Debate: Population Growth and Morality

            Many have criticized advocates for population control, and here we will be discussing China's implementation  under the communistic leader Deng Xiaoping.of its One-Child Policy in 1979. The law applies only to the urban Chinese, as the rural population has less need for population control - they use less resources and have a higher rate of infant death due to malnutrition and lack of healthcare. As of 2004, infant mortality in rural China was about 25 per 1000, more than double the urban infant mortality rate of 10. But what do the figures say about China's population growth? The current estimates are that due to this policy China now has 300 million less people! This can be viewed in two different lights. On one hand, that is 300 million people that China's rule of law has indirectly killed by not allowing to live. There are many logical fallacies in this, but its focal point is that these are children that parents were not able to enjoy raising and bringing in to their family. On the other hand, that is 1) 300 million people that are not taking away resources from other citizens across the world, many of whom are already deprived of necessary resources, and 2) 300 million people who are not potentially suffering due to stretching of resources. Either way we look at it this reveals a couple problems currently underway in our societies. We are coming to the realization that we do in fact have limited resources to use on this planet; and we are using the resources we have quite inefficiently and wastefully in many parts of the world.
            Now onto the ethical dilemma. We do not have to define here what the ethics are, for most of us can agree that killing people is wrong and that making people suffer is wrong. Those both have exceptions, but let's apply them to innocent people to turn away from those potential problems. What we do have to define, is not what the morality is, but when this morality is applied. Is it more wrong to deprive families of the miracles of child-raising and the family expansion that is so ingrained in our species, than to cause the suffering of many more people in the future due to stretched resources? In one case we are harming people now, in the other case we are harming possibly many more people in the future.
            The course of humanity's thoughts on morality have evolved from individual morality, how to change oneself to be let in to Heaven, live a holy and virtuous life, move up to the next strata in your next life, etc. From there we moved to the morality of nations as we began to pass laws and regulations on our behavior, and thoughts at most times. After a long time we came to the argument of cultural relativism - understanding that morality might be dependent on the culture in which it was born and is applied. Still we have a universal morality etched in our Universal Declaration of Human Rights written by almost every country's, or at least governmental representatives.
            But that is slightly besides the point. Over generations humanity has moved from dimension to dimension in defining and applying morality. The first dimension - a line, this is the individual and their movement through life. The second dimension - a plane, this is a group of people and their society. The third dimension - a sphere (our planet), this is the acknowledgement and combination of various cultures' codes of morality. All of these have their basis in space. What we are moving towards now is a realization that our morality needs to span time as well. Is killing one person now less moral than killing two people in the future? Because in many cases we will not be around to either gain or suffer from such consequences in the future, they seem irrelevant. But from a moral standpoint, is time not just another means of separation, any different from geography? If we are to understand morality as universal, must that universality span not only space but time as well? Or if morality is not universal, then will cultural relativism begin to apply to the culture's of the past and the future? Surely an American culture is different now than it was one hundred years ago, just as it will be different in another one hundred years. Is understanding American 19th century culture not a form of cultural relativism. We look in condemnation upon those culture's a thousand years ago that sacrificed people, but in that culture was it not morally relevant? Were those sacrifices not made to bring rain and great harvest and thus benefit to future populations? These are all questions that are evolving in our moral debate, and by simply acknowledging them we are furthering our knowledge and understand about our condition, and that of humanity.

Gardening and Natural Processes

            This will be the first in a long string of posts dedicated to growing and maintaining your own food supply, whether it be simple herbs like sweet basil or winter thyme, annuals such as cherry tomatoes, or perennials like asparagus or eggplant. I will not stress here the many benefits from growing your own food, or plants for that matter. It is as fulfilling as it is filling. Gardening is a power, a control that we place over nature's processes and over the years humans have, in vast ignorance, strayed from those natural processes. Just as humans can not live off of multivitamins (which are derived from petroleum but that is for another post) and protein supplements, plants and the earth's soil can not live off of synthetic nutrients (which are also petroleum based). It sounds strange to refer to the soil as living, but in fact in just one tablespoon of healthy topsoil there exists over one million microorganisms. It is these organisms which break down organic matter and nutrients and make them digestible for a plant's roots. And when the plants shed their leaves and fruits they provide food again for these soil organisms. Animals are also part of this cycle, as we serve both the plants and the soil. By eating the fruits of a plant (this refers to vegetables as well) we digest the seeds. These seeds pass through our digestive tract often unharmed and we release them in another location, encased in a ball of nutrients. It is strange to think of our feces as nutrient-dense, but it manure nonetheless. What we are doing here is helping the plant to spread its seed and increase its chances of reproduction and survival. We are also providing the soil with rich nutrients for them to feed off of. Surprisingly enough, fungi are some of the most prevalent organisms in soil, and are a vital part of the nutrient cycle by breaking down nitrogen for plant's to use. Thus a cycle is born with life, survival and dependency ingrained in every step. Soil organisms depend on plants for organic matter and animals for manure; Plants depend on soil organisms for vital nutrients and animals for spreading their seed and/or pollinating them; Animals are dependent on plants for food and thus soil organisms as they give life to plants.
                So where does agriculture play in all of this? When we first began domesticating and controlling the growth of plants, we seriously altered this cycle. Methods of permaculture (permanent agriculture), biodynamics, companion planting and every other method you here in the "healthy, sustainable, organic" food movement are simply trying to replicate nature's processes. When this cycle is fully understood, we can more effectively replicate it for our own benefit without altering our ecosystems to a state where we can no longer use them for our survival. Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - as well as more modern Elizabethean and Puritan ways of thinking revolve around the premise that humans are separate from nature. Nature, its plants and animals and bacteria, are all primal and dirty and beneath us. Whether or not you prescribe to that train of though makes no difference to nature, as we still utterly depend on its processes, on its nutrient and chemical cycles from tectonic plates to topsoil to trees to atmosphere to our protective magnetic isosphere. Humans are just as much a part of the food chain and the nutrient cycle as a dust mite, a blue whale or a red oak. You can dismiss this information, or you can look at it as depressing to think that we are no different from bacteria in the dirt or birds in the sky. But we are different, because no other part of this cycle has the ability to realize that it is in fact a part of this cycle. Humans can take a step back, look at their lives, their environment and the world in which they live and understand it. We have the ability to become aware of our place within this world, we can break free from thinking and acting just in line with our place in this cycle and realize the cycle as a whole. If that is not fascinating enough or a sign of the magnificence of humans then i don't know what is. We have only to look around us to find what is most brilliant, beautiful and worthy of our attention. Humans have studied and replicated nature since the dawn of agriculture. Now we use it to understand how to fly, to create hearing aids, to build farms, and to acquire energy from the sources around us. This replication is currently deemed Biomimicry and is a fast growing field in construction of net-zero energy houses, buildings, and cities.
               More posts will come providing detailed and helpful instructions on how to specifically grow plants cheaply and efficiently, whether on your windowsill, in your backyard or at your school. But it is of crucial importance before beginning any project to understand the project as a whole. If you go in to growing your own food without any insight as to the natural processes at work, or without understanding your place in the process, then there will inherently be oversights and failures. And you will learn, by trial and error, from those failures. But this need not be the case, as nature and man have provided us with more examples and information then we could gather in a lifetime. When the process and context of growing food is fully acknowledged and understood, the actions springing from that frame of mind will inherently be successful and virtuous if only in the process. This applies naturally to all of life and any future projects. What is it that you are really doing? What is the object and how does it relate to you? And one last word of advice before I wrap this up... The process of any project is equally if not more important than the final product, and as the product is merely an extension of the process, a healthy and fulfilling process based on as much knowledge and insight as can be gathered will lead to a healthy and successful product.

Quote: May I Never Be Complete

May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect."

                          ~Chuck Palahnuik

This quote symbolizes man's constant progression throughout history and throughout his individual life. The definition of perfect changes from culture to culture and from time to time. Even in your own life your idea of perfection changes. We think of the perfect person as including notions of morality, of actions and thoughts alike, maybe of physical and mental fitness, and of our relationship to others whether they be through love or power. As it is constantly changing, and not absolute through space or time, how can we expect to reach this perfection. It's a cruel joke reminiscent of a Greek underworld. 

But the idea of perfection does not have to be totally dismissed, just shifted. Since there is no absolute perfection we must change the form of perfection from one of an end-result, to one of a process-result. Trying to understand what perfection means to us, what it means in our cultures and why humans have even come up with the concept of perfection is as close to perfect as we will come.

What does perfection have to do with survival? How did this hierarchy of imperfect to perfect evolve in our thinking? How has it been projected on to our world? We see it in media across the board, from technology to diets to relationships; we build it through art, in symmetrical skyscrapers, in Michelangelo's David and Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man; and we formulate it in our conscious. We judge ourselves against a perfect us, something that will never be achieved similar to drawing a perfect circle. The circle is an abstract concept, it does not exist in nature because it presupposes that everything does not move, that it is static. But the world is dynamic and therefore a perfect circle can not exist in our natural realities because it will always be moving and changing.

Article Summary: Exploring Synergies, Eradicating Poverty by Cristobal Kay

"The fight against hunger and poverty is also predicated on the creation of a world order that accords priority to social and economic development."                                                                                                                                                                                                  

       ~Lula de Silva

[Note to Reader: This writing assumes the causal links between poverty and hunger, given that food production exceeds population requirements and yet starvation still persists.]

                

                A developmental paradigm in which industry and agriculture are viewed as separate entities is a crutch in the understanding of state development and the eradication of poverty. It is commonly argued in discussing the evolution of the Industrial Revolution whether or not it was caused by agricultural improvement, and the mobilization of the resulting surplus in to industry, or vice versa. Cristobal Kay argues instead that it was a synergy between industry and agriculture, and that this framework for policymaking must be adopted by states today in order to eradicate poverty. Kay ’s theory proposes a solution to two common misperceptions in state development.

                ‘Agriculture first,’ the withholding of agricultural productivity surpluses for reinvestment in agriculture can stagnate industry and thus agricultural technological improvement and productivity, as well as leave the country with an insufficient industrial foothold in the competitive global economy. In contrast, the ‘Industry first’ concept can lead to an over-extraction of resources from the agricultural sector, thus stagnating agriculture and halting any industrial progress. Using the ‘Soviet industrialization debate’ as a case study for this concept, Kay argues that under Lenin the Soviet Union focused too heavily on rapid industrialization without investment towards increasing agricultural output within a distressed collective farming system, thus leading to the inability of peasant farmers to meet quotas for a growing urban and industrial populace. When quotas were enforced the peasants were left with inadequate resources to feed themselves leading to further agricultural erosion, thereby “killing the goose which laid the golden egg.”  

                South Korea and Taiwan, using a more synergistic approach, ignored neoliberal policy directions and used price discrimination and selective investment in agriculture, the Green Revolution’s agricultural industry, and labour-intensive consumer-good oriented industry to successfully distribute surpluses and effectively decrease inequality and poverty. Enabling such policies was a “redistributionist agrarian reform” which allowed for an egalitarian transfer of investment and technology from state and industry to agriculture. Kay argues Latin American countries would be in a similar position had they successfully carried out agrarian reform instead of focusing all their investment on the “large-scale commercial farm sector” while adhering to neoliberal policies reliant solely on free market mechanisms.

                Kay states that a synergistic industrial-agricultural paradigm for development leaves room for contextual differences; that we can “confront and come to terms with the diversity that exists in the real world – whatever uniform tendencies some abstract theories might suggest.” In analyzing developmental paths Kay presumes an export-oriented economy is essential, and assumes the necessary context of a global market. This is either more wise than arguing for a romanticized past of restrictive trade barriers, or more ignorant, in lacking discourse on the perceived, post hoc necessity and ever-presence of a globalized economy. Whatever the case, Kay argues successfully within the present context of globalization for a new, synergistic approach where urban-rural and industrial-agricultural lines are consistently being blurred.

                Ignoring, however, environmental debates about the sustainability of Green Revolution technology, which allowed for the export-driven surpluses and industrial-agricultural synergies in South Korea and Taiwan leaves Kay’s argument contextually dependent upon older, expansionist, pre-ecological paradigms of economy. If his model can overcome such an ecological context, then it would be wise to adopt it in replacement of current one-sided paradigms which claim universality in the processes of social and economic development which are necessary for eradicating poverty, and thus hunger.

Book Review: Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

            The Big Thirst explores man and society’s relationship to water and how it is seen, or not seen, and how placing a price on the only resource humans have labeled as free is the solution to present and future water crises and water wars. Fishman disproves the idea of a ‘global water crisis’ by explaining how each potential or ongoing crisis is local, and how an individual’s water use in America does not correlate to water availability in India. Thorough case studies of water shortages, debates, solutions and Plan B’s from Las Vegas casinos to Indian peasants to Australian coal mines gives Fishman a strong foundation for his arguments: We look at water as a common property, as free, as limitless, as the source of life and a force of death, and yet societies’ take no measure to properly manage, conserve, and allocate this vital resource. Fishman states, “We may well go directly from the golden age of water to the revenge of water.”

             An abundance of free water enabled Las Vegas to become a “water oasis”, allowed Australia to irrigate the majority of its state, and let Galveston, Texas glean over the fact that they did not have a Plan B. While the water saved from a low-flush toilet can not cut back the hours Indian women walk for water, it can be used for better purposes – replenishing our drying rivers and aquifers. As the island off of Texas realized after Hurricane Ike, a Plan B for water is necessary, and yet this has only been realized when Plan A, the only plan, fails. Instead of freely allocating water to whomever can pay the shipping and handling costs, Fishman argues that water needs to be treated economically, as if it were any other resource, as if it were “Money in the pipes.”

             On the other side of free water is India, where the idea of free water is still pervasive, but 24/7 water seems ludicrous and women and children wake up to water-walks instead of work or school. Lack of water management, of water security and pollution control essentially cripples the people and the economy. Understanding water and its sources as more than holy items is what is lifting new, “planned,” Indian cities from vicious cycles of poverty and disease.

             New systems of water management proposed and implemented by IBM include monitoring water like we do our oil. Where is there waste, where is there energy loss? Desalination plants, water monitoring systems, and wastewater recycling, however, all require intense capital. While United States’ metropolises and Australian drylands can afford such new and improved water management, places like India require outside investment. Fishman’s ideas of an economically based water system leaves many fearful of a dystopic future where only the rich get clean water. The basis of such a system however, would be a “first-glass” allocation in which fixed amounts are provided for drinking, as well as the environment. But limiting the discussion to any specifics, whether it be economics or reverse osmosis, misses the point entirely. His goal in Big Thirst is merely to talk about water and by doing so, “rescue water not so much from ignorance as from being ignored.”

              Water’s apparent limitlessness is a plague that has reached nearly every aspect of our natural society. From the buffaloes to the fish, from oil to water, perceptions of a resource as infinite slowly give way to depletion and extinction, as well as (hopefully) better understanding and management. Whether that can be accomplished before the herd or the school is gone, or the well is dry, is unfolding right now. Fish stocks are disappearing at never before seen rates, and efforts to combat their extinction at the hand of market forces are floundering. On the other side, efforts to combat water shortages and water wars are being fought by the juxtaposition of market forces. Although seemingly contrary in their approach, both reveal an increased awareness and understanding of the resource at hand, whether it be fish, or the waters in which those fish swim.

               Fishman states at the end of Big Thirst, “Many civilizations have been crippled or destroyed by an inability to understand water or manage it.” Skeptics such as Lomborg might argue, with facts of decreasing water usage in the U.S. and increasing supplies of clean drinking water to children, that water is not as assumedly important as the Big Thirst states. Whether or not humanity faces an upcoming water crises, or these are exaggerated figures as stated in Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist, it seems most important to prioritize above all else our understanding of the resources which we are dependent. The capital and the labor to be spent on urgent water programs is not the first argument. The initial discourse must be on awareness, and then education, and then action.  

                An understanding of the soil is needed for an agricultural program, an understanding of fish stocks is needed before a fish conservation program, and an understanding of the basic life force of water is absolutely necessary before any water system is to be implemented. However, humanity already created water infrastructures without this knowledge, and the events unfolding now, in the form of Young’s “water glass” paradigm or Pat Mulroy’s reduction solutions, will reveal just how great a value we want to place on this resource.

Project: Food Diary

Day 1

9:30am One egg, over easy, over sautéed kale and red cabbage on top of a flour tortilla. Cooked in vegetable oil with salt, black pepper, and Creole seasoning (garlic, onion, red pepper, etc.) Small glass of HyVee not-from-concentrate grapefruit juice.

11:00am One cup of black coffee.

3:00pm Two small flour tortillas, each filled with sautéed kale, red onions and red cabbage. Vegetable oil with salt, pepper, and cumin. Glass of 2% Vitamin D milk.

6:45pm Pizza: White crust, pre-made tomato sauce, spinach, mozzarella, Sriracha. Glass of water

10:00pm Half of a wrap I made in the caf and snuck out: Large flour tortilla, green peppers, cheddar cheese, lettuce (presumably iceberg), radishes, coleslaw (presumably white cabbage, carrots, mayo, sugar). Glass of water

Day 2

9:30am One poached egg over breakfast potatoes made the day before: red potatoes, onions, vegetable and olive oil, salt, pepper, Creole seasoning. Glass of milk.

3:00pm Other half of the wrap from Day 1, added Sriracha.

6:30pm Bowl of soup made a few days ago: onion, celery, carrots, V8 juice, sardines, salt, pepper, olive oil, basil (dried), garlic salt, sugar. Cup of coffee, milk and sugar.

11:00pm Bowl of vanilla yogurt with half an apple. 

             

                There are an infinite array of ways to look at this food diary: As a consumer, producer, dietician, biologist, psychologist, anthropologist, sociologist, or historian; from the standpoint of self identity or group identity; from a social, economic, or political perspective; within a local, national, or global context. But it is just this conundrum of choices that brings to light the complexity hidden within our most basic and universal act... choosing what to eat.

                The convergence of Warren Belasco’s three prongs - Convenience, Responsibility and Identity - reveals who I am and where I stand. Could I scourge for food in the urban or semi-urban jungle with their planned and scattered natural landscapes? Would I find anything to eat that could sustain me? It is out of convenience and habit that I find myself within the comfort of a supermarket, a fairly modern and international bazaar. Hunting and gathering through the aisles, scavenging the shelves, reading the labels: This is my weekly forage.

                As you can see I stick to several main ingredients or food items: onions, cabbage, kale, celery, carrots, mushrooms, black beans, coffee, canned tuna, bread, tortillas; vegetable oil, olive oil, butter, milk; salt, pepper, cumin, sugar, and a spice mix. Even the fact that I have water at hand whenever the need arises says something about the context in which I live. I am provided with a refrigerator to store my foods and a gas stove to heat them; pots and pans to cook with and utensils to aid in the process.

                The fact that I choose, what I believe to be, such simple food products – as compared to pre-made and processed foods, fine cuts of meat, poultry or seafood, a worldly variety of spices and herbs – highlights my struggle between eating sustainably as I see it (responsibility), lack of time and money (convenience), and my personal taste as well as preference for cooking (identity). 

                Cooking enables a sense of control over food, something which has been lost within the agro-industrial context in which we live. But is this not self-deception? Do we still not all, including myself, rely on supermarkets, on fossil fuels, on refrigeration, kitchenware companies, and transportation? I put salt and pepper on everything, cook everything in fats, use flour-based items as most of my meals’ foundations, and more importantly, feed only myself in each meal. The historical context and progression of merged cuisines, individualism, and the more recent notion of sustainability founded on man’s fear of extinction all come alive with every meal I entertain. That there even exists a movement towards sustainability reveals a deep-seeded biological and psychological drive towards long-term species continuance. Can you argue that altruism is an integral piece of continual existence? How much can we truly survive and function without others, and are we not then a tightly woven mesh of personalities, knowledge, and bodies? Can such generalities, observations and conclusions be brought about from other everyday items? Or is food, its production and distribution, the treasured key to understanding the core paradigms upon which a civilization, a culture, or a community rests?

Food in America

Everyday we eat, some of us more than others. While the United States has the largest people in the world, we also have the most on diets - six out of every ten. We don't know what to eat, we rely on experts. How did we get to a stage, as animals, where we don't instinctively know what to eat? It began with the extension of the American colonies westward - Manifest Destiny. Jefferson had an agrarian ideal for this new country - a nation of independent farmers that would let the corrupt manufacturing take place in Europe. In 1862 a couple acts were passed, seemingly contradictory. First, the Homestead Act was signed, enabling any individual or family a right to 160 acres of land to sustain themselves on. This was an extension of the Jeffersonian ideals of subsistence and the virtue of tending your own land. That same year the Morrill Act was passed, granting money to states to build universities (land-grant universities) so as to research and develop agriculture. This was not for the purposes of providing assistance for families to better sustain themselves, it was to develop more efficient ways to grow crops for market. Around this time canals were being built, allowing faster transportation of goods and the accumulation of both capital and money. These were the first big cities - New York, Chicago, Boston, etc. They were quite dependent on canals as they were the fastest form of transportation. People actually thought that due to the Appalachia severing the canal routes that the U.S. would split East-West. And then the Erie Canal was built, a massive project unlike anything at the time. Similar to the Three Gorges Dam today or the Great Pyramids of Giza in the mid-26th century B.C.E.
And then came railroads, the impact of which can not be fully explained or understood today. It is comparable to the invention of the Internet today. Railroads manipulated time and space, a strange concept to consider. What has essentially occurred over the ages is an advancement in transportation of resources whether they be goods, people or ideas. Railroads allowed the accumulation of even more capital and wealth. Now back to agriculture.
Farmers began producing for the markets. Grains, certain grains such as winter or red wheat, proved easily transportable and widely used. This is however a riddle of chicken and egg. Which came first, the market or the producer? The supply or the demand? Either way wheat was being produced and transported on a larger and larger scale. The farmers needed help transitioning from a subsistence view of American life to a market-oriented future, one that would have caused Jefferson quite discomfort. To help these new farmers with their 160 acres of Homestead land start this transition to market, to accumulated wealth and a shot at the big times in this emerging capitalist society, the government passed the Organic Act establishing the United States Department of Agriculture. And this was initiated... 1862. A revolutionary year to say the least.
The USDA set up extension offices to do research and provide knowledge to farmers now growing mass amounts of wheat. This knowledge was not generational was the knowledge used by subsistence farmers when they first got their land, but was manufactured, laboratory knowledge. This information grew to substitute for the generational knowledge inherited and practiced by the first American farmers and their farming ancestors.
Growing for the market necessitated a logic of growing food for money, as who could subsist off of four tons of hardy winter wheat alone. Farms thus tried to produce more and more, became more capital-intensive as the technology grew. The first tractor replaced animal energy in 1880 and became popularized in the early 1910s. Farms grew larger and only those with enough money and resources could compete, and thus they bought up the smaller farms. This process continued all the way up until the end of World War I.
Before the Great Depression there was an agricultural depression. During the war farmers were producing more than had ever been reaped in history, and they were encouraged to so as to feed the troops. When the troops came back and the demand slowed to a halt, prices dropped, and the market crashed. This is when the government came in, and the system of support structures for large corn and soy farmers still exist today and has created a Too-Big-To-Fail institution that most of the world depends on. What most citizens are unaware of is the true power of our agriculture. It is our greatest foreign policy weapon, as most countries depend on our grains for survival. Food, once the life giving substance, is now used to coerce other nations. I will pick up this story again, but for now it is helpful to think of how this play between markets and farmers shaped our landscape, changed our notion of the ideal American, created an abundance of a resource used for purposes of power (much like oil or gold), and altered our diet and our relationship to both food, farming, and the land. Nearly everything we eat today has corn syrup in it. How has that come to be, is it a natural progression, how would it be different if we could grow potatoes really well? How does an abundance of a resource change societies? It was only with agriculture that humans were able to accumulate resources on a systematic scale - land, food, animals. This was furthered with railroads and industrialization, a system dependent on having a lot of capital to play in the market. Has the internet moved us in the opposite direction, decentralizing resources such as information? What are the boundaries between physical and non-physical resources, and how does their accumulation affect individuals and societies? These are just some questions to ponder over, and in doing so hopefully you will come up with more questions, and more answers, and will understand your self and your world a little better.

Generations of Knowledge

Knowledge in human existence has undergone a progress of trial and error, from the hands of nature, to that of man, and now industry. As hunter gatherers we knew the berries whose juice would poison us , the tubers whose starches would sustain us, and the parts of the animal best to eat and best for tools. We knew these rules to keep us alive because our fathers showed us the way. Many died for our fathers to learn. “Like the first monkeys shot in to space.” Without death and sacrifice, our fathers would have learned nothing. But we left that knowledge in glorious pride for a new way of life. Hunting and gathering came to a halt as the Neolithic stage began.

                 As farmers we came to understand the crops best suited for summer harvest, the pests both harmful and beneficial, and the rotations necessary for a fertile ground. Many starved when their crops failed, because they had no knowledge of survival to catch them when they inevitably fell. They were orphans of knowledge. The successful raised many children, domesticated animals, and honed their methods of till, sow and harvest. We are now leaving that knowledge on the soil and covering it with processing plants. Farmer life disintegrated and the Industrial era began.

                As industrialists our knowledge comes from the labs of scientists, our tools from the factories, and our food from the satellite-scanned farms and distribution networks. Our forefathers marched from the savannahs to the farms, and we march now from the farms to the laboratories. They are isolated from the travails of nature and their method of learning does not leave damage. No more hurt, we say. No more unruly pain. Without death, without sacrifice, our fathers will never learn and our children will never grow.

                We are a traveler who fills his bag along our journey, and upon beholding another greater bag, drops his first, spilling everywhere his memorabilia for walkers by to pick up, or be swept in to the gutters. This new bag is bigger, but made from the same amount of material and thus its fibers are of weaker connections. We loaded this bag with useful objects, from mountain sides to swamps, and in a shorter period than last threw it to the floor as we rushed to swoop up our current bag - larger and more fragile than last. How long will it be before this bag is stocked up and let fall to the floor in a moment of haste? Will it be packed beyond capacity, will it tear sending its holdings to the ground once again? These are the questions a traveler must ask before he starts forward on his journey. But he rarely does. He calls the older bags primitive and he loathes them, while praises and deifies the newer. What this traveler fails to realize is that it is not the bag which matters for his journey, nor is it the objects or memorabilia gathered along the way. It is the relationship between bag and item that must be recognized. If a balance is not found - if the bag is too weak and items too many; or the bag too small and the items too few for even basic survival and fulfillment – then the bag will eventually rip open and send our objects to the floor, where they will be crushed, or swept in to the gutter; or we will starve and be left for the wolves of mother earth. And the traveler will never be able to tell his full story.  

You have stumbled across this page in a quest to understand the meaning of life and how you can live with the most fulfillment of every day. Well you are in luck! For you have already begun... By asking yourself questions about life, about your self and consciousness, about your role in nature and your place in society, you are in fact attaining a more meaningful existence. Whether you are a monotheist, a polytheist, or an atheist the life we have now is but a part of a journey, and we want to know how to make the best of that journey. For me, I understand it as I am a cog in the wheel of nature – one stage in the nutrient cycle. So what are we to do here? Do we have a purpose? Is there a path? These are all questions that are necessary to living a meaningful existence, simply because they are questions. Everyday we are bombarded with facts, from classes to news programs to internet sites. And yet this information is useless without understanding its deeper meaning, its context within history and the present, and its application to your existence. You have come here to explore, gain knowledge, and in doing so give greater meaning to your life. Let us help each other in this quest, and feel better everyday. Life is a process, the means are the end. And once that is understood the process of living will begin…