Steven, I have been on WTO Watch for a year. I know. I guess I was surprised that Greg Palast said they were bribing the officials, but I shouldn't have been. What I was trying to get at is that the irreverent guys like Greg Palast and Mike Moore do what the NGOs can't--with the gallows humor of irreverence. It isn't funny humor. It's grim when you have to resort to irreverence to get through to an ignorant and apathetic population. How can we get this all to change? The two party system in the U.S. is only as good as the men and women who choose to be politicians. If they can be coopted by campaign contributions, then what?
But I believe our problem is much deeper than that. Did you happen to read the "Interview with Hartmut von Jeetze" in the newest issue of JPI's Applied Biodynamics? This man was a child when his parents went to RS's lectures on Agriculture and as a teenager worked on farms. He tells the whole story of the times--how their 2 1/2 ac farm, the largest in their village, was indebted and they went into receivership trying to convert to BD--"I stirred my first 500 when I was ten years old. About eight to ten youngsters, we were from the school and after school you stirred 500, each in a wooden bucket of about two and a half gallons and sang songs with it. There was an old man, he's still around by the way, he should be a hundred yers old now"...and the war--"At the age of 15 in 1943 I was spending from 6:30 in the morning to 8:30 at night on a reaper-binder, operating the handles to get the harvest done, the crops cut...before long, Mr. Voegele asked, 'Well, maybe you can handle a team of horses...'--I had no choice actually (on whether to be a farmer or not) after the war. Everything was broken down, so when I got back to where my parents lived as refugees, not the farm where we grew up, that was gone, but in West Germany...(He worked on an orthodox farm for comparison to his BD training.)...when the field was seeded, everyone knew, it's a thing where your human discipline of practice of agriculture actually is equivalent of a meditative work done in the the physical world...Farming is a meditative work. How you approach things is important. But it's got to be so that the outer disciplines and the inner disciplines begin to become experiential to you. If you read the article on the lecture I gave last year on "The Four Ethers in Their Relation to Agriculture, you will find an exact description of what I mean (BIODYNAMICS 236 (2001):9-14)..I'm saying all these things because unless you have a personal experience by way of relationship to the soil, you won't get too easily to the same point of beginning even to think of Biodynamaic agriculture. So what we have lost is the personal relationship to the land...Only when your fields don't yield anymore to conventional treatment, do you begin to ask yourself what's happening?...I can't tell people to change....everyone has to come in their own way to begin to realize, "Wait a minute, we can't go on like this. What can I do to improve life to the land?...What's not happening is that for most people here in the West, to understand that personal relationship to the land, not only of one person, but of a group of human beings, of a village, matters...What has disappeared in the last century by very rapid stages is the social interdependence between all the craftsmen, all the people in the village and the small towns, ...where all this was a synthesis of human social abilities creating the social pattern as the basis for the ...basic fabric of the social order, an order in which Nature, by the way of harmonized landscapes becomes the social equivalent, complementing what human beings do to the land...RS's first lecture...the judgment over what is necessary or right or needed on a farm, can only be done by the farmer who walks over the field...he or she often without knowing it is doing meditative work..." My point is that because of technology, a whole civilization of human beings have lost their connection to the land. The people in charge of the country are making decisions based on short-term monetary gain which exaccerbates alienation from the land. It's the effect of technology on culture. How can we retain the experience of the land? My husband took a trip yesterday to Lost Creek south of Priest Lake, ID, at Sundance Mountain. The creek bottom is untouched cedar bottom land and right now it's flooded because the beaver blocked the culvert under the road. The water is crystal clear. The mosses and wild flowers were prime. He saw tracks of the big moose he had seen last fall in the mud and left-over snow. The land isn't like that anymore except in small areas. People don't know what they are missing. People in cities don't have a clue. And those in charge of the U.S. at this time in connection with the WB and IMF are trying to force the civilization all over the world to this sorry state. This whole mess has happened because humans are using their minds only. People have lost touch with any kind of spirituality even when they go to church they get second-hand experience. We are too many for the land...financial, cultural forces are pushing us. The people who have the drive to be leaders are not connected to the land. We BD gardeners and farmers are fragmented. Only on a list/serve can we find anyone to talk to, to share with. Our communities are dominated with other points of view. People are apathetic, resigned, eeking out a living doing things that don't mean anything to them. Rural life has only little pockets of healthy community life. I know our community is struggling. In my backhanded way, I was trying to say something without alienating Gil and all those people who don't want to think about politics. Merla Merla, Have you heard the term "Lords of Poverty" - headed up by organisations such as the IMF, World Bank, and other public organisations. I have worked for more than one of these and can vouch for their disgusting approaches - was only too keen to leave when I realised what they do. The Monsanto's of this world are another organisation, as are the agro-chemical companies (dumping chemicals in developing countries which are banned in developed countries, without appropriate instructions, protective clothing etc, etc). The atrocities are horrendous. > Lloyd, > > And in South Africa, our esteemed Minister of Agriculture has announced that > we will be taking the Hi-Tech road to agricultural development - the > chemical companies have got to her OK. > > Stephen Barrow
