THE ORGANIC IS MECHANIZED

        Today the organic, what is left of it, is fully mechanized under
the aegis of a few petrochemical corporations.  Their artificial
fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and near-monopoly of the world's seed
stock defines a total environment that integrates food production from
planting to consumption.  Although Levi-Strauss is right that
"Civilization manufactures monoculture like sugar beet," only since World
War II has a completely synthetic orientation began to dominate.
        Agriculture itself takes more organic matter out of the soul that
it puts back, and soil erosion is basic to the monoculture of annuals.
Regarding the latter, some are promoted with devastating results to the
land; along with cotton and soybeans, corn, which in its present
domesticated state is totally dependent on agriculture for its existence,
is especially bad.  J. Russell Smith called it "the killer of continents
... and one of the worst enemies of the human future."  The erosions cost
of one bushel of Iowa corn is two bushels of topsoil, highlighting the
more general large-scale industrial destruction of farmland.  The
continuous tillage of huge monoculture, with massive use of chemicals and
no application of manure or humas, obviously raised soul deterioration and
solid loss to much higher levels.
        The dominant agricultural mode had it that soil needs massive
infusions of chemicals, supervised by technians whose overriding goal is
to maximize production.  Artificial fertilizers and all the rest from this
outlook eliminate the need for the complex life of the soul and indeed
convert it into a mere instrument of production.  The promise of
technology is total control, a completely contrived environment that
simply supersedes the natural balance of the biosphere.
        But more and more energy is expended to purchase great monocultural
yields that are beginning to decline, never mind the toxic contamination
of the soil, groundwater and food.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture
says that cropland erosion is ocuring in this country at a rate of two
million tons of soil a year.  The National Academy of Sciences estimates
that over one third of topsoil is already gone forever.  The ecological
imbalance caused by monocroping and synthetic fertilizers causes enormous
increases in pests and crop diseases; since World War II, crop loss die to
insects has actually doubled.  Technology responds, of course, with
spiraling application of more synthetic fertilizers, and weed and pest
killers, accelerating the crime against nature.
        Another post-war phemoninon was the Green Revolution, billed as
the salvation of the impoverished Third World by American capital and
technology.  But rather than feeding the hungry, the Green Revolution
drove millions of poor people from farmlands in Asia, Latin America and
Africa as victims of the program that fosters large corporate farms.  It
amounted to an enormous technological colonization creating dependency on
capital-intensive agribusiness, destroying older agrarian communalism,
requiring massive fossil fuel consumption and assaulting nature on an
unprecedented scale.
        Desertification, or loss of soil due to agriculture, has been
steadily increasing.  Each year, a total area equivalent to more than two
Belguims is being converted to desert worldwide.  The fate of the world's
tropical rainforests is a factor in the acceleration of this dessication:
half of them have been erased in the past 30 years.  In Botswana, the last
wilderness region of Africa has disappeared like much of the Amazon jungle
and almost half the rainforests of Central America, primarily to raise
cattle for the hamburger markets in the US and Europe.  The few areas safe
from deforestation are where agriculture doesn't want to go: the
destruction of the land proceeding in the US over greater land area than
was encompassed by the original 13 colonies, just as it is at the heart of
the sever African famine of the mid-'80s and the extinction of one species
of wild animal and plant after another.
        Returning to animals, one is reminded of the words of Genenis in
which God said to Noah, "And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be
upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon
all the fishes of the sea; into your hands are they delivered."  When
newly discovered territory was first visited by the advance guards of
production, as wide descriptive literature shows, the wild mammals and
birds show no fear whatsoever of the explorers.  The agriculturalized
mentality, however, so aptly foretold in the biblical passage, projects an
exaggerated belief in the fierceness of wild creatures, which follows from
progressive estrangement and loss of contact with the animal world plus
the need to maintain dominance over it.
        The fate of domestic animals is defined by the fact that
agricultural technologists continually look to factories as models of how
to refine their own production systems.  Nature is banished from these
systems as, increasingly, farm animals are kept largely immobile throughout
their deformed lives, maintained in high-density, wholly artificial
environments.  Billions of chickens, pigs and veal calves, for example, no
longer even see the light of day much less roam the fields -- fields
growing silent as more and more pastured are plowed up to grow feed for
these hideously confined being.
        The high-tech chickens, whose beak-ends have been clipped off to
reduce death due to stress-caused fighting, often exists four or even five
to a 13 inch by 18 inch cage and are periodically deprived of food and
water for up to ten days to regulate their egg-laying cycles.  Pigs live
on concrete floors with no bedding; foot-rot, tail-biting and cannibalism
are epidemic because of physical conditions and stress.  Sows nurse their
piglets sepperated by metal grates, mother and offspring barred from
natural contact.  Veal calves are often raised in total darkness, chained
to stalls so narrow as to disallow turning around or other normal postural
adjustment.  These animals are generally under regimens of constant
medication due to the tortures involved and their heightened
susceptibility to diseases: automated animal production relies upon
hormones and antibiotics.  Such systematic cruelty, not to mention the
kind of food that results, brings to mind the fact that captivity itself
and every form of enslavement has agriculture as its progenitor and model.