New Jersey couple launches food scrap pickup service

Java’s Compost talks challenges and barriers of starting composting business and expanding to include residential, commercial pickup.

Good article in Waste Today by Kelly Maile on the problems of starting a compost food pick up service.  Click Here to read the article.

Many of us who have plots in Community Gardens in Southern California are aware of some of the problems.  Most of the gardens compost some of the greens that are grown, but shy away from a lot of actual food like vegetables and fruit that is bad.  This tends to go into the trash bins.

A while back we did an experiment.  We set up compost bins in several back yards.  We then collected a lot of food waste from markets and individuals in 5 gallon buckets and dropped it off at the compost locations.  The soil compost that came out was incredibly rich, and was used in growing many other veggies and tomatoes with great success.  We really didn’t have any rules, just no meat, cheese, or egg products, we took all greens, veggies that had gone bad, fruit that had started to go bad, etc.  Anyone can do this in their own back yard with good results.  We also mixed in grass and bush trimmings and other organic material from nieghbors who were trimming their landscaping.

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Adam Purple, Creator of NY Garden of Eden, Dead at 84

Brilliant Environmentalist and Urban Farmer –

NY City Destroyed the Garden of Eden

NY Garden of Eden

Adam Purple passed last week in NY City.  He was a famous environmentalist and urban farmer who created a fantastic garden in the middle of an abandoned area of New York.  It lasted for years, until the greedy NY politicians seized the land and tore up the garden, which had become a tremendous community asset, both for the food it produced and for the restful place that folks could gather around.

Watch the short documentary below:

Adam Purple and The Garden of Eden from Harvey Wang on Vimeo.

Here’s another video of Adam Purple speaking at the opening of the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space in 2012.


RIP to New York’s controversial recycler and gardener, Adam Purple, creator of the Garden of Eden in NY.

 

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Cancer Control Convention Moves to Glendale

 

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Plants Have Similar Traits as Humans

Kenny Ausubel: Plants Are Sentient Beings

 Bioneers 2016 Short Clips Series

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California Farmland, Water Poisoned

Studies, Lawsuits Claim Dow Chemical and Shell

Oil Dumped TCP On Farmlands

Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris

ARVIN, Calif. — In the Central Valley of California, hundreds of wells that provide water to a million people are tainted with a chemical that some experts say is one of the most powerful cancer-causing agents in the world.

The state is poised to take the first step Tuesday to regulate the substance — called 1,2,3, TCP — but test data compiled by an activist group show it’s also been detected by utilities across the country.

Some who live in this lush farmland believe it’s to blame for the health problems of their family members and neighbors.

Read more: Click Here

What else do you need to know to have us  go back to Natural Farming?

 

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BACK TO THE LAND – Chapter One

The Real Human-Made Garden-of-Eden, The Origins of the State, and The Way Out of the Pitfall of Humanity: How the Selectively Cultivated Edible Jungle Was Lost in Pre-History and Antiquity

By Mark Andrews

Introduction to An Anthropological Analysis of Natural Farming

Human civilization probably could have been civil if it had been built upon principles in harmony with nature. Many people who study aboriginal life have a relatively positive image of native lifestyles, but most of us who have studied ancient civilization do not have such a positive image. Nevertheless, most people do not desire to go back to living a completely primitive lifestyle because they want the benefits of modern technology and civilization. Also, people innately believe that since humanity is able to develop modern technology, that therefore somehow it is natural for us to create it, and that there must be a right way to do it. Even though there is the negative image of internecine tribal warfare, life in hunter/gatherer societies has for quite some time enjoyed a net positive image as egalitarian, democratic and respectful to all its members. Ancient civilization carries with it the exact opposite image with an elite hierarchy ruling over the mass of peasant slaves. Until recently, the commonly accepted explanation for this unpleasant transformation from a dignified tribal life to a servile social structure within civilization is that these unpleasant characteristics are simply the necessary birth pangs of a possibly humanistic future civilization. Now, approximately eight thousand years after the beginning of the first known vestiges of recorded civilization, people en mass are giving up hope of the possibility of there ever becoming a sane civilization, and radical misanthropic and nihilistic philosophies are on the rise.

Anthropologists have debated for quite some time about whether or how much hunter/gatherers did or did not want to give up their nomadic lifestyle for a more settled existence. Regardless of how hunter/gatherers viewed the idea of home, people throughout much of civilization certainly have thought fondly of the idea, partly because it provides shelter from the elements such as harsh weather, poisonous bugs, snakes and wild carnivorous animals. Also, a non-nomadic/domestic lifestyle is essential for humans to be able to develop whatever other types of technology we have seen as desirable for improvements in living, such as storing food surpluses for winter or droughts, having a clean comfortable bed for a good night sleep, etc. There is no doubt that ensuring a constant food supply has been a formidable periodic problem with hunter/gatherer lifestyles,1 but the commonly held belief that modern agriculture solves this problem is a misguided notion, and many people in the modern world have forgotten about the many famine producing crop failures that have occurred throughout the history of civilization.2 However, on the face of it, and in spite of the shortcomings of what we know about agriculture, it seems like it should have been a good thing that humans had developed an agricultural home life. But something went seriously wrong as demonstrated by the totalitarian nature of early civilization. The idea here is to figure out where we went wrong and try to go back and fix it!

There is no apparent reason why agriculture, sedentism (non-nomadic lifestyle), domestication and civilization have to mean automatic human bondage to an upper class. The fact that our only knowledge of the first civilizations reveals human bondage should give us a clue that we did something wrong and took a wrong turn on the wrong path, way back when. Instead of thinking that human bondage is a normal birth pang of the beginning of civilization and that the only answers lie exclusively in the realm of looking forward towards technological progress, or else automatically assuming as the Deep Ecologists and anarcho-primitivists would have it that humanity needs to go in the exact opposite direction all the way “Back to the Pleistocene”3, we need to look backward to figure out what mistakes we can fix from the past. We know too little about the transitional steps that our ancestors passed through on their way from the hunter/gatherer ‘noble savage’ mode of life to a servile civilization. We need to do some thinking about this. Let us first analyze what we know about how the first civilizations evolved.

As Edward Hyams explains in Soil and Civilization, the four major original civilizations—Sumer, Babylonia and Mesopotamia in the Tigris/Euphrates river valley; Egypt in the Nile river valley; India in the Indus river valley; and China in the Yellow river valley—all started in river delta valleys with nutrient rich alluvial soil. There are very few places on Earth with alluvial fans large enough to foster a sizable civilization, and this is why there were only a few original civilizations that date way back in time. Each year these rivers would flood the delta regions where the rivers empty into the sea, and the floodwaters would spread plenty of valuable alluvium, which is silt that contains many nutrient-rich mineral compounds eroded from the mountainous regions upstream, and this would add great fertility to the soil. A great deal of biomass bound up within a natural ecosystem cannot flourish in alluvial soil regions due to the heavy flooding and the large quantities of silt that washes down the alluvial fans. The annual silt inundations tend to cover up the many smaller plants that begin growth in these regions, and the soft sandy silt does not hold water well. The water tends to either evaporate, or it drains down into the subsoil, both of which are due to the porosity of the soil and the lack of soil structure that usually accompanies more complex biotic communities. Because of the dryness of the native alluvial soils and because of the lack of small plants, the distance between plants tends to be of a relatively high magnitude. Removing the few native plants that were there initially at the start of agriculture would not have been a difficult task, since most of the plants would have been easy to merely pull out or dig out due to the softness of the alluvial soils. The main reason why the earliest civilizations started in the alluvial areas was, (a) due to the softness of the alluvial soils; they are the only soils that can be farmed on a regimented large-scale basis without strong metallic tools that can drastically alter the landscape; and, (b) the alluvial soils have inexhaustible and indestructible fertility due to the annual silt inundations.

Massive regimented till-based agriculture is basically impossible to achieve in the loess soil areas without metallic tools (Edward Hyams in Soil and Civilization uses the term loess soil to refer to any arable soils that are not alluvial, which will serve our purposes here.) Nevertheless, at a certain point in time humans began the practice of the cultivation of edible plants in many parts of the world, usually without turning over the soil much due to the lack of metallic implements that made till-based agriculture on loess soil possible. Unwanted plants were extirpated one way or another, and the seeds of edible plants were either just tossed out in a scattered fashion, or they were sown with a digging stick which merely poked a hole in the ground where the seed was placed. The hunter/gatherers of the rainforests no doubt sowed some of their selected food bearing crops amongst the other forest plants, but it is questionable how well these preferred edibles could compete with the root structures of the native plants of the forest floor. Less woody areas with more delicate plants were undoubtedly the preferred areas that the earliest agriculturalists chose to cultivate their select food producing plants on loess soil. They would either pull the plants out with the roots, or rip the tops of the plants off and leave the roots in the ground to rot, before they would scatter their select crop seeds. Sometimes the agriculturalists would wait for herbivorous animals to graze an area before they would scatter the seeds. At a later stage, using domesticated animals was an effective way of removing unwanted foliage, but at the time of the beginning of the domestication of plants, such domesticated animals were not available, nor are they associated with the hunter/gatherer mode of existence. Since the loess soil landscape was not easy to alter with rudimentary Stone Age implements, there is every reason to believe that the earliest loess soil farming sort of blended in with the natural vegetation, and the selected domesticated food bearing plants were sown along with the native plants.

The main theses of this first chapter is to establish the notion that, the reason why there has been so little democracy and liberty here on Earth throughout the history of civilization is because civilization has been predicated upon regimented till-based agriculture, instead of the agriculture that we should have been practicing which is natural ecosystem mimicking and not regimented nor till-based. In other words, there is a direct cause and effect relationship between a society that embraces practices and principles in harmony with nature, and a society that embraces democracy and liberty; and what is good for ecology is also good for democracy and liberty. Since neolithic farmers on loess soils didn’t have metallic tools and they lacked the ability to till the soil, many of them were naturally in the process of developing agricultural ecosystems that were very integrated in with the natural wilderness habitat, and this is why the original agriculture that was in the process of evolving in many of the areas around the planet can be referred to as natural farming.4

We have to keep in mind that the Earth was much more moist ten or fifteen thousand years ago, since in the intervening years humans have had an incredibly desiccating influence upon much of the face of the Earth through the improper grazing and overgrazing of domesticated animals, careless over logging, soil erosion through till agriculture, and the displacement of wild habitat with overpopulation and human technical artifice. Some deserts were probably natural due to the soil types that were geologically formed after the cooling of the Earth, but a certain percentage of deserts were human caused, and many people speculate that even the Sahara Desert was not natural, but rather human caused.5 Of course one of our goals should be to reverse such global desiccation, because the more moist the planet is the more reliable the weather will be for agriculture, the less wildfires will simplify the biotic community, the more moderate the various average micro climates will be around the entire planet, and the less we will have to worry about rising sea levels. Ten or fifteen thousand years ago the Earth was much more jungle-like, and because of this and the fact that humans lacked metallic instruments, humans often had a very difficult time clearing the unwanted foliage for agriculture. Now the Earth is so dry that even the tropical rainforests have lots of dry brush at various parts of the year, and people now don’t even have to use solvents such as gasoline to start fires in the dry brush to clear the rainforests for their cash cattle. Ten or fifteen thousand years ago it was virtually impossible to start fires to clear foliage for agriculture on much of the Earth due to the moistness of the climate and the wetness of the landscape.

The Neolithic Age, or late Stone Age, is known as the time that agriculture began.6 Even though agriculture began in many different places around the world during this time, most human development outside of the alluvial areas only reached the level of small isolated agricultural villages until the Iron Age. The stone axe was invented in the Neolithic period, and greatly allowed humans to alter the environment, such as opening up the heavy forest; building dams, reservoirs and irrigation ditches; erecting stockades; terracing hills; staking out permanent fields; pile driving; building clay and wooden dwellings.7 However, there are great limitations in terms of the efficiency of stone axes, and the amount of alterations to the landscape were undoubtedly kept to a minimum due to the heavy labor involved. The fact is that the early indigenous peoples were able to avoid a lot of such intensive labor because there was still no great amount of population pressure that would have necessitated a high degree of agriculture over hunting and gathering, and the agriculture they were practicing was natural farming so they didn’t need to expend a lot of labor to till the soil in the first place.

“Though neolithic cultivation is often referred to as hoe culture, the hoe is a relatively late contribution. There could be no cheap, efficient hoes until the Iron Age. The chief means of working the soil, right into Egyptian and Sumerian times, was the digging-stick, sometimes with a stone attached near the bottom to weight it. Even after the plow had been invented, it was actually a digging-stick in traction, not the furrow-turning plow that came in only at a nearer point in the Iron Age (sometime after 1000 B.C.) The late Sumerian ‘Dialogue Between the Plow and the Pickaxe’ as to their respective merits suggests that the plow did not become dominant at once.”8 The plow was not needed in the alluvial areas due to the softness of the soils, and long before a strong metal plow was invented the ard was invented at least by 6000 B.P., which was simply a large strong piece of wood held upright and pulled by an ox. The ard would plow the alluvial soil for the purpose of weeding, and to shape the soft soil into row mounds so the irrigation water would flow evenly to the right places.

Due to the lack of sponging action that accompanies the lack of soil structure, the civilizations that evolved in the alluvial regions logically were temped to employ labor intensive irrigation projects to extend the growing season year round. Because of the softness of the alluvial soils farmers were able to create irrigation trenches with the only primitive stone and wood implements that were available in the early period of civilization. As Karl Wittfogel has pointed out, irrigation is an activity that can often consume more than fifty percent of the total time a typical peasant devotes to their entire work schedule within agrarian civilization.9 Most of the irrigation related work involved digging irrigation canals and trenches, keeping the canals clear of mud, and carrying water from the river to the canal. Unfortunately, the annual alluvial floods meant that much of this trench construction and maintenance had to be almost completely redone each year.

Since the alluvial soil areas were limited in their acreage, before long these areas were completely occupied, and people began to fight over the choice spots versus the marginal areas on the alluvial fringe. Warring factions within each provincial area inevitably formed and various warlords would head-up these factions. Each farmer eventually would have to give a certain amount of their surplus to the regional warlord for protection. In the name of keeping the peace within the province, the provincial warlords would demand a greater surplus from the farmers who occupied the better land to keep people from fighting so much over better pieces of land.10 As time went on, various warlords from the different alluvial provinces would form alliances, so over a period of time there would be fewer and larger factions that would occasionally fight in huge wars. Eventually all the remaining large factions merged and the last remaining warlords joined forces to form ‘the state’, which in this case, it was the entire alluvial river delta region. (Civilization, by definition, means a human society usually covering a fairly large geographic land mass—such as a bioregion or an area enclosed by natural geographic boundaries, such as mountains or bodies of water, or alluvial areas surrounded by loess soil—that is controlled by the formation of a state. There are various textbook theories about the dynamics of warfare and its role in establishing the original complex societies, all of which might not necessarily, or at least not immediately, be pertinent for our purposes here.)11

There is no doubt that the great alluvial delta river valleys were the ideal habitat on the face of the Earth for totalitarianism to initially flourish, because alluvium is the type of soil that would allow a ruling class to squeeze the greatest amount of food surpluses out of each farmer, without modern implements, to support the largest possible non-farming class of people. The greater the relative size of the non-farming classes certainly meant the greater the size of the military that was made possible in these delta regions for the purpose of controlling the domestic population and expanding their empire, which became possible when metallic tools became available for farming the tough loess soils using till-based techniques on the lands beyond the borders of their alluvial home-base kingdoms.

Regimented agriculture generally uses the land more intensively, requires turning over the soil, is very mechanical and repetitive for the farmer, is very labor-intensive, and the logic of its dictates forces it’s toilers to farm in a very robotic fashion. Before humanity had developed metallic tools, the alluvial areas were the only places on Earth where regimented till-based agriculture could be practiced, and this is the reason why the alluvial areas were the ideal places for totalitarianism to initially flourish. (Regimented agricultural techniques such as what we are describing here, for our purposes we will refer to as simply till agriculture.)

With the evolution of alluvial civilizations, eventually a non-laboring antagonistic parasitical elite ruling class would form at the very top of the state. This elite ruling class would have their minions lord over the farmers and turn them into slaves, work them like robots from dawn to dusk, and force each slave to maximize their acreage cultivated in order to maximize the food surplus; all for the purpose of maximizing the relative size of the ruling class and non-farming classes. Long before metal plows became available the alluvial civilizations were ready to explode in their expansion of their empires beyond the bounds of the alluvial soil, but instead were contained within the confines of the alluvial soil due to the lack of good metal plows that were required to turn over the loess soil to implement till-based agriculture. The desire for empire expansion beyond the bounds of the alluvial deltas was a major impetus for the first mining operations and the first metallurgy in order to make the first plows strong enough to till loess soil. When they finally were able to achieve this technology these civilizations burst out of their cradles with a vengeance, and were finally able to create the expansive empires that they had long been dreaming of.

Even though the lack of good plows before metallurgy forced the alluvial civilizations to remain contained within the boundaries of the alluvial areas, this however didn’t stop them from conducting many expeditions out into the surrounding areas over the many thousands of years that they were contained in the alluvial areas. On these expeditions these civilizations became familiar with the surrounding landscape many miles away, if not thousands of miles away, and they took inventory of the resources, the peoples, and all of the various details of the surrounding terrain. These civilizations generally had the policy of slaughtering any small village farmers that they would come across, thus causing the land revert back to hunter/gatherer territory by default. Part of the reason for this policy was for the purpose of keeping the surrounding terrain free of settled peoples, thus making it easier for these civilizations to expand their empires into the surrounding territories when they had the proper technologies. The other reason why the alluvial elites wanted to slaughter the small village peoples in the surrounding territories is because the people in these villages had a better and freer lifestyle, which would set an example of a superior way of life, which would produce cognitive dissonance with the citizens of the alluvial civilizations if they found out about it. As Lewis Mumford beautifully describes in The Myth of the Machine, in many ways there was a lot of joy to life in the neolithic village, largely because of the wild nature of the landscape, the free time available for the inhabitants, and also because people were free from oppressive government and the oppressiveness of too many people overcrowding each other and getting in each other’s way.12

After the metal plow was developed in the alluvial-based civilizations, the larger the non-farming sector became, obviously the greater the need became for increasing food surpluses from the farming sector. Given that the farmer/slaves were already maxed out on their hours worked—dawn to dusk—this extra food surplus was achieved by, (a) increased productivity per labor hour through further advancement in more efficient farming techniques thus allowing the maximum acreage cultivated per farmer; and, (b) imperial expansion by encouraging population growth in order to increase the amount of farmers and thus the total amount of loess soil acreage under cultivation within civilization. Traditional till-based farming societies are endemically undemocratic due to the amount of labor-hours that can be squeezed out of the farmers by the ruling class.13 With constant work there is no way that the farmers can educate themselves enough to keep track of what the ruling class is doing politically; and everybody knows that the level of democracy is dependent on the level of education achieved by the populace. Contrary to the traditional Malthusian view, since the ruling class of the earliest societies up to at least the last third of the twentieth century wanted maximum population growth in order to expand their empires, an argument can be made that, the practice of till agriculture rather than genetically-based human stupidity is the root cause of human ignorance and the endless growth of civilization, totalitarianism and overpopulation,14 along with all the wars and other evils associated with civilization. (Relatively recently, in 1980, The Global 2000 Report to the President was published, and this was one of the more overt signals that the agenda was beginning to shift into the extermination/de-growth/contraction phase (more on this in chapters two and three.))

Once the logic of efficiency in agriculture became ingrained for the purpose of expanding the size of the non-farming class of people, this process of progression inevitably led from a totalitarian civilization to a totalitarian empire. The delta-based civilizations began to turn into a megamachine,15 and the leaders of civilization began to make decisions based on the logic of this machine, and growth for the sake of growth, and greater power for the sake of greater power became an end unto its own.16 A larger military meant the need for greater farm surpluses, and greater farm surpluses required more land and more people, and thus a bigger military was required to take over more land, and to manage more land and more people. Some time after this process took form and kicked into motion, the elites then came up with all sorts of ideas about grandiose things that needed to be built and fancy things that needed to get done; basically laying the foundation of the infrastructure for the first major empires. The more numerous all of these ambitious projects became, the greater the necessity grew for an ever increasing non-farming classes of engineers and specialized tradesmen, and of course the military, for maintaining and expanding the infrastructure. Basically, the simple universal formula was applied to all new lands that the empire expanded onto: kill the natives, till the soil and plant the crops in rows; and in the more sub-tropical and arid regions, irrigation works were installed. Authority within civilization was delegated to slave drivers who would crack the whip to make sure everyone kept to the grindstone. The elites were extremely happy with this arrangement because this kept the entire lower classes completely busy on mindless tasks, and the great hordes had no time or ability to watch what the elites were up to most of the time, let alone hold them accountable.

Consider the work involved with farming the alluvial areas: the plowing and shaping the soil into row-mounds and water channels; the weeding and pulling the remains of the last crop plants; transplanting the seedlings from the germinating area to the growing area, such as how the Chinese transplant the rice plants from the water inundated rice paddies to growing fields; sowing the seeds or seedlings in a perfectly planted and spaced-apart manner; creating, maintaining, and keeping clear the irrigation canals by constantly digging the mud out; physically lifting and/or carrying water from the river up to an irrigation reservoir where the water is finally released into a canal by an irrigation sluice; etc. Many of these activities were only seasonal, but there were many other things for the slaves to do when farming work did not require their full attention such as, re-thatching the roofs of their own private houses; producing many other important useful items for all aspects of society; and, doing maintenance work on much of the public infrastructure. Basically, the government would see to it that there was plenty of make-work that could keep the slaves busy just about every day of the year.

Due to the annual flooding of waters laden with nutrient rich silt, the soils in these alluvial deltas were inexhaustible, regardless of how the farming techniques that might have been practiced carelessly lacked conservation measures. Since the farming methods practiced in these inexhaustible alluvial soils lacked the necessity of soil conservation measures, such measures were almost assuredly not implemented due to the extra effort involved. Such soil conservation measures practiced under traditional organic till agriculture that are required to maintain the fertility in loess soil, but are not required on alluvial soil, include: crop rotation; allowing fields to grow fallow every four to seven years, sown with nitrogen fixing legumes or other cover crops to be tuned under or mulched; composting and recycling all organic wastes, including human waste, back into the soil; planting trees and hedgerows for windbreaks; having small versus large plots surrounded with canal irrigation. The small plots serve the need for integrated pest management, and the canals surrounding the small plots serve the purpose of soil conservation by preventing water from running across large areas in a torrential downpour which would tend to cause gully erosion and generalized topsoil erosion. The canals partly serve the need for soil conservation when heavy rains and winds carry soil into the canals, because the soil can be scooped from the canals and carried back to the fields; etc. Since the first great civilizations all evolved in areas with indestructible alluvial soil and were habituated to such careless farming practices that lacked these conservation measures, this would in part explain why they were so destructive to the loess soils that they later expanded onto.17

What is conventionally known as agriculture is antithetical to natural principles, because when we think of agriculture we think of plowing the soil and clearing the land to make it ready for sowing the seeds of our choosing. In terms of an ecosystem, this is the equivalent to pushing a reset button and forcing nature to begin to rebuild the ecosystem from scratch all over again. Some animals in nature might dig up and eat select plants, but they don’t dig up all the plants on any given piece of land; since in a state of nature all plants and animals are part of, and dependent on mature ecosystems, and reducing the ecosystem to such an extent would end up eliminating the animal that would do such a thing. There is nothing in nature that tears up the land and reduces the ecosystem back to square one, and there is nothing in nature that digs up and loosens the soil and makes it vulnerable to wind and water erosion the way that till farming does. Many books illustrate the degree of destruction to the loess soils that various civilizations have caused with till agriculture, such as: Topsoil and Civilization by Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale (1955, 1974); Soil and Civilization by Edward Hyams (1952); Deserts on the March by Paul Sears (1935, 1980); Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion by G.V. Jacks and R.O. Whyte (1939); Dust Bowl by Donald Worster (1979); and, Soil Conservation by Hugh Bennett (1939). As the plow went through its many technological innovations and became much more efficient at turning over the soil, the rate of destruction to the Earth’s soils began to rise enormously. As Carter and Dale point out, soil erosion is not easy to recognize, and by the time many cultures found out, it was too late.18 A big part of the history of civilization is the history of till agriculture destroying many lands through the process of soil erosion, which in turn causes social dislocation and causes populations to encroach upon and start wars with neighboring populations.19

There have been many artifacts that indicate some form of agriculture was taking place in many different loess soil areas at least as early as the earliest agriculture in the alluvial areas. There seems to be very little known about the form the original farming took that initially began in the loess soil areas of the Earth, due to the lack of record keeping and the lack of artifacts that indicate many details about the earliest farming practices. A lot of what takes place in anthropology is speculation and the piecing together of clues with artifacts, and this is what we will have to resort to here. None of our human records indicate that any major human civilization has been based on natural farming, but this does not mean that natural farming is an inferior type of farming compared to till farming. On the contrary, we need to keep in mind that almost all civilizations based on till farming have been run by tyrants and have been inherently totalitarian by nature, except for rare sporadic revolutionary exceptions in time. Therefore, a good case can be made that till farming is inferior to natural farming since natural farming never had a totalitarian civilization based upon it. Also, it is a very significant fact that mature examples of natural farming in our present day have shown that natural farming can produce just as many calories per acre as till farming, which once again dispels the myth that till farming is superior. From what anthropologists have been able to surmise, neolithic loess soil farming did in fact support humans living in small villages. Yes, life in the Neolithic Age was small-scale and slow-paced, but there is no reason to believe that the natural farming that supported the small neolithic village could not have eventually evolved along with a more complex civilization. No doubt it would have taken longer for a civilization predicted upon natural farming to have evolved compared to the short amount of time that loess-based till civilizations or alluvial civilizations evolved, but many people know that things of quality often take longer than puffed up instant ersatz fraud based literally on a sandy foundation. Needless to say, it would have been much better if people had never begun farming the alluvial areas, or, if the people that had farmed the alluvial areas had been more spiritually evolved and had been willing to keep their civilization confined to the alluvial areas, and had been civil to their neighbors; but this would probably be expecting way too much from our ancient ancestors (at least at this stage of the universe (see chapter six on theoretical cosmology.))

In a classic book entitled, The One-Straw Revolution, and two other succeeding books, Japanese author and farmer Masanobu Fukuoka was the first to demonstrate to many students who visited his farm that he was able to get just as much or more food from his land compared to regular agriculture, and overall his farming methods require far less work than traditional till farming. In stark contrast from the traditional image of rows of plowed soil, the basic concept with the farming methods that Fukuoka refers to as “natural farming” is an overgrown edible jungle, or a human manipulated semi-natural edible ecosystem, with lots of varieties of different food plants all growing together—something that could easily be thought of as a garden-of-eden-like landscape. Later, others followed and began to adopt similar farming principles in what became known as the permaculture movement. Bill Mollison was the first to coin the term permaculture; he credited Fukuoka for his original inspiration20; and at least for our purposes here the term permaculture will be used synonymously with natural farming. Permaculture means permanent ecosystem and permanent ground cover; both of which till agriculture has neither.21 What really is very inspiring about natural farming is: (a) the concept of restoring a thick mature flora and fauna biotic layer back to most of the surface of the Earth, similar to or even more complex than what was there before humans started agriculture; (b) also, this thick biotic layer can be a fantastic habitat for humans to make their home due to an abundant amount of edible living plant and animal species integral to such a habitat; and, (c) the idea that working with nature doesn’t have to be a lot of work, so it can be a win-win for humanity and the environment.

Natural farming, or what Fukuoka calls “do nothing farming” has four rules known as “the four no’s”: no plowing, no composting, no weeding, and no chemicals. Fukuoka talks about minimizing labor through having the wisdom of knowing what truly needs to be done, but even more importantly knowing what does not need to be done in order to nurture an edible ecosystem that (pretty much) does it’s own thing once it has reached maturity. Before it reaches maturity, the setup process can be long and difficult, requiring lots of experimentation, tinkering, and failed efforts before things start to work right. As a final result and after the edible landscape is in full bloom, the natural farmer requires an enormous amount of intimate knowledge of the specific edible ecosystem landscape. Since knowledge plays a much larger role than physical labor, timing is a crucial element: when to harvest, when to cast seeds, when to cast straw for mulch, and when to irrigate are the big questions pertaining to whatever labor is required. Fukuoka’s methods are very subtle and intuitive, and it is very hard to do justice to them and convey much of an understanding of how they function here, but before we continue with our analysis let’s go over some direct quotes from The One-Straw Revolution. The following is his synopsis of the four principles:

“The first is NO CULTIVATION, that is, no plowing or turning of the soil. For centuries, farmers have assumed that the plow is essential for growing crops. However, non-cultivation is fundamental to natural farming. The earth cultivates itself naturally by means of penetration of plant roots and the activity of microorganisms, small animals, and earthworms.

“The second is NO CHEMICAL FERTILIZER OR PREPARED COMPOST.22 People interfere with nature, and, try as they may, they cannot heal the resulting wounds. Their careless farming practices drain the soil of essential nutrients and the result is yearly depletion of the land. If left to itself, the soil maintains its fertility naturally, in accordance with the orderly cycle of plant and animal life.

“The third is NO WEEDING BY TILLAGE OR HERBICIDES. Weeds play their part in building soil fertility and in balancing the biological community. As a fundamental principle, weeds should be controlled, not eliminated. Straw mulch, a ground cover of white clover interplanted with the crops, and temporary flooding provide effective weed control in my fields.

“The fourth is NO DEPENDENCE ON CHEMICALS.23 From the time that weak plants developed as a result of such unnatural practices as plowing and fertilizing, disease and insect imbalance became a great problem in agriculture. Nature, left alone, is in perfect balance. Harmful insects and plant diseases are always present, but do not occur in nature to an extent which requires the use of poisonous chemicals. The sensible approach to disease and insect control is to grow sturdy crops in a healthy environment.”24

Mr. Fukuoka speaking on some of his techniques for growing vegetables:

“…In growing vegetables in a “semi-wild” way, making use of a vacant lot, riverbank or open wasteland, my idea is to just toss out the seeds and let the vegetables grow up with the weeds. I grow my vegetables on the mountainside in the spaces between the citrus trees.

“The important thing is knowing the right time to plant. For the spring vegetables the right time is when the winter weeds are dying back and just before the summer weeds have sprouted.25 For the fall sowing, seeds should be tossed out when the summer grasses are fading away and the winter weeds have not yet appeared.

“It is best to wait for a rain which is likely to last for several days. Cut a swath in the weed cover and put out the vegetable seeds. There is no need to cover them with soil; just lay the weeds you have cut back over the seeds to act as a mulch and to hide them from the birds and chickens until they can geminate. Usually the weeds must be cut back two or three times in order to give the vegetable seedlings a head start, but sometimes just once is enough.

“Where the weeds and clover are not so thick, you can simply toss out the seeds. The chickens will eat some of them, but many will germinate. If you plant in a row or furrow, there is a chance that beetles or other insects will devour many of the seeds. They walk in a straight line. Chickens also spot a patch which has been cleared and come to scratch around. It is my experience that it is best to scatter the seeds here and there.

“Vegetables grown in this way are stronger than most people think. If they sprout up before the weeds, they will not be overgrown later on. There are some vegetables, such as spinach and carrots, which do not germinate easily. Soaking the seeds in water for a day or two, then wrapping them in a little clay pellet, should solve the problem…”26

A few comments on the terms for abandoning chemicals:

“…There are those, however, who say that turning to a non-chemical agriculture to supply the nation’s food is unthinkable. They say that chemical treatments must be used to control the three great rice diseases—stem rot, rice blast disease, and bacterial leaf blight. But if farmers would stop using weak, “improved” seed varieties, stop adding too much nitrogen to the soil, and reduce the amount of irrigation water so that strong roots could develop, these diseases would all but disappear and chemical sprays would become unnecessary.

“At first, the red clay soil in my fields was weak and unsuited for growing rice. Brown spot disease frequently occurred. But as the field gradually grew in fertility, the incidence of brown spot disease decreased. Lately there have been no outbreaks at all.

“With insect damage the situation is the same. The most important thing is not to kill the natural predators. Keeping the field continuously under water or irrigating with stagnant or polluted water will also lead to insect problems. The most troublesome insect pests, summer and fall leaf-hoppers, can be kept under control by keeping water out of the field.

“Green rice leaf-hoppers, living in the weeds over the winter, may become a virus host. If this happens the result is often a loss of ten to twenty percent from rice blast disease. If chemicals are not sprayed, however, there will be many spiders present in the field and one can generally leave the work to them. Spiders are sensitive to even the slightest human tampering and care must always be taken on this account.

“Most people think that if chemical fertilizer and insecticides were abandoned agricultural yields would fall to a fraction of the present level. Experts on insect damage estimate that losses in the first year after giving up insecticides would be about five percent. Loss of another five percent in abandoning chemical fertilizer would probably not be far mistaken.

“That is, if the use of water in the rice field were curtailed, and the chemical fertilizer and pesticide spraying encouraged by the Agricultural Co-op were abandoned, the average losses in the first year would probably reach about ten percent. The recuperative power of nature is great beyond imagining and after this initial loss, I believe harvests would increase and eventually surpass their original level.”27

His expression of triumphant exhilaration when two very important breakthroughs were achieved simultaneously, growing rice in a dry field without using a plow:

“I have made a lot of mistakes while experimenting over the years and have experienced failures of all kinds. I probably know more about what can go wrong growing agricultural crops than anyone else in Japan. When I succeeded for the first time in growing rice and winter grain with the non-cultivation method, I felt as joyful as Columbus must have felt when he discovered America.”28

Fukuoka on the limits of the scientific method:

“Before researchers become researchers they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create. Doctors should first determine at the fundamental level what it is that human beings depend on for life.

“In applying my theories to farming, I have been experimenting in growing my crops in various ways, always with the idea of developing a method close to nature. I have done this by whittling away unnecessary agricultural practices.

“Modern scientific agriculture, on the other hand, has no such vision. Research wanders about aimlessly, each researcher seeing just one part of the infinite array of natural factors which affect harvest yields. Furthermore, these natural factors change from place to place and from year to year.

“Even though it is the same quarter acre, the farmer must grow his crops differently each year in accordance with variations in weather, insect populations, the condition of the soil, and many other natural factors. Nature is everywhere in perpetual motion; conditions are never exactly the same in any two years.

“Modern research divides nature into tiny pieces and conducts tests that conform neither with natural law nor with practical experiences. The results are arranged for the convenience of research, not according to the needs of the farmer. To think that these conclusions can be put to use with invariable success in the farmer’s field is a big mistake.

“…A scientific testing method which takes all relevant factors into account is an impossibility.

“…It appears that things go better when the farmer applies “scientific” techniques, but this does not mean that science must come to the rescue because the natural fertility is inherently insufficient. It means that rescue is necessary because the natural fertility has been destroyed.

“By spreading straw, growing clover, and returning to the soil all organic residues, the earth comes to possess all the nutrients needed to grow rice and winter grain in the same field year after year. By natural farming, fields that have already been damaged by cultivation or the use of agricultural chemicals can be effectively rehabilitated.” 29

If science instead had as its goal to serve natural farming and other harmonious holistic outcomes in actuality, maybe Fukuoka would have felt differently about it. Maybe the real problem is how the scientific method is defined, because it seems that there should be a way for humanity to study natural farming in different geographical regions in order to gather knowledge and organize information pertaining to rainfall patterns, soil types, regional biotic and ecosystem variation, etc., that might be useful for farmers struggling to perfect natural farming habitats.

1 Charles A. Reed, 1977, “Origins of Agriculture: Discussion and Conclusions”, p. 942, in Charles A. Reed (ed.) Origins of Agriculture. “The low density of population of hunter/gatherers was maintained by widely-spaced births, frequent infanticides, and occasional episodes of local intensified death rates during droughts, floods, or particularly severe winters; this latter factor would obviously be of greater importance in regions away from the tropics.”
2 Many people, at least the ones with money, in the more privileged “developed” G-8 or G-20 countries have not known famine due to the unfair trading advantages these countries have enjoyed in relation to the more poor disadvantaged nations. If one of these privileged countries have crop failures or shortages due to drought for instance, these countries merely buy up extra crops from other nations around the world, and often take food out of the mouths of many poor people in the more poor countries. This luxurious privilege could soon come to an end for many people in the developed world if the current economic situation continues to slide in the direction it is heading.
3 “Back to the Pleistocene” is a famous slogan of The Earth First! Movement and the philosophy of ‘Deep Ecology.’ Some basic references are, John Davis (ed.), 1991, The Earth First! Reader: Ten Years of Radical Environmentalism; Bill Devall and George Sessions (eds.), 1985, Deep Ecology: Living As Nature Mattered; Michael Tobias (ed.), 1984, 1988, Deep Ecology.
4 The geographical exception to this other than the alluvial areas would be the dry areas (what Allan Savory refers to as “brittle” environments, where the rainfall is sporadic, seasonally undependable, and/or low in aggregate to the point that it has been a contributing factor in causing the plant biodiversity, and therefore the animal biodiversity of the environment to be very simplified and monoculturated over the past eons of time. Savory explains that it is not just the inches of rainfall that matter for diversified ecosystems with high biomass, but the rainfall patterns. Instead of a single torrential downpour accounting for most of the rain for the year in a given location, a much better rainfall pattern would be lighter rains multiple times a year.) Quite often natives would grow one harvest of grain and maybe some legumes in the same season per year, and be hunter/gatherers throughout most of the rest of the year. They would wait for the weather to look like it was going to rain, use fire to clear a section of the land, and then they would just toss out their crop seeds. Using fire to clear land in brittle environments for agriculture tends to degrade the soil and further simplify the biological diversity, and is generally known as swidden agriculture. Swidden agriculture is not till-based but nor is it considered natural farming, because swidden agriculture generally requires long periods of time (in between periodic semi-controlled burns) where the land remains fallow; therefore it is not a permanent ecosystem, so it doesn’t qualify by any means to be labeled as permaculture or natural farming.
5 In the introduction to A Forest Journey by John Perlin, 1989, p. 1, Lester Brown mentions that many anthropologists believe that the Sahara Desert was caused by logging.
6 In order to be clear on terminology, the following nomenclature is a listing of some of the various time periods. The term Paleolithic Age is an anthropological term, meaning—paleo or early, and lithos which is Greek for the word stone; early Stone Age—and is the earliest age that humans and our ancestral primates used stones for tools, which some anthropologists claim could go back as far as 3,000,000 years B.P (before present.) The Paleolithic Age overlaps with the last half of the Pliocene geological epoch and covers the entire time span of the later Pleistocene epoch, which ends simultaneously with the Paleolithic Age. The Pleistocene is a geological term which means the age of at least four major Ice Ages which span from 1,600,000 B.P. to 17,000 B.P. (creationists question if we even had an Ice Age, and many believe that we had a flood or floods instead.) The Holocene epoch is the current post-Ice Age geological period, which is characterized as the age of humanity. The Mesolithic Age (17,000 to 10,000 B.P.)—or middle Stone Age—is generally defined as the period from the end of the last Ice Age and the beginning of the Holocene to the age of the beginning of agriculture. Since the time of the beginning of agriculture differed in different geographical areas, the end of the Mesolithic Age varies depending on the area in question. The Neolithic Age (10,000 to 6,000 B.P.)—or late Stone Age—marks the beginning of the age of agriculture to the beginning of the Bronze Age (6,000 to 3,000 B.P.) The Iron Age began somewhat before 3000 B.P. in western Asia and Egypt. All of these dates usually mark the approximate beginning of a significant change in human culture at the first particular location of the change, but obviously such changes happened at different times for different human cultures.
7 Lewis Mumford, 1966, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development, p. 127.
8 Ibid., p. 134.
9 Karl Wittfogel, 1957, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, p. 23.
10 This economic principle, otherwise known as the socialization of the rental value of land, benefited the warlords, but they also bore the burden of fighting other warlords beyond their local geographical province. This system ostensibly created more peace and less fighting over land within the province, because this system created more equality as to the comparative benefit of occupying one piece of land versus another. The socialization of land-rent much later became a major issue starting with the French Physiocrats in eighteenth century classical economics, and will be dealt with in chapter three. A basic textbook dealing with this would be, A History of Economic Doctrines: From the Time of the Physiocrats to the Present Day, 1913, by Charles Gide and Charles Rist.
11 For example see, Robert J. Wenke, 1980, Patterns in Prehistory: Mankind’s First Three Million Years, Chapter 8: “The Origins of Complex Societies.”
12 Lewis Mumford, 1966, op. cit., pp. 156-162.
13 Some people would take issue with this statement, citing for example the early American Republic. This was a unique exception never to happen again due to the fact that a certain amount of freedom and independence had to be allowed for the frontier farmers because they had a brand new continent to settle. As soon as the continent was settled the freedom quickly evaporated.
14 Not the faux overpopulation during the Mesolithic Period that supposedly pushed us into agriculture which could have been the truly evolutionary if we had learned from our mistakes with till or swidden agriculture and converted over to permaculture a lot sooner (to be explained later.)
15 Lewis Mumford refers to totalitarian civilization as the megamachine. The reason why he used the phrase The Myth of the Machine as the title of his book was for the purpose of highlighting the myth that the machine was invented in the Industrial Revolution. Many people insist that the Egyptian pyramids couldn’t have been built without advanced technology, and they debate whether they were built by extraterrestrials or by some other super-ancient and super-advanced civilization. Regardless of whether the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids or not, we know from much other historical evidence that their civilization was extremely totalitarian and machine-like. This historical fact has bolstered the image that mainstream anthropology has conjured up, of huge numbers of slave-laborers being forced to work in unison like a megamachine to build the Egyptian pyramids without modern technology.
16 Langdon Winner’s book, 1977, Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought, is a masterful treatise about how the logic of technology becomes the dominant theme in society. Contrary to the idea of the ruling class being autonomous and making the ultimate decisions, Winner explains how techno-logic dictates to the ruling class what decisions they are going to make about every aspect of life.
17 Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale, 1974, Topsoil and Civilization, pp. 63-64.
18 Ibid., p. 102.
19 Ibid., p. 7, “Many historians point out the fact that most wars and colonizing movements were started because someone wanted more land. But seldom do they note that the conquerors or colonizers had often ruined their own land before they started to take that of their neighbors. Most writers of current history recognize that the strong and wealthy nations of today are those with abundant natural resources. But, too often, they forget that many of the poor and weak nations once had plenty. They do not note that most of the poor peoples of the earth are poor mainly because their ancestors wasted the natural resources on which present generations must live.” Carter and Dale’s Topsoil and Civilization is probably one of the best books in highlighting the fact that soil erosion has been the most significant cause for the decline of many past civilizations.
20 Barbara Dunlap audio interview with Bill Mollison, aired on KPFK, Pacifica radio in 1990.
21 Permaculture is a term that has become popular these days, and it is therefore probably no surprise that it has lost some of its original meaning in various circles. This could be partly because everybody wants instant permaculture in spite of the fact that Fukuoka talks about how long it can take to get natural farming to work correctly. Bill Mollison could be partly responsible for this because he hasn’t emphasized the length of time permaculture could take to mature. Quite often it seems that permaculture is used in a relative sense—something that is more sustainable than modern agribusiness, instead of a distinct sense—something that is a completely different mode-of-production. Since modern agribusiness is so bad, any type of farming that is organic is relatively sustainable. For many people the term permaculture implies nothing different from till intensive small-scale organic horticulture and it carries with it no meaning of permanent ground cover and permanent ecosystem.
22 “For fertilizer Mr. Fukuoka grows a leguminous ground cover of white clover, returns the threshed straw to the fields, and adds a little poultry manure.”
23 “Mr. Fukuoka grows his grain crops without chemicals of any kind. On some orchard trees he occasionally uses a machine oil emulsion for the control of insect scales. He uses no persistent or broad-spectrum poisons, and has no pesticide “program.”
24 Masanobu Fukuoka, 1978, The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming, pp. 33-34.
25 “This method of growing vegetables has been developed by Mr. Fukuoka by trial and experiment in accordance with local conditions. Where he lives there are dependable spring rains, and a climate warm enough to grow vegetables in all seasons. Over the years he has come to know which vegetables can be grown among which weeds and the kind of care each requires.

“In most parts of North America the specific method Mr. Fukuoka uses for growing vegetables would be impractical. It is up to each farmer who would grow vegetables in the semi-wild manner to develop a technique appropriate to the land and the natural vegetation.”
26 Ibid., pp. 66-67.
27 Ibid., pp. 70-71.
28 Ibid., p. 52.
29 Ibid., pp. 74-76.

Copyright 2017 Mark Andrews and Jasmine Publications

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Back To The Land Book 1 – Table of Contents

Here is a Teaser of What is in Book 1 of

Mark Andrews’ Controversial

“Back To The Land” Manuscript

Table of Contents

Book 1

The Real Human-Made Garden-of-Eden, The Origins of the State, and The Way Out of the Pitfall of Humanity: How the Selectively Cultivated Edible Jungle Was Lost in Pre-History and Antiquity

Chapter One: Introduction to An Anthropological Analysis of Natural Farming. Page 1.

Chapter Two: Natural Farming and the Question of Deep Agricultural Antiquity. Page 20.

Chapter Three: Mark Nathan Cohen’s Thesis of Overpopulation in the Mesolithic Age and the Origins of Agriculture. Page 39.

Chapter Four: David R. Harris’ Thesis of Agricultural Types Determined by Precipitation Levels. Page 53.

Chapter Five: The Spread of Civilization and the Elusiveness of Natural Farming. Page 75.

Chapter Six: Natural Farming and the Question of Civilization. Page 100.

Chapter Seven: Natural Farming and the Possible Influence of Extraterrestrials. Page 118.

Chapter Eight: Natural Farming: The Only Mode-of-Production Worthy of Civilization. Page 143.

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Study Claims Cities Running Out of Room

Poor and Middle Class Being Pushed Out of Big Cities.

 

A recent report claims that America’s big cities have run out of room,  has dire effect for the poor and middle class Americans.  In addition to a lack of space, the existing space is subject to very high rents, where only the rich can afford to live.  All over the country, density in the large cities is increasing at an alarming rate.  Even older apartments are being torn down to be replaced by even larger, more expensive units.

With all this, it is time to give serious attention to alternatives for the middle class and the bulging homeless population, now living on the streets of large cities.  Here’s two such options that need urgent discussion:

  1.  Author Mark Andrew’s new book on the Back To The Land movement (BTTL).  YardEats is publishing parts of his book in an exclusive arrangement.  Mr. Andrews says that with modern communications and technology, it is now feasible to shift the population from over-crowded cities to small rural farming communities, using the newly discovered methods of Natural Farming.
  2. Another new movement seeks to build “floating cities” out in the world’s oceans.  With modern technology, small communities can “float” and survive on the sea, allowing incredible new political freedom and diversity.  This social movement is  now being tested  Check out The Seasteading Institute at www.SeaSteading.org for more information on this new movement, which is now building prototype floating cities.

Articles on the cities running out of room:   Info Wars, click here.    and also at Real Clear Markets, click here.

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Controversial Back To The Land Manuscript

Publisher Releases Serial Rights to BTTL Master Volume to YardEats.com

The Back To The Land (BTTL) Master Volume consists of 6 books, now put into one huge volume, over 500 pages.  This book covers many controversial ideas, philosophies, political ideas, Utopian concepts and activist anti-globalist objectives.  Nothing like it has ever been published.  The publisher is allowing us to present selected parts of this massive book for serialization, before the book itself goes on sale later this year.  Please note that the ideas presented in this volume are of the author, Mr. Mark Andrews, and do not necessarily represent the ideas of the publisher or of this website, and are presented for informational and inspirational use.

 

 

This entire book is copyright 2017 by Mark Andrews and Jasmine Publications

Outline of Books Contained in the Master Volume of Back To The Land (BTTL)

By Mark Andrews

The following is a rundown of the various parts that are included in the Master Volume of Back To The Land. Book One deals with the problem of agriculture. Throughout recorded history, humanity practiced a very labor intensive type of agriculture, and because of this, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of farmers welcomed mechanized agriculture with open arms, in spite of the fact that it is destructive to the environment and human health, and it allowed for the concentration of capital. Masanobu Fukuoka was the first to demonstrate that agriculture does not have to be Technics intensive for it not to be labor intensive. Since natural farming is not labor intensive it is the answer to many people’s objections about living close to the land as being too much work. Fukuoka also states that what he calls “natural farming” must have been the original form of agriculture. Chapter one is an anthropological analysis of natural farming, which asks the question: If natural farming is a superior form of agriculture and is much more worthy of humanity than both the traditional labor intensive agriculture and also the new mechanized agriculture, then why did humanity abandon natural farming in our early history and prehistory, and why don’t we have any records, knowledge, or academic speculative studies of this transition?

Book Two deals with the fact that the architectural foundation for any decent terrestrial modern society is a decentralized infrastructure comprised of connected small towns. Throughout history we had a decentralized infrastructure comprised of small towns, but we still had governmental tyranny. This is because we were practicing labor intensive agriculture instead of natural farming. In a more modern situation, the key to avoiding governmental tyranny is to not only have natural farming as the chosen mode-of-production for the means of subsistence, and a decentralized infrastructure comprised of small towns, but additionally, if the small towns are connected with transportation and communication technologies, then a democratic dimension heretofore unknown to society is possible. Additionally, to repeat, as Ebenezer Howard famously explained his notion of Social Cities and the Town-Country Magnet, which is the virtual big city comprised of connected small towns: when small towns are properly spaced apart and connected with the correct communication and transportation technologies, all of the benefits of the big city can be achieved without the drawbacks, and all of the benefits of the countryside can be achieved without the drawbacks. Technologically connecting the small towns at the beginning and throughout the Industrial Revolution would have formed a lattice structure with the small towns, which would have transformed the farmlands of the world into a new fabric of society, to the point that it would be considered a completely different species of society than anything the world has ever known. Not only could the lifestyle have been enriching and enjoyable for a lot more of the worlds’ people than the actual lives lived, or that were prevented from being lived, around the world throughout the last few centuries, but there is great reason to believe that a much greater level of democracy could have been achieved, along with a much more even distribution of capital throughout the world, along with the strong likelihood that the Earth’s biosphere would have ended up in an incomparably better ecological state—then the people of the world need to face up to the fact that a great injustice has been foisted upon the whole Earth. But this injustice has come in the form, and has all the earmarkings of a hoodwink—and the hoodwink will continue until people begin to understand that the correct basic structure for society is physical decentralist. Once people understand this, then it will be possible for them to view Marxism, along with many other aspects of history, with a whole different perspective; but in particular, such a perspective would allow people to see the man Marx and his work, and entire promotion of Marxism as a whole, as an entirely different sort of beast than what most people have been used to thinking about, regardless whether they have liked Marxism or not—as the elite contrived Hegelian dialectical antithesis to get the worlds’ people off the land.1 The only hint there is that Marx and Engels’ attack on the utopians is very significant.2

Book Four deals with a conspiracy theory regarding the counterculture, and the fact that psychedelic drugs are a deeply profound gift provided by Mother Nature for us-humanity to explore, if we are going to unlock the power of our subconscious minds and unravel our neurotic impulses, which have been intentionally imprinted, conditioned and exacerbated by the ruling elite for the purpose of controlling humanity. A lot of the evidentiary forensics to support this theory is based on Jan Irvin’s research at www.gnosticmedia.com (even though we don’t necessarily come to all the same conclusions). The following is an elaborate conspiracy theory, and some people would say that such a theory gives the elite too much credit, and they are not that smart. All it takes is for a few really smart people at the top to decide the policy agenda, and then all of their minions fall in line. They are often that smart because in case you forgot, they run the world, and they have massive think tanks doing game theory actuaries to figure how such policy agendas would play out in the real world.

The sixties counterculture was a movement against shallow materialism, in favor of a more meaningful existence, in harmony with the laws of the universe, and it was fueled by the use of psychedelic drugs. The establishment felt very threatened by the potential that psychedelics possessed, to uniquely help people in the Atomic Age discover the secret formula of the political back-to-the-land movement, which could threaten the power base of the elites. A lot of the top-brass within the CIA turned-on to LSD-25 shortly after its discovery in 1943 and they became obsessed with experimenting with it until at least the late 1950’s.3 As a result of these acid trips, being who these people are, they came up with a far less than savory action plan. (By the way, LSD, or at least the naturally occurring psychedelic drugs, could have a very positive overall effect if used correctly. Since it was accidentally discovered right at the same time that the Manhattan Project was underway, many people consider LSD to be the spiritual antidote to the atom bomb.) The CIA, the Tavistock Institute and the Rand Corporation felt compelled to adopt a pro-active strategy on psychedelics, because they knew that the Baby Boom Generation was historically destined to wage the first psychedelic countercultural revolution in the history of the planet, mainly, but still only partly because they were the first Atomic Age generation in the history of the planet. These elite think-tanks did not want people to become acquainted with psychedelics in an organic low-frequency-of-use low-key contemplative social milieu, especially with an emphasis on real education and character building, without a lot of hype. These agencies, along with the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) (which really meant anti-intelligence program) and especially the CIA’s project MK-ULTRA (the MK stands for mind control), were very much involved with the creation and manipulation of groups within the counterculture, and they helped to encourage the abuse of psychedelics along with the mixing of every form of vice, overindulgence, and bad New Age philosophy; all for the purpose of finally creating the counter-counterculture of the 1980’s “Reagan Revolution”, which was the first truly techno-fascist backlash in the history of the planet; where the meme changed from the apocalyptic Atomic Age to the progressive Computer Age; and it was a contrived hoodwink turning of a cycle ‘back to business—back to sanity, normalcy, law & order’; all of which we are still in the continuing phases of.

Book Four also deals with the theory and strategy of the proposal presented here for a new urban-based Back-to-the-Land Movement. Suggested here is the concept of protesting against what symbolizes the opposite of the broadest solution to the worlds’ problems, in order to promote and demonstrate for the solution, and not just to protest against in order to stop something. Since most of the worlds’ people live in big cities and we need to broadcast the Back-to-the-Land message to the worlds’ people, we need to ask the urban-based question that best relates to the Back-to-the-Land concept: Is stopping all big city housing development the ideal and correct position in all possible scenarios, in the short-to-medium-run? Because the universe is aligned with what is correct, the answer derived after honestly analyzing this question, luckily comes out a resounding yes, regardless of whether a cheap plentiful non-polluting form of energy is possible, and irrespective of whether it would help the Back-to-the-Land agenda (please keep in mind that a decentralized society is the best way to utilize solar-based energy sources due to the much reduced energy usage, passive solar design works better with low-density housing, and the lack of need for long-distance electricity transmission.) A yes answer on whether stopping all big city housing development is correct would in fact greatly help an urban-based Back-to-the-Land movement, because not having to allow some city housing redevelopment to continue helps make the Back-to-the-Land platform much more simple, and greatly helps clarify the Back-to-the-Land position on urban development into a much more radical and non-compromising perspective. The protest movement against city development is what makes this Back-to-the-Land Movement urban-based, and the protest against city development acts as a natural podium to present the solution, because city development is the opposite of the solution.

Some people might think that a protest movement against city development is a moot idea because of the imminent economic collapse that looms on the horizon. The rejoinder to this objection is that, the economy will have its ups and downs for quite some time into the future (unless, of course, we have World War Three), and the elite will want to redevelop cities for quite some time into the future to make them more compact and supposedly more “ecological” (luckily most people don’t want to live like sardines under surveillance, eating weaponized food.) When such economic upsurges happen, the Back-to-the-Land Movement should use such opportunities to protest against city development in order to promote the concept of physical decentralization, and to promote the Back-to-the-Land Party. During economic crises, the elite banksters will consolidate and confiscate more urban and rural real estate and drive more rural people into the cities, and city development might temporarily come to a halt; but the Back-to-the-Land Party should do especially well at the ballot-box during these times, because socially subsidized decentralist agrarian development—funded in large part by wealth expropriated from the super rich—is the best and most economically efficient way to house, feed, and provide a decent livelihood for the unemployed members of the populace.

Included in Book Four is a discussion of back-to-the-land economics which incorporates some of Henry George’s ideas regarding land tenure. Also covered is an analysis of the modern day environmental movement, which is really for centralized development, regardless of whether it is endorsed overtly through commission, or covertly through omission. A good example of such commission is the following arrogant quote by Roderick Nash from Wilderness and the American Mind, where he states that,

“There are two ways of thinking about the end of wilderness on earth. One might be termed the wasteland scenario. It anticipates a ravaged planet; one which is paved and poisoned (perhaps by nuclear war) to the point that the world dies with T.S. Eliot’s celebrated whimper. This nightmare of creeping urbanization traditionally fired the protests of nature lovers, conservationists, and preservationists. It could still occur, especially given the increase of technological capability, but the greatest long-term threat to the interests of people who covet the wild may reside in the garden scenario. It too ends wilderness, but beneficently rather than destructively. Rene Dubos points the way with his vision of a bounteous, stable and, to many tastes, beautiful earth that is totally modified. In a garden-earth the fertility of the soil is not only maintained but enhanced. Fruit trees support songbirds. Carefully managed streams run clear and pure. The air is unpolluted. Forests provide an endless supply of wood. Large cities are rare as people decentralize into the hinterland. Many live on self-sufficient family farms. The animals permitted to exist are safe and useful. A softer variety of technology enables man to live gracefully and gratefully as part of the natural community. There is a minimum of pavement, cows dot the meadows, democracy thrives, and the kids have rosy cheeks. It is an appealing vision whose roots run back through Thomas Jefferson’s deification of the yeoman farmer to the Garden of Eden. But wilderness is just as dead in the garden as it is in the concrete wasteland “Defenders of wilderness have traditionally regarded proponents of a garden-earth as fellow travelers, if not comrades in arms, against the wasteland. A reappraisal suggests instead a sharp divergence in objectives. The problem, of course, is numbers. There are simply too many people on the planet to decentralize into garden environments and still have significant amounts of wilderness. We can glimpse this kind of future in parts of the world where large numbers of people are attempting to live rural lifestyles…”4

What Nash and many other environmentalists don’t seem to understand is that corporate farming is decentralized and that centralized human populations and corporate agribusiness go hand-in-hand. Decentralists need to demand that any new human community should have a goal of healing the land, and there is no reason why humans need to move to wilderness areas when there is so much damaged farmland that needs healing. But if all future housing development is constructed on damaged corporate farmland, this will still mean that there will be less food for the big cities. The simple solution to this is a temporary stop-gap measure of doing indoor grow-lamp food production in existing urban skyscraper office buildings. Hopefully this will not be necessary too much for too long, especially if a lot of city people move to the country and a lot of urban land is opened up for food production. The human race as a whole needs to learn to self-limit their reproductive rate in a relatively enlightened, self-reflective way, so that population quality can replace population quantity. The elite that spawn from an urban world don’t want people to be sane enough to do this; but other than that, as long as humanity would be willing to consciously decrease reproduction, there is no reason why we cannot have a decentralized society and still have enough land dedicated to natural wilderness for species preservation, biodiversity, and ecosystem viability.

My own personal position on abortion is that, I am pro-choice but also pro-abortion, in the sense that people who don’t have the qualifications to be relatively quality parents should be encouraged by their peers, etc., to have abortions. Many people claim that human life starts at the moment of conception, I agree, and this is a good reason to encourage many people to have abortions because the Earth is overpopulated by humans. I do not consider this statement of mine to be misanthropic, and I only mean it to be constructive, because it is simply a matter of truth, that the world is overfilled with lower quality people than what there should be at such a late stage of human history. With all of the stresses of the modern world, the human race has been undergoing a sharp increase in certain types of degenerative processes for the last fifty to one hundred years, and during this time the birth rates have definitely gone up just as rapidly. At least for the time being, until the birthrate takes a big swing downward for a while, we do not have to encourage people these days to have more offspring. Maybe later the reverse could be true, and we will need people to reproduce at a higher rate to restock lost levels that might be needed for the job of Earth restoration. The only stipulation that I have about abortion is that, if someone is going to have an abortion, they should have it as early as possible to minimize the suffering of the fetus. I believe in reincarnation, and if I am going to be aborted as a fetus in the future, I would wish that it would be as early as possible. I don’t support post-birth abortions, i.e. infanticide, because such abortions will not contribute much to lessening the population levels, and it is not humane, and it goes past a certain basic level of decency. To achieve the correct population levels to optimize the health of the Earth and society, contraception is the preferred method of birth control, with abortion as a backup. But make no mistake, it is much better to use personal birth control than have external birth control, such as poverty, pestilence, famine, environmental breakdown, or elite extermination programs because we were not able to overthrow them and setup a decent society, which is somewhat contingent on not having population overload, because excess population will overflow from what the rural areas can handle and will continue to cause urban bloat, which will continue to act as a power engine for the globalist elites.

Much of the environmental movement is committing the logical fallacy of reification, which means treating an abstract concept or metaphor as tangibly real, and thus helping to convert a transitory miasmatic state into a more permanent congenital deformity. Such as, ‘humanity is a disease, so we have to quarantine them in the big cities in order to keep them away from and preserve nature.’ What is masked with many environmentalists unfortunately is a complete misanthropic non-holistic bias against civilization and technology that wants only wilderness. This bias will only hurt humanity by compromising with the Earth’s complete contradiction, which is physical centralization. Case in point, Dave Foreman, charismatic founder and leading spokesman for the Earth First! movement, whose slogan is, by the way, “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth”. Back in the 1980’s Foreman once said, “I hope one day the word wilderness will disappear from the human lexicon, when there will be only wilderness and nothing else to compare to”; and I also think he referred to big cities as “ecological sacrifice zones”, although the reference currently escapes me. People like Nash are saying that we cannot decentralize before we depopulate. But there is no way that we are going to consciously depopulate—or consciously do much of anything for that matter—if we start with such an ignorant mentality as supporting demographic centralization.

I really do believe that this process of reification is the main reason why so few people have advocated physical decentralization, and it is, I think, why the radical environmental movement has not jumped on the decentralist bandwagon. Obviously a lot of radical environmentalists have a lot of common sense, but their fear of “the human plague” spreading out on the land like a disease completely overshadows and overrides their common sense. This mental reification is also the reason why permaculture and natural farming have not gained more play in radical environmentalist literature, because it relates to humanity spreading out on the land, and as a result, many radical environmentalists have completely overlooked the significance of the discovery of natural farming. With just the thought or casual mention of humanity spreading out to live subsistence lifestyles close to the land, the average radical environmentalist immediately cringes and visualizes the land-based subsistence lifestyle morphing into the ultimate dreaded environmental anathema—suburban sprawl. But the next logical question is: why don’t they think about what a disaster corporate farming is, and how much better things could be if organic farmers repopulated the sterile corporate farming landscapes? The answer, I believe is that, they are somewhat covertly hoping civilization will collapse, and they are visualizing the empty corporate farmscapes regenerating back over time into natural prairie, or whatever other natural habitats were there before agriculture began. In the meantime, everybody is trying to figure out how to live a healthy lifestyle in the midst of an insane civilization; but nutritional science keeps contradicting itself, because the ultimate nutritional health knowledge is that a people cannot be statistically healthy unless they are living close enough to the land to have rich soil and food that is fresh, pure and unadulterated.

To be a holistic thinker means to be a problem solver, and to figure out how humanity can properly live on the face of the Earth, and how we can align ourselves with the principles of nature. To want civilization to collapse is environmentally illogical, not only because we will have missed the opportunity for our souls to have learned how civilization can work well (which is in our own personal karmic evolutionary interest), but also because of all the toxic wastes that are presently being stored. Nuclear and other toxic wastes have to be constantly maintained, and their containment is a high-tech undertaking that requires consistent management by a stable civilization. Also, as Allan Savory points out in his book, Holistic Management, much of the corporate farmlands will not regenerate on their own for millions of years if abandoned, and these damaged lands will require human care and attention if they are going to have a chance of regeneration in any relatively short period of time.5 Radical environmentalists regularly quote professional biologists, who of course are funded by the elite in order to engender misanthropy, in order to create a mindset that wants to keep humanity penned in the cities. Environmentalists have got to learn not to be duped by the proponents of Agenda 21, who are the same elite that for centuries have been shaping the world the way it is, and who are greatly responsible for the exacerbation of all environmental problems.

When Nash talks about “decentralizing into garden environments” he is not talking about the truly holistic garden-of-eden mode-of-production that has been lost and unknown throughout history, which is dealt with in chapter one of this book. But rather, he is referring to the old Neo-Malthusian paradigm that he is stuck in, which says that quality organic farming has to be labor intensive, and therefore people practicing quality organic farming will automatically breed like rats because they will be ignorant due to the quantity of labor required. Even if there is a lot of work that needs to be done in the short-to-medium-run, at least now that we are in the computer age, a lot of people can listen to educational podcasts while they are doing their physical work, so there really are far fewer reasons why people will have to be uninformed with a labor-intensive lifestyle. There will never not be a good reason to begin and continue the decentralization process, since there is no shortage of corporate farmland. The bottom line is that we cannot have a true dialogue and true lasting education about the important issues in life as long as the elite are in power. And we cannot eject the elites from power without a political Back-to-the-Land Movement.

Book Five deals with a new theory of, how to determine what is true in regards to the large cosmological questions. Basically, the theory is that, the way we can know if something pertaining to a cosmological question is true, is if the belief would logically motivate people to create a harmonious worldly society, based, of course, on the concept of back-to-the-land and infrastructural decentralization. After the fundamentals of this theory are briefly explained, then a logical guess of a cosmological worldview is made based on the initial theoretical premise. The initial premise has some elements of William James’ epistemological theory of pragmatism.

Book Six deals with a method of voting, which has not received much media attention, called Score Voting (developed by Warren Smith at www.scorevoting.org.) Score Voting is similar to how the judges score the athletes in the Olympics—scoring each candidate within a range of zero to ten and dividing the added scores by the number of scores—with only one addition, which would allow the voter to indicate a no-vote if they are not familiar with a particular candidate. The winner of an election would have to have at least fifty percent of all the ballots indicating a score rather than a no-vote for that candidate, so this way the winner is guaranteed to be well known to the voters but not docked for not being familiar to all of the voters.

Most people are simply unaware that the ‘plurality’ method of voting that is currently practiced in the United States, of putting one dot next to the name of one candidate, literally creates the one-party duopoly controlled by the Republicans and Democrats. Any well-known third-party candidate is automatically viewed as a “spoiler” and is strongly frowned on for even thinking about running. In a plurality system, if there are two strong candidates on the left side of the political spectrum, then the single well-known right-wing candidate wins; and, if there are two strong candidates on the right side of the political spectrum, then the single well-known left-wing candidate will win. Score Voting is the best system of electoral reform, so promoting Score Voting is a good reason why a third party, such as a Back-to-the-Land Party, should run, in addition to promoting the Back-to-the-Land agenda.

After reading all the chapters, a worldview, a big picture, or, a vision will emerge for the reader where a good and decent society is possible, and not just merely a better society. Reading about the solutions to the various world problems should dispel the notion that eternal vigilance is what is necessary to ward off governmental tyranny. Instead, what is needed here is an understanding of the sociological principles that need to be continually applied to prevent tyranny from festering after it is eradicated with the initial implementation of back-to-the-land principles. Yes, vigilance will be initially required to extirpate tyranny and fix the horrible problems in the world. However, once the problems are resolved, maintaining a good world shouldn’t require eternal vigilance at all, as long as the important sociological principles are taught to students in school throughout the various stages of their intellectual growth. A truly good world is one where there is plenty of room for play, leisure, art, fun, laughter, and a carefree attitude toward time. Eternal vigilance does not fit into this worldview.

People are not meant to work very hard! Unnecessary work is unhealthy because it stresses people out, because they know that they could be doing much more meaningful and gratifying things with their time. Avoiding work, of course in an honorable way, is why humans have a brain! So we can spend our time thinking about the higher things in life. What is nourishing for the soul is also nourishing for the body, and emotional health helps to keep the body healthy in an optimum fashion. As hunter/gatherers, in a lot of cases depending on the geographical area, humans didn’t have to work very much; two to four hours a day in many cases. The human brain evolved a lot faster than average in the geographical areas where humans were able to live with less work and had more leisure time.6 Of course this isn’t always the case, because some human tribes undoubtedly didn’t use their free time as creatively as other tribes. But also, to balance this discussion out, there was a quite a bit of brain evolution that undoubtedly took place when people were under survival related stresses, when they had to develop agriculture and technology to adapt to population pressure. Any kind of new stressful situation forces the brain to think about things that it is not used to, and this causes the brain to form new neuro-pathways. Such survival stresses also cause a certain amount of higher creative thinking, especially for people who have free time, so they can contemplate the meaning of the social changes and the most intelligent way to deal with the new situation. But even a lot of the people who have to do a lot of grunt work often listen to people who have had more time to think about the new situation, and this type of cognition within the mass public has definitely caused massive brain evolution within the bulk of humanity throughout the ages.

This leads back to the classical debate on biological evolution between the exponents of Darwinian “natural selection” and the Lamarckian “inheritance of acquired characteristics.” The Darwinians believe that nothing alters the parents’ germ plasm except selection played out on a mass basis over time. The Lamarckians on the other hand believe that environmental factors along with our personal volition affect our personal germ plasm, and thus the genes of our offspring will be somewhat mutated based on these Lamarckian factors. If this is true, then if the parent uses their brain or muscles in a certain way then not only will there be a good chance that the offspring will be smarter or stronger in the same way, but their genetic code in a small way will reflect these changes. Combining these minute Lamarckian mutations with Darwinian selection, over time there will be smarter and dumber strains of human genetics for example, and weaker and stronger strains, etc. According to new research, both the Darwinian and Lamarckian factors are valid contributors to the genetic change and evolution of a species (just do an internet search for “scientific proof of Lamarckism”.) August Weismann’s Neo-Darwinian germ plasm theory was officially smashed when science finally proved that the germ plasm is altered by the cells taking in information through the membrane via mechanisms called integral membrane proteins (IMPs).7 The problem has been, at least up until recently, that modern academia, ever since Jean Baptiste Lamarck published his Philosophie Zoologique in 1809, has vehemently denied the Lamarckian inheritance factor, and has insisted that evolution is attributed entirely to natural selection only, period; and occasionally there have even been derogatory epithets railed against Lamarck.8 Until more recently, before more scientific proof became available, the Lamarckians maintained that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is only a theory until more scientific proof is available. Academia’s main argument has been that the burden of proof is upon the progenitors of the Lamarckian theory, and they claim that Lamarckism is false because it can’t be proved. However, the logical fallacy with this is that the burden of proof is supposed to be with the person who is making a declarative statement about a fact, which is what academia has repeatedly done with many statements saying that Lamarckism is false.

Academia hasn’t wanted people to believe that free time is evolutionary, because when humans have free time they can cause their brains to evolve much faster. The last thing the elite want is for humanity to realize on a mass basis that thinking is fun and exciting; and this is exactly what it is when a person is following their heart about what type of thinking they want to do and what type of thinking they are interested in. But the biggest problem with the exclusivity of the Darwinian/Weismann/selectionist theory has been that it has denied environmental influences upon the germ plasm. How convenient is that for the elites? So they can dump chemicals ad infinitum into the environment and claim that it won’t cause our genes to mutate or degenerate. It’s sort of like that old saying, “what won’t kill you will make you stronger”, except the replacement clause is, “what won’t kill you will cause you to evolve.” (This way they can dumb us down, depopulate the planet without real education and an increase in consciousness, and prevent the people’s desire to go back to the land because the land will be so damaged—all so they can keep their big city model.)

All of the chapters, especially the first three, deal with historical information about why things developed the way they did. The more people understand how and why the history of civilization happened the way it did, the more motivated we will be to reverse the course of history. When people do not know how and why things happened the way they did, such people will always have a nagging doubt that maybe things are the way they are supposed to be, and that maybe if we keep moving ahead, staying on the same course that we are already on, then maybe we will finally arrive at the place we are supposed to be. True history tells us that the reasons are evil and irrational why we are where we are, and if we keep going along the current path we will not get to where we should go or would want to go. Wanting quality organic food is not enough to motivate people to fight for a decentralized society, because if this is all that people are interested in, they will more than likely settle for, as many are now, fake organic food farmed by big agribusiness. People need a much greater historical understanding than what they have now, and hopefully this book will provide some of the missing information in this direction.

But there are intellectual roadblocks to people being open-minded to learning about true history. For one thing, conspiracy theory is absolutely necessary, and people have been accustomed to being automatically close-minded to anything that labels and presents itself as conspiracy theory. Since conspiracy theories are always pointing the finger at government causation, of course the media and universities are going to teach people to dismiss such types of thinking. A lot of conspiracy theorists want to deny that there is any theory in what they are talking about, and they insist that they are involved only with conspiracy research, conspiracy facts and conspiracy science. It is true that a lot of what conspiracy researchers are involved with is science, and many of the issues that they are researching are of the nature of, who is behind one big event such as the Kennedy assassination or 9/11. However, even with these types of events there are areas of speculation that are not one hundred percent factually verifiable, involving minutia relating to causation and the many tributaries, personnel, and the various assorted motivational elements behind such events, and a lot of researchers do not want to admit that they enter into such realms of theory at all due to the bias against this.

With the various topics of historical speculation that are dealt with in especially the first three chapters of this book, there is no way around conspiracy theory. Since the government knows how important it is that we don’t know our history in order for them to maintain control, this is why they have spent so much time and energy tarnishing the term conspiracy theory. All of the following subjects are not one-time criminal events, but rather long-term historical processes shaped by conspiring world leaders with long-term plans, and therefore, these historical processes indeed require speculation and theorizing to uncover their true nature, and the reasons why all of these unfolded the way they did: the origins of agriculture and the causes of the transformation from the first forms of agriculture to the next; the causes of the origins of the state; the causes of large-scale urbanization and the reasons why civilization developed the way it did; the reasons why the psychedelic counterculture of the sixties happened the way it did. Maybe if the doors were flung open to the highly classified sections of the elite libraries at Oxford and the Vatican, we could all read about exactly who, what, where, how and why these processes happened the way they did. But most people are not likely to be granted the required high-security clearances to these special reading areas anytime soon. Instead, all we can do is piece-together the evidence that is documented and available to us and to try to reverse engineer the true history in our minds and on paper. There is no way around the fact that this undertaking will of course require speculation and theorizing about the way all of these long-term historical processes happened. After all, many of the topics dealt with here haven’t had much time and research spent on them because the elites don’t want them dealt with correctly; and as we all know, true science starts with theories and hypotheses before it can be accepted as factual science. The more the available facts fit in with the conspiracy theories that we have developed, the more validation we will have that we are on the right track in compiling the correct history.

1 A fairly good book on the subject, even though it doesn’t deal with characterizing Marx and his work as the contrived Hegelian dialectical antithesis, is, Marx Against The Peasant by David Mitrany, 1951.

2 The two main sources by Marx and Engels that I am familiar with on this topic are, The Communist Manifesto and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

3 Martin A. Lee, Acid Dreams, 1985.

4 Roderick Nash, 1982, Wilderness and the American Mind (third edition), pp. 380-381. This passage was also quoted in a book called Defending the Earth (1991) which is a transcription of a live debate between Dave Foreman and Murray Bookchin.

5 Allan Savory, 1998, Holistic Management, p. 139, “In more brittle environments, which cover most of the earth’s land surface, the time scale for regeneration would not be a human one but a geological one. Lands surrounding cities that were abandoned and left to nature centuries ago in these environments are still deteriorating. They won’t recover, at least on a human scale, unless we use the animals still available to us that can simulate the effects produced by the herds and predators that once made these environments functioning wholes. The alternative is to wait several million years for new species to develop, which is of course impractical. We have no option but to take responsibility.”

6 Lewis Mumford, in The Myth of the Machine, 1967, makes the case that humans didn’t choose to develop technology faster because they were busy doing more interesting things such as building the human brain with creative thinking.

7 Theodore D. Hall, The Ark: Surviving the Flood of Disinformation, 1997 (Leading Edge International Research Group.) This is an interesting book in support of Lamarckism.

8 A good example of this is in a book by Conway Zirkle, Evolution, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene, 1959, p. 72, where he makes the statement, “As a scientist, [Lamarck] was a duffer”.

To be continued….

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Do Plants Talk To Each Other? An Interesting Case

30 Foot Century Plant Set to Bloom in Studio City

The Plant Dates Back to at Least 1972

by Paulie Hart, Staff Writer

An old Century Plant, so-called because of their exceptionally long life, although not 100 years as the name suggests, is set to bloom in Studio City, California.  The plant, an agave americana, dates back to about 1972 or earlier.  The neighborhood, called Valley Village, has had so much change in the last few years that I couldn’t find any old timers left who might have some information about the plant.  Most of the old houses have been torn down for apartment buildings or “mansionized”.  A ninety-some year old woman who lived across the street from the plant sold her house last year and moved away.  The house was torn down and is now in the process of becoming another apartment building.

Before surrounding plants were taken out.

The huge plant, which has grown to about 6 feet tall and about 5 feet wide, is at least 50 years old.  Smaller “offspring” are growing around the base of the plant.  The building where the plant resides is at the northeast corner of Kling and Radford in Valley Village, not far from CBS Radford studios.  The building was sold last year to an apartment operating company which is conducting massive re-modeling of the entire complex.  One of the  things that they did was to cut off all the bottom leaves of the plant, making it look a bit top heavy and it appears to be listing to one side.

Is Plant to Plant Communication Possible?

In addition, gardeners from the company have removed most of the other plants near the Century Plant, including a pretty hedge that blooms little blue flowers.  Another huge area of plants was also removed.  One interesting thought is that the Century Plant is aware that all of its neighbors have been torn out, as well as the base of the plant being cut away.  Has this triggered its final “suicide”, by shooting up a thirty-foot stalk into the air, the once and final bloom before it dies?  If the plant feels threatened, seeing its neighbors torn out and being cut itself, could this trigger it’s own final moment?  The tall stalk will bloom and spread its seeds out in the hopes of spawning other, new plants.  Then it will die.

We hope to see it bloom shortly, but there’s danger for it.  In Mexico, some people will cut the huge stalk down before it blooms, and use the soft interior of the plant to make an alcoholic beverage called pulque.  Will some night-stalker get to the plant before it blooms?  Stay tuned here for the latest update.  When the stalk reaches it’s predetermined height, it will bloom out some beautiful yellowish or orange flowers.  In a very short time it has shot up to the height of the 2 story apartment building.

It is now as high as the buiding itself.

The theory that plants can communicate with one another has been derided in the past.  But new studies have shown that plants can defend themselves from insects by releasing chemical clouds and this can warn other plants in the area as well.  It is entirely possible that plants have a secret system of communication and that they are aware of what is happening to other plants and trees around them.  This has huge implications in the agricultural area, and also could have implications on human health as well.

If humans are tearing out plants, and they can communicate with one another, they may release chemicals, not only to defend against insects, but some slight change that could affect the health of humans or animals who eat the plants.  Much more study needs to be done in this fascinating area of discovery.  Here is a link to a Wired article on the subject, click here.   We will monitor the Century Plant in Studio City, and hope that it is allowed to bloom.

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