One of my readers sent me this picture, taken at the headquarters cafeteria during a recent social event.
Anyone want to request a kit and lesson plan, then report back to the rest of us?
Svalbard Global Seed Vault
Don’t Be A Sucker
This is the latest video to be making the rounds of the Internet, and as usual I’m a little behind everyone else. Many people are comparing it to what’s happening in Charlottesville, what Trump is saying and so on.
For me this video says a lot about The Netherlands now. All you have to do is substitute what’s said about negros with non-ethnic Dutch, and the Catholic church with mosques. Like everywhere else, the number of bad people here is very small, but they are very effective at creating division between different groups, and making themselves heard.
The food industry in particular here is very effective in promoting their genetically pure and uniform products, using tactics like these and genetically pure, white, Dutch figureheads.
European Farming in 2020
Last month the EU Council issued a press release announcing agreement on a new EU organic farming EU organic farming regulation. This is actually a big deal, and I know a number of people who have been involved in the negotiations. It still has to be formally passed as a legislative package, but since the important parties have all agreed, this is likely just a formality. It will come into effect 1 July 2020, meaning it won’t fully be in force until the 2021 planting season, and consumers won’t fully see the changes until later that year after the harvest.
Not Perfect, and Lots of Compromises
This is not a perfect piece of legislation, and there’s still a long way to go towards reforming agriculture in Europe. Putting so much emphasis on organic food is flawed. Organic is a legally defined term, and is subject to different interpretations.
What we need in Europe is normal food, based on biodiversity, agroecology and grown and sold by small and local producers. This regulation goes some way towards these goals, but is not enough. This regulation gives too much control to large agricultural interests. In particular it doesn’t do enough to control pesticide use overall, doesn’t do enough to reduce and sequester greenhouse gas emissions and doesn’t really promote agroecology.
What it does do is make agroecology theoretically possible, as well as provide a few loopholes to the strict EU seed laws. It might mean fewer dangerous pesticides are used on food consumed in Europe. It will mean consumers have access to more biodiversity in their food, and there are potentially big gains to be had in the quality of food available.
These small gains have been fought fiercely by the food industry, who have pretty much guaranteed market dominance for themselves. The food industry is prepared in almost all ways to wait until a small farmer has a clever idea, then steal it and destroy the business model of the small farmer in the process.
Agroecology
This is a somewhat unfortunate term. It’s a bit like organic, in that it’s being co-opted by industrial agriculture. Like the term organic, it refers to what used to be normal agriculture. Different people have given it different names along the way, like permaculture or ecological. For some reason we’ve needed to invent yet another name for it, so different people can claim ownership over the idea and define it according to their own purposes. I use the term reluctantly, because it is what a lot of people are saying at the moment.
This is a term that describes a system of ‘normal’ agriculture, without chemical or unnatural inputs, generally operating in a closed system without any inputs. It’s principle is building soil over time — over centuries. It has very little to do with the 3 years without chemicals need to produce certified organic food. The consequence of building up soil is the sequestering of greenhouse gasses. The system is very fragile, and any contamination with chemicals at all generally causes very long term damage. It depends on large tracts of adjoining land, also based on agroecology, in order to maintain biodiversity and habitats for beneficial organisms.
This new organic regulation envisages patches of certified organic land, side by side conventional farms, where the classification of the land changes back and forth over time, and has little to do with agroecology or maintaining ecosystems and building soils.
The relationship between conventional and organic producers is somewhat like public smoking. The use of pesticides damages the public health and environment. A short term solution is isolating conventional farmers in their own regions, but in the long term no one will be happy with that solution, so eventually it will be necessary to phase out the use of pesticides. The pesticide industry is however very powerful and deceptive, and difficult to deal with.
Pesticide Industry
What this organic regulation really does is significantly strengthen the position of the pesticide industry. The pesticide manufacturers are already facing competition from old unpatented products like glyphosate. Using very deceptive public campaigns, designed to look like some sort of activists’ issue, they are using organizations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to promote their products — even to the extent of staging fake European Citizens’ Initiatives.
Not only is this likely to continue, but as the older products are removed from the market, new ones will take their place. Since the definition of organic is subject to formal and strict interpretation, they are very likely to find ways of including their products in the food chain. For example, they may develop new products based on GMOs, used in food packaging or that can be used on perimeters of organic land without actually contaminating the food grown on them, but possibly causing a great deal of damage to the ecosystem.
There are likely to be a lot more grey lines in the use of pesticides in organic agriculture, and still a lot more battles to be fought. It’s going to be more important than ever to buy food from local producers that you know personally, trust and don’t have enough money to spend it on pesticides.
The Segmented Society
This was the title of a book written by my late father. You can buy it on Amazon here, if you’re interested. It’s not my intention to say what this book means, or what he thought. In fact not many people like it when others say what they think, and I don’t think he would have either. If you want to know what he thought, you should read the book and come to your own conclusions, or maybe talk to some of his former students or colleagues. His thoughts are his, and mine are mine.
The purpose of this post is to talk about what I think the relevance of segmentation in our society is, both to this blog as well as the seed movement and democracy in general.
Information Bubbles
We all live in our own information bubbles. We all choose what information to read and acquire, according to our interests and the people we trust. Reading this blog, and this article, identifies you with one particular bubble. If you also listen to Fox News in the US, or the BBC in the UK, these are also information bubbles. Your profession, religion, education, ethnicity and many other factors play a role in the information bubbles you participate in. There are countless information bubbles all over the world, and seemingly more developing all the time. Perhaps more important, is what you choose to exclude from your information bubbles.
Labour is an important political party in some European countries, comparable to the Democratic Party in the US. Here in The Netherlands, the Labour party had similar problems to the US Democratic party, and is struggling to find relevance with voters. It was once a somewhat left leaning party, but in recent times has mostly capitulated to the more conservative parties, and no one knows what they stand for any more.
The Labour party commissioned a study into their recent electoral losses. One of the conclusions of the study was that society is becoming more fragmented, and they aren’t doing enough to stay sufficiently relevant, so people aren’t continuing to include them in their information bubbles.
The Rise and Fall of Television
The declining importance of TV, and the rising relevance of the Internet, has played an important role in the segmenting of society. It used to be that TV was a major influence in people’s lives, all over the world, and being a part of everyone’s information bubbles was as simple as paying for an advertisement.
Cigarette advertising also played a major role, because the money the tobacco industry invested in advertising paid for a great deal of public advertising infrastructure.
Now, everything from ad blocking software, open source software, downloading TV programs with the advertising removed, and the ability to choose which internet sites we look at (often based on advice from others), give us all a lot more control over the information we choose to let into our bubbles.
We still have companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google and so on, which all play major roles in our news, choice of websites and what we choose to buy.
Bubbles as Membership and Labels
Participating in information bubbles can have very tangible consequences. For example, when you read this blog, link to it, comment on it, talk to others about what you’ve seen, mention it on Facebook, put it in your own words elsewhere on the Internet and so on, it can have a cascading effect.
Initially, I will see it in my log files if you read this site. This allows me to tell others how many readers I have, and if you leave comments others can see my readers are active. If things I write about become topics of discussion, others will find my original post in Google, and may become more active or long term readers of this blog. Even very passive participation can have a big impact on this blog. If you get in touch with me, and tell me what you think, you even have a chance to participate in the contents of the blog.
But also, once you identify yourself as a reader of this blog to others, then they know something about you. Just like if someone tells you they watch Fox in the US, you know something about them. You can like or dislike this blog, tell others, and allow them to develop their own opinions about you. You become a part of the community of this blog.
The same thing happens with every other blog or news site, or TV station. The same thing happens when you join or support other organizations or groups. I think this is an important way democracy works.
Importantly, you allow this blog to speak on your behalf! If you identify yourself as a member or participant, you generally support the positions of this blog, and I sometimes make assertions based on this blog’s topics and size of readership. This is true of any traditional media source, or any other organization.
Identifying Opponents
As well as finding friends within your information bubbles, and other like minded people, you can also use these bubbles to identify people who are working against things you believe in. Sometimes this is intentional, perhaps because of commercial interests, and other times it’s just people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes the issues are very complicated, and people make the wrong spur of the moment choices. It often requires thought and discussions with others to straighten things out, and above all it requires depending on people you trust.
This is a very important tool of information bubbles, and in my opinion as a society we are just learning how to do this. This is an important part of this blog, and related to my discussions recently on fake news.
It often requires resisting the temptation to pay attention to famous or well known people, who are possibly trying to turn their notoriety into money.
Tool of Democracy
Effectively controlling and manipulating your information bubbles are a very important part of Democracy. It allows you to filter out untrustworthy information, and to see the truth in situations. It allows you to identify and resist advertising, and prevent being manipulated by the wealthiest 1% who continue to have the power to pay for providing you with fake news and misleading information.
I’m going to post more about this in the future.
