Sterility: Packaging and Packages
Or
We all live in a Sterilnation
Fertility gods
The Hebrews searched for the Promised Land following a promise made to father Abraham of a great nation coming forth from his seed. These stories of history of captivity and freedom inform our present prophets as people seeing a more whole connected way of relating, a story of the goodness of the seed bearing fruitful and commandment on our seed to be multiplying. Every seed bearing fruit the humans were given, and blessed. It was good. However, the Babylonian creation stories, such as the stories from the capital of the empire Babylonian, Babylonia were violent, describing a god slicing through the body of a lover god such as the Enuma elish. They were people of the land, and then they were enslaved. During this captivity with the Babylonians and the Egyptians, this great story of creation emerged. For four hundred years of wondering the temptation to worship Baal was all around them falling from captive land to captive land, left wandering. Baal worship. I remember that from red felt boards with Elijah vs. The Empire showing-down, whose god is the true god. All the Baal priests holding snakes, crying, commanded disconnected sexual encounters, prophets on a mountaintop. and violence. Infants were usually burned to appease and win favor from Baal the god of false fertility. The Baal worshippers stood all around showing favor with rain and lush harvest. The harvest has now turned from the people to profit laying an economy of warfare and violence. The modern equivalent of the worship of fertility gods would be Monsanto, the patentee of genetic seed code, wartime chemicals, producer of round-up ready, fertilizers, pesticides, proven to cause male infertility: Seed- sperm, deformers. Perhaps we can unpack the current state of agriculture and some of the violence on the land and people. Here are a few stories that I’ve heard about the obsession of sterility and it’s relationship to the food that we eat, becoming an imperial system that has come to capture our collective prophetic imagination. One day the organic farmers will stand-up and sue Monsanto holding them liable for the war crimes they have committed on land and people, in the seed. One day our imaginations will be freed to see the enslavement of the consumption of plastic.
Sterility
Here are three stories and how I’ve seen the culture of sterility holding captive of understanding our food in relationship with packaging and our bodies:
1. Once a fourth grader in one of my Art Classes was working on her collage. Pitied an African mother breastfeeding her child in a National Geographic Magazine during our art class, “Aw, look at how poor she is.”
2. When I work with young adults we really get to know each other. One tweenager came to the Eve’s Garden Cooking Classes this summer and said, “I only eat salad from McDonalds, I don’t like knowing where it comes from.” Truth be told, I don’t really want to know all the terrible consequences of the industrial food system either.
3. And the Chicken Cowboys who keep the hens at our farm asserted in the beginning that they “only eat eggs from the store.” Now they love these eggs, after they’ve tasted them.
On NPR this summer there was a story about the rise of persistent and chronic digestive diseases in recent decades. The report suggests that disease conditions such as Celiac disease, Crohn's disease, diverticulitis and ulcers are perhaps connected with the loss of almost all of the “parasites” in our system. How have we killed all the parasites? Perhaps it has something to do with the over-obsession of using antibacterial handsoap 45 times a day, treating our fruit and vegetables with it to clean them, filling our herds with antibiotics, filling our waterways residually. Like compost our stomachs digest as a system, now perhaps the obsessive culture of sterility is what is making us sicker, in epidemic proportions. How we wrap our packaging is that, it’s only the packaging of the whole problem of the industrialization, patriarchy, and the dualistic system. There are many unintended consequences of society that are never calculated within the externalities of false health for clay bodies.
Take for example the current famine in Africa. When pesticides and round-up ready are used in growing millet the fields are ploughed and harvested straight and deep planted with one type of seed, maybe even using a tractor. With traditional methods of agriculture the plants growing between the rows known as the native plants or the “weeds” were in fact the source of great protein, subsistence. Between the rows are hundreds of varieties of edible plants such as ragi and red root, finger millet also known as “famine food” all over eastern Africa. When pesticides and herbicides are sprayed the native plants and the grasshopper protein snacks were just poisoned and died. Africans are left with struggling grains that do not produce as much protein as the grasshoppers that would have been eaten that were killed to grow the millet in the first place. The insect population is a high source of protein, commonly eaten parts of Africa, particularly during times of drought and hunger.
Sterile Packages
Since the industrial revolution and the emergence of military developed petroleum made plastics, DDT, and processed food, we have sterilized the food and the people. By no mean do I claim to be an expert of the human body, especially not themale reproductive organs, but the plastics in water bottles are making men infertile. Estrogen is in our drinking water and plastic bottles have been known to release synthetic estrogene-mimicing chemical hormones. As written in Contribution of environmental factors to the risk of male infertility in the Oxford Journey “We have shown that environmental factors contribute to the severity of infertility, and that this may worsen the effects of pre-existing genetic or medical risk factors” naming both drinking from plastic and farming chemicals as both examples of causing male infertility and chemical persistence flowing in our waters and spigot. It’s not only the men, 24% of migrant farmerworker ladies have reported having miscarriages. 88% of the farmworkers in the United States are Latino. A Latino working in the fields in California is at an up to 69% greater risk of developing cervical, uterine, stomach cancer, and leukemia. Not only are the workers who grow most of the food in this country more likely to become sick, approximately 2/5 of all Latinos in the U.S. are uninsured (during 2008, compared to 14.1 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 16 percent for Asians/Pacific Islanders.)
Packaging Quiz
What percentage of trash is made up of discarded packaging wastes?
A. 70%
B. 30-40%
C. 5%
What percentage of our garbage is plant matter and can be composted?
A. 25-30
B. 80
C. 3
Which country has 6% of the world's population and produces half of the world's garbage?
A. The Soviet Union
B. China
C. The United States
Added together the food that we waste and how we package it makes up over two-thirds of all that we discard. I find hope in some sort of systemic legislations, or policies that would very quickly decrease the amount of trash and recyclables that are created. Think of all of the resources that could be made if instead we created a valuable soil out of the food that we don’t eat, and if it’s packaging were compostable, all made with intention in design. Whether the material is recyclable or not, this socio-ecological measure needs to be reflected in cost calculations. Taxes based on the mass of the material, separate from weight need to be included. It is important to recognize that recycling has a carbon footprint. Diesel trucks are still carrying our recyclables “away.” The engines sort, chomp, jibble, crush, stack, and process the material where it is then processed into the next material, in the recycling process Even what we do with our recycled cardboard is ludicrous. I recently went down to the recycling facility to ask for some cardboard for a new citywide Camden Farms initiative. I went into the office to ask for a donation of cardboard, “Hi, I’m Andrea I’ve been bringing to you my cardboard for about eight years, and have helped to greatly increase the amount of cardboard that you receive each year through education initiatives around the city, I’d like a donation of cardboard to help build some new gardens around the city.” The cardboard conversation followed,
“I’m sorry I can’t give you cardboard,” him.
“Ok, I’d like to buy it,” me
“I only sell it by the ton” him.
“Perfect” me.
“ $157 a ton,” him.
“I’d like to buy one ton of cardboard” me.
I only take checks” him.
“Great” me.
“We only sell our cardboard to China.”
There they make it into recycled paper, crossing seas to make recyclables.
Plasticsea
One day this summer I was walking with a friend across the beach. We talked about everything great that’s going on in Camden, and at the end of the conversation, Madeline inspired said, “that’s amazing. People will be so connected with the beauty that’s surrounding them everywhere, that they won’t throw down their trash anymore in Camden.” We walked toward the salty-air and the line between blue-green -gray sea and sky. With sand between the toes I walked up to another friend, Robin sitting in her chair looking out far into the sea with the eyes of wisdom and children. She said, “Andrea, I walked to the pier and back, as the tide was coming in and picked up six garbage bags of plastics.” I looked to the pier a dozen blocks up the beach and watched family after family picking up their chairs to move from the approaching water, leaving their trash behind like at a movie theater or baseball stadium. This beach is full of rather upwardly mobile individuals, in one of the more well to do beaches in our area. It could be more obvious the plastics are meeting a sea of plastics. They go into the sea, one of our most beautiful and important resources. Everything is meaningless walking around with cellophane wrapped glasses on our selaphane wrapped faces. Oh my God, how can we take off this packaging?!! Within the captivity of sterility in which we now stand the act of sharing our stories is the only liberator. Tell stories that are good, full of truth, and daring. Find yourself between here and not yet; knowing that perhaps the greatest act of love we may ever hold is to conceive the words, of the reality of our human experience grounded in the goodness of the earth.
If you imagine a see-saw, apply it’s motion into the mathematics of tipping point, cause a revolution on your playground, eat food that falls on the floor, don’t wash your pillow cases as much as you wash your underwear, and sit close to your friends as they breastfeed. It has been said that not all people need to enact cultural change in order for it to become an inevitable trend. In fact, not even 50%. The momentum has mass that overcomes the natural law of gravity, a tipping point only needs 17%-33% to begin to swing.
One of the best examples of community based sustainable development is near the edge of the Amazon Forest in Colombia. The community called Gaviotas (http://www.friendsofgaviotas.org/) located in a place where it once hardly rained, where the trees had all been cut down at the edge of the forest. In their permaculture design as a community of a few hundred people they started to replant the forest trees, and they realized it started to rain again. They had regenerated their aquifer and began a bottled water business out of waste-stream bio-plastics, harvesting the water at a sustainable rate, designing the bottles to be like big legos. Rather than being thrown away, they are reused, filled with sand and interlocked as bricks for construction. The empty bottles are not a waste, they are a valuable resource.
The chicken cowboys walk with their mother on Saturdays to pick up cans in the vacant lots around the neighborhood, sell each one for coins, and save all their money. They see cash as they walk down the street craving to bend down by every thrown can of the neighborhood. Transform your problems into resources, Practice Resurrection.
http://cwmi.css.cornell.edu/TrashGoesToSchool/Trash.html
http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/latino/english/latino_en.pdf
