Just this month the front cover of Forbes called Monsanto “Seed Heroes”.

(hack, cough, cough) Balderdash.

I may buy a copy just so I can frame that cover as evidence that Forbes has abandoned even the pretext of journalistic integrity and cannot be trusted to be truthful in any matter whatsoever.

The linked video, about the effects of chemical farming in India, is instructive. I know that your time is valuable. I’m asking for 30 minutes of it with the promise that I will not waste even a single minute. Start by viewing the video for the first 26 minutes.

Then, with the other 4 minutes, read and meditate on Revelation 11:18 — especially that last clause.

“But the nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time for the dead to be judged, and to give [their] reward to your slaves the prophets and to the holy ones and to those fearing your name, the small and the great, and to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”

Look around you at the synthetic material in your home, your clothing, your containers, your car, your workplace, your places of worship and recreation and the vendors you do business with. And anyplace else that you can think of that I left off the list.

Most plastics NEVER biodegrade and putting them at curbside for pickup does NOT take care of the problem: the plastic is still on the planet … and so are you. Using them willingly makes us just as guilty of ruining the earth as their manufacturers, because we are the ones who provide the economic justification for their manufacture. No acceptance = no consumption = no sale = no manufacture.

As I write this, I move my plastic mouse around on a foam rubber mat and type on a plastic keyboard on my plastic laptop full of phenolic resin circuit boards and powered by a lithium battery. It’s sitting on a wood composition desk that contains, among other things, formaldehyde binding the termite puke together and some sort of vinyl, paper and ink fake wood grain surface treatment. Thank you, Sauder, for a desk that could have cost me thousands of dollars to have made in wood, but only a few hundred to slide out of a box and assemble on site.

Now, do you think you could do the same thing without the poisons?

I humbly acknowledge that the problem of getting plastic out of our lives and pesticide out of our foods is not a simple one; but somewhere along the line we’ve at least got to try. Pitching the existing plastic and using hemp grocery shopping bags is just a symbolic gesture, not the cure … the pitched bags have nowhere to go. But it is, at the very least, a start.

Do you remember when Madison Avenue was pitching us to change from paper grocery bags to plastic ones? We were told that the plastic was a lot cheaper to use and it was implied that this would favorably impact the cost of groceries. Well, the money difference is perhaps 3-5 cents per bag against the paper version which never seems to have shown up in MY grocery receipts, but the environmental difference is totally lopsided against the plastic. Paper versions decompose biologically … eventually becoming new trees. Or zucchini, or something else living. On the other hand, the plastic versions photo degrade until they are small enough to enter the food chain and then begin the march up that chain to your dinner plate. Even when they have degraded all the way down to the molecular level, that molecule is still an indigestible long chain polymer; some of which are mistaken by the endocrine system for the hormone estradiol.

Someone in Great Britain with too much time on their hands calculated that the average work life of the million or so plastic bags used in that country PER DAY was only about 7 minutes. Its lifetime after that is measured in millennia.

Plural.

I mention the plastic because we in America may be willing to accept birth defects in India as simply a sad fact of life … especially since it lowers the price of almonds for us. But are we willing to accept plastics in the edible portions of our own foods? The point being, we will not ‘get off the dime’ until we perceive a direct and significant threat to ourselves.

Monsanto makes the chemicals used in India. It also holds most of the GMO patents and sells roughly 70% of the world’s seeds. And it also makes a mountain of plastic each and every year. This DOES affect us and, unlike the people in India, we are actually in a position to take action against it.

– Bill

If you’ve read this far, you are probably also interested in at least a few of the additional videos at the bottom of the linked video page.