Organic Fertilizer Quotes

Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. 'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic. They've served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.

And Ethan? That boy lived in his own little wonderland, convinced he could save the world one organic radish at a time.

In order to be labeled organic, a crop must be grown without the use of certain synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, as specified by the USDA. Though produced with fewer synthetic compounds, organic vegetables are not necessarily tastier or more nutritious than their conventional counterparts. Also keep in mind that the certification process is often too expensive for small farms even though their practices may meet or exceed those set by the USDA. The smallest farms-those selling less than $5,000 worth of crops annually-may by law label their produce organic without being inspected or certified. Rather than rely on labeling, we prefer, when possible, to buy locally grown vegetables in their season.

Self-fertilization is a risky strategy, which is why sex is so popular among large and complex organisms.

If nature is left to itself, fertility increases. Organic remains of plants and animals accumulate and are decomposed on the surface by bacteria and fungi. With the movement of rainwater, the nutrients are taken deep into the soil to become food for microorganisms, earthworms, and other small animals. Plant roots reach to the lower soil strata and draw the nutrients back up to the surface.

Incidentally, if you really think organic means pure, then you’re in for a helluva heartbreak. Organic farms do use pesticides and, as reported by Brian Palmer in Slate, organic wine needs eighty times more fertilizer than conventional vino.

Why do we keep believing that we can control nature,even as it banishes us repeatedly from our homes in search of new fertile ground?

For meat, milk, and eggs labelled organic, animals must: 1) be raised on organic feed (without most synthetic pesticides/fertilizers) 2) be traced 3) not be fed antibiotics or growth hormones 4) have "access to the outdoors

It is obvious that human (and non-human) diseases are evolving with an unusual rapidity simply because changes in our behaviour facilitate cross-fertilization of different strains of germs as never before, while an unending flow of new medicines (and pesticides) also present infectious organisms with rigorous, changing challenges to their survival.

It’s ironic that the Tea Party populists, most of whom believe that they are furthering the American ideal of “rugged individualism,” are supporting mega-corporate-friendly policies like Reaganomics and Clintonomics and are making it very difficult for individuals to be anything other than drones in a giant corporate-run economic machine. And, on the flipside, those countries that call themselves “democratic socialist” in their organization—Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden—actually provide a deep and fertile soil into which entrepreneurs may plant new businesses.

I think, therefore a single fertilized egg cell can replicate itself into trillions of specialized and exquisitely organized cells.

Stabilize your blood sugar Nurture your adrenal glands Support your organs of elimination Syncing with your menstrual cycle Engage your feminine energy

This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character. In the next chapter I shall discuss the complex and little known laws of variation and of correlation of growth. In the four succeeding chapters, the most apparent and gravest difficulties on the theory will be given: namely, first, the difficulties of transitions, or in understanding how a simple being or a simple organ can be changed and perfected into a highly developed being or elaborately constructed organ; secondly the subject of Instinct, or the mental powers of animals, thirdly, Hybridism, or the infertility of species and the fertility of varieties when intercrossed; and fourthly, the imperfection of the Geological Record. In

All the great agricultural systems which have survived have made it their business never to deplete the earth of its fertility without at the same time beginning the process of restoration.

The vinedresser does a curious thing with the rotten fruit. He turns it back into the soil and there, underground, by some spectacular organic miracle of nature, it fertilizes a future harvest.

No matter how much one trained, pruned, and fertilized, one could not dominate nature, but only guide it to become what it willed itself to be. No, her mother preferred to spend her time organizing

Organically grown fruits and vegetables are grown with all natural methods on organic farms and are far superior nutritionally. The big commercial farms use chemical fertilizers, pesticides and GMO seeds.

Consider the genesis of a single-celled embryo produced by the fertilization of an egg by a sperm. The genetic material of this embryo comes from two sources: paternal genes (from sperm) and maternal genes (from eggs). But the cellular material of the embryo comes exclusively from the egg; the sperm is no more than a glorified delivery vehicle for male DNA—a genome equipped with a hyperactive tail. Aside from proteins, ribosomes, nutrients, and membranes, the egg also supplies the embryo with specialized structures called mitochondria. These mitochondria are the energy-producing factories of the cell; they are so anatomically discrete and so specialized in their function that cell biologists call them “organelles”—i.e., mini-organs resident within cells. Mitochondria, recall, carry a small, independent genome that resides within the mitochondrion itself—not in the cell’s nucleus, where the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes (and the 21,000-odd human genes) can be found. The exclusively female origin of all the mitochondria in an embryo has an important consequence. All humans—male or female—must have inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, who inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, and so forth, in an unbroken line of female ancestry stretching indefinitely into the past. (A woman also carries the mitochondrial genomes of all her future descendants in her cells; ironically, if there is such a thing as a “homunculus,” then it is exclusively female in origin—technically, a “femunculus”?) Now imagine an ancient tribe of two hundred women, each of whom bears one child. If the child happens to be a daughter, the woman dutifully passes her mitochondria to the next generation, and, through her daughter’s daughter, to a third generation. But if she has only a son and no daughter, the woman’s mitochondrial lineage wanders into a genetic blind alley and becomes extinct (since sperm do not pass their mitochondria to the embryo, sons cannot pass their mitochondrial genomes to their children). Over the course of the tribe’s evolution, tens of thousands of such mitochondrial lineages will land on lineal dead ends by chance, and be snuffed out. And here is the crux: if the founding population of a species is small enough, and if enough time has passed, the number of surviving maternal lineages will keep shrinking, and shrinking further, until only a few are left. If half of the two hundred women in our tribe have sons, and only sons, then one hundred mitochondrial lineages will dash against the glass pane of male-only heredity and vanish in the next generation. Another half will dead-end into male children in the second generation, and so forth. By the end of several generations, all the descendants of the tribe, male or female, might track their mitochondrial ancestry to just a few women. For modern humans, that number has reached one: each of us can trace our mitochondrial lineage to a single human female who existed in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago. She is the common mother of our species. We do not know what she looked like, although her closest modern-day relatives are women of the San tribe from Botswana or Namibia. I find the idea of such a founding mother endlessly mesmerizing. In human genetics, she is known by a beautiful name—Mitochondrial Eve.

In 1999 the National Research Council concluded that 'the total exposure to naturally occurring carcinogens exceeds the exposure to synthetic carcinogens.'... The point was that even if organics were pesticide-free, the gain wouldn't make up for the downside of organic food: It's more likely to be infested with bacteria because it's grown in 'natural' fertilizer. Natural fertilizer is the health food business's euphemism for cow manure. (The much-criticized 'nonorganic' produce is grown in nitrogen fertilizers. Although organics advocates sneer at the chemicals, 'chemical' nitrogen is perfectly healthy; air is 78 percent nitrogen, after all. We have a choice between foods grown in nitrogen taken from the air, and 'organic' food grown in cow manure.)

When a livestock farmer is willing to “practice complexity”—to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to—he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn’t designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.

It's funny, this - so many words to describe the same thing,” she smiled...“Penis is simply an anatomical appendage, as exciting as a finger or a phalange. A willy is something small and flaccid, and at least slightly humorous. Prick is the organ as viewed with distaste, perhaps with so much as to describe the entire body it’s attached to, like a dick, but more so. Phallus is a symbol of fertility, but my favourite...is the cock, which is only ever the hard, real thing, unleashed and ready to dive head-first into any waiting orifice. Or hole, while I’m in thesaurus mode.

Ovik Mkrtchyan Quote On current trends in organic farming The wrong approach to farming, when the focus is on high yields of the fields in any way, including the use of pesticides, growth hormones and artificial fertilisers, leads to the destruction of the fertile soil layer, which can take decades to restore.

Just tell us,” Harding said, bent over the wound. “Darwin had no idea …” “That life is so unbelievably complex,” Malcolm said. “Nobody realizes it. I mean, a single fertilized egg has a hundred thousand genes, which act in a coordinated way, switching on and off at specific times, to transform that single cell into a complete living creature. That one cell starts to divide, but the subsequent cells are different. They specialize. Some are nerve. Some are gut. Some are limb. Each set of cells begins to follow its own program, developing, interacting. Eventually there are two hundred and fifty different kinds of cells, all developing together, at exactly the right time. Just when the organism needs a circulatory system, the heart starts pumping. Just when hormones are needed, the adrenals start to make them. Week after week, this unimaginably complex development proceeds perfectly—perfectly. It’s incredible. No human activity comes close.

Daca ma gandesc bine, reprosul esential pe care il am de facut tarii si vremurilor este ca ma impiedica sa ma bucur de frumusetea vietii. Din cand in cand, imi dau seama ca traiesc intr-o lume fara cer, fara copaci si gradini, fara extaze bucolice, fara ape, pajisti si nori. Am uitat misterul adanc al noptii, radicalitatea amiezii, racorile cosmice ale amurgului. Nu mai vad pasarile, nu mai adulmec mirosul prafos si umed al furtunii, nu mai percep, asfixiat de emotie, miracolul ploii si al stelelor. Nu mai privesc in sus, nu mai am organ pentru parfumuri si adieri. Fosnetul frunzelor uscate, transluciditatea nocturna a lacurilor, sunetul indescifrabil al serii, iarba, padurea, vitele, orizontul tulbure al campiei, colina cordiala si muntele ascetic nu mai fac de mult parte din peisajul meu cotidian, din echilibrul igienic al vietii mele launtrice. Nu mai am timp pentru prietenie, pentru taclaua voioasa, pentru cheful asezat. Sunt ocupat. Sunt grabit. Sunt iritat, hartuit, coplesit de lehamite. Am o existenta de ghiseu: mi se cer servicii, mi se fac comenzi, mi se solicita interventii, sfaturi si complicitati. Am devenit mizantrop. Doua treimi din metabolismul meu mental se epuizeaza in nervi de conjunctura, agenda mea zilnica e un inventar de urgente minore. Gandesc pe sponci, stimulat de provocari meschine. Imi incep ziua apoplectic, injurand "situatiunea": gropile din drum, moravurile soferilor autohtoni, caldura (sau frigul), praful (sau noroiul), morala politicienilor, gramatica gazetarilor, modele ideologice, cacofoniile noii arhitecturi, demagogia, coruptia, bezmeticia tranzitiei. Abia daca mai inregistrez desenul ametitor al cate unei siluete feminine, inocenta vreunui suras, farmecul tacut al cate unui colt de strada. Colectionez antipatii si prilejuri de insatisfactie. Scriu despre mizerii si maruntisuri. Bomban toata ziua, mi-am pierdut increderea in virtutile natiei, in soarta tarii, in rostul lumii. Am un portret tot mai greu digerabil. Patriotii de parada m-au trecut la tradatori, neoliberalii la conservatori, postmodernistii la elitisti. Batranilor le apar frivol, tinerilor reactionar. Una peste alta, mi-am pierdut buna dispozitie, elanul, jubilatia. Nu mai am ragazuri fertile, reverii, autenticitati. Ma misc, de dimineata pana seara, intr-un univers artificial, agitat, infectat de trivialitate. Apetitul vital a devenit anemic, placerea de a fi si-a pierdut amplitudinea si suculenta. Respir crispat si pripit, ca intr-o etuva. Cand cineva trece printr-o asemenea criza de vina e, in primul rand, umoarea proprie. Te poti acuza ca ai consimtit in prea mare masura imediatului, ca nu stii sa-ti dozezi timpul si afectele, ca nu mai deosebesti intre esential si accesoriu, ca, in sfarsit, ai scos din calculul zilnic valorile zenitale. Dar nu se poate trece cu vederea nici ambianta toxica a momentului si a veacului. Suntem napaditi de probleme secunde. Avem preocupari de mana a doua, avem conducatori de mana a doua, traim sub presiunea multipla a necesitatii. Ni se ofera texte mediocre, show-uri de prost-gust, conditii de viata umilitoare. Am ajuns sa nu mai avem simturi, idei, imaginatie. Ne-am uratit, ne-am instrainat cu totul de simplitatea polifonica a lumii, de pasiunea vietii depline. Nu! mai avem puterea de a admira si de a lauda, cu o genuina evlavie, splendoarea Creatiei, vazduhul, marile, pamantul si oamenii. Suntem turmentati si sumbri. Abia daca ne mai putem suporta. Exista, pentru acest derapaj primejdios, o terapie plauzibila? Da, cu conditia sa ne dam seama de gravitatea primejdiei. Cu conditia sa impunem atentiei noastre zilnice alte prioritati si alte orizonturi.

Nature knows two fundamentally different ways of adaptation, which determine the further existence of the living organism the one is by increased fertility, accompanied by a relatively small degree of defensive power and individual conservation; the other is by individual equipment of manifold means of self-protection, coupled with a relatively insignificant fertility.

Displaced workers, along with others who fear for their livelihood, are fertile ground in which to sow anti-immigrant sentiment, since angry and frustrated people often seek some target on which to blame their problems. The right wing has organized and manipulated such anger and resentment, turned it away from corporations, and directed it against the government, decrying high taxes and the inability of the state to solve problems such as social deterioration, homelessness, crime, and violence. In addition to the target of “failed liberal policies,” immigrants make a convenient and tangible target for people’s anger. Racial prejudice is often an encoded part of the message…Right-wing populist themes are particularly effective at attracting working people disenchanted with the system.

but while he probed about with his copulatory organ to fertilize her eggs, the female turned back her long, elegant neck and bit off his head. He was so busy humping, he didn’t notice. His neck stump waved about as he continued his business, and she nibbled on his thorax, and then his wings. Finally, his last foreleg protruded from her mouth as his headless, heartless lower body copulated in perfect rhyme.

Now, all of this is enough to make anyone a bit anxious, and I’ve seen women, as well as myself when I first got started, develop a type of eating disorder called “orthorexia,” a term meaning hyper-correct/clean eating. This is behavior where a woman will only eat foods, and will delay eating until she is able to eat foods, that she feels are correct and safe—for orthorexics typically this means organic foods.

I discovered that social climbing was a middle-class phenomenon, the poor never gave it a thought, they were too busy trying to survive. Over the years these communities acquired political savvy, they organized and became fertile territory for leftist parties. Ten years later, in 1970, they were decisive in electing Salvador Allende and for that reason had to suffer the greatest repression during the dictatorship.

Kya couldn’t tell, but while he probed about with his copulatory organ to fertilize her eggs, the female turned back her long, elegant neck and bit off his head. He was so busy humping, he didn’t notice. His neck stump waved about as he continued his business, and she nibbled on his thorax, and then his wings. Finally, his last foreleg protruded from her mouth as his headless, heartless lower body copulated in perfect rhyme.

Peoples of the Fertile Crescent domesticated local plants much earlier. They domesticated far more species, domesticated far more productive or valuable species, domesticated a much wider range of types of crops, developed intensified food production and dense human populations more rapidly, and as a result entered the modern world with more advanced technology, more complex political organization, and more epidemic diseases with which to infect other peoples.

Ilhan Omar’s 100,000-strong Somali community in Minneapolis is the terrorist recruitment capital of the United States. It is a fertile base for both direct and online recruitment. FBI data show that more men from this community have joined, or sought to join, a foreign terrorist organization over the last dozen years there than in any other jurisdiction in the nation. From this community alone, 45 members left to join either the Somalia-based insurgency al-Shabab or the Iraqi and Syrian wing of ISIS.

By the fourth millennium BC, the Fertile Crescent was not the only region of coalesced communities; organized agricultural, military, religious, and administrative activity had also begun to appear in the Indus Valley, in what is now Pakistan. Even before written records, there is evidence of trade between these two regions. Archaeologists have discovered lamps and cups in Mesopotamia dating from the late fourth millennium BC and made from conch shells found only in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman.

In 1801, the visiting French naturalist, François Péron, noted that “after residing a year or two at Port Jackson, most of the English prostitutes became remarkably fruitful”. Rather than attributing this to changes in climate and diet, he believed the fertility of the “disgusting prostitutes” was linked to “the sudden revolution in their moral conduct”, paradoxically arguing that a reduction in sexual activity resulted in more babies, as “an excess of sexual intercourse destroys the sensibility of the female organs”.

What do we mean by the lived truth of creation? We have to mean the world as it appears to men in a condition of relative unrepression; that is, as it would appear to creatures who assessed their true puniness in the face of the overwhelmingness and majesty of the universe, of the unspeakable miracle of even the single created object; as it probably appeared to the earliest men on the planet and to those extrasensitive types who have filled the roles of shaman, prophet, saint, poet, and artist. What is unique about their perception of reality is that it is alive to the panic inherent in creation: Sylvia Plath somewhere named God "King Panic." And Panic is fittingly King of the Grotesque. What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types-biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killerbees attacking with a fury and demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out-not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in "natural" accidents of all types: the earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, automobiles make a pyramid heap of over 50 thousand a year in the U.S. alone, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism's comfort and expansiveness. "Questo sol m'arde, e questo m'innamore," as Michelangelo put it.

{On to contributions to evolutionary biology of 18th century French scientist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon} He was not an evolutionary biologist, yet he was the father of evolutionism. He was the first person to discuss a large number of evolutionary problems, problems that before Buffon had not been raised by anybody.... he brought them to the attention of the scientific world. Except for Aristotle and Darwin, no other student of organisms [whole animals and plants] has had as far-reaching an influence. He brought the idea of evolution into the realm of science. He developed a concept of the "unity of type", a precursor of comparative anatomy. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the acceptance of a long-time scale for the history of the earth. He was one of the first to imply that you get inheritance from your parents, in a description based on similarities between elephants and mammoths. And yet, he hindered evolution by his frequent endorsement of the immutability of species. He provided a criterion of species, fertility among members of a species, that was thought impregnable.

In science knowledge comes first and then faith follows. In spirituality faith comes first and then knowledge follows. The knowledge that pesticides and chemical fertilizers are good for plants came through science. Based on this knowledge, people had faith in pesticides and fertilizers and they were used all over the world. Then a different knowledge came and faith shifted to organic farming. Knowledge brought faith, the knowledge changed, and then faith changed. The knowledge and faith of science is of "happening." In spirituality, faith is first and knowledge comes later.

In agricultural communities, male leadership in the hunt ceased to be of much importance. As the discipline of the hunting band decayed, the political institutions of the earliest village settlements perhaps approximated the anarchism which has remained ever since the ideal of peaceful peasantries all round the earth. Probably religious functionaries, mediators between helpless mankind and the uncertain fertility of the earth, provided an important form of social leadership. The strong hunter and man of prowess, his occupation gone or relegated to the margins of social life, lost the umambiguous primacy which had once been his; while the comparatively tight personal subordination to a leader necessary to the success of a hunting party could be relaxed in proportion as grain fields became the center around which life revolved. Among predominantly pastoral peoples, however, religious-political institutions took a quite different turn. To protect the flocks from animal predators required the same courage and social discipline which hunters had always needed. Among pastoralists, likewise, the principal economic activity- focused, as among the earliest hunters, on a parasitic relation to animals- continued to be the special preserve of menfolk. Hence a system of patrilineal families, united into kinship groups under the authority of a chieftain responsible for daily decisions as to where to seek pasture, best fitted the conditions of pastoral life. In addition, pastoralists were likely to accord importance to the practices and discipline of war. After all, violent seizure of someone else’s animals or pasture grounds was the easiest and speediest way to wealth and might be the only means of survival in a year of scant vegetation. Such warlikeness was entirely alien to communities tilling the soil. Archeological remains from early Neolithic villages suggest remarkably peaceful societies. As long as cultivable land was plentiful, and as long as the labor of a single household could not produce a significant surplus, there can have been little incentive to war. Traditions of violence and hunting-party organization presumably withered in such societies, to be revived only when pastoral conquest superimposed upon peaceable villagers the elements of warlike organization from which civilized political institutions without exception descend.

the planned destruction of Iraq’s agriculture is not widely known. Modern Iraq is part of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia where man first domesticated wheat between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, and home to several thousand varieties of local wheat. As soon as the US took over Iraq, it became clear its interests were not limited to oil. In 2004, Paul Bremer, the then military head of the Provisional Authority imposed as many as a hundred laws which made short work of Iraq’s sovereignty. The most crippling for the people and the economy of Iraq was Order 81 which deals, among other things, with plant varieties and patents. The goal was brutally clear-cut and sweeping — to wipe out Iraq’s traditional, sustainable agriculture and replace it with oil-chemical-genetically-modified-seed-based industrial agriculture. There was no public or parliamentary debate for the conquered people who never sought war. The conquerors made unilateral changes in Iraq’s 1970 patent law: henceforth, plant forms could be patented — which was never allowed before — while genetically-modified organisms were to be introduced. Farmers were strictly banned from saving their own seeds: this, in a country where, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 97 per cent of Iraqi farmers planted only their own saved seeds. With a single stroke of the pen, Iraq’s agriculture was axed, while Order 81 facilitated the introduction and domination of imported, high-priced corporate seeds, mainly from the US — which neither reproduce, nor give yields without their prescribed chemical fertiliser and pesticide inputs. It meant that the majority of farmers who had never spent money on seed and inputs that came free from nature, would henceforth have to heavily invest in corporate inputs and equipment — or go into debt to obtain them, or accept lowered profits, or give up farming altogether.

And yet, because I am without a doubt mortal, I have the troubling desire to do good, to please, to communicate my warmth, to still be very beautiful sometimes to inspire a taste for beauty. I know that these times are not fertile in grace...I am afraid tomorrow the grace of woman...may be recognized as a public utility & be socialized to the point of becoming a banal article, a bazaar object like in '93 & that one will find types of tender or amusing women with millions of copies like the creations of the big...fashion stores where it is always the same thing. I want to affirm the superiority of the god over that of the organizer of concerts for the poor.

Organic farming is environmentally friendlier to every acre of land. But it requires _more_ acres. The trade-off is a harsh one. Would we rather have pesticides on farmland and nitrogen runoffs from them? Or would we rather chop down more forest? How much more forest would we have to chop down? If we wanted to reduce pesticide use and nitrogen runoff by turning all of the world’s farmland to organic farming, we’d need about 50 percent more farmland than we have today. Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, whose work helped triple crop yields over the last fifty years and arguably saved billions from starvation, estimates that the world would need an _additional_ 5 to 6 billion head of cattle to produce enough manure to fertilize that farmland. There are only an estimated 1.3 billion cattle on the planet today. Combined, we’d need to chop down roughly half of the world’s remaining forest to grow crops and to graze cattle that produce enough manure to fertilize those crops. Clearing that much land would produce around 500 billion tons of CO2, or almost as much as the total cumulative CO2 emissions of the world thus far. And the cattle needed to fertilize that land would produce far _more_ greenhouse gases, in the form of methane, than all of agriculture does today, possibly enough to equal all human greenhouse gases emitted from all sources today. That’s not a viable path.

The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested ... Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all "NPK" fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients.

The differentiation of organ systems, organ parts, etc, is a stepwise affair which has been compared to the way a sculptor carves a statue out of a block of wood. With each step in the development the functions assigned to each group of cells become more precise, and more of its genetic potential is suppressed-until in the end most cells lose even their basic freedom to divide. By the time the fertilized ovum has developed into an adult organism, the individual cell has been reduced from totipotentiality to almost nullipotentiality. It still carries the coded blue-print of the whole organism in its chromosomes, but all, except that tiny fraction of the code which regulates its specialized activities, has been permanently switched off.

To be sure, there are hunter-gatherer societies that don’t exhibit the elaborately organized violence denoted by the term “war.” But often what turns out to be lacking is the organization, not the violence. The warless !Kung San were billed in the title of one book as The Harmless People, yet during the 1950s and 1960s, their homicide rate was between 20 and 80 times as high as that found in industrialized nations.114 Eskimos, to judge by popular accounts, are all cuddliness and generosity. Yet early this century, after westerners first made contact with a fifteen-family Eskimo village, they found that every adult male had been involved in a homicide. One reason the !Kung and most Eskimo haven’t waged war is their habitat.115 With population sparse, friction is low. But when densely settled along fertile ground, hunter-gatherers have warred lavishly. The Ainu of Japan built hilltop fortresses and, when raiding a neighboring

Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides affect the soil food web, toxic to some members, warding off others, and changing the environment. Important fungal and bacterial relationships don’t form when a plant can get free nutrients. When chemically fed, plants bypass the microbial-assisted method of obtaining nutrients, and microbial populations adjust accordingly. Trouble is, you have to keep adding chemical fertilizers and using “-icides,” because the right mix and diversity—the very foundation of the soil food web—has been altered. It makes sense that once the bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa are gone, other members of the food web disappear as well. Earthworms, for example, lacking food and irritated by the synthetic nitrates in soluble nitrogen fertilizers, move out. Since they are major shredders of organic material, their absence is a great loss. Without the activity and diversity of a healthy food web, you not only impact the nutrient system but all the other things a healthy soil food web brings. Soil structure deteriorates, watering can become problematic, pathogens and pests establish themselves and, worst of all, gardening becomes a lot more work than it needs to be.

Foreign nongovernment organizations (NGOs) that support Russian democratic civic groups are a particular target of Russian accusations of foreign economic intrigue. In 2004, President Putin accused Russian NGOs of pursuing "dubious group and commercial interests" for taking foreign money. FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev told the Russian State Duma in 2005 that the FSB had uncovered spies working in foreign-sponsored NGOs. He further claimed, "Foreign secret services are ever more actively using non-traditional methods for their work and, with the help of different NGOs educational programs, are propagandizing their interests, particularly in the former Soviet Union." Patrushev accused the United States of placing spies undercover within the Peace Corps, which was expelled from Russia in 2002, the Saudi Red Crescent, and the Kuwaiti NGO Society for Social Reform. Patrushev attributed an economic motive to these perceived foreign plots, alleging that industrialized states did not want "a powerful economic competitor like Russia." Echoing Soviet-era accusations of nefarious Western economic intent, he claimed that Russia had lost billions of dollars per year due to U.S., EU, and Canadian "trade discrimination. Pushing for stronger regulation of NGOs, Patrushev said, "The imperfectness of legislation and lack of efficient mechanisms for state oversight creates a fertile ground for conducting intelligence operations under the guise of charity and other activities. In 2012, Putin signed the "foreign agent law," which ordered Russian civil rights organizations that received any foreign funding to register as "foreign agents.

It is conceivable that an interplay of genes and epigenes coordinates human embryogenesis. Let us return, yet again, to Morgan's problem: the creation of a multicellular organism from a one-celled embryo. Seconds after fertilization, a quickening begins in the embryo. Proteins reach into the nucleus of the cell and start flicking genetic switches on and off. A dormant spaceship comes to life. Genes are activated and repressed, and these genes, in turn, encode yet other proteins that activate and repress other genes. A single cell divides to form two, then four, and eight cells. An entire layer of cells forms, then hollows out into the outer skin of a ball. Genes that coordinate metabolism, motility, cell fate, and identity fire "on." The boiler room warms us. The lights flicker on in the corridors. The intercom crackles alive. Now a second code stirs to life to ensure that gene expression is locked into place in each cell, enabling each cell to acquire and fix an identity. Chemical marks are selectively added to certain genes and erased from others, modulating the expression of the genes in that cell alone. Methyl groups are inserted and erased, and histones are modified to repress or activate genes. The embryo unfurls step by step. Primordial segements appear, and cells take their positions along various parts of the embryo. New genes are activated that command subroutines to grow limbs and organs, and more chemical marks are appended on the genomes of individual cells. Cells are added to create organs and structures-forelegs, hind legs, muscles, kidneys, bones, eyes. Some cells die a programmed death. Genes that maintain function, metabolism, and repair are turned on. An organism emerges from a cell.

The urban isolated individual An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups because such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spirltual and emotional life; they are not easily penetrated by propaganda. For example, it is much more difficult today for outside propaganda to influence a soldier integrated into a military group, or a militant member of a monolithic party, than to influence the same man when he is a mere citizen. Nor is the organic group sensitive to psychological contagion, which is so important to the success of Nazi propaganda. One can say generally, that 19th century individualist society came about through the disintegration of such small groups as the family or the church. Once these groups lost their importance, the individual was substantially isolated. He was plunged into a new environment generally urban and thereby "uprooted." He no longer had a traditional place in which to live. He was no longer geographically attached to a fixed place, or historically to his ancestry. An individual thus uprooted can only be part of a mass- He is on his own, and individualist thinking asks of him something he has never been required to do before: that he, the individual, become the measure of all things. Thus he begins to judge everything for himself. In fact he must make his own judgments. He is thrown entirely on his own resources; he can find criteria only in himself. He is clearly responsible for his own decisions, both personal and social. He becomes the beginning and the end of everything. Before him there was nothing; after him there will be nothing. His own life becomes the only criterion of justice and injustice, of Good and Evil. The individual is placed in a minority position and burdened at the same time with a total crushing responsibility. Such conditions make an individualist society fertile ground for modern propaganda. The permanent uncertainty, the social mobility, the absence of sociological protection and of traditional frames of reference — all these inevitably provide propaganda with a malleable environment that can be fed information from the outside and conditioned at will. The individual left to himself is defenseless the more so because he may be caught up in a social current thus becoming easy prey for propaganda. As a member of a small group he was fairly well protected from collective influences, customs, and suggestions. He was relatively unaffected by changes in the society at large.

Indeed, Aristotle makes as many mistakes as possible for a man who is founding the science of biology. He thinks, for example, that the male element in reproduction merely stimulates and quickens; it does not occur to him (what we now know from experiments in parthenogenesis) that the essential function of the sperm is not so much to fertilize the ovum as to provide the embryo with the heritable qualities of the male parent, and so permit the offspring to be a vigorous variant, a new admixture of two ancestral lines. As human dissection was not practised in his time, he is particularly fertile in physiological errors: he knows nothing of muscles, not even of their existence; he does not distinguish arteries from veins; he thinks the brain is an organ for cooling the blood; he believes, forgivably, that man has more sutures in the skull than woman; he believes, less forgivably, that man has only eight ribs on each side; he believes, incredibly, and unforgivably, that woman has fewer teeth than man.25 Apparently his relations with women were of the most amicable kind.

to boost plant health during this critical period with the following measures: ● Make absolutely certain that plants are well watered and that there is never any water stress. Overwatering at this point is better than underwatering. ● Make sure that there are zero signs of nutrient deficiencies. If you spot any, make sure to thoroughly fertilize. I give detailed instructions on how to fertilize in a later chapter. ● Do a very careful walk-through of the garden in mid and late July. Look closely for the presence of any pests. If any are present, spray all plants with the appropriate organic pesticides. Spray as directed. From this point on pay close attention to the presence of pests. Address problems immediately and aggressively. I will discuss pest management in more detail in a later chapter. ● Look closely for male and/or hermed plants and immediately remove any and all of these from your garden.

I have to admit that fertilizing the majority of perennials isn’t mandatory. If you plant them in soil that suits them (and do your homework when choosing the plants), they may do just fine without it. Good, organically rich soil and good growing conditions and regular water can sustain healthy, hearty perennial growth for quite some time.

Industrial food may be inexpensive, but its production exacts a significant toll on the environment and on the health of workers. For every calorie of industrial food you eat, approximately 10 calories of fossil fuel were spent to plant, fertilize, harvest, ship, and process the food before it got to your plate.27 Further, unless the food was organic, massive quantities of pesticides and inorganic fertilizers were used, polluting water supplies and sometimes poisoning workers. The most extreme and disturbing type of industrial food is meat. Because

The Germans had done their best to evacuate Majdanek before the Red Army arrived, but in their hurry to leave they had failed to conceal the evidence of what had taken place here. When Soviet troops drove into the compound they discovered a set of gas chambers, six large furnaces with the charred remains of human skeletons scattered around them and, nearby, several enormous mounds of white ash filled with pieces of human bones. The ash mounds overlooked a huge field of vegetables, and the Soviets came to the obvious conclusion: the organizers of Majdanek had been using human remains as fertilizer. ‘This is German food production,’ wrote one Soviet journalist at the time. ‘Kill people; fertilize cabbages.

sodium nitrate. This active compound, which is mined exclusively in South America, is employed primarily by organic farmers growing winter vegetables in dry soil. They use it as a soluble fertilizer to enhance the soil with nitrogen. In addition to the environmental costs of mining and shipping the compound, sodium nitrate contributes to groundwater pollution by furthering freshwater eutrophication (intensification of phosphorous and nitrogen) and salinization.

US cattle also absorb all the herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers used to grow the feed crops on which they are forced to gorge, and a high percentage of these hapless creatures arrive at the slaughterhouse riddled with cancerous tumors and tuberculosis. All this poison is passed directly on to the consumer, so if you like to eat beef, be sure it has been organically raised without drugs and hormones, and preferably range-fed rather than pen-fed.

A related issue to the Anthropic Principle is the so-called “god-of-the-gaps” in which theists argue that the (shrinking) number of issues that science has not yet explained require the existence of a god. For example, science has not (yet) been able to demonstrate the creation of a primitive life-form in the laboratory from non-living material (though US geneticist Craig Venter’s recent demonstration lays claim to having created such a laboratory synthetic life-form, the “Mycoplasma Laboratorium”). It is therefore concluded that a god is necessary to account for this step because of the “gap” in scientific knowledge. The issue of creating life in the laboratory (and other similar “gap” issues such as those in the fossil record) is reminiscent of other such “gaps” in the history of science that have since been bridged. For example, the laboratory synthesis of urea from inorganic materials by Friedrich Wöhler in 1828 at that time had nearly as much impact on religious believers as Copernicus’s heliocentric universe proposal. From the time of the Ancient Egyptians, the doctrine of vitalism had been dominant. Vitalism argued that the functions of living organisms included a “vital force” and therefore were beyond the laws of physics and chemistry. Urea (carbamide) is a natural metabolite found in the urine of animals that had been widely used in agriculture as a fertilizer and in the production of phosphorus. However, Friedrich Wöhler was the first to demonstrate that a natural organic material could be synthesized from inorganic materials (a combination of silver isocyanate and ammonium chloride leads to urea as one of its products). The experiment led Wöhler famously to write to a fellow chemist that it was “the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact,” that is, the slaying of vitalism by urea in a Petri dish. In practice, it took more than just Wöhler’s demonstration to slay vitalism as a scientific doctrine, but the synthesis of urea in the laboratory is one of the key advances in science in which the “gap” between the inorganic and the organic was finally bridged. And Wöhler certainly pissed on the doctrine of vitalism, if you will excuse a very bad joke.

While the reasons why hunter-gatherers became farmers may still be the subject of debate, the most important consequences are now established. This change in the means of subsistence initially represented great success for the human species: according to some authors, the global population increased tenfold from 8 million at the start of the Neolithic to 85 million in 5000 BCE.6 At the same time, a gradual process of sedentarization and hence the accumulation of goods occurs, firstly of food and subsequently also of household effects and even valuables. It started with the semi-permanent establishment of hunter-gatherers in places that were so rich in natural nourishment that they no longer had to constantly hunt for their food. But this only became possible for larger parts of humanity with the development of agriculture. This, too, was a lengthy process. In many parts of the world, farmers who employed the slash-and-burn method remained highly mobile. Every year, or every few years, an area of forest was burned down and crops were sown in the fertile ash. These farmers were thus continuously changing land. The specialization of certain farmers as pastoralists also involved a high degree of mobility. Finally, permanently established farmers could decide to move for all kinds of reasons – as evidenced by the immigration from the Old to the New World following Columbus’s discovery of that continent.7 These caveats aside, it remains the case that, since the Neolithic, humanity has become considerably more place-bound, which has had an enormous impact on the organization of work. It was a

It’s also true that certain medical organizations treat rape survivors with a drug that prevents fertilization but fails to act against a conceived zygote, thus opening the possibility that a pregnancy could occur as the result of the rape.

Although molecular biology was not born in 1953 with the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick, its elucidation has provided the molecular biologist with tools and techniques that have propelled the science forward. All the information required to make a human being is contained in a single cell. The molecules comprising this fertilized egg will organize the development, sustain the life, allow for the reproduction of, and ultimately execute the demise of an individual. Molecular biology is the study of the way in which molecules function to organize life. Remarkably, the same molecules and principles lie at the heart of all the life sciences, as they control the fundamental machinery of cells. The field of molecular biology concerns macromolecules such as nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, and their interrelationships, that are essential for life itself.

Without this [Soil Food Web system of bacteria, fungi etc], most important nutrients would drain from soil. Instead, they are retained in the bodies of soil life. Here is the gardener's truth: when you apply a chemical fertilizer, a tiny bit hits the rhizosphere, where it is absorbed, but most of it continues to drain through soil until it hits the water table. Not so with the nutrients locked up inside soil organisms, a state known as immobilization; these nutrients are eventually released as wastes, or mineralized.

Nigerian human rights activist Obianuju Ekeocha casts a spotlight on the new colonialism and subjects it to searching critical scrutiny. She shows, for example, how in the name of “human rights” the basic right to life of the unborn child is being daily undermined by Western governments and by (often partially government-funded) “nongovernmental organizations”, such as International Planned Parenthood, who push abortion. Similarly, the pro-fertility and pro-marriage and family beliefs of vast numbers of Africans and others are undermined in the name of “human rights”, as that term is (mis)used by advocates of population control, sexual permissiveness, certain forms of self-styled feminism, and the redefinition of marriage to eliminate the norm of sexual complementarity.

Imagine a Sapiens group - a tribe of five hundred, say, in bands of twenty-five or so--living around 55,000 years ago in the lowlands near the headwaters of the White Nile in what is today southern Sudan. They are the inheritors of the modern culture that has spread from southern Africa, and they survive with the skillful hunting and fishing techniques developed over the millennia, the close-knit organizations that establish and maintain group harmony, the communications capabilities of at least a rudimentary language, and a healthy diet based on both plants and animals in abundance. But there are other inheritor bands around, for the region is fertile and the climate generally benign, and they continue to grow in population and this means that in time it gets harder and harder to find new fields of tubers, or large herds of impala, or the usual swamp tortoises. Human pressure on the area is pushing it past its carrying capacity, and relations with other bands in other tribes become increasingly stressful as competition intensifies.

I’m so glad it freed up on the conversation. Even now, when someone tells me they’re pregnant, they’ll often tell me, “and I also had a miscarriage,” or “I struggled fertility-wise.” And I don’t think that conversation would happen so organically if people didn’t know that’s something I understand or want to talk about, and I’m very grateful for that.

All the information for embryonic development is contained within the fertilized egg. So how is this information interpreted to give rise to an embryo? Does the DNA contain a full description of the organism to which it will give rise; is it a blueprint for the organism? The answer is no. Instead, the fertilized egg contains a program of instructions for making the organism—a generative program—that determines where and when different proteins are synthesized and thus controls how cells behave. A descriptive program such as a blueprint or a plan describes an object in some detail, whereas a generative program describes how to make an object. For the same object, the programs are very different. Consider origami, the art of paper folding. By folding a piece of paper in various directions it is quite easy to make a paper hat or a bird from a single sheet. To describe in any detail the final form simply by marking regions on the flat piece of paper is really very difficult, and not of much help in explaining how to achieve it. Much more useful and easier to formulate are instructions on how to fold the paper. The reason for this is that simple instructions about folding have complex spatial consequences. In development, gene action similarly sets in motion a sequence of events that can bring about profound changes in the embryo. One can thus think of the genetic information in the fertilized egg as equivalent to the folding instructions in origami; both contain a generative program for making a particular structure.

Finally, we can contemplate the evolution of our understanding of developmental biology. Progress has been impressive but due to the complexity of cells with all their proteins and other molecules interacting, there is still much to be learned. It is likely that in the next 50 years, given the genes and structure of a fertilized egg, it will be possible to reliably compute the details of that organism’s development and just what the adult would be.

Controlled economy was the economic base of totalitarianism and fertile soil for bureaucratic privilege. Under a highly centralized political and economic system, survival depended on bureaucrats who could arbitrarily allocate state assets and ration the necessities of daily life. A strict household-registration system ensured that the vast majority of China’s peasants never ventured far from where they were born. Employees of government organs and state-run enterprises had their housing and all their daily necessities allocated by their work units. Secret dossiers decided the fate of every cadre and worker.

Chapter 3 presents an argument for Darwin’s premise that all organic beings need at least occasionally to cross with other individuals of the same species, since nature abhors perpetual self-fertilization. Darwin had stated this premise in the Origin but provided little evidence for it. Here he does fulfill his promise to expand on his abstract with pages and pages of observations.

Richter compares the conditions of rat domestication with those now provided by the 'Welfare State'-ample food, no danger, no stress, uniform environment and climate, and so forth. But he notes that, under these seemingly favorable conditions, organic deterioration has taken place: a decrease in the size of the adrenal glands, which help the organism meet stress or fatigue and forfend certain diseases: while the thyroid gland, the regulator of metabolism, becomes less active. Not strangely, perhaps, the brains of the domestic rat, and perhaps their mental ability, are smaller. At the same time, the sex glands mature earlier, become bigger, show more activity, and result in a higher rate of fertility. How human!

In hunting and agriculture work had been a sacred function, one of collaborating with the forces of nature, and invoking the gods of fertility and organic abundance to countenance with their favor the efforts of the human community: pious exaltation and cosmic wonder mingled with strenuous muscular exercise and meticulous ritual. But for those who were drafted into the megamachine, work ceased to be a sacred function, willingly performed, with many pleasurable rewards in both the act and its fruition: it became a curse.

do to make my setting the most fertile ground in the world for the growth of talent?

In accepting the truth about my complicit role in aiding and abetting cruelty, I had to leave the cycle of denial... As a feminist, I couldn't hide from the fact that what we do to animals to fulfill our consumer demands is profoundly un-feminist. We impregnate the animals against their will, breeding them into captivity, we imprison them, we control and violate their reproductive sovereignty and organs so we can take what we want out of them, and, when they have given us most of what they have, we toss them out to make room for more fertile ones. This is what feminists approve of and directly cause when we consume animals' stolen milk and eggs. we take the babies we have forced into them so we can have the products we want. The mothers get nothing. They are denied the pleasure of raising their babies. They are denied the comforts of being suckled and feeling their wings around their chirping young. Even in rare cases where the babies and mothers aren't separated and are allowed something resembling a decent life, we still decide how they will live as well as when they will die. None of this challenges the status quo of ownership, of our "right" to their very physical bodies. From "How I Became a Vegan Feminist Agitator" in Circles of Compassion

According to estimates from the World Health Organization, of the estimated 20 million desperate women who risk their lives through unsafe abortion each year, about 47,000 die. Stated alternatively, about 1 woman in 425 dies trying to control her fertility, her body, and her destiny this way.

The purpose of consciousness—any consciousness—was to achieve infinite comprehension. It was as simple as that. If a God existed, humanity must strive to discover this God and help this deity become omniscient, not just in one infinity, but in an infinity of infinities. This was one possible purpose for her species. But her alter ego, using symbolic logic, had arrived at a possibility she considered much more likely: that humanity’s purpose, together with all life across all universes, was not to discover God—it was to become God. If a single human egg could possess consciousness at the instant of fertilization, how would it view itself? It couldn’t possibly predict or comprehend the multi-trillion-celled being it would ultimately become. The entirety of humanity could well be that single, fertilized cell, unaware that it would grow a trillion-fold more complex and eventually become God, perhaps had already become God, in a universe in which all pasts, presents, and futures existed side by side. Humanity was composed of separate individuals now, but an embryo at early stages was also nothing more than a ball of separate cells. But these separate cells would ultimately become connected in wondrous ways to create something unimaginably greater than themselves. And seen in this light, altruism and sociopathy were far from straightforward concepts, beyond even the complexities that Abraham Lincoln had revealed. Absolute altruism on one level could be absolute selfishness in disguise on another, and vice-versa. The cells making up the human body were selfless; gladly sacrificing themselves when necessary for the good of the organism. On the microscopic level they were being foolishly altruistic, foolishly suicidal, but on the macroscopic level they were being purely selfish—ensuring the survival of the body. And what happened when an individual cell became selfish and exhibited Nietzsche’s will to power? It became a cancer. The cell would break free of the restraints on its own division and become immortal—for a while—until its very immortality choked the entire organism to death, killing the selfish cell in the process.

Growing your own food is like printing your own money. When you grow your own food, you supply your family with meals and help them survive, without the help of a food business. This is how we begin to shift toward a more resource-based economy, by providing our own resources in the safety of our own backyards. Make sure the food you grow is organic and do not use any harmful pesticides or fertilizers. By growing your own food, you can also build a great community. People will work together for the common goal of eating a healthy meal.

Rather than a state of equal brotherhood and sisterhood, Kim had introduced an elaborate social order in which the eleven million ordinary North Korean citizens were classified according to their perceived political reliability. The songbun system, as it was known, ruthlessly reorganized the entire social system of North Korea into a communistic pseudofeudal system, with every individual put through eight separate background checks, their family history taken into account as far back as their grandparents and second cousins. Your final rating, or songbun, put you in one of fifty-one grades, divided into three broad categories, from top to bottom: the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile class. The hostile class included vast swathes of society, from the politically suspect (“people from families of wealthy farmers, merchants, industrialists, landowners; pro-Japan and pro-U.S. people; reactionary bureaucrats; defectors from the South; Buddhists, Catholics, expelled public officials”) to kiaesaeng (the Korean equivalent of geishas) and mudang (rural shamans). Although North Koreans weren’t informed of their new classification, it quickly became clear to most people what class they had been assigned. North Koreans of the hostile class were banned from living in Pyongyang or in the most fertile areas of the countryside, and they were excluded from any good jobs. There was virtually no upward mobility—once hostile, forever hostile—but plenty downward. If you were found to be doing anything that was illegal or frowned upon by the regime, you and your family’s songbun would suffer. Personal files were kept locked away in local offices, and were backed up in the offices of the Ministry for the Protection of State Security and in a blast-resistant vault in the mountains of Yanggang province. There was no way to tamper with your status, and no way to escape it. The most cunning part of it all was that Kim Il-Sung came up with a way for his subjects to enforce their own oppression by organizing the people into inminban (“people’s groups”), cooperatives of twenty or so families per neighborhood whose duty it was to keep tabs on one another and to inform on any potentially criminal or subversive behavior. These were complemented by kyuch’aldae, mobile police units on constant lookout for infringers, who had the authority to burst into your home or office at any time of day or night. Offenses included using more than your allocated quota of electricity, wearing blue jeans, wearing clothes bearing Roman writing (a “capitalist indulgence”) and allowing your hair to grow longer than the authorized length. Worse still, Kim decreed that any one person’s guilt also made that person’s family, three generations of it, guilty of the same crime. Opposing the regime meant risking your grandparents, your wife, your children—no matter how young—being imprisoned and tortured with you. Historically, Koreans had been subject to a caste system similar to India’s and equally as rigid. In the early years of the DPRK, the North Korean people felt this was just a modernized revitalization of that traditional social structure. By the time they realized something was awfully wrong, that a pyramid had been built, and that at the top of it, on the very narrow peak, sat Kim Il-Sung, alone, perched on the people’s broken backs, on their murdered families and friends, on their destroyed lives—by the time they paused and dared to contemplate that their liberator, their savior, was betraying them—in fact, had always betrayed them—it was already much, much too late.

Originally, all foods were “organic”—grown without synthetic pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers or hormones. Large-scale farming with chemicals began around World War II, around the same time that food processing exploded. Large-scale farming works against the natural cycles of the earth, relying on chemicals to produce big returns. This process has depleted much of the world’s soil of its minerals and nutrients. The resulting vegetable and animal foods are not only deficient in nutrients, but they are also full of pollutants and agrochemicals.

The UNFPA and other population control organizations are loath to report the truth about falling fertility rates worldwide, since they raise funds by frightening people with the specter of overpopulation. They

Meiosis is an elegant process but in any organism errors in meiosis sometimes occur. These errors may be the result of mistakes in separation of the chromosomes during division or of an incorrect exchange of genetic information during chiasma formation. Many genetic disorders in humans can be traced back to errors in the formation of the gametes in meiosis. Mistakes in meiosis can result in an abnormal number of chromosomes in an egg or sperm cell. If this egg or sperm is then involved in fertilization, the zygote will exhibit an abnormal number of chromosomes. The child produced from this zygote (following mitosis and differentiation) will have cells with too few or too many chromosomes

The nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium analysis (N-P-K), which federal law requires to be printed on bags of fertilizer, is basically irrelevant in an organic program. Feeding the soil and plants with nothing but nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium is like feeding your kids nothing but white bread.

The creation of a human being from the union of a sperm and an egg. Think about it. A single fertilized egg cell gives rise to many trillions of cells. Impressive enough already. But how do these trillions of cells know how to organize themselves into a human body? Into a human brain? How do they know where to be?” Alyssa smiled stupidly.

Great Babylon” (16:19): though Babylon is not mentioned in Scripture between Genesis 11:9 (Babel is the Hebrew name for Bab-ili, which we render Babylon) and the days of Hezekiah, it had its own position in Hebrew thought. Though it had little political importance between its capture by the Kassites in 1530 BC and its being made the capital of a Chaldean empire in 626 BC, it was the virtually undisputed commercial and religious capital of the Fertile Crescent. So it is the personification, so to speak, for the Bible, of humanity organized for financial profit, and of manmade religion in all its attractive sophistry. These are the two aspects which are dealt with in chapters 17 (religion) and 18 (commerce). If we compare Nahum and Habakkuk, we shall learn something of the different impression created by the pride and cruelty of Assyria and the corruption of human nature which the prophet saw in Babylon.

Fruits: blueberries, strawberries, apples, melons, pears, peaches •  Miscellaneous: celery, peppers, tomatoes •  Root vegetables: potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash •  Leafy green vegetables: all lettuces, kale, cabbage, spinach, other greens •  Animal protein: beef, poultry, dairy, eggs (especially because these animals, when not organically fed and properly pastured, are fed a diet of antibiotics, growth hormones, and genetically modified foods that will exacerbate your existing hormonal imbalance)

Not only do hormones tell all the systems of your body what to do—kidneys, liver, metabolism, digestion, nervous system, reproductive organs—they also have an impressive second job: self-regulation.

It must be borne in mind, however, that, despite their destructive potential, floods are a natural part of both the hydrologic and the ecological systems of the West. Floodwaters carry nutrients and organic material that are deposited onto the surrounding floodplains, producing fertile soils. These soils have made California one of the most important agricultural centers in the world, generating $30 billion per year. More than half of the fruits, nuts, and vegetables consumed in the United States are grown on some 87,500 farms in California’s Central Valley. Nevertheless, residents in California and other regions of the American West continue to face risks from catastrophic flooding as they place themselves directly in the path of floodwaters, building their homes on floodplains that will inevitably be washed away in the next extreme wet year. To this day, cities sprawl onto the floodplains, housing developments pop up in the deltas, and homes are built on the edges of cliffs and canyons where landslides occur. Clearly, as Steinbeck indicated, society has collectively “lost its memory” of the earth’s climatic past.

Red Clover Another excellent overall tonic herb, red clover blossoms have a very high vitamin and mineral content, which nourishes the reproductive organs as well as the entire body. This wonderful fertility herb also helps balance hormones for a great boost in your chances of getting pregnant more quickly.

Maca Smoothie Recipe: 1/2 cup raw cow or goat milk or nut milk (avoid soy and non-organic cow's milk) heaping spoonful of plain whole milk yogurt 1/4 cup raw honey one ripe frozen banana one tablespoon maca powder sprinkling of cinnamon

the 10 Desires of Team Members: Make sure that people feel competent at what they are doing. Give them work that challenges their abilities but that is still within their grasp. Try to let people feel accepted by you and the group. Compliment them on their achievements (but only if you mean it). Make sure that their curiosity is addressed. Even though some activities can be boring, there should always be something new for them to investigate. Give people a chance at satisfying their honor. You must allow teams to make their own rules, which team members will follow happily (or sometimes grudgingly). Infuse the business with some idealism (purpose). You’re not just there to make money. You’re also making a (small) contribution to make the world a better place. (Note: Be careful with this one. It is often abused by top management in an attempt to obfuscate its real purpose, which is simply to make money.) Foster people’s independence (autonomy). Allow them to be different from other people, with their own tasks and responsibilities. And compliment them on their original and interesting hair style. Make sure that some level of order is maintained in the organization. People work better when they can rely on some (minimal) company rules and policies. Make sure that people have some power or influence over what’s happening around them. Listen to what they have to say and help them in making those things happen. Create the right environment for social contacts (relatedness) to emerge. There’s usually no need to venture into the romance area, but friendships can easily arise, provided that managers take care of a fertile context. Finally, it is important for people to feel that they have some status in the organization. They shouldn’t feel like dangling somewhere at the bottom of a big hierarchy.

no organism is primarily adapted to be healthy, long-lived, happy, or to achieve many other goals for which people strive. As a reminder, adaptations are features shaped by natural selection that promote relative reproductive success (fitness). Consequently, adaptations evolve to promote health, longevity, and happiness only insofar as these qualities benefit an individual’s ability to have more surviving offspring. To return to an earlier topic, humans evolved to be prone to obesity not because excess fat makes us healthy, but because it increases fertility. Along the same lines, our species’ proclivities to be worried, anxious, and stressed cause much misery and unhappiness, but they are ancient adaptations to avoid or cope with danger. And

At-a-glance Conditioning summary chart *All volumes and quantities are per bale DAY IN PROCESS Day 1 TRADITIONAL FERTILIZER 1/2 cup ORGANIC FERTILIZER 3 cups WATER Water to saturation DAY IN PROCESS Day 2 TRADITIONAL FERTILIZER Skip ORGANIC FERTILIZER Skip WATER Water to saturation DAY IN PROCESS Day 3 TRADITIONAL FERTILIZER 1/2 cup ORGANIC FERTILIZER 3 cups WATER Water to wash in fertilizer DAY IN PROCESS Day 4 TRADITIONAL FERTILIZER Skip ORGANIC FERTILIZER Skip WATER Water to saturation DAY IN PROCESS Day 5 TRADITIONAL FERTILIZER 1/2 cup ORGANIC FERTILIZER 3 cups WATER Water, warm is best DAY IN PROCESS Day 6 TRADITIONAL FERTILIZER Skip ORGANIC FERTILIZER Skip WATER Water, warm is best DAY IN PROCESS Day 7 TRADITIONAL FERTILIZER 1/4 cup ORGANIC FERTILIZER 1 1/2 cups WATER Water, warm is best DAY IN PROCESS Day 8 TRADITIONAL FERTILIZER 1/4 cup ORGANIC FERTILIZER 1 1/2 cups WATER Water, warm is best DAY IN PROCESS Day 9 TRADITIONAL FERTILIZER 1/4 cup ORGANIC FERTILIZER 1 1/2 cups WATER Water, warm is best DAY IN PROCESS Day 10 TRADITIONAL FERTILIZER 1 cup 10-10-10 ORGANIC FERTILIZER 3 cups with P and K WATER Water to wash in fertilizer

If things become dire for the fungi and their trees despite all this support, then the fungi can take radical action, as in the case of the pine and its partner Laccaria bicolor, or the bicolored deceiver. When there is a lack of nitrogen, the latter releases a deadly toxin into the soil, which causes minute organisms such as springtails to die and release the nitrogen tied up in their bodes, forcing them to become fertilizer for both the trees and the fungi.

Nature has designed the human body to maintain its reproductive sexual potency at all costs, in order to ensure the propagation of the species. Therefore, whenever sexual essence and energy are depleted, especially in the male immediately after ejaculation, the body promptly tries to restore sexual potency by producing more sperm, semen, and sexual hormones. If any of the vital nutrients required for this task are missing or deficient, which is often the case, the body 'borrows' them from other organs, glands, and tissues, particularly from the cerebrospinal fluid and sexual glands. Sexual excess therefore causes a constant drain of vital nutrients and hormones from the brain, spine, and adrenals as the body struggles to maintain sexual potency and fertility. This is primarily a male problem, because only the male of the species loses his potent semen-essence during intercourse. Nature has designed the female in such a way that sexual activity does no deplete her vital resources, thereby ensuring her ability to nourish and protect her offspring.

Since the immaterial Being envelopes the Nothing, this nothing, in “cooperation” with the Universal Being (Mind), becomes space as we experience and describe it. The “fabric” of this created space, with the help of nothingness, is curved. But all this is the product of the transformation of the Being into its different forms, modes, and interdependent qualities of reality. The “material” world is only a symphony of “materialized” qualities of the Universal Being,” not matter per se because matter per se does not exist. What we see as space is a “materialized” program of the Universal Mind. What appears to us as dimensions is the underlying nothingness holding the illusion of Reality, making it appear material. The Primordial Primary Quality is the Primary Ultimate Force, or Source, that powers all we see, experience, and measure. Everything is related to Everything else and is affected and conditioned by Everything else. Everything within the Universe is a message, information, and code to everything else. Energy and matter are the messages of the Universal Mind sent into nothingness to fertilize it. Relationships and communication among the myriad beings are the life of one organism. All the features of matter we experience are real in the sense that we experience the spacetime continuum, but all that is the result of programming and conditioning rather than energy and matter as physical realities per se. Everything was One and became a multitude, yet Everything stayed One on the most basic level. The story of One is the story of All. Every sense, every pain, and everything we feel are the messages of existence, messages of the Universal Mind in action, interconnecting the Web of the Universe into One Family. Absolute is the Ultimate uniting force of Everything. To be one and only is death. That’s why creating is needed. Without creating, there is no life. The Universe is the life of the Absolute. Something and Nothing are the Father and the Mother of the World. From One Absolute, there is an almost endless family dispersed through space in search of life and meaning, which is what we call existence.

Eating is no trifling activity. For any creature to eat, other creatures must die, most often by being eaten themselves. The soil that is the basis for the fertility, growth, and enjoyment of all terrestrial life is also one vast feeding frenzy in which billions of organisms live and die together. Life as we know it depends on death. That means death is not simply the end of life; it is life’s steadfast companion. There is no sharing in life that is not also a sharing in another’s death. Acknowledging this is terrifying. How does any one of us become worthy of another’s death and communicate that its life is not trivial or to be engaged recklessly?

If the DNA sequence is an instruction manual that explains how to make a whole organism from a fertilized zygote, then epigenetic information is a highlighted and annotated version of the text. Some molecular “colours” denote the parts of the text that need to be read most carefully, and others mark parts that can be ignored.

Some of the most clear-cut examples of desertification are those that have occurred on farmland because the resulting declines in crop yield are relatively straightforward to monitor. Fields on which just a single crop is grown year after year, so-called ‘monocultures’, will slowly become degraded, as studies on cropland in the semi-arid Pampas of Argentina have shown. The long-term cultivation of millet has affected both the chemical and physical properties of soils. The depletion of nutrients means that larger amounts of fertilizers have to be applied to maintain crop yields, while declines in organic matter and soil stability have meant a greater susceptibility to erosion.

That is why she is the Cultivator, as much a custodian of living things as inert materials. One day, far into the future, the entire ship will be a single amorphous organism. She is helping to make this a reality, to coax and to nurture. It is hard work, back-breaking and relentless, but it gives her a certain measure of pride. She has sons and daughters growing up in the lower decks, already learning to grasp a ratchet and siphon a fuel sump. If they survive the mutations and the plagues, one of them might one day become Cultivator. And if they are blessed with fertility, in centuries to come one of their progeny might be there, on that mystical and long-awaited day when Solace speaks for the first time, not in hisses of steam or scrapes of iron but in a real voice with real words.

Visualize any wooded area you remember visiting. It is beautiful, majestic - and no one ever fertilized any of the plants there. Not one single time.

A valuable by-product of raising ducks is manure. Duck manure is an excellent organic fertilizer that is high in nitrogen.

According to Lewis, imagination was “the organ of meaning,” while reason was “the natural organ of truth,” and it was always his aim in his writing to combine the two organs as fully and naturally as possible, whatever the communicative task in hand. Works of philosophy, no less than works of creative fiction, required the marriage of fertile imagination and penetrating reason.

We moved to Eugene, Oregon, a small college town in the Pacific Northwest. The city sits near the source of the Willamette River, which stretches 150 miles north, from the Calapooya Mountains outside of town to its mouth on the Columbia. Carving its way between mountains, the Cascade Range to the east and the Oregon Coast Range to the west, the river defines a fertile valley where tens of thousands of years ago a series of ice age floods surged southwest from Lake Missoula, traveling over eastern Washington and bringing with their floodwaters rich soil and volcanic rock that now shore up the layers of its earth, alluvial plains fit for a vast variety of agriculture. The town itself is coated in green, hugging the banks of the river and spreading out up into the rugged hills and pine forests of central Oregon. The seasons are mild, drizzly, and gray for most of the year but give way to a lush, unspoiled summer. It rains incessantly and yet I never knew an Oregonian to carry an umbrella. Eugenians are proud of the regional bounty and were passionate about incorporating local, seasonal, and organic ingredients well before it was back in vogue. Anglers are kept busy in fresh waters, fishing for wild chinook salmon in the spring and steelhead in the summer, and sweet Dungeness crab is abundant in the estuaries year-round. Local farmers gather every Saturday downtown to sell homegrown organic produce and honey, foraged mushrooms, and wild berries. The general demographic is of hippies who protest Whole Foods in favor of local co-ops, wear Birkenstocks, weave hair wraps to sell at outdoor markets, and make their own nut butter. They are men with birth names like Herb and River and women called Forest and Aurora.