Help

The other day I was talking with a friend about what we were doing here at the farm and the subject of Organic Certification came up. My friend asked why we are not certified and I, in my usual flip way, said something like Organics is not enough. That led to a bit of a philosophical discussion which went very poorly. I know why we are doing what we are doing. The reasoning is crystal clear to me. But, I don’t seem to be able to articulate it very well. I’d like to try again to lay out my philosophy. I’d appreciate it if you would rip it apart. Question it. Find the holes, the bits that don’t make sense, the leaps in reasoning that you can’t make and let me know. I need to be able to explain this to people in a way that they can understand. I sometimes think I have a different cognitive framework to hang my ideas on; that I perceive things differently. Even if that is true, I got here through the same system that everyone else is using. If I can do that I should be able to help other people do that too. So…


There was a man who came to the doctor. He had a throbbing head ache that would not go away. He had tried all kinds of medicine, relaxation techniques, yoga, prayer, everything, and nothing worked. The doctor listened to the man, took his blood pressure, waited for him to stop bashing himself in the head with a hammer, and prescribed a potent pain killer. The man took the medicine, whacked himself in the head with the hammer, and went home wondering if the head ache would stop this time.

We are very much like the man and the doctor. We have been dealing with problems of environmental degradation and population growth for a very long time. We have tried and retried a vast number of programs to fix the pain, and have never found one that really worked. Why? Because we keep bashing ourselves in the head with a hammer. We keep seeing the same effects, even though we put great amounts of effort and resources into solving the problems. We pour millions into efforts to save this animal or that one and at the same time destroy the habitat of some other creature as fast as we can. Next year we will start a program for that creature. We fund hunger relief programs all over the world. We produce more food every year but millions still go hungry. We teach about birth control to help ease the population growth but it still races on at an exponential rate. Why? Because we are still doing the thing that causes these effects. (I could go into a long discussion of history and “pre-history” to show how we got here, but it really doesn’t matter.) The thing I find interesting is that none of the other creatures living on this planet have this problem. They have been living well in every part of the globe for hundreds of thousands of years with out causing massive environmental degradation. On the whole there are not large groups of any living thing starving to death or over running their normal range. (We sometimes see animals starving, or causing environmental problems, but that is always a result of our altering the system, not their normal way of living.) We humans managed to live for several hundred thousand years without causing the kind of problems we have now. So the question is; what are we doing that none of the other creatures are doing? How are they living that is different from how we are living? I think there should be some common law that is true for elephants, trees, fish, spiders, worms, etc. (Every other system in the universe operates on simple laws, why would life be any different?) I have published those laws in the side bar. Right now our way of life, our systems of production, violates the first basic law. We go outside our range for the resources used to produce an excess of food, water, and energy. When we have used up those resources in one area we go looking for them in another. This causes the environmental degradation we are fighting. It also fuels the exponential population growth we continue to see. This population growth must be met with more production which causes more population growth… which brings us to now. So, why would I say Organics is not enough? It’s like really nice aspirin. It will mask the pain for a short time, but if we don’t change how we live, how we produce what we need to live, we will keep whacking ourselves in the head with the hammer until we die.