Just this month Forbes called Monsanto heroes.

(hack, cough, cough) Balderdash. I try not to use stronger words, but they would certainly apply.

I should probably post this link on my long-neglected organic gardening blog and, after I post it here, I might just do that.

But this blog gets somewhat more traffic and I think that this 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 that 30 minutes. Start by viewing the film 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. 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. And 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 the 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 in its glue and some sort of vinyl, paper and ink fake wood grain surface treatment. Thank you, Sauder.

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. Just 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.

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.

If you’ve read this far, I would also direct your attention to the list of additional videos at the bottom of the linked video page.