I’m going to post a warning on this entry. I’m royally p***** off. So yeah, this is a pretty in your face entry. But, after this I’m going to be writing about what people, lots of little people are doing to take on the control freaks the strip mine mentality. And winning more often than not. The conservatives blather about the short comings of the main stream media. And they do go on about that "socialist" in the White House. News flash boys and girls. This oligarchs in this country have done a fantastic job of privatising the profits and sticking the rest of us for the cost of cleaning up their messes.
Well, the local paper didn’t give more than two sentences to the Monsanto protests here and around the world. So I have to turn up a few rocks. And bite back the urge to heave them through a few windows.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the belittling attitudes women face. Or the absolutely entrenched attitudes towards sexual assault. Remember it’s not about sex. It’s about control. And we’re up against a group of extraordinary control freaks.
What’s the cheapest way to get to the coal and other ores we want to mine? Rip up the mountain and dump the debris over the side. Too bad about the stream, the fish, the other wild life that depends on that watershed. And really too bad about the folks living downstream that have use that water for their kids, their farms and their gardens.
And it isn’t a strip mine but the front page of the B section of the local paper headlined a superfund site in Douglas country south of Springfield. The mine was operating from 1990 t0 1993 when it forced to close for violating just about every environmental rule in the book. The Formosa mine was operated by a Canadian company backed by a Japanese company. The Canadians are out of business, the Japanese can’t be touched and there’s no money to clean up the site. The debris field is leaching heavy metals into the ground water and the flooded mine is draining into a creek that feeds into the Umpqua river. The creek used to host salmon and Chinook runs. It’s pretty much dead now. So sorry about that.
What’s the cheapest way to grow crops? Genetically modified monocultures engineered to be poisoned and still survive. Too bad about the loss of genetic diversity. Too bad that more than one study shows that the engineered crops don’t have the same mix of nutrients that their unf***** up relatives do. (sources Animal Vegetable Miracle, Wendell Berry and various Vendana Shiva essays). Too bad the herbicides screw up the mix of microbes and insects that allow the plants to absorb nutrition. Too bad about the loss of topsoil since we keep taking without putting compost back or giving the land a chance to rest and recover between crops of subsidized corn, soy or cotton.
Too bad about the falling water tables as we try to grow water hungry crops in semi deserts. Barbara Kingsolver finally decided to move her family to land her husband owned in Tennessee. The deal breaker? Tucson built a new canal (open canal not a pipeline) to bring in a new water supply. Users were warned that while the water was ok for human use don’t use it for your goldfish. It’ll kill ‘em. Ugh.
What’s the fastest, cheapest (up front at least) way to grow beef, chicken and pork? Stick ‘em in feed lots or warehouses, stuff them grain and ship them to the slaughter house as quickly as possible. Too bad the high grain diet isn’t what cattle are adapted to eat. Some studies suggest that we didn’t turn them into roasts and steaks they’d probably die anyway.
And you have to wonder what the stress hormones due to overcrowding do to the meat. And I wonder how we’d like standing around in our own s*** for the six months or so it takes to get the critter to slaughter weight. Too bad that the manure that would have helped replenish pasture is now sewage that we can barely handle. Too bad about the spinach crop that was contaminated by feed lot run off a few years ago. What were the final death toll and hospital costs for the e-coli outbreak?
Then there’s the low dose antibiotics meant to counter disease brought on by over crowding. Guess where the majority of antibiotics used in this country end up. Hint. It isn’t in the people.
I could go on. The collapse of the fishing industry as we strip mine the ocean the same way we’re strip mining the land. And too bad about the environmental damage done by fish and shrimp farming. Funny how critters that are used to swimming around in the ocean don’t take to being penned up any better than steers or chickens do.
The control freaks are raping Mother Earth in search of the quick buck every day. I suspect that Her daughters and sons shouldn’t be surprised when get the same lack of respect. Physical rape is just the tip of the iceberg. The destruction of traditional, sustainable ways of living in search of the almighty dollar, yen and Euro is rape too. But, with no police reports to fill out.
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