If your gut’s hurtin’ you, blame the Green Revolution.
No, not the idiocy that has polluted every decent plot of land with solar panels that will be left to rust after the tenant tax-credit bandits leave them behind for the farmer to dispose of pursuant to an onerous double-hazmat process that is impossible to comply with unless the farmer hires his Senator’s brother-in-law’s company to do it at a fee greatly exceeding all the lease payments he received for f’ing up his fields in the first place.
No, I’m not talking about that barrel of dung bequeathed to us by puppet Obama and hologram Biden.
I’m talking about the Green Revolution in agriculture, that phenomenon of food production after WWII that made crop yields explode by abandoning traditional agricultural practices. Farmers moved to hybrid and GMO seeds, expanded use of irrigation, bought bigger-assed tractors with treads that crush the earth like a corpulent sorority girl’s high heels on her way to a social, and, of course, applied tons of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides to the ground. Experts estimate that the Green Revolution lifted approximately 1.294 bajillion people out of poverty.
Great thing.
Until it sucks.
And it’s sucking right about now.
When you read “NPK” levels on a fertilizer product, splatter the container on the floor, then run away before Walmart security realizes what happened.
The soil is more than Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium, just like the central government is more than the Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary. If you focus only on those three things, your soil will die and the CIA will drug you with LSD while you try to bang a whore. Both those things happened late in the last century. I feel bad for the LSD-laced johns, but at least they got laid. The rest of us? We got nothin’ except food budgets that work only because Dollar General opens two stores in every village and stocks them with canola-infused muffins that your local white trash foodie labels as “health food.”
The Green Revolution focused solely on NPK (capitalized because they’re secular gods) on one end of the binary and weeds and fungus on the other end of the binary. They promoted the former and killed the latter, applying more chemicals to 40 acres than the Germans piped into an Auschwitz shower building.
In the process, they killed the soil’s microbiome. It no longer crawls with microbes, bugs, and worms. It’s become more sterile than a roid boy after a nasty accident with the Manscape Lawn Mower 3.0 Plus.
Some say we’re looking at the next Oklahoma Dust Bowl, but this time, in Wisconsin, Peking, and all points in between.
When they sterilized the soil, they killed our guts.
The bleeding-edge soil science tells us that our gut microbiomes are formed, fueled, and fed by the soil’s microbiome, and now that our soil’s microbiome is struggling along like an inebriated Stephen Hawking without his wheelchair, there’s evidence that it’s f’ing up our guts, which then is leading to allergies, autism, and autoimmune disorders.
I used to think “non-binary” was a term used by dudes who tried to understand why they got their asses kicked in the locker room after taking a sneak peek. But now, despite being an ardent hater of other men’s buttocks, I find myself using it (the term “non-binary,” not the sneak peek).
The left hemisphere loves binaries. It makes things simple, and if things are simple, the left hemisphere can get its jobs done quickly. White people who live on a continent, good; yellow people on an island, bad; nuke ‘em. Simple. Efficient. Finished. Tell Elizabeth Anscombe and her moralizing objections to shut the f’ up. Move on.
So the left hemisphere apotheosizes good things and demonizes bad things. It’s why our culture converts every clever saying into a slogan and mercilessly says it over and over until we want to stab ourselves in the ears with pitchforks, while bad things are treated like Jeffrey Epstein after the security cameras go down.
The problem is, there are, indeed, 50 shades of grey, and not just on Little Saint James after a robust happy hour. The left hemisphere loathes grey more than an aging supermodel, but it’s there. Always. Defying the binary.
When we focus on the binal ends, all the grey--the subtlety and uncertainty in the guts of reality–gets neglected until everything turns black, or in the case of our soil, a pale, dusty brown.