Monday, November 29, 2010

microcosm/macrocosm








My body has become a long-term miniature ecology experiment which has yielded a gradual comprehensive healing, and I'm convinced the same principles applied to earth herself would produce similar results.

If a person with a sick digestive system stops eating industrially-produced and -processed "food," and begins taking only real and whole nutrition, the afflicted organs gradually heal themselves, unless they're so degenerated they can't recover. Recovering from inflammatory bowel disease and everything that goes with it, right down to the hemorrhoids, is the most important facet of positive dietary changes, but there are others, including psychological effects.

Much of the world's arable land is sick from petroleum-based "inputs:" chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. But diseased ecosystems, like diseased people, can recover by going on a diet which eliminates industrially-processed nutrients and substitutes the proper, organic constituents that will enable depleted soil to regain its vitality. This consists mainly of composted human and animal wastes which are currently flushed, sometimes treated and sometimes not, into the hydrosphere rather than recycled into its naturally life-sustaining end product, a rich humus.

As with drastic reductions in our petroleum consumption, these changes in our approaches to agriculture will happen when ruling elites recognize they have no choice, as sooner or later all of them will. The transition to a sustainable future will be difficult, but the survivors and their descendants will be better off for it than we are now.

Copperplate engraving by Robert Fludd, about 1618.

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