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Depleted Soils=Depleted Health
Modern man's achievements in the increase of wealth have been wonderful, but all the while Nature quietly has been revealing the divine laws of life by his physical impoverishment. We hear in these days the cliche of poverty in thc midst of plenty, that poverty has become an anachronism. Meanwhile a greater and more radical poverty continually steals upon us and is accepted.
Date: 5/19/2009 7:26:24 AM ( 15 y ) ... viewed 1554 times
May 19, 09
5:22 AM
I highly recommend that you look over
Chapter 10 of
THE WHEEL OF HEALTH.
Also please take a look
at AN ESSAY ON MAN,
these excepts from
ALEXANDER POPE,
below....
Chapter ten
Progress by Recoil
{Recoil=Wrench uses the word the way we use the word Recovery today...]]
http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0203cat/020301wrench/02030100frame.html
This MS is on line.
I will be referring to this chapter in
COME ALIVE! This Wendesday night,
May 20.
That is indeed a deplorable picture of the impoverishment of modern civilized man, but one which we know is not untrue.
It is but the final picture of the impoverishment of our soils, an impoverishment forced upon us because we did not possess the almost unimaginable foresight that was needed to feed the rapidly growing urban populations of the industrial era.
Here is a picture of a soil and animal impoverishment from one of the most distant.providers of London and other big towns of England. It is taken from Sir John Orr's excellent treatise On Minerals in Pastures.
"Munro reports that in the Falkland Islands sheep have been reared and exported for forty years without any return to the soil to replace the minerals removed. During the last twenty years it has become increasingly difficult to rear lambs. The other animals are also deteriorating." The sheep are exported to the United Kingdom, and with them goes the mineral food of the soil which they represent.
This is a typical instance of what is a widespread loss due to the same causes. "The process of depletion," Orr writes:
"and the resulting deterioration which shows itself in decreased rate of growth and production, and in extreme cases by the appearance of disease, is proceeding on all pastures from which milk, carcases or other animal products are taken off without a corresponding replacement being made. Accompanying the visible movement of milk and beef, there is a slow invisible flow of fertility. Every cargo of beef or milk products, every shipload of bones, leaves the exporting country so much the poorer. In many of the grazing grounds of the world this depletion has become a serious economic problem. In Scotland, for example, generation after generation of sheep have been taken off the hills with little compensatory returns. Accompanying the resulting deterioration of the pasture, the stocks tend to be reduced in the rough hill grazings. . . . This process of depletion of the Scotch hills has been going on with increasing rapidity since the time when the produce of the animals, instead of being consumed on the land and therefore returned to the soil, began to be driven off to be consumed in the industrial areas. There are now districts in the Highlands which could not support populations which once lived there, even though the people were willing to accept the standard of living of their ancestors.
"Richardson has recently called attention to the effects of depletion in Victoria. He has estimated that the soil of Victoria has been depleted to the extent of about 360,000 tons of phosphoric acid during the last sixty years, through the removal of phosphates in the exported meat, meal and other animal products, and that nearly 2,000,000 tons of super-phosphate would need to be added to the pasturelands to restore them to the condition they were in about 1860. He attributes malnutrition in stock to the resulting deficiency of phosphorus in the pastures.
"In our own country this process of depletion has been going on for many years, especially in hill pastures, and it is probable that the recognized decrease in the value of hill pastures in certain areas, owing to the increase in the diseases and mortality of sheep, is associated with the gradual process of the impoverishment of the pasture and its soil.
"There is evidence that the same process of depletion has taken place in India. During the years 1920-25 over 520,000 tons of bones have been exported without any compensating return to the soil. The evidence presented before the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India shows that there has been in recent years a marked deterioration in cattle."
McCarrison himself was an emphatic witness to this deterioration, and the need of co-ordination of all forms of research, nutritional, medical, veterinary, and agricultural.
The waste of western civilization is summed up by King in these words: "On the basis of the data of Wolff, Kellner, and Carpenter, or of Hall, the people of the United States and of Europe are pouring into the sea, lakes or rivers, and into underground waters from 5,794,300 to 12,000,000 pounds of nitrogen, 1,881,900 to 4,151,000 pounds of potassium, and 777,200 to 3,057,600 pounds of phosphorous per million of adult population annually, and this waste we esteem one of the achievements of our civilization."
This waste shows some of the impoverishment of the soil, which is the canvas on.which Sihle painted the poor picture of modern man. The picture is framed in a golden frame. Modern man's achievements in the increase of wealth have been wonderful, but all the while Nature quietly has been revealing the divine laws of life by his physical impoverishment. We hear in these days the cliche of poverty in thc midst of plenty, that poverty has become an anachronism. Meanwhile a greater and more radical poverty continually steals upon us and is accepted.
Suflicient has been said, it is hoped, to show that there is a desirability for the individual westerner to pay heed to the food-methods of a people who "still in great measure succeed in approximating to the ideal of health."
STUDY MATERIALS
for CLASS TWO OF
COME ALIVE!
Alexander Pope,
An ESSAY ON MAN;
Please reflect on this:
"See plastic nature working to this end"(Epistle 3, line 9).
Here Pope uses a common word that back then meant something different than what we usually attribute to the word today. Plastic is more commonly a noun today, we would likely use the word plasticity if we were looking for the meaning of Pope's use of "plastic". The footnote says that "plastic" refers to the "formative power accorded to nature by God"(139). I speculate that if Pope wrote this today he would use the word plasticity, or something similar, but certainly not plastic. The mutability of nature however, is well related here and througout the poem.
http://people.stu.ca/~hunt/18c/33360102/finlwebs/GSDWY/rudee.htm
http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/apope/bl-apope-essay-3.htm
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul;
That, chang'd thro' all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth, as in th' aethereal frame,
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives thro' all life, extends thro' all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns,
As the rapt seraph that adores and burns:
To him no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.
Cease then, nor order imperfection name:
Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.
Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, Heav'n bestows on thee.
Submit. In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing pow'r,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good.
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, 'Whatever is, is right.'
from AN ESSAY ON MAY
EPISTLE ONE
From EPISTLE THREE:
Look round our world; behold the chain of love
Combining all below and all above.
See plastic nature working to this end,
The single atoms each to other tend,
Attract, attracted to, the next in place
Form'd and impell'd its neighbour to embrace.
See matter next, with various life endu'd,
Press to one centre still, the gen'ral good.
See dying vegetables life sustain,
See life dissolving vegetate again:
All forms that perish other forms supply,
(By turns we catch the vital breath, and die)
Like bubbles on the sea of matter born,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return.
Nothing is foreign; parts relate to whole;
One all-extending, all-preserving soul
Connects each being, greatest with the least;
Made beast in aid of man, and man of beast;
All serv'd, all serving: nothing stands alone;
The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.
Has God, thou fool! work'd solely for thy good,
Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food?
Who for thy table feeds the wanton fawn,
For him as kindly spread the flow'ry lawn:
Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings?
Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings.
Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat?
Loves of his own and raptures swell the note.
The bounding steed you pompously bestride,
Shares with his lord the pleasure and the pride.
Is thine alone the seed that strews the plain?
The birds of heav'n shall vindicate their grain.
Thine the full harvest of the golden year?
Part pays, and justly, the deserving steer:
The hog, that plows not, nor obeys thy call,
Lives on the labours of this lord of all.
Know, nature's children all divide her care;
The fur that warms a monarch, warm'd a bear.
While man exclaims, 'See all things for my use!'
'See man for mine!' replies a pamper'd goose:
And just as short of reason he must fall,
Who thinks all made for one, not one for all.
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