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Global Warning - Nov 21, 2006 - Printable Version
- Monsanto on my Mind
by Robin Buckallew
During the recent election season, a great many candidates began to blur together and sound suspiciously alike as the campaign progressed, leading to the unspoken assumption on my part that they had all visited Stepford, and become The Stepford Pols. On some of the issues there was not enough space between the Republicans and the Democrats to determine that they were, in fact, separate individuals and not Siamese twins joined at the hip, readily to jointly occupy the office they were currently competing for. One of these issues, on which there is near unanimous agreement, is the desirability and the wisdom of “growth”. No matter what words they couched it in, or what methods they proposed to reach this desired end, one thing was crystal clear – “Growth is good, Growth is to be pursued at all times, nothing must stand in the way of Growth”. I’d like to talk a little about growth. I’d like to talk a little about Monsanto. What do they have to do with each other? Well, actually, Monsanto can offer us up a wonderful lesson about growth. Monsanto is the well beloved chemical company that offers us such wonderful products as Round-Up® and other pesticides. They offer us “better living through chemistry”. It is through the action of these pesticides that we can begin to get a picture of the problems with growth. Many herbicides are made of natural, plant-based products known as plant growth hormones. The weed killer you use may actually be a product that the plant produces to help it grow. What’s that you say? You don’t want your weeds to grow, you want them to DIE? Well, don’t worry. They will. You see, these plant growth hormones will cause the plant to grow beyond its capacity to maintain growth. They will cause it to grow asymmetrically, so that it can’t hold up its own tissues. In short, the plant will literally grow itself to death. These pesticides have been highly effective. Many a plant has been persuaded to grow itself to death.
It shouldn’t take a huge leap of reasoning to see where I’m going next. Our system is based on growth. Economically, politically, socially, we believe we require growth to maintain the system. We are sure that if the demand for goods doesn’t continually grow, our economic system will face certain collapse. We are sure that if the constituency doesn’t continually grow, our political system will have to be restructured as our particular city/county/state loses representatives to other cities/counties/states that are growing (or growing faster – many areas in the last census actually gained population and lost representatives because they didn’t gain as much population as some other area). Socially, we like growth because it just seems to us to be natural. It’s what we’ve always done. Bigger is better. If a little bit is good, a lot is great.
There’s one major problem with this paradigm. The planet isn’t getting any bigger. This world we call Earth, this third rock from the sun, is of a finite size, and carries finite resources. There is only so much that can be extracted from a finite world – only so many minerals ripped out of the crust, only so many vegetables yanked out of the soil, only so many trees sliced and diced to make wood-based products. For a time, we have fooled ourselves with the illusion of plenty, as technology has improved our methods of coaxing the earth to provide more and more, but we have been living on an illusion. At the current time, we are consuming more than earth’s capacity can reasonably provide. Where is all this coming from? It’s coming from the future. We are borrowing on the future to meet the growing appetite of the present. Meanwhile, we are paving more and more land, building bigger (better?) houses, making our yards larger, our stores and parking lots larger, our cities larger. We are growing, all right. We are not only growing, we are growing spontaneously, randomly, without a plan or a goal other than growth. As a result, we are growing asymmetrically. Sound familiar? We are drunk on our own growth, and we can’t get enough, even if it kills us. As well it may.
Before you write all this off as the random ramblings of a deranged mind (though it may very well be), consider this quote by Edward Abbey: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”. A cancer exists when cells begin to divide and grow unrestrained; it is always serious, and frequently lethal. The treatment for cancer is frequently painful, and often makes quite nauseous. The treatment for unrestrained human growth is likely to be painful. I doubt it will make us nauseous, but we might find it rather unpalatable at times. The paradigm of growth is so deeply ingrained within our psyche that the change will be strongly resisted. There will be lots and lots of “yes, buts….”. In fact, most of us carry around a huge portfolio of “yes, buts….” with us at all times, just in case we find ourselves in need of a convenient excuse. The time for excuses is past. We are now at a turning point in human history, and our decisions will have significant repercussions in the future. Those repercussions can echo loudly and clearly to our descendents our overall selfishness, carelessness, and lack of consideration, as our children and grandchildren struggle to survive in an overgrown world where the finite resources were borrowed from them by their ancestors with no intent of ever repaying the loan. Right now, every indicator points in this direction. We can change that direction, but we cannot do it with excuses or procrastination. The time is now. We must reject the paradigm of growth, endlessly parroted by our politicians and our pundits, and seek to curtail the cancer that is choking our earth. We must seek instead to find stability and sustainability, so that our actions don’t foul the nest for future generations.
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