To the Editor:
Will Prime Minister Harper continue to support Monsanto? The people of Creston, the people of Canada and people all over the world want an end to genetically engineered food, they want the food that is in the food chain now labelled and they want Monsanto stopped from poisoning our environment. We need to give dignity to farmers and gardeners. It is nature, the soil and the farmers who will feed the world, not Monsanto, not genetically modified crops and not the technocrats. People from all walks of life in all parts of the world are coming alive, impelled to create a more just and sustainable society.
In his book, Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken estimates that the number of grassroots groups and nongovernmental organizations for social justice, indigenous rights and environmental sanity numbers two million. There are forest defenders, military resisters, designers of windmills, urban farmers, occupiers of Wall Street, teachers in favelas and many more.
We see the changes happening in our valley, too. More and more locally produced food is becoming available — real, fresh organic milk in returnable glass bottles, cheese, eggs from free-run chicken, fruit juice and more. The valley is on the way to become self-sufficient instead of bringing it in from far away places and polluting our Earth by burning fossil fuel.
In the Agricultural Revolution of tens of thousand years ago, the domestication of plants and animals led to a radical shift in the way we live. In the Industrial Revolution that began just a few hundred years ago, a similar dramatic transition took place.
Right now, a shift of comparable scope and magnitude is occurring. We are in the transition from a doomed economy of unlimited industrial growth to a life sustaining recovery of the world to save our sacred Earth from total destruction. The transition is already well under way; many people hear within them the sounds of the Earth crying.
Like all true revolutions, it belongs to the people and it is happening all over the world. Future generations looking back at this historical moment may call it the time of “the great turning”. Most of our governments are so outdated and so far behind the times that it would be too dangerous to wait for them to act.
Creston