Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Commodity and chemical-based agriculture has many profound effects and one of the most overlooked ones is evolution driven by mass-scale global chemical application. It is also one of the most Sisyphean: the solution is always more powerful chemicals.

Recently Reuters reported that weeds are becoming resistant to multiple chemical herbicides. It is wild that the headline for this article includes the term “crop-killing weeds” in an article which is effectively about the consequences of the act of pouring billions of gallons of toxic chemicals all over the place for several decades. The article mentions not just glyphosate but all of its chemical successors, and announces – astoundingly – that a new chemical is planned to be launched in 2026.

It is stunning, absolutely stunning, that we allow this to happen as though there are no other alternatives, that we have no choice, that it must be done for the good of this or that or the other. The anthropocentric view that humans are superior to or above nature, that we are immune to the consequences of our own absurd inventions, that the life around us is lesser than – less evolved, simple, or stupid – is the central philosophical hubris that drives these sad “innovations.”

Evolution is really simple.

A farmer can nuke a field with whichever chemical for whichever pest, insect, plant or otherwise. If one thing survives the chemical attack it will live to produce resistant offspring, and with lifecycles of one year or less, the results show themselves in a matter of years.

Commodity agriculture’s two largest enemies are weeds and insects, both things which have spent 2 billion years perfecting the ability to survive. They will not be done in by human-invented chemicals, that we spray wantonly, with little oversight, and with the assurance of lobbyists, and governments eager to help powerful companies. They have survived the paraquat, the atrazine, the glyphosate, the 2-4D, the dicamba. They will survive the next one. Here is another article from Reuters that is 12 years old warning of resistance in GMO crops.

The most incredible thing in this hamster wheel is the amount of resources spent on inventing new chemicals. It is not only the invention of the chemical, but also the accompanying GMO-infused organism: a new chemical will need an updated GMO crop. The farmer who has voluntarily signed up for the hamster wheel will need to throw down $$$ for both. The cycle never ends, the organisms evolve out, and we are back to square one. The winners here are the companies, who continue to profit, and the shareholders, who continue to profit. The entire system is based on a belief that there is no other way.

The losers are consumers, the environment, our broader public health, and the health of the environment we live in. The chemical residue is on the food you eat and accumulates in body tissues (killing hundreds of thousands per year, and untold more cancers and birth defects), it has entered the wildlife food chain and had catastrophic effects on insects and bids, it has lodged itself in soil, or washed into ditches and waterways, where it can affect groundwater, where humans get the opportunity to ingest it a second time.

In 2024, we have now experienced approximately 100 years of mass-scale applications of chemicals globally, which exploded following World War II when industries and technologies focused on war were directed instead to civilians and domestic markets.

It is enormously profitable.

If the same amount that has been spent on this agricultural chemical bondage since the end of WWII had instead been spent on research on the collective ecological function of plants, and how to leverage the systems that nature has already developed for agriculture, we would not only have a much deeper knowledge of how all life is interconnected but we would have achieved some degree of broader societal understanding of how nature functions. More importantly…farmers themselves would be transformed into ecosystem engineers and plant experts, instead of relegating themselves to paths to profit for shareholders, chemical delivery agents and unwitting evolutionary experimentalists.

World War II ended, but we have been fighting another war this entire time. A war against nature and our planet. A war denying and suppressing biology in favour of the belief in our own superior power and supposed intelligence.

Words from Rachel Carson’s beautiful and influential book Silent Spring published in 1962:

“The whole process of spraying seems caught up in an endless spiral. Since DDT was released for civilian use, a process of escalation has been going on in which ever more toxic materials must be found. This has happened because insects, in a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular insecticide used, hence a deadlier one has always to be developed – and then a deadlier one than that…Thus the chemical war is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.”

This book read today, contains within it the terrifying realization that the numbers, figures and facts cited were already astronomical for the time, and that it has largely continued unabated, for the intervening 62 years.

“The production of synthetic pesticides in the United States soared from 124, 259, 000 pounds in 1947 to 637, 666, 000 pounds in 1960 – more than a fivefold increase. The wholesale value of these products was well over a quarter of a billion dollars. But in the plans and hopes of the industry this enormous production is only a beginning.”

According to the United Nations, the number of pounds of pesticides used in North America alone in 2020 was over 1 billion pounds.

It is the wish of the author of this blog that this chemical insanity stops during his lifespan. It is time we stop being hoodwinked by the promises of these massive and powerful companies.

I believe that the more one knows about the natural world, the more phenomenal and incredible it seems, the more in awe you are of it: for when you learn what plants are capable of you can only draw one conclusion…that plants are intelligent. It is in this insight that one realizes that the concepts of consciousness and intelligence, applied to the human race, are often mutually exclusive.

“Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.” – E.B. White

Graham

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