I have an abundance of hips and haws; columns of ivy flowers buzzing with bees. I have paper bags marked up with Tagetes, Sweet Pea, Nasturtium, Cosmos; all collected from this year’s crop. I have a select few tomatoes and tomatillos ripening on the vine ready for seed collection.
I love collecting seeds. It is, after all, a basic human right is it not? To collect the seeds from the crops we grow which may well have been planted by our forefathers and handed down through the generations. Each year they are planted and grown so that the plant adapts to the changes in climate and conditions. That’s how we feed ourselves; that is how the world has worked since agriculture began.
But if we are not vigilant, all that might change.
I have just returned from a showing of the documentary film about Vandana Shiva. Well worth the time, what an amazing woman!
I went to see it because she has taken up the cause against Monsanto and their ilk. You know, the people who want to rid the world of ancient seeds so that we can only grow their patented genetically modified version; the people who would cover the world with a mass of monoculture fields all sprayed with their own brand of pesticide.
Yum-yum!
Their promises of greater yield producing higher value crops have proven to be empty. All they have done is produce super bugs resistant to the pesticides creating a need for more and more of the stuff. Small farmers cannot afford it and end up selling out to the bigger ones and there goes the ancient family business. Sign of the times? No, it doesn’t have to be. Not if we get our thinking straight.
We must all realise by now that biodiversity holds the key to the future not monoculture with its nitrates and pesticides. If the birds are not following the ploughman over the fields, then you are looking at a dead field that contains no natural nutrients for the crops it is forced to grow. If there are no minerals in the fields, there will be no minerals in our food. If we are not eating minerals in our food, our health suffers.
This is not the way forward and it’s a no brainer. Really.
Of course, there is the argument that the world belongs to the people who live in it and that everything started to go wrong when someone said, “This patch of land belongs to me.”
The agrarian society invented ownership of land and property which led to the blossoming of civilisation. The concept is so ingrained in our western way of life that I find it hard to get my head around this one. Aren’t we a little too crowded for a free for all?
Maybe not. Maybe it is all about our attitude towards one another. I’ve just been reading “Humankind: A Hopeful History” by Rutger Bregman which is a very uplifting read generally (apart from the sad bits). It turns out the Lord of the Flies is extremely unlikely to exist because, basically, we prefer to get along with each other. The more you read this book the more you realise that humans are actually nice people when the media isn’t stirring things up.
When I step back and look at what we have created collectively, I have to say that things are not working too well. The poverty gap is getting bigger, families are going hungry, stress levels are getting higher which leads to the uptake of anti-depressants and other pills. Many of them produced by Bayer, of course, who is joined at the hip with Monsanto.
Well, whatdayaknow?
Vandana Shiva quotes Ghandi by saying we should: Be the change we want to see in the world. I was going to finish at that as it is a wonderful statement and very true. But Joseph Ranseth has checked the quotation and found that this is a paraphrase, what Ghandi actually said takes things a little deeper, so I shall finish with the actual quote:
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
Mahatma Gandhi