food and other agricultural products.

Nature is to blame for famine. If there is sufficient food to feed everyone, Nature cannot be to blame. Starvation hits only the poorest but food is always available for those who can afford it. Millions live on the brink of disaster in south Asia, Africa and S America, because a powerful minority own the land and extort punitive rents. Trapped in the unremitting grip of debt, or miserably paid, the poor starve. In America many poor and homeless die from the cold every winter. The weather is not to blame but an economy that fails to ensure everyone is provided for, and a society that places economic efficiency over compassion. This is the most boastingly Christian society in the world!

Too many people. Birth rates are falling rapidly worldwide, following the fall in death rates. Population growth will remain a concern until birth rates equal death rates but nowhere does population density explain hunger. Costa Rica, with only half of Honduras’s cropped acres per person, has a life expectancy 11 years longer than that of Honduras. Rapid population growth and hunger are endemic to societies where land ownership, jobs, education, health care, and old age security are beyond the reach of most people. The lives of the poor, especially poor women, must improve before they can choose to have fewer children.

The environment vs more food? Efforts to feed the hungry are not causing the environmental crisis. Large corporations are mainly responsible for deforestation—creating and profiting from developed-country consumer demand for Third World cash crops. Pesticides used in the Third World are applied to export crops. In advanced countries, they are used to give blemish-free produce, with no improvement in nutritional value. Organic farmers show the alternative. Environmentally sound agricultural alternatives can be more productive than environmentally destructive ones.

The Green Revolution is the answer. Thanks to the Green Revolution, million of tons more grain a year are being harvested. But increasing production cannot alleviate hunger because it fails to alter who can buy the additional food. In Green Revolution successes like India, Mexico and the Philippines, grain production and in some cases, exports, have climbed, but hunger remains and the quality of the soil degrades. The prospect of a “New Green Revolution” based on biotechnology threatens to further accentuate inequality.

We need large farms. Large landowners who control most of the best land often leave much of it idle. Small farmers typically achieve four to five times greater output per acre, in part because they work their land more intensively and use integrated, and often more sustainable, production systems. Without secure tenure, the millions of tenant farmers in the Third World have little incentive to invest in land improvements. With pressure to live, the fail to rotate crops or to leave land fallow for the sake of long-term soil fertility. Yet, comprehensive land reform has increased production in countries as diverse as Japan, Zimbabwe and Taiwan. A World Bank study of northeast Brazil estimates that redistributing farmland into smaller holdings would raise output an astonishing 80 percent.

The free market can end hunger. Every economy on earth combines the market and government in allocating resources and distributing goods, so this is an untrue dogma. The market can only work to eliminate hunger when people have enough money to spend. Most free-market dogmatists cannot see that people must have money, if the free market system is to work. If corporations will not employ people so that they have money to spend, then governments must. Government has to counter the tendency toward economic concentration through tax, credit and land reforms to disperse buying power toward the poor. More privatization and de-regulation are the opposite of the answer, by reducing the means government has of redistributing wealth to the poor so that the economy will cough into life.

Free trade is the answer. Free trade has not alleviated hunger. In Third World countries, exports have boomed while hunger has continued or worsened. Export crop production squeezes out basic food production. Pro-trade policies like NAFTA and GATT pit working people in different countries in a race to the bottom—who will work for least, without health coverage or environmental and safety standards.

Too hungry to fight for their rights. For those with few resources, mere survival requires tremendous effort. If the poor were truly passive, few could even survive. Around the world, movements for change are underway. People will feed themselves, if allowed to do so. Our responsibility is to remove the obstacles in their paths, obstacles often created by large corporations and big governments with their policies and world institutions.

More aid will help the hungry. Aid works against the hungry. It undercuts local food production in the recipient country. It reinforces the status quo. Aid is used to impose free trade and free market policies to the advantage of the advanced countries. It promotes exports at the expense of food production, and buys the armaments that repressive governments need to stay in power. Even humanitarian aid, only five percent of the total, often ends up enriching foreign companies while failing to reach the hungry. Debt relief, not aid would be more effective. It is the foreign debt burden that forces most Third World countries to cut back on basic health, education and anti-poverty programs.

We benefit from their poverty. Enforced poverty in the Third World jeopardizes our jobs, wages and working conditions as corporations seek cheaper labor abroad. In a global economy, historic achievements in employment, wage levels, and working conditions can be protected only when working people in every country are freed from economic desperation. Educating ourselves about the common interests we share with the poor in the Third World and at home allows us to be compassionate without sliding into pity. In working to clear the way for the poor to free themselves from economic oppression, we free ourselves as well.

Curtail freedom to end hunger? Why should freedom be seen as opposed to hunger. Freedom is not incompatible with ending hunger. Hungry people are often today in the least free countries. If freedom is the right to unlimited accumulation of wealth, then that is contrary to good planetary management and food supply. Economic security for all guarantees liberty. Ending hunger makes us free.

Global Insanity

The founder of permaculture, Bill Mollison, a Tasmanian Australian ecologist, wrote in 1981:

I do not think anybody has summarized what is happening on the face of the Earth. The systems that are beginning to fail are the soils, forests, the atmosphere, and nutrient cycles. We are responsible for that. We have not evolved any sustainable systems in agriculture or forestry. We do not have a system.

Half of the soil we had before 1950 has gone. Rain and the action of plants create soil at about four tons per annum per acre—less in dry areas. Soil disappears at a much faster rate from cultivated land.

In Australia, 27 tons of soil per acre per annum are lost. Wind deflection of soils has caused failure of the inland soils in the US corn belt, where as much as 400 tons per acre per annum disappear, though the average is about 20. Soils blow to Los Angeles and fall as red rain. Wind blown soil settles on some cities at a rate of 12 tons per acre per day. The drier it gets, the more wind becomes the factor in soil erosion. Canada is running out of humus. In the prairies, starting with good humic soils, they are down to a mineral soil base. It now costs about 12 tons of soil per person per year for us to grow grain.

Tillage causes this loss. Tilling soil is killing soil. At this rate, we will soon have little agricultural soil left. Desertification also destroys soil. Not only soils that are tilled are lost, but also soils that are not tilled.

In Britain, the main factor causing loss of soils is the construction of highways. Britain has a mile of highway for every square mile of surface and all governments propose to build more—more insanity. Highways are being extended on the supposition that the soil is superfluous when highways allow anything to be distributed according to need!

The world’s cities are built on the 11 per cent of the best soils of the Earth. By spreading insidiously over top quality soils, agriculturalists have to move to less viable soil. Yet more production out of these poorer soils is demanded. The farmers have been persuaded by transnational propaganda and the governments that they have succeeded in lobbying to use the modern methods of fertilizer, herbicide, fungicide and pesticide treatment. So, more and more chemicals are put on less and less surface. Fruit and vegetables often have ten or more chemical treatments before they come to the table.

In some arid places, farmers indulge in a purely exploitative way, by sinking a well into semi-saline leads and pumping it up to irrigate temporary crops. They do this for four years. Surface pH rises by about two points each year. Starting at pH 8, the pH rises after a few seasons to 11. Then they give up and pull out, with the soils glued together with carbonates. The surface is mineralized and another area is sought for the next few seasons.

But the main reason for soil degradation is the cutting of forest. And almost always the cutting of the forest is remote from where the soil is lost. If your soil starts to turn salty, the reason lies at the watershed, maybe a thousand miles away. Soil salting is being experienced even in humid conditions in Australia. It is no longer only occurring in deserts.

By removing forests, fresh rain water runs directly on the surface and soaks down, carrying with it the salts in the four tons of soil per acre eroded from rocks. These salts normally travel away in deep leads. Even in humid climates, water is saltier at depth than on the surface. Trees pump out water by respiration leaving the leads deep. By cutting the trees down respiration ceases and the deep leads rise. They are rising across America, Africa and Australia. When they reach about three feet from the surface, the trees get ill and die of pathogen attack. At about 18 inches from the surface, other crops start to die. At the surface, water evaporates and the soil turns salty. Farmers decide to pump out the salt water, but er… where do they put it? They have to build concrete culverts to lead the water to the nearest river.

The multinationals do well out of this. They sell chain saws to cut down forest and pumps to pump water into concrete culverts to the sea. They also supply the concrete. Are the analysts of the multinational firms aware of the problems they cause? They are clever people. Though they have degrees in economics and business management, subjects that ignore Nature, they know because it is their business. Transnational CEOs and their shareholders remain happy making big profits knowing they are destroying the earth. But people nearer the soil are not so happy.

The Death of Forests

Forests are the climate’s regulators. They moderate everything—excessive cold and heat, excessive run-off, excessive pollution. When they are removed extremes occur.

If there is 3 per cent less green area around the world, the whole earth is going to die through lack of oxygen. We feel happy in the spring because oxygen from the plants begins to replenish the air. We breathe out carbon dioxide and breathe in oxygen, and the plants do the opposite. Human beings and plants not only have a relationship in eating, but also share air.

Forests are more important in the oxygen cycle than oceans which used to be though as the most important factor in global oxygen cycling. Oceans contribute less than 8 per cent of the oxygen in atmospheric recycling, but if we release more mercury into the seas, the ocean will become oxygen-consuming. We depend on forests to oxygenate the air. Rain forests are more important in the oxygen cycle, and in atmospheric stability, than the northern forests.

Rain forests are not merely inducers of rain. They cause precipitation also by condensation—dew. When forest is cut precipitation may fall over 86 per cent, of which less than half is rain. On quiet, clear nights with no cloud and no rainfall recorded anywhere, to have a major dewfall in forest systems. Maritime climates are most subject to this when moist air blows inland to condense as dew, but it is true elsewhere. Simply by clearing trees from a ridge top semi-desert conditions can be rapidly produced from dense forest. This is happening. Above all, forests create soil.

What is happening to forests? We are cutting one million hectares per annum in excess of planting. Even in recent years, the Mississippi bottom land forests were cleared for soy beans, doubling for a short while the rate of forest clearance.

As little as 2 per cent of forests remain in Europe. No primeval European forests remain. As little as 8 per cent remain in South America, and 15 per cent is a general figure in other areas. Only a remnant of the world’s forests remains already. Forests are being cut for one-off gain, with no thought to the future—even of future profit! Some logging companies claim to be replanting, but it will take a century for these trees to mature and meanwhile the earth suffers from emphysema. Not only that but the microclimates are destroyed because the logging is total in many areas not selective.

What are the uses to which we put forests? The major uses are as newsprint and packaging material. Even the few remaining primeval forests are being cut for this. Forests that had never seen the footsteps of man, that had never experienced any human interference, are being cut for newsprint. Those are forests in which the trees may be 200 feet to the first branch, gigantic cathedrals. They are being machined into wood chippings for paper pulp. There are trees in Tasmania much taller than redwoods that are being cut and shipped out as chips. We are cutting primeval forests for the most trivial use.

Waste products from this logging business are killing the sea. We are carpeting the sea bottom with forest products turning coastal seas like the Baltic, the Mediterranean and the coast off New York into oxygen demanding seas. 12,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide are being released annually by the death of forests. Forests lock up the carbon dioxide that we produce. Instead, by destroying them, we are creating extra carbon dioxide from a cybernetic system Nature evolved to help life on the planet.

The effects of this on world climate are becoming apparent both in the composition of the atmosphere and in the inability of the atmosphere to buffer changes. After 200 years of recording climate details, each month the world weather records are broken somehow, the windiest, the driest, or the wettest. People have had the illusion that the Greenhouse Effect will improve world temperatures, so that those living in temperate climates will begin to enjoy a Mediterranean or sub-tropical climate. In practice, higher temperatures mean more atmospehric energy and that manifests as unpredictable climate fluctuations, more storms and hurricanes, more rainfall more droughts.

Clearing forests is bad enough but there is another factor. Since the 1920s, with increasing frequency, a succession of pathogens have struck trees. The trees affected are those with the greatest leaf area per unit. First chestnuts, with maybe sixty acres of leaf area per tree. Then the elms, running at about forty. Now the beeches are going, the oaks and the eucalypts in Australia and Tasmania. The Japanese, Canadian, Russian and northern European coniferous forests are also failing.

In each country, elms, chestnuts, poplars, firs are subject to attack by specific pathogens. What are the diseases? Phasmids are responsible for the death of eucalypts. There is the cinnamon fungus. In elms, it is the Dutch elm disease. In the poplars, it is the rust. And in the firs, it is also rust. Are these diseases killing the forest or are they simply finshing off a dying body, like maggots? We blame the fungi, the pathogens, for killing the trees, but the real cause is pollutants and acid rain. People, not bugs, are killing the forests.

Any wilderness remaining should be left strictly alone. We have no business there any more. What is so necessry about cutting down the last of the ancient forests? To be able to talk of the last ancient forests is a condemnation of our society! The lessons we need to learn are in Nature, so we had better leave the last of the old forests and wildernesses be.

Pundits have been saying for several decades that water would become the world’s rarest mineral. What has been done? Water tables everywhere, many of them 40,000 years in evolution, are now falling rapidly. We do not return water to the water table because, once in a stream or a river, it is gone, and all our tarmacadamed roads and concreted drains lead the water directly there.

Radioactivity is emerging in table waters from the long term disposal of atomic waste in deep borings. Some of these are beginning to seep through the Sacramento Valley. Industry has used deep bores to put dangerous wastes into the water table so that large areas of this water table have become unviable. Boston is said to have stopped using its ground water. How long will it take the experts to clean ground water that took 40,000 years to accumulate?

In many towns and cities, water has 700 parts per million of dissolved salts, about the limit of tolerance of the human kidney. At 1100 parts per million, people would experience symptoms like fainting and water retention in the tissues. Water is close to being poisonous. Yet half a million gallons of distilled water will fall on the roof of a modest house in a temperate zone annually. No one tries to save it.

There is a desperate scramble for energy sources, whether they are wood, coal, oil or atomic power. These are all really dangerous things to use in terms of the general life system. Where are all the people driving like madmen on the highways going? What is in all those trucks? How many of the journeys by private car or by trucks are unnecessary? How many are taking kippers to Loch Fine, when Loch Fine sends its kippers everywhere else. The danger is in the end result—what comes out of the process, what goes up the chimneys, what leaves the exhaust. They might kill trees but, in the case of wood as fuel, a tree is destroyed directly.

Insanity in Agriculture

So, soil is eroding in most areas of the world. Water supplies tainted with farm chemicals—nitrates, herbicides and manure—are commonplace. Despite enormous efforts in agriculture, our pest problems persist. Large amounts of costly and dangerous chemicals have been used for over fifty years but not a pest has been eradicated. And almost every release of chemicals, such as DDT, PCBs, dioxin and chlorine, has unforeseen and long term results. Persisting with the same ineffective “solutions” seems insane. Mollison concluded we do not have a sustainable agriculture or a sustainable forestry anywhere in the world.

E Charles Brummer asks, “Why?” Why do our most serious agricultural problems still exist? Simple cultural methods can solve most, and possibly all, of our most serious pest problems, not to mention our soil, water, and animal health issues. Why are these immediately applicable techniques ignored? We should change our focus from finding useless solutions to discovering why the problems exist in the first place.

Economics overules ecology and good husbandry. The diversity of crop species on a farm, which at one time controlled pest and weed problems, has been replaced by unhealthy monoculture. We are depleting our genetic base by overdependence on too few highly specialized varieties. 90 per cent of all seeds used in agriculture were extinct by the year 2000. Most normal open-pollinated crop varieties produce equally high yields with a fraction of the resources and few insect and disease problems, because of the healthy soil they produce, if ecological farming practice is followed. Pests can also be managed, through crop rotation, to be no threat to food growing.

Though these facts are well known, they have been ignored by the multinational suppliers, who want to sell expensive, and therefore profitable, biotechnogical solutions, instead of using tried and tested cultural methods of pest control, the mega-companies force farmers to buy their expensive, ineffective and indeed harmful cures. As Wendell Berry pointed out, “business” has replaced “culture”on the farm. We now have agribusiness not agriculture.

Take fifteen eighty-acre farms and join them together in the ownership of an “agribusinessman” who will get rid of the livestock, take out the fences, buy the large machinery necessary to farm on a big scale, and plant all twelve hundred acres in corn or corn and beans. Health will decline in everything from the soil to the community. Soil loss may rise as high as six bushels per bushel of corn. This farmer-as-agribusinessman will be a life-long extravagant consumer of everything he needs, from fuel to fertilizer, from credit to extension courses in stress management. He will be a good citizen of the economy. But whether he knows it or not, and sooner or later he will know it, this economy proposes to ruin him, as it has ruined millions of others, and sell him out to a bigger agribusinessman who wants to “handle” 2400 acres and help the economy even more.

Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Good Land”

Agriculture has become an input driven enterprise, based on fossil fuels and chemicals. To what purpose? Efficiency? They cannot sell all the grain they produce! They produce so much that governments subsidize the conversion of corn grain into ethanol for motor fuel. This is barely better than burning the surplus. The energy returned is little more than the energy of producing and marketing the grain then the ethanol! Not only that but most corporate-made bread must be fortified chemically because of the poor quality of monoculture wheat. Why aren’t these facts more widely reported? Agricultural research is not about feeding the world—we have enough to do that if we want to. The only reason for it is its positive effect on transnational share values.

Genetically modified crops are the latest panacea purporting to make our food supply safe and secure. GM crops, like failed strategies before, do not address the fundamental question: Why do we have a problem? “Prevention is better than cure,” is an adage that the multinationals do not want to hear. They are selling cures! Monoculture is the problem! Monoculture encourages pests to thrive, while polyculture discourages them. Pests find fields full of nothing but their favourite food irresistible. And attempts to eradicate the enemy have never worked, so far, while causing degradation of soil quality, and annihilating innocent and helpful animals in Nature. Transgenic crops are being developed because they extend monoculture into new territory, increasing farmers’ dependence on suppliers, not because they are needed for producing food.

Only when we say to the corporations, “Enough!” will we have any chance of change. If crop rotation, green manure crops and livestock manure provide better control of weeds, improved soil and water quality, and reduced input costs, what is the objection to using these established methods to optimize usability, environmental stability, productivity, and profitability for the farmer? We ignore all previous agricultural good practice, and, in doing so, we set ourselves up for an ecological collapse.

The great excuse for inaction is that we need more evidence. Do we need any more evidence? How much do we need before we have enough? It is a smokescreen for the transnationals, and makes a nice sinecure for passive academics. Fukuoka writes:

This professor often comes to my field, digs down a few feet to check the soil, brings students along to measure the angle of sunlight and shade and whatnot, and takes plant specimens back to the lab for analysis. I often ask him “When you go back, are you going to try non-cultivation, direct seeding?” He laughingly answers, “No I’ll leave the applications to you. I’m going to stick to research.”

There will come a time when it is too late to gather more evidence. The trouble is that that time might already have passed.

Alternatives

In the 1960s and 70s, economic conditions for farmers were getting worse and family farms began to fold in increasing numbers. At the same time an environmental agriculture movement grew in response to soil erosion, pesticide use, and groundwater contamination.

Wes Jackson, in 1980, began to use the expression “sustainable agriculture” and interest began to grow, until it has become the umbrella for organic and biological farming systems. Sustainable Agriculture is based on human goals and on understanding the long-term effect we have on the environment and on other species. We have to learn from traditional practices embodying long-time experience and safe scientific advances to create integrated, resource-conserving, equitable farming systems, to reduce environmental degradation, and maintain agricultural productivity, promote economic viability in both the short and long term and maintain stable rural communities and quality of life. Sustainable agriculture embraces all agricultural systems striving to meet this definition. Modern agriculture can be sustainable.

It is the use of chemicals for fertility and pest control that is most questioned as unsustainable in modern agriculture. Alternatives have to be found for environmental, economical, and regulatory reasons. Low-input farming serves as an intermediate stage from industrial to organic farming. Any monocropped system run by machinery, sustained by chemicals and worked by fewer and fewer people is, by definition, unsustainable if the fossil fuels, pertrochemicals and transportation economics are counted. Monocropping devalues land and soil and people. Financial or economic return is not the only or even necessarily the main issue in farming. Quality, ethical, or spiritual issues are as important and maybe more important to many people. Not everything should be seen in financial terms.

In coping with problems such as these, the only sensible approach is to discontinue the unnatural practices which have brought about the situation in the first place. The farmer has a responsibility to repair the damage he has caused. Cultivation of the soil should be discontinued. If gentle measures such as spreading straw and sowing clover are practiced, instead of using man-made chemicals and machinery to wage a war of annihilation, then the environment will move back toward its natural balance and even troublesome weeds can be brought under control.

Masanobu Fukuoka, “The One-Straw Revolution”

We really must investigate alternative solutions. Brummer says, “Diversification, mixtures of species in a field such as oat-forage intercrops, multi-species crop rotations, and the integration of crops and livestock, result in a system similar to that of 1950, the so-called unproductive farming of the past.”

That implies that there has to be a use for forage. Er… why not feed it to cows? Ruminant animals actually like forage! Beef cattle in disgustingly unhygienic feedlots are contaminated with faeces and deadly E coli 0157. Feeding hay to beef cattle a while before slaughter reduces their level of E coli strains. Instead of having integrated farms, vast amounts of feed is shipped around the world unnecessarily to feed distant cows. The cow manure meanwhile becomes a problem—a waste product to be disposed of instead of being used as Nature intended to improve the soil quality for another season’s growth.

Let the cows rejoin the wheat and help close the fertility gap that farmers feel obliged to fill with ammonium nitrate, poisoning the rivers for good measure. They will not because of the power of the transnationals who want to sell fertilisers and pesticides. Natural farming is a threat to their global interests.

Large scale agriculture is not the agriculture that is producing the food. When you make a farm big, productivity and yield fall but less people make it, so it is declared economically “efficient” per capita of labour. It takes commercial agriculture up to an acre (43,560 square feet) to grow all the food for one person for one year, while bringing in large inputs from other areas. The productivity of quarter acre plots is higher. Only smaller plots get less efficient. At the same time, commercial agricultural practices are causing the loss of approximately six pounds of soil for each pound of food produced. In Biosphere II in Arizona, ecologically based techniques raised the equivalent of a complete year’s diet for one person on 3,403 square feet! The day is arriving when all commercial food will be made of soya beans. Without gardeners or imports, we would have a monodiet.

Agriculture is a destructive system. It is not designed to be sustainable. Instead it is a disaster. So, we need a lot more serious gardeners. Gardeners are the most productive, most hands-on agriculturists. Fifty-three per cent of households in the US cultivate gardens. They garden only 600 square feet on the average, making about $1.50 a square foot. Yet, these household gardens are producing 18 per cent of the food in the United States. In Russia, the peasant farmer, on a half-acre to an acre, produced 84 per cent of the food. The state farms, which occupied most of the agricultural land, produced the rest.

Alternative and Sustainable Farming Systems

The rationale behind organic field crop agriculture is to keep the land covered with a live—and predominantly, growing—crop year-around. The common thread in approaches to alternative farming, Steve Diver tells us, is an emphasis on biological systems to supply fertility and pest control rather than chemical inputs.

“Organic farming” evolved as an alternative to chemical agriculture in the 1940s, largely in response to the publications of J I Rodale in the US, Lady Eve Balfour in England, and Sir Albert Howard in India. In 1980, USDA defined organic farming as:

A production system which avoids or largely excludes the use of synthetically compounded fertilizers, pesticides, growth regulators, and livestock feed additives. To the maximum extent feasible, organic farming systems rely upon crop rotations, crop residues, animal manures, legumes, green manures, off-farm organic wastes, mechanical cultivation, mineral-bearing rocks, and aspects of biological pest control to maintain soil productivity and tilth, to supply plant nutrients, and to control insects, weeds, and other pests.

A long-term study of crop rotations on cotton in Louisiana showed that the effect of rotations and the addition of fertilizer were the same for the first 10 years, but after 10 years the rotation treatment improved and continued to improve over the fertilizer treatment. The problem with many research studies comparing organic/biodynamic studies is that most are less for than 10 years and would not show the full effects. How many long-term research trials are there? Biologically-based soil changes are slow, possibly cumulative, and do not lend themselves to traditional short term research methodology.

In the 70s and 80s, organic certification of farms emerged as a marketing tool to insure foods produced organically met specified standards of production.

“Biodynamic farming” evolved in Europe in the 1920s from lectures on agriculture by the Austrian anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner. It places greater emphasis than organic farming on the integration of animals to create a closed nutrient cycle, the effect of crop planting dates in relation to the calendar, and the awareness of spiritual forces in nature. A unique feature of this system is the use of eight specific preparations derived from cow manure, silica, and herbal extracts to treat compost piles, soils, and crops.

The biodynamic movement is responsible for the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) marketing programs, and Demeter(tm), its certification program for food and feed produced by strictly biodynamic farming methods. In an article on soil quality and financial performance, comparing of 16 adjacent farms, the biodynamic farms had better physical, biological, and chemical properties of their soil and were just as financially viable as the “commercial” farms.

“Biological farming” or “eco-agriculture” uses the Reams fertility system, based on the LaMotte-Morgan soil test, for crop production. It uses largely insoluble rock powders like rock phosphate and calcium carbonate with compost to achieve nutrient ratios of 7:1 calcium to phosphorus, 2:1 phosphorus to potassium, and so on. So, some chemical fertilizers are permitted but soluble ones that are easily leached and cause widespread and uncalculable damage are used minimally. Use of herbicides and insecticides is avoided but not discounted all together. A large commercial fruit and vegetable company reduced its annual pesticide bill from $500,000 to $50,000 per year after adopting a Biological Farming fertility program.

Mokichi Okada, who later formed the Mokichi Okada Association (MOA), founded “Nature Farming” in Japan in the 1930s. Humus is its basis—it emphases soil health through composts rather than organic fertilizers. Since the late 1980s, it has gained recognition in the United States. A variant, Kyusei Nature Farming, uses microbial preparations.

In the late 1970s and 80s under the direction of Robert Rodale, the Rodale Institute, moved on to “Regenerative agriculture” to make deliberate use of nature’s own capacity to cope with pests, enhance soil fertility, and increase productivity, using low-input and organic farming systems as a framework to achieve these goals.

Bill Mollison, an Australian forest ecologist, in 1978 coined the term “Permaculture” as a contraction of “permanent agriculture.” Permaculturists design ecological human habitats and food production systems using a variety of principles, not being limited to any specific method of production.

All oppose the industrial model of agriculture with the principles:

1. decentralization,
2. independence,
3. cooperation,
4. harmony with nature,
5. diversity,
6. moderation.

No dogma about farming technology is laid down in these principles, but their adoption necessarily exclude industrial farming.

Low-Input Agriculture

Low-input agriculture does not require elimination of synthetic chemicals but yields are maintained through increasing emphasis on cultural practices, and using on-farm resources instead. Any system that reduces purchased chemicals can be called low-input farming. Examples reported include:

1. poultry litter can replace nitrogen fertilizers in the production of watermelons,
2. legume cover crops can supply the total nitrogen requirements of pecan trees,
3. two timely applications of a synthetic insecticide can produce a full crop of worm-free apples,
4. compost amended potting mixes produce superior vegetable transplants than traditional soilless mixes,
5. no-till vegetable systems are feasible using reduced herbicide rates to kill cover crops,
6. subterranean clover living mulches supply nitrogen and weed control in peach orchards.

Steve Diver reminds us that we should not be holier than thou about these things because:

Any system that allows people to get started, however imperfect it might be, is the right system for that situation.

We should delight and rejoice that people are making a move away from industrialised and non-sustainable methods towards sustainable ones, even though their steps are tentative and incomplete. We should encourage them to take the full step once they have gone this far, not criticise them for not immediately going further.

Jerusalem Artichokes

Jerusalem artichokes are a most neglected plant. They are a great substitute for potatoes in a culture where everyone eats too much but have far less calories. They are ideal for busy urban dwellers because they are the easiest of vegetables to grow, at least in this temperate climate of England, requiring hardly any cultivation and suffering from no pest troubles at all, except for minimal slug damage, and giving yields per plant of kilograms.

More recently it has been discovered that the tubers are rich in fructan inulin, a substance which favourably affects the balance of microflora in the gut. This improves digestion and the scent of faeces. Why then do people not grow them? First, they have a nutty or earthy taste which many people do not like, making them reject the vegetable ever after. Yet the taste is easily acquired and then is valued, just as the taste of olives is. For that matter, many of the people who reject Jerusalem artichokes for their taste will be cigarette smokers, a distinctly acquired taste and many will be wine or beer drinkers other acquired tastes.

So, it requires little persistence to acquire the taste of Jerusalem artichokes, and must be worth it to save money and help save the environment. If it seems difficult, the Jerusalem artichoke can be used as an excellent soup base, just as mashed potato can. The artichokes are cooked and pureed, then used with fried onions, garlic, chicken stock, a little milk and green vegetables, like watercress, sorrel or even lettuce to make wonderful soups.

A second reason they are unpopular is that they are strange shapes making them difficult to prepare by peeling. They can be scrubbed, but earth can be caught in the folds. However, there are much less nobbly varieties that take away most of this complaint. The final reason they are unpopular perhaps derives from that fructans inulin. Because they improve the bowel action, they are liable to give you wind, though the smell is not noxious, for the same reason. Since people eat lots of beans and cabbage without complaining and these are not so kind in respect of the smell, this is hardly a real problem.

So, go out and acquire the taste for Jerusalem artichokes and turn over part of your allotment to them. They are a tall plant that will form a yellow daisy head in October, rather like a small sunflower, to which they are related, and unlike potatoes can be left in the ground over winter with nothing more than a few slug bites. Because they grow tall, they can be used to hide eyesores like compost heaps or ugly sheds in their growing season. Their dried stems are fibrous but whether the fibres could be put to any use, I do not know. They can be shredded and used as a mulch.

Varieties can be bought commercially or just buy some from a greengrocer, if you can find them. Some greengrocers sell them, often supplied to them by a local gardener, since they seem to have been all but abandoned as a commercial crop.

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