Changing Course for Life

Congratulations to Michael Schmidt - the Ontario farmer who’s due in a Newmarket court today for the verdict on charges he violated the provincial Milk Act by selling unpasteurized milk - for standing up to the anti-raw-milk lobbyists. I am very aware of what he and his supporters are up against, having founded the Association for Unpasteurised Milk Producers and Consumers in the United Kingdom back in 1989 to prevent the British government’s proposed ban of unpasteurized milk - and again in 1997. We won our battle on both occasions, maybe because of the “and Consumers” factor and much press support.

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. (more…)

“Changing Course for Life – Local Solutions to Global Problems” Julian Rose

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.” (more…)

SAVING THE SEEDS OF HOPE - BANNING THE SEEDS OF DESPAIR

I thank you for the opportunity of speaking on this special occasion.

There could hardly be a more important issue confronting not just farmers, but the whole of society, than the subject of this meeting: how to grow adequate food and produce adequate energy without the aid of rapidly diminishing and highly polluting fossil fuels. And the reason why it is so important is because: this is not a concern for the future - it is the reality at this very moment. The transition from a 250 year old fossil fuel powered society to a genuinely sustainable renewable energy fuelled society is to be achieved in less than 25 years - if we are to avoid an ultimate meltdown of most of what sustains our present planetary ecology. That is not my prognosis but the increasingly broadcast view of the majority of professional climatologists from all around the world. (more…)

Resistance comes in three shades: passive, occasionally active and active.
The corporate and political powers who aim to take a controlling influence over the food chain count on the majority of civil resistance being of a passive ‘dumbed down’ nature. They can tolerate a certain amount of ‘occasionally active’ interference in their master plan, but they do not tolerate genuinely active resistance. So those of us who hammer continuously on genetically modified corporate doors are monitored, harassed and generally marginalised by the prevailing ’status quo’ and its media poodles.We should have little doubt that the prevailing corporate backed government agenda is financed by the big agribusiness and pharmaceutical corporations, who turn-in annual combined profits in double figure billions and who do, indeed, aim to wrest total control over the human food chain. “Control oil and you control the State. Control food and you control the people” said Richard Nixon’s ex secretary of state Henry Kissinger. (more…)