My Garden Of Eden

Harvest time is near.

I took a few horticulture classes at the local Cosumnes college about fifteen years ago, trying to extend my interest in learning after I graduated.

I was terrible at it.

I did learn that I'd starve within weeks if I had to coax food out of the ground, so in some respects it was a valuable education. I realize how totally dependent I am on others who have carried on the culture of growing food, and I suppose this isn't a good thing for someone who thinks we're going to enter a long period of austerity in this nation, what with double digit health care increases and triple digit deficits. Nonetheless, I am able to grow weeds pretty well. Harvest time is indeed near.

With that in mind, I was thinking today about how our American culture chooses to invalidate nature. Why do we have these double digit health care increases? I'd argue in part due to our failures to see value in plants. We eat fewer and fewer of them as they come straight out of the earth, the tree, the bush or the vine. Wheat and sugar beets are taken by diesel machines and processed into Pop Tarts and sprayed with just the essence of strawberries. The strawberry is no longer the source of provision for most of us; the Pop Tart is.

Marijuana is a plant that can (or could) provide, too. I find the paradox interesting, how a conservative Republican can choose to declare war on a plant yet will swill several vodkas on the rocks each night -- and will make the rocks pills.

I've oft mentioned how I do not fear getting run down on my bicycle by a stoned driver but obviously worry about someone laden with prescription drugs or/and alcohol. In all cases, impaired driving is illegal, but it's a plant that gets outlawed outright. Interesting.

Interesting, indeed...but not without precedent. We have a long and glorious history of suppressing plants. The religious right ought to know all about this: not only do they enjoy taxation to suppress the possession of a dried flower, they know that Eve was busted out of the garden trying to extract knowledge from a plant. Were it not for plants (and talking snakes), there'd be no original sin.

Today we look to Big Pharma to provide the same knowledge an apple from a tree of knowledge may have provided....er, rather, to provide ignorance -- we want to ignore our high blood pressures, ignore our low blood sugars, ignore our pain. Pharma does this, and does this well, but with a steep price. Steep, both in dollars and in overall health. If Eve could just have been allowed to finish that apple...

If we could reconnect our health care system to a good plant-based diet, nutrition, and fitness, we'd perhaps not have to worry about it absorbing 16% of our GDP as it barrels towards 30%. I'd also argue that emotional well being and community would go a long way towards that as well...both of which are advanced through the use of plants. If we chose not to subdue them, as we have been told to do in Genesis, we might have an out.

But the odds of that happening are zero. Along with hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles at a million+ a pop, we're well on our way towards insolvency, financially and socially. I shall hope that I learn from my little garden of eden, where I can go to reflect on nature, my garden a place where I might find wisdom. I sure as shit won't find inside a box of Pop Tarts.