Supermarkets present a very seductive picture to the consumer, but just under the surface it is a different story.

Research carried out in the UK some 15 years ago revealed that the average distance travelled by the food in a typical supermarket trolley is more than 3,000 kilometers. Most”fresh” produce is at least 4 days old and has passed through a number of processing and storage plants, involving subjection to very different temperature fluctuations, before getting onto the shelves. In the process, there is a loss of between 40 and 50% of the nutritional value of these foods.

„Sell by dates” are routinely altered in many chains, to keep fresh looking produce longer. Staff are paid very low rates and, in more than one known chain, have to wear nappies, as they are not given sufficient breaks to go to the toilet.

Huge power requirements are needed to maintain freezer and cold storage facilities, drawing heavilly on the national grid and thereby encouraging wasteful practices that increase already critical global warming patterns. They use excessive, non biodegradeable packaging and contribute significantly to Britain’s vast saturated rubbish tips.

Being able to buy “anything at any time” comes at a high price to our environment and farmers. The large supermarket chains buy their supplies from wherever it is produced at the lowest cost on the world market. Organic and conventional. This involves contracting large agrichemical oriented farms to mass produce “cheap” food. Because the price paid is very low, the farmer has to compensate by maximising production and minimising employment.

The result is the huge monocultural prairies that dominate US agriculture and have now established a significant foothold in Europe. These ‘food factories’ are entirely dependent upon chemical inputs: herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, nitrate fertilizers and increasingly, genetically modified seeds/plants. Their soils are so barren that they care incapable of producing any crops at all without heavy doses of agrichemicals.

The same applies to meat production. The great majority of farm animals, in order to be raised to strict supermarket specifications and time lines, are housed is vast sheds with very little room to move freely or express their natural physiological needs. Electric lighting is kept on night and day and most animals never see real daylight or indeed, the outside world. Pigs and chickens are routinely fed antibiotics in their heavilly processed and genetically modified feed, in order to speed up their rate of growth and prevent them from becoming sick. Inspite of this, mortality rates are high.

All chickens routinely have their beaks clipped in order to stop them pecking each other in the overcrowded cages in which they are raised. The feed of egg laying hens contains chemical colours to make the yolks look red. The farmer can choose from a wide variety of orange colourings.

When I kept hens (free range) I was sent a yolk „colour chart” by the manufacturers hoping I would buy their products!

Without these colours the yolks of hens kept in these conditions would be grey and conequently completely unacceptable. Hens require access to green foods (ie grass) to have naturally orange yolks. The hens that supply the supermarket chains never get outside. They live for an average of just 3 months before being culled and put on display on polystyrene dishes in supermarket chillers, as quick chill chicken dishes and dog/cat food. The same goes for birds specifically grown for meat: they are fed 24 hours a day on genetically modified maize and soya plus antibiotic growth promotors in vast indoor air controlled (no windows) sheds often containing upwards of 30,000 hens. They are slaughtered at an average age of 2.5 months, their under – formed leggs barely able to hold their exaggerated weight.

Pigs suffer in similar conditions as chickens. They are housed on concrete and metal slatted floors and in large artificially heated and lit sheds. They are fed on mostly antibiotic laced GM soya and the piglets are fattened and slaughtered in less than half the time of piglets raised on free range outdoor systems.

On average, dairy cattle are culled (slaughtered) after just 3 lactation cycles, because they cannot maintain the peak volumes of milk demanded by the supermarkets in their thirst for profit, beyond the age of 4/5 years. Many suffer severe mastitis inflamations of the udder and hoof rotting due to the unnatural conditions in which they are kept.

On my organic farm in the UK, my diary cattle averaged 14 years before they ceased commercial milk production. I then kept them on as nurse cows for raising calves.

Each large supermarket that gains planning permission acceptance leads to the subsequent loss of an average of 250 local jobs through the closure of local businesses (Rural Development Commission, 1992). Money which used to circulate in the local economy is lost to the global economy, thereby draining the community of its life blood.

Supermarkets and hypermarkets require special road structures to cater for their large transportation vehicles and equally large concreted delivery areas. They are major contributors to CO2 emmissions, largely because of their vast and power hungry refrigeration units, but also because they encourage families to use cars to get to them – instead of shopping locally.

Tesco’s profit margins increase every year – and are now regularly in the 3.5 billion pound area. The other large competing chains are not far behind. They are all leading exponents of a cetralised market economy and have no interest in supporting local communities or stocking local food, inspite of requests to do so from their customers. Their representatives often claim that they will take an interest in purchasing locally – to placate any critics – but in reality they source 98 percent of their produce wherever it can be purchased most cheaply and most easily on the national and world market: via farming ’sweat shops’.

All in all supermarkets and hypermarkets are at the front line of contributors to a degraded food growing environment on a global scale; inhumane animal welfare practices and the undermining of the integrity of local communities.

Any community that wishes to encourage a robust local economy would be well advised to steer well clear of such marketing practices. Individuals should think three times before spending their money in support of such irresponsible and market dominating monoliths.

Julian Rose

2010

Julian Rose

On June 6^th, one brave soul from Jasna Gora Radio News did a great service to Polish citizens. He reported on strange goings-on in the sky around Poland; reports of aeroplanes, flying high in the sky and leaving a trail of vapour behind them that did not dissolve like normal jet vapours, but stuck in the sky and filled-out into veil-like clouds, creating a haze which partly obscured the sun.

He spoke of the many people who had witnessed these events and had made contact with him. Some used binoculars to try and find out what markings these mysterious planes carried. Most, they said, were unmarked and most probably of military origin. The substance causing the trails appeared to be coming from an area near the tail fin or just below the engines and, due to the large number of aircraft criss crossing the sky, geometric patterns of white trails were steadily formed across a large area of sky. They were definitely different, said the observers, from the condensed water that freezes behind high flying jets at around 5,000 metres and then quickly dissolves and disperses into the atmosphere.

What these people were witnessing are what are commonly called “chemtrails”. ‘Chem’ because the substance being exuded from these aircraft has been analysed (by a number of laboratories around the world) and found to contain a very strange mixture of ingredients, variously reported as: Barium, Ethylene Dibromide, aluminium nano particles and silicon. Barium is a metallic substance containing a radioactive isotope; Ethylene Dibromide is a pesticide, carcinogen and chemical toxin. Aluminium nano particles are found to pollute the blood stream and are connected with Alzheimer’s disease.

Why then, would jet aircraft be spraying these elements into the atmosphere?

Firstly, it is important to know that ‘chemtrails’ are prolific, having been seen by thousands in the skies of North America and Europe on a virtually daily basis for well over ten years. Many attempts have been made by citizens in various Countries to elicit information from government bodies as to what exactly is going on? Who owns these planes? Who gives them permission to fly through sovereign air space? Exactly what are they spraying – and why are they spraying?

No clear answer has ever been given. And in many cases officials simply claim that they are just ordinary aeroplane ‘contrails’ and that there is nothing more to it.

However, we now know better. Researching the subject reveals that the US authorities have been playing with these poisoned jet trails for around two decades and have recently admitted the fact , stating that the veil of cloud resulting from these trails is intentional and is being carried out on the pretext that it may provide a solution to climate change. Reflecting back the sun’s rays and thereby providing a screen against terrestrial global warming.

In spite of the existence of an international treaty to protect the upper atmosphere, the US has managed to make these spraying activities a ‘fait accomplis’ but at the same time is refusing to provide any evidence of the ingredients of this toxic air-born cocktail. The suppression of ‘global warming’ is hardly a credible answer to what is, by any account, an extraordinary invasion of citizens rights to clean air, water and soil. Aluminium sours the soil and makes it saline, reducing crop growth and establishing a toxic chain reaction through the food chain. Nano particles make ingestion by humans and animals more pervasive and dangerous. Aluminium inhalation and digestion is also believed to have a marked destabilising/depressant effect on the neocortex.

Ethylene Dibromide is a toxic pesticide and fumigant. It is recognised as potentially lethal when inhaled regularly. It is currently used for the control of wax moths in beehives and against bark beetles and termites. It can seriously impair liver and kidney function and effect reproduction by damaging sperm cells in the testicles.

Silicon is a common matalloid more often associated with computer manufacture and mobile phones than aircraft emissions.

When one puts together the full picture of this bizarre experiment one cannot help but realise something is very badly wrong. By passing publicly the information passed on to him by observers from all over Poland, the courageous gentlemen from Jasna Gora News has helped raise our awareness. No longer will it be so easy for deniers to shout ‘lunatic!’ or ‘conspiracy!’ at those who speak honestly about what they perceive to be true. The fact is that millions of people are the unsuspecting recipients of a sinister cocktail of metals and chemicals being rained down on them quite deliberately by unmarked aircraft criss crossing the skies of Europe and North America on a continual basis.

One thing seems sure – they are not stabilising the climate. They are almost certainly destabilising it. After one particularly virulent day of ‘chemtrail’ activity in the Southern Malopolska skies early this May, the rains started – and didn’t stop for 3 weeks. Others reported similar incidence in other regions.

Could ‘chemtrails’ serve the purpose of hidden weapons of mass destruction and climate modification? Could the toxic cocktail they rain down on earth act as a suppressant of the free functioning of human intelligence and overall human health?

Are they rendering our soils toxic and at the same time inducing bizarre weather patterns that knock out traditional agricultural practices and pave the way for ‘Climate Ready’ GM crops and seeds that will then come to dominate the human food chain? More than five hundred patents for ‘Climate Ready’ GM crops and seeds are now awaiting licences in the corridors of power in Washington and Brussels.

Who is behind this culling of our planetary species?

Everyone has a right to know the answers to these questions – and to ask many more. Its a matter of life or death.

J.R.

June 7^th 2010

‘Guns drawn and warrants issued against volunteers and supporters of life saving healthy foods’?

Is this an example of the sort of ‘democracy’ that the US wishes to defend and promote throughout the world via the establishment of its 600-plus military bases in more than 60 Countries?

It’s truly shocking to read about the hysterical federal and police intimidation actions taken against ‘Rawsome’ in Los Angeles this June. An action that bluntly flaunts the law in order to impose the will of some corporate pirate determined to maintain a stranglehold on the food chain. This is a prime example of totalitarian state interference in the lives and activities of well meaning citizens.

Personally, I have not witnessed anything approaching this level of outright malevolence in Europe; nor have I heard of such incidences from others. However, there lurks in the background the barely hidden threat of heavy fines or even imprisonment for anyone considered to be participating in activities that might be deemed to be in breach of some EU or government ’sanitary and hygiene’ food regulation. Plenty of farmers have already suffered under such impositions.

The ‘bacterialogical police’ are the long arm of corporate attempts to maintain dominance over the food chain. They operate at the behest of large supermarket chains that use their vast profits to lobby Brussels to introduce ever more draconian ’standards’ upon independent family farms that fail to slot in to the monocultural centralised chain of command. Any form of ‘competition’ that might hold up attempts by big pharma and big agro to dominate the food chain – are not smiled upon. However, in Europe, ’sophisticated propaganda’ is preferred to rule by the gun.

It may even be more effective. We have had ear tagged cattle and animal passports for more than 20 years. We have been put under the cosh of centralised bureaucracy ever since the European Union introduced “The Common Agricultural Policy” in phased instalments across Europe over the past 40 years. This has meant the virtual elimination of local abattoirs, local processing plants, agricultural supply shops, family seed businesses and countryside support organisations right across the EU. ‘Real Farms’ have disappeared at the same rate as trees in tropical rain forests and desert like monocultures have taken their place, just as the GM soy and palm oil plantations continue to replace the hacked down rain forests.

However, this seemingly relentless top-down heist to install a ‘one world food chain’ is meeting increasing resistance. Resistance from farmers and from ‘consumers’. A resistance that springs from a desire to ‘take back control’ of our basic rights to simple good food and authentic quality.

In the UK there are now more clandestine house cows than before the war. More and more people are keeping and raising domestic poultry, maintaining a pig and digging a vegetable plot. Raw milk is selling out more quickly than it can be produced and new producers are coming into the market. A little revolution is under way that threatens to open a substantial chink in the corporate and state armory.

There are entrepreneurial farmers getting together to establish a ‘grass fed’ marketing regime in response to people’s wish to purchase meat with real flavour and free range status. The word ‘local’ is getting a wider and wider airing as customers seek regional authenticity, more genuine choice and less food miles. Health concerns, brought about by obsessive ‘pharmaceutical fixes’ to all symptoms and a totally degraded food supply chain, are attracting considerably wider interest in natural remedies and organic foods. Even the British House of Parliament insists on organic food on its menu – while promoting GM research and supporting Codex attempts to close down natural remedy outlets and marginalise homeopathic medicine.

All in all, one can detect a simmering renaissance of agricultural diversity stirring amongst the stalwart monocultures of European agriculture and in the newly established smallholding revival culture. There appears to be a growing (and possibly subconscious) desire amongst many (mostly town dwellers) to get their hands in the earth. If this is so, then it is a genuine survival signal that has pushed its way to the surface in a sterilized and largely urbanised environment where living on additive loaded junk foods is part and parcel of everyday life – and a fast lane to hospitalisation.

None of this is to say that the corporate powers that dominate the food chain do not maintain their steely controls. They do. The massive profit driven budgets of the Tescos and Walmarts of this world ensure an endless stream of TV adverts that create a chloroform sense of ‘food conformity’ in the great majority; but a new awareness is growing. An awareness that stems from a rising number of independent thinking people who care about their health and that of their children.

The US is not the UK and the tide of totalitarian state intervention is less advanced in Europe than in North America. But we live in globalised world where a handful of mega corporate enterprises team up with bankers and pharmaceutical/ agribusinesses to keep their world domination agendas on track. Raw milk producers are, of course, in the front line of attack. They have had the gall to offer the public a ‘living food’ that cannot help but expose the ‘dead food’ that most rely upon. This, to the state controllers in the US at least, appears to amount to an act of terrorism, where giving people a life line to health is a dangerous and subversive activity that should be snuffed out before it gets going.

But we are an irrepressible tribe. We won’t lie down. The new resistance is growing and won’t be stopped. We are establishing the new arks that will indeed be life lines for those who wish to maintain a decent, humanistic quality of life and refuse to be pushed into the darkness of an extended slavery. Fighting back against the forces of repression is a natural reaction, it is proof that we are still human beings and not automatons.

(Sir) Julian Rose is an organic farmer and founder of the Association of the UK based Unpasteurised Milk Producers and Consumers. He is President of The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside and author of the book “Changing Course for Life – Local Solutions to Global Problems” www.changingcourseforlife.info

This article is taken from www.theecologist.org

The dreams of the early organic pioneers have been subsumed into a rush for global supply chains, strict regulations and fast-selling brands

Back in 1975, when I first started converting my farm to organic agriculture, there were no standards for production and no rule book. Just a few people committed to weaning their land off agrichemicals, improving soil fertility and supporting good animal health through regular crop rotations and through the sensible applications of farm yard manure. It was about taking a caring attitude to the overall welfare of our farms and trying to engender a wide bio-diversity of species within the farmland habitat.

We were not overly concerned about financial profit, but were interested in making an adequate return on our investments and in the quality, flavour and freshness of the foods we produced. We were perhaps more mindful than most of the words of Soil Association founder, Eve Balfour, that ‘organic’ food should be mostly unrefined and distributed and consumed locally, in its optimum condition.

Happy cattle

I decided to develop my farm at Hardwick, in the Chiltern Hills of South Oxfordshire, on a mixed farming model, utilising a wide number of grasses and herbs in the lays and retaining all the ‘never ploughed’ permanent pasture that covers the chalk hills and sweeps along the Thames-side meadows. My view was that the dairy cows, sheep and beef cattle that I purchased to graze these meadows would produce subtle, fine flavoured milk and meat and would be kept healthy by eating their particular choice of medicinal herbs and hedgerow leaves, at will.

I was not disappointed. The cattle thrived and the crops grew free from disease. We were able to start a local unpasteurised milk and cream round that was much appreciated by local country people. When, in 1987, the Government tried to ban raw milk, I led a ‘Campaign for Real Milk’ and beat it off.

A growing enterprise

As we continued to build up the enterprises on the farm, so the milk round offered more choice of fresh and local organic produce: free range eggs, butter, pork, beef and table poultry. And in 1986 Hardwick’s smoked bacon won the first ever Soil Association Food Award.

The organic farming movement was giving birth and there was a sense of excitement in the air. We were proving that the wisdom of old was alive and well: one could contribute to the long-term sustainability of the land while producing robust, wholesome foods in sufficient volumes to satisfy local needs and produce a modest economic return. At that stage there was no premium, no mass production and no supermarket sales. We were an embryonic movement which shared much commonality with the fast disappearing traditional mixed family farms whose standard practice included rotational farming and minimal applications of agrichemicals.

The dream sours

What ‘organic food’ and its localised market was in those days bears little resemblance to ‘the industry’ that it is today: an industry that is heavily and centrally policed, has a compendium of regulations and is ‘big business’ on a global scale. In fact, much of the ‘organic’ produce shipped in from around the world and across the UK today carries no sense of connection with its geography or its farmers. It is as anonymous as the majority of conventional chemically produced foods, as dull in flavour and as lacking in nutritional vitality. What’s more it belongs in the category of ‘high food miles’ heavy ecological footprint produce, exceeding the 3,000 kilometre average shopping basket once identified as the UK norm. Due to the need to carry a lot of information, it is also responsible for an excessive level of packaging – most of which is non biodegradeable.

All this is a far cry from what might be considered a responsible and sustainable form of greening, and a far cry from the original aspiration that organic food should stand for ‘unrefined, fresh, local and seasonal’. One can even purchase ‘organic’ ultra heat treated homogenised milk in supermarkets today, a product that bears no resemblance to real milk at all.

Stagnation

However, there just might be some compensation for this consumer-oriented form of ‘green’ indulgence if the level of UK land converted to organic farming methods had shown substantial increases throughout this time. But this is not the case. In fact the official statistics reveal that there has been a negligible level of land converted to organic status over the past 20 years. It has remained pretty much static at around 3 to 4 percent of UK farmed land throughout this time.

So apart from the resilience of a small body of local producers who have helped to pioneer such marketing ventures as box schemes, farmers’ markets, farm shops and dedicated farm-to-mill/processor chains, we have today an organic marketplace that is almost wholly dominated by super- and hypermarket chains. Their green credentials include the import of some eighty percent of organic foods, shipped and flown in from all over the world and from farms that are often as big and as undistinctive as their conventional monocultural lookalikes.

A boon for Tescos

Of course this is all very nice for the Tescos and Sainsburys of this world. It provides a nice bit of green icing for their very un-green cake. But what does it mean for human health? For the future of the 96 per cent of our farmland that remains dependent on heavy doses of toxic agrichemicals? To the once happy dream of a living, quality food-based rural economy and to more birds, bees and insects establishing their habitats amongst our unsprayed species rich fields? To farmers who care?

Organic food and farming was predicated on the belief that something called ‘holistic thinking’ would grow up along with the species-rich meadows and living foods. It was established on a belief that we humans are capable of comprehending, even participating in, the cyclic wheel of nature, seasons and unforced productivity. But only a little way down the line, it seems that we lost the plot.

We are now fast approaching a state in which a first and second class ‘two tier’ food culture will become the norm. A culture in which the financially secure and generally privileged will choose a premium priced, largely pesticide free ‘organically raised’ diet, while those less fortunate will have to contend with factory farmed, hydroponic and genetically modified foods, churned out by corporate enterprises having no other goals other than big profit and domination of the human food chain.

The organic food and farming movement can only help reverse this Orwellian scenario, and contribute to a better future, by revisiting its roots and ceasing to chase the chimera of big-time branded salvation.

This article is taken from Resurgence magasine May/June 2010

The green movement needs to revisit its fundamental principles; including (and especially) ‘Small is beautiful’, writes Julian Rose.

In the rush of excitement over both government and corporate moves to back green solutions for tackling climate change, many of the lessons so clearly spelled out by our founding fathers, including Leopold Kohr and E. F. Schumacher, have been all-too-hastily abandoned by those who should have known better.

Not only should we all be questioning the direction in which the environmental movement has moved over the past decade, but we should be asking why it has failed to come up with a dynamic, localised and ‘human-scale’ solution to the large-scale and government-backed, corporate agenda that continues to dominate our lives and our landscapes. Instead, there has been a noticeable and insidious growing level of largely passive ‘green’ obeisance to central government policies and EU handouts.

It is salutary to take ‘energy’ issues as an illustration of this. Here, it is plain to see the increasing monopolisation of green issues by market-oriented, profit-driven business enterprises and government institutions whose goals bear no relationship to the ones that inspired the term “Small is Beautiful” or the potent spark that title once ignited in our imaginations. There is no relationship, either, to the deeper concepts of ‘sustainability’ and ‘scale’ which directly connect appropriate technological advances with comm-unity regeneration and a due sense of proportion in all things.

What we have seen instead is widespread failure amongst large segments of society to recognise that most negative environmental impacts come about because of the profligate material expectations that continue to dominate our Western world – expectations that are raised and continuously promoted by powerful corporate, government and media vested interests.

Government calls to move towards renewable energy resources in order to “satisfy UK needs” (while meeting binding CO2 emission-reduction obligations) are really calls to continue to massage the needs of a consumer-fixated society rather than to address any of our actual needs, which, in truth, remain largely unknown. What is now known is that sentient human beings embody a greater need for spiritual, intellectual and emotional development than for the trappings of material opulence. The reason why this never gets mentioned is that we have allowed ourselves to be subjects of societal indoctrination, an indoctrination that promotes excessive consumerism as a baro-meter of human happiness and as being essential for the continuation of the now infamous holy grail: ‘economic growth’ and ever bigger profits for the dominant corporations.

But the long-sustained myth about the benefits to be accrued by this unending expansion of consumer-driven growth has recently been dealt a severe blow. There is no shortage of evidence of growing destruction to natural habitats and both ecological and human degradation continuing to be manifest even in ‘developed’ countries boasting a high GDP. Why then, in this ‘developed’ world, are the majority of green thinkers not converging on finding common and enduring answers to the ever deepening crisis in our midst? Are these deeper issues being sacrificed to the apparent imperatives of climate change?

If so, we need to recognise the fact and address it. Countries attempting to comply with national climate-change targets do so by postulating the need for so many million gigawatts of processed energy to fulfil ‘x’ perceived national demand. However, such calculations are predicated upon the wrong model: the current ‘living beyond our means’ one. The one that leads to the statement that we would need four more Planet Earths in order to supply the whole world with the standards of living “enjoyed” by Western Europeans and North Americans.

But what sort of standard of living are we enjoying when, for example, 10,000 tons of food is thrown out of households and supermarkets in England and Wales every day? When every rubbish tip is filled to bursting with packaging materials? When our impoverished soils are still being soused with thousands of tons of toxic agrichemicals every year? When almost everything we purchase today has three or four times less life-expectation than during the Victorian era? Is this still all going to be fine just so long as the generated energy that makes it possible is coming from renewable sources rather than fossil fuels?

The UK Green Party, for instance, is now publicly calling for help in the development of “Large-scale wind and tidal energy schemes” involving “massive investments” that will “raise wind energy production to the levels of Denmark by 2020″. Such ambitions seem to indicate that the Green Party is being swept along by the dictates of mainstream ‘business as usual’, in which broadly centralised energy-distribution patterns are main-tained and under the same corporate ownership – but driven by renewables instead of by fossil fuels.

Some may dispute this, but the impression being given is that there is a supposed ‘plus’ brought about by providing extra jobs through encouraging such schemes, and that this overrides the actual stand-alone merit of the schemes themselves.

So what would a renaissance of genuinely ‘people-led’ regional regen-erative initiatives actually look like?

The essence of my argument is that we don’t need ‘massive investment’ in any grand schemes. On the contrary, we need lots of small investments in highly diversified local and regional schemes, owned and run by the communities they serve. Integrated, local regeneration and ‘people-led’ creative solutions are, I would suggest, the imperative of our time.

There are signs of the emergence of such schemes within localised food and farming initiatives and through such initiatives as the Transition Town energy descent models. However, good as these are, they still fail to touch the broad swathe of green supporters needed to create a critical mass of public opinion for deeper change.

Fritz Schumacher and Leopold Kohr argued most cogently for “appropriate scale” in all things constructed to meet our daily needs; ones that are at once low impact and affordable and utilise local materials, thereby exerting a largely benign influence on our environment. Their words resonate ever more clearly as each year passes. We need to remind ourselves of this and act on such fundamental wisdom while we still have the chance. Large-scale wind farms, vast banks of photovoltaic panels, giant hydroelectric schemes are not the solution in the majority of cases. Not to climate change, nor to human change. Schumacher, in his wisdom, once stated that no structure should ever be built to a height taller than the tallest tree in the area, thereby never dominating Nature or humans.

How far we still are from this level of sensibility and vision! Instead we see green energy proponents applauding the establishment of regimented rows of 30-to-60-metre-high wind turbines that are increasingly marching across the landscape of the Western world, starkly symbolising continued obeisance to the gods of mass-produced power distributed through vast, centralised grid systems. It is a startlingly cogent reminder of just how sidelined and ignored the whole issue of scale, proportionality and environmental impact has been in the blinkered rush for idealistically flawed ‘green’ manufactured energy. ‘Scale’ as a humanitarian instinct guided by Nature, not by money and power.

So it has to asked, maybe even shouted: Why is it that the broader environmental movement is not promoting this sort of subtle and sensitive approach to our human and environmental needs? Why is so little emphasis given to the need for decentralised, human-scale solutions to the most pressing issues of our time? What has happened to environmentalists, ecologists, greens? Have the big environmental lobby organisations sold out to the ‘green’ corporate lobby? Are they simply the purveyors of a superficial greening of ‘business as usual’?

There is a pressing, urgent need to focus attention on the truly human-scale solutions that our world so profoundly needs and not to become obsessed with the grand technological fixes that are being mooted as potential deterrents to climate change. Let’s not be taken in by talk of a new ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ which so excites political figureheads and industrialists today. We citizens should have none of this. It’s more than time to take control over our destinies and cease supporting the out-of-control corporate theft of our futures.

Within the great shake-up which is now under way throughout a wide arena of planetary concerns, we have a one-in-a-million chance to do something radical: to help people take control of their lives at the local and regional levels, within communities, and not further appease the already ‘past its sell-by-date’ consumer-driven status quo.

On Sunday March 28^th 2010, we are inaugurating the first of a series of exploratory workshops in the beautiful setting of Hardwick House and grounds, entitled “Taking Control of Our Lives.” These will be run in parallel with workshops at the ICPPC Eco Centre in Southern Poland.

The first workshop in the series will explore the main issues raised in Julian Rose’s controversial new book “Changing Course for Life – Local Solutions to Global problems” and will ask: “Is it time to establish a new platform for decentralised community based people power?”

The programme will start with a short introduction to the activities on the Hardwick Estate the majority of which has been organically managed since 1975.

Programme:

10:00 Introduction to the Hardwick Estate and walk in the grounds.
11:00 Tea/coffee
11:30 Workshop Session led by Julian Rose
12:30 ‘The Polish Experience’ led by Jadwiga Lopata, Goldman Prize winner and founder: International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside.
13:00 Organic Lunch

14:30 Open session/debate
15:30 Summary and conclusion
16:00 Depart

The cost of the day is £40 per person. All interested parties are welcome. We ask you to please pay in advance. Payment ensures your booking.

Please book early as workshop can only accommodate 20 people.

For more information please email Hardwickestate@btinternet.com

Address: Hardwick Estate Office, Whitchurch-on-Thames, Reading, RG8 7RD
Nearest train station is Pangbourne (2 miles from Hardwick)

Payment details: When you register for the workshop we will send you a PayPal invoice via email. Alternatively you can make a direct bank payment to:

Julian Rose,
Account number:         00440458
Sort code:                    30 96 96

I ran a doorstep delivery service of our own Guernsey organic raw milk and cream, and this inspired me to write a leaflet with a tear-off strip briefly proclaiming the positive case for raw milk. The purchasers then signed the statement and sent the slip back to AUMPC. This was reproduced amongst 150 raw milk producers and their customers. We collected 15,000 signatures and delivered them personally to the Minister of Agriculture.

The scientific case was greatly helped by a very useful publication, The Case for Untreated Milk, by Barbara Pickard. The other element in our favour was that the Prince of Wales is a keen supporter of raw milk and family farms. He was able to support our campaign with some well-chosen words, and this greatly helped in promoting the issue in the press.

I still have hundreds of letters of support from raw milk enthusiasts. They are outstanding for their passion and determination to keep the raw milk tradition – and associated family farms – alive. I can see that the same enthusiasm is alive and well in Canada and the United States.

But we are up against the intractable obstinacy of technocrats and more than that: a deliberate attempt to destroy independent mixed family farms by corporate/government cartels only interested in exercising total control of the global food chain. I have no doubt we will win this battle – “people power” once harnessed to a strong grassroots cause will always come through the victor in the end. With this can come a genuine “renaissance” of food and farming: real food and real farming.

The positive values of responsibly produced raw milk greatly exceed the negative factors. In fact, there are virtually no negatives when real milk is coming from well- cared-for family farms whose owners understand and apply the simple laws of animal and land husbandry.

The cream layer of raw milk has enzymes that are of the highest value to our health – highly protective of our immune system. Which is probably why “the industry” insists that butter fat is a cholesterol raiser and thrombosis threat. In the 1980s, Japanese firms were approaching British raw milk producers and contracting owners of high butterfat herds to sell them the cream off their standing milk in order to develop special anti-cancer medical products with these high-enzyme derivatives. As we know, pasteurization kills off the subtle nutrients and vitamins that our bodies must have for proper protection.

It’s a sad reflection on the bewitching powers of the reductionist “dead food is safe food” lobby that our supermarket-obsessed culture can’t even access real food any more. But it’s a sure sign of hope for farmers’ markets and other alternative marketing ventures that are burgeoning in the U.K. and beyond. There are new raw milk producers registering their farms every month, and public interest in acquiring their products (milk, cheese and cream) is on the rise.

More and more people are waking up to the reality that most of what is called “food” is nothing more than a synthesized conglomeration of quasi-food materials to which are added various synthetic chemical components, including colours, preservatives and flavourings, with the now added-value factor of genetic modification and nanoparticles.

Standing up for our rights to produce and consume real food is probably the single most important act of independence and responsible citizenship we can make.

Julian Rose
January 2010

In Changing Course for Life, Julian Rose spells out the truth of our current socio-economic context in a blatant and transparent acknowledgement of the ills of our society. It is easy to hide behind our ignorance of the finer and less savoury details of corporate greed, of modern industrialised agriculture, of the wide ranging effects of our unmitigated obsession with technological advancement. He explores just how and when our economies and societies departed from the objective of servicing our needs for a happy and harmonious state of existence with the natural world, to the point at which we now find ourselves: disconnected. A condition Rose aptly summarises as a state of being ‘subjugated to a sense of impotence by our own inventions’.

The book covers a broad range of aspects of modern society, from the disproportionate levels of power and wealth, to society’s single minded focus on technological advancement at the expense of labour enhancing techniques to the continuing loss of food biodiversity and steadily declining state of our soils.

But this book goes beyond merely pointing out how and where we have gone wrong. His clear objective is identifying a new way of living our lives. This encompasses a very personalised and spiritual consideration of the ends to which we devote our daily thoughts and energies. He acknowledges the need to realign our energies with the natural rhythms of the earth rather than directing them daily into the current model of degradation of our natural state of being. But he also discusses society at large, considering the necessary changes to our politico-economic environment, to agriculture, education, and greening our city lives. This book is, quite literally, bursting forth with ideas: ideas for change, ideas for how we can move forward into the next phase of consciousness, away from a mechanistic view of us in relation to the universe and the landscape, to a mindset that embraces the concept of living as a holistic integrated whole.

Rose writes with a palpable energy that is infectious. I found that no matter what frame of mind I was in when I sat down to read this book, when I put it down the energy contained within flowed through my veins and made me urgently aware of the need and desire to DO something. This book is full of idealism at a time when idealism is exactly what we need. It is perhaps our current tendency towards too little idealism and too much apathetic acceptance of the status quo that sees us trapped and stagnating as we are. So I challenge you to read this book, to awaken and to transform your way of interacting with the world around you.

(Louise Tait is an economist working in the environmental and development fields and has worked in both South Africa and the UK. She likes to read and think and engage with the world around her. She believes in the harmony of all things and strives to make this a reality.”

Excerpt:

“It is said that a civilisation that is loosing its seeds and destroying its soil is a dying civilisation: and we are. Today, over eighty percent of mankind’s diet is provided by the seeds of less than a dozen plant species – and most of these are ‘owned’ by just two or three transnational corporations. Ninety eight percent of vegetable varieties have disappeared from the diet of the western world over the past hundred years. Unless this catastrophic loss of biodiversity is reversed, our gene pool – upon which all life depends – will run dry within the span of this century.”

As US citizens remain transfixed by the financial crises engulfing their nation, the US House of Representatives is about to take a decision on a seemingly innocuous series of bills that appear to offer further protection against poor hygiene and sanitary conditions in the food chain. However, these bills are not what they seem. A carefully planned and executed heist is underway, care of the Monsanto Corporation and the ‘Codex’ arm of the World Trade Organisation, to rid the agribusiness dominated food chain of any genuine ‘organic’ produce. ‘Nutrients’ of virtually all descriptions are under attack as potentially ‘unsafe’ and therefore a threat to public health. They should be made illegal according to the protagonists of these bills. So only sanitized, irradiated and chemically treated ‘nutrients’ will be permitted to enter the food chain if these bills get through Congress. In fact, the food chain will be one step nearer ‘total ownership’ by the “two or three transnational corporations” cited in the above chapter of my book.

Its a very disturbing development for US citizens who, for the most part, still appear to be bathing in the ‘Obama Honeymoon’ with its still lingering promise of change and more power to the people. Barak Obama had, prior to his election, raised hopes amongst anti GMO and pro organic activists, by stating that he would support the development of ecological farming and critically review GM technology. As it is, he has elected Tom Vilsack, the most solid of GMO supporters, as Secretary of Agriculture. Vilsack was named ‘Governor of the Year’ by the Biotechnology Industry Organisation in 2008. Just to compound the deception, the President’s wife instigated the digging up of part of the White House lawn in order to grow some symbolic organic veggies.

What happens in the USA tends, after a small delay, to arrive in Europe. Owing to the dubious distinction of the ’special relationship’ between the USA and UK, almost everything involving US corporate aggrandizement and power politics gets ’special attention’ by leading political figures in our Country. Blair was already promoting Monsanto’s GM technology on the behest of Clinton. Lord Sainsbury was given the job of pushing forward the UK GM agenda when he was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry. I was surprised to see his heraldic ‘Knights of the Garter’ flag hanging in Windsor Castle’s Saint George’s chapel, in 2000.

Blair’s team invested large sums of pension funds in UK GMO developments, but was no doubt disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm of the British public for GM foods and field trials. The trials were unceremoniously ripped up by protesters who knew that pollen from the maize and oilseed rape crops would soon contaminate the British countryside, causing irreparable damage to the food chain. Brown, not to be outdone, continues to press-on with secretive GM research funding programmes and Hilary Ben has never flinched from the idea that genetic modification still has an important role to play in the future of our food.

What all this tells us is that the Agricultural Policy in the UK, USA and most of the ‘developed’ world, is an unashamed attempt to exert almost total politico-corporate control over the food chain, and to do it using a technology that guarantees the patented ‘ownership’ of plants and seeds by the corporations that create them. This involves expropriating the seeds that are the intellectual property of peasant farmers from around the world, laying claim to the seed’s DNA, and selling them back again under strict contractual conditions that include prohibiting any subsequent harvested seed to be saved, as well as demanding royalties be paid on every new purchase. Such practices are condoned by our governments as part of necessary ‘development’ and ‘modernisation’ policies for southern hemisphere countries. But the reality is that they force independent farmers into slavery to the vast corporate agribusiness and pharmaceutical agencies that profit from their carefully conceived ‘patents on life’ and the vast outreach accorded to them by the World Trade Organisation’s forcible demands that poorer Countries lift their protective trade barriers. This, in exchange for vast loans designed to ‘Westernise’ native agricultural practices whose origins and current practices are about providing food sovereignty to their people – and not providing western supermarkets with mass produced green beans.

The ‘Codex Alimentarius’ arm of the WTO is now working in tandem with the US pharmaceutical companies to destroy not only organic food and farming, but natural medicine as well. All herbal, naturpath and homeopathic practices are being told that they will have to to be registered under the same costly terms as commercial pharmaceutical companies by 2010/12, or be forced to close.

Our ‘freedom of choice’ is being curtailed at a rapidly gathering pace. Once the food chain has become dominated – and quite literally ‘owned’ – by the corporate conglomerate, it will be too late to protest. It is for this reason that “Changing Course for Life” is calling for us to “take control of our lives before we become unrecallably controlled.” This can done by shifting our allegiances away from the supermarkets: the mass global food purveyors of unashamed ‘consumerism’ – and returning to more human , local and regional, small to medium-scale decentralised models of genuinely sustainable production and consumption.

Its a challenge we cannot shirk if we want to retain the ability to feed and house ourselves in the not too distant future. But its not just a countryside challenge. City dwellers take heart; in Cuba 8% of the total urban land area is cultivated by 18,000 gardeners and is thus helping to supply urban generated food for many thousands of families. Greening the city is not just a nicety, it is an essential component in the strategy of ‘taking control’ recommended in my book as a sine qua non for forging a new renaissance of enduring community living; in defiance – if necessary – of the bureaucratic rule book and state interference. Such an event is, in fact, already beginning to manifest itself in many urban centres throughout Europe and beyond.

The stage is now set for a radical, and distinctly pragmatic, reappraisal of our long overrated consumerist life styles. The catalyst of such a change will be the no longer tolerable forces of politico-corporate oppression, coupled with a resource and climate crisis that demands a very different approach to the way we currently manage our planet and ourselves.

In “Changing Course for Life – Local Solutions to Global Problems” the reader will be able to find a thought provoking resolution to these crucial issues that confront us in all the main avenues of contemporary life. It is a call to action, providing answers at a time when mainstream politics has no answers. If we really want to escape the clutches of Codex and the advancing ‘One World Government’, we have no option but to invent and build the new society.

“There is no magic pill to cure our planet or its people. However the more aware we become about the deep seated ills afflicting all realms of planetary life, the more ready we will be to shift the angle of our current trajectory, and embark on the new course. A course that leads beyond the ensuing chaos and into the new order which it is our absolute prerogative to set in motion.”

“Changing Course for Life – Local Solutions to Global Problems” by Julian Rose. New European Publishing Company. Paperback. Price 10 pounds. See www.changingcourseforlife.info