S.O.S — Save Our Seeds
The third week of my Permaculture Course at Lago Atitlan has begun. Through the training, I’m beginning to see on a deeper level the importance of personal responsibility—reflected in the world.
Week three
In merely two weeks’ time, I’ve bonded deeply with the fellow participants in the Course. I feel at home within a global family of people, who are both spiritual and highly down to earth at the same time. A mesh of people brought together by their interest in Permaculture. Many of the Artists, Builders, and Farmers within this self-reliant and growing global community, truthfully, are Westerners. Individuals from all ages and backgrounds, who come to create non-centrally organized common grounds, where ecological and social values intersect and collaborate. Additionally, the course in Guatemala is focussed on the cosmology of the Indigenous People of these lands as well. To me, it makes sense, that Permaculture weaves the practical with the cosmic — filling in the cracks of the false dichotomy that splits Heaven and Earth. For that is how most Indigenous Technology operates.
Land + Gold = Autonomy
Two newly acquainted friends, a Chinese Medicine Practitioner and a certified Sound Healer, tell me that they are in the process of acquiring land in Colombia; a country which has one of the lowest national debts in the world — signaling a relative independence from the imperial forces of the USA. In dialogue with my friends, I’ve come to understand the importance of getting as much of our (personal and/or communal) value out of banks as possible. They say that having land and gold, instead of savings in banks, grants us autonomy. I am intrigued by the sheer notion of getting valuables out of banks, of conveying that form of power into things I can touch and walk upon — at the same time though, I struggle with land ownership, especially in another country.
Obtaining land, Gold or other forms of tangible and transferable value will grossly diminish once susceptibility to the theatrics of the global economy — or so I learn. It makes sense to actually own the valuables that we use, instead of having banks use what we ‘earn’ for their own maneuvers. It would help the human enterprise at large when we start to collaborate though a value-system that doesn’t devalue itself from the inside out, wouldn’t it? Shifting ownership of what is free in the first place, from the few to the many.
Owning and growing our own seeds is as central in sovereignty as money is
The sky is the limit when it comes to creative solutions of how we engage in economies, exchange and co-existence together (1). It makes a lot of sense to me, to bring autonomy in our valuables and create shared ownership of lands amongst local communities that are in collaboration — rotational ownership, even. Shared, anyhow. But what was new to my ears, was the truth that OWNING AND GROWING OUR OWN SEEDS is likely to be as central in re-claiming sovereignty as money is. Let me elaborate.
1) MONO-CULTURE vs.
SEED AUTONOMY
Before Guatemala, earlier this year, I learned that many of the world’s political and religious instability and wars originate in a shattering of natural abundance, destruction of (crop-)diversity and the effective ending Regional Autonomy. It was at Tamera, a Peace Research Campus in Portugal, where I was told that much of the instability in Syria was caused, fore-mostly, by the controlling and damming of the Euphrates River. Cutting a river upstream for electricity kills entire ecosystems of Man & Nature down below—a humanitarian, ecological and spiritual disaster.
It is often the case that the livelihood of farmers, local businesses and communities is destroyed for the benefit of a single energy company — which in turn, makes those very people dependent on authorities and governments that they previously had no need for. Severed from the natural system that was known to locals for vast stretches of time, the people now need to seek, hastily, for solutions to a precarious situation that is entirely new to them. A situation, which above all, wasn’t there before this cut in the homeostasis.
For the first time, ancient communities will have to look at national authorities to provide them what had previously been (freely) available, under their own integrated natural management. Obviously, this is not a spiral upwards. It is not a road to peace. Besides the livelihood of many people, living in interdependence with the natural systems, let’s also take a moment to consider the delicate fabric of life, animals, species and subtle energies that unfold their grace around well established natural ecosystems and watersheds. Stab wounds such as cutting off the flow of a river, or owning a watershed is a ludicrous, violent stab wound unto the fabric of life. Ripping the Regional Autonomy of people embedded in their environments apart is crippling beyond comprehension.(2)
Mono-culture kills life.
Mono-culture kills culture.
Seed Autonomy
But let me speak SEED AUTONOMY here, for it is such an important component of Regional Autonomy — a subject that should be included in everyone’s education, really. Seeds are so soft, so low tech, so close to home, yet so politically and economically entangled in power grabs—it’ll shock you.
“During the United States-led invasion of Iraq, in March, 2003, the looting of Iraq’s national archeological museum received considerable attention, but almost no one noted that the country’s national seed bank was destroyed. The bank contained seeds of ancient varieties of wheat, lentils, chickpeas, and other crops that once grew in Mesopotamia… Fortunately, several Iraqi scientists had placed samples of the country’s most important crops in a cardboard box and sent them to an international seed bank in Aleppo, Syria. There they sit, on a shelf in a cold room, waiting for a time when Iraq is stable enough to store them again.”
The above is a quote from a 2007 article in the New Yorker.
Monstrous companies such as Monsanto-Bayer and Nestlé (forces behind the face of democratic conduct) focus their power to hinder the possibility of self-sustainable and self-organized lifestyles. Essentially, they are in the game of forcing free-born souls and nations into slavery. They are the contemporary equivalent of the forces that crippled various North/South/Central American Indigenous Cultures. First, by open warfare and betrayal, now by subversive international ‘trade agreements’ and mandates that prohibit the free exchange of seeds, order the ownership of natural resources, and strip communities of their power.
Peoples with rich spiritual, agricultural and artisanal traditions are being forced into a culture of mono-crops like corn and rubber. Via the planned destruction of bio-diversity and the ruining of the natural occurring homeostasis, the autonomous trade, economy and cultures of many Indigenous People have almost entirely died out.
In today’s world, run by laws-stripped-from-the-land, we see on the one hand Indian farmers killing themselves to escape the high-costs and debts that Monsanto’s Seed Monopoly brings about. While on the other, we see entire populations in the West getting sick from the over-cultivated and dulled-out DNA of Wheat and other Grains — bethieved from variety.
2) S.O.S — Save Our Seeds!
“Afghanistan’s bank, which contained rare varieties of almonds and walnuts, and also fruits including grapes, melons, cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, and pears — many of which originated in the region, was destroyed in the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban.”
Quote from the same 2007 article in the New Yorker.
Is seems that besides tremendous monetary benefits to the war-based economy of the USA, the military invasion of any Sovereign Nation (and the overthrowing of apparent terrorism) also helps to eradicate the rich and diverse forms of autonomous food production in those places.
And this, my friend, is where you enter into the scenario: YOU CAN SAVE OUR SEEDS! Everywhere, all the time. You can make them, take them, and distribute them. Grow stuff and give it to friends. Take a crap in a woodland. Burry your compost at an odd spot. Perhaps you can even start your own plot of land, begin a Local Seed Center, operate it non-centralized, with friends — make it a hobby(3). Being subversive has never been this fun! Whatever you do: realize that each plant you grow could be the last of it’s kind — SAVE ITS SEED!
Seed Banking
Deep inside a mountain, on a remote island halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, lies a huge cement tank: The Global Seed Vault.
It’s admirable and perhaps necessary, to try and protect seeds in a fortress. However, I see a striking similarity to where we put our monetary credits—supposedly ‘safe’ in a bank that then suddenly supports un-ethical Oil-Pipelines and War-machinery, without our consent. Why put your freedom in the hands of yet another corporation; store it in a Concrete Mausoleum that no one has access to?
Seeds in a deep freezer remind me of those few who have half the planet’s richness in their name. Putting seeds in a freezer is like putting LIFE ON HOLD while we wait for crooks to stop their crookery. I mean, the only safe and common way of saving seeds is distribution! Set it all free, I say, turn our richness into abundant land, plant, and garden. Like money, seeds want to be sown, spread and circulate freely in the hands and soils of all.
Trust me, without action, foreign seeds banks will be destroyed for the sake of fictional valuables. Suspended in a fraudulent global economic game, everyone, in the end, will draw the short straw. Cutting life apart and putting it in vaults simply does not serve life — it does not follow the current.
True Conservation is Rotation.
Truly, the best way to preserve seeds is to give them to people: move them.
Surely, some need to be kept safe, stored over winter, held back for the harsher years. Every household or farm could store an amount of their own (native/heirloom) seeds for a year or so — but swapping and exchanging and growing is what truly keeps it going.
“The solution lies not in Seed Banking, but in putting the farmer itself back on top as the primary actor and beneficiary of all seed-saving strategies.”
Exactly. Put life in the hands of the many, and the seeds back in the soil.
At times I still wonder if the destructions of the Seed Banks as mentioned in this piece have been intentional or not; if the historic and current obstruction of Regional Autonomy is intentional or not… But quicker than before I realize that second-guessing the planned abuse of the livelihood of many is in ways similar to thinking that we never invaded the Americas. As if we never killed millions, in an attempt to force our culture of slavery and ownership onto others. No, it is obvious that regional autonomy, the sovereignty of the many, is being worked against. In today’s world then, aspiring to become a self-sustainable Permaculture Farmer makes you an anti-authoritarian activist — a rebel. At least in the countries most oppressed by global agro-corporations, this is the case. There, a homegrown crop becomes a buccaneer. A small act of plant care, a potential revolution. A seed a pioneer — and Earth, a vessel for life again.
With love,
J_16
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(1) See also, Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein.
(2) See also, The Importance of Sacred Natural Sites for Biodiversity Conservation, Unesco.
(3) Seed Saving: http://seedsave.org
All photographs by the author,
except for the two with hands holding seeds.
www.jaspergriepink.nl
