Back in 1993 when the world was waking up to the market potential of organic food Simon Wright put together a technical book called The Guide to Organic Processing and Production that cost £75 (a lot of money for a book in those days) which was essential reading for anyone who wanted to cash in on the coming organic boom. I wrote the Introduction, a long explanation of what organic was, where it came from and why it was the future. I wrote "The difference between conventional farming and organic farming is the difference between war and peace. Conventional farmers wage war on nature using their armoury of chemicals to keep her at bay while they take as much as they can get. Organic farmers attempt to apply a creative process of conflict resolution whereby nature volunteers her bounty in return for a balancing contribution towards her well-being. E.F.Shumacher wrote: 'We speak of the battle with Nature, but we should do well to remember that if we win that battle, we are on the losing side.'"
So when I read Maria Rodale's recent open letter to President Obama I was 100% behind her. Maria is the granddaughter of J.I. Rodale, the man who convinced Lady Eve Balfour to call their enlightened way of farming 'organic' and who founded Rodale Press. It's the world's leading health and wellness publisher (Organic Gardening, Prevention, Women's Health, Men's Health and books like The South Beach Diet) and Maria is CEO. Her letter refers to a cartoon of a little girl speaking to Obama - his speech bubble says "We are going to war with Syria because they poison little children" and the kid replies "So why don't you bomb Monsanto?"
Like many people in the organic movement, Maria Rodale campaigned in support of Obama's election campaign. She was subsequently dismayed at his unthinking support of Monsanto's interests. Now she is horrified to see that he seems no more than a puppet of the military-industrial complex that needs wars in order to use up the weaponry that keeps arms factories going. With 3500 cruise missiles at $2 million each, the US is well-stocked, but that means that Raytheon, who make Tomahawk cruise missiles, will have to shut their factory if they don't get more orders. So the military has to use them up. Sound familiar? Monsanto needs to sell herbicide, that's where their profits come from. If farmers make peace with nature and find non-poisonous ways of dealing with weeds, coexisting with them and protecting biodiverity, then the bottom falls out of Monsanto's market. It's the same with GM - designed to allow increased use of ever more deadly herbicides and to contain poisons that kill insects on contact... until the weeds and bugs develop resistance. Then they use stronger poisons. Now Wall Street is pouring money into pesticide companies as their sales boom to farmers for whom the GM crops no longer work.
The Organic Trade Board and the Pesticide Action Network have shown that the amount of pesticide residues we and our kids consume has doubled in the past decade - unless we choose organic. We know that pesticides can trigger adverse health reactions and that long-term exposure is undesirable. But the fact is that American and British kids are 'collateral damage' in the war against weeds and bugs just as Pakistani kids are 'collateral damage' when a drone blows up a village because a terrorist might be there. In Vietnam a US officer famously said: "We had to destroy that village in order to save it."
Our 'village' is the global community. It is being torn apart by unnecessary wars fought for fictitious reasons but leaving behind real corpses, devastated landscapes and psychologically damaged ex-soldiers whose suicide rate exceeds their death rate in battle. The war against nature using pesticides and genetic modification, leaves behind devastated landscapes and (in India) devastated farmers whose suicide rate exceeds any historic comparison.
It's time to stop the killing and to fight on the side of nature. Instead of making imaginary enemies let's all fight together against global warming, which no amount of genetic modification or explosive weaponry can stop. We only have one planet to live on and we are destroying life on every level, from the tiniest microbes in the soil to entire communities of people in whose lives we have no business to interfere. Living organically means being committed to peaceful coexistence with nature - it's in everyone's ultimate best interest to shut down the arms trade's endless war against people and to shut down the pesticide industry's endless war against nature. Let's use the trillions they waste each year to make the Earth safer for future generations by waging war on carbon dioxide emissions instead.
