Jungle Tales – Part 1

Think about it! The vast sums of money spent manufacturing, transporting and broadcasting chemical fertilizer is staggering. To exacerbate matters the raw material that is used to make all these super duper fertilizers just happens to be oil. And guess what the world is running out of oil! 

So the executive summary is simply this, mankind is addicted to oil in the way the fabled marijuana addict needs his daily joint just to get by – and like all addicts, he is only preoccupied with the present and cares very little for the future. 

Wonder no more why agriculture as we know it these days is driven mainly by a few multinationals such as Monsanto and Behn Meyer – the shocking aggressiveness and recklessness by which these firms ply their trade makes Detroit look like a glue sniffer — and as a result it has deepened the divide between knowledge and ignorance, emancipation and bondage, as these evil juggernauts have all but leveled down the field of possibilities on how best to increase yield.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. I can fashion my plantation into a model for the others to follow. 

You see. I happen to read alot. There used to be a time not so very long ago when planters in antiquity used to fertilize the land and traded the black arts by sitting underneath a tree while chugging down fermented coconut moonshine. Since the rise of multinationals every principle of agriculture, every lesson learned over hundreds of thousands of years, every single credo of nourishing the land in the old way has frittered away — all those tersely stated, manly things that made up the legend of the real planter has all but disappeared – it has has been picked apart and, for the most part, discarded and lost. No thanks to a large part to brainless wonders likes of Philip Yeo et al who once proclaimed, there is no agriculture and proceeded to dismantle all research in this area. Today when we look at the tumultuous events unfolding in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia et al – we are beginning to see the first fissures of a new dawn that I call the age of acute resource scarcity – this simple fact is still unbeknown to the masses, but the world may have reached a tipping point when it can no longer produce enough to feed itself. And it stands to reason why Ali Baba in Cairo is taking to the streets as he can no longer afford to put naan on the table for his family despite breaking his back from dawn to dusk – so what does he have to lose? 

There has to be another way and the secret lies deep in the interior of the jungle, where it is not uncommon for to trees grow tall and strong without commercial fertilizers. I have seen how tribesmen frequently nourish the soil with fish entrails, blood, bone, egg shells, dung and what we normally consider waste – so far no one has really bothered to do any research into this area. I consider this a great omission.

To cut a long story short – the guilds think that I have lost my marbles and many see me as some Col Kurtz caricature who has gone pear shaped – as they consider this whole idea of dumping money into agriculture passé – so they refuse to reconsider this proposition. In reality most of them don’t want to get dirt underneath their finger nails. 

So this leaves me with very little choice. We will just have to go deeper. But one thing is certain when and if I get back to civilization, I am going to whoop those pencil pushers by presenting a killer paper in the next Confederation meet in Munich!

You see I believe form this point onwards, the world has no choice but to return back to basics; the human race is not so different from a jet plane that has reached the upper limits of it’s flight envelop, push it any further and everything will just fall to bits and that leaves only one theoretical possibility – it will have to come down to earth.

Darkness 2011