Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Back in January I wrote a piece detailing the absurd reliance and insistence on widespread chemical usage in agriculture.

There is something I would like to draw attention to: a stunning collaborative journalism piece titled “Revealed: the US government-funded ‘private social network’ attacking pesticide critics“ exposing the lengths to which the chemical industry will go to discredit other lines of thought or inquiry shines light on an important piece of the industrial agricultural model: the obscene power behind agricultural market forces. It is a big win for consumers, farmers, and science that this work was published and the realities of the active attacks from chemical industries on other ways of pursuing agriculture or science have been exposed to the light.

The history of science is a hobby topic of mine, and there is something remarkable about how many times throughout history society has actively fought against accepting a new truth. Each time, science prevails. Society at large in 2024 does not believe the earth is in the centre of the universe…no matter how hard the church tried to suppress it in the 16th century. Nor do we widely all agree that we have to let our blood out to cure tuberculosis, common practice through the 19th century.

We now live in an age where hundreds of billions of dollars are all it takes to influence public policy and stymie scientific research. In other words…the dollar has replaced the church as the power centre of our time.

There are many legitimate lines of scientific inquiry into how plants work, and how plant intelligence reacts to different stimuli. While these efforts are slowed significantly by the chemical lobby as shown in the journalism, they will not be stopped.

This line of scientific inquiry can be traced quite a ways back, but it begins to get really interesting with Charles Darwin, who published many thoughts and questions to be explored further with regard to plants and plant behaviour. His final book was on earthworms…an organism with profound effects that are conspicuously absent from modern chemical agricultural systems.

I am stunned by how, when I look at my first university Botany textbook from the mid-2000’s, how much knowledge of plants has leapt forward. It seems so simple and chemical in retrospect. Science is beginning to catch up to what many wise sages scattered throughout the ages have known: that plants are biological organisms and exist in a symbiotic fashion with the ecology that immediately surrounds them. More and more evidence comes out – at a faster and faster pace – that plants are actively creating and sustaining these symbiosis via the products of photosynthesis. The textbooks are being continuously re-written at this important and fascinating period of time. Big discoveries and insights are inevitable.

It would be very inconvenient for the chemical industry to be upturned by knowledge that changes the way we see plants…all plants, but especially the ones we consume.

For the sake of our planet and our species, the sooner we come to terms with the fact that we are the only known lifeboat in the entire universe, the sooner we can begin to repair the damage we have done. The first step is to highly regulate and legislate these chemicals out of existence.

There will come a time when humans will think of applying synthetic chemicals to plants as absurd as the idea of purposely leaking blood to cure turberculosis.

In my opinion, that time cannot come soon enough.

Graham

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