TERMS STARTING WITH
agriculture, and one of the 72 angels bearing the
agriculture ::: n. --> The art or science of cultivating the ground, including the harvesting of crops, and the rearing and management of live stock; tillage; husbandry; farming.
TERMS ANYWHERE
Action Levels ::: Regulatory levels recommended by EPA for enforcement by Food and Drug Administration and United States Department of Agriculture when pesticide residues occur in food or feed commodities for reasons other than the direct application of the pesticide. As opposed to "tolerances" which are established for residues occurring as a direct result of proper usage, action levels are set for inadvertent residues resulting from previous legal use or accidental contamination. In the Superfund program, the existence of a contaminant concentration in the environment high enough to warrant action or trigger a response under SARA and the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Contingency Plan. The term is also used in other regulatory programs.
Adam-Adammi (Hebrew) ’Ādām ’Adāmī [’ādam mankind + ’adāmī fortress] Used by Chwolsohn in his Nabathean Agriculture and regarded by Blavatsky as “a generic compound name as old as languages are” (SD 2:452). Adam-Adami, like Adam, was not a man but a race, specifically the “dark Race” which was “the first to fall into generation” in contradistinction with Sarku, or the light Race, which remained pure much longer (SD 2:5). “Adam-Adami is a personation of the dual Adam: of the paradigmic Adam-Kadmon, the creator, and of the lower Adam, the terrestrial . . .” (SD 2:456). See also ADAM; ’ADAM QADMON.
agricolation ::: n. --> Agriculture.
agricultural ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to agriculture; connected with, or engaged in, tillage; as, the agricultural class; agricultural implements, wages, etc.
agriculture, and one of the 72 angels bearing the
agriculture ::: n. --> The art or science of cultivating the ground, including the harvesting of crops, and the rearing and management of live stock; tillage; husbandry; farming.
agriculturism ::: n. --> Agriculture.
agriculturist ::: n. --> One engaged or skilled in agriculture; a husbandman.
agronomy ::: n. --> The management of land; rural economy; agriculture.
Angel of Agriculture [Risnuch]
Artemis (Greek) Greek divinity, commonly identified with the Roman Diana, daughter of Leto and Zeus, twin of Apollo. Goddess of chastity and protectress of youths and maidens against the wiles of Aphrodite, she is celebrated in Arcadian rites and legends which are older than those of Homer. These show her to be a nature goddess, patroness of fields and forests, goddess of life-giving waters, marshes, rivers, and springs. As goddess of agriculture, she brings increase to the fields, drives away mice and pests, and is the friend of the sower and reaper. The legend of the Calydonian boar shows her to have been worshiped as a harvest goddess. She was also called the tamer, the goddess of the chase, and the healer. She is the protector of the beasts, rather than their persecutor in the chase.
Bona Dea A Roman divinity called Fauna, Fatua, and Oma: the sister, wife, or daughter of Faunus. Reverenced as chaste and prophetic, revealing her oracles to women only (as Faunus did to men), her festival being on the first of May and no male person being allowed to be present. A goddess of agriculture and shepherds, she revealed certain truths of nature to those approaching her in a harmonious, synchronizing state of mind. In general Bona Dea is the goddess of fecundity and productivity, the generative spirit of motherhood. Because she was considered to be the great producer holding the seeds of all things in her mighty womb, she was frequently identified with Ops, the goddess of plenty, fertility, and riches. The ideas regarding her are intimately related with Saturnus or Saturn.
business ::: n. --> That which busies one, or that which engages the time, attention, or labor of any one, as his principal concern or interest, whether for a longer or shorter time; constant employment; regular occupation; as, the business of life; business before pleasure.
Any particular occupation or employment engaged in for livelihood or gain, as agriculture, trade, art, or a profession.
Financial dealings; buying and selling; traffic in general; mercantile transactions.
Chaldeans, Chaldees To the seventh subrace of the third root-race belong the far-distant predecessors of the Mystery school; and to now forgotten geologic history the predecessors of those later called Chaldees, along with Hindu, Egyptian, Persian, and Phoenician sages. In their records are mentioned divine dynasties preceding the human kings, and the cycle of 432,000 years. From them came the origins of all such thoughts as are contained in the occult Nabathean Agriculture, and in their ancient records is found the source of the original Biblical cosmogonic allegories. The mathematical and astronomical lore of the Chaldeans was celebrated in all the ancient Mediterranean world: the word Chaldee often meant simply an adept, magician, or astrologer. In the Bible they are usually spoken of as Babylonians.
choctaws ::: n. pl. --> A tribe of North American Indians (Southern Appalachian), in early times noted for their pursuit of agriculture, and for living at peace with the white settlers. They are now one of the civilized tribes of the Indian Territory.
chreotechnics ::: n. --> The science of the useful arts, esp. agriculture, manufactures, and commerce.
Cybele (Greek) Kybele. A Phrygian goddess of caves and mountains, vines and agriculture, and town life, first worshiped at Pessinus; later throughout Asia Minor and in Greece. The equivalent in Phrygia and Crete of Rhea, the Magna Mater (great mother), wife of Kronos and mother of Zeus. Her worship was celebrated exoterically, especially in later degenerate times, by wild dances by her votaries. In one of her phases Cybele was closely connected with the moon and its extremely recondite functions. The moon is at once a sexless potency, to be well studied because to be dreaded, and a female deity for exoteric purposes. Cybele is “the personification and type of the vital essence, whose source was located by the ancients between the Earth and the starry sky, and who was regarded as the very fons vitae of all that lives and breathes” (BCW 12:214). The breath of Cybele, equivalent in its highest substance to akasa-tattva — “is the one chief agent, and it underlays the so-called ‘miracles’ and ‘supernatural’ phenomena in all ages, as in every clime” (BCW 12:215). See also CORYBANTES; CURETES
Demeter belongs to the class of the kabiria (kabir, kabiri): “beneficent Entities who, symbolized in Prometheus, brought light to the world, and endowed humanity with intellect and reason” (SD 2:363), great beings to whom are credited the invention of the arts and sciences that make civilization — letters and the alphabet, law, philosophy, science, art, architecture, music, spinning, weaving, and agriculture.
Demeter (Greek) [possibly from Doric da earth + meter mother] The Earth-Mother; one of the great Olympian deities, in popular mythology specially associated with the earth and its products, patron of agriculture, goddess of law and order, and protector of marriage and the birth of offspring. As the grain goddess, counterpart of the Egyptian Isis, Roman Ceres, and corn mothers, corn maidens, and harvest goddesses of the various native cultures of the Americas today, and of the early Teutonic and Scandinavian races of central and northern Europe.
farming ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Farm ::: a. --> Pertaining to agriculture; devoted to, adapted to, or engaged in, farming; as, farming tools; farming land; a farming community.
Fauns, Fauni Faunus was an ancient Italian deity, protecting agriculture and flocks and giving oracles. The Romans later identified him with the Greek Pan, and because of the many manners in which the forces of nature manifest themselves, pluralized the name into fauni, which in turn were identified with the Greek satyrs. The fauns were popularly pictured as mischievious, carpricious imps and were said to cause nightmares.
GE Information Services "networking, company" One of the leading on-line services, started on 1st October 1985, providing subscribers with hundreds of special interest areas, computer hardware and software support, award-winning multi-player games, the most software files in the industry (over 200 000), worldwide news, sports updates, business news, investment strategies, and {Internet} {electronic mail} and fax (GE Mail). Interactive conversations (Chat Lines) and {bulletin boards} (Round Tables) with associated software archives are also provided. GEnie databases (through the ARTIST gateway) allow users to search the full text of thousands of publications, including Dun & Bradstreet Company Profiles; a GEnie NewsStand with more than 900 newspapers, magazines, and newsletters; a Reference Center with information ranging from Agriculture to World History; the latest in medical information from MEDLINE; and patent and trademark registrations. {(http://genie.com/)}. {Shopping 2000 (http://shopping2000.com/shopping2000/genie/)}. Telephone: +1 (800) 638 9636. TDD: +1 (800) 238 9172. E-mail: "info@genie.geis.com". [Connection with: GE Information Services, Inc., a division of General Electric Company, Headquarters: Rockville, Maryland, USA?] (1995-04-13)
geometrid ::: a. --> Pertaining or belonging to the Geometridae. ::: n. --> One of numerous genera and species of moths, of the family Geometridae; -- so called because their larvae (called loopers, measuring worms, spanworms, and inchworms) creep in a looping manner, as if measuring. Many of the species are injurious to agriculture, as
geoponical ::: a. --> Pertaining to tillage of the earth, or agriculture.
geoponics ::: n. --> The art or science of cultivating the earth; agriculture.
georgical ::: a. --> Relating to agriculture and rural affairs.
hacienda ::: n. --> A large estate where work of any kind is done, as agriculture, manufacturing, mining, or raising of animals; a cultivated farm, with a good house, in distinction from a farming establishment with rude huts for herdsmen, etc.; -- a word used in Spanish-American regions.
Halutz or Chalutz ::: (Heb. Pioneer, Bibl. Girded One ) Pioneer, especially in agriculture, in Palestine.
harrow ::: n. --> An implement of agriculture, usually formed of pieces of timber or metal crossing each other, and set with iron or wooden teeth. It is drawn over plowed land to level it and break the clods, to stir the soil and make it fine, or to cover seed when sown.
An obstacle formed by turning an ordinary harrow upside down, the frame being buried.
To draw a harrow over, as for the purpose of breaking clods and leveling the surface, or for covering seed; as, to harrow land.
Herbs The very large number of plants used as remedial agents in medicine are the natural remedies in treating disease, divine instructors having revealed to early humanity the great boon of agriculture and the medical use of plants. Echoes of the archaic wisdom appear in Vedic writings, but few can interpret the philosophy of the one Life which functions in the elements and forces of the human body, and their related action in the plants and minerals of the body of the earth.
husbandry ::: n. --> Care of domestic affairs; economy; domestic management; thrift.
The business of a husbandman, comprehending the various branches of agriculture; farming.
In ancient Egypt there were thirty Dynasties of kings, as enumerated by the historian Manetho. But the Egyptian priests told Herodotus that there were three divine dynasties which preceded the reign of the human kings: that of the gods, of the demigods, and of the heroes. China too had its divine dynasties which preceded the human dynasties: thus the Chow rulers are placed at 1100 BC, but they were again preceded by the Sheng and the still earlier Hea (or Hia) dynasties. The Greeks taught the existence of divine dynasties followed by human, and Plato tells of divine and semi-divine instructors who first taught mankind the arts, sciences, and agriculture. The same general tradition is found in ancient America. The ancient Chaldeans used the figures 4 3 2 in their calculations concerning the time periods of their dynasties, which they said extended backwards from themselves for a length of 432,000 years.
isis ::: n. --> The principal goddess worshiped by the Egyptians. She was regarded as the mother of Horus, and the sister and wife of Osiris. The Egyptians adored her as the goddess of fecundity, and as the great benefactress of their country, who instructed their ancestors in the art of agriculture.
Any coral of the genus Isis, or family Isidae, composed of joints of white, stony coral, alternating with flexible, horny joints. See Gorgoniacea.
Jabal (Hebrew) Yābāl Stream; in the Bible, the son of Lamech and Adah: “he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle” (Genesis 4:20). Blavatsky compares Jabal to the kabiri who were the instructors of mankind in agriculture (SD 2:390).
labor ::: n. --> Physical toil or bodily exertion, especially when fatiguing, irksome, or unavoidable, in distinction from sportive exercise; hard, muscular effort directed to some useful end, as agriculture, manufactures, and like; servile toil; exertion; work.
Intellectual exertion; mental effort; as, the labor of compiling a history.
That which requires hard work for its accomplishment; that which demands effort.
...Lecabel, controls vegetation and agriculture [17 3]
Mars: Originally a Roman god of agriculture, later the god of war, identified with the Greek Ares.
Moshav Shittufi ::: (“collective moshav”). Agricultural village in Israel whose members possess individual homesteads but where the agriculture and economy are conducted as a collective unit.
Nabathean Agriculture was translated about 1860 by Orientalist Chwolsohn into German from the Arabic translation of the Chaldean, widely considered a forgery. The Jewish scholar Maimonides (1135-1204), however, spoke pointedly of it as a specimen of archaic literature, though he disagreed with its teachings. Chwolsohn describes the book as a complete initiation into the mysteries of the “pre-Adamite” nations, and a compendium of Chaldean and other ancient lore. But the book shows periods of incalculable duration and numberless dynasties preceding the so-called Adamic race. The doctrines propounded therein were originally told by Saturn to the Moon, who communicated them to her eidolon, who revealed them to the author of the original work, Qu-tamy.
Nabatheans or Nabateans [from Shem Nebo Mercury] Worshipers of Mercury; a people of ancient Arabia, an offshoot of the Persian Yezidi, spoken of by Josephus, Jerome, Pliny, and others. Diodorus (312 BC) describes them as a tribe of some 10,000 warriors, preeminent among the nomad Arabs, eschewing agriculture, fixed abode, and wine, living by pastoral pursuits and trade.
navajoes ::: n. pl. --> A tribe of Indians inhabiting New Mexico and Arizona, allied to the Apaches. They are now largely engaged in agriculture.
Njord (Icelandic) A Norse deity, corresponding to Saturn of other mythologies and to Cronos (time). Njord is the father of Frey (the earth god), and Freyja (goddess of Venus, patroness of earth’s humanities); he is the patron of commerce and traffic, of agriculture and fishery. His home (globe) is named Noatun (ships’ harbor).
No Observable Adverse Effect Level (NOAEL)::: From long-term toxicological studies of agriculture chemical active ingredients, levels at which indicate a safe, lifetime exposure level for a given chemical. Used to establish tolerance for human diets. Also written, NOEL.
Oannes (Assyrian-Babylonian) A deity, half man, half fish, who rose every day from the Persian Gulf and taught the people wisdom, the arts and sciences, agriculture, etc. Identified with the deity Ea and also called Dagon (Dāḡôn) and Annedotus. A somewhat similar story is related in the Sanskrit Hari-Purana about Vishnu during his Matsya-avatara (fish incarnation).
Of Njord is told a legend like that of Moses: as an infant he was set adrift on a sheaf of wheat and surrounded with his father’s weapons; under the name Sceaf he landed on the earth and became the instructor of humanity in the skills of agriculture and the arts.
ORT ::: (Organization for Rehabilitation through Training), an international organization for developing skilled trades and agriculture among Jews. ORT established a vocational training network for Jewish Displaced Persons.
over agriculture and fecundity. Habuhiah is one
Pai chia: The "Hundred Schools," referring to the various tendencies of thought in philosophy, logic, ethics, law, politics, diplomacy, economics, agriculture, military science, etc, in the third and fourth centuries B.C. with Chi Hsia as a center. -- W.T.C.
Polonnaruva. [alt. Polonaruva; Polonnaruwa]. An ancient capital of Sri Lanka, it was declared the capital by King Vijayabāhu I after his defeat of the Cola in 1070. The city's golden age occurred under King PARĀKRAMABĀHU I, the grandson of Vijayabāhu, during whose reign agriculture and trade flourished and numerous architectural projects were undertaken. The city remained the capital until the late thirteenth century. Polonnaruva was the site of several important monasteries and STuPAs, the ruins of which remain today. The ancient city was declared a World Heritage Site in 1982. Perhaps its most famous site is the Gal Viharaya, where three large statues of the Buddha (standing, seated, and reclining) were cut from a single granite wall during the reign of Parākramabāhu I. A stone inscription at the site details the king's efforts to unite the sangha (S. SAMGHA) under a single NIKĀYA tradition and sets forth his sāsana reforms of the dispensation (P. sāsana; S. sĀSANA).
Qu-tamy (Chaldean) The mystic student or initiate represented as receiving certain doctrines originally told by Saturn to the Moon, who communicated them to her idol, which revealed them to her devotee — according to the Nabathean Agriculture.
Risnuch—genius of agriculture, according to
rural ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the country, as distinguished from a city or town; living in the country; suitable for, or resembling, the country; rustic; as, rural scenes; a rural prospect.
Of or pertaining to agriculture; as, rural economy.
Saturnus [possibly from Latin sero to sow] was one of the oldest Italic deities — among other things patron of agriculture — who became assimilated with the Greek Chronos or Kronos. Like Kronos he dethrones his father Uranus and is himself dethroned by Jupiter (Zeus); his mutilation of his father indicates that eternal time becomes limited; his devouring of his children is symbolic of time which both gives birth to events and then destroys them. He presides over the Golden Age of innocent but unprogressive peace, when men are unable to rule themselves and are ruled by genii; his kingdom was Lemuria. The Latins represented him as having, after his dethronement by Jupiter, become king of Italy, which was therefore called Saturnia, and presiding over the Golden Age; and Vergil voices the prophecy that such a Saturnian Age shall one day return.
Science and Engineering Research Council "body" (SERC) Formerly the largest of the five research councils funded by the British Government through the Office of Science and Technology. SERC funded higher education research in science and engineering, including computing and was responsible for the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Oxford; the Daresbury Laboratory, near Warrington; the Royal Greenwich Observatory at Cambridge and the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. In April 1994 SERC was split into the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council. SERC's remote sensing efforts have been transferred to the Natural Environment RC and its biotechnology efforts merged with the Agriculture and Food RC to make the new Biotechnology and Biological Sciences RC. The two major SERC laboratories - {Rutherford Appleton Laboratory} and Daresbury Laboratory are now independent. {(http://unixfe.rl.ac.uk/serc/serc.html)}. (1994-12-15)
scythe ::: an implement used in agriculture consisting of a long, curved, very sharp, single-edged blade with a long bent handle, used for mowing or reaping.
Shichifukujin. (七福神). In Japanese, "Seven Gods of Good Fortune"; an assembly of seven deities dating from at least the fifteenth century, which gained popularity in Japan's folk religious setting and are still well known today. Those who have faith in the group are said to gain happiness and good fortune in their lives. Before their grouping, each of the individual gods existed independently and historically shared little in common. Of the seven, Ebisu is the only god with an identity linked to the Japanese islands. Daikokuten (C. Dahei tian; S. MAHĀKĀLA), Bishamonten (C. Pishamen tian; S. VAIsRAVAnA), and Benzaiten (C. Biancai tian; S. SARASVATĪ) originated in India, and Hotei (C. BUDAI, d. 917), Jurojin (C. Shoulaoren), and Fukurokuju (C. Fulushou) come from the Chinese Buddho-Daoist traditions. Their grouping into seven gods of good fortune likely occurred in the Japanese Kansai region, with the commerce-affiliated Daikoku and Ebisu gaining initial popularity among merchants. Early mention of them appears in a reference from 1420, when they were said to have been escorted in procession through Fushimi, a southern ward of Kyoto, in imitation of a daimyo procession. ¶ Ebisu (a.k.a. Kotoshiro-nushi-no-mikoto, the abandoned child of Izanami and Izanagi) is the god of fishermen and the sea, commerce, good fortune, and labor. Among its etymological roots, the term "ebisu" traces back to the Ainu ethnic group of Hokkaido, connecting them to fishermen who came from abroad. Ebisu is often depicted with a fishing rod in one hand and either a large red sea bream (J. tai) or a folding fan in the other. Since the inception of the Shichifukujin, he is often paired with Daikokuten as either son or brother. ¶ Daikokuten, or "Great Black Spirit," comes originally from India (where is he is called Mahākāla); among the Shichifukujin, he is known as the god of wealth, agriculture, and commerce. Typically portrayed as standing on two bales of rice, Daikokuten carries a sack of treasure over his shoulder and a magic mallet in one hand. He is also considered to be a deity of the kitchen and is sometimes found in monasteries and private kitchens. Prior to the Tokugawa period, he was called Sanmen Daikokuten (Three-Headed Daikokuten), a wrathful protector of the three jewels (RATNATRAYA). ¶ Bishamonten, also originally from India (where he is called Vaisravana), is traditionally the patron deity of the state and warriors. He is often depicted holding a lance in one hand and a small pagoda in the palm of his other hand with which he rewards those he deems worthy. Through these associations, he came to represent wealth and fortune. His traditional residence is Mt. SUMERU, where he protects the Buddha's dais and listens to the dharma. ¶ Benzaiten ([alt. Myoonten]; C. Miaoyin tian) is the Indian goddess Sarasvatī. She is traditionally considered to be a goddess of music, poetry, and learning but among the Shichifukujin, she also represents good fortune. She takes two forms: one playing a lute in both hands, the other with eight arms. ¶ Hotei is the Japanese name of Budai (d. 916), a Chinese thaumaturge who is said to have been an incarnation of the BODHISATTVA MAITREYA (J. Miroku bosatsu). The only historical figure among the Shichifukujin, Hotei represents contentment and happiness. Famous for his fat belly and broad smile, Hotei is often depicted holding a large cloth bag (Hotei literally means "hemp sack"). From this bag, which never empties, he feeds the poor and needy. In some places, he has also become the patron saint of restaurants and bars, since those who drink and eat well are said to be influenced by Hotei. ¶ Jurojin and Fukurokuju, often associated with one another and said to share the same body, originated within the Chinese Daoist tradition. Jurojin (lit. "Gaffer Long Life"), the deity of longevity within the Shichifukujin, is possibly a historical figure from the late eleventh through twelfth century. Depicted as an old man with a long, white beard, he is often accompanied by a crane or white stag. Fukurokuju (lit. "Wealth, Happiness, and Longevity") has an elongated forehead, a long, white beard and usually a staff in one hand; he is likely based on a mythical Daoist hermit from the Song period. ¶ This set of seven gods is most commonly worshipped in Japan. There are, however, other versions. Especially noteworthy is a listing found in the 1697 Nihon Shichifukujinden ("The Exposition on the Japanese Seven Gods of Good Fortune"), according to which Fukurokuju and Jurojin are treated as a single god named Nankyoku rojin and a new god, Kichijoten (C. Jixiang tian; S. srīmahādevī), the goddess of happiness or auspiciousness, is added to the group.
terraculture ::: n. --> Cultivation on the earth; agriculture.
The same idea underlies the Jewish Sabbath (Shabbath, a period of rest), the Lord’s day, and Jehovah in one of its meanings is Saturn, the genius of the Hebrew nation. It was from Saturn that came the teachings revealed to Qutamy in Nabathean Agriculture. Among the many equivalents of Saturn are Chium, Seth, Cain, Ildabaoth among the Egyptian Gnostics, Agruerus, Sydyk (Melchisedec), and Satan — the girdle about the loins of Satan is the rings of the planet Saturn. In the Biblical list of Gnostic emanations, Saturn corresponds to Thrones.
Thor: Thunder-god of Norse mythology, a god of fertility and agriculture, patron of sailors.
Tolerances ::: Permissible residue levels for pesticides in raw agricultural produce and processed foods. Whenever a pesticide is registered for use on a food or a feed crop, a tolerance (or exemption from the tolerance requirement) must be established. EPA establishes the tolerance levels, which are enforced by the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture.
Vaisya (Sanskrit) Vaiśya A man who settles on the soil; also a peasant or working man. The third of the four castes into which Hindu society was divided in Vedic and post-Vedic periods. In those times it also referred to one whose occupation was that of trade as well as of agriculture. See also CHATUR-VARNA
Votan A legislator and deified hero of ancient America, regarded as the traditional founder of culture in Central America. The traditions of the people as recorded by Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg tell that he came across the waters in large ships, he and his companions wearing long flowing garments and speaking a language akin to the Nahuatl — which is similar to the story told about Quetzalcoatl. He found the people of Central America, from Darien to California, in a barbarous condition, living in rude huts or caverns, using skins of beasts for clothing. Votan instructed the people in the sciences and arts, such as in the use of agriculture and the art of weaving; established forms of government; and taught them the truth about the gods and their supreme head called the god of truth, who was at first worshiped without temples and without altars. According to legend he founded the city of Palenque, said to be the oldest city in Central America.
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1:The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. ~ John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife, #KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Agriculture is the most healthful, most useful, and most noble employment of man ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 2:Football: A sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 3:Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 4:It would be wryly interesting if in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 5:Industry is increased, commodities are multiplied, agriculture and manufacturers flourish: and herein consists the true wealth and prosperity of a state. ~ alexander-hamilton, @wisdomtrove 6:As mankind becomes more enlightened to know their real interests, they will esteem the value of agriculture; they will find it in their natural& 7:What the Secretary of Agriculture is trying to do is to teach the farmer corn acreage control, and the hogs birth control, and one is just as hard to make understand it as the other. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 8:Agriculture is the soul and chief support of empires; industry produces riches and the happiness of the people; exportation represents the superabundance, and good use of both. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 9:Love had forged ahead so swiftly that in no time it had displaced agriculture as the leading industry of the period. To anyone who has tried both, this wont come as much of a surprise. ~ groucho-marx, @wisdomtrove 10:With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine. ~ bertrand-russell, @wisdomtrove 11:I know of no pursuit in which more real and important services can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture, its breed of useful animals, and other branches of a husbandman's cares. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 12:Nature without learning is like a blind man; learning without Nature, like a maimed one; practice without both, incomplete. As in agriculture a good soil is first sought for, then a skilful husbandman, and then good seed; in the same way nature corresponds to the soil, the teacher to the husbandman, precepts and instruction to the seed. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 13:For the sake of humanity it is devoutly to be wished that the manly employment of agriculture and the humanizing benefits of commerce would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest; and the swords might be turned into ploughshares, the spears into pruning-hooks, and as the Scripture expresses it, "the nations learn war no more. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 14:The advancement of agriculture, commerce and manufactures, by all proper means, will not, I trust, need recommendation. But I cannot forbear intimating to you the expediency of giving effectual encouragement as well to the introduction of new and useful inventions from abroad, as to the exertions of skill and genius in producing them at home. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 15:Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 16:There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 17:The rapid progress of the sciences makes me sorry, at times, that I was born so soon. Imagine the power that man will have over matter, a few hundred years from now. We may learn how to remove gravity from large masses, and float them over great distances. Agriculture will double its produce with less labor. All diseases will surely be cured... even old age. If only the moral sciences could be improved as well. Perhaps men would cease to be wolves to one another... and human beings could learn to be human. ~ benjamin-franklin, @wisdomtrove 18:One can see from space how the human race has changed the Earth. Nearly all of the available land has been cleared of forest and is now used for agriculture or urban development. The polar icecaps are shrinking and the desert areas are increasing. At night, the Earth is no longer dark, but large areas are lit up. All of this is evidence that human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit. But human demands and expectations are ever-increasing. We cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere, poison the ocean and exhaust the land. There isn't any more available. ~ stephen-hawking, @wisdomtrove 19:Finally, we can congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern Sapiens only if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals. Much of the vaunted material wealth that shields us from disease and famine was accumulated at the expense of laboratory monkeys, dairy cows and conveyor-belt chickens. Over the last two centuries tens of billions of them have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Agriculture is the new golf ~ Ed McMahon, #NFDB
2:the second revolution: agriculture. ~ A G Riddle, #NFDB
3:If you eat, you are involved in agriculture. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
4:Most things, except agriculture, can wait ~ Jawaharlal Nehru, #NFDB
5:Everything else can wait, agriculture can’t. ~ Norman Borlaug, #NFDB
6:Agriculture is the foundation of manufactures; ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
7:To be economical agriculture must be ecological. ~ Charles Walters, #NFDB
8:Weeding is as necessary to agriculture as sowing. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
9:Romans often took family names from agriculture, Cato ~ Mark Kurlansky, #NFDB
10:A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
11:Agriculture and intercultural dialogue: our common heritage. ~ Jacques Diouf, #NFDB
12:We're the biggest food and agriculture company in the world. ~ Dwayne Andreas, #NFDB
13:Agriculture is the process of turning eco-systems into people. ~ Toby Hemenway, #NFDB
14:Second to agriculture, humbug is the biggest industry of our age. ~ Alfred Nobel, #NFDB
15:Agriculture engenders good sense, and good sense of an excellent kind. ~ Joseph Joubert, #NFDB
16:In industrial agriculture, a sow is nothing more than a piglet machine. ~ Barry Estabrook, #NFDB
17:The discovery of agriculture was the first big step toward a civilized life. ~ Arthur Keith, #NFDB
18:To make agriculture sustainable, the grower has got to be able to make a profit. ~ Sam Farr, #NFDB
19:Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food. ~ Albert Allen Bartlett, #NFDB
20:The Charkha supplemented the agriculture of the villagers and gave it dignity. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
21:A sustainable agriculture is one which depletes neither the people nor the land. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
22:Industrial agriculture now accounts for over half of America's water pollution. ~ Robert Kennedy, #NFDB
23:Africa had a kind of feudalism, like Europe based on agriculture, and with hierarchies ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
24:Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place. ~ David R Brower, #NFDB
25:If we don't get sustainability right in agriculture first, it won't happen anywhere. ~ Wes Jackson, #NFDB
26:Agriculture is the most healthful, most useful, and most noble employment of man ~ George Washington, #NFDB
27:Agriculture is in danger. The whole world is in danger. We need to learn to adapt. If we ~ Cary Fowler, #NFDB
28:On the professional side, those 18 years on the farm instilled my love for agriculture. ~ Mike Johanns, #NFDB
29:He who doesn’t regard agriculture will truly value it when food becomes scarce! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, #NFDB
30:There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song ~ Masanobu Fukuoka, #NFDB
31:Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
32:Agriculture is at the same time the most tranquil, healthy, and independent occupation. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
33:,Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
34:people Trump had sent into the Department of Agriculture were white men in their twenties. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
35:The lifeblood of Mercy For Animals is our undercover investigations of animal agriculture. ~ Nathan Runkle, #NFDB
36:Historically, its primary industries had been agriculture and a sort of willful illiteracy. ~ Daniel O Malley, #NFDB
37:I always go to the Agriculture Building, where they make apple cider popsicles for a dollar. ~ Kate DiCamillo, #NFDB
38:Jared Diamond to describe agriculture as “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”) ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
39:Once you get the government involved in agriculture you'll have nothing but problems and expenses. ~ Ron Paul, #NFDB
40:The only thing they (the English) have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease. ~ Jacques Chirac, #NFDB
41:Agriculture is one economic activity that does not obey the laws of demand and supply. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith, #NFDB
42:There's an unexpectedly high share of workers still in agriculture, .. That's like a fault line. ~ Edward Taylor, #NFDB
43:Football: A sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
44:Agriculture specialists say our farm production is increasing and will go on increasing. Thank God. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
45:Water is a finite resource that is essential in the advancement of agriculture, and is vital to human life. ~ Jim Costa, #NFDB
46:Food shortages are stoking inflation, while tourism and agriculture—two of Crimea's mainstays—are suffering. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
47:If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
48:Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
49:and the horticulturalists really believed that gardening would save the world that agriculture was destroying. ~ Jane Smiley, #NFDB
50:When you concentrate on agriculture and industry and are frugal in expenditures, Heaven cannot impoverish your state. ~ Xunzi, #NFDB
51:Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
52:In 1930, more than 20% of the American population was employed in agriculture. Today it's less than 2%. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
53:That is the point of agriculture: it diverts the labour of other species to providing services for human beings. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
54:The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
55:Organic agriculture is more about fairness and respect than it is about parts-per-billion of pesticide residues ~ Jim Hightower, #NFDB
56:Russian Revolution and on Stalin, who was worse than the czars, killing his own people to collectivise agriculture. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
57:The [Democratic] party's become an urban party, and they don't get rural America. They don't get agriculture. ~ Collin Peterson, #NFDB
58:Agriculture is the most destructive industry that we have. More than coal mining and other extractive industries. ~ Allan Savory, #NFDB
59:The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape, how we take part in that basic source of civilization- agriculture. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
60:We Communists have to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their agriculture and their technology. ~ Leonid Brezhnev, #NFDB
61:You can't do everything. You can't do health and forestry and agriculture. You've got to focus and do one or the other. ~ Jane Goodall, #NFDB
62:I never wanted to become an actor. I always wanted to be a farmer and dreamt of owning half an acre of agriculture land. ~ Pawan Kalyan, #NFDB
63:According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 16% of men and 13% of women ages 20 to 39 eat pizza every single day. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
64:At least I sure hope it will - and I see good signs all the time, especially in things like the rise of local agriculture. ~ Bill McKibben, #NFDB
65:I dream of making India a $20 trillion economy. For that, I am pushing for agriculture, manufacturing and service sectors. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
66:When wildlife damages agriculture we eliminate the wildlife. Rather we should eliminate agriculture when it damages wildlife. ~ James Cook, #NFDB
67:Here we have 40 million Russian citizens involved in the sphere of agriculture one way or another. This is very important. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
68:Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
69:Asking the Department of Agriculture to promote healthy eating was like asking Jack Daniels to promote responsible drinking. ~ Denise Minger, #NFDB
70:Agriculture is the #1 source of deforestation. By some estimates it accounts for 80% of the forests chopped down in the tropics. ~ Ramez Naam, #NFDB
71:Amazonians practiced a kind of agro-forestry, farming with trees, unlike any kind of agriculture in Europe, Africa, or Asia. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
72:BJP is committed to transform the agriculture sector. We want to increase farmer income and the purchasing power of villages. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
73:I grew up in a city. My parents would think there was something wrong with America if they knew I was secretary of agriculture. ~ Tom Vilsack, #NFDB
74:Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture. (Health Is Membership, pg. 98) ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
75:The agriculture we seek will act like an ecosystem, feature material recycling and run on the contemporary sunlight of our star. ~ Wes Jackson, #NFDB
76:Right now, in America, 70 percent of our water is used for agriculture, yet 50 percent of the food produced gets thrown away. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
77:To me, one of the easiest ways of addressing climate change and potentially remedying climate change is to stop subsidizing animal agriculture. ~ Moby, #NFDB
78:Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture. ~ Quintilian, #NFDB
79:I get that disappointed look all the time,” Tensen said in a cheerful tone. “No one is ever excited to meet the minister of agriculture. ~ Marie Rutkoski, #NFDB
80:The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
81:Sometimes the large scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
82:In my father's language: "To create something out of nothing." That possibility exists in India even in old-world sectors like agriculture. ~ Mukesh Ambani, #NFDB
83:More than a mere alternative strategy, regenerative agriculture represents a fundamental shift in our culture’s relationship to nature. ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
84:Along with currency manipulation, the New Deal introduced to Americans the spectacle of Fascist dictation to business, labor, and agriculture. ~ Herbert Hoover, #NFDB
85:Brezhnev wasn't a minus for the history of our country, he was a huge plus, He laid a foundation for the country's economics and agriculture. ~ Leonid Brezhnev, #NFDB
86:Education became Finland’s best hope for preparing its population for a new economy based not on agriculture or manufacturing, but on knowledge. ~ Anu Partanen, #NFDB
87:Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology. ~ Edward Thorndike, #NFDB
88:Regenerative agriculture represents more than a shift of practices. It is also a shift in paradigm and in our basic relationship to nature. ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
89:The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
90:As the tension eases, we must look in the direction of agriculture, industry and education as our final goals, and toward democracy under Mr Mubarak. ~ Naguib Mahfouz, #NFDB
91:It's only a slight exaggeration to say we haven't progressed much beyond the invention of agriculture when it comes to our view of the natural world. ~ Annalee Newitz, #NFDB
92:Before the discovery of agriculture mankind was everywhere so divided, the size of each group being determined by the natural fertility of its locality. ~ Arthur Keith, #NFDB
93:It would be wryly interesting if in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
94:Little ol' boy in the Panhandle told me the other day you can still make a small fortune in agriculture. Problem is, you got to start with a large one. ~ Jim Hightower, #NFDB
95:Modern agriculture has been accurately described as a way of turning oil into food. As the price of oil continues to rise, so will the price of food. ~ Jeremy Grantham, #NFDB
96:The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
97:Organic food production has existed for thousands of years (since the beginning of agriculture) and it will continue as long as humans live on the planet. ~ David Wolfe, #NFDB
98:I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music. ~ John Quincy Adams, #NFDB
99:in a world where only a minor portion of the land is really well suited to agriculture, man is using much of the best land with dubious efficiency. ~ Frances Moore Lappe, #NFDB
100:I know of nothing uglier or more saddening than a machine-flailed hedge. It speaks of the disdain of nature and craft that still dominates our agriculture. ~ Roger Deakin, #NFDB
101:The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it with slavery. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
102:More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services - from movies to agriculture to national defense. ~ Marc Andreessen, #NFDB
103:The coldest growing seasons of the future [will be] hotter than the hottest of the past. Is agriculture adapted to that? I don't know. Can fish play the piano? ~ Cary Fowler, #NFDB
104:Industry is increased, commodities are multiplied, agriculture and manufacturers flourish: and herein consists the true wealth and prosperity of a state. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
105:Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
106:It's clear that agriculture, done right, is the best means the world has today to simultaneously tackle food security, poverty and environmental degradation. ~ Irene Rosenfeld, #NFDB
107:In Old Europe and Ancient Crete, women were respected for their roles in the discovery of agriculture and for inventing the arts of weaving and pottery making. ~ Carol P Christ, #NFDB
108:Man's survival, from the time of Adam and Eve until the invention of agriculture, must have been precarious because of his inability to ensure his food supply. ~ Norman Borlaug, #NFDB
109:American agriculture is badly in need of diversity. Another threat to the food system of course is the likelihood that petroleum is not going to get any cheaper. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
110:Conventional agriculture has never succeeded in feeding the world, and it's never produced anything good to eat. For the future, we need to look toward alternatives. ~ Dan Barber, #NFDB
111:Ergot, growing millennia later on certain cultivated grains, seems to have coincided in its arrival on the human stage with the discovery by Man of agriculture. ~ R Gordon Wasson, #NFDB
112:High tech companies that focus on research, development and production will learn that they can be the perfect complement to our world-renowned agriculture heritage. ~ Alan Autry, #NFDB
113:Traditional agriculture was labour intensive, industrial agriculture is energy intensive, and permaculture-designed systems are information and design intensive. ~ David Holmgren, #NFDB
114:does imperialism offer the only remaining possible form in which to expand the exchange between industry and agriculture within capitalism? This is the basic question. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
115:True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
116:Technological innovations had shifted the basis of England’s economy from agriculture to industry between 1750 and 1850. The development of steam power and a boom ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
117:Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons? ~ Jane Goodall, #NFDB
118:Animal agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm- 99.9% of chickens raised for meat, 97% of laying hens, 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs, and 78% of cattle. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
119:For of all gainful professions, nothing is better, nothing more pleasing, nothing more delightful, nothing better becomes a well-bred man than # agriculture ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
120:The most humble research scientist in the Department of Agriculture is at this time contributing more to this country than the most useful member of Congress. ~ Fiorello H La Guardia, #NFDB
121:Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
122:Mr. President, it may surprise my colleagues, but I am no fan of federal disaster programs for agriculture. They are difficult to pass and often a disaster to implement. ~ Pat Roberts, #NFDB
123:that as much as 84 percent of the total use of antimicrobials in the United States was for non-therapeutic purposes in agriculture, with 70 percent in livestock. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
124:Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
125:We would be foolish and silly not to unite with people in the public health sector, the environmental community, [and] unions, to try to challenge corporate agriculture. ~ Wayne Pacelle, #NFDB
126:As mankind becomes more enlightened to know their real interests, they will esteem the value of agriculture; they will find it in their natural--their destined occupation. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
127:Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
128:modern agriculture has thoroughly separated the agri from the culture. They’ve killed the meaning of the word—bifurcated it, completely, in just the last thirty or so years. ~ Dan Barber, #NFDB
129:Since nature has the most sustainable ecosystem and since ultimately agriculture comes out of nature, our standard for a sustainable world should be nature's own ecosystem. ~ Wes Jackson, #NFDB
130:The Department of Agriculture announced that it will ban six new strains of E. coli. Which explains why the hot dog vendor outside my building is now just selling napkins. ~ Jimmy Fallon, #NFDB
131:So imagine a world 6 degrees warmer. It's not going to recognize geographical boundaries. It's not going to recognize anything. So agriculture regions today will be wiped out. ~ Steven Chu, #NFDB
132:The problem is that this round from its inception has had agriculture at its centerpiece. The EU and the U. S. and other WTO members cannot wish that away, that is a reality. ~ Rob Portman, #NFDB
133:Wait a minute! I'm not interested in agriculture. I want the military stuff. During a briefing military stuff in which officials began telling him about missile silos. ~ Sean William Scott, #NFDB
134:Security for agriculture merits serious concern by not only the agricultural community but our nation as a whole. The risk to the U.S. food supply and overall economy is real. ~ Pat Roberts, #NFDB
135:The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
136:It is obvious that the greatest and most important service that is required of our agriculture under existing conditions is an enlarged production of the staple food crops. ~ David F Houston, #NFDB
137:The change from the categories of hunter-gatherers to pastoralism to agriculture involved using a decreasing area of land, but an increasingly more intensive use of the land. ~ Romila Thapar, #NFDB
138:At President Obama's direction, the U.S Department of Agriculture is working hard to unleash the power of America's innovators and entrepreneurs to build a green energy economy. ~ Tom Vilsack, #NFDB
139:human population growth mushroomed as quality of life plummeted. The shift to agriculture, wrote author Jared Diamond, is a “catastrophe from which we have never recovered. ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
140:Our farmers and ranchers have never faced as many problems as they do today with drought, range fires, high gas prices and an ever tightening budget on agriculture subsidies. ~ Michael McCaul, #NFDB
141:The experience of ages has shown that a man who works on the land is purer, nobler, higher, and more moral... Agriculture should be at the basis of everything. That's my idea. ~ Nikolai Gogol, #NFDB
142:France would be reluctant to embrace any proposal by the European Commission to slash agricultural tariffs if it threatened the European Union's Common Agriculture Policy . ~ Christine Lagarde, #NFDB
143:Media coverage of the legislative fights is overwhelmingly negative for agriculture interests. The impression left among consumers is that the proponents had something to hide. ~ Wayne Pacelle, #NFDB
144:You cannot, for instance, sustainably protect the environment if the majority of the people are still in primitive agriculture leading to the encroachment of forest reserves. ~ Yoweri Museveni, #NFDB
145:For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
146:In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate. ~ Garrett Hardin, #NFDB
147:It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term 'agribusiness.' ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
148:Only when an unknown genius discovered naturally mutated grain plants that did not shatter—and purposefully selected, protected, and cultivated them—did true agriculture begin. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
149:The tractor’s arrival had signaled, among other things, agriculture’s shift from an almost exclusive dependence on free solar energy to a total dependence on costly fossil fuel. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
150:The first form of culture is agriculture. It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
151:As the first Member of Congress from western Washington to serve on the House Agriculture Committee in over 50 years, I am proud to represent the needs of our agriculture community. ~ Rick Larsen, #NFDB
152:In the United States, frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Frozen pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, is regulated by the Department of Agriculture. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
153:The concentration and reciprocal effect of industry and agriculture conjoin in a growth of productive powers, which increases more in geometrical than in arithmetical proportion. ~ Friedrich List, #NFDB
154:Foreign aid has been perfected so that it subsidizes corporate U.S. agriculture while preventing poor countries from developing profitable agriculture or feeding themselves. ~ Nicholas von Hoffman, #NFDB
155:If you're using first-class land for biofuels, then you're competing with the growing of food. And so you're actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
156:Agriculture is the soul and chief support of empires; industry produces riches and the happiness of the people; exportation represents the superabundance, and good use of both. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
157:Whatever of social importance is done today, whether in politics, finance, manufacture, agriculture, charity, education, or other fields, must be done with the help of propaganda. ~ Edward L Bernays, #NFDB
158:Great food, like all art, enhances and reflects a community’s vitality, growth and solidarity. Yet history bears witness that great cuisines spring only from healthy local agriculture. ~ Rick Bayless, #NFDB
159:Love had forged ahead so swiftly that in no time it had displaced agriculture as the leading industry of the period. To anyone who has tried both, this wont come as much of a surprise. ~ Groucho Marx, #NFDB
160:Profits might also increase, because improvements might take place in agriculture, or in the implements of husbandry, which would augment the produce with the same cost of production. ~ David Ricardo, #NFDB
161:To keep farmers on the farm we must maintain a strong farm safety net, but we will also have to build a thriving companion economy to compliment production agriculture in rural America. ~ Tom Vilsack, #NFDB
162:African agriculture today is among, or is, the most under-capitalized in the world. Only seven percent of arable land in Africa is irrigated, compared to 40 percent in Asia. ~ Eleni Zaude Gabre Madhin, #NFDB
163:Women can succeed in villages all over the world today without relying on heavy machinery or debt. They can take leadership roles in agriculture, eliminating hunger and inequity. ~ Frances Moore Lappe, #NFDB
164:We have had a great depression in agriculture, caused mainly by several seasons of bad harvests, and some of our traders have suffered much from a too rapid extension in prosperous years. ~ John Bright, #NFDB
165:Because of technological limits, there is a certain amount of food that we can produce per acre. If we were to have intensive greenhouse agriculture, we could have much higher production. ~ Ralph Merkle, #NFDB
166:Congress did not pass last year's 2006 budget proposals. The 2007 budget proposals are very similar, and once again unfairly target agriculture. I expect Congress to reject them again. ~ Saxby Chambliss, #NFDB
167:Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, reflecting on Bush’s “stay-the-course” strategy, said, “If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want the drillin’ rights on that man’s head. ~ Molly Ivins, #NFDB
168:HAGGIS The U.S. Department of Agriculture prohibits Americans from eating the authentic Scottish dish because it contains sheep lungs, which legally "shall not be saved for use as human food. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
169:Germany under Hitler was still only a partially modernized society, in which upwards of 15 million people depended for their living either on traditional handicrafts or on peasant agriculture. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
170:Meg gagged. "I hate bugs."
That made sense for a daughter of the agriculture goddess, but to me the dead ant didn't seem any grosser than the piles of garbage in which we often swam. ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
171:America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
172:I farm taro. I have eight varieties of taro, which is a staple of the Hawaiian people from about 2,000 years ago, and sweet potatoes, and it's a sustainable living, agriculture, off the grid. ~ Jason Scott, #NFDB
173:The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die. ~ Barry Commoner, #NFDB
174:I must study war and politics so that my children shall be free to study commerce, agriculture and other practicalities, so that their children can study painting, poetry and other fine things. ~ John Adams, #NFDB
175:Finally I decided that since peasants were the largest segment of the world's population, it would be an honorable and worthy career to devote my life to the study of peasants and agriculture. ~ James C Scott, #NFDB
176:It may be that Hamilton’s preference for a diversified economy of manufacturing and agriculture originated in his youthful reflections on the avoidable poverty he had witnessed in the Caribbean. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
177:Instead of trying to understand agriculture in its own terms, acknowledge that agriculture ultimately comes out of nature. Right now agriculture is the No. 1 threat to biodiversity on the planet. ~ Wes Jackson, #NFDB
178:Low-cost fuels, high-performing vaccines, and ultrayield agriculture are just three of the reasons that the exponential growth of biotechnology is critical to creating a world of abundance. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
179:With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
180:Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
181:Agricultural sustainability doesn't depend on agritechnology. To believe it does is to put the emphasis on the wrong bit of 'agriculture.' What sustainability depends on isn't agri- so much as culture. ~ Raj Patel, #NFDB
182:Then he discovered the library’s collection of agriculture books, which included works by Sir Albert Howard and Rudolf Steiner. “I read them and it clicked,” he said. “I mean, it all just came together. ~ Dan Barber, #NFDB
183:In the rush to industrialize farming, we've lost the understanding, implicit since the beginning of agriculture, that food is a process, a web of relationships, not an individual ingredient or commodity. ~ Dan Barber, #NFDB
184:In the rush to industrialize farming, we’ve lost the understanding, implicit since the beginning of agriculture, that food is a process, a web of relationships, not an individual ingredient or commodity. ~ Dan Barber, #NFDB
185:There won't be some overnight miracle cure. But the measures I take will be sustainable. Our goal is to cease food imports within four years. This will create a minimum of 2 million jobs in agriculture. ~ Ashraf Ghani, #NFDB
186:When we protect the places where the processes of life can flourish, we strengthen not only the future of medicine, agriculture and industry, but also the essential conditions for peace and prosperity. ~ Harrison Ford, #NFDB
187:Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It's agriculture. It's golf courses. It's domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the gulf. ~ Sylvia Earle, #NFDB
188:One succeeds in obtaining an equivalent production at a lower price by improving the arts, trades and agriculture and by developing the physical and moral qualities of workers, farmers and craftsmen. ~ Antoine Lavoisier, #NFDB
189:There seems to be three ways for a nation to acquire wealth: the first is by war...this is robbery; the second by commerce, which is generally cheating; the third by agriculture, the only honest way. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
190:I know of no pursuit in which more real and important services can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture, its breed of useful animals, and other branches of a husbandman's cares. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
191:I hear from readers a good deal, and I try to answer every letter. I think, because of my commitment to issues of conservation and good agriculture and peaceableness, they find something hopeful in my work. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
192:I think that the agriculture system in general is rooted in racism - consider that historically black labor on plantations was the backbone of the economy. These workers didn't reap the benefit of that system. ~ Bryant Terry, #NFDB
193:As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture. ~ Wes Jackson, #NFDB
194:The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
195:There’s something about patience that God deems necessary for our life in the age to come and so, whether through agriculture or discipleship or bodily development or eschatology or procreation, God makes us wait ~ Russell D Moore, #NFDB
196:We only invented the word organic because we made things inorganic.
We only invented the word natural because we made things unnatural.
We only invented the word permaculture because we made agriculture. ~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen,#NFDB
197:I wish I could give you all the examples over the last two years as secretary of agriculture, where I hear people in rural America constantly being criticized, without any expression of appreciation for what they do do. ~ Tom Vilsack, #NFDB
198:Collectivize one sixth of the earth? How? With what levers? Even the ultraleftist Trotsky, in a speech a few years back, had called a “transition to collective forms” of agriculture a matter of “one or two generations. ~ Stephen Kotkin, #NFDB
199:That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as the soil-that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat-may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
200:Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
201:My priority going forward is to be able to be involved in things like the farm and fighting hunger events, and then doing things to give back to charity, and staying involved in agriculture and farming, and building that. ~ Chris Soules, #NFDB
202:Agribusiness and food processing are important parts of modernizing our economy, of modernizing our agriculture and moving into a phase where a more modernized agriculture helps not only farmers but also helps consumers. ~ Manmohan Singh, #NFDB
203:Our current expectations for what our students should learn in school were set fifty years ago to meet the needs of an economy based on manufacturing and agriculture. We now have an economy based on knowledge and technology. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
204:Every endeavor should be used to weaken and destroy all those institutions relating to corporations, apprenticeships, &c, which cause the labours of agriculture to be worse paid than the labours of trade and manufactures. ~ Thomas Malthus, #NFDB
205:But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
206:Even as the population doubled from three to six billion, we managed to race ahead with all kinds of technological and scientific events in agriculture - from using more fertilizers to mechanization to advanced plant breeding. ~ Nina Fedoroff, #NFDB
207:Montana's ranchers raise the best cattle in the world. If Taco Bell needs to beef up, they can give their customers the highest quality meat around by using Montana beef, and in the process, supporting agriculture jobs in Montana. ~ Jon Tester, #NFDB
208:Animal agriculture takes up an incredible 70% of all agricultural land, and a whopping 30% of the land surface of the planet. As a result, farmed animals are probably the biggest cause of slashing and burning the world's forests. ~ Kathy Freston, #NFDB
209:If we get agriculture right in Africa, where most of the people now are working in that sector, not only would it help boost development but we will be secure in terms of food and nutrition and then be able to move on to other areas. ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB
210:Contrasting sharply, in the developing countries represented by India, Pakistan, and most of the countries in Asia and Africa, seventy to eighty percent of the population is engaged in agriculture, mostly at the subsistence level. ~ Norman Borlaug, #NFDB
211:Texas has been hit especially hard this year by a continuing drought, threatening high winds and increasingly destructive range fires. Simply, these conditions have lead to extremely adverse conditions in the agriculture industry. ~ Michael McCaul, #NFDB
212:The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grains represents an...evil whose consequences may be far greater and longer lasting than any past examples of violence inflicted by men against thier fellow human beings. ~ Jeremy Rifkin, #NFDB
213:The culture of good place-making, like the culture of farming, or agriculture, is a body of knowledge and acquired skills. It is not bred in the bone, and if it is not transmitted from one generation to the next, it is lost. ~ James Howard Kunstler, #NFDB
214:This is an exciting time for farmers and ranchers of all types and sizes as agriculture is a bright spot in the American economy. In 2011, agricultural exports hit a record high and producers saw their best incomes in nearly 40 years. ~ Tom Vilsack, #NFDB
215:Ritual regulation
of production and belligerence means that domestication has become the decisive factor. "The emergence of systematic warfare, fortifications, and weapons of destruction," says Hassan, "follows the path of agriculture. ~ John Zerzan,#NFDB
216:I would stare at the honest brightness of the gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid green of oaks or at a distant hill scrambling out — scarred but still untamed — from the wilderness of agriculture that was trying to swallow it. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
217:One imputation in particular has been repeated till it seems as if some at least believed it: that I am an enemy to commerce. They admit me a friend of agriculture, and suppose me an enemy to the only means of disposing of its produce. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
218:Beard’s view, slavery and emancipation were almost incidental to the real causes and consequences of the war. The sectional conflict arose from the contending economic interests of plantation agriculture and industrializing capitalism. ~ James M McPherson, #NFDB
219:India has tens of thousands of NGOs, including local arms of global charities and homegrown groups, working on causes including the status of women, urban safety, human rights, environmental protection, healthcare, agriculture and clean energy. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
220:W. S. Merwin . . . traced our attitude of dominion to the beginnings of agriculture. He argued that settling down in permanent places gave us the “illusion of possession.” That fateful moment in our hominid history set us up for our downfall. ~ Mary Pipher, #NFDB
221:The combination of new equipment and new chemicals turned the American farm into the most efficient food bank on earth, capable of producing more wheat, corn, and so forth, per acre than any other country's farms in the history of agriculture. ~ Peter Lynch, #NFDB
222:The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
223:In the days when the nation depended on agriculture for its wealth it made the Lord Chancellor sit on a woolsack to remind him where the wealth came from. I would like to suggest we remove that now and make him sit on a crate of machine tools. ~ Prince Philip, #NFDB
224:Almost all the knowledge required to produce more food than eroding soil is available today - we just need to use that knowledge within a holistic paradigm - managing agriculture holistically, forming the policies that undergird it holistically. ~ Allan Savory, #NFDB
225:Al Gore has made no serious attempt to level the playing field for U.S. agriculture exports, which have fallen 16 percent in the last three years. And Al Gore has opposed every serious proposal to provide American farmers with meaningful tax relief. ~ Dan Quayle, #NFDB
226:Likely the milpa cannot be replicated on an industrial scale. But by studying its essential features, researchers may be able to smooth the rough ecological edges of conventional agriculture. “Mesoamerica still has much to teach us,” Wilkes said. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
227:The gods of hunter-gatherers are often capricious and malevolent. They sometimes punish bad behavior, but they bring suffering to the virtuous as well. As groups take up agriculture and grow larger, however, their gods become far more moralistic. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
228:It is a maxim universally agreed upon in agriculture, that nothing must be done too late; and again, that everything must be done at its proper season; while there is a third precept which reminds us that opportunities lost can never be regained. ~ Pliny the Elder, #NFDB
229:In other words, theorists like van der Leeuw envision that a switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture creates a virtuous circle between problem-solving capacity and societal size, gradually leading to an increase of the scale of cooperation. I ~ Peter Turchin, #NFDB
230:On this National Agriculture Day, when we all should be taking time to thank and pay tribute to America's farmers, ranchers and their families who produce the food for our tables, we are finding those same people in dire need of our help and support. ~ Michael McCaul, #NFDB
231:Politics was good a hundred years ago. Today, politicians have no ability to solve any problems because they are not students of behavior. They are not students of agriculture, oceanography - they know nothing about the factors that operate the world. ~ Jacque Fresco, #NFDB
232:There can be little doubt that the equalization of property which we have supposed, added to the circumstance of the labour of the whole community being directed chiefly to agriculture, would tend greatly to augment the produce of the country. ~ Thomas Robert Malthus, #NFDB
233:Don’t tell me you’ve offended that one too.” Daeng shook her head. “Have we offended that one?” Siri asked. “Don’t recall,” said Civilai. “Wait. Isn’t he the one whose limousine we filled up with ducks?” “No. That was the Vice-Minister of Agriculture. ~ Colin Cotterill, #NFDB
234:The moment when H. sapiens, having achieved (principally by way of agriculture) stable groupings in considerable clusters, really began to establish a permanent network of thinking centres on earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group, #NFDB
235:Take agriculture, where we haven't done much, or sanitation; saying, "okay, we will be able to make a really huge effort there." It really energized the foundation and half of what we've gotten done in this last decade is because Warren [Buffett] trusted us. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
236:The planting of [orchards] represents a reduction of a complex ecology into the monocultural grid of modern agriculture, and the transformation of a complex symbiosis with the land into the simpler piecework or agricultural labour for surplus and export. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
237:10,000 years of fitful advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills and 16th-century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced relentless technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
238:I had a good mind to discontinue permanently the supply of grain to the city, reliance on which had discouraged Italian agriculture, but refrained because some politician would be bound one day to revive the dole as a means of ingratiating himself with the people. ~ Augustus, #NFDB
239:The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions. ~ Philip Johnson, #NFDB
240:We got a malaria initiative, really a phenomenal time, even though in the early stages there was some uncertainty. Then of course [Barack] Obama, although he had budget constraints, he believed in these things; a lot of new initiatives, including in agriculture. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
241:GMO agriculture will probably save the world in this century. But in the developed world, where few people are haunted by the specter of famine, people are free to fetishize heirloom tomatoes and worry about the provenance of what sits on their dinner tables. ~ Annalee Newitz, #NFDB
242:It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands...but empty cages; not traditional animal agriculture but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of dead animals; not more humane hunting and trapping, but the total eradication of these barbarous practices. ~ Tom Regan, #NFDB
243:I want to be Miss USA or Miss America. I would bring the trophy back to Nebraska. My interests are agriculture and corn. Hey, I'm just riding this train as long as I can. As long as I'm having fun, I'll do it. When it stops being fun, I'll try something else. ~ Gabrielle Union, #NFDB
244:You need governance, but you also need a middle class, you need agriculture, they need to be able to export. I think that's probably the biggest issue, the job creation that could come with the kinds of things that Haiti has all the potential in the world to export. ~ Sean Penn, #NFDB
245:In the more remote ages of antiquity, the world was unequally divided. The east was in the immemorial possession of arts and luxury; whilst the west was inhabited by rude and warlike barbarians, who either disdained agriculture, or to whom it was totally unknown. ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
246:In agriculture, people have taken wild plants that can't be eaten by people - and turned them into wonderful food sources. And that's because genomes can change, and people working with plants have picked mutations. Mutations are nothing more than genetic changes. ~ Nina Fedoroff, #NFDB
247:The construction industry is the world’s second largest (after agriculture), worth $8 trillion a year. But it’s remarkably inefficient. The typical commercial construction project runs 80% over budget and 20 months behind schedule, according to McKinsey. ~ Harvard Business Review, #NFDB
248:There are hundreds, even thousands of remarkable pilot or experimental projects in all fields - in agriculture, health, education. But where do these pilots take us? Do they lead to change on a broader scale? If not, how can we ensure that they have broader impact? ~ Ruth Simmons, #NFDB
249:We have a series of regular meetings with South African business. Big business. Black business. Agriculture. As well, of course, with the trade unions. A whole series of meetings like that which engage issues that these South African social partners need to address. ~ Thabo Mbeki, #NFDB
250:When the nations of the world look upon the United States, they see a country which has achieved what they would all like to become one day. Whether it is in the field of science, art, music, agriculture, politics, economics or war, the United States is the leader. ~ John F Kerry, #NFDB
251:Between 6 and 8 percent of pigs die before they are trucked from the factory farm to slaughter. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about 123 million pigs were slaughtered in 2006. That means 7 to 10 million died on their own before we could kill them. ~ Steven M Wise, #NFDB
252:Very few people can communicate with one another. The only language that's not subject to interpretation is mathematics, chemistry, basic science, engineering principles, and applied agriculture. But other than that, many systems today are subject to interpretation. ~ Jacque Fresco, #NFDB
253:III. THE PLANTER
How seven per cent of a section within a nation ruled five million white people and four million black people and sought to make agriculture equal to industry through the rule of property without yielding political power or education to labor. ~ W E B Du Bois,#NFDB
254:The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it's something that made everything possible (...) The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
255:The seven things that make up the rainbow of India's development are India's strong and deep rooted family system, Agriculture-Animal development, India's Matru Shakti (women power), Natural Resources (Jal, Jameen, Jungle), Youth power, Vibrant Democracy and Knowledge. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
256:I’ve been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
257:In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree. (pg. 123, The Body and the Earth) ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
258:Right,” Hamza said, flipping his laptop open. “It’s a hedge fund. Starrer, Wern, Bigby and Greenborough. They manage assets valued in the neighborhood of thirty-five billion dollars, investing in a wide variety of concerns, from pharmaceuticals to agriculture to nanotech ~ Charles Soule, #NFDB
259:For tens if not hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture, human societies had very effective social norms and institutions for controlling bullies. Why would they suddenly (in a few thousand years) replace them with institutions that gave the upstarts legitimacy? ~ Peter Turchin, #NFDB
260:The authority of the prince," said Artaxerxes, "must be defended by a military force; that force can only be maintained by taxes; all taxes must, at last, fall upon agriculture; and agriculture can never flourish except under the protection of justice and moderation." ^55 ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
261:Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state. ~ Gore Vidal, #NFDB
262:Essentially all civilizations that rose to the level of possessing an urban culture had need for two forms of science-related technology, namely, mathematics for land measurements and commerce and astronomy for time-keeping in agriculture and aspects of religious rituals. ~ Frederick Seitz, #NFDB
263:Eventually, humans invented agriculture, which could be understood as a way of turning the natural world into a tool for our use. There's evidence that we have been domesticating crops and animals for at least 15,000 years, adapting ecosystems to our preferred way of life. ~ Annalee Newitz, #NFDB
264:I can't remember one [example of regulation] that's good. Regulation of transport, regulation of agriculture - agriculture is a, zoning is z. You know, you go from a to z, they are all bad. There were so many studies, and the result was quite universal: The effects were bad. ~ Ronald Coase, #NFDB
265:It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
266:It is often said,” Vandana Shiva has written, “that the so-called miracle varieties of the Green Revolution in modern industrial agriculture prevented famine because they had higher yields. However, these higher yields disappear in the context of total yields of crops on farms. ~ Dan Barber, #NFDB
267:Nature is one body. We can say that while human beings and insects are part of nature, they also represent nature as a whole. And if that is so, when we harm plants, microorganisms, and insects through large-scale conventional agriculture, we are harming humanity as well. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka, #NFDB
268:I believe we can create a truly humane, sustainable, and health food production system without killing any animals. I imagine a revolution in veganic agriculture in which small farmers grow a variety of vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes, all fertilized with vegetable sources. ~ Gene Baur, #NFDB
269:We must then build a proper relationship between the richest and the poorest countries based on our desire that they are able to fend for themselves with the investment that is necessary in their agriculture, so that Africa is not a net importer of food, but an exporter of food. ~ Gordon Brown, #NFDB
270:Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs. ~ Martin Heidegger, #NFDB
271:I would say my fraternity was nothing but a bunch of farm boys; we weren't really in the whole fraternity scene, but yeah, that's a safe assessment of who I am. I've lived that life, growing up in agriculture and then going off to college and joining a fraternity, livin' that life. ~ Luke Bryan, #NFDB
272:Real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users. ~ Naomi Klein, #NFDB
273:The interaction, the interdependence, of life and death, which in nature is the source of an inexhaustible fecundity, is the basis of a set of analogies, to which agriculture and the rest of the human economy must conform in order to endure, and which is ultimately religious.... ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
274:re: the US agriculture industry: " This puts us in the odd position of consuming fossil fuels --geologically one of the rarest and most useful resources ever discovered-- to provide a substitute for dirt --the cheapest and most widely available agricultural input imaginable. ~ David R Montgomery, #NFDB
275:The greatest danger invariably arises from the ruthless application, on a vast scale, of partial knowledge such as we are currently witnessing in the application of nuclear energy, of the new chemistry in agriculture, of transportation technology, and countless other things. ~ Ernst F Schumacher, #NFDB
276:The receding waves of foreign peon labor are leaving California agriculture to the mercies of our own people. The old methods of intimidation and starvation perfected against the foreign peons are being used against the new white migrant workers. But they will not be successful. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
277:Humanity has experienced many revolutionary changes over the course of history: revolutions in agriculture, in science, industrial production, as well as numerous political revolutions. But these have all been limited to the external aspects of our individual and collective lives. ~ Daisaku Ikeda, #NFDB
278:If you ask what you are going to do about global warming, the only rational answer is to change the way in which we do transportation, energy production, agriculture and a good deal of manufacturing. The problem originates in human activity in the form of the production of goods. ~ Barry Commoner, #NFDB
279:He just said the base did boring agriculture stuff. Counting cows and crops, that’s how he put it.” “What’s the second thing?” “The closing of the base.” “Right, when was that?” “Fifteen years ago,” Kaufman says. “Three months after your brother and Augie’s daughter were found dead. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
280:Soil erosion is as old as agriculture. It began when the first heavy rain struck the first furrow turned by a crude implement of tillage in the hands or prehistoric man. It has been going on ever since, wherever man's culture of the earth has bared the soil to rain and wind. ~ Hugh Hammond Bennett, #NFDB
281:Paternity certainty, far from being the universal and overriding obsession of all men everywhere and always, as the standard narrative insists, was likely a nonissue to men who lived before agriculture and resulting concerns with passing property through lines of paternal descent. ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
282:The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
283:After a few generations of warfare, though, the fanatics were either killed along with their backups, or were persuaded to modify their positions. Most of the religious pockets had evolved into low-density lands devoted to agriculture, abundance, popular piety, and toleration. ~ Walter Jon Williams, #NFDB
284:In the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln had decided it was time to make U.S. agriculture more efficient: each person not needed on the farm was another person freed up to do something else. That’s why the Department of Agriculture was created in the first place, as a vast science lab. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
285:No, the founders of our culture didn't just fall into a lifestyle of total dependence on agriculture, they had to whip themselves into it, and the whip they used was this meme: Growing all your own food is the best way to live. Nothing less could imaginably have done this amazing trick. ~ Daniel Quinn, #NFDB
286:It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership. ~ William Kittredge, #NFDB
287:We have to walk on two legs. We have to create conditions in which manufacturing and services - the economy outside agriculture - move and move fast enough. And at the same time the working force that is available must have skills which will fit the kind of jobs which will be in demand. ~ Manmohan Singh, #NFDB
288:CO2 had increased due to human activities, CO2 will continue to increase unless changes are made, and these increases will affect weather, agriculture, and ecosystems. None of the physical scientists suggested that accumulating CO2 was not a problem, or that we should simply wait and see. ~ Naomi Oreskes, #NFDB
289:In olden times there were warriors, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. Agriculture was said to be closer to the source of things than trade or manufacturing, and the farmer was said to be "the cupbearer of the gods." He was always able to get by somehow or other and have enough to eat. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka, #NFDB
290:Mecca became a station for these northbound caravans. It was conveniently located in the center of the Hijaz, and even though it was built on solid rock, which made agriculture impossible there, settlement was feasible because of an underground water source that the Arabs called Zamzam. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
291:Gravettian men stood on average six feet tall. When agriculture arrived in Europe some eight thousand years ago, people experienced a tremendous drop in stature. Men lost eight inches of height. The drop was likely the result of Europeans switching to a grain-rich diet much lower in protein. ~ Carl Zimmer, #NFDB
292:The production of natural resources in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, stable natural hydrological cycles, fertile soils, a balanced climate and numerous other vital ecosystem services can only be permanently secured through the protection and sustainable use of biological diversity. ~ Sigmar Gabriel, #NFDB
293:Many organic practices simply make sense, regardless of what overall agricultural system is used. Far from being a quaint throwback to an earlier time, organic agriculture is proving to be a serious contender in modern farming and a more environmentally sustainable system over the long term. ~ David Suzuki, #NFDB
294:The big gorilla of homeowner tax breaks is the deduction for mortgage interest, which reduces income tax revenues by about $100 billion each year. That is, this one tax deduction costs more than the budgets of the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, the Interior, and the Treasury combined. ~ T R Reid, #NFDB
295:The knowledge society has two very important components driven by societal transformation and wealth generation. The societal transformation is with respect to education, healthcare, agriculture and governance. These will lead to employment generation, high productivity and rural prosperity. ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
296:Agriculture is for living; mind culture is for life. Skills are for shaping material things so that they cater more for the comfort of man; studies are for shaping attitudes, feelings, desires, emotions and impulses of man, so that they may confer more peace, more joy and more fortitude on man. ~ Sathya Sai Baba, #NFDB
297:When the Mongols destroyed the caliphate in Baghdad in 1258, the independence of Al Andalus was solidified, and the Spanish Moors began to relate more to Europe than the Middle East. In arts and agriculture, learning and tolerance, Al Andulus was a beacon of enlightenment to the rest of Europe. ~ James Reston Jr, #NFDB
298:We Communists have got to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their agriculture and their technology. But we are going to continue massive military programs. . . (soon) we will be in a position to return to a much more aggressive foreign policy designed to gain the upper-hand. ~ Leonid Brezhnev, #NFDB
299:American slavery the most cruel form of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
300:At the time we were funding our national debt, we heard much about "a public debt being a public blessing"; that the stock representing it was a creation of active capital for the aliment of commerce, manufactures and agriculture. This paradox was well adapted to the minds of believers in dreams. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
301:In a country riven by quarrels, Hamilton produced a vision of harmonious parts. Agriculture and commerce were mutually beneficial. North and south, the western frontier and the eastern seaboard, enjoyed complementary economies. The only thing needed to capitalize on these strengths was national unity. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
302:The person who can most easily take up natural agriculture is the one who doesn't have any of the common adult obstructing blocks of desire, philosophy, or religion . . . the person who has the mind and heart of a child. One must simply know nature . . . real nature, not the one we think we know! ~ Masanobu Fukuoka, #NFDB
303:The serious problem is the education of the peasantry. The peasant economy is scattered, and the socialization of agriculture, judging by the Soviet Union's experience, will require a long time and painstaking work. Without socialization of agriculture, there can be no complete, consolidated socialism. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
304:A few little flowers will spring up briefly in the dry gulley through which torrents of water pass occasionally. But it is steady streams that bring thick and needed crops. In the agriculture of the soul that has to do with nurturing attributes, flash floods are no substitute for regular irrigation. ~ Neal A Maxwell, #NFDB
305:A colleague once asked me about community supported agriculture (CSA). When I explained how it worked—driving to the farm weekly to pick up my produce—she responded, 'Well, that’s fine for you, but what about the rest of us?' It’s funny how perception works, because in my eyes, I am 'the rest of us. ~ J Natalie Winch, #NFDB
306:We believe one magnificent highway of this kind [the Lincoln Highway], in actual existence, will stimulate as nothing else could the building of enduring highways everywhere that will not only be a credit to the American people but that will also mean much to American agriculture and American commerce. ~ Carl G Fisher, #NFDB
307:Agriculture is not crop production as popular belief holds - it's the production of food and fiber from the world's land and waters. Without agriculture it is not possible to have a city, stock market, banks, university, church or army. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization and any stable economy. ~ Allan Savory, #NFDB
308:What is different and exciting is how much we have learned. We learned we were right that we don't need the chemical model of agriculture. We know so much more about the life of soil now and we understand how plants synergistically work together with microbes and animals to create healthy conditions. ~ Frances Moore Lappe, #NFDB
309:So outside agriculture, in manufacturing and services, we must create a lot more jobs. But that also means that we must ensure that our systems of general education and technical education are in line with the job requirements that a more modern manufacturing and a more modern services sector would require. ~ Manmohan Singh, #NFDB
310:contradict unquestioned beliefs of our culture: that the knowledge of good and evil, far from being harmful, is wholesome and beneficial; that agriculture is a blessing, not a curse; that no enmity exists between herders and tillers of the soil, and the foods they produce are equally worthy of divine blessing. ~ Daniel Quinn, #NFDB
311:No, the problem at Göbekli Tepe is the pristine, sudden appearance, like Athena springing full-grown and fully armed from the brow of Zeus, of what appears to be an already seasoned civilization so accomplished that it “invents” both agriculture and monumental architecture at the apparent moment of its birth. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
312:That the discipline of agriculture should have been so divorced from other disciplines has its immediate cause in the compartmental structure of the universities, in which complementary, mutually sustaining and enriching disciplines are divided, according to “professions,” into fragmented, one-eyed specialties. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
313:It is now 14 years since I first suggested that organic farming might have some benefits and ought to be taken seriously. I shall never forget the vehemence of the reaction.. much of it coming from the sort of people who regard agriculture as an industrial process, with production as the sole yardstick of success. ~ Prince Charles, #NFDB
314:It is about moving from ideas about merely being sustainable to ones that include regenerating areas devastated by agriculture, mining, and other destructive activities. It is about revolution. The transition from a death economy to a life economy is truly about a change in consciousness — a consciousness revolution. ~ John Perkins, #NFDB
315:There are five areas where India has core competencies for integrated action: (1) Agriculture and food processing (2) Reliable and quality electric power, surface transport and infrastructure for all parts of the country (3) Education and healthcare (4) Information and communication technology (5) Strategic sectors ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
316:The thing is, it looks exactly like him; tall with tan skin and broad shoulders, a little crooked to the right and a vast empire of agriculture throughout the middle. But if this is the case, and we actually are staring at the shirtless form of the hot and sexy state of California, then why is he here on the East Coast? ~ Chuck Tingle, #NFDB
317:The government is now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s - use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations. To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
318:Those who proposed the Constitution knew, and those who ratified the Constitution also knew that this is...a limited government tied down to specified powers....It was never supposed or suspected that the old Congress could give away the money of the states to encourage agriculture or for any other purpose they pleased. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
319:I was told by journalists who can't publish it that there are in Mexico, close to the U.S. border, big areas that used to be devoted to agriculture that are now devoted to poppies. They say you can't get in there because they're guarded, first by the cartels, but also by the army, which goes hand in hand with the cartels. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
320:Many families participate in the Community Supported Agriculture movement, which allows a family to buy shares in a farmer's produce so that they know where their food is coming from, and they can take their families out and see the farm and meet the farmer. That movement has helped create a new culture around food. ~ Frances Moore Lappe, #NFDB
321:The locust plague constituted the worst and most widespread natural disaster the country had ever seen, causing an estimated $200 million in damage to western agriculture (the equivalent of $116 billion today) and threatening millions of farmers in remote locations—far from social services in the cities—with starvation. ~ Caroline Fraser, #NFDB
322:All my plans in private life; all my pursuits; all my designs, wishes, and thoughts, have this one great object in view: the overthrow of the ruffian Boroughmongers. If I write grammars; if I write on agriculture; if I sow, plant, or deal in seeds; whatever I do has first in view the destruction of those infamous tyrants. ~ William Cobbett, #NFDB
323:If you understand it from an ecological or sustainability perspective, agriculture is the primary way we meet most of our needs, and it's the greatest form of human intervention on our environment. It has intimately shaped our culture as powerfully as industrial modernity, but for ten thousand years rather than two hundred. ~ David Holmgren, #NFDB
324:Imagine making a nearly life-size sculpture of yourself out of sugar cubes and consuming it over the next 365 days. That’s essentially what many of us are doing. The typical American eats an average of 128 pounds of added sugars each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And it affects our bodies on every level. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
325:. . . one important difference between the religion of Orpheus and the religion of Christ. Though sublimated into a mystical form . . the spiritual impetus preserved the most significant quality of a religion rooted in the art of agriculture . . . the eternally recurrent cycle of birth, growth, fullness, and decay. P. 135 ~ Carl Gustav Jung, #NFDB
326:My concern is the holistic development of society. No one should go back, everyone must move forward. Enough time has been spent going backwards; now let us pledge to stride ahead, whether it's in education, health, agriculture or education of our daughters. This Government belongs to the poor. It is to support the destitute. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
327:Fresh drinking water is an issue of primary importance, since it is indispensable for human life and for supporting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Sources of fresh water are necessary for health care, agriculture and industry. Water supplies used to be relatively constant, but now in many places demand exceeds the sustainable ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
328:(Sheep are some of the nastiest creatures in the world. They’re smelly, stupid things that have been bred to have way too much hair, meaning that all their bodily fluids and drippings get felted right into the wool. If not for bleach, we’d all walk around covered in sheep shit all the time. Agriculture is not a pretty thing.) ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
329:The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers, processors of information. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
330:Everything we think about regarding sustainability - from energy to agriculture to manufacturing to population - has a water footprint. Almost all of the water on Earth is salt water, and the remaining freshwater supplies are split between agricultural use and human use - as well as maintaining the existing natural environment. ~ Jamais Cascio, #NFDB
331:Kwon Tae-jin, a specialist on North Korean agriculture at the Korea Rural Economic Institute, which is funded by the South Korean government, told me in Seoul. In the far north, where food supplies are historically lean and farmers are regarded as politically hostile, the military takes a quarter of total grain production, Kwon ~ Blaine Harden, #NFDB
332:Traditional agriculture uses 70 percent of the water on the planet. Hydroponics is 70 percent more efficient than traditional agriculture. Aeroponics, meanwhile, is 70 percent more efficient than hydroponics. Thus, if we used aeroponics for agriculture, we could drop water use from 70 percent to 6 percent—quite the savings. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
333:Youngsters inspired by Maoism have taken the gun and are spilling blood on streets, but our land needs the colour of progress not the colour of blood. Maoists must not have the gun in their hands, instead they must have agriculture tools and pens so that they can serve others. Raasta kalam, hal aur pasine ka hai, khoon ka nahi. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
334:The Indian intelligentsia was mesmerized by the apparent success of the USSR. It wanted big steel plants and not small factories which made clothes, shoes, toys, and bicycles—the sort of things that the masses could use. In those days, anyone in India who advocated greater investment in agriculture was branded an American agent. ~ Gurcharan Das, #NFDB
335:Nature without learning is like a blind man; learning without Nature, like a maimed one; practice without both, incomplete. As in agriculture a good soil is first sought for, then a skilful husbandman, and then good seed; in the same way nature corresponds to the soil, the teacher to the husbandman, precepts and instruction to the seed. ~ Plutarch, #NFDB
336:Of course, with agriculture came the first big civilizations, the first cities built of mud and brick, the first empires. And it was the administers of these empires who began hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and wine that was owed and the taxes that was owed on them by making marks; marks on clay in that time. ~ Howard Rheingold, #NFDB
337:The proper role of government, however, is that of partner with the farmer -- never his master. By every possible means we must develop and promote that partnership -- to the end that agriculture may continue to be a sound, enduring foundation for our economy and that farm living may be a profitable and satisfying experience. ~ Dwight D Eisenhower, #NFDB
338:Ati sarvatra varjayet: Excess of anything is bad. Some of us are attracted to Good. But the universe tries to maintain balance. So what is good for some may end up being bad for others... Agriculture is good for us humans as it gives us an assured supply of food, but it is bad for the animals that lose their forest and grazing land. ~ Amish Tripathi, #NFDB
339:I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have the liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecutre, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine. ~ John Ferling, #NFDB
340:A primitive capitalism had developed, which had quite different priorities. The lavish sacrifices had been designed to impress the gods and to enhance the patron’s prestige. By the fifth century, these eastern peoples had realized that their improved trade and agriculture brought them far more wealth and status than the Vedic rites. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
341:What I am saying every day to Malawians is that time has come for us to move from aid to trade. We have picked several sectors that we think we can focus on immediately in order for us to grow our economy. So we have decided to diversify agriculture, we decided to develop our tourism sector, we have decided to develop our mining sector. ~ Joyce Banda, #NFDB
342:Food security is an authentically human requirement. Guaranteeing it for present and future generations also means safeguarding ourselves against the uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources. Indeed, the process of consumption and waste seems to overlook any concern for ... biodiversity, which is so important for agriculture. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
343:Growing up in Georgia, my dad was a farmer and we worked in agriculture, so we were always looking up at the sky, checking if rain was in the forecast. That always set the tone for the mood in my household, whether we had rain coming in or not - we knew the crops would be good and it was going to be a good week around the Bryan household. ~ Luke Bryan, #NFDB
344:The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact...Man, not the earth, makes civilization. ~ Ariel Durant, #NFDB
345:I'm confident because of the - what we [USA government] call the strategic agreement we're now working on with them, we will be deeply involved within every aspect of their government from helping them improve their agriculture, to train air traffic controllers, to train pilots for the F-16s they're buying. So we'll have a deep relationship. ~ Joe Biden, #NFDB
346:There's almost no food that isn't genetically modified. Genetic modification is the basis of all evolution. Things change because our planet is subjected to a lot of radiation, which causes DNA damage, which gets repaired, but results in mutations, which create a ready mixture of plants that people can choose from to improve agriculture. ~ Nina Fedoroff, #NFDB
347:Cities originally surrounded by a wall can produce an urban population cut off from the surrounding fields and from agriculture altogether. At the same time, the greenbelt laws eliminate the possibility of the unchecked expansion of a city into a monstrous megalopolis. If there is a need for additional homes, a new city must be established. ~ Yehuda Levi, #NFDB
348:For example, they have land. The government of Qatar wants to lease the Tana River delta, which is in Kenya, from the Kenyan government, so that they can produce food there. People in Kenya need food. We have people who have studied agriculture. Why is it that if we really need food, we cannot go into the delta and develop our own food? ~ Wangari Maathai, #NFDB
349:I must study politics and war,” wrote John Adams, “that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. ~ Charles Krauthammer, #NFDB
350:The decay of old aristocratic prejudices against greedy speculation, the undermining of orthodox Christian faith (which forbids avarice)... the debauching of agriculture to a gross money-getting concern: these particular aspects of a vast and voracious concentration upon profits are so many illustrations of our sinning confusion of values. ~ Russell Kirk, #NFDB
351:Women have an important role in agriculture. We need to introduce technology, which will help us harness the potential of women in agriculture. We need to divide the agriculture sector into three parts- regular farming, farming of trees and animal husbandry. If we are able to do this, the contribution of our women will increase even more. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
352:Les agrocarburants provoquent des catastrophes sociales et climatiques. Ils réduisent les terres vivrières, détruisent l'agriculture familiale et contribuent à aggraver la faim dans le monde.
Leur production s'accompagne du rejet dans l'atmosphère du dioxyde de carbone en grande quantité et absorbe un volume élevé d'eau potable. (p. 306) ~ Jean Ziegler,#NFDB
353:Much of the criticism of economic globalization has centered on factory labor abuses. But the majority of the world's poor are not employed in factories; they are self-employed - as peasant farmers, rural peddlers, urban hawkers, and small producers, usually involved in agriculture and small trade in the world's vast "informal" economy . ~ David Bornstein, #NFDB
354:Eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as 'consumers.' ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
355:According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame it's counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium. ~ Barry Estabrook, #NFDB
356:For the sake of humanity it is devoutly to be wished that the manly employment of agriculture and the humanizing benefits of commerce would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest; and the swords might be turned into ploughshares, the spears into pruning-hooks, and as the Scripture expresses it, "the nations learn war no more. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
357:onslaught from a big, well-funded household name. The way the industry is set up means that large companies would have big advantages: better able to navigate complex regulations; better placed to exploit the economies of scale inherent in agriculture; and better able to reassure nervous new customers, with a trusted, nationally known brand. ~ Tom Wainwright, #NFDB
358:rule. The first, widely known, was the Great Leap Forward. This was a set of national policies implemented in the 1950s that included collectivization of agriculture, a disaster everywhere it has been tried, but nowhere as much as China. The resulting famine killed between 20 and 40 million people in three years, the deadliest in human history. ~ Clay Shirky, #NFDB
359:African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel form of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
360:The advent of agriculture and civilization caused life expectancy to drop significantly, reaching a low of 18 during the Bronze Age of 3,300 B.C. to 1,200 B.C.. Life expectancy remained low (between 20 and 30) through 1500 A.D. and then climbed only gradually, reaching ~ Mark Sisson30 in 1800 and ~ Mark Sisson40-50 in 1900 in the USA and Europe. ~ Mark Sisson, #NFDB
361:The advancement of agriculture, commerce and manufactures, by all proper means, will not, I trust, need recommendation. But I cannot forbear intimating to you the expediency of giving effectual encouragement as well to the introduction of new and useful inventions from abroad, as to the exertions of skill and genius in producing them at home. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
362:new ruler occupied himself largely with reforming Persia: its administration, its army, its treasury, and its capital. To Khusro, such categories were not discrete. One of the relatively few maxims that can be reliably attributed to him reads, “The throne depends on the army, the army on revenue, revenue on agriculture, and agriculture on justice. ~ William Rosen, #NFDB
363:Every individual, from the common mechanic, that works in wood or clay, to the prime minister that regulates with the dash of his pen the agriculture, the breeding of cattle, the mining, or the commerce of a nation, will perform his business the better, the better he understands the nature of things,and the more his understanding is enlightened. ~ Jean Baptiste Say, #NFDB
364:For me the two biggest issues are climate change and animal welfare/animal agriculture. And oddly enough animal agriculture is such a contributor to climate change. According to the United Nations, 25% of climate change comes from animal agriculture, so every car, bus, boat, truck, airplane combined has less CO2 and methane emissions than animal agriculture. ~ Moby, #NFDB
365:If you think about the last 50 years, Africa's proximity and historical context has absolutely been with Europe and the United States, but their approach in dealing with the economic challenges that Africa faces in particular has been one of handing out aid, not developing economies, not building a long term relationship around agriculture and so on. ~ Dambisa Moyo, #NFDB
366:Our bread is not what it used to be. It is more of a Frankenfood, a by-product of industrial agriculture or “super-starch and super-gluten.” Combine that with the damage our guts have suffered from our diet, environment, lifestyle, and overuse of antibiotics, acid blockers, and anti-inflammatories, and you have the perfect storm for gluten intolerance. ~ Mark Hyman, #NFDB
367:To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals. And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
368:Every organized religion created after the dawn of agriculture placed a premium on human destiny. Thus, every religion in the world today, with the exception of those rare outliers among indigenous peoples, was created to answer a question the very asking of which betrays a bias so vast we can scarcely see around it: What is the meaning of human life? ~ Clark Strand, #NFDB
369:Financialization is the major dynamic polarizing today’s economies. Its aim is to appropriate the means of production and rent-extracting privileges for a creditor class to load labor, industry, agriculture and governments down with debt. Employment, wages and capital investment cannot recover as long as the resulting debt overhead is left in place. ~ Michael Hudson, #NFDB
370:Native American farmers revealed all of these problems. Native Americans showed evidence of suffering diseases of civilization long before Western civilization arrived, which is why we need to define civilization as the arrival of domestication, of agriculture. We are really talking about diseases of agriculture and adoption of the sedentary way of life. ~ John J Ratey, #NFDB
371:The vision for India’s Green Revolution was formed in the 1970s under the leadership of C. Subramaniam. With his visionary leadership, and with the scientific leadership of Nobel Laureate Dr Norman Borlaugh and Dr M.S. Swaminathan, and the active support of B. Sivaraman, Secretary Agriculture, in partnership with agricultural scientists and farmers, ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
372:That one American farmer can now feed himself and fifty-six other people may be, within the narrow view of the specialist, a triumph of technology; by no stretch of reason can it be considered a triumph of agriculture or of culture. It has been made possible by the substitution of energy for knowledge, of methodology for care, of technology for morality. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
373:As societies switched from foraging to agriculture ten thousand years ago, the average height for both men and women shrank by about six inches, and there’s ample evidence of parasites, disease, and childhood malnutrition. Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, called the adoption of agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race. ~ Tim Harford, #NFDB
374:Nothing could grow under such conditions, and without corn, wheat, and hay livestock could not survive. Alarmed, the secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace, dispatched an expedition to the Gobi Desert to see if there were any species of grass there that might be able to survive in the deserts that the American West and Midwest were quickly becoming. ~ Daniel James Brown, #NFDB
375:I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. ~ David McCullough, #NFDB
376:This resiliency of hunting and gathering is now thought to explain why it survived for two million years before giving way to agriculture. In those areas where human remains span the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to farmers, anthropologists have reported that both nutrition and health declined, rather than improved, with the adoption of agriculture. ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
377:Because of the industrialization of agriculture -- using massive amounts of fossil fuel -- only 2 percent of Americans work in farming. And yet they produce enough food to feed all 300 million Americans, with plenty left over for export. When are liberals going to break the news to their friends in Darfur that they all have to starve to death to save the planet? ~ Ann Coulter, #NFDB
378:Within 10,000 years—an evolutionary eyeblink—humans have made of wild aurochs more than 700 distinct cattle breeds.71 The wild aurochs themselves were a casualty of this process. Now, many of these breeds are about to become casualties of further developments in the domestication process—primarily the ever-increasing mechanization and globalization of agriculture, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
379:The earliest evidence of recognizable human art is forty thousand years old. The earliest evidence of human agriculture, by contrast, is only ten thousand years old. Which means that somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was way more important to make attractive, superfluous items than it was to learn how to regularly feed ourselves. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
380:Embedded in every conversation about feeding people, conserving natural resources and ensuring a a healthy diet, both now and in the future, is the threat of the loss of agricultural biodiversity—the reduction of diversity in everything that makes food and agriculture possible, a shift that is the direct result of our relationship with the world around us. ~ Preeti Simran Sethi, #NFDB
381:The corporate approach to agriculture or manufacturing or medicine or war increasingly undertakes to help at the risk of harm, sometimes of great harm. And once the risk of harm is appraised as “acceptable,” the result often is absurdity: We destroy a village in order to save it; we destroy freedom in order to save it; we destroy the world in order to live in it. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
382:This fortunate state of things has done much to diffuse knowledge, promote commerce, agriculture, and manufactures; in fine, to increase the greatness of the nation and the happiness of the individual. Under these circumstances our people have grown up with habits and dispositions essentially pacific, and it is to be hoped that these feelings may not soon be changed. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
383:I have a conflicted view on beer styles. As historical artifacts, they're endlessly fascinating to study. And I think that they generally represent confluences -- and compromises -- of technology, agriculture, cuisine, and geology that make the most of what a region has to offer. That means existing styles are usually quite wonderful to drink, and I'm all for that. ~ Randy Mosher, #NFDB
384:Government, not the oil industry, is the biggest 'profiteer' from oil. And it uses the tax revenue to expand its own authority at the expense of the individual, as it does with an endless number of other industries - including electric power, coal, lumber, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, aircraft, and agriculture. The Statist's intrusion to the free market is boundless. ~ Mark Levin, #NFDB
385:The earliest evidence of recognizable human art is forty thousand years old. The earliest evidence of human agriculture, by contrast, is only ten thousand years old. Which means that somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was way more important to make attractive, superfluous items than it was to learn how to regularly feed ourselves. The ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
386:The UN special envoy on food called it a 'crime against humanity' to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol when almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion human who are living in dire poverty? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
387:I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. —John Adams ~ Joel Rosenberg, #NFDB
388:I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. (12 May 1780) ~ John Adams, #NFDB
389:When we conduct agriculture, we are, therefore, altering the ecological arrangement that was responsible for our genesis as a species. I think that this is the reason that this alienation has allowed us to see and regard land mostly as a resource. So we have created a problem for ourselves from the word "go," for land is not a resource any more than humans are resources. ~ Wes Jackson, #NFDB
390:In the same way, current Chinese growth has nothing to do with Chinese values or changes in Chinese culture; it results from a process of economic transformation unleashed by the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who, after Mao Zedong’s death, gradually abandoned socialist economic policies and institutions, first in agriculture and then in industry. ~ Daron Acemo lu, #NFDB
391:Globalization, which attempts to amalgamate every local, regional, and national economy into a single world system, requires homogenizing locally adapted forms of agriculture, replacing them with an industrial system-centrally managed, pesticide-intensive, one-crop production for export-designed to deliver a narrow range of transportable foods to the world market. ~ Helena Norberg Hodge, #NFDB
392:The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible. ~ Colin Woodard, #NFDB
393:If farmers become weak the country loses self-reliance but if they are strong, freedom also becomes strong. If we do not maintain our progress in agriculture, poverty cannot be eliminated from India.But our biggest poverty alleviation programme is to improve the living standard of our farmers. The thrust of our poverty alleviation programmes is on the uplift of the farmers. ~ Rajiv Gandhi, #NFDB
394:Almost always when I told someone I was writing a book about "eating animals", they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It's a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
395:Drinks have had a closer connection to the flow of history than is generally acknowledged, and a greater influence on its course. Understanding the ramifications of who drank what, and why, and where they got it from, requires the traversal of many disparate and otherwise unrelated fields: the histories of agriculture, philosophy, religion, medicine, technology, and commerce. ~ Tom Standage, #NFDB
396:Then, after 10,000 years of fitful advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills and 16th-century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced relentless technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970. As a result, we have inherited a richer society than any previous generation would have been able to imagine. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
397:Even if you could use all the organic material that you have--the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues--and get them back on the soil, you couldn't feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests. ~ Norman Borlaug, #NFDB
398:Thus, the distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” has been obscured. Red grapefruits created by neutron radiation, seedless watermelons produced with the chemical compound colchicine, apple orchards in which every tree is a perfect genetic clone of its neighbors—none of these aspects of modern agriculture is natural. Yet most of us eat these foods without complaint. ~ Jennifer A Doudna, #NFDB
399:Guy struck a jangling chord on the keyboards and then another. 'You know,' he announced, sitting back and crossing his arms. 'We need some new material. We’ve got to write some new songs.'
'Like what?'
He shrugged. 'I don’t know. Throw out some ideas.'
'Love! Death! Existential struggle!' Emily intoned dramatically, rattling out a drumroll. 'Agriculture! ~ Francine Pascal,#NFDB
400:I was struck by the fact that for Joel abjuring agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals is not so much a goal of his farming, as it so often is in organic agriculture, as it is an indication that his farm is functioning well. “In nature health is the default,” he pointed out. “Most of the time pests and disease are just nature’s way of telling the farmer he’s doing something wrong. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
401:Whatever man may stand, whatever he may do, to whatever he may apply his hand - in agriculture, in commerce, and in industry, or his mind, in the world of art, and science - he is, in whatsoever it may be, constantly standing before the face of God. He is employed in the service of his God. He has strictly to obey his God. And above all, he has to aim at the glory of his God. ~ Abraham Kuyper, #NFDB
402:Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of independent India transformed India into a democracy. Dr C. Subramaniam’s Agriculture Vision enabled India to realize the Green Revolution. Dr Varghese Kurien’s Milk Vision led to India’s White Revolution. Prof. Vikram Sarabhai’s Space Vision enabled India to join the space club. Dr Homi Bhabha’s Nuclear Vision led India to become a nuclear power. ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
403:He thus reaps the full fruits which result from his toil and labors with the incentive of free enterprise to maximize his effort to achieve increasing production. Representing over a half of Japan's total population, the agriculture workers have become an invincible barrier against the advance of socialistic ideas which would relegate all to the indignity of state servitude. ~ Douglas MacArthur, #NFDB
404:In China the struggle to consolidate the socialist system, the struggle to decide whether socialism or capitalism will prevail, will still take a long historical period. However, we should all realize that the new system of socialism will unquestionably be consolidated. We can assuredly build a socialist state with modern industry, modern agriculture, and modern science and culture. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
405:A man who took great pride in his lawn found himself with a large crop of dandelions. He tried every method he knew to get rid of them. Still they plagued him. Finally he wrote the department of agriculture. He enumerated all the things he had tried and closed his letter with the question: "What shall I do now?" In due course the reply came: "We suggest you learn to love them." ~ Anthony de Mello, #NFDB
406:In our society, we move people out of government. It's all operated by machines, meaning – not the people, just the products: the farming, the agriculture, the production – it's all machine-designed and programming. But it does not program or design people. People are free to live whatever lifestyle they want to. If they hurt other people, they're helped – they’re not put in prisons ~ Jacque Fresco, #NFDB
407:It has happened that a species has tried to live in violation of the Law of Limited Competition. Or rather it has happened one time, in one human culture—ours. That’s what our agricultural revolution is all about. That’s the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That’s what makes it totalitarian. ~ Daniel Quinn, #NFDB
408:When people, land, and community are as one, all three members prosper; when they relate not as members but as competing interests, all three are exploited. By consulting Nature as the source and measure of that membership, The Land Institute seeks to develop an agriculture that will save soil from being lost or poisoned while promoting a community life at once prosperous and enduring. ~ Wes Jackson, #NFDB
409:I carry in my datebook a piece of paper that my mother copied out for me, from the 1840 Census. Hardy Callaway Culver of Hancock County, Georgia, had 42 slaves, 31 "employed in agriculture." Culver was my great-great-great grandfather. I carry this piece of paper with me every day because I don't want to forget. I don't know what to do with the information, but I don't want to forget it. ~ Laura Lippman, #NFDB
410:For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt, #NFDB
411:This is not good news for our modern industrial civilization because its capital stocks are supported by winnings from the geological lottery that laid down fantastic amounts of fossilized solar energy in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas. Even the very small fraction of our resource base that comes from the "paycheck" of agriculture, forestry, and fishing depends on fossil fuels. ~ John Michael Greer, #NFDB
412:Human beings have been under cultivation longer than we’ve been cultivating anything else. Our cultures domesticate us for obscure purposes, nurturing and encouraging certain aspects of our behavior and tendencies while seeking to eliminate those that might be disruptive. Agriculture, one might say, has involved the domestication of the human being as much as of any plant or other animal. 2 ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
413:It wasn’t about me anymore. I had a child. A husband who needed me to be there for him in the midst of what was turning out to be a terrible time to be making a living in agriculture. I didn’t have time to get mired in the angst of my own circumstances anymore. I didn’t have time for the past. My family--my new family--was all that mattered to me. My child. And always and forever, Marlboro Man. ~ Ree Drummond, #NFDB
414:Since many donor countries required development projects—from agriculture to politics—to consider specifically how the lives of Afghan women were to be improved, Kabul had turned into a place brimming with “gender experts”—a term encompassing many of the foreign-born aid workers, sociologists, consultants, and researchers with degrees in everything from conflict resolution to feminist theory. ~ Jenny Nordberg, #NFDB
415:The most important characteristic of an organism is that capacity for internal self-renewal known as health. There are two organisms whose processes of self-renewal have been subjected to human interference and control. One of these is man himself (medicine and public health). The other is land (agriculture and coservation). The effort to control the health of land has not been very successful. ~ Aldo Leopold, #NFDB
416:Our present agriculture, in general, is not ecologically sustainable now, and it is a long way from becoming so. It is too toxic. It is too dependent on fossil fuels. It is too wasteful of soil, of soil fertility, and of water. It is destructive of the health of the natural systems that surround and support our economic life. And it is destructive of genetic diversity, both domestic and wild. So ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
417:There may be a logical or historical reason why mid-Victorian English butchers should have been predominantly Conservative (a link with agriculture?) and grocers overwhelmingly Liberal (a link with overseas trade?), but none has been established, and perhaps what needs explaining is not this, but why these two omnipresent types of shopkeeper refused to share the same opinions, whatever they were. ~ Eric Hobsbawm, #NFDB
418:When it comes to animal agriculture, there is conventional, which is really hideous, and "compassionate" or "certified humane" or whatever, which *may* be *slightly* less hideous. But it's all torture. It's all wrong. These "happy" gimmicks are just designed to make the public feel better about exploiting animals. Don't buy the propaganda of "happy" exploitation. Go vegan and promote veganism. ~ Gary L Francione, #NFDB
419:During the Qin Dynasty, all books not relating to practical concerns
such as agriculture or construction were ordered burned by the
emperor to guard against "dangerous thought." Whether accounts of
zombie attacks perished in the flames will never be known. This
obscure section of a medical manuscript, preserved in the wall of an
executed Chinese scholar, might be proof of such attacks. ~ Max Brooks,#NFDB
420:Very few people know that my department is responsible for 1.2 million home loans since I have been secretary. That's 1.2 million families that are living in homes in rural America that would never have homeownership, but for the United States Department of Agriculture's programs. We have to do more of educating people about the partnership that does exist between rural America and their government. ~ Tom Vilsack, #NFDB
421:Loss of genetic diversity in agriculture is leading us to a rendezvous with extinction--to the doorstep of hunger on a scale we refuse to imagine. To simplify the environment as we have done with agriculture is to destroy the complex interrelationships that hold the natural world together. Reducing the diversity of life, we narrow our options for the future and render our own survival more precarious. ~ Cary Fowler, #NFDB
422:The tendency of a national bank is to increase public and private credit. The former gives power to the state, for the protection of its rights and interests: and the latter facilitates and extends the operations of commerce among individuals. Industry is increased, commodities are multiplied, agriculture and manufacturers flourish: and herein consists the true wealth and prosperity of a state. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
423:On the most basic level, agriculture leads to more food; more food leads to more people; more people leads to professional specialization; professional specialization leads to invention; invention leads to the development of greater weapons; the development of greater weapons leads to conquest. What this meant, over the centuries, is that agricultural people basically kicked the shit out of hunters. ~ Steven Rinella, #NFDB
424:First came Sumer with its amazing ziggurats, agriculture (they had four types of beer!), and written language. The Sumerian cuneiform tablets, more than half a million still cached away in museums across the world, state that civilization was brought to them by beings who could fly through the air. These god-like beings were called the Anunnaki, translated as “those who came from the heavens to the Earth. ~ Jim Marrs, #NFDB
425:I am persuaded to think that any climate change is bad because of the investments and adaptations that have been made by human beings and all of the things that support human existence upon this globe. Even minor fluctuations of climate could change the distribution of fish, … upset agriculture,…and inundate costal cities…… Such changes could occur at a faster rate perhaps than human society can evolve. ~ Fred Singer, #NFDB
426:Why the ancient rishis selected the cow for apotheosis is obvious to me. The cow in India was the best comparison; she was the giver of plenty. Not only did she give milk, but she also made agriculture possible. The cow is a poem of pity; one reads pity in the gentle animal. She is the second mother to millions of mankind. Protection of the cow means protection of the whole dumb creation of God. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
427:The sacrifices of our people were very great. Out of a population of one million, 28,000 were killed, 12,600 wounded, 10,000 were made political prisoners in Italy and Germany, and 35,000 made to do forced labour, of ground; all the communications, all the ports, mines and electric power installations were destroyed, our agriculture and livestock were plundered, and our entire national economy was wrecked. ~ Enver Hoxha, #NFDB
428:Usually, the first thing a country does in the course of economic development is to introduce a lot of livestock. Our data are showing that this is not a very smart move and the Chinese are listening. They are realizing that animal-based agriculture is not the way to go.... We are basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant food and minimizing our intake of animal foods. ~ T Colin Campbell, #NFDB
429:In Genesis, the Bible's first book, woman is born from the body of man. The Fall from Eden represents the demise of hunter-gatherer life, the expulsion into agriculture and hard labor. It is blamed on Eve, of course, who bears the stigma of the Fall. 1' Quite an irony, in that domestication is the fear and refusal of nature and woman, while the Garden myth blames the chief victim of its scenario, in reality. ~ John Zerzan, #NFDB
430:The smart people who are straight are involved in simply the media management of what has turned into a slow apocalypse, spreading starvation, exacerbated class differences, toxified agriculture, so forth and so on. I don't believe the Establishment thinks there are solutions. Their policy is basically the management of panic, which is hardly a forward moving approach to the adventure of human civilization. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
431:There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war...This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
432:You can be entrepreneurial even if you don’t want to be in business. You can be a social entrepreneur focused on the not-for-profit sector. You can be an agriculture entrepreneur if you want to change how people think about farming. You can be a policy entrepreneur if you want to go into government. The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges. ~ Steve Case, #NFDB
433:It is only two hundred years ago that we had the invention of industrial agriculture. What did that revolution do to us? It brought us power.” And freedom from a life spent kneeling in sodden rice paddies or struggling fourteen hours a day to collect cotton bolls or snap peas. Freedom, in short, from an existence governed by agony, injury, and pain—one that most farmers, and most humans, have always had to endure. ~ Michael Specter, #NFDB
434:I cite a good example, say, of agriculture, .. In agriculture we need to move with speed to bring to full utilization the land that is now in our possession. We need to curb aspects of corruption that are endemic in the economy. We need to be transparent in everything that we do. We need to be consistent in implementing the policies we would have agreed. And not implement policies one day and reverse them the other day. ~ Gideon Gono, #NFDB
435:Socialist revolution aims at liberating the productive forces. The changeover from individual to socialist, collective ownership in agriculture and handicrafts and from capitalist to socialist ownership in private industry and commerce is bound to bring about a tremendous liberation of the productive forces. Thus, the social conditions are being created for a tremendous expansion of industrial and agricultural production. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
436:This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
437:I still sought a respectful, holistic way of eating and living, my decision to hunt shaped by the same concerns that shaped my veganism. My inner aim had also been the same. Having concluded that I needed some animal protein in my diet and that some harm to animals was inevitable in even the gentlest forms of agriculture, integrity and alignment could only come from taking responsibility for at least a portion of the killing. ~ Tovar Cerulli, #NFDB
438:One is that if agriculture is to remain productive, it must preserve the land, and the fertility and ecological health of the land; the land, that is, must be used well. A further requirement, therefore, is that if the land is to be used well, the people who use it must know it well, must be highly motivated to use it well, must know how to use it well, must have time to use it well, and must be able to afford to use it well. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
439:Proper turkey preparation is critical. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more Americans die every year from eating improperly cooked turkey than were killed in the entire Peloponnesian War. This is because turkey can contain salmonella, which are tiny bacteria that, if they get in your bloodstream, develop into full-grown salmon, which could come leaping out of your mouth during an important business presentation. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
440:The four-month monsoon season ended last week leaving a deficit of 12 per cent. The authorities have called it a below-normal monsoon and the worst in the past five years, but skim the data and the picture seems even more sobering. Nearly one-third of the 36 met divisions in the country have received deficient rainfall, with Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh — which are major agriculture regions — reporting a 50 per cent deficit. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
441:(Wolf) shrugged, without a hint of self-pity. "I don't know what they can or can't grow in the agriculture sectors. Whatever it is, I'm sure it can't compete with Benoit Farms and Gardens." His eyes twinkled, and Scarlet - to her own surprise - started to blush again.
"You two are giving me a stomachache," Thorne griped.
"I'm pretty sure that's the meat," said Cinder, ripping a piece of dried mystery meat with her teeth. ~ Marissa Meyer,#NFDB
442:You can't participate in agriculture or redesign of aircraft for making them safer if you know nothing about it. So, whenever a person says 'will I be participating in the new world?' Only in areas that you can participate it. Areas that you have competence in. I'm not talking about self confidence, I'm talking about the ability to solve problems. Electrical, chemical, technical. I don't know of any other kind of problem. ~ Jacque Fresco, #NFDB
443:studies show that the world's climate has been unusually stable for the past 10,000 years- exactly the lifetime of agriculture and civilization....Steady warming will be bad enough, but the worst outcome would be a sudden overturning of the Earth's climactic balance - back to it's old regime of sweats and chills. If that happens, crops will fail everywhere and the great experiment of civilization will come to a catastrophic end. ~ Ronald Wright, #NFDB
444:If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture - it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we 'grow' our lives - we believe that we 'make' them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love. ~ Parker J Palmer, #NFDB
445:With rare exception, as in the case of a paper by Köpke, 2 reviews in recent years have not been decidedly in favor of organic foods. He asserts that organic agriculture is environmentally sound and more sustainable than mainstream agriculture.However, since Köpke is the head of the Institute of Organic Agriculture, and president of the International Society of Organic Agriculture Research, the potential for pro-organic bias is strong ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
446:The hunter-gatherer lifestyle worked at least tolerably well for the nearly 100,000-year history of behaviorally modern humans. Everybody in the world was a hunter-gatherer until the local origins of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, and nobody in the world lived under a state government until 5,400 years ago. The lessons from all those experiments in child-rearing that lasted for such a long time are worth considering seriously. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
447:Agriculture probably required a far greater discipline than did any form of food collecting. Seeds had to be planted at certain seasons, some protection had to be given to the growing plants and animals, harvests had to be reaped, stored and divided. Thus, we might argue that it was neither leisure time nor a sedentary existence but the more rigorous demands associated with an agricultural way of life that led to great cultural changes. ~ Charles Heiser, #NFDB
448:Even in our own agriculture strategy, if we got a great new drought-resistant seed and we managed to get it distributed in the system, we just assumed that it would reach female farmers. That's a false assumption, because women don't interact with agro-dealers. So if you don't develop specific programming to ensure that seed gets in a woman's hands, then the extra income [generated by higher-yielding crops] goes into her husband's hands. ~ Melinda Gates, #NFDB
449:The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature. EZRA TAFT BENSON, FORMER SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
450:Almost always, when I told someone I was writing a book about “eating animals,” they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It’s a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case. (What assumptions did you make upon seeing the title of this book?) ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
451:Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born. ~ Yanis Varoufakis, #NFDB
452:It's an attitude of superiority. We are superior to the rest of life. The Book of Genesis says: 'Increase and multiply and have dominion over the birds of the air and the animals and so forth.' You run it; it's yours; do what you like with it. I don't know how old that text is, but it represents an attitude that probably really got going with the beginning of agriculture. Before that, the hunter-gatherers were gentler people than the agriculture. ~ W S Merwin, #NFDB
453:Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things. ~ Van Jones, #NFDB
454:area was less busy, swirling like currents in a lazy stream and sparking light greens, clear blue, and lemon yellow, which was a relief after so much horror lining the streets of downtown Lisbon. The area was mostly ghostless, but I supposed that a place that had been used only for agriculture for a few hundred years hadn’t acquired the depth of life and death that towns and cities do. After a very long block, we turned and crossed the street to ~ Kat Richardson, #NFDB
455:My old friend, Gene Logsdon, who’s a fine writer on agriculture, and lately a novelist, once asked an Amish factory owner, “Do you have a toxic effluent from your factory?” And the owner looked at him in horror. He said, “Our children play around this factory.” If you had a local slaughterhouse patronized by local people, who could watch the slaughtering and butchering of their own animals, you wouldn’t need the government to inspect for sanitation. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
456:human history was dominated by what Jared Diamond had called the “conditions of unpredictably alternating feast and famine that characterized the traditional human lifestyle.” Reasonable as this may seem, we have no evidence that food was ever any harder to come by for humans than for any other organisms on the planet, at least not until our ancestors began radically reshaping their environment ten thousand years ago, with the invention of agriculture. ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
457:Agriculture seems to be the first pursuit of civilized man. It enables him to escape from the life of the savage, and wandering shepherd, into that of social man, gathered into fixed communities and surrounding himself with the comforts and blessings of neighborhood, country, and home. It is agriculture alone, that fixes men in stationary dwellings, in villages, in towns, and cities, and enables the work of civilizations, in all its branches, to go on. ~ Edward Everett, #NFDB
458:The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
459:Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is sympathy that most appropriately enlarges the context of human work. Contexts become wrong by being too small - too small, that is, to contain the scientist or the farmer or the farm family or the local ecosystem or the local community - and this is crucial. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
460:More and more major industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not. ~ Marc Andreessen, #NFDB
461:Though the moral onus for promoting war has made the munitions manufacturers the scapegoats, the fact is that the paper-profits of war equally enrich every other part of the national economy, even agriculture; for war, with its unparalleled consumption of goods, and its unparalleled wastes, temporarily overcomes the chronic defect of an expanding technology-'over-production.' War, by restoring scarcity, is necessary on classic capitalist terms to ensure profit. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
462:The lineage of agriculture is a lineage of humans rearranging plant DNA. For a very long time, crossbreeding was the preferred method, but then came Mendel and his peas. As we began to understand how genetics worked, scientists tried all kinds of wild techniques to induce mutations. We dipped seeds in carcinogens and bombarded them with radiation, occasionally inside of nuclear reactors. There are over 2,250 of these mutants around; most of them are certified ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
463:Illegal immigration is praised only by those who benefit directly from it, whether in the familial sense of inexpensive nannies, cooks, or gardeners; or in the corporate interest of cheap labor in the hospitality industries, agriculture, and construction; or in the political sense of new liberal constituents; or in the tribal sense of expanding the so-called La Raza base. But the vast majority of Americans accept that when federal law is ignored, chaos ensues. ~ Victor Davis Hanson, #NFDB
464:The dialectical or ecological approach asserts that creating the world is involved in our every act. It is impossible for us to operate in our daily lives and not create the world that everyone must live in. What we desire arranges the genetic code in all of our major crops and livestock. We cannot avoid participating in the creation, and it is in agriculture, far and away our largest and most basic artifact, that human culture and the creation totally interpenetrate. ~ Wes Jackson, #NFDB
465:Agriculture is the foundation of manufactures; since the productions of nature are the materials of art. Under the Roman empire, the labour of an industrious and ingenious people was variously, but incessantly employed, in the service of the rich. In their dress, their table, their houses, and their furniture, the favourites of fortune united every refinement of conveniency, of elegance, and of splendour, whatever could soothe their pride or gratify their sensuality. ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
466:There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
467:The biggest threat to the American people today lies with the United States government. ... [T]he long-term solution is to dismantle, not reform, the iron fist of the welfare state and the controlled economy. This includes the end (not the reform) of the IRS, the DEA, the BATF, the SEC, the FDA, HUD, the departments of HHS, Labor, Agriculture, and energy, and every other agency that takes money from some and gives it to others or interferes with peaceful behavior. ~ Jacob G Hornberger, #NFDB
468:I am being bombed by questions of all kinds. I will try to be very concise and try to explain to the American people. We had a great number of mistakes in the economic fleld, naturally. I am not the critic. It is Fidel Castro, the one who has criticized repeatedly the mistakes we have made, and he explained why we have made them. We did not have a previous preparation. We made mistakes in agriculture. We made mistakes in industry. All these mistakes are being settled now. ~ Che Guevara, #NFDB
469:How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
470:Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not woodspeople; indeed, they were so incurious about their environment that Bradford felt obliged to comment in his journal when Francis Billington . . . climbed to the top of a tall tree to look around. As Thoreau noted with disgust, the colonists landed at Plymouth on December 16, but it was not until January 8 that one of them went as far away as two miles--and even then the traveler was, again, Francis Billington. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
471:Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture—but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level…. Then—just a couple of hundred years ago—people started getting richer. And richer and richer still.2 ~ Robert J Gordon, #NFDB
472:A few years ago, at a conference on organic agriculture in California, a corporate organic grower suggested to a small farmer struggling to survive in the competitive world of industrial organic that "you should really try to develop a niche to distinguish yourself in the market." Holding his fury in check, the small farmer replied as levelly as he could manage: "I believe I developed that niche twenty years ago. It's called 'organic.' And now you, sir, are sitting on it. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
473:sees the revolutionary dimension of the war not simply as a triumph of freedom over slavery, or industrialism over agriculture, or the bourgeoisie over the plantation gentry—but as a combination of all these things. Plantation agriculture in the South was not a form of feudalism, Moore insists; rather, it was a special form of capitalism that spawned a value system and an ideology that glorified hereditary privilege, racial caste, and slavery while it rejected bourgeois ~ James M McPherson, #NFDB
474:Metal tools largely created slash-and-burn agriculture, William M. Denevan, the Wisconsin geographer, told me. “This picture of swidden as this ancient practice by which Indians kept themselves in a timeless balance with Nature—that is mostly or entirely a myth, I think. At least there’s no evidence for it, and a fair amount of evidence against it, including the evidence of simple logic.” Slash-and-burn, supposedly a quintessentially Amazonian trait, “is a modern intrusion. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
475:Divine worship means the same thing where time is concerned, as the temple where space is concerned. "Temple" means... that a particular piece of ground is specially reserved, and marked off from the remainder of the land which is used either for agriculture or habitation... Similarly in divine worship a certain definite space of time is set aside from working hours and days... and like the space allotted to the temple, is not used, is withdrawn from all merely utilitarian ends. ~ Josef Pieper, #NFDB
476:The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human
history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator. ~ David Wallace Wells,#NFDB
477:We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish. ~ Ken Robinson, #NFDB
478:All the capital employed in paper speculation is barren and useless, producing, like that on a gaming table, no accession to itself, and is withdrawn from commerce and agriculture where it would have produced addition to the common mass It nourishes in our citizens habits of vice and idleness instead of industry and morality It has furnished effectual means of corrupting such a portion of the legislature as turns the balance between the honest voters whichever way it is directed. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
479:No matter what our job is, we view it not as our purpose in life but rather as where God has sovereignly placed us for the purpose of making Christ known and his name great. If you are a teacher, if you are a politician, if you are a businessman, if you are in agriculture, if you are in construction, if you are in technology, if you are in the arts, then you should not be saying, ‘I need to find my life’s purpose in this work,’ but rather, ‘I need to bring God’s purpose to this work.’ ~ Matt Chandler, #NFDB
480:If we took 75% of the world’s trashed rangeland, we could restore it from agriculture back to functioning prairies — with their animal cohorts — in under fifteen years. We could further sequester all of the carbon that has been released since the beginning of the industrial age. So I find that a hopeful thing because, frankly, we just have to get out of the way. Nature will do the work for us. This planet wants to be grassland and forest. It does not want to be an agricultural mono-crop. ~ Lierre Keith, #NFDB
481:Consider, for example, and you will find that almost all the transactions in the time of Vespasian differed little from those of the present day. You there find marrying and giving in marriage, educating children, sickness, death, war, joyous holidays, traffic, agriculture, flatterers, insolent pride, suspicions, laying of plots, longing for the death of others, newsmongers, lovers, misers, men canvassing far the consulship and for the kingdom; yet all these passed away, and are nowhere. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
482:We can change our thinking. Rather than viewing the chemical adulteration of our environment and our bodies as the inevitable practice of convenience and progress, we can decide that cancer is inconvenient and toxic pollution archaic and primitive. We can start seeing the creation of carcinogens as the result of outmoded technologies. We can demand green engineering and green chemistry. We can let our systems of industry and agriculture know that they are suffering from a design flaw. ~ Sandra Steingraber, #NFDB
483:The current economic crisis...has numerous causes and sends a powerful message about the need for a profound revision of the model of global economic development. It's an acute symptom that is added to other more grave and already well-known ones, such as the continued imbalance between wealth and poverty, the scandal of hunger, the ecological emergency and the problem of unemployment, which has now become general. In this context a strategic re-launching of agriculture appears decisive. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
484:They’ve destroyed small farms and local economies across the globe. And now, they own patents on the seeds themselves. Those seeds represent the knowledge, labor, and heritage of all of humanity, and their DNA is now owned by Monsanto and ConAgra and ADM. They’re the oligarchs of food, the pater familias of life itself. “The ownership, genetic code, practices and profits of agriculture are being collected in fewer and fewer hands—hands that have no dirt under the fingernails,” writes George Pyle. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
485:The response by agribusiness interests has been to back laws that ban animal advocates from taking pictures or videos at these facilities, and ban the media from publishing any that are taken. The laws also make it a crime for animal advocates to seek employment at animal enterprises without disclosing their intentions. Media coverage of the legislative fights is overwhelmingly negative for agriculture interests. The impression left among consumers is that the proponents had something to hide. ~ Wayne Pacelle, #NFDB
486:...no matter how rhapsodic one waxes about the process of wresting edible plants and tamed animals from the sprawling vagaries of nature, there's a timeless, unwavering truth espoused by those who worked the land for ages: no matter how responsible agriculture is, it is essentially about achieving the lesser of evils. To work the land is to change the land, to shape it to benefit one species over another, and thus necessarily to tame what is wild. Our task should be to deliver our blows gently. ~ James McWilliams, #NFDB
487:What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
488:Weather patterns in the Pacific were not human-driven, but the futures market in Chicago was. The world had shifted so rapidly from subsistence agriculture to a market economy that price fluctuations sent ripples throughout the system, destabilizing entire regions. Traders could now set off starvation halfway across the world with the touch of a telegraph key, sucking up grain supplies in India or the Dakotas and sending them to Europe, where prices were high. It was the dawn of “price famines.”174 ~ Caroline Fraser, #NFDB
489:To visit a modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines—“production units”—incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert one’s eyes on the part of everyone else. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
490:Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
491:Every effort therefore must be made to perpetuate prosperity. And, since that is to the advantage of the rich as well as the poor, all that accrues from the revenues should be collected into a single fund and distributed in block grants to those in need, if possible in lump sums large enough for the acquisition of a small piece of land, but if not, enough to start a business, or work in agriculture. And if that cannot be done for all, the distribution might be by tribes or some other division each in turn. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
492:The government has departments to deal with the special interest groups that make themselves heard and felt. A Department of Agriculture cares for the farmers' needs. There is a Department of Health, Education and Welfare. There is a Department of the Interior - in which the Indians are included. Is the farmer, the doctor, the Indian, the greatest problem in America today? No - it is the black man! There ought to be a Pentagon-sized Washington department dealing with every segment of the black man's problems. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
493:Competition permits the capitalist to deduct from the price of labour power that which the family earns from its own little garden or field; the workers are compelled to accept any piece wages offered to them, because otherwise they would get nothing at all, and they could not live from the products of their small-scale agriculture alone, and because, on the other hand, it is just this agriculture and landownership which chains them to the spot and prevents them from looking around for other employment. ~ Friedrich Engels, #NFDB
494:NINETEENTH-CENTURY AUTHORS TENDED TO INTERPRET history as a progression from savagery to civilization. Key hallmarks of this transition included the development of agriculture, metallurgy, complex technology, centralized government, and writing. Of these, writing was traditionally the one most restricted geographically: until the expansions of Islam and of colonial Europeans, it was absent from Australia, Pacific islands, subequatorial Africa, and the whole New World except for a small part of Mesoamerica. As ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
495:The minority has discovered a powerful help in influencing majorities. It has been found possible so to mold the mind of the masses that they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction. In the present structure of society, this practice is inevitable. Whatever of social importance is done today, whether in politics, finance, manufacture, agriculture, charity, education, or other fields, must be done with the help of propaganda. Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government. ~ Edward Bernays, #NFDB
496:Nordhaus and Shellenberger called this view “nihilistic ecotheology.” That worldview, they said, comprises “apocalyptic fears of ecological collapse, disenchanting notions of living in a fallen world, and the growing conviction that some kind of collective sacrifice is needed to avoid the end of the world.” The eco-nihilists have “nostalgic visions of a transcendent future in which humans might, once again, live in harmony with nature through a return to small-scale agriculture, or even to hunter-gatherer life. ~ Robert Bryce, #NFDB
497:The rapid progress of the sciences makes me sorry, at times, that I was born so soon. Imagine the power that man will have over matter, a few hundred years from now. We may learn how to remove gravity from large masses, and float them over great distances. Agriculture will double its produce with less labor. All diseases will surely be cured... even old age. If only the moral sciences could be improved as well. Perhaps men would cease to be wolves to one another... and human beings could learn to be human. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
498:It has become increasingly clear that the way we farm affects the local community, and that the economy of the local community affects the way we farm; that the way we farm affects the health and integrity of the local ecosystem, and that the farm is intricately dependent, even economically, upon the health of the local ecosystem. We can no longer pretend that agriculture is a sort of economic machine with interchangeable parts, the same everywhere, determined by “market forces” and independent of everything else. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
499:Certain elements of today's ecological crisis reveal its moral character. First among these is the indiscriminate application of advances in science and technology. Many recent discoveries have brought undeniable benefits to humanity. Indeed, they demonstrate the nobility of the human vocation to participate responsibly in God's creative action in the world. Unfortunately, it is now clear that the application of these discoveries in the fields of industry and agriculture have produced harmful long-term effects. ~ Pope John Paul II, #NFDB
500:Many people think that when we practice agriculture, nature is helping us in our efforts to grow food. This is an exclusively human-centered viewpoint... we should instead, realize that we are receiving that which nature decides to give us. A farmer does not grow something in the sense that he or she creates it. That human is only a small part of the whole process by which nature expresses its being. The farmer has very little influence over that process... other than being there and doing his or her small part. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka, #NFDB
501:If the Edfu Texts contain a record of these events, as I have proposed, then we should take seriously the message they transmit, that there were survivors of the cataclysm who made it their mission to bring about: 'The resurrection of the former world of the gods. ... The re-creation of a destroyed world.'
These survivors are said to have wandered the earth, setting out and building sacred mounds wherever they went, and teaching the fundamentals of civilization, including religion, agriculture, and architecture. ~ Graham Hancock,#NFDB
502:How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
503:However, when we step into farm fields, the vegetation becomes very quiet. Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost the ability to communicate above or below ground-you could say they are deaf and dumb-and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests. That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes so that they'll be more talkative in the future. ~ Peter Wohlleben, #NFDB
504:Extreme weather like the droughts in Russia, China and Brazil and the flooding in Pakistan and Australia [in 2010] have contributed to a level of food price volatility we haven't seen since the oil crisisof 40 years ago. Unfortunately, this could be just a taste of things to come because in the next few decades the build-up of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere could greatly increase the risk of droughts, flooding, pest infestation and water scarcity for agriculture systems already under tremendous stress. ~ John Beddington, #NFDB
505: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. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
506:As John Adams famously wrote during the American Revolution, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” So maybe today they’re writing apps rather than studying poetry, but that’s an adjustment for the age. ~ Fareed Zakaria, #NFDB
507:All of our uncertainties about nutrition should not obscure the plain fact that the chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
508:They have a policy in China for their big companies called "Go abroad." It's a rational thing for both the company and the country to say, "We want big, successful companies." Particularly in areas where they need it: agriculture, energy, technology. I think banking, too. One or two have bought a trading house. Some have already begun expanding around the world. Of course they're going to have those ambitions. Why wouldn't they? They're just doing it methodically. It's a logical strategy and, well-executed, they will succeed. ~ Jamie Dimon, #NFDB
509:There was a transition going on - Baghdad being the intellectual capital of the world where major advances were made in agriculture and mathematics and engineering and medicine and astronomy, and then that all sort of collapsed. And I was trying to understand how such a intellectually fertile environment can lose its compass bearing. Because I think about the creative centers today - countries, or even regions. Will Silicon Valley always be as innovative? Will the United States be innovative, or will we become complacent? ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
510:This is the year of agriculture,” he announced in 1992. “The nation must realize the people’s century-long dream to eat white rice and meat soup, wear silken clothes, and live in tiled-roof homes.” Trouble was, I’d heard it all before. The very same speech. Way back in 1961. Not long after I’d moved to North Korea. The very same idiotic speech! The same shameless lavish self-praise. But Kim Il-sung had never fulfilled any of his promises. Not one. He promised us “paradise on earth” and instead consigned us to its very opposite. ~ Masaji Ishikawa, #NFDB
511:The administration of private justice between the citizens of the same state, the supervision of agriculture and of other concerns of a similar nature, all those things in short which are proper to be provided for by local legislation, can never be desirable cares of a general jurisdiction . . . the attempt to exercise these powers would be as troublesome as it would be nugatory; and the possession of them, for that reason, would contribute nothing to the dignity, to the importance, or to the splendour of the national government. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
512:Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no genius or talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufacturers and agriculture.
Nuestros legisladores no han aprendido todavía el valor comparativo del libre cambio y la libertad, la unión y la rectitud hacia la nación. No tienen genio ni talento para hacerse preguntas humildes sobre impuestos y finanzas, comercio, manufactura y agricultura. ~ Henry David Thoreau,#NFDB
513:It is irrational to charge high prices for socially valuable innovations as this guarantees that they will be underutilized. It is much better to sell them at cost and then to reward the innovator in some other way. This is not always possible, because in some cases the value of an innovation is in the eye of the beholder; it's very difficult to value how much a new Madonna song is worth, for example. But in the case of medicines, green technologies and seeds in agriculture, such an alternative reward mechanism is fairly straightforward. ~ Thomas Pogge, #NFDB
514:I must study politics and war," wrote John Adams, "that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics, and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children the right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." Adams saw clearly that politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the right to pursue your own happiness. ~ Charles Krauthammer, #NFDB
515:Human nature has been landscaped, replanted, weeded, fertilized, fenced off, seeded, and irrigated as intensively as any garden or seaside golf course. Human beings have been under cultivation longer than we’ve been cultivating anything else. Our cultures domesticate us for obscure purposes, nurturing and encouraging certain aspects of our behavior and tendencies while seeking to eliminate those that might be disruptive. Agriculture, one might say, has involved the domestication of the human being as much as of any plant or other animal. ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
516:Fast rather than slow, more rather than less--this flashy "development" is linked directly to society's impending collapse. It has only served to separate man from nature. Humanity must stop indulging the desire for material possessions and personal gain and move instead toward spiritual awareness.
Agriculture must change from large mechanical operations to small farms attached only to life itself. Material life and diet should be given a simple place. If this is done, work becomes pleasant, and spiritual breathing space becomes plentiful. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka,#NFDB
517:Industrial agriculture now accounts for over half of America's water pollution. Two years ago, Pfiesteria outbreaks connected with wastes from industrial chicken factories forced the closure of two major tributaries of the Chesapeake and threatened Maryland's vital shellfish industry. Tyson Foods has polluted half of all streams in northwestern Arkansas with so much fecal bacteria that swimming is prohibited. Drugs and hormones needed to keep confined animals alive and growing are mainly excreted with the wastes and saturate local waterways. ~ Robert F Kennedy Jr, #NFDB
518:My first banjo? My mother's sister, my aunt, lived about a mile from where we did, and she raised some hogs. And she had - her - the hog - the mother - they called the mother a sow - of a hog. And she had some pigs. Well, the pigs were real pretty, and I was going to high school and I was taking agriculture in school. And I sort of got a notion that I'd like to do that, raise some hogs. And so my aunt had this old banjo, and my mother told me, said, which do you want, the pig or a banjo? And each one of them's $5 each. I said, I'll just take the banjo. ~ Ralph Stanley, #NFDB
519:Indeed, as we begin the twenty-first century, the money and traditional economies are slowly destroying their own support system. Increasing demands of the two economies are surpassing the sustainable yields of the ecosystems that underpin them. For example, one-third of the world's cropland is losing topsoil at a rate that is undermining its long-term productivity, fully half of the world's rangeland is overgrazed and deteriorating into desert, and the world's forests have shrunk by about half since the dawn of agriculture and are continuing to shrink. ~ Stuart L Hart, #NFDB
520:We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements—transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting—profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
521:Don’t give me any shit about that, Lucas—not with your history,” Henderson said, irritated. “No matter what happens with me, I’ll get her an impressive-sounding staff job in Washington, something involving Virginia agriculture and natural resources,” Henderson said. “I’ll buy her some top-end TV training, some good threads, lean on my friends for donations. A hot, female, law-and-order Democrat who carries a gun and has major experience in D.C.? Are you kiddin’ me? That Tea Party asshole won’t know what hit him. He’ll be like Toto in the fuckin’ tornado. ~ John Sandford, #NFDB
522:Man has existed for about a million years. He has possessed writing for about 6,000 years, agriculture somewhat longer, but perhaps not much longer. Science, as a dominant factor in determining the belief of educated men, has existed for about 300 years; as a source of economic technique, for about 150 years. In this brief period it has proved itself an incredibly powerful revolutionary force. When we consider how recently it has risen to power, we find ourselves forced to believe that we are at the very beginning of its work in transforming human life. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
523:Human beings have been creative beings for a really long time—long enough and consistently enough that it appears to be a totally natural impulse. To put the story in perspective, consider this fact: The earliest evidence of recognizable human art is forty thousand years old. The earliest evidence of human agriculture, by contrast, is only ten thousand years old. Which means that somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was way more important to make attractive, superfluous items than it was to learn how to regularly feed ourselves. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
524:It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease. The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
525:He that would travel for the entertainment of others, should remember that the great object of remark is human life. Every Nation has something peculiar in its Manufactures, its Works of Genius, its Medicines, its Agriculture, its Customs, and its Policy. He only is a useful Traveller, who brings home something by which his country may be benefited; who procures some supply of Want, or some mitigation of Evil, which may enable his readers to compare their condition with that of others, to improve it whenever it is worse, and whenever it is better to enjoy it. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
526:Hypocrisy, double standards, and "but nots" are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted, but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq, but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth, but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue for China, but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed, but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle. ~ Samuel P Huntington, #NFDB
527:Over the last 30 odd years, Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into the mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby... That's the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers and civil war re-enactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans and who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal. ~ Bill Maher, #NFDB
528:The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. ~ John Adams, #NFDB
529:The chief non-human species that practice war, with organized armies engaging in deadly combat, are certain varieties of ant. Those social insects some sixty million years ago had invented all the major institutions of 'civilization,' including 'kingship' (actually, queenship), military conquest, the division of labor, the segregation of functions and castes, to say nothing of the domestication of other species and even the beginnings of agriculture. Civilized man's chief contribution to this anthill complex was to add the powerful stimulant of irrational fantasy. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
530:In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between their clinical and nonclinical uses. Public health advocates don’t object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don’t want to see the drugs lose their effectiveness because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn’t be sick if not for the diet of grain we feed them. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
531:Out of the autopoiesis and evolution of mental, especially neural, structures emerges the magnificent wealth of human creativity. On the one hand it creates with technology a world of equilibrium structures, on the other with art and social institutions and organizations as well as in science and in the great religions and ideologies autopoietic/evolving systems of a symbolic as well as a real kind. It enters into new forms of symbiosis with other forms of life, in particular in agriculture and in the management of ecological resources. ~ Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe, #NFDB
532:In the sociocultural phase of evolution the individual becomes co-responsible for macroevolution. The process of mentation originates in the individual, but the autopoietic structures of the neural mind form their own systems of relations which become translated into sociocultural macrosystems such as communities, societies, and civilizations. In the same way, the neural mind shapes a world of equilibrium structures, such as buildings, machines, and roads and interferes creatively with ecosystems, for example, by introducing agriculture. ~ Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe, #NFDB
533:Al and Lou had arrived at the Wisconsin State Fair by nine in the morning for fresh egg omelettes in the Agriculture Building and some apple cider donuts. They'd nibbled their donuts and wandered the stalls celebrating various products grown and raised in Wisconsin. You could sample and buy anything, from honey-filled plastic sticks to ostrich steaks to cranberry scones. They followed up their breakfast with a stop at the milk barn, where Lou had forced him to try root beer-flavored milk. While he'd been skeptical, it tasted delicious and precisely like a root beer float. ~ Amy E Reichert, #NFDB
534:Once our ancestors began cultivating land for food, they were running on a wheel, but never fast enough. More land provides more food. And more food means more children born and fed. More children provide more help on the farm and more soldiers. But this population growth creates demand for more land, which can be won and held only through conquest and war. Put another way, the shift to agriculture was accelerated by the seemingly irrefutable belief that it’s better to take strangers’ land (killing them if necessary) than to allow one’s own children to die of starvation. ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
535:One can see from space how the human race has changed the Earth. Nearly all of the available land has been cleared of forest and is now used for agriculture or urban development. The polar icecaps are shrinking and the desert areas are increasing. At night, the Earth is no longer dark, but large areas are lit up. All of this is evidence that human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit. But human demands and expectations are ever-increasing. We cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere, poison the ocean and exhaust the land. There isn't any more available. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
536:A little science is something that they must have. I should like my nephews to know what air is, and water; why we breathe, and why wood burns; the nutritive elements essential to plant life, and the constituents of the soil. And it is no vague and imperfect knowledge from hearsay I would have them gain of these fundamental truths, on which depend agriculture and the industrial arts and our health itself; I would have them know these things thoroughly from their own observation and experience. Books here are insufficient, and can serve merely as aids to scientific experiment. ~ Jean Henri Fabre, #NFDB
537:With the decline of Italian agriculture and the provision of subsidized corn for the urban masses in the capital, Sicily was Rome’s most important provider of cereals and it was essential to ensure stability of its supply and price. The oldest of Rome’s provinces, the island had been won from the Carthaginians in 241 and, as tribute, its communities were required to export gratis 10 percent of their corn harvest to Rome. If more was needed, it could be acquired by compulsory purchase. It was the Quaestors’ job to calculate the price and the quantity of extra corn to be bought. ~ Anthony Everitt, #NFDB
538:The idea of hunting and gathering as the best way for life has become quite popular recently, much more populare in some circles than the idea of simple farming as the best way of life. Many of the new primitives regard the beginnings of agriculture as one of humanity's major steps in the wrong direction. Most of the people who are drawn to such ideas do their actual hunting and gathering in grocery stores, but the *feeling* is there; it takes the form of a religion...expressed by particpating in American Indian rituals - or primitive-style rituals that are created anew. ~ Walter Truett Anderson, #NFDB
539:I would say that, from an agricultural perspective, I have a little bit of concern, because some of the folks I don't know are particularly supportive of the renewable fuel industry and the renewable fuel standard, which is a big part of certainly Midwestern agriculture. I'm hopeful that, when we see his ultimate selection for ag secretary, that we will see someone who is a strong advocate for renewable fuels, and what that means to Midwestern producers. And, for that matter, now, all over the country, we're seeing more and more of the biofuels being produced from a variety of sources. ~ Tom Vilsack, #NFDB
540:While our burning of coal and gas has provided us in the developed world with the benefits of extraordinary transportation, agriculture, and information technology, it has also enabled us to cover Earth with a thin blanket of gas that is too thick for comfort. Although humankind did this unwittingly, we need to work our way off our dependence on burning ancient buried material as quickly as we can. Coal is the biggest problem here. Not only does it unleash the most carbon dioxide, it also releases all kinds of heavy metals and reactive chemicals while we’re trying to squeeze out its heat. ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
541:Beavers, the animal that doubles as an ecosystem, are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront. Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfire? Take two families of beaver and check back in a year. If that all sounds hyperbolic to you, well, I’m going to spend this book trying to change your mind. ~ Ben Goldfarb, #NFDB
542:Middle East and Africa is a product of failed states unable to keep up with the age of accelerations and enable their young people to realize their full potential. But these trends are exacerbated by climate change, population growth, and environmental degradation, which are undermining the agricultural foundations that sustain vast African and Middle Eastern populations on rural lands. The combination of failing states and failing agriculture is producing millions of young people, particularly young men, who have never held a job, never held power, and never held a girl’s hand. That ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
543:The intensive cultivation methods of European farming were finally abandoned by the immigrants and they moved swiftly to the other extreme, farming soils to exhaustion and abandoning them to move on to new fields. American genius in agriculture until the dust bowl years has really never been its cleverness but its inexhaustible supply of land that could be carelessly exploited and abandoned. Southern planters controlled thousands of acres and ruthlessly exploited labor and land and then sought more land. By the Revolution “the older tobacco areas along the Chesapeake and the great rivers ~ Vine Deloria Jr, #NFDB
544:Two very clear indicators are the appearance of lavishly furnished burials and large, elaborate private residences. Skeletons can tell us that one segment of population ate much higher-quality foods and enjoyed better health than the rest. Based on such indicators, we know that large differentials between the rich and powerful few and the rest arose within a few thousand years of agriculture in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mexico, and the Andes. Somehow a segment of society succeeded in manipulating itself into a position of superiority in these regions; this is a fact accepted by all archaeologists. ~ Peter Turchin, #NFDB
545:It stands to reason that, until very recently, all vertebrate life on the planet was wildlife. But astoundingly, today wildlife accounts for only 3 percent of earth’s land animals; human beings, our livestock, and our pets take up the remaining 97 percent of the biomass. This Frankenstein biosphere is due both to the explosion of industrial agriculture and to a hollowing out of wildlife itself, which has decreased in abundance by as much as 50 percent since 1970. This cull is from both direct hunting and global-scale habitat destruction: almost half of the earth’s land has been converted to farmland. ~ Peter Brannen, #NFDB
546:A devastating, a traumatic defeat, [to Germany] and the Danes might well have fallen into a Treaty of Versailles mentality. Mysteriously, they did not. Instead they redirected their aims and will; they did turn inward. They changed their agriculture from grain to dairy products, they set up cooperatives, gave their attention to social and economic advancement, chose a neutral policy, developed an altogether new kind of adult schooling. It was a chain reaction, but the links gradually forged themselves into a virtuous circuit. It has turned out well. [from "Portrait Sketch of a Country: Denmark 1962"] ~ Sybille Bedford, #NFDB
547:Monsanto actually emerged as a war chemicals industry. It is known for Agent Orange, and for toxics. It wasn't ever in seed and agriculture. This is a recent entry, because they realized controlling the seed means controlling the entire food chain and the profits they can make from that are so much more than they can make at any other level. So in a way they brought war to our farmlands. They brought war against our farmers. The economics of it are first and foremost the economics of a monopoly, created by a highly undemocratic, international trade treaty, which brought clauses on control over the seed. ~ John Robbins, #NFDB
548:The UN special envoy on food called it a “crime against humanity” to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol while almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion humans who are living in dire poverty? And that 756 million tons doesn’t even include the fact that 98 percent of the 225-million-ton global soy crop is also fed to farmed animals. You’re supporting vast inefficiency and pushing up the price of food for the poorest in the world, ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
549:sustainable," like "green" and "organic," is an easily corruptible concept that, not surprisingly, has been willfully corrupted by people who would very much like to sell you a hybrid SUV or an Energy Star-rated flat-screen TV with no money down and zero percent interest for 60 months. There is very little about agriculture that is truly sustainable. At its core, agriculture is a human manipulation of a natural process. Is there a version of agriculture that is truly sustainable? Probably so. Is there a version of agriculture that is truly sustainable and able to feed 7 billion people? Almost certainly not. ~ Ben Hewitt, #NFDB
550:Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
551:In 2002, a Cochrane Collaboration review of the evidence concluded that low-fat diets induced no more weight loss than calorie-restricted diets, and in both cases the weight loss achieved “was so small as to be clinically insignificant.” A similar analysis was published in 2001 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In this case, the authors identified twenty-eight relevant trials of low-fat diets, of which at least twenty were also calorie-restricted. The overweight subjects consumed, on average, less than seventeen hundred calories a day for an average weight loss of not quite nine pounds over six months. ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
552:In this techscape, new values also emerge—often made up of old words with new connotations: automatic, digital, mobile, wireless, frictionless, smart—and new technology adapts to those values. The current meaning of the word wilderness, one could argue, emerged directly from the techscape of industrialism, just as the current meaning of the word network emerged from the world of telecommunications. With the advent of industrial technology we began to see wilderness less as a landscape devoid of agriculture and more as a landscape free from technology—and thus the wild went from being a wasteland to a refuge. ~ Robert Moor, #NFDB
553:The combined biomass of all domesticated animals is now some twenty-five times that of all remaining wild terrestrial mammals. Some of our favored plants have become among the most widely propagated on the planet. Wheat, rice, coffee, and cannabis, to name a few, have gone worldwide by giving us what we want. You have to wonder who has been using whom, because in terms of evolutionary success, these plants have done well by us 7—others, not so much. Through our reworking of landscapes, especially for agriculture, we have destroyed and altered habitats and, often without realizing it, created new ones. We’ve ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
554:And all this time the earth was being despoiled. The minerals were being ripped out, the fuels wasted, the soils depleted by an improvident and short-sighted agriculture, the animals and plants slaughtered and destroyed, the seas being filled with filth and poison, the atmosphere was corrupted - and always, all the time, the propaganda machines thumped out: more, more, more, drink more, eat more, consume more, discard more -in a frenzy, a mania. These were maddened creatures, and the small voices that rose in protest were not enough to halt the processes that had been set in motion and were sustained by greed. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
555:Greatest engineering achievements of 20th century ranked by National Academy of Engineering:
1. Electrification
2. Automobile
3. Airplane
4. Water supply and distribution
5. Electronics
6. Radio and Television
7. Mechanization of agriculture
8. Computers
9. The telephone system
10. Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration
11. Highways
12. Spacecraft
13. The Internet
14. Imaging
15. Household appliances
16. Health technologies
17. Petroleum and Petrochemical Technologies
18. Lasers and Fiber-optics
19. Nuclear technologies
20. High performance materials ~ Henry Petroski,#NFDB
556:What is most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. To go from the chicken (Gallus gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal's pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
557:The survey revealed, in areas quite close to known and even famous and well-visited Mayan sites such as Tikal, more than 60,000 previously unsuspected ancient houses, palaces, defensive walls, fortresses, and other structures as well as quarries, elevated highways connecting urban centers, and complex irrigation and terracing systems that would have been capable of supporting intensive agriculture. Previously scholars had believed that only scattered city-states had existed in an otherwise sparsely populated region, but the Lidar images make it clear, [...] that 'scale and population density had been grossly underestimated. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
558:First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day—or an entire life—mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone. ~ Sebastian Junger, #NFDB
559:Like the legends of Kon-Tiki Viracocha [...], the South American civilizing hero, white-skinned and bearded like Quetzalcoatl and the Apkallu sages [...], who was said to have come to the Andes during a terrifying period, thousands of years in the past, "when the earth had been inundated by a great flood and plunged into darkness by the disappearance of the sun." (Exactly like Quetzalcoatl in Mexico, and the Apkallu sages in Mesopotamia, Viracocha's civilizing mission in the Andes had been to bring laws and a moral code to the survivors of the disaster, and to teach them the skills of agriculture, architecture and engineering. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
560:the dull old facts of altered climate, vanishing forests, creatures and polar ice. Profitable and poisonous agriculture obliterating biological beauty. Oceans turning to weak acid. Well above the horizon, approaching fast, the urinous tsunami of the burgeoning old, cancerous and demented, demanding care. And soon, with demographic transition, the reverse, populations in catastrophic decline. Free speech no longer free, liberal democracy no longer the obvious port of destiny, robots stealing jobs, liberty in close combat with security, socialism in disgrace, capitalism corrupt, destructive and in disgrace, no alternatives in sight. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
561:The notion that a professionally run government could maximize a society’s output and stability through the application of scientific principles had widespread appeal, but almost every country lacked one key element: information. Yes, as we saw, governments had long been keeping track of trade and agriculture—the two traditional sources of wealth and power. But scientific management of society required data, and there, most societies and most governments were largely in the dark. As of the middle of the nineteenth century, almost every metric we now take as a given—from health statistics to economic data—simply did not exist. ~ Zachary Karabell, #NFDB
562:In many ways, it took ten thousand years of gradual change to mold us in the shape we are in today. We like to fault modern industrial agriculture and everything that goes with it—overpopulation, a hyperindustrialized food chain, and sedentary living—as underlying the epidemic sweep of diseases of civilization. But the fact is, these all began millennia ago, when humans first domesticated grain. This is a bedrock belief among anthropologists. The effects of the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age pale in comparison with the effects of the advent of agriculture, the single greatest change in two million years of hominid history. ~ John J Ratey, #NFDB
563:The divide ran through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, and stretches south into Mexico and north into Manitoba, Canada, separating more densely populated communities full of large farms from sparser, open land that was never truly made valuable by agriculture. Since just 1980, that boundary has moved fully 140 miles east, almost to the 98th parallel, drying up hundreds of thousands of square miles of farmland in the process. The planet’s only other similar boundary is the one separating the Sahara desert from the rest of Africa. That desert has expanded by 10 percent, too; in the winter, the figure is 18 percent. ~ David Wallace Wells, #NFDB
564:Those guidelines, according to Dr. Light, did not survive their trip to the office of the Head of the Department of Agriculture. In a 2004 account, she described herself as “shocked” by the changes that were made. Her team placed fruits and vegetables at the base of the pyramid and whole-grain breads and cereals further up. The new guidelines not only switched carbohydrates to the base of the pyramid, it moved processed foods like crackers and corn flakes, which Dr. Light and her team had placed at the top of the pyramid with chocolate, to the base of the pyramid. Even with all the edits, the food pyramid was not released for another 12 years. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
565:Les historiens non-maghrébins semblent poser des questions légitimes : Que sont les berbères ? Se demandent les préhistoriens. Comment sont-ils passés de la barbarie à la civilisation ? Se demandent protohistoriens et classicisants. Pourquoi adoptèrent-ils l’islam ?, se demandent les médiévistes. Derrière ces questions s’en cachent cependant d’autres, bien moins innocentes : Ont-ils manqué l’âge des métaux ? Reçurent-ils l’agriculture des phéniciens ? Méconnurent-ils l’organisation politique de Rome ? Ce sont en fait des affirmations à peine voilées et au fond desquelles se cache toujours la vielle exclamation horrifiée : Quel scandale que l’Islamisation ! ~, #NFDB
566:…It's as if they actually think that what other people think of them somehow doesn't matter. I mean, I know we're all supposed to believe that, but obviously, none of us actually do. And nor should we, because it does! It does matter! And the people who genuinely believe it doesn't tend to be the very people who ought to care most what other people think of them, because what the other people are thinking is, 'No, actually, I don't think the Chinese are "up to something,"' or, 'You should use mouthwash,' or, 'Your mania for the collective socialization of agriculture will surely cause the deaths of millions,' or, 'Forty cats is too many cats. ~ David Mitchell, #NFDB
567:Ebenezer Howard’s vision of the Garden City would seem almost feudal to us. He seems to have thought that members of the industrial working classes would stay neatly in their class, and even at the same job within their class; that agricultural workers would stay in agriculture; that businessmen (the enemy) would hardly exist as a significant force in his Utopia; and that planners could go about their good and lofty work, unhampered by rude nay-saying from the untrained. It was the very fluidity of the new nineteenth-century industrial and metropolitan society, with its profound shiftings of power, people and money, that agitated Howard so deeply ~ Jane Jacobs, #NFDB
568:What we must think about is an agriculture with a human face. We must give standing to the new pioneers, the homecomers bent on the most important work for the next century - a massive salvage operation to save the vulnerable but necessary pieces of nature and culture and to keep the good and artful examples before us. It is time for a new breed of artists to enter front and center, for the point of art, after all, is to connect. This is the homecomer I have in mind: the scientist, the accountant who converses with nature, a true artist devoted to the building of agriculture and culture to match the scenery presented to those first European eyes. ~ Wes Jackson, #NFDB
569:The fecundity of freedom is demonstrated most dramatically and clearly in agriculture. When the Declaration of Independence was enacted, fewer than 3 million persons of European and African origin (i.e., omitting the native Indians) occupied a narrow fringe along the eastern coast. Agriculture was the main economic activity. It took nineteen out of twenty workers to feed the country's inhabitants and provide a surplus for export in exchange for foreign goods. Today it takes fewer than one out of twenty workers to feed the 220 million inhabitants and provide a surplus that makes the United States the largest single exporter of food in the world. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
570:In this sense many apparently immoral beliefs are actually factual errors based on incorrect causal theories. Today we hold that it is immoral to burn women as witches, but the reason our European ancestors in the Middle Ages strapped women on a pyre and torched them was because they believed that witches caused crop failures, weather anomalies, diseases, and various other maladies and misfortunes. Now that we have a scientific understanding of agriculture, climate, disease, and other causal vectors—including the role of chance—the witch theory of causality has fallen into disuse; what was a seemingly moral matter was actually a factual mistake. ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
571:A charge often levied against organic agriculture is that it is more philosophy than science. There's some truth to this indictment, if that it what it is, though why organic farmers should feel defensive about it is itself a mystery, a relic, perhaps, of our fetishism of science as the only credible tool with which to approach nature. ... The peasant rice farmer who introduces ducks and fish to his paddy may not understand all the symbiotic relationships he's put in play--that the ducks and fishes are feeding nitrogen to the rice and at the same time eating the pests. But the high yields of food from this ingenious polyculture are his to harvest even so. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
572:Globalized industrialized food is not cheap: it is too costly for the Earth, for the farmers, for our health. The Earth can no longer carry the burden of groundwater mining, pesticide pollution, disappearance of species and destabilization of the climate. Farmers can no longer carry the burden of debt, which is inevitable in industrial farming with its high costs of production. It is incapable of producing safe, culturally appropriate, tasty, quality food. And it is incapable of producing enough food for all because it is wasteful of land, water and energy. Industrial agriculture uses ten times more energy than it produces. It is thus ten times less efficient. ~ Vandana Shiva, #NFDB
573:we left Earth to its own devices for long enough, it would eventually enter another ice age. This would be much more extreme than the kinds of climate changes we are potentially facing now. During the last ice age, up until about thirteen thousand years ago, an unbroken sheet of ice two or three miles thick extended from the poles down to the latitude of Minneapolis. Sea level dropped by around three hundred feet, completely redrawing coastlines and the paths of rivers around the world. There is no way that a civilization of many billion humans, tied to cities and dependent upon a global system of agriculture and trade, could survive such a transition intact. ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
574:For more than half a million years, our recent hominid ancestors lived nomadic lives of extreme duress on the plains of East Africa, but the advent of agriculture changed that about 10,000 years ago. That is only 400 generations—not enough to adapt, genetically, to the changes in diet and society that ensued. Privately worked land and the accumulation of capital made humans less oriented toward group welfare, and the Industrial Revolution pushed society further in that direction. No one knows how the so-called Information Age will affect us, but there's a good chance that home technology and the Internet will only intensify our drift toward solipsism and alienation. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
575:The transition from egalitarian small-scale societies to archaic states did not happen as soon as people settled down in farming villages. Polynesians colonized Hawaii around 800 CE, and it took around eight centuries for archaic states to emerge.144 What’s more, the Polynesians already had a lot of the cultural elements needed to develop a centralized, hierarchical society. Because agriculture arrived on the Pacific islands around 1500 BCE,145 the overall period of “gestation” for archaic states seems to be something like 3,000 years. In other areas of the globe the period between the adoption of agriculture and the rise of the first states was even longer. The ~ Peter Turchin, #NFDB
576:The word agriculture, after all, does not mean "agriscience," much less "agribusiness." It means "cultivation of land." And cultivation is at the root of the sense both of culture and of cult. The ideas of tillage and worship are thus joined in culture. And these words all come from an Indo-European root meaning both "to revolve" and "to dwell." To live, to survive on the earth, to care for the soil, and to worship, all are bound at the root to the idea of a cycle. It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term "agribusiness." (pg. 285, The Use of Energy) ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
577:Inspired by these tiny sculptures, a few hyperfeminist mystics deduced a delightfully satisfying ideological fantasy—that an Earth-Mother religion preceded every other spiritual belief system, all over the planet. This ubiquitous Neolithic creed must obviously have worshipped a goddess! One whose top traits were fecundity and serene maternal kindliness. That is, till gentle Gaia was toppled by violent bands of macho Jehovah-Zeus-Shiva followers, spurred by an abrupt wave of vile new technologies—metallurgy, agriculture, and literacy—that arrived with concurrent and destabilizing suddenness, all at once shaking the tranquil old ways and toppling the pastoral mother goddess. ~ David Brin, #NFDB
578:I don't believe vegans (or vegetarians) who still get their (packaged, preservative/chemical-ridden) food from industrial food systems have any righteous ground to stand on, nor do I think a deep look at the sentient life of plants or the true environmental impact of agriculture permits them any comfortable distance from cruelty. Everything in this world eats something else to survive, and that something else, whether running on blood or chlorophyll, would always rather continue to live rather than become sustenance for another. No animal wants to be penned up and milked, or caged and harvested, and you've never seen plants growing in regimented lines of their own accord. ~ Brian Awehali, #NFDB
579:The destruction of artisanal industries by colonial trade policies did not just impact the artisans themselves. The British monopoly of industrial production drove Indians to agriculture beyond levels the land could sustain. This in turn had a knock-on effect on the peasants who worked the land, by causing an influx of newly disenfranchised people, formerly artisans, who drove down rural wages. In many rural families, women had spun and woven at home while their men tilled the fields; suddenly both were affected, and if weather or drought reduced their agricultural work, there was no back-up source of income from cloth. Rural poverty was a direct result of British actions. ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
580:Townsmen generally regard agriculture as one of the lowest occupations to which man can devote himself. Yet the enormous majority of the population of the whole world is engaged in agriculture, and on it the possibility of existence for all the rest of the human race depends. In reality, the human race is made up of husbandmen. All the rest – ministers, locksmiths, professors, carpenters, artists, tailors, scientists, physicians, generals, and soldiers – are but the servants or parasites of the agriculturist. Thus agriculture, besides being the most moral, healthy, joyful, and necessary occupation, is also the highest of human activities and alone gives men true independence. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
581:I’ve come to believe that what we need is a republic. People need to be run by people who like them, not boxed into a game they can’t win by people who can’t lose it. We need a head of state who’s been on the run. An interior minister who’s had the two o’clock knock and done solitary. A minister of agriculture who’s seen a spade fired in anger and done twenty years on the land. A health minister who’s had his life saved through swift transportation to a well-staffed, properly equipped hospital. An interior minister dedicated to dismantling the state with its futile bureaucratic waste and saving real money. And a police force that would put an end to the Bowmans of this world. ~ Derek Raymond, #NFDB
582:The craft, trade, agriculture, science, a large part of the art - all this can only stand on a broad base , on a consolidated, strong and healthy mediocrity. Served in their services and the science of their work - and even the arts. We cannot wish for better: it belongs to such an average sort of person - it is under displace exceptions - it has nothing aristocratic about something and still les in their anarchic instincts - The power of the center is then held upright by the trade, especially the money market: the instinct of great financiers goes against all extremes, - the Jews are the reason for the time being conserve power in our so insecure and threatened Europe. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
583:Noon found me strolling about the ashram grounds, on to the grazing land of a few imperturbable cows. The protection of cows is a passion with Gandhi. “The cow to me means the entire sub-human world, extending man’s sympathies beyond his own species,” the Mahatma has explained. “Man through the cow is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives. Why the ancient rishis selected the cow for apotheosis is obvious to me. The cow in India was the best comparison; she was the giver of plenty. Not only did she give milk, but she also made agriculture possible. The cow is a poem of pity; one reads pity in the gentle animal. She is the second mother to millions of mankind. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
584:It’s important to keep in mind that when viewed against the full scale of our species’ existence, ten thousand years is but a brief moment. Even if we ignore the roughly two million years since the emergence of our Homo lineage, in which our direct ancestors lived in small foraging social groups, anatomically modern humans are estimated to have existed as long as 200,000 years.* With the earliest evidence of agriculture dating to about 8000 BCE, the amount of time our species has spent living in settled agricultural societies represents just 5 percent of our collective experience, at most. As recently as a few hundred years ago, most of the planet was still occupied by foragers. ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
585:In our day, there are stresses and fractures of the human-animal bond, and some forces at work would sever it once and for all. They pull us in the wrong direction and away from the decent and honorable code that makes us care for creatures who are entirely at our mercy. Especially within the last two hundred years, we've come to apply an industrial mind-set to the use of animals, too often viewing them as if they were nothing but articles of commerce and the raw material of science, agriculture, and wildlife management. Here, as in other pursuits, human ingenuity has a way of outrunning human conscience, and some things we do only because we can--forgetting to ask whether we should. ~ Wayne Pacelle, #NFDB
586:When James Larrick and his colleagues studied the still relatively isolated Waorani Indians of Ecuador, they found no evidence of hypertension, heart disease, or cancer. No anemia or common cold. No internal parasites. No sign of previous exposure to polio, pneumonia, smallpox, chicken pox, typhus, typhoid, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, or serum hepatitis.16 This is not as surprising as it may seem, given that almost all these diseases either originated in domesticated animals or depend upon high-density population for easy transmission. The deadliest infectious diseases and parasites that have plagued our species could not have spread until after the transition to agriculture. ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
587:The common where we had walked the previous evening was a deserted tract of land, typical of Surrey, looking as if it might be miles from any habitation, while only a few deciduous trees divided it from country studded with bungalows. Some of the land showed traces of heath fires, charred roots and stones lying about on the blackened ground. Walking there was not at all like being in the country. Agriculture seemed as remote as in a London street. This waste land might have been some walled-in space in the suburbs where business men practised golfstrokes; or the corner of a cinema studio used for shooting wilderness scenes. It had neither memories of the past nor hope for the future. ~ Anthony Powell, #NFDB
588:The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts.—I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. ~ John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, after May 12, 1780; reported in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence (1973), vol. 3, p. 342., #NFDB
589:And just as agriculture has displaced species-dense communities with its monocrops, its diet has displaced the nutrient-dense foods that humans need, replacing them with mononutrients of sugar and starch. This displacement led immediately to a drop in human stature as agriculture spread - the evidence couldn’t be clearer. The reasons are just as clear. Meat contains protein, minerals, and fats, fats that we need to metabolize those proteins and minerals. In contrast, grains are basically carbohydrates: what protein they do contain is low quality - lacking essential amino acids - and comes wrapped in indigestible fiber. Grains are essentially sugar with enough opioids to make them addictive. ~ Lierre Keith, #NFDB
590:We walked almost a mile before we came out of the woods atop a ridge overlooking a broad green meadow that looked almost artificial in its pastoral sweetness, like someone had transplanted it from a movie set in New Zealand. Fluffy clouds of sheep dotted the green, and we were far enough away that they looked a little dingy but not filthy—a beautiful trick of distance. (Sheep are some of the nastiest creatures in the world. They’re smelly, stupid things that have been bred to have way too much hair, meaning that all their bodily fluids and drippings get felted right into the wool. If not for bleach, we’d all walk around covered in sheep shit all the time. Agriculture is not a pretty thing.) ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
591:There is a prediction (albeit retroactive) lurking in this idea of the liquid network, as well as in the premise that innovative environments share signature patterns at different scales. The prediction is that whenever human beings first organized themselves into settlements that resembled liquid networks, a great flowering of innovation would have immediately followed. For ages, early humans lived in the cultural equivalent of gaseous networks: small packs of hunter-gatherers bouncing around the landscape, with almost no contact between groups. But the rise of agriculture changed all that. For the first time, humans began forming groups that numbered in the thousands, or tens of thousands. ~ Steven Johnson, #NFDB
592:At a broader level, cultivation theory has been and continues to be useful in understanding the influence of the media metaphorically. The very name of the theory cultivation is a metaphor drawing upon agriculture to help highlight the basic idea of the theory that the media help to create an ordered homogenous reality instead of a disorganized random weed patch reality. There are other metaphors used to understand media’s influence. Gravity has been used to highlight the nonlinear nature of the theory; heavy uses of TV are drawn to the ‘TV reality’ as if TV had a gravitational force. Perhaps the most famous is the metaphor of story telling; TV is the great ‘story teller’ of the current era. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
593:The fullest account we have of Oannes is found in surviving fragments of the works of a Babylonian priest called Berossos who wrote in the third century BC. [...] Oannes did not do his work alone but was supposedly the leader of a group of beings known as the Seven Apkallu--the "Seven Sages"--who were said to have lived "before the flood" (a cataclysmic global deluge features prominently in many Mesopotamian traditions, including those of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylon). Alongside Oannes, these sages are portrayed as bringers of civilization who, in the most ancient past, gave humanity a moral code, arts, crafts and agriculture and taught them architectural, building and engineering skills. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
594:Jenny Hopkinson, a Politico reporter, obtained the curricula vitae of the new Trump people. Into USDA jobs, some of which paid nearly $ 80,000 a year, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT& T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company, with skills like “pleasant demeanor” listed on their résumés. “In many cases [the new appointees] demonstrated little to no experience with federal policy, let alone deep roots in agriculture,” wrote Hopkinson. “Some of those appointees appear to lack the credentials, such as a college degree, required to qualify for higher government salaries. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
595:. . . every society that grows extensive lawns could produce all its food on the same area, using the same resources, and . . . world famine could be totally relieved if we devoted the same resources of lawn culture to food culture in poor areas. These facts are before us. Thus, we can look at lawns, like double garages and large guard dogs, [and Humvees and SUVs] as a badge of willful waste, conspicuous consumption, and lack of care for the earth or its people.
Most lawns are purely cosmetic in function. Thus, affluent societies have, all unnoticed, developed an agriculture which produces a polluted waste product, in the presence of famine and erosion elsewhere, and the threat of water shortages at home. ~ Bill Mollison,#NFDB
596:Agriculture's principles are not identical with those of trade, and the rights of the proprietor are balanced by his duties. The final causes of agriculture are identical with the final causes of the state. Two negative ends of the state exist: its own safety, and the protection of person and property. Three positive ends stand beside these: to make the means of subsistence more easy to each individual; to secure to each of its members the hope of bettering his condition or that of his children; and the development of those faculties which are essential to his humanity, that is, to the rational and moral being. Knowing these ends, we must reform our courses, recast our measures, and make ourselves a better people. ~ Russell Kirk, #NFDB
597:The pace of innovation continues to increase, and the Information Revolution holds a hint of what may lie ahead. Taken together, the parallels between APM-based production and digital information systems suggest that change in an APM era could be swift indeed—not stretched out over millennia, like the spread of agriculture, nor over centuries, like the rise of industry, nor even over decades, like the spread of the Internet’s physical infrastructure. The prospect this time is a revolution without a manufacturing bottleneck, with production methods akin to sharing a video file. In other words, APM holds the potential for a physical revolution that, if unconstrained, could unfold at the speed of new digital media. ~ K Eric Drexler, #NFDB
598:Etatism by no means aims at the formal transformation of all ownership of the means of production into State ownership by a complete overthrow of the established legal system. Only the biggest industrial, mining, and transport enterprises are to be nationalized; in agriculture, and in medium- and small-scale industry, private property is nominally to continue. Nevertheless, all enterprises are to become State undertakings in fact. Owners are to be left the title and dignity of ownership, it is true, and to be given a right to the receipt of a 'reasonable' income, 'in accordance with their position'; but, in fact, every business is to be changed into a government office and every livelihood into an official profession. ~ Ludwig von Mises, #NFDB
599:Agriculture makes people dependent on a few domesticated crops and animals instead of hundreds of wild food sources, creating vulnerability to droughts and blights and zoonotic diseases. Agriculture makes for sedentary living, leaving humans to do something that no primate with a concern for hygiene and public health would ever do: namely, living in close proximity to their feces. Agriculture makes for surplus and thus almost inevitably, the uneven distribution of surplus generating socio-economic status differences that dwarf anything that other primates cook up with their hierarchies. And from there it's just a hop, skip and a jump until we've got Mr. McGregor persecuting Peter Rabbit and people incessantly singing Oklahoma. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
600:Denmark: Fatal Outbreak Tied to Meat By REUTERS An outbreak of listeria tied to contaminated Danish meat has killed 12 people since last September, with most of the deaths in the past three months, the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries said Tuesday. The outbreak was finally traced on Monday to a popular type of cold cut called rullepolse — “rolled sausage” in Danish, typically made of pork stuffed with herbs and spices — produced by a company near Copenhagen, Jorn A. Rullepolser A/S. “This is completely incomprehensible for us,” Christina Lowies Jensen, an official at the company, told TV2 television, saying all production and sales had been halted. Listeria can lead to fatal infections, especially in the young or the elderly. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
601:Industrial agriculture, built according to the single standard of productivity, has dealt with nature, including human nature, in the manner of a monologist or an orator. It has not asked for anything, or waited to hear any response. It has told nature what it wanted, and in various clever ways has taken what it wanted. And since it proposed no limit on its wants, exhaustion has been its inevitable and foreseeable result. This, clearly, is a dictatorial or totalitarian form of behavior, and it is as totalitarian in its use of people as it is in its use of nature. Its connections to the world and to humans and the other creatures become more and more abstract, as its economy, its authority, and its power become more and more centralized. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
602:Why does this happen even though India has a good economic foundation? It is because we have an economic system which is vulnerable to the fluctuations of the world economy and our economic growth is not sustainable, as witnessed from the 5 per cent GDP growth in the 1990s to 9 per cent for around four years till 2009 and, finally, the present 5.5 per cent. This is mainly due to our prevailing economic policies which are stifling the growth of agriculture and food processing, the manufacturing sector and the service sector. If we bring a marked change in our socio-political and economic policies with a focus on inclusiveness, then I am confident that we as a nation will be able to overcome the economic crisis and progress to new heights. ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
603:At this time, the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century, had a plebiscite been taken amongst all the inhabitants of the world, by far the great number of them, occupied as they were throughout the planet with daily business of agriculture of the slash and burn variety, warfare, metaphysics and procreation, would have heartily concurred with these indigenous Siberians that the whole idea of the twentieth century, or any other century at all, for that matter, was a rum notion. Had the global plebiscite been acted upon in a democratic manner, the twentieth century would have forthwith ceased to exist, the entire system of dividing up years by one hundred would have been abandoned and time, by popular consent, would have stood still. ~ Angela Carter, #NFDB
604:Nandprayag is a place that ought to be famous for its beauty and order. For a mile or two before reaching it we had noticed the superior character of the agriculture and even some careful gardening of fruits and vegetables. The peasantry also, suddenly grew handsome, not unlike the Kashmiris. The town itself is new, rebuilt since the Gohna flood, and its temple stands far out across the fields on the shore of the Prayag. But in this short time a wonderful energy has been at work on architectural carvings, and the little place is full of gemlike beauties. Its temple is dedicated to Naga Takshaka. As the road crosses the river, I noticed two or three old Pathan tombs, the only traces of Mohammedanism that we had seen north of Srinagar in Garhwal. Little ~ Ruskin Bond, #NFDB
605:Back in the pens, once the herd was gathered, the men gingerly and methodically guided the calves into a separate gated area. The cows mooed and their babies bawled once they realized the extent of the physical distance between them, and my bottom lip began to tremble in sympathy. Before that moment, I had no hands-on experience of the tug of motherhood and the tangible connection between the hearts of a mother and child, whether it be bovine, equine, or human. And while I knew that what I was witnessing was a rite of passage, a normal part of agriculture, I realized for the first time that this enormous thing that would be happening in a few short months--this motherhood thing--was serious business.
It took a morning among cows for me to understand. ~ Ree Drummond,#NFDB
606:I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I can find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world. But the world is deaf. The world—and really I mean the West—has no interest in change or self-improvement and my role it seems to me on a dark day like today is merely to document these oddball cultures in the nick of time, just before Western mining and agriculture annihilates them. And then I fear that this awareness of their impending doom alters my observations, laces all of it with a morose nostalgia. ~ Lily King, #NFDB
607:When the organics industry representative is on national TV, she has to admit the truth, that organics are no more nutritious. But in the health food stores, the sales staff passionately tells people organics will make them healthier, happier, stronger, and smarter. Sales keep rising. If organics are no healthier, are they at least better for the planet? Even that isn’t true, says Avery, because organic farmers waste so much land. They’re forced to use more because they lose so much of their crop to weeds and insects. “Agriculture takes a third of the earth’s surface right now,” he says. “If overnight all our food supply were suddenly organic, to feed today’s population, we’d have plowed down half of the world’s land area not under ice to get organic food. ~ John Stossel, #NFDB
608:I know I’ll never get every single thing I dreamed of. I’ll never be thin. I’ll never win a Pulitzer or even, probably, the pie-baking contest at the Agriculture Fair in Truro every August (because I think the judges are biased against summer people, but that’s another story). I will never get a do-over on my first marriage, or on my older daughter’s infancy; I’ll never get to not be divorced. I will never give birth again, and neither of my births were what I’d hoped for. I’ll never get my father back; never get to ask him why he left and whether he was sorry and whether he ever found what he was looking for. But, dammit, I got this far, and I got some stories along the way, and maybe that was the point, the point of the whole thing, the point all along. ~ Jennifer Weiner, #NFDB
609:Urbanization is not some law of nature, nor an inevitable stage of human progress. Economic and technological conditions, among them the mechanization of agriculture and its conversion into commodity production, drive urbanization. Urbanization is uprooting; it is disconnection from the places of multigenerational cultural embedment; it is a distancing from the land. Yes, there is a role for cities; the archetype of the city will not and should not disappear from earth. Cities can be beautiful cauldrons of cultural ferment, alchemic crucibles that yield products only possible in an intense concentration of humanity. Yet for many, the land is calling; in fact, the trend toward urbanization is already showing signs of reversing in some developed countries. ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
610:We believe this sharing behavior extended to sex as well. A great deal of research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy, and psychology points to the same fundamental conclusion: human beings and our hominid ancestors have spent almost all of the past few million years or so in small, intimate bands in which most adults had several sexual relationships at any given time. This approach to sexuality probably persisted until the rise of agriculture and private property no more than ten thousand years ago. In addition to voluminous scientific evidence, many explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists support this view, having penned accounts rich with tales of orgiastic rituals, unflinching mate sharing, and an open sexuality unencumbered by guilt or shame. ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
611:American politicians had done little through the years to stem the flood. Hispanic voters wanted their kinsmen to be able to enter the United States regardless of their ability to contribute to the economy or pay their own bills, yet this wasn’t the decisive factor. Farmers and small-business men wanted a source of cheap labor, and were content to pass the true costs, the social costs, on to the taxpayers. Generous public welfare programs also drew millions of Mexicans, more than small business or agriculture could possibly use. Even draining off an eighth of the population didn’t really help Mexico, which found itself racked by turf wars between vicious criminal gangs that smuggled drugs into the United States to supply the richest narcotics market in the world. ~ Stephen Coonts, #NFDB
612:There is a must-see film out called Forks over Knives ( forksoverknives.com), which is a documentary about the work of these two amazing researchers. You’ll hear from them in this book, and also from other leading medical experts on diet and health. You will also find first-person accounts of people who overcame life-threatening and debilitating diseases through their shift to a plant-based diet. But the personal health benefits are just one part of the story, albeit a very important one. What about the social and environmental benefits I mentioned above? It seems clearer every day that the planet thrives for every person who chooses to eat more plant-based fare, because animal agriculture is one of the top culprits in creating a host of very serious environmental problems. ~ Kathy Freston, #NFDB
613:If you are a feminist and are not a vegan, you are ignoring the exploitation of female nonhumans and the commodification of their reproductive processes, as well as the destruction of their relationship with their babies;
If you are an environmentalist and not a vegan, you are ignoring the undeniable fact that animal agriculture is an ecological disaster;
If you embrace nonviolence but are not a vegan, then words of nonviolence come out of your mouth as the products of torture and death go into it;
If you claim to love animals but you are eating them or products made from them, or otherwise consuming them, you see loving as consistent with harming that which you claim to love.
Stop trying to make excuses. There are no good ones to make. Go vegan. ~ Gary L Francione,#NFDB
614:By the end of the century Rome seemed as powerful and stable as ever. But below the surface the foundations were cracking, and through the fissures new ideas and new institutions were thrusting themselves. The cities are everywhere in decline; trade, industry, and agriculture bend under the weight of taxation. Communications are less safe, and some provinces are infested with marauders, peasants who can no longer earn a living on the land. The Empire is gradually dissolving into units of a kind unknown to classical antiquity, which will some day be brought together in a new pattern, feudal and Christian. But before that can happen generations must pass, while the new absolutism struggles by main force to keep the roads open, the fields in cultivation, and the barbarian at bay. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
615:ONLY a few areas of the world developed food production independently, and they did so at widely differing times. From those nuclear areas, hunter-gatherers of some neighboring areas learned food production, and peoples of other neighboring areas were replaced by invading food producers from the nuclear areas—again at widely differing times. Finally, peoples of some areas ecologically suitable for food production neither evolved nor acquired agriculture in prehistoric times at all; they persisted as hunter-gatherers until the modern world finally swept upon them. The peoples of areas with a head start on food production thereby gained a head start on the path leading toward guns, germs, and steel. The result was a long series of collisions between the haves and the have-nots of history. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
616:Agriculture is twenty percent of GDP. The most important crop is wheat. We are almost self-sufficient, overall almost eighty percent self-sufficient, in food.” In addition, he says, the country’s external debt of $7 billion is only ten percent of GDP, a proportion Greece, Spain, and Italy could envy. With foreign reserves of $17 billion, the country, in his view, could go on importing for another ten months. Syria is receiving assistance from Russia, Iran, and Iraq, which helps further to ease the burden. In any case, as in Iraq from 1990 to 2003, the sanctions are affecting the populace more than the regime. Further harming the people and the economy is the endemic corruption of some within the regime, who have treated the state as their personal business enterprise to be looted at will. ~ Charles Glass, #NFDB
617:That not all men are piggy, only some; that not all men belittle me, only some; that not all men get mad if you won’t let them play Chivalry, only some; that not all men write books in which women are idiots, only most; that not all men pull rank on me, only some; that not all men pinch their secretaries’ asses, only some; that not all men make obscene remarks to me in the street, only some; that not all men make more money than I do, only some; that not all men make more money than all women, only most; that not all men are rapists, only some; that not all men are promiscuous killers, only some; that not all men control Congress, the Presidency, the police, the army, industry, agriculture, law, science, medicine, architecture, and local government, only some.
I sat down on the lawn and wept. ~ Joanna Russ,#NFDB
618:Mary Vial Holyoke was the daughter of a Boston merchant and the wife of a Salem gentleman, Edward Augustus Holyoke, a casual versifier and serious physician who was a member of the town’s economic and intellectual elite.3 The Holyokes enjoyed the barbecues, dances, teas, and “turtles” of the Essex County gentry, yet each of the four major housekeeping roles is clearly apparent in Mary’s diary, as this selection of entries from the 1760s shows: Service and maintenance: “Washed.” “Ironed.” “Scoured pewter.” “Scowered rooms.” “Scoured furniture Brasses & put up the Chintz bed & hung pictures.” “Burnt 5 Chimnies.” “Opened cask of Biscuit.” “Began a Barrel of flour.” “Began upon 22 lb. of chocolate.” “Dressed a Calves Head turtle fashion.” Agriculture: “Sowd sweet marjoram.” “Sowed pease. ~ Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, #NFDB
619:The history of ecosystems and the whole biosystem may be viewed as an aspect of multifold phylogenesis. In the human world, there is a very strong two-way interaction in the much faster processes of technological intervention in the environment, and the conditioning of man by his technologically changed living space. Such a large-scale feedback interaction in the human world now seems to demand a shift from the one-way causal concept of energy-pushing technology (changing the environment) to the mutual-causal concept of a cybernetic technology—recycling, tapping natural energy flows (hydropower, solar and tidal energy) instead of liberating energy stored in fossil or nuclear fuel, biological production processes beyond agriculture, and so forth. ~ Erich Jantsch, Evolution and Consciousness - Human Systems in Transition, #NFDB
620:This precocious advance may have had a lot to do with the nature of the plain between the Yangtze and Yellow rivers. The territory is well suited both for agriculture, which leads to population growth, and for warfare, the two principal propellants of state formation. A relentless process of consolidation forced tribal systems to yield to states. In 2000 BC, a large number of political entities—traditionally put at 10,000—existed in the Yellow River valley. By the time of the Shang dynasty in 1500 BC, these had dwindled to some 3,000 tribal chiefdoms. The Eastern Zhou dynasty began in 771 BC with 1,800 chiefdoms and ended with 14 entities that were much closer to states. During the ensuing Warring States period, which lasted from around 475 BC to 221 BC, the 7 remaining states were reduced to 1. China ~ Nicholas J Wade, #NFDB
621:In developing regions, the number of hungry people has fallen to 780 million today, or 12.9 percent of the population, from 991 million 25 years ago, or 23.3 percent of the population at the time, according to the United Nations’ annual hunger report, published by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the World Food Program. Despite the finding that nearly 800 million people in the world remain hungry, the report called the progress a significant achievement. It said that 72 of the 129 nations monitored by the Food and Agriculture Organization had achieved the target under the so-called Millennium Development Goals of halving the percentages of hungry people in their populations and that developing regions had missed the target by only a small margin. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
622:DeVoto decried “the economy of liquidation” that had prevailed in the West since it was first settled, a philosophy that applied to aquifers and farms as well as mines. In the West “the miner’s right to exploit transcends all other rights whatsoever.” As for agriculture, it soon became clear that it was impossible without irrigation, and that irrigation itself was impossible without the massive dams that only the federal government could build. Which, combined with the fact that much grazing and mining occurred on public land, made westerners chronically dependent on government help. In fact, contrary to the image of rugged individualism, westerners were more dependent on help and community than any other region. Dams, irrigation, free private use of public land. It all amounted to a rugged, beautiful, and wild welfare state. ~ David Gessner, #NFDB
623:A greater and more ruinous mistake cannot be fallen into, than that the trades of agriculture and grazing can be conducted upon any other than the common principles of commerce; namely, that the producer should be permitted, and even expected, to look to all possible profit which, without fraud or violence, he can make; to turn plenty or scarcity to the best advantage he can; to keep back or to bring forward his commodities at his pleasure; to account to no one for his stock or for his gain. On any other terms he is the slave of the consumer; and that he should be so is of no benefit to the consumer. No slave was ever so beneficial to the master as a freeman that deals with him on an equal footing by convention, formed on the rules and principles of contending interests and compromised advantages. [Thoughts and Details on Scarcity] ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
624:Children learned about the adult world by participating in it in a small way, by doing a little work and making a little money—a much more effective, because pleasurable, and a much cheaper method than the present one of requiring the adult world to be learned in the abstract in school. One’s elders in those days were always admonishing one to save nickels and dimes, and there was tangible purpose in their advice: With enough nickels and dimes, one could buy a cow or a sow; with the income from a cow or a sow, one could begin to save to buy a farm. This scheme was plausible enough, evidently, for it seemed that all grown-ups had meditated on it. Now, according to the savants of agriculture—and most grown-ups now believe them—one does not start in farming with a sow or a cow; one must start with a quarter of a million dollars. What ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
625:Even in purely economic terms, the opportunity costs of extinction are going to prove enormous. Research on jus small numbers of wild species has yielded major advances in the quality of human life -- an abundance of pharmaceuticals, new biotechnology, and advances in agriculture. If there were no fungi of the right kind, there would be no antibiotics. Without wild plants with edible stems, frukit and seeds available for selective breeding, there would be no cities, and no civilization. No wolves, no dogs. No wild fowl, no chickens. No horses and camelids, no overland journeys except by hand-pulled vehicles and backpacks. No forests to purify water and pay it out gradually, no agriculture except with less productive dryland crops. No wild vegetation and phytoplankton, not enough air to breathe. Without nature, finally, no people. ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
626:Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall cal an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, determine, intercept, model, control , or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and - why not - language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses - one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primitive inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face. ~ Giorgio Agamben, #NFDB
627:But Germany is stronger than her enemies realize. True, it is a poor country in raw materials and agriculture; but it is making up for this poverty in aggressiveness of spirit, ruthless state planning, concentrated direction of effort, and the building up of a mighty military machine with which it can back up its aggressive spirit. True, too, that this past winter we have seen long lines of sullen people before the food shops, that there is a shortage of meat and butter and fruit and fats, that whipped cream is verboten, that men’s suits and women’s dresses are increasingly being made out of wood pulp, gasoline out of coal, rubber out of coal and lime; that there is no gold coverage for the Reichsmark or for anything else, not even for vital imports. Weaknesses, most of them, certainly, and in our dispatches we have advertised them. It ~ William L Shirer, #NFDB
628:Burlington, Vermont, is an example of a certain kind of small city that David Brooks calls “Latte Towns,” enclaves of affluent and well-educated people, sometimes in scenic locales such as Santa Fe or Aspen and sometimes in university towns such as Ann Arbor, Berkeley, or Chapel Hill. Of Burlington, Brooks writes: Burlington boasts a phenomenally busy public square. There are kite festivals and yoga festivals and eating festivals. There are arts councils, school-to-work collaboratives, environmental groups, preservation groups, community-supported agriculture, antidevelopment groups, and ad hoc activist groups.… And this public square is one of the features that draw people to Latte Towns. People in these places apparently would rather spend less time in the private sphere of their home and their one-acre yard and more time in the common areas. ~ Charles Murray, #NFDB
629:Actually, the great traveler is usually a small, mussy person in a faded, green, fuzzy hat, inconspicuous in a corner of the steamer bar. He speaks only one language, and that gloomily. He knows all the facts about 19 countries except the home lives, wage scales, exports, religions, politics, agriculture, history and languages of those countries. He is as valuable as Baedeker in regard to hotels and railroads, only not so accurate. He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something. He who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little, and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all. Four hundred pictures on a wall are four hundred times less interesting than one picture, and no one knows a cafe until he has gone there often enough to know the names of the waiters. These are the laws of travel. ~ Sinclair Lewis, #NFDB
630:Although emperor after emperor refused entry to almost all human beings from Europe and the Americas, they could not keep out other species. Key players were American crops, especially sweet potatoes and maize;* their unexpected arrival, the agricultural historian Song Junling wrote in 2007, was “one of the most revolutionary events” in imperial China’s history. The nation’s agriculture, based on rice, had long been concentrated in river valleys, especially those of the Yangzi and Huang He (Yellow) rivers. Sweet potatoes and maize could be grown in the dry uplands. Farmers moved in numbers to these areas, which had previously been lightly settled. The result was a wave of deforestation, followed by waves of erosion and floods, which caused many deaths. The regime, already straining under many problems, was further destabilized—to Europe’s benefit. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
631:Jess gazed at the apples arranged in all their colors: russet, blushing pink, freckled gold. She cast her eyes over heaps of pumpkins, bins of tomatoes cut from the vine, pale gooseberries with crumpled leaves. "You could buy a farm."
"Why would I do that?"
"To be healthy," said Jess.
Emily shook her head. "I don't think I'd be a very good farmer."
"You could have other people farm your farm for you," said Jess. "And you could just eat all the good things."
Emily laughed. "That's what we're doing here at the Farmers' Market. We're paying farmers to farm for us. You've just invented agriculture."
"Yes, but you could have your own farm and go out there and breathe the fresh air and touch the fresh earth."
"I think that's called a vacation," said Emily.
"Oh, you're too boring to be rich," Jess said. "And I would be so talented! ~ Allegra Goodman,#NFDB
632:To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals - obviously because of the importance of these things to the household. And there have been times, one of which is now, when some people have tried to practice a proper human husbandry of the nondomestic creatures in recognition of the dependence of our households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name of all practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.
And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry. ~ Wendell Berry,#NFDB
633:Today the concept of global carrying capacity has evolved into the idea of planetary boundaries. The boundaries set the environmental terrain “within which we expect that humanity can operate safely,” a team of twenty-nine European and American scientists argued in an influential report from 2009. (It was updated in 2015.) To prevent “non-linear, abrupt environmental change,” they said, humankind must not transgress nine global limits. That is, people must not 1. use too much fresh water; 2. put too much nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer into the land; 3. overly deplete the protective ozone in the stratosphere; 4. change the acidity of the oceans too much; 5. use too much land for agriculture; 6. wipe out species too fast; 7. dump too many chemicals into ecosystems; 8. send too much soot into the air; and 9. put too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
634:For years, President Obama and his top officials vehemently denounced China for using its surveillance capabilities for economic advantage while insisting that the United States and its allies never do any such thing. The Washington Post quoted an NSA spokesperson saying that the Department of Defense, of which the agency is a part, “ ‘does engage’ in computer network exploitation,” but “does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including ‘cyber’ ” [emphatic asterisks in the original]. That the NSA spies for precisely the economic motive it has denied is proven by its own documents. The agency acts for the benefit of what it calls its “customers,” a list that includes not only the White House, the State Department, and the CIA, but also primarily economic agencies, such as the US Trade Representative and the Departments of Agriculture, Treasury, and Commerce: ~ Glenn Greenwald, #NFDB
635:Children learned about the adult world by participating in it in a small way, by doing a little work and making a little money—a much more effective, because pleasurable, and a much cheaper method than the present one of requiring the adult world to be learned in the abstract in school. One’s elders in those days were always admonishing one to save nickels and dimes, and there was tangible purpose in their advice: With enough nickels and dimes, one could buy a cow or a sow; with the income from a cow or a sow, one could begin to save to buy a farm. This scheme was plausible enough, evidently, for it seemed that all grown-ups had meditated on it. Now, according to the savants of agriculture—and most grown-ups now believe them—one does not start in farming with a sow or a cow; one must start with a quarter of a million dollars. What are the political implications of that economy? I ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
636:Al-Shabaab seemed right about many things. The newsletter said that international aid was brought to ruin Somali agriculture and to make people dependent on foreign food; both had indeed been side effects of the relief effort. They said that the West wanted Somalis to be held in ‘camps, like animals’, which could be an accurate description of Dadaab. Most of all though, it was the rhetorical question posed in the newsletter that had the biggest impact among Guled’s traumatized generation: ‘Why invade a country that has been fighting a civil war for a decade and a half the moment they have decided to live in peace?’ The Islamic Courts Union had brought peace. It had been wildly popular and Somalis resented the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion. ‘The United States cannot abide a situation in which Islam is the solution,’ the newsletter argued. And to many that seemed like the truth. The ~ Ben Rawlence, #NFDB
637:Gates put it to me this way: “For good stuff to happen, it requires a lot of things to go well—you need many pieces to get stability right.” None of it is going to happen overnight, but we need to work with the forces of order that do still exist in the World of Disorder to start building a different trajectory, beginning with all the basics: basic education, basic infrastructure—roads, ports, electricity, telecom, mobile banking—basic agriculture, and basic governance. The goal, said Gates, is to get these frail states to a level of stability where enough women and girls are getting educated and empowered for population growth to stabilize, where farmers can feed their families, and where you “start to get a reverse brain drain” as young people feel that they have a chance to connect to and contribute and benefit from today’s global flows by staying at home and not emigrating. Believe ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
638:call this the “bottom-up” theory of the evolution of social complexity, because it treats social complexity as a sort of “superstructure” on the material resource base. In other words, if you stir enough resources into your evolutionary pot, social complexity will inevitably bubble up. The problem with the bottom-up theory is that in several places where we can date the key stages in this process, we see a different sequence of events. The two sites with early monumental architecture that we discussed in Chapter 1, Göbekli Tepe and Poverty Point, arose before agriculture. So here we have an inverted sequence of events. First, a fairly large-scale society arises, with quite sophisticated ritual activities and buildings requiring the mobilization of large numbers of workers. Only later comes agriculture. Has the standard theory reversed cause and effect? Second, hunter-gatherer societies share food. ~ Peter Turchin, #NFDB
639:Free Trade: The stage of trade policy that followed mercantilist and protectionist success in raising first Britain and then the United States and Germany to industrial and financial dominance. Pulling up the ladder, these leading industrial nations demand that other countries open their markets to lead-nation exports and investment instead of protecting, subsidizing and modernizing their own industry and agriculture. Such “free trade” has become a euphemism for centralizing industrial, agricultural and financial power in the United States, while offshoring employment to the low-wage countries. Academic rationalization of this kind of globalization is based on short-term equilibrium theory that excludes consideration of how protectionist policies may support capital investment to raise productivity over time. Also ignored are “off balance sheet” costs borne by society to clean up environmental pollution ~ Michael Hudson, #NFDB
640:Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. The visitor might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four-hour clock on which one hour of clock-time represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 pm we adopted agriculture. In retrospect, the decision was inevitable, and there is now no question of turning back. But as our second midnight approaches, will the present plight of African peasants gradually spread to engulf all of us? Or, will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us except in mixed form? ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
641:MAKING MARKETS SAFE is one of the oldest problems of market design, going back to well before the invention of agriculture, when hunters traded the ax heads and arrowheads that archaeologists today find thousands of miles from where they were made. More recently, one of the responsibilities of kings in medieval Europe was to provide safe passage to and from markets and fairs. For healthy commerce, buyers and sellers needed to be able to participate in these markets safely, without being waylaid and robbed (or worse) by highwaymen. Indeed, the word waylay captures the act of robbing travelers carrying money or valuables on their way to or from a market. Without some assurance of safe passage, these markets would have failed; they would have been too risky to attract many participants. And if the markets had failed, the kingdoms would have been deprived of the prosperity that markets, and the taxes on them, bring. ~ Alvin E Roth, #NFDB
642:Extractive institutions are so common in history because they have a powerful logic: they can generate some limited prosperity while at the same time distributing it into the hands of a small elite. For this growth to happen, there must be political centralization. Once this is in place, the state—or the elite controlling the state—typically has incentives to invest and generate wealth, encourage others to invest so that the state can extract resources from them, and even mimic some of the processes that would normally be set in motion by inclusive economic institutions and markets. In the Caribbean plantation economies, extractive institutions took the form of the elite using coercion to force slaves to produce sugar. In the Soviet Union, they took the form of the Communist Party reallocating resources from agriculture to industry and structuring some sort of incentives for managers and workers. As we have seen, ~ Daron Acemo lu, #NFDB
643:A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each against each, so brutal and incesssant that it was impossible to develop industry or even agriculture or the arts while that condition persisted. It's this description that culmintes in his famous epithet "And the life of man, solitary, poor, brutish, and short." It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, bot a culture or religion binding togetehr a civilization, only a convenience. Men, in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature... ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
644:It appears to be widely assumed by politicians, executives, academics, public intellectuals, industrial economists, and the like that they have a competent understanding of agriculture because their grandparents were farmers, or they have met some farmers, or they worked on a farm when they were young. But they invoke their understanding, which they do not have, only to excuse themselves from actual thought about actual issues of agriculture. These people have found “inevitability” a sufficient explanation for the deplorable history of industrial agriculture. They see the reason for the present discontent of “blue collar” voters as low or “stagnant” wages. They don’t see, in back of that, the dispossession that made many of them wage-workers in the first place. The loss everywhere of small farms and small towns and the respectable livelihoods that they provided was ruled “inevitable” and thus easily explained and forgotten. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
645:As for all of you who are worried about the hormones in milk and cruelty towards the calf, buy from small farms who look after their cows. And if we had been taught about farming and the basics of agriculture in school, then we would know that if the calf drinks all the milk that the cow produces, it could actually harm him. If you ever visit a farm and observe while a calf drinks off the mother, after a while the cow will push the calf away. This is simply to protect the calf. When it comes to a lactating cow, it’s always two udders for the calf and two for the farmer’s family; the kids will even drink it straight from the udders. This was, and is, a non-cruel, non-harming method for all involved. Indian and African communities knew a thing or two about sustainability long before the word was invented. The ‘untouched by hand’ milk comes from all four udders, so your ‘hygiene’ is coming at the cost of cruelty to the animal. ~ Rujuta Diwekar, #NFDB
646:After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals--and how few they are--gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
647:Let us suppose that such a person began by observing those Christian activities which are, in a sense, directed towards this present world. He would find that this religion had, as a mere matter of historical fact, been the agent which preserved such secular civilization as survived the fall of the Roman Empire; that to it Europe owes the salvation, in those perilous ages, of civilized agriculture, architecture, laws, and literacy itself. He would find that this same religion has always been healing the sick and caring for the poor; that it has, more than any other, blessed marriage; and that arts and philosophy tend to flourish in its neighborhood. In a word, it is always either doing, or at least repenting with shame for not having done, all the things which secular humanitarianism enjoins. If our enquirer stopped at this point he would have no difficulty in classifying Christianity—giving it its place on a map of the ‘great religions. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
648:Now, early in 1865, the war is over. The North does not especially want free Negroes, it wants trade and wealth. The South does not want a particular interpretation of the Constitution. It wants cheap Negro labor and the political and social power based on it. Had there been no Negroes, there would have been no war. Had no Negroes survived the war, peace would have been difficult because of hatred, loss and bitter fried. But its logical path would have been straight.
The South would have returned to its place in congress with less than its former representation because of the growing North and West. These areas of growing manufacture and agriculture, railroad building and corporations, would have held the political power over the South until the South united with the new insurgency of the West or the Eastern democratic ideals. Industrialization might even have brought a third party representing labor and raised the proletariat to dominance. ~ W E B Du Bois,#NFDB
649:Imagine if we had locally supported, collectively organized agriculture, where our apples were grown in--I dunno--Kent, and if you lived in Kent you could buy and eat those apples in Kent. And then someone turned up and said "I've got a better idea! Let me take over yourr orchard and all orchards like it, fly their produce around the globe to be spruced up and then we'll give em back to ya! Sound like a plan?" We'd tell em to fuck off, wouldn't we? Well it has happened, and we didn't because nobody explained it to us. The reason they don't explain this to us is that they know if we find out the extraordinary lengths that they're going to to fuck us over we will overthrow the current system and replace it with something fair. That is why all this important stuff is made to seem inaccessible, boring, and abstract. That is why our participation in politics has been sanded down into an impotent nub: Stick your X into this box and congratulate yourself on being free. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
650:As on Easter Island and at Chaco Canyon, Maya peak population numbers were followed swiftly by political and social collapse. Paralleling the eventual extension of agriculture from Easter Island's coastal lowlands to its uplands, and from the Mimbres floodplain to the hills, Copan's inhabitants also expanded from the floodplain to the more fragile hill slopes, leaving them with a larger population to feed when the agricultural boom in the hills went bust. Like Easter Island chiefs erecting ever larger statues, eventually crowned by pukao, and like Anasazi elite treating themselves to necklaces of 2,000 turquoise beads, Maya kings sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples, covered with thicker and thicker plaster-reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEOs. The passivity of Easter chiefs and Maya kings in the face of the real big threats to their societies completes our list of disquieting parallels. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
651:At a broader level, cultivation theory has been and continues to be useful in understanding the influence of the media metaphorically. The very name of the theory cultivation is a metaphor drawing upon agriculture to help highlight the basic idea of the theory that the media help to create an ordered homogenous reality instead of a disorganized random weed patch reality. There are other metaphors used to understand media’s influence. Gravity has been used to highlight the nonlinear nature of the theory; heavy uses of TV are drawn to the ‘TV reality’ as if TV had a gravitational force. Perhaps the most famous is the metaphor of story telling; TV is the great ‘story teller’ of the current era. Of course, metaphors are used to make certain characteristics of something more salient and often more can be learned about the object of a metaphor by exploring the metaphor in more detail (Collins and Gentner, 1987). We particularly like the storyteller metaphor because it ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
652:Warren Weaver is not a household name, but he may be the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of, actively shaping three of the most important scientific revolutions of the last century—life sciences, information technology, and agriculture. In 1932 Weaver joined the Rockefeller Foundation to lead the division charged with supporting scientific research. Funding was scarce during the Great Depression, and the Rockefeller Foundation, with an endowment nearly twice the size of Harvard’s at the time, was one of the most important patrons of scientific research in the world. Over his three decades at the Rockefeller Foundation, Weaver acted as a banker, talent scout, and kingmaker to support the nascent field of molecular biology, a term he himself coined. Weaver had an uncanny knack for picking future all-stars. Eighteen scientists won Nobel Prizes for research related to molecular biology in the middle of the century, and Weaver had funded all but three of them. ~ Donald Sull, #NFDB
653:You can’t just do whatever you feel like.” “You can’t just do anything you want.” “You have to learn self-restraint.” “You’re only interested in gratifying your desires.” “You don’t care about anything but your own pleasure.” Can you hear the judgmentality in these admonitions? Can you see how they reproduce the mentality of domination that runs our civilization? Goodness comes through conquest. Health comes through conquering bacteria. Agriculture is improved by eliminating pests. Society is made safe by winning the war on crime. On my walk today, students accosted me, asking if I wanted to join the “fight” against pediatric cancer. There are so many fights, crusades, campaigns, so many calls to overcome the enemy by force. No wonder we apply the same strategy to ourselves. Thus it is that the inner devastation of the Western psyche matches exactly the outer devastation it has wreaked upon the planet. Wouldn’t you like to be part of a different kind of revolution? ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
654:Today Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. The income of an average Ethiopian is about one-fortieth that of an average citizen of England. Most people live in rural areas and practice subsistence agriculture. They lack clean water, electricity, and access to proper schools or health care. Life expectancy is about fifty-five years and only one-third of adults are literate. A comparison between England and Ethiopia spans world inequality. The reason Ethiopia is where it is today is that, unlike in England, in Ethiopia absolutism persisted until the recent past. With absolutism came extractive economic institutions and poverty for the mass of Ethiopians, though of course the emperors and nobility benefited hugely. But the most enduring implication of the absolutism was that Ethiopian society failed to take advantage of industrialization opportunities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, underpinning the abject poverty of its citizens today. T ~ Daron Acemo lu, #NFDB
655:Diodorus wrote at great length of the worship of the Goddess Isis (the Greek translation for Au Set), who had incorporated the aspects of both Ua Zit and Hathor. Isis was also closely associated with the Goddess as Nut, who was mythologically recorded as Her mother; in paintings Isis wore the wings of Nekhebt. Diodorus explained that, according to Egyptian religion, Isis was revered as the inventor of agriculture, as a great healer and physician and as the one who first established the laws of justice in the land. He then recorded what we today may find a most startling description of the laws of Egypt, explaining that they were the result of the reverence paid to this mighty Goddess. He wrote, “It is for these reasons, in fact, that it was ordained that the queen should have greater power and honour than the king and that among private persons the wife should enjoy authority over the husband, husbands agreeing in the marriage contract that they will be obedient in all things to their wives. ~ Merlin Stone, #NFDB
656:In urbanisation, the suburbs are just as monocultural (as agriculture), with a lifestyle that maximises the excessive consumption of material goods in an astonishingly wasteful manner and with isolating and individualising social effects. Capital dominates the practices whereby we collectively and even individually relate to nature. It disregards anything other than functionalist aesthetic values. In its ruinous approach to the sheer beauty and infinite diversity of a natural world (of which we are all a part) it exhibits its own utterly barren qualities. If nature is fecund, given over to the perpetual creation of novelty, then capital cuts that novelty into pieces and reassembles the bits into pure technology. Capital carries within itself a dessicating definition not only of the teeming diversity of the natural world but of the tremendous potentiality of human nature to evolve freely its own capacities and powers. Capital's relation to nature and human nature is alienating in the extreme. ~ David Harvey, #NFDB
657:Impoverished Spain depended on imports not only for manufactured products but even for sufficient food. Spanish agriculture was hampered by poor soil and by the strange institution known as the Mesta. Spanish sheep grew high-quality fleeces—not as good as those of English sheep but better than could be found elsewhere—and Spain had, in fact, replaced England as the source of wool for the Flemish and Italian cloth industries. The Mesta was an organization of sheep owners who had royal privileges to sustain migratory flocks of millions of sheep. The flocks moved all across Spain—north in the summer, south in the winter—grazing as they went, making it impossible to farm along their routes.42 When conflicts arose with landowners, the crown always sided with the Mesta on grounds that nothing was more important to the economy than the wool exports. The government’s protection of the Mesta discouraged investments in agriculture, so Spain needed to import large shipments of grain and other foodstuffs. ~ Rodney Stark, #NFDB
658:When corporate-endowed foundations first made their appearance in the United States, there was a fierce debate about their provenance, legality, and lack of accountability. People suggested that if companies had so much surplus money, they should raise the wages of their workers. (People made these outrageous suggestions in those days, even in America.) The idea of these foundations, so ordinary now, was in fact a leap of the business imagination. Non-tax-paying legal entities with massive resources and an almost unlimited brief—wholly unaccountable, wholly nontransparent— what better way to parlay economic wealth into political, social, and cultural capital, to turn money into power? What better way for usurers to use a minuscule percentage of their profits to run the world? How else would Bill Gates, who admittedly knows a thing or two about computers, find himself designing education, health, and agriculture policies, not just for the US government but for governments all over the world?35 ~ Arundhati Roy, #NFDB
659:Dr. Luise Light is a nutrition expert and led the team at the Department of Agriculture that made the original recommendations for the food pyramid. If you review her original recommendations, they sounds very similar to dietary advice given by nutritionists today: lots of vegetables, more lean sources of protein like fish and nuts, and less dairy and processed foods. Those guidelines, according to Dr. Light, did not survive their trip to the office of the Head of the Department of Agriculture. In a 2004 account, she described herself as “shocked” by the changes that were made. Her team placed fruits and vegetables at the base of the pyramid and whole-grain breads and cereals further up. The new guidelines not only switched carbohydrates to the base of the pyramid, it moved processed foods like crackers and corn flakes, which Dr. Light and her team had placed at the top of the pyramid with chocolate, to the base of the pyramid. Even with all the edits, the food pyramid was not released for another 12 years. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
660:I'll tell you something banal.We're emotional illiterates.And not only you and I-practically everybody,that's the depressing thing.We're taught everything about the body and about agriculture in Madagascar and about the square root of pi, or whatever the hell it's called,but not a word about the soul.We're abysmally ignorant,about both ourselves and others.There's a lot of loose talk nowadays to the effect that children should be brought up to know all about brotherhood and understanding and coexistence and equality and everything else that's all the rage just now.But it doesn't dawn on anyone that we must first learn something about ourselves and our own feelings.Our own fear and loneliness and anger.We're left without a chance,ignorant and remorseful among the ruins of our ambitions.To make a child aware of it's soul is something almost indecent.You're regarded as a dirty old man.How can you understand other people if you don't know anything about yourself?Now you're yawning,so that's the end of the lecture. ~ Ingmar Bergman, #NFDB
661:Before researchers become researchers they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create.Doctors should first determine at the fundamental level what it is that human beings depend on for life...
Modern scientific agriculture, on the other hand, has no such vision. Research wanders about aimlessly, each researcher seeing just one part of the infinite array of natural factors which affect harvest yields.
Even though it is the same quarter acre, the farmer must grow his crops differently each year in accordance with variations in weather, insect populations, the condition of the soil, and many other natural factors. Nature is everywhere in perpetual motion; conditions are never exactly the same in any two years.
Modern research divides nature into tiny pieces and conducts tests that conform neither with natural law nor with practical experiences. The results are arranged for the convenience of research, not according to the needs of the farmer. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka,#NFDB
662:The private-equity approach can take the form of simple improvements, such as changing irrigation from antiquated dykes and canal networks to automatic spray systems: these are the equivalent of picking low-hanging fruit. Pricey robots can boost milk per cow by 10-15%. Using “big-data” analytics to plant and cultivate seeds can push crop yields up 5%. “This is an industry where the gap between the top and bottom quartile is greater than anywhere else,” says Detlef Schoen of Aquila Capital, an alternative-investment firm. And yet the 36 agriculture-focused funds, with $15 billion under management, pale in comparison to the 144 funds focused on infrastructure ($89 billion) and 473 targeting real estate ($163 billion), according to Preqin, a data provider. TIAA-CREF, an American financial group, is a market leader with $5 billion in farmland, from Australia to Brazil, and its own agricultural academic centre at the University of Illinois. Canadian pension funds and Britain’s Wellcome Trust are among those bolstering their farming savvy. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
663:Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people. ~ John Adams, #NFDB
664:It is a mistake to confound Alchemy with Chemistry. Modern Chemistry is a science which deals merely with the external forms in which the element of matter is manifesting itself. It never produces anything new. We may mix and compound and decompose two or more chemical bodies an unlimited number of times, and cause them to appear under various different forms, but at the end we will have no augmentation of substance, nor anything more than the combinations of the substances that have been employed at the beginning. Alchemy does not mix or compound anything, it causes that which already exists in a latent state to become active and grow. Alchemy is, therefore, more comparable to botany or agriculture than to Chemistry; and, in fact, the growth of a plant, a tree, or an animal is an alchemical process going on in the alchemical laboratory of nature, and performed by the great Alchemist, the power of God acting in nature. ~ Franz Hartmann, in In the Pronaos of the Temple of Wisdom, containing the History of the True and the False Rosicrucians (1890), p. 129, #NFDB
665:China, despite many imperfections in its economic and political system, has been the most rapidly growing nation of the past three decades. Chinese poverty until Mao Zedong’s death had nothing to do with Chinese culture; it was due to the disastrous way Mao organized the economy and conducted politics. In the 1950s, he promoted the Great Leap Forward, a drastic industrialization policy that led to mass starvation and famine. In the 1960s, he propagated the Cultural Revolution, which led to the mass persecution of intellectuals and educated people—anyone whose party loyalty might be doubted. This again led to terror and a huge waste of the society’s talent and resources. In the same way, current Chinese growth has nothing to do with Chinese values or changes in Chinese culture; it results from a process of economic transformation unleashed by the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who, after Mao Zedong’s death, gradually abandoned socialist economic policies and institutions, first in agriculture and then in industry. Just ~ Daron Acemo lu, #NFDB
666:A comparison between the mitochondrial DNA sequences of the Ainu descended from the Jomon people and the indigenous people of the Andes showed them to be basically the same. Isn't that amazing? If you count the distance from Africa, that's a journey of fifteen thousand miles. And you know what? I don't believe that a power struggle or the declining environment was what pushed them to travel all that way. They just had to see what kind of place the edge of the earth was. I'm sure of it. And the genes encoded with this ridiculously simple impulse remained no matter how many generations passed. Besides, humans never had it in them to settle in one place. And then something called agriculture was invented--'
'So what are you trying to say Sugihara?' asked Sakurai, a gentle smile floating across her lips.
'What I'm trying to say,' I said, looking her in the eyes, 'is that they're really cool, and I want to be like them.'
Her smile grew wider as she said, 'You're just trying to impress me, right?'
I nodded earnestly. ~ Kazuki Kaneshiro,#NFDB
667:Cleave’s desire for simplicity led him to theorize that any cluster of diseases so intimately associated must have a single underlying cause. Darwin’s theory of evolution led Cleave to believe that endemic chronic disease must be caused by a relatively rapid change in our environment to which we had not yet adapted. He called this idea “The Law of Adaptation”: species require “an adequate period of time for adaptation to take place to any unnatural (i.e., new) feature in the environment,” he wrote, “so that any danger in the feature should be assessed by how long it has been there.” The refining of carbohydrates represented the most dramatic change in human nutrition since the introduction of agriculture. “Whereas cooking has been going on in the human race for probably 200,000 years,” Cleave said, “there is no question yet of our being adapted to the concentration of carbohydrates…. Such processes have been in existence little more than a century for the ordinary man and from an evolutionary point of view this counts as nothing at all.” Cleave ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
668:Cyclical time already dominates the experience of nomadic populations because they find the same conditions repeated at every moment of their journey: Hegel notes that “the wandering of nomads is only formal because it is limited to uniform spaces.” The society which, by fixing itself in place locally, gives space a content by arranging individualized places, thus finds itself enclosed inside this localization. The temporal return to similar places now becomes the pure return of time in the same place, the repetition of a series of gestures. The transition from pastoral nomadism to sedentary agriculture is the end of the lazy liberty without content, the beg inning of labor. The agrarian mode of production in general, dominated by the rhythm of the seasons, is the basis for fully constituted cyclical time. Eternity is internal to it; it is the return of the same here on earth. Myth is the unitary construction of the thought which guarantees the entire cosmic order surrounding the order which this society has in fact already realized within its frontiers. ~ Guy Debord, #NFDB
669:Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, recently warned that we may be facing a future in which many of our miracle drugs no longer work. She stated, “A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill.”147 We may soon be past the age of miracles. The director-general’s prescription to avoid this catastrophe included a global call to “restrict the use of antibiotics in food production to therapeutic purposes.” In other words, only use antibiotics in agriculture to treat sick animals. But that isn’t happening. In the United States, meat producers feed millions of pounds of antibiotics each year to farm animals just to promote growth or prevent disease in the often cramped, stressful, and unhygienic conditions of industrial animal agriculture. Yes, physicians overprescribe antibiotics as well, but the FDA estimates that 80 percent of the antimicrobial drugs sold in the United States every year now go to the meat industry. ~ Michael Greger, #NFDB
670:After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of to-day are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals--and how few they are--gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies. The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating; things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation of Nature. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
671:told his students in “The World Since 1914” class that there was little point in discussing the Third World when they knew so little about how their own society works: “So I told them about the USA — really very hair-raising when it is all laid out in sequence: . . . . 1. cosmic hierarchy; 2. energy; 3. agriculture; 4. food; 5. health and medical services; 6. education; 7. income flows and the worship of GROWTH; 8. inflation. . . showing how we are violating every aspect of life by turning everything into a ripoff because we. . . have adopted the view that insatiable individualistic greed must run the world.” 7 He feared “that the students will come to feel that all is hopeless, so I must. . . show them how solutions can be found by holistic methods seeking diversity, de-centralization, communities. . .etc.” 8 Pleased with the class response, he later recalled: “The students were very excited and my last lecture in which I put the whole picture together was about the best lecture I ever gave. That was 10 Dec. [1975], my last full day of teaching after 41 years. ~ Carroll Quigley, #NFDB
672:The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
673:Today an estimated 13 percent of birds are threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. So are 25 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians, in large part because of human activity. Hydropower and road construction imperil China’s giant pandas. The northern bald ibis, once abundant in the Middle East, has been driven almost to extinction by hunting, habitat loss, and the difficulties of doing conservation work in war-torn Syria. Hunting and the destruction of wetlands for agriculture drove the population of North America’s tallest bird, the whooping crane, into the teens before stringent protections along the birds’ migratory route and wintering grounds helped the wild flock build back to a few hundred. Little brown bats are dying off in the United States and Canada from a fungus that might have been imported from Europe by travelers. Of some 300 species of freshwater mussels in North America, fully 70 percent are extinct, imperiled, or vulnerable, thanks to the impacts of water pollution from logging, dams, farm runoff, and shoreline development. ~ Rebecca Skloot, #NFDB
674:The overwhelming consensus is that egalitarian social organization is the de-facto system for foraging societies in all environments. In fact, no other system could work for foraging societies. Compulsory sharing is simply the best way to distribute risk to everyone’s benefit: participation mandatory. Pragmatic? Yes. Noble? Hardly. We believe this sharing behavior extended to sex as well. A great deal of research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy, and psychology points to the same fundamental conclusion: human beings and our hominid ancestors have spent almost all of the past few million years or so in small, intimate bands in which most adults had several sexual relationships at any given time. This approach to sexuality probably persisted until the rise of agriculture and private property no more than ten thousand years ago. In addition to voluminous scientific evidence, many explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists support this view, having penned accounts rich with tales of orgiastic rituals, unflinching mate sharing, and an open sexuality unencumbered by guilt or shame. ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
675:Our ability to believe in supernatural agents may well have begun as an accidental by-product of a hypersensitive agency detection device, but once early humans began believing in such agents, the groups that used them to construct moral communities were the ones that lasted and prospered. Like those nineteenth-century religious communes, they used their gods to elicit sacrifice and commitment from members. Like those subjects in the cheating studies and trust games, their gods helped them to suppress cheating and increase trustworthiness. Only groups that can elicit commitment and suppress free riding can grow. This is why human civilization grew so rapidly after the first plants and animals were domesticated. Religions and righteous minds had been coevolving, culturally and genetically, for tens of thousands of years before the Holocene era, and both kinds of evolution sped up when agriculture presented new challenges and opportunities. Only groups whose gods promoted cooperation, and whose individual minds responded to those gods, were ready to rise to these challenges and reap the rewards. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
676:We need to get beyond our ignorance of the other. We need to move beyond the thinking that white privilege means that all whites live a privileged life. This perspective ignores the reality of class in this country. The plight of poor whites was largely ignored until the last presidential election. According to the 2013 data from the US Department of Agriculture, 40.2 percent of food stamp recipients were white; 25.7 percent, black.4 What’s Their Story? We would do well to hear and learn from the stories of whites, especially those who share the common struggle of poverty and marginalization. In Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance shares his story of growing up poor: “To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”5 When we understand the details of the other’s story we realize that we have much more in common than we ever imagined. ~ John M Perkins, #NFDB
677:West couldn't simply leave the man like this, he didn't have it in him.
"Goodman Heath," he said as he approached, and the peasant looked up at him, surprised. He fumbled for his hat and made to rise, muttering apologies.
"No, please, don't get up." West sat down on the bench. He stared at his feet, unable to look the man in the eye. There was an awkward silence. "I have a friend who sits on the Commission for Land and Agriculture. There might be something he can do for you…" He trailed off, embarrassed, squinting up the corridor.
The farmer gave a sad smile. "I'd be right grateful for anything you could do."
"Yes, yes, of course, I'll do what I can." It would do no good whatsoever, and they both knew it. West grimaced and bit his lip. "You'd better take this," and he pressed his purse into the peasant's limp, calloused fingers. Heath looked at him, mouth slightly open. West gave a quick, awkward smile then got to his feet. He was very keen to be off.
"Sir!" called Goodman Heath after him, but West was already hurrying down the corridor, and he didn't look back. ~ Joe Abercrombie,#NFDB
678:The theme of his life’s work was his effort to bridge this gap. The way to do it was simply to refuse to see anything in isolation. Everything, as he saw it, existed within a context, outside of which it was unintelligible. Moreover, every problem existed within a context, outside of which it was unsolvable. Agriculture, thus, cannot be understood or its problems solved without respect to context. The same applied even to an individual plant or crop. And this respect for context properly set the standard and determined the methodology of agricultural science: The basis of research was obviously to be investigation directed to the whole existence of a selected crop, namely, “the plant itself in relation to the soil in which it grows, to the conditions of village agriculture under which it is cultivated, and with reference to the economic uses of the product”; in other words research was to be integral, never fragmented. 11 If nothing exists in isolation, then all problems are circumstantial; no problem resides, or can be solved, in anybody’s department. A disease was, thus, a symptom of a larger disorder. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
679:One day in his new job he was handed the budget for the Department of Agriculture. “I was like, Oh yeah, the USDA—they give money to farmers to grow stuff.” For the first time, he looked closely at what this arm of the United States government actually does. Its very name is seriously misleading—most of what it does has little to do with agriculture. It runs 193 million acres of national forest and grasslands, for instance. It is charged with inspecting almost all the animals Americans eat, including the nine billion birds a year. Buried inside it is a massive science program, a large fleet of aircraft for firefighting, and a bank with $ 220 billion in assets. It monitors catfish farms. It maintains a shooting range inside its DC headquarters. It keeps an apiary on its roof, to study bee-colony collapse. There’s a drinking game played by people who have worked at the Department of Agriculture: Does the USDA do it? Someone names an odd function of government (say, shooting fireworks at Canada geese that flock too near airport runways) and someone else has to guess if the USDA does it. (In this case, it does.) ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
680:When I first began to criticize small farming, a number of critics (most of them small-scale farmers) roundly condemned me for supporting agribusiness. In my favorite example to date, Joel Salatin, who figures prominently in the grass-fed-beef chapter, condemned my “love affair with confinement hog factories”! This reaction, while wildly inaccurate, is nonetheless important to take seriously. Most notably, it’s almost comically indicative of how narrowly we have framed our options. Joel was serious. His accusation shows that by constricting our choices to animal products sourced from either industrial or nonindustrial operations, by holding up the animal-based alternatives to industrial agriculture as our only alternative, we have silenced discussion of the most fertile, most politically consequential, and most reform-minded choice: eating plants. This alternative to the alternatives changes the entire game of revolutionizing our broken food system. It places the food movement on a new foundation, infuses it with fresh energy, and promotes the only choice that keeps agribusiness executives awake at night. ~ James McWilliams, #NFDB
681:In the last chapter I suggested that humans are, like our primate ancestors, innately equipped to live in dominance hierarchies that can be quite brutal. But if that’s true, then how come nomadic hunter-gatherers are always egalitarian? There’s no hierarchy (at least among the adult males), there’s no chief, and the norms of the group actively encourage sharing resources, particularly meat.26 The archaeological evidence supports this view, indicating that our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years in egalitarian bands of mobile hunter-gatherers.27 Hierarchy only becomes widespread around the time that groups take up agriculture or domesticate animals and become more sedentary. These changes create much more private property and much larger group sizes. They also put an end to equality. The best land and a share of everything people produce typically get dominated by a chief, leader, or elite class (who take some of their wealth with them to the grave for easy interpretation by later archaeologists). So were our minds “structured in advance of experience” for hierarchy or for equality? For hierarchy, ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
682:Whether in their policy of religious tolerance, devising a universal alphabet, maintaining relay stations, playing games, or printing almanacs, money, or astronomy charts, the rulers of the Mongol Empire displayed a persistent universalism. Because they had no system of their own to impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems from everywhere. Without deep cultural preferences in these areas, the Mongols implemented pragmatic rather than ideological solutions. They searched for what worked best; and when they found it, they spread it to other countries. They did not have to worry whether their astronomy agreed with the precepts of the Bible, that their standards of writing followed the classical principles taught by the mandarins of China, or that Muslim imams disapproved of their printing and painting. The Mongols had the power, at least temporarily, to impose new international systems of technology, agriculture, and knowledge that superseded the predilections or prejudices of any single civilization; and in so doing, they broke the monopoly on thought exercised by local elites. ~ Jack Weatherford, #NFDB
683:How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power?
Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer to this fundamental question. The state must be large in territory and self-sufficient in economics, with a balance between industry and agriculture that supported a hardily conformist and ideologically motivated citizenry capable of fulfilling historical prophecies - either Stalinist internal industrialization or Nazi colonial agrarianism. Both Hitler and Stalin aimed at imperial autarky, within a large land empire well supplies in food, raw materials, and mineral resources. Both understood the flash appeal of modern materials: Stalin had named himself after steel, and Hitler paid special attention to is production. Yet both Stalin and Hitler understood agriculture as a key element in the completion of their revolutions. Both believed that their systems would prove their superiority to decadent capitalism, and guarantee independence from the rest of the world, by the production of food.
p. 158 ~ Timothy Snyder,#NFDB
684:Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century."
Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra. ~ Jung Chang,#NFDB
685:The rebirth of China came with a significant move away from one of the most extractive set of economic institutions and toward more inclusive ones. Market incentives in agriculture and industry, then followed by foreign investment and technology, would set China on a path to rapid economic growth. As we will discuss further in the next chapter, this was growth under extractive political institutions, even if they were not as repressive as they had been under the Cultural Revolution and even if economic institutions were becoming partially inclusive. All of this should not understate the degree to which the changes in economic institutions in China were radical. China broke the mold, even if it did not transform its political institutions. As in Botswana and the U.S. South, the crucial changes came during a critical juncture—in the case of China, following Mao’s death. They were also contingent, in fact highly contingent, as there was nothing inevitable about the Gang of Four losing the power struggle; and if they had not, China would not have experienced the sustained economic growth it has seen in the last thirty years. ~ Daron Acemo lu, #NFDB
686:. . . every society that grows extensive lawns could produce all its food on the same area, using the same resources, and . . . world famine could be totally relieved if we devoted the same resources of lawn culture to food culture in poor areas. These facts are before us. Thus, we can look at lawns, like double garages and large guard dogs, [and Humvees and SUVs] as a badge of willful waste, conspicuous consumption, and lack of care for the earth or its people.
Most lawns are purely cosmetic in function. Thus, affluent societies have, all unnoticed, developed an agriculture which produces a polluted waste product, in the presence of famine and erosion elsewhere, and the threat of water shortages at home.
The lawn has become the curse of modern town landscapes as sugar cane is the curse of the lowland coastal tropics, and cattle the curse of the semi-arid and arid rangelands.
It is past time to tax lawns (or any wasteful consumption), and to devote that tax to third world relief. I would suggest a tax of $5 per square metre for both public and private lawns, updated annually, until all but useful lawns are eliminated. ~ Bill Mollison,#NFDB
687:Today I address professionals, business leaders and researchers on how they can contribute with innovative ideas to achieve these ten pillars. These are as follows: 1) A nation where the rural and urban divide has reduced to a thin line. 2) A nation where there is equitable distribution and adequate access to energy and quality water. 3) A nation where agriculture, industry and the service sector work together in symphony. 4) A nation where education with value systems is not denied to any meritorious candidates because of societal or economic discrimination. 5) A nation which is the best destination for the most talented scholars, scientists and investors. 6) A nation where the best of healthcare is available to all. 7) A nation where the governance is responsive, transparent and corruption free. 8) A nation where poverty has been totally eradicated, illiteracy removed and crimes against women and children are absent and no one in the society feels alienated. 9) A nation that is prosperous, healthy, secure, peaceful and happy and follows a sustainable growth path. 10) A nation that is one of the best places to live in and is proud of its leadership. ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
688:In the Palacolithic period, for example, when agriculture was developing, the cult the Mother Goddess expressed a sense that the fertility which was transforming human life was actually sacred.Artists carved those statues depicting her as a naked pregnant woman which archaeologists have found all over Europe, the Middle East and India.The Great Mother remained imaginatively important for centuries.Like the old Sky God, she was absorbed into later pantheons and took her place alongside the older deities.She was usually of powerful of the gods, certainly more powerful than the Sky God, who remained a rather shadowy figure.She was called Inana in ancient Sumeria, Ishtar in Babylon, Anat in Canaan, Isis in Egypt and Aphrodite in Greece, and remarkably similar stories were devised in all these cultures to express her role in the spiritual lives of the people.These myths were not intended to be taken literally but were metaphorical attempts to describe a reality that was too complex and elusive to express in any other way.These dramatic and evocative stories of gods and goddesses helped people to articulate their sense of powerful but forces that surrounded them. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
689:the TTAPS study and the wider debate it ignited helped drive home the absurdity of nuclear strategies dependent on massive deterrence. The United States and the USSR had created a situation where even a limited nuclear conflict would cause a climate disaster that could quite possibly, among other things, collapse global agriculture, dooming civilization as we know it. With these weapons, there was no destroying your enemy without also destroying yourself. It brought to mind Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Cold War dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviets create a “doomsday machine” that will detonate if a nuclear war starts, rendering the entire world uninhabitable. The TTAPS nuclear winter study revealed that we had, unwittingly, built such a machine. These results were widely discussed in the security communities of both superpowers, and are often cited as helping to motivate the partial disarmament that both sides undertook as the Cold War wound down. Anti-Greenhouse In all these studies, Pollack and his collaborators were discovering variations that can be induced, by changes in quantities of gases or suspended particles, in a planetary greenhouse. ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
690:We discover the bumps are milpa, small mounds of earth on which complementary crops were planted. Unlike linear plowing, which encourages water runoff and soil erosion, the circular pattern traps rainfall. Each mound is planted with a cluster of the Three Sisters that were the staples of Indian agriculture: corn, beans, and squash. The corn provided a stalk for the beans to climb, while also shading the vulnerable beans. The ground cover from the squash stabilized the soil, and the bean roots kept the soil fertile by providing nitrogen. As a final touch, marigolds and other natural pesticides were planted around each mound to keep harmful insects away. Altogether it was a system so perfect that in some Central American countries too poor to adopt linear plowing with machinery, artificial pesticides, and monocrops of agribusiness, the same milpa have been producing just fine for four thousand years. 19 Not only that, but milpa can be planted in forests without clear-cutting the trees; at most, by removing a few branches to let sunlight through on a mound. This method was a major reason why three-fifths of all food staples in the world were developed in the Americas. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
691:The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo Sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected.
Yes, Einstein was a badass. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,#NFDB
692:Small families are not a new invention. For most of human history, from about one million years ago until as recently as ten to fifteen thousand years ago, all people lived as hunter-gatherers. Men hunted animals and women foraged for fruit and vegetables. Societies were made up of small, scattered bands of people. They had a good, protein-rich diet and most deaths were due to accident, predation and inter-group warfare rather than disease. The children of hunter-gatherers had an excellent chance of survival. Using nothing but the natural, stress-related methods we have discussed, women gave birth to only three or four children in their lifetime. Of these, two or three survived.
Large families did not appear until about ten thousand years or so ago, when agriculture brought a change of lifestyle. In the most fertile areas, large and concentrated communities developed, living on a carbohydrate-rich diet. Disease and infant mortality were rife. The average number of children was about seven or eight, but double figures were commonplace. Even so, whole families could be wiped out in days by virulent disease. As with the hunter-gatherers, on average, only two or three in each survived. ~ Robin Baker,#NFDB
693:Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, [...] came to teach [the ancient inhabitants of Mexico] the benefits of settled agriculture and the skills necessary to build temples. Although this deity is frequently depicted as a serpent, he is more often shown in human form--the serpent being his symbol and his alter ego--and is usually described as "a tall bearded white man" ... "a mysterious person ... a white man with a strong formation of body, broad forehead, large eyes and a flowing beard." Indeed, [...] the attributes and life history of Quetzalcoatl are so human that it is not improbable that he may have been an actual historical character ... the memory of whose benefactions lingered after his death, and whose personality was eventually deified. The same could very well be said of Oannes--and just like Oannes at the head of the Apkallu (likewise depicted as prominently bearded) it seems that Quetzalcoatl traveled with his own brotherhood of sages and magicians. We learn that they arrived in Mexico "from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles," and that Quetzalcoatl was regarded as having been "the founder of cities, the framer of laws and the teacher of the calendar. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
694:Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people. “It was, in all,” writes McCullough, “a declaration of Adams’s faith in education as the bulwark of the good society, the old abiding faith of his Puritan forebears. ~ Sarah Vowell, #NFDB
695:Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all-and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.
If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from
agriculture-it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we "grow" our lives-we believe that we "make" them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, snake meaning, make money, make a living, make love.
I once heard Alan Watts observe that a Chinese child will ask, "How does a baby grow?" But an American child will ask, "How do you make a baby?" From an early age, we absorb our culture's arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything, reducing the world to mere "raw material" that lacks all value until we impose our designs and labor on it. ~ Parker J Palmer,#NFDB
696:And that’s exactly what was observed. The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
697:Gaia giveth even as she taketh away.
The warming of the global climate over the past century had melted permafrost and glaciers, shifted rainfall patterns, altered animal migratory routes, disrupted agriculture, drowned cities, and similarly necessitated a thousand thousand adjustments, recalibrations and hasty retreats. But humanity's unintentional experiment with the biosphere had also brought some benefits.
Now we could grow oysters in New England.
Six hundred years ago, oysters flourished as far north as the Hudson. Native Americans had accumulated vast middens of shells on the shores of what would become Manhattan. Then, prior to the industrial age, there was a small climate shift, and oysters vanished from those waters.
Now, however, the tasty bivalves were back, their range extending almost to Maine.
The commercial beds of the Cape Cod Archipelago produced shellfish as good as any from the heyday of Chesapeake Bay. Several large wikis maintained, regulated and harvested these beds, constituting a large share of the local economy.
But as anyone might have predicted, wherever a natural resource existed, sprawling and hard of defense, poachers would be found. ~ Paul Di Filippo,#NFDB
698:Cependant, pour les pays les plus avancés, les mesures suivantes pourront assez généralement être applicables :
1 ̊Expropriation de la propriété foncière et confiscation de la rente foncière au profit de l’Etat.
2 ̊Impôt fortement progressif.
3 ̊Abolition de l’héritage.
4 ̊Confiscation de la propriété de tous les émigrants et de tous les rebelles.
5 ̊Centralisation du crédit dans les mains de l’Etat au moyen d’une banque nationale, avec capital de l’Etat, et avec le monopole exclusif.
6 ̊Centralisation dans les mains de l’Etat de tous les moyens de transport.
7 ̊Augmentation des manufactures nationales et des instruments de production, défrichement des terrains incultes et amélioration des terres cultivées d’après un système général.
8 ̊Travail obligatoire pour tous, organisation d’armées industrielles, particulièrement pour l’agriculture.
9 ̊Combinaison du travail agricole et industriel, ; mesures tendant à faire disparaître la distinction entre ville et campagne.
10 ̊Education publique et gratuite de tous les enfants, abolition du travail des enfants dans les fabriques tel qu’il est pratiqué aujourd’hui. Combinaison de l’éducation avec la production matérielle, etc., etc. ~ Karl Marx,#NFDB
699:Many questions come to mind. How influenced by contemporary religions were many of the scholars who wrote the texts available today? How many scholars have simply assumed that males have always played the dominant role in leadership and creative invention and projected this assumption into their analysis of ancient cultures? Why do so many people educated in this century think of classical Greece as the first major culture when written language was in use and great cities built at least twenty-five centuries before that time? And perhaps most important, why is it continually inferred that the age of the "pagan" religions, the time of the worship of female deities (if mentioned at all), was dark and chaotic, mysterious and evil, without the light of order and reason that supposedly accompanied the later male religions, when it has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles and written language were initially developed in societies that worshiped the Goddess? We may find ourselves wondering about the reasons for the lack of easily available information on societies who, for thousands of years, worshiped the ancient Creatress of the Universe. ~ Merlin Stone, #NFDB
700:To preserve the benefits of what is called civilized life, and to remedy at the same time the evil which it has produced ,ought to be considered as one of the first objects of reformed legislation.
Whether that state that is proudly, perhaps erroneously, called civilization, has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested. On one side, the spectator is dazzled by splendid appearances; on the other, he is shocked by extremes of wretchedness; both of which it has erected. The most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized.
To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe. Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state. On the other hand, the natural state is without those advantages which flow from agriculture, arts, sciences and manufactures. -Agrarian Justice ~ Thomas Paine,#NFDB
701:The idea of specific populations predisposed to obesity is encapsulated in a notion now known as the thrifty gene—technically, the thrifty-genotype hypothesis—that is now commonly invoked to explain the existence of the obesity epidemic and why we might all gain weight easily during periods of prosperity but have such difficulty losing it. The idea, initially proposed in 1962 by the University of Michigan geneticist James Neel, is that we are programmed by our genes to survive in the paleolithic hunter-gatherer era that encompassed the two million years of human evolution before the adoption of agriculture—a mode of life still lived by many isolated populations before extensive contact with Western societies. “Such genes would be advantageous under the conditions of unpredictably alternating feast and famine that characterized the traditional human lifestyle,” explained the UCLA anthropologist Jared Diamond in 2003, “but they would lead to obesity and diabetes in the modern world when the same individuals stop exercising, begin foraging for food only in supermarkets and consume three high-calorie meals day in, and day out.” In other words, the human body evolved to be what Kelly Brownell has called an “exquisitely efficient calorie conservation machine. ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
702:First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day—or an entire life—mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone. The evidence that this is hard on us is overwhelming. Although happiness is notoriously subjective and difficult to measure, mental illness is not. Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society—despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology—is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in a society seems to foster it. ~ Sebastian Junger, #NFDB
703:Hunter-gatherer societies have typically been egalitarian, as we'll soon see, throughout hominin history. Inequality emerged when stuff, things to possess and accumulate, was invented following animal domestication and the development of agriculture. The more stuff, reflecting surplus, job specialization, and technological sophistication, the greater the potential inequality. Moreover, inequality expands enormously when cultures invent inheritance within families. Once invented, inequality became pervasive. Among traditional pastoralists or small-scale agricultural societies, levels of wealth inequality match or exceed those in the most unequal industrialized societies. Why have stratified cultures dominated the planet, generally replacing more egalitarian ones? For population biologist Peter Turchin, the answer is that stratified cultures are ideally suited to being conquerors. They come with chains of command. Both empirical and theoretical work suggest that in addition, in unstable environments, stratified societies are better able to survive resource shortages than egalitarian cultures by sequestering mortality to the lower classes. In other words, when times are tough, the unequal access to wealth becomes the unequal distribution of misery and death. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
704:For the vast majority of our time on earth, our species did not buy its food or its clothing or its shelter or its education or its medical healing. We chased down our food, skinned rabbits and deer and buffalo for clothing, found caves and built shelters of buffalo hides attached to tree trunks, and carved limbs and even buffalo bones, and sought out plants that heal. Our elders told the important stories around camp-fires, healers studied plants for their powers and chanted to the heavens for theirs. In short, for 98 percent of our existence as hunter-gatherers, we did not consume. We created. Ten thousand years ago, in a creative discovery that has proven to be a mixed blessing indeed, we started to plant things. We no longer imitated the prairie in the way it seeded itself patiently each year: We hurried the process along and chose to do our own planting. We called this “agriculture.” Agriculture was not a moment of “pure progress” for humankind. It looked like a good deal—we could choose our diets no matter what the game were doing in our neighborhoods; we could stay home more and wander less; we could even have some people do the seeding and growing while others gathered in villages and then cities and were fed by the growers. But we paid a great price for this. Wes ~ Matthew Fox, #NFDB
705:The “dual economy” paradigm, originally proposed in 1955 by Sir Arthur Lewis, still shapes the way that most social scientists think about the economic problems of less-developed countries. According to Lewis, many less-developed or underdeveloped economies have a dual structure and are divided into a modern sector and a traditional sector. The modern sector, which corresponds to the more developed part of the economy, is associated with urban life, modern industry, and the use of advanced technologies. The traditional sector is associated with rural life, agriculture, and “backward” institutions and technologies. Backward agricultural institutions include the communal ownership of land, which implies the absence of private property rights on land. Labor was used so inefficiently in the traditional sector, according to Lewis, that it could be reallocated to the modern sector without reducing the amount the rural sector could produce. For generations of development economists building on Lewis’s insights, the “problem of development” has come to mean moving people and resources out of the traditional sector, agriculture and the countryside, and into the modern sector, industry and cities. In 1979 Lewis received the Nobel Prize for his work on economic development. Lewis ~ Daron Acemo lu, #NFDB
706:Mikael took command. “The gods are not cowards. They have escaped today, but they will return. We must be ready for them.” He looked at Uriel and Gabriel. “You two squabblers try to gather intelligence on where they went. They will be much harder to catch if they become guerilla fighters.” Raguel said, “Mastema has left Assyria in the hands of another. I am needed there.” “And I at Babylon,” said Remiel. “Where did Mastema go?” asked Gabriel. “To the Italian peninsula,” said Raguel. “That doesn’t make any sense,” complained Uriel. “That is a backwater of small Latin villages with undeveloped agriculture. There is no earthly power for him there.” “Maybe that is why he wants it,” said Raphael, the angel who barely spoke. “He can build from the bottom up, and he can engage in his nefarious purposes unmolested for centuries.” Mikael said, “We need to focus on what is happening right now in front of us. I will return to Israel with Raphael. The Rephaim forces are building and the Sons of Rapha have not slackened their pace in hunting down the messiah king.” Saraqael said, “I am called to Syria. That will be Israel’s next trouble, Mikael. They are amassing quite a strength up north.” “Well then,” said Mikael, “let us call upon the name of Yahweh Elohim and ask for strength to face what is coming. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
707:It is true that those of us who have political experience could wrestle for power just as any other politician. But we have no time; we have more important things to do. And there is no doubt that the knowledge we hold to be sacred would be lost in the process. To acquire power, millions of people have to be fed illusions. This too is true: Lenin won over millions of Russian peasants, without whom the Russian Revolution would have been impossible, with a slogan which was at variance with the basic collective tendencies of the Russian party. The slogan was: "Take the land of the large land-owners. It is to be your individual property." And the peasants followed. They would not have offered their allegiance if they had been told in 1917 that this land would one day be collectivized. The truth of this is attested to by the bitter fight for the collectivization of Russian agriculture around 1930. In social life there are degrees of power and degrees of falsity. The more the masses of people adhere to truth, the less power-mongering there will be; the more imbued with irrational illusions the masses of people are, the more widespread and brutal individual power-mongering will be. ~ Wilhelm Reich, #NFDB
708:The “food system,” according to Professor Shaw, now uses 16.5 percent of all energy used in the United States. This 16.5 percent is used in the following ways: On-farm production 3.0% Manufacturing 4.9% Wholesale marketing 0.5% Retail marketing 0.8% Food preparation (in home) 4.4% Food preparation (commercial) 2.9% Apologists for industrial agriculture frequently stop with that first figure—showing that agriculture uses only a small amount of energy, relatively speaking, and that people hunting a cause of the “energy crisis” should therefore point their fingers elsewhere. The other figures, amounting to 13.5 percent of national energy consumption, are more interesting, for they suggest the way the food system has been expanded to make room for industrial enterprise. Between farm and home, producer and consumer, we have interposed manufacturers, a complex marketing structure, and food preparation. I am not sure how this last category differs from “manufacturing.” And I would like to know what percentage of the energy budget goes for transportation, and whether or not Professor Shaw figured in the miles that people now drive to shop. The gist is nevertheless plain enough: The industrial economy grows and thrives by lengthening and complicating the essential connection between producer and consumer. In ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
709:When nations break out of institutional patterns condemning them to poverty and manage to embark on a path to economic growth, this is not because their ignorant leaders suddenly have become better informed or less self-interested or because they’ve received advice from better economists. China, for example, is one of the countries that made the switch from economic policies that caused poverty and the starvation of millions to those encouraging economic growth. But, as we will discuss in greater detail later, this did not happen because the Chinese Communist Party finally understood that the collective ownership of agricultural land and industry created terrible economic incentives. Instead, Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who were no less self-interested than their rivals but who had different interests and political objectives, defeated their powerful opponents in the Communist Party and masterminded a political revolution of sorts, radically changing the leadership and direction of the party. Their economic reforms, which created market incentives in agriculture and then subsequently in industry, followed from this political revolution. It was politics that determined the switch from communism and toward market incentives in China, not better advice or a better understanding of how the economy worked. W ~ Daron Acemo lu, #NFDB
710:What kind of margins should be left at the edges of modern economic sectors so that the unemployed can still do meaningful work, and the poor have opportunities to provide for their own families rather than standing in line waiting for others’ generosity? In the restaurant and grocery sector, with their close links to agriculture, for-profit companies and not-for-profit organizations have partnered to ensure that the abundant leftovers of modern food service become available for the clients of food banks—though these efforts could be much improved by creating opportunities for the dignity of harvest rather than the passivity of handouts. But the practice of margins and gleaning has more than just an economic application. It applies wherever there are dramatic disparities in power. Precisely because our power is the result of genuine image bearing, a genuine human calling to have dominion over the world in God’s name, the human hunger for power is insatiable. We seek greater opportunities to use our gifts for a good reason: we are meant for far more. It is not wrong to want to “expand our territory” (in the words of the Old Testament figure named Jabez). But the more our territory expands, the more we must embrace the disciplines that make room on the margins for others to also exercise their calling to image bearing. ~ Andy Crouch, #NFDB
711:I must study politics and war,” wrote John Adams, “that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” Adams saw clearly that politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the right to pursue your own happiness. That’s politics done right, hard-earned, often by war. And yet the glories yielded by such a successful politics lie outside itself. Its deepest purpose is to create the conditions for the cultivation of the finer things, beginning with philosophy and science, and ascending to the ever more delicate and refined arts. Note Adams’ double reference to architecture: The second generation must study naval architecture—a hybrid discipline of war, commerce and science—before the third can freely and securely study architecture for its own sake. The most optimistic implication of Adams’ dictum is that once the first generation gets the political essentials right, they remain intact to nurture the future. Yet he himself once said that “there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. ~ Charles Krauthammer, #NFDB
712:As Marlboro Man slid open the huge barn doors and flipped on the enormous lights mounted to the beams, my heart began beating quickly. I couldn’t wait to smell its puppy breath.
“Happy wedding,” he said sweetly, leaning against the wall of the barn and motioning toward the center with his eyes. My eyes adjusted to the light…and slowly focused on what was before me.
It wasn’t a pug. It wasn’t a diamond or a horse or a shiny gold bangle…or even a blender. It wasn’t a love seat. It wasn’t a lamp. Sitting before me, surrounded by scattered bunches of hay, was a bright green John Deere riding lawn mower--a very large, very green, very mechanical, and very diesel-fueled John Deere riding lawn mower. Literally and figuratively, crickets chirped in the background of the night. And for the hundredth time since our engagement, the reality of the future for which I’d signed up flashed in front of me. I felt a twinge of panic as I saw the tennis bracelet I thought I didn’t want go poof, disappearing completely into the ether. Would this be how presents on the ranch would always be? Does the world of agriculture have a different chart of wedding anniversary presents? Would the first anniversary be paper…or motor oil? Would the second be cotton or Weed Eater string?
I would add this to the growing list of things I still needed to figure out. ~ Ree Drummond,#NFDB
713:prepare for them.12 It was not a spread-eagle speech, but it probably represented in its earnestness and the honesty of its convictions the highest pitch of eloquence Powell was capable of. His heart was still in the irrigation struggle, and the battle could still be won. While he was telling North Dakota what was good for it and urging it to make maximum use of its streams, the North American Review published a Powell article 13 (the source of Senator Stewart’s learning) pointing up the lessons of the Johnstown flood. It said what only an ethnologist might have been expected to know: that agriculture developed first in arid lands, that irrigation agriculture was historically the first agriculture worthy of the name, that on the Indus and the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile, as well as in the American Southwest, stable civilizations had built themselves on the necessity of controlling streams for irrigation. The only truly agricultural American Indians were desert Indians living in areas where agriculture might have been thought impossible. There was the full hope and expectation, therefore, that the American West would become one of the great agricultural regions of the world, but the hope was predicated on wise use of water and control of the rivers. The Johnstown flood, which had told many Americans that it was fatally dangerous to dam ~ Wallace Stegner, #NFDB
714:We have the money. We've just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion.
Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent - at least when it comes to housing - we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians' canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. ~ Matthew Desmond,#NFDB
715:It wasn’t about me anymore. I had a child. A husband who needed me to be there for him in the midst of what was turning out to be a terrible time to be making a living in agriculture. I didn’t have time to get mired in the angst of my own circumstances anymore. I didn’t have time for the past. My family--my new family--was all that mattered to me. My child. And always and forever, Marlboro Man.
And then he appeared--walking down the basement steps in his Wranglers and rain-drenched boots. He stepped into the basement, a warm, gentle smile on his face. It was Marlboro Man. He was there.
“Hey, Mama…,” he called. “It’s all fine.”
The storm had passed us by, the funnel cloud dissipating before it could do any damage.
“Hey, Daddy,” I answered. It was the first time I’d ever called him that.
Looking on the ground at the water bottles and granola bars, he asked, “What’s all this for?”
I shrugged. “I wasn’t sure how long I’d be down here.”
He laughed. “You’re funny,” he said as he scooped our sleeping baby from my arms and threw the blanket over his shoulder. “Let’s go eat. I’m hungry.” We walked across the yard to our cozy little white house, where we ate pot roast with mashed potatoes and watched The Big Country with Gregory Peck…and spent the night listening to a blessed September thunderstorm send rain falling from the sky. ~ Ree Drummond,#NFDB
716:The obvious question is, what are the “conditions to which presumably we are genetically adapted”? As it turns out, what Donaldson assumed in 1919 is still the conventional wisdom today: our genes were effectively shaped by the two and a half million years during which our ancestors lived as hunters and gatherers prior to the introduction of agriculture twelve thousand years ago. This is a period of time known as the Paleolithic era or, less technically, as the Stone Age, because it begins with the development of the first stone tools. It constitutes more than 99.5 percent of human history—more than a hundred thousand generations of humanity living as hunter-gatherers, compared with the six hundred succeeding generations of farmers or the ten generations that have lived in the industrial age.
It’s not controversial to say that the agricultural period—the last .5 percent of the history of our species—has had little significant effect on our genetic makeup. What is significant is what we ate during the two and a half million years that preceded agriculture—the Paleolithic era. The question can never be answered definitively, because this era, after all, preceded human record-keeping. The best we can do is what nutritional anthropologists began doing in the mid-1980s—use modern-day hunter-gatherer societies as surrogates for our Stone Age ancestors. ~ Gary Taubes,#NFDB
717:We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion.
Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent—at least when it comes to housing—we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. ~ Matthew Desmond,#NFDB
718:How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
719:It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
720:Winston Churchill on Islam: “How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. “Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die. But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome. ~ Robert Spencer, #NFDB
721: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. ~ Ramez Naam,#NFDB
722:How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.” “The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.” “Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities–but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.” –Sir Winston Churchill (The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248–50). ~ Arthur Kemp, #NFDB
723:The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest, most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature known as Homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. That record covers nearly twenty-five hundred years in an unbroken stretch of this animated oddity’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, logic, politics, botany, zoölogy, medicine, geography, theology,—everything, I believe, that lies in the range of human knowledge or speculation. Hence the mind which has attentively canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind, it is an experienced mind. It has come, as Emerson says, into a feeling of immense longevity, and it instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound and weighty experience. Our studies were properly called formative, because beyond all others their effect was powerfully maturing. Cicero told the unvarnished truth in saying that those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children; and if one wished to characterise the collective mind of this present period, or indeed of any period,—the use it makes of its powers of observation, reflection, logical inference,—one would best do it by the one word immaturity. ~ Albert Jay Nock, #NFDB
724:To think of food as a weapon, or of a weapon as food, may give an illusory security and wealth to a few, but it strikes directly at the life of all.
The concept of food-as-weapon is not surprisingly the doctrine of a Department of Agriculture that is being used as an instrument of foreign political and economic speculation. This militarizing of food is the greatest threat so far raised against the farmland and the farm communities of this country. If present attitudes continue, we may expect government policies that will encourage the destruction, by overuse, of farmland. This, of course, has already begun. To answer the official call for more production -- evidently to be used to bait or bribe foreign countries -- farmers are plowing their waterways and permanent pastures; lands that ought to remain in grass are being planted in row crops. Contour plowing, crop rotation, and other conservation measures seem to have gone out of favor or fashion in official circles and are practices less and less on the farm. This exclusive emphasis on production will accelerate the mechanization and chemicalization of farming, increase the price of land, increase overhead and operating costs, and thereby further diminish the farm population. Thus the tendency, if not the intention, of Mr. Butz confusion of farming and war, is to complete the deliverance of American agriculture into the hands of corporations. ~ Wendell Berry,#NFDB
725:These waves, predicted by Einstein, are ripples moving at the speed of light across the fabric of space-time, and are generated by severe gravitational disturbances, such as the collision of two black holes. And that’s exactly what was observed. The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
726:In our earliest history, so far as we can tell, individuals held to an allegiance toward their immediate tribal group, which may have numbered no more than ten or twenty individuals, all of whom were related by consanguinity. As time went on, the need for cooperative behavior--in the hunting of large animals or large herds, in agriculture, and in the development of cities--forced human beings into larger and larger groups. The group that was identified with, the tribal unit, enlarged at each stage of evolution. Today, a particular instant in the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth and in the several-million-year history of mankind, most human beings owe their primary allegiance to the nation-state (although some of the most dangerous political problems still arise from tribal conflicts involving smaller population units). Many visionary leaders have imagined a time when the allegiance of an individual human being is not to his particular nation-state, religion, race, or economic group, but to mankind as a whole; when the benefit to a human being of another sex, race, religion, or political persuasion ten thousand miles away is as precious to us as to our neighbor or our brother. The trend is in this direction, but it is agonizingly slow. There is a serious question whether such a global self-identification of mankind can be achieved before we destroy ourselves with the technological forces our intelligence has unleashed. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
727:I LIVE IN A part of the country that at one time a good farmer could take some pleasure in looking at. When I first became aware of it, in the 1940s, the better land, at least, was generally well farmed. The farms were mostly small and were highly diversified, producing cattle, sheep, and hogs, tobacco, corn, and the small grains; nearly all the farmers milked a few cows for home use and to market milk or cream. Nearly every farm household maintained a garden, kept a flock of poultry, and fattened its own meat hogs. There was also an extensive “support system” for agriculture: Every community had its blacksmith shop, shops that repaired harness and machinery, and stores that dealt in farm equipment and supplies. Now the country is not well farmed, and driving through it has become a depressing experience. Some good small farmers remain, and their farms stand out in the landscape like jewels. But they are few and far between, and they are getting fewer every year. The buildings and other improvements of the old farming are everywhere in decay or have vanished altogether. The produce of the country is increasingly specialized. The small dairies are gone. Most of the sheep flocks are gone, and so are most of the enterprises of the old household economy. There is less livestock and more cash-grain farming. When cash-grain farming comes in, the fences go, the livestock goes, erosion increases, and the fields become weedy. Like ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
728:A good example of a really large-scale anarchist revolution—in fact the best example to my knowledge—is the Spanish revolution in 1936, in which over most of Republican Spain there was a quite inspiring anarchist revolution that involved both industry and agriculture over substantial areas, developed in a way which to the outside looks spontaneous. Though in fact if you look at the roots of it, you discover that it was based on some three generations of experiment and thought and work which extended anarchist ideas to very large parts of the population in this largely pre-industrial—though not totally pre-industrial—society. And that again was, by both human measures and indeed anyone's economic measures, quite successful. That is, production continued effectively; workers in farms and factories proved quite capable of managing their affairs without coercion from above, contrary to what lots of socialists, communists, liberals and others wanted to believe, and in fact you can't tell what would have happened. That anarchist revolution was simply destroyed by force, but during the period in which it was alive I think it was a highly successful and, as I say, in many ways a very inspiring testimony to the ability of poor working people to organize and manage their own affairs, extremely successfully, without coercion and control. How relevant the Spanish experience is to an advanced industrial society. one might question in detail. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
729:The inescapable and troublesome conclusion was that if there was a political entity in tenth-century Judea, it was a small tribal kingdom, and that Jerusalem was a fortified stronghold. It is possible that the tiny kingdom was ruled by a dynasty known as the House of David. An inscription discovered in Tell Dan in 1993 supports this assumption, but this kingdom of Judah was greatly inferior to the kingdom of Israel to its north, and apparently far less developed. The documents from el-Amarna, dating from the fourteenth century BCE, indicate that already there were two small city-states in the highlands of Canaan—Shechem and Jerusalem—and the Merneptah stela shows that an entity named Israel existed in northern Canaan at the end of the thirteenth century BCE. The plentiful archaeological finds unearthed in the West Bank during the 1980s reveal the material and social difference between the two mountain regions. Agriculture thrived in the fertile north, supporting dozens of settlements, whereas in the south there were only some twenty small villages in the tenth and ninth centuries BCE. The kingdom of Israel was already a stable and strong state in the ninth century, while the kingdom of Judah consolidated and grew strong only by the late eighth. There were always in Canaan two distinct, rival political entities, though they were culturally and linguistically related—variants of ancient Hebrew were spoken by the inhabitants of both. ~ Shlomo Sand, #NFDB
730:I opened the front door of my parents’ house the next evening. His starched blue denim shirt caught my eye only seconds before his equally blue eyes did.
“Hello,” he said, smiling.
Those eyes. They were fixed on mine, and mine on his, for more seconds than is customary at the very beginning of a first date. My knees--the knees that had turned to rubber bands that night four months earlier in a temporary fit of illogical lust--were once again as firm as cooked spaghetti.
“Hello,” I answered. I was wearing sleek black pants, a violet V-necked sweater, and spiked black boots--a glaring contrast to the natural, faded denim ensemble he’d chosen. Fashionwise, we were hilariously mismatched. I could sense that he noticed this, too, as my skinny heels obnoxiously clomped along the pavement of my parents’ driveway.
We talked through dinner; if I ate, I wasn’t aware of it. We talked about my childhood on the golf course; about his upbringing in the country. About my dad, the doctor; about his dad, the rancher. About my lifelong commitment to ballet; about his lifelong passion for football. About my brother Mike; about his older brother, Todd, who had died when he was a teenager. About Los Angeles and celebrities; cows and agriculture. By the end of the evening, I had no idea what exactly I’d even said. All I knew was, I was riding in a Ford F250 diesel pickup with a cowboy--and there was nowhere else on earth I wanted to be. ~ Ree Drummond,#NFDB
731:He was waiting in the reception hall, a lone figure lost in the vast, vaulted chamber. The Herrani representative was an elderly man whose thin frame leaned heavily on his walking stick.
Kestrel faltered. She approached more slowly. She couldn’t help looking over his shoulder for Arin.
He wasn’t there.
“I thought the barbarian days of the Valorian empire were over,” the man said dryly.
“What?” said Kestrel.
“You’re barefoot.”
She glanced down, and only then realized that her feet were freezing, that she’d forgotten even the existence of shoes when she’d left her dressing chamber and hurtled through the palace for all to see, for the Valorian guards flanking the reception hall to see right now.
“Who are you?” Kestrel demanded.
“Tensen, the Herrani minister of agriculture.”
“And the governor? Where is he?”
“Not coming.”
“Not…” Kestrel pressed a palm to her forehead. “The emperor issued a summons. To a state function. And Arin declines?” Her anger was folding onto itself in as many layers as her ball gown--anger at Arin, at the way he was committing political suicide.
Anger at herself. At her own bare feet and how they were proof--pure, naked, cold proof--of her hope, her very need to see someone that she was supposed to forget.
Arin had not come.
“I get that disappointed look all the time,” Tensen said in a cheerful tone. “No one is ever excited to meet the minister of agriculture. ~ Marie Rutkoski,#NFDB
732:He was waiting in the reception hall, a lone figure lost in the vast, vaulted chamber. The Herrani representative was an elderly man whose thin frame leaned heavily on his walking stick.
Kestrel faltered. She approached more slowly. She couldn’t help looking over his shoulder for Arin.
He wasn��t there.
“I thought the barbarian days of the Valorian empire were over,” the man said dryly.
“What?” said Kestrel.
“You’re barefoot.”
She glanced down, and only then realized that her feet were freezing, that she’d forgotten even the existence of shoes when she’d left her dressing chamber and hurtled through the palace for all to see, for the Valorian guards flanking the reception hall to see right now.
“Who are you?” Kestrel demanded.
“Tensen, the Herrani minister of agriculture.”
“And the governor? Where is he?”
“Not coming.”
“Not…” Kestrel pressed a palm to her forehead. “The emperor issued a summons. To a state function. And Arin declines?” Her anger was folding onto itself in as many layers as her ball gown--anger at Arin, at the way he was committing political suicide.
Anger at herself. At her own bare feet and how they were proof--pure, naked, cold proof--of her hope, her very need to see someone that she was supposed to forget.
Arin had not come.
“I get that disappointed look all the time,” Tensen said in a cheerful tone. “No one is ever excited to meet the minister of agriculture. ~ Marie Rutkoski,#NFDB
733:On The Conduct Of The World Seeking Beauty Against
Government
Is that the only way we can become like Indians, like Rhinoceri,
like Quartz Crystals, like organic farmers, like what we imagine
Adam & Eve to’ve been, caressing each other with trembling limbs
before the Snake of Revolutionary Sex wrapped itself round
The Tree of Knowledge? What would Roque Dalton joke about lately
teeth chattering like a machine gun as he dabated mass tactics
with his Companeros? Necessary to kill the Yanquis with big bomb
Yes but don’t do it by yourself, better consult your mother
to get the Correct Line of Thought, if not consult Rimbaud once he got his leg cut
off
or Lenin after his second stroke sending a message thru Mrs Krupskaya
to the rude Georgian, & just before his deathly fit when the Cheka aides
outside
his door looked in coldly assuring him his affairs were in good hands no need to
move - What sickness at the
pit of his stomach moved up to
his brain?
What thought Khlebnikov on the hungry train exposing his stomach to the
sun?
Or Mayakovsky before the bullet hit his brain, what sharp propaganda for
action
on the Bureaucratic Battlefield in the Ministry of Collective Agriculture in
Ukraine?
What Slogan for Futurist architects or epic hymn for masses of Communist
Party Card holders in Futurity
on the conduct of the world seeking beauty against Government?
~ Allen Ginsberg,#NFDB
734:Von Thünen’s abstract principles had strikingly concrete geographical consequences. A series of concentric agricultural zones would form around the town, each of which would support radically different farming activities. Nearest the town would be a zone producing crops so heavy, bulky, or perishable that no farmer living farther away could afford to ship them to market. Orchards, vegetable gardens, and dairies would dominate this first zone and raise the price of land—its “rent”—so high that less valuable crops would not be profitable there. Farther out, landowners in the second zone would devote themselves to intensive forestry, supplying the town with lumber and fuel. Beyond the forest, farmers would practice ever more extensive forms of agriculture, raising grain crops on lands where rents fell—along with labor and capital investment—the farther out from town one went. This was the zone of wheat farming. Finally, distance from the city would raise transport costs so high that no grain crop could pay for its movement to market. Beyond that point, landowners would use their property for raising cattle and other livestock, thereby creating a zone of even more extensive land use, with still lower inputs of labor and capital. Land rents would steadily fall as one moved out from the urban market until they theoretically reached zero, where no one would buy land for any price, because nothing it might produce could pay the prohibitive cost of getting to market. ~ William Cronon, #NFDB
735:The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. By contrast, swine, mainstays of European agriculture, transmit anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass diseases to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people. Only a few of De Soto’s pigs would have had to wander off to contaminate the forest. The calamity wreaked by the De Soto expedition, Ramenofsky and Galloway argued, extended across the whole Southeast. The societies of the Caddo, on the Texas-Arkansas border, and the Coosa, in western Georgia, both disintegrated soon after. The Caddo had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After De Soto’s army left the Caddo stopped erecting community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between the visits of De Soto and La Salle, according to Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century, the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today would reduce the population of New York City to 56,000, not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. “That’s one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said to me. “Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
736:Extraits
The Man Closing Up,' from Night Light' (1967),
would make his bed,
If he could sleep on it.
He would make his bed with white sheets
And disappear into the white,
Like a man diving,
If he could be certain
That the light
Would not keep him awake,
The light that reaches
To the bottom.
dour vision of life's journey: from 'Sestina on Six Words by Weldon Kees'
There is no way to ease the burden.
The voyage leads on from harm to harm,
A land of others and of silence.
'The Miami of Other Days'
The winter streets an orchestra of horns
And gods slept under tabernacle tents
That sprang up overnight on circus grounds
Like giant toadstools yearning for respectability.
In a portrait of himself at age seven he writes :
sometimes he would squat among the foul weeds of the vacant lot,
Waiting for dusk and someone dear to come
And whip him down the street, but gently, home.
'Poem to Be Read at 3 A.M.'
Excepting the diner
On the outskirts
The town of Ladora
At 3 A.M.
Was dark but
17
For my headlights
And up in
One second story room
A single light.
A more recent poem on the Great Depression shows his cynical side:
Agriculture embraced Industry,
Mammothly, on public walls.
Meanwhile we camped out underneath
Great smiles on billboards fading.
How shall I speak of Doom, and ours in special,
But as of something altogether common ?
~ Donald Justice,#NFDB
737:This earth carries aboard it many ordinary passengers; and it carries, also, a few very important ones. It is hard to know which people are, or were, or will be which. Great men may come to the door in carpet-slippers, their faces like those of kindly or fretful old dogs, and not even know that they are better than you; a friend meets you after fifteen years and the Nobel Prize, and he is sadder and fatter and all the flesh in his face has slumped an inch nearer the grave, but otherwise he is as of old. They are not very important people.
On the other hand, the president of your bank, the Vice-Chancellor of the—no, not of the Reich, but of the School of Agriculture of the University of Wyoming: these, and many Princes and Powers and Dominions, are very important people; the quality of their voices has changed, and they speak more distinctly from the mounds upon which they stand, making sure that their voices come down to you.
The very important are different from us. Yes, they have more everything. They are spirits whom that medium, the world, has summoned up just as she has the rest of us, but there is in them more soul-stuff, more ego—the spirit of Gog or Magog has been summoned. There is too much ectoplasm: it covers the table, moves on toward the laps of the rest of us, already here, sitting around the table on straight chairs, holding one another's hands in uneasy trust. We push back our chairs, our kinship breaks up like a dream: it is as if there were no longer Mankind, but only men. ~ Randall Jarrell,#NFDB
738:Broward had been vilified by modern environmentalists for his intense assautl on the everglades, but he was considered a staunch conversvationist in his day. he supported strict laws to protect fish, game, birds, and oysters, and his top priority was the reclamation of a swamp for agriculture and envelopment. Brossard never stopped to think what draining the Everglades might do to the fish, game, birds, and oysters that lived there, but hardly anyone did. The conservationist John Giford dedicated his book of Everglades essays to Broward, explaining that “the man who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before is the proverbial public benefactor, bu the man who inaugurates a movement to render 3,000,000 acres of waste land highly productive deserves endless commendation.”
Broward was also a progressive- an anti railroad, anti corporation, anti-Flagler populist. His crusade for Everglades drainage was not just a fight for man against nature; it was a fight for ordinary Floridians angst’s the “seductive and enslaving power of corporate interests” who monopolized state lands without improving them. Flagler and other railroad barons, he complained, were “draining the people instead of the swamps” At a time when the richest one percent of Americans owned halfthe nation’s wealth, when forty-two corporate trusts controlled at least 70 percent of their industries, Broward wanted to turn the Everglades into a place where ordinary people could deprive their lot in life through hard work. That’s what he had done. ~ Michael Grunwald,#NFDB
739:The origin of the caste system, formulated by the great legislator Manu, was admirable. He saw clearly that men are distinguished by natural evolution into four great classes: those capable of offering service to society through their bodily labor (Sudras); those who serve through mentality, skill, agriculture, trade, commerce, business life in general (Vaisyas); those whose talents are administrative, executive, and protective-rulers and warriors (Kshatriyas); those of contemplative nature, spiritually inspired and inspiring (Brahmins). “Neither birth nor sacraments nor study nor ancestry can decide whether a person is twice-born (i.e., a Brahmin);” the Mahabharata declares, “character and conduct only can decide.” 281 Manu instructed society to show respect to its members insofar as they possessed wisdom, virtue, age, kinship or, lastly, wealth. Riches in Vedic India were always despised if they were hoarded or unavailable for charitable purposes. Ungenerous men of great wealth were assigned a low rank in society. Serious evils arose when the caste system became hardened through the centuries into a hereditary halter. Social reformers like Gandhi and the members of very numerous societies in India today are making slow but sure progress in restoring the ancient values of caste, based solely on natural qualification and not on birth. Every nation on earth has its own distinctive misery-producing karma to deal with and remove; India, too, with her versatile and invulnerable spirit, shall prove herself equal to the task of caste-reformation. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
740:Many peoples practiced agriculture, but they were never obsessed by the delusion that what they were doing was *right*, that everyone in the entire world had to practice agriculture, that every last square yard of the planet had to be devoted to it...
If they got tired of being agriculturalists, if they found they didn't like where it was leading them in their particular adaptation, they were *able* to give it up. They didn't say to themselves, 'Well, we've got to keep going at this even if it kills us, because its the *right* way to live.' For example, there was once a people who constructed a vast network of irrigation canals in order to farm the deserts of what is now southeastern Arizona. They maintained these canals for three thousand years and built a fairly advanced civilization, but in the end they were free to say, 'This is a toilsome and unsatisfying way to live, so to hell with it.' They simply walked away from the whole thing and put it so totally out of mind that we don't even know what they called themselves. The only name we have for them is the one the Pima Indians gave them: Hohokam--those who vanished.
But it's not going to be this easy for the Takers. It's going to be hard as hell for them to give it up, because what they're doing is *right*... Giving it up would mean that all along they'd been *wrong*. It would mean they'd *never* known how to rule the world. It would mean relinquishing their pretensions to godhood.... It would mean spitting out the fruit of that tree and giving the rule of the world back to the gods. ~ Daniel Quinn,#NFDB
741:Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in coming decades. Many of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry. They have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited. For example, changes in climate, to which animals and plants cannot adapt, lead them to migrate; this in turn affects the livelihood of the poor, who are then forced to leave their homes, with great uncertainty for their future and that of their children. There has been a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation. They are not recognized by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind, without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever. Sadly, there is widespread indifference to such suffering, which is even now taking place throughout our world. Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
742:Well, it depends which planned economies you mean. There are lots of planned economies―the United States is a planned economy, for example. I mean, we talk about ourselves as a "free market," but that's baloney. The only parts of the U.S. economy that are internationally competitive are the planned parts, the state-subsidized parts―like capital-intensive agriculture (which has a state-guaranteed market as a cushion in case there are excesses); or high-technology industry (which is dependent on the Pentagon system); or pharmaceuticals (which is massively subsidized by publicly-funded research). Those are the parts of the U.S. economy that are functioning well.
And if you go to the East Asian countries that are supposed to be the big economic successes―you know, what everybody talks about as a triumph of free-market democracy—they don't even have the most remote relation to free-market democracy: formally speaking they're fascist, they're state-organized economies run in cooperation with big conglomerates. That's precisely fascism, it's not the free market.
Now, that kind of planned economy "works," in a way―it produces at least. Other kinds of command economies don't work, or work differently: for example, the Eastern European planned economies in the Soviet era were highly centralized, over-bureaucratized, and they worked very inefficiently, although they did provide a kind of minimal safety-net for people. But all of these systems have been very anti-democratic―like, in the Soviet Union, there were virtually no peasants or workers involved in any decision-making process. ~ Noam Chomsky,#NFDB
743:We might be excused our ignorance in this case, because ocean-atmosphere systems are, after all, almost inconceivably complex. Less easy to excuse is our astounding lack of knowledge of much more visible features of our planet’s natural resources and ecology—features that have a direct impact on our well-being. For instance, we know surprisingly little about the state of the planet’s soils. While we have good information for some areas, like the Great Plains of the United States, soil data are sketchy for vast tracts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where billions of people depend directly on agriculture for survival. So we can’t accurately judge how badly we’ve degraded these soils through overuse and poor husbandry, though we do have patchy evidence that the damage is severe and getting worse in many places.18 Similarly, despite extensive satellite photography, our estimates of the rate and extent of tropical deforestation are rudimentary. We know even less about the natural ecology and species diversity inside these forests, where biologists presume most animal and plant species live. As a result, credible figures on the number of Earth’s species range from 5 to 30 million.19 And when it comes to broader questions—questions of how all these components of the planet’s ecology fit together; how they interact to produce Earth’s grand cycles of energy, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur; and how we’re perturbing these components and cycles—we find a deep and pervasive lack of knowledge, with unknown unknowns everywhere. Our ignorance, for all practical purposes, knows no bounds. ~ Thomas Homer Dixon, #NFDB
744:A modern example of this stunning knowledge of nature that Einstein has gifted us, comes from 2016, when gravitational waves were discovered by a specially designed observatory tuned for just this purpose.† These waves, predicted by Einstein, are ripples moving at the speed of light across the fabric of space-time, and are generated by severe gravitational disturbances, such as the collision of two black holes. And that’s exactly what was observed. The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
745:Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there's immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years. And who were the immigrants? Those in the settled world who were cranks, malcontents, restless, heretical, black sheep, hyperactive, hypomanic, misanthropic, itchy, unconventional, yearning to be rich, yearning to be out of their damn boring repressive little hamlet, yearning. Couple that with the second reason - for the majority of its colonial and independent history, America has had a moving frontier luring those whose extreme prickly optimism made merely booking passage to the New World insufficiently novel - and you've got America the individualistic.
Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family's rice. The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it withe slavery. ~ Robert M Sapolsky,#NFDB
746:The Politics of the Bible The key to seeing the political passion of the Bible is hearing and understanding its primary voices in their ancient historical contexts. These contexts are not only literary, but also political. The political context of the Bible is “the ancient domination system,” sometimes also called “the premodern domination system.” Both phrases are used in historical scholarship for the way “this world”—the humanly created world of societies, nations, and empires—was structured until the democratic and industrial revolutions of the past few centuries. Ancient Domination Systems Ancient domination systems began in the 3000s BCE. Two developments account for their emergence. The first was large-scale agriculture and the production of agricultural surpluses, made possible by the invention of metal and metal farm instruments, especially the plow, and the domestication of large animals. The second was the direct result of the first: cities—large concentrations of settled population—became possible. Before large-scale agriculture that produced surpluses, humans lived as nomads or in small settlements that depended on horticulture—gardening—for their sustenance. Cities created the need for a ruling class. One need was a protector class because many people lived outside of cities and knew that cities had food and wealth and were thus apt to attack them. A second need was to order the life of cities. People cannot live in concentrations of thousands without organization. Thus a ruling class of power and wealth emerged. Cities were quickly followed by kingdoms and empires, small and large, all in the same millennium. ~ Marcus J Borg, #NFDB
747:During the war, Monod had joined the Communist Party as a matter of expediency, so that he could join the FTP. But he developed reservations about the Communists’ intolerance of other political views and quietly quit the Party after the war, at a time when many fellow citizens were joining. That might have been the end of Monod’s involvement with Communism, were it not for bizarre developments in the sphere of Soviet science. In the summer of 1948, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, Joseph Stalin’s anointed czar of Soviet agriculture, launched a broad attack on the science of genetics. Lysenko believed that virtually any modification could be made rapidly and permanently to any plant or animal and passed on to its offspring. His belief, while consistent with Soviet doctrine that nature and man could be shaped in any way and were unconstrained by history or heredity, flew in the face of the principles of genetics that had been established over the previous fifty years. Nevertheless, Lysenko demanded that classical genetics, and its supporters, be purged from Soviet biology. Lysenko’s outrageous statements were heralded in Communist-run newspapers in France. Monod responded with a devastating critique that ran on the front page of Combat. Monod exposed Lysenko’s stance on genetics as antiscientific dogma and decried Lysenko’s power as a demonstration of “ideological terrorism” in the Soviet Union. The public scrutiny damaged the credibility of Soviet socialism in France. The episode thrust Monod into the public eye and made him resolve to “make his life’s goal a crusade against antiscientific, religious metaphysics, whether it be from Church or State. ~ Sean B Carroll, #NFDB
748:Think about ethanol again. The benefits of that $7 billion tax subsidy are bestowed on a small group of farmers, making it quite lucrative for each one of them. Meanwhile, the costs are spread over the remaining 98 percent of us, putting ethanol somewhere below good oral hygiene on our list of everyday concerns. The opposite would be true with my plan to have left-handed voters pay subsidies to right-handed voters. There are roughly nine right-handed Americans for every lefty, so if every right-handed voter were to get some government benefit worth $100, then every left-handed voter would have to pay $900 to finance it. The lefties would be hopping mad about their $900 tax bills, probably to the point that it became their preeminent political concern, while the righties would be only modestly excited about their $100 subsidy. An adept politician would probably improve her career prospects by voting with the lefties.
Here is a curious finding that makes more sense in light of what we‘ve just discussed. In countries where farmers make up a small fraction of the population, such as America and Europe, the government provides large subsidies for agriculture. But in countries where the farming population is relatively large, such as China and India, the subsidies go the other way. Farmers are forced to sell their crops at below-market prices so that urban dwellers can get basic food items cheaply. In the one case, farmers get political favors; in the other, they must pay for them. What makes these examples logically consistent is that in both cases the large group subsidizes the smaller group.
In politics, the tail can wag the dog. This can have profound effects on the economy. ~ Charles Wheelan,#NFDB
749:Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it...
Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.
Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step. ~ Peter Watts,#NFDB
750:Cash resources freed up by SNAP not only make it less likely that a household with children will fall behind on rent and utilities, but they also reduce the chances that someone in the house will skip a visit to the doctor because of the cost. Thus, SNAP not only puts food in the stomachs of hungry kids, but it also buffers families from other kinds of hardships. There is a downside to this type of substitution, though. A considerable number of families on SNAP continue to experience what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls “food insecurity,” meaning they run out of food before the month is over. The budgets of these working-poor families are often so tight—and so far in the red—that some level of substitution is needed to avoid eviction and to keep the lights on. For many families, these concerns can outweigh the need to stave off hunger. Families who substitute in this way aren’t breaking the law, not even close. They aren’t even doing anything unethical. They are simply reallocating some of the money they had been spending on food to other uses. Yet trading SNAP for cash—the most common strategy used for survival among the families in this book—is a crime, and a serious one at that. The reason the $2-a-day poor do so anyway is that the practice of substitution doesn’t work for them. They have no cash to spend on food in the first place. Meanwhile, the need to pay the light bill, or even get the kids new socks and underwear, can seem more compelling than the need to eat in a couple of weeks’ time. What’s more, it’s easier for a family with nothing to get food from another source—such as a food pantry—than to acquire those other things from charities. This is why food stamp “trafficking,” though rare among the poor more generally, is common among the $2-a-day poor. ~ Kathryn Edin, #NFDB
751:The first true men had tools and weapons only a little better than those of their ancestors a million years earlier, but they could use them with far greater skill. And somewhere in the shadowy centuries that had gone before they had invented the most essential tool of all, though it could be neither seen nor touched. They had learned to speak, and so had won their first great victory over Time. Now the knowledge of one generation could be handed on to the next, so that each age could profit from those that had gone before.
Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future.
He was also learning to harness the force of nature; with the taming of fire, he had laid the foundations of technology and left his animal origins far behind. Stone gave way to bronze, and then to iron. Hunting was succeeded by agriculture. The tribe grew into the village, the village into the town. Speech became eternal, thanks to certain marks on stone and clay and papyrus. Presently he invented philosophy, and religion. And he peopled the sky, not altogether inaccurately, with gods.
As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful. With stone and bronze and iron and steel he had run the gamut of everything that could pierce and slash, and quite early in time he had learned how to strike down his victims from a distance. The spear, the bow the gun and finally the guided missile had given him weapons of infinite range and all but infinite power.
Without those weapons, often though he had used them against himself, Man would never have conquered his world. Into them he had put his heart and soul, and for ages they had served him well.
But now, as long as they existed, he was living on borrowed time. ~ Arthur C Clarke,#NFDB
752: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. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
753:The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant. This habit began to be important with the rise of agriculture; no animal and no savage would work in the spring in order to have food next winter, except for a few purely instinctive forms of action, such as bees making honey or squirrels burying nuts. In these cases, there is no forethought; there is a direct impulse to an act which, to the human spectator, is obviously going to prove useful later on. True forethought only arises when a man does something towards which no impulse urges him, because his reason tells him that he will profit by it at some future date. Hunting requires no forethought, because it is pleasurable; but tilling the soil is labour, and cannot be done from spontaneous impulse. Civilization checks impulse not only through forethought, which is a self-administered check, but also through law, custom, and religion. This check it inherits from barbarism, but it makes it less instinctive and more systematic. Certain acts are labelled criminal, and are punished; certain others, though not punished by law, are labelled wicked, and expose those who are guilty of them to social disapproval. The institution of private property brings with it the subjection of women, and usually the creation of a slave class. On the one hand the purposes of the community are enforced upon the individual, and, on the other hand the individual, having acquired the habit of viewing his life as a whole, increasingly sacrifices his present to his future. It is evident that this process can be carried too far, as it is, for instance, by the miser. But without going to such extremes, prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
754:Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the heights—the cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts, commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of occupational activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism. The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not society, but the only sort of happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes them intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization. It would be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable in mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional: it is a necessary condition to a high degree of civilization. When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heart—it is simply his duty.... Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence—who make him envious and teach him revenge.... Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of “equal” rights.... What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge.—The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry.... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
755:The newspapers, according to their political colour, urged punishment, eradication, colonisation or a crusade against the newts, a general strike, resignation of the government, the arrest of newt owners, the arrest of communist leaders and agitators and many other protective measures of this sort. People began frantically to stockpile food when rumours of the shores and ports being closed off began to spread, and the prices of goods of every sort soared; riots caused by rising prices broke out in the industrial cities; the stock exchange was closed for three days. It was simply the more worrying and dangerous than it had been at any time over the previous three or four months. But this was when the minister for agriculture, Monsieur Monti, stepped dexterously in. He gave orders that several hundred loads of apples for the newts should be discharged into the sea twice a week along the French coasts, at government cost, of course. This measure was remarkably successful in pacifying both the newts and the villagers in Normandy and elsewhere. But Monsieur Monti went even further: there had long been deep and serious disturbances in the wine-growing regions, resulting from a lack of turnover, so he ordered that the state should provide each newt with a half litre of white wine per day. At first the newts did not know what to do with this wine because it caused them serious diarrhoea and they poured it into the sea; but with a little time they clearly became used to it, and it was noticed that from then on the newts would show a lot more enthusiasm for sex, although with lower fertility rates than before. In this way, problems to do with the newts and with agriculture were solved in one stroke; fear and tension were assuaged, and, in short, the next time there was another government crisis, caused by the financial scandal around Madame Töppler, the clever and well proven Monsieur Monti became the minister for marine affairs in the new cabinet. ~ Karel apek, #NFDB
756:Professor Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and former Chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, goes public over the World Bank’s, “Four Step Strategy,” which is designed to enslave nations to the bankers. I summarise this below, 1. Privatisation. This is actually where national leaders are offered 10% commissions to their secret Swiss bank accounts in exchange for them trimming a few billion dollars off the sale price of national assets. Bribery and corruption, pure and simple. 2. Capital Market Liberalization. This is the repealing any laws that taxes money going over its borders. Stiglitz calls this the, “hot money,” cycle. Initially cash comes in from abroad to speculate in real estate and currency, then when the economy in that country starts to look promising, this outside wealth is pulled straight out again, causing the economy to collapse. The nation then requires International Monetary Fund (IMF) help and the IMF provides it under the pretext that they raise interest rates anywhere from 30% to 80%. This happened in Indonesia and Brazil, also in other Asian and Latin American nations. These higher interest rates consequently impoverish a country, demolishing property values, savaging industrial production and draining national treasuries. 3. Market Based Pricing. This is where the prices of food, water and domestic gas are raised which predictably leads to social unrest in the respective nation, now more commonly referred to as, “IMF Riots.” These riots cause the flight of capital and government bankruptcies. This benefits the foreign corporations as the nations remaining assets can be purchased at rock bottom prices. 4. Free Trade. This is where international corporations burst into Asia, Latin America and Africa, whilst at the same time Europe and America barricade their own markets against third world agriculture. They also impose extortionate tariffs which these countries have to pay for branded pharmaceuticals, causing soaring rates in death and disease. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
757:For example, only some members of a hunting society have the experience of losing their weapons and being forced to fight a wild animal with their bare hands. This frightening experience, with whatever lessons in bravery, cunning and skill it yields, is firmly sedimented in the consciousness of the individuals who went through it. If the experience is shared by several individuals, it will be sedimented intersubjectively, may perhaps even form a profound bond between these individuals. As this experience is designated and transmitted linguistically, however, it becomes accessible and, perhaps, strongly relevant to individuals who have never gone through it. The linguistic designation (which, in a hunting society, we may imagine to be very precise and elaborate indeed—say, “lone, big kill, with one hand, of male rhinoceros,” “lone big kill, with two hands, of female rhinoceros,” and so forth) abstracts the experience from its individual biographical occurrences. It becomes an objective possibility for everyone, or at any rate for everyone within a certain type (say, fully initiated hunters); that is, it becomes anonymous in principle even if it is still associated with the feats of specific individuals. Even to those who do not anticipate the experience in their own future biography (say, women forbidden to hunt), it may be relevant in a derived manner (say, in terms of the desirability of a future husband); in any case it is part of the common stock of knowledge. The objectification of the experience in the language (that is, its transformation into a generally available object of knowledge) then allows its incorporation into a larger body of tradition by way of moral instruction, inspirational poetry, religious allegory, and whatnot. Both the experience in the narrower sense and its appendage of wider significations can then be taught to every new generation, or even diffused to an altogether different collectivity (say, an agriculture society that may attach quite different meanings to the whole business). Language ~ Peter L Berger, #NFDB
758:Commentators, journalists, and, on exceptionally clear days, their audiences are beginning to wonder why it is that with fatal environmental problems bearing down upon us, with global warming threatening agriculture and our minimal ability to feed ourselves, the rich and powerful aren’t more actively attempting to remedy the situation. Worse, why do they so often seem to want to do just the opposite of what is required?
This question is easy to answer if we understand the psychology of the capitalist. Easy and disturbing. The logic of capitalism acknowledges that there will be destructive consequences for its activities. Economists even have a name for it: negative externality. This is also known as “externalizing cost” when it comes time for somebody other than the perpetrator to pay for the damage. It is a secular form of what the generals call “collateral damage,” which means that the wrong person got blown up. Or, as one might say, “We didn’t mean to pollute the river with coal ash. We were only pursuing private prosperity and personal happiness. In the meantime, we’re glad to have someone else pay to fix it.” But what do you do when it’s not a river - when it’s a whole world that has been trashed? Are taxpayers going to have to pay for a new planet?
So the oligarchs and their minions, the so-called 1 percent, aren’t missing anything. They’re not stupid. If they choose to do nothing about looming global catastrophe, it is because they don’t want to do anything. And they do not want to do anything because the threat of destruction is, frankly, not persuasive to them. Those who benefit from capitalism understand that it has always depended on suffering, and they have confidence that if someone is to suffer it won’t be them. “Let the songbirds suffer in my place,” they say. “Or those fucking - what do they call ‘em - manatees. There’s only about ten of them left anyway. And, we admit, the miscellaneous poor will suffer, here and in those faraway countries, but why shouldn’t they suffer? Look at them! They’re rather good at it. Besides, the humans could use a little downsizing.”
Pereat mundus, dum ego salvus sim! ~ Curtis White,#NFDB
759:Japan, a country that had done its best to have no contact with strangers and to seal out the rest of the world. Its economy and politics were dominated by feudal agriculture and a Confucian hierarchical social structure, and they were steadily declining. Merchants were the lowest social class, and trading with foreigners was actually forbidden except for limited contact with China and the Dutch. But then Japan had an unexpected encounter with a stranger—Commodore Matthew Perry—who burst in on July 8, 1853, demanding that Japan’s ports be open to America for trade and insisting on better treatment for shipwrecked sailors. His demands were rebuffed, but Perry came back a year later with a bigger fleet and more firepower. He explained to the Japanese the virtues of trading with other countries, and eventually they signed the Treaty of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854, opening the Japanese market to foreign trade and ending two hundred years of near isolation. The encounter shocked the Japanese political elites, forcing them to realize just how far behind the United States and other Western nations Japan had fallen in military technology. This realization set in motion an internal revolution that toppled the Tokugawa Shogunate, which had ruled Tokyo in the name of the emperor since 1603, and brought Emperor Meiji, and a coalition of reformers, in his place. They chose adaptation by learning from those who had defeated them. They launched a political, economic, and social transformation of Japan, based on the notion that if they wanted to be as strong as the West they had to break from their current cultural norms and make a wholesale adoption of Western science, technology, engineering, education, art, literature, and even clothing and architecture. It turned out to be more difficult than they thought, but the net result was that by the late nineteenth century Japan had built itself into a major industrial power with the heft to not only reverse the unequal economic treaties imposed on it by Western powers but actually defeat one of those powers—Russia—in a war in 1905. The Meiji Restoration made Japan not only more resilient but also more powerful. ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
760:. . .biographers tend to regard as character those elements of personality that remain constant, or nearly so, throughout. . .Like practitioners of fractal geometry, biographers seek patterns that persist as one moves from micro- to macro-levels of analysis, and back again.
. . .
It follows from this that the scale across which we seek similarity need not be chronological. Consider the following incidents in the life of Stalin between 1929 and 1940, arranged not by dates but in terms of ascending horror. Start with the parrot he kept in a cage in his Kremlin apartment. The dictator had the habit of pacing up and down for long periods of time, smoking his pipe, brooding, and occasionally spitting on the floor. One day the parrot tried to mimic Stalin's spitting. He immediately reached into the cage with his pipe and crushed the parrot's head. A very micro-level event, you might well say, so what?
But then you learn that Stalin, while on vacation in the Crimea, was once kept awake by a barking dog. It turned out to be a seeing-eye dog that belonged to a blind peasant. The dog wound up being shot, and the peasant wound up in the Gulag. And then you learn that Stalin drove his independently minded second wife, who tried to talk back to him, into committing suicide. And that he arranged for Trotsky, who also talked back, to be assassinated halfway around the world. And that he arranged as well the deaths of as many of Trotsky's associates that he could reach, as well as the deaths of hundred of thousands of other people who never had anything to do with Trotsky. And that when his own people began to talk back by resisting the collectivization of agriculture, he allowed some fourteen million of them to die from the resulting starvation, exile, or imprisonment.
Again, there's self-similarity across scale, except that the scale this time is a body count. It's a fractal geometry of terror. Stalin's character extended across time and space, to be sure, but what's most striking about it is its extension across scale: the fact that his behavior seemed much the same in large matters, small matters, and most of those that lay in between. ~ John Lewis Gaddis,#NFDB
761:Slavery became a huge, international business, and of course would remain one down to the present moment. It’s estimated that at the midpoint of the fifth century every third or fourth person in Athens was a slave. When Carthage fell to Rome in 146 B.C.E., fifty thousand of the survivors were sold as slaves. In 132 B.C.E. some seventy thousand Roman slaves rebelled; when the revolt was put down, twenty thousand were crucified, but this was far from the end of Rome’s problems with its slaves. But new signs of distress appeared in this period that were far more relevant to our purpose here tonight. For the first time in history, people were beginning to suspect that something fundamentally wrong was going on here. For the first time in history, people were beginning to feel empty, were beginning to feel that their lives were not amounting to enough, were beginning to wonder if this is all there is to life, were beginning to hanker after something vaguely more. For the first time in history, people began listening to religious teachers who promised them salvation. It's impossible to overstate the novelty of this idea of salvation. Religion had been around in our culture for thousands of years, of course, but it had never been about salvation as we understand it or as the people of this period began to understand it. Earlier gods had been talismanic gods of kitchen and crop, mining and mist, house-painting and herding, stroked at need like lucky charms, and earlier religions had been state religions, part of the apparatus of sovereignty and governance (as is apparent from their temples, built for royal ceremonies, not for popular public devotions). Judaism, Brahmanism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and Buddhism all came into being during this period and had no existence before it. Quite suddenly, after six thousand years of totalitarian agriculture and civilization building, the people of our culture—East and West, twins of a single birth—were beginning to wonder if their lives made sense, were beginning to perceive a void in themselves that economic success and civil esteem could not fill, were beginning to imagine that something was profoundly, even innately, wrong with them. ~ Daniel Quinn, #NFDB
762:Gods in The Lost Hero Aeolus The Greek god of the winds. Roman form: Aeolus Aphrodite The Greek goddess of love and beauty. She was married to Hephaestus, but she loved Ares, the god of war. Roman form: Venus Apollo The Greek god of the sun, prophecy, music, and healing; the son of Zeus, and the twin of Artemis. Roman form: Apollo Ares The Greek god of war; the son of Zeus and Hera, and half brother to Athena. Roman form: Mars Artemis The Greek goddess of the hunt and the moon; the daughter of Zeus and the twin of Apollo. Roman form: Diana Boreas The Greek god of the north wind, one of the four directional anemoi (wind gods); the god of winter; father of Khione. Roman form: Aquilon Demeter The Greek goddess of agriculture, a daughter of the Titans Rhea and Kronos. Roman form: Ceres Dionysus The Greek god of wine; the son of Zeus. Roman form: Bacchus Gaea The Greek personification of Earth. Roman form: Terra Hades According to Greek mythology, ruler of the Underworld and god of the dead. Roman form: Pluto Hecate The Greek goddess of magic; the only child of the Titans Perses and Asteria. Roman form: Trivia Hephaestus The Greek god of fire and crafts and of blacksmiths; the son of Zeus and Hera, and married to Aphrodite. Roman form: Vulcan Hera The Greek goddess of marriage; Zeus’s wife and sister. Roman form: Juno Hermes The Greek god of travelers, communication, and thieves; son of Zeus. Roman form: Mercury Hypnos The Greek god of sleep; the (fatherless) son of Nyx (Night) and brother of Thanatos (Death). Roman form: Somnus Iris The Greek goddess of the rainbow, and a messenger of the gods; the daughter of Thaumas and Electra. Roman form: Iris Janus The Roman god of gates, doors, and doorways, as well as beginnings and endings. Khione The Greek goddess of snow; daughter of Boreas Notus The Greek god of the south wind, one of the four directional anemoi (wind gods). Roman form: Favonius Ouranos The Greek personification of the sky. Roman form: Uranus Pan The Greek god of the wild; the son of Hermes. Roman form: Faunus Pompona The Roman goddess of plenty Poseidon The Greek god of the sea; son of the Titans Kronos and Rhea, and brother of Zeus and Hades. Roman form: Neptune Zeus The Greek god of the sky and king of the gods. Roman form: Jupiter ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
763:The combined activities of our enormous population are already producing breathtaking effects. Our planet is only 12,700 kilometers in diameter—about three times the distance between New York and Los Angeles—and we can easily travel halfway around it in less than a day. We have turned much of its land surface into a patchwork of cities, industrial parks, farms, and rangeland. We have laid on this land a web of roads, canals, and pipelines. We have dug out of it hundreds of billions of tons of material, moved this material around, processed it, and dumped it. Our factory ships and trawlers crisscross the world’s oceans to exploit every valuable fishery. Our planes and satellites weave themselves around its sphere. We are moving so much rock and dirt, blocking and diverting so many rivers, converting so many forests to cropland, releasing such huge quantities of heavy metals and organic chemicals into air and water, and generating so much energy, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen compounds that we are perturbing the deepest dynamics of our global ecosystems. Between one-third and one-half of the planet’s land area has been fundamentally transformed by our actions: row-crop agriculture, cities, and industrial areas occupy 10 to 15 percent of Earth’s land surface; 6 to 8 percent has been converted to pasture; and an area the size of France is now submerged under artificial reservoirs. We have driven to extinction a quarter of all bird species. We use more than half of all accessible fresh water. In regions of major human activity, large rivers typically carry three times as much sediment as they did in pre-human times, while small rivers carry eight times the sediment. Along the world’s tropical and subtropical coastlines, our activities—especially the construction of cities, industries, and aquaculture pens—have changed or destroyed 50 percent of mangrove ecosystems, which are vital to the health of coastal fisheries. And about two-thirds of the world’s marine fisheries are either overexploited, depleted, or at their limit of exploitation. The decline of global fish stocks has followed a predictable pattern: like roving predators, we have shifted from one major stock to another as each has reached its maximum productivity and then begun to decline.30 ~ Thomas Homer Dixon, #NFDB
764:The blinking message light on the phone screamed at us when we walked into the bedroom of our suite. Marlboro Man audibly exhaled, clearly wishing the world--and his brother and the grain markets and the uncertainties of agriculture--would leave us alone already. I wish they’d leave us alone, too.
In light of the recent developments, though, Marlboro Man picked up the phone and dialed Tim to get an update. I excused myself to the bathroom to freshen up and put on a champagne satin negligee in an effort to thwart the external forces that were trying to rob me of my husband’s attention. I brushed my teeth and spritzed myself with Jil Sander perfume before opening the door to the bedroom, where I would seduce my Marlboro Man away from his worries. I knew I could win if only I applied myself.
He was just getting off the phone when I entered the room.
“Dammit,” I heard him mumble as he plopped down onto the enormous king-size bed.
Oh no. Jil Sander had her work cut out for her.
I climbed on the bed and lay beside him, resting my head on his arm. He draped his arm across my waist. I draped my leg around his.
He sighed. “The markets are totally in the shitter.”
I didn’t know the details, but I did know the shitter wasn’t a good place.
I wanted to throw out the usual platitudes. Don’t worry about it, try not to think about it, we’ll figure it out, everything will be okay. But I didn’t know enough about it. I knew he and his brother owned a lot of land. I knew they worked hard to pay for it. I knew they weren’t lawyers or physicians by profession and didn’t have a whole separate income to supplement their ranching operation. As full-time ranchers, their livelihoods were completely reliant on so many things outside of their control--weather, market fluctuations, supply, demand, luck. I knew they weren’t home free in terms of finances--Marlboro Man and I had talked about it. But I didn’t understand enough about the ramifications of this current wrinkle to reassure him that everything would be okay, businesswise. And he probably didn’t want me to.
So I did the only thing I could think of to do. I assured my new husband everything would be okay between us by leaning over, turning off the lamp, and letting the love between us--which had zero to do with markets or grains--take over. ~ Ree Drummond,#NFDB
765:Since the launch of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928, tens of thousands of their comrades in the urban centers had been working tirelessly to build power stations, steel mills, and manufacturing plants for heavy machinery. As this historic effort unfolded, it would be essential for the country’s grain-producing regions to do their part—by meeting the increased demand for bread in the cities with leaps in agricultural production. But to pave the way for this ambitious effort, it was deemed necessary to exile a million kulaks—those profiteers and enemies of the common good, who also happened to be the regions’ most capable farmers. The remaining peasants, who viewed newly introduced approaches to agriculture with resentment and suspicion, proved antagonistic to even the smallest efforts at innovation. Tractors, which were meant to usher in the new era by the fleet, ended up being in short supply. These challenges were compounded by uncooperative weather resulting in a collapse of agricultural output. But given the imperative of feeding the cities, the precipitous decline in the harvest was met with increased quotas and requisitions enforced at gunpoint. In 1932, the combination of these intractable forces would result in widespread hardship for the agricultural provinces of old Russia, and death by starvation for millions of peasants in Ukraine. (While many of the young loyalists (like Nina) who joined the udarniks in the countryside would have their faith in the Party tested by what they witnessed, most of Russia, and for that matter the world, would be spared the spectacle of this man-made disaster. For just as peasants from the countryside were forbidden to enter the cities, journalists from the cities were forbidden to enter the countryside; delivery of personal mail was suspended; and the windows of passenger trains were blackened. In fact, so successful was the campaign to contain awareness of the crisis, when word leaked out that millions were starving in Ukraine, Walter Duranty, the lead correspondent for The New York Times in Russia (and one of the ringleaders in the Shalyapin Bar), would report that these rumors of famine were grossly exaggerated and had probably originated with anti-Soviet propagandists. Thus, the world would shrug. And even as the crime unfolded, Duranty would win the Pulitzer Prize.) ~ Amor Towles, #NFDB
766:In the face of this vision, Powell put forth another. What was needed above all else, Powell believed, was to know the land, to understand the land, and to react accordingly. This had practical consequences: while a cow might properly graze on a half-acre in the lush East, it would require fifty times that amount of land in most of the West. It followed that the standard acreage of settlement should be different, and it followed that settlement should take into account sources of water. Powell’s goal with his survey was to clearly map out the western lands, to determine what land could be realistically used for agriculture, which meant also determining where irrigation dams should be placed for best effect. In other words, his goal, to use Wendell Berry’s phrase, was to think about “land use” and to do so on a massive scale. Specifically, Powell wanted to think out the uses of land that would be the most beneficial and fruitful for the human beings living there, and for the entire ecosystem (though that word did not yet exist). From the Mormons, Powell learned how “salutary co-operation could be as a way of life, how much less wasteful than competition.” In the late 1880s, Powell wrote a General Plan for land use in the West that “reached to embrace the related problems of land, water, erosion, floods, soil conservation, even the new one of hydroelectric power” that was based on “the settled belief in the worth of the small farmer and the necessity of protecting him both from speculators and from natural conditions he did not understand and could not combat.” It was a methodical, sensible, scientific approach, essentially a declaration of interdependence between the people and their land, and the miracle is that it came very close to passing into law. But of course it met with fierce opposition from those who stood to profit from exploitation, from the boosters and boomers and politicians who thought it “unpatriotic” to describe the West as dry. After all, how dare he call their garden a desert? What right did he have to come in and determine what only free individuals should? Powell was attacked in the papers, slandered in Congress. According to Stegner, Congressman Thomas M. Patterson of Colorado referred to Powell as “this revolutionist,” and the overall attack on Powell “distinguished itself for bombast and ignorance and bad faith. ~ David Gessner, #NFDB
767:think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble,” he writes. “The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.” Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world; for all smartphones, even the “cheap” ones, the number is somewhere between a quarter and a third. Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started. The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator. ~ David Wallace Wells, #NFDB
768:The principal energy sources of our present industrial civilization are the so-called fossil fuels. We burn wood and oil, coal and natural gas, and, in the process, release waste gases, principally CO2, into the air. Consequently, the carbon dioxide content of the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing dramatically. The possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect suggests that we have to be careful: Even a one- or two-degree rise in the global temperature can have catastrophic consequences. In the burning of coal and oil and gasoline, we are also putting sulfuric acid into the atmosphere. Like Venus, our stratosphere even now has a substantial mist of tiny sulfuric acid droplets. Our major cities are polluted with noxious molecules. We do not understand the long-term effects of our course of action. But we have also been perturbing the climate in the opposite sense. For hundreds of thousands of years human beings have been burning and cutting down forests and encouraging domestic animals to graze on and destroy grasslands. Slash-and-burn agriculture, industrial tropical deforestation and overgrazing are rampant today. But forests are darker than grasslands, and grasslands are darker than deserts. As a consequence, the amount of sunlight that is absorbed by the ground has been declining, and by changes in the land use we are lowering the surface temperature of our planet. Might this cooling increase the size of the polar ice cap, which, because it is bright, will reflect still more sunlight from the Earth, further cooling the planet, driving a runaway albedo* effect? Our lovely blue planet, the Earth, is the only home we know. Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. But the Earth is just right, a heaven for humans. After all, we evolved here. But our congenial climate may be unstable. We are perturbing our poor planet in serious and contradictory ways. Is there any danger of driving the environment of the Earth toward the planetary Hell of Venus or the global ice age of Mars? The simple answer is that nobody knows. The study of the global climate, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are fields that are poorly and grudgingly funded. In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
769:Ireland, like Ukraine, is a largely rural country which suffers from its proximity to a more powerful industrialised neighbour. Ireland’s contribution to the history of tractors is the genius engineer Harry Ferguson, who was born in 1884, near Belfast.
Ferguson was a clever and mischievous man, who also had a passion for aviation. It is said that he was the first man in Great Britain to build and fly his own aircraft in 1909. But he soon came to believe that improving efficiency of food production would be his unique service to mankind. Harry Ferguson’s first two-furrow plough was attached to the chassis of the Ford Model T car converted into a tractor, aptly named Eros. This plough was mounted on the rear of the tractor, and through ingenious use of balance springs it could be raised or lowered by the driver using a lever beside his seat. Ford, meanwhile, was developing its own tractors. The Ferguson design was more advanced, and made use of hydraulic linkage, but Ferguson knew that despite his engineering genius, he could not achieve his dream on his own. He needed a larger company to produce his design. So he made an informal agreement with Henry Ford, sealed only by a handshake. This Ford-Ferguson partnership gave to the world a new type of Fordson tractor far superior to any that had been known before, and the precursor of all modern-type tractors. However, this agreement by a handshake collapsed in 1947 when Henry Ford II took over the empire of his father, and started to produce a new Ford 8N tractor, using the Ferguson system. Ferguson’s open and cheerful nature was no match for the ruthless mentality of the American businessman. The matter was decided in court in 1951. Ferguson claimed $240 million, but was awarded only $9.25 million. Undaunted in spirit, Ferguson had a new idea. He approached the Standard Motor Company at Coventry with a plan, to adapt the Vanguard car for use as tractor. But this design had to be modified, because petrol was still rationed in the post-war period. The biggest challenge for Ferguson was the move from petrol-driven to diesel-driven engines and his success gave rise to the famous TE-20, of which more than half a million were built in the UK. Ferguson will be remembered for bringing together two great engineering stories of our time, the tractor and the family car, agriculture and transport, both of which have contributed so richly to the well-being of mankind. ~ Marina Lewycka,#NFDB
770:en vérité il est très agréable de se réunir, de s’asseoir et de bavarder des intérêts publics. Parfois même je suis prêt à chanter de joie, quand je rentre dans la société et vois des hommes solides, sérieux, très bien élevés, qui se sont réunis, parlent de quelque chose sans rien perdre de leur dignité. De quoi parlent-ils ? ça c’est une autre question. J’oublie même, parfois, de pénétrer le sens de la conversation, me contentant du tableau seul.
Mais jusqu’ici, je n’ai jamais pu pénétrer le sens de ce dont s’entretiennent chez nous les gens du monde qui n’appartiennent pas à un certain groupe. Dieu sait ce que c’est. Sans doute quelque chose de charmant, puisque ce sont des gens charmants. Mais tout cela paraît incompréhensible. On dirait toujours que la conversation vient de commencer ; comme si l’on accordait les instruments. On reste assis pendant deux heures et, tout ce temps, on ne fait que commencer la conversation. Parfois tous ont l’air de parler de choses sérieuses, de choses qui provoquent la réflexion. Mais ensuite, quand vous vous demandez de quoi ils ont parlé, vous êtes incapable de le dire : de gants, d’agriculture, ou de la constance de l’amour féminin ? De sorte que, parfois, je l’avoue, l’ennui me gagne. On a l’impression de rentrer par une nuit sombre à la maison en regardant tristement de côté et d’entendre soudain de la musique. C’est un bal, un vrai bal. Dans les fenêtres brillamment éclairées passent des ombres ; on entend des murmures de voix, des glissements de pas ; sur le perron se tiennent des agents. Vous passez devant, distrait, ému ; le désir de quelque chose s’est éveillé en vous. Il vous semble avoir entendu le battement de la vie, et, cependant, vous n’emportez avec vous que son pâle motif, l’idée, l’ombre, presque rien. Et l’on passe comme si l’on n’avait pas confiance. On entend autre chose. On entend, à travers les motifs incolores de notre vie courante, un autre motif, pénétrant et triste, comme dans le bal des Capulet de Berlioz. L’angoisse et le doute rongent votre coeur, comme cette angoisse qui est au fond du motif lent de la triste chanson russe :
Écoutez... d’autres sons résonnent.
Tristesse et orgie désespérées...
Est-ce un brigand qui a entonné, là-bas, la chanson ?
Ou une jeune fille qui pleure à l’heure triste des adieux ?
Non ; ce sont les faucheurs qui rentrent de leur travail...
Autour sont les forêts et les steppes de Saratov. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky,#NFDB
771:Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place.
Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side.
He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work.
Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder. ~ Jung Chang,#NFDB
772:Economic growth Stalin style was simple: develop industry by government command and obtain the necessary resources for this by taxing agriculture at very high rates. The communist state did not have an effective tax system, so instead Stalin “collectivized” agriculture. This process entailed the abolition of private property rights to land and the herding of all people in the countryside into giant collective farms run by the Communist Party. This made it much easier for Stalin to grab agricultural output and use it to feed all the people who were building and manning the new factories. The consequences of this for the rural folk were calamitous. The collective farms completely lacked incentives for people to work hard, so production fell sharply. So much of what was produced was extracted that there was not enough to eat. People began to starve to death. In the end, probably six million people died of famine, while hundreds of thousands of others were murdered or banished to Siberia during the forcible collectivization. Neither the newly created industry nor the collectivized farms were economically efficient in the sense that they made the best use of what resources the Soviet Union possessed. It sounds like a recipe for economic disaster and stagnation, if not outright collapse. But the Soviet Union grew rapidly. The reason for this is not difficult to understand. Allowing people to make their own decisions via markets is the best way for a society to efficiently use its resources. When the state or a narrow elite controls all these resources instead, neither the right incentives will be created nor will there be an efficient allocation of the skills and talents of people. But in some instances the productivity of labor and capital may be so much higher in one sector or activity, such as heavy industry in the Soviet Union, that even a top-down process under extractive institutions that allocates resources toward that sector can generate growth. As we saw in chapter 3, extractive institutions in Caribbean islands such as Barbados, Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica could generate relatively high levels of incomes because they allocated resources to the production of sugar, a commodity coveted worldwide. The production of sugar based on gangs of slaves was certainly not “efficient,” and there was no technological change or creative destruction in these societies, but this did not prevent them from achieving some amount of growth under extractive institutions. ~ Daron Acemo lu, #NFDB
773:Banjo Dog Variations
Tramps on the road: floating clouds. OLD CHINESE POEM
Agriculture and Industry
Embraced in public on a wall—
Heroes in shirt-sleeves! Next to them
The average man felt small.
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
By Vassar girls surrounded.
They harmonized expertly; oh,
Their little true hearts pounded.
Joe went on smiling.
I thought I saw what Trotsky saw,
A friendly cossack wink;
And then his friends brought down their clubs.
Christ, what would Trotsky think!
Train had just slowed for the crossing when
Out from the bushes jumped a hundred men.
With baseball bats and iron bars
They persuaded us back onto the cars.
11
And out of dirty fists sometimes
Would bloom the melancholy harp.
Then low-low-low on the gon-doh-lah
We swayed beneath our tarp.
And far lights moving in and out of rain.
What you do with the Sunday news
Oh, citizens of the great riffraff,
Is you put the funny papers in your shoes.
It gives the feet a laugh.
We read our brothers’ shirts for lice
And moved around with the fruit,
Went north to Billings for the beets
And had three good days in the jail at Butte.
We chalked our names on red cliffsides,
High up, where only eagles dwelled.
Each time a big truck went by below,
The earth trembled like a woman held.
And we passed fields of smoking stumps
Where goats sometimes or ponies grazed.
Abandoned tractors stood against the sky
Like giant fists upraised.
10
12
But if we bent our knees it was
To drink from a creek’s rust-colored slime,
And splash our chests with it, and rub our eyes,
And wake into another world and time.
11
Let us go then, you and me,
While the neon bubbles upward ceaselessly
To lure us down back streets and alleyways,
Where we may wander and be lost for days.
Many days and many hours.
12
I miss the smell of the ratty furs
And saturday night cologne and beer,
And I miss the juke and the sign that read:
NO POLICE SERVED HERE.
13
Off Mission, wasn’t it? The old
White Angel Breadline, where we met?
You had just come west from Arkansas,
But the rest of it I forget.
A cup of coffee; afterwards a hymn.
14
Once we stood on a high bluff,
Lights fanning out across the bay.
A little ragged band of Christs we were,
13
And tempted—but we turned away.
15
And didn’t I see you Saturday night,
After the paycheck from the mill,
Bearing a pot of store-bought lilies home,
One budding still?
Ah, oh, my banjo dog!
~ Donald Justice,#NFDB
774:Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not.
Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children.
Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions. ~ Patricia Hill Collins,#NFDB
775:A Ballad Of Pikeville
Down in Southern Arizona where the Gila monster thrives,
And the 'Mescalero,' gifted with a hundred thousand lives,
Every hour renounces one of them by drinking liquid flame
The assassinating wassail that has given him his name;
Where the enterprising dealer in Caucasian hair is seen
To hold his harvest festival upon his village-green,
While the late lamented tenderfoot upon the plain is spread
With a sanguinary circle on the summit of his head;
Where the cactuses (or cacti) lift their lances in the sun,
And incautious jackass-rabbits come to sorrow as they run,
Lived a colony of settlers-old Missouri was the State
Where they formerly resided at a prehistoric date.
Now, the spot that had been chosen for this colonizing scheme
Was as waterless, believe me, as an Arizona stream.
The soil was naught but ashes, by the breezes driven free,
And an acre and a quarter were required to sprout a pea.
So agriculture languished, for the land would not produce,
And for lack of water, whisky was the beverage in useCostly whisky, hauled in wagons many a weary, weary day,
Mostly needed by the drivers to sustain them on their way.
Wicked whisky! King of Evils! Why, O, why did God create
Such a curse and thrust it on us in our inoffensive state?
Once a parson came among them, and a holy man was he;
With his ailing stomach whisky wouldn't anywise agree;
So he knelt upon the _mesa_ and he prayed with all his chin
That the Lord would send them water or incline their hearts to gin.
Scarcely was the prayer concluded ere an earthquake shook the land,
And with copious effusion springs burst out on every hand!
Merrily the waters gurgled, and the shock which gave them birth
Fitly was by some declared a temperance movement of the earth.
Astounded by the miracle, the people met that night
To celebrate it properly by some religious rite;
And 'tis truthfully recorded that before the moon had sunk
Every man and every woman was devotionally drunk.
A half a standard gallon (says history) per head
15
Of the best Kentucky prime was at that ceremony shed.
O, the glory of that country! O, the happy, happy folk.
By the might of prayer delivered from Nature's broken yoke!
Lo! the plains to the horizon all are yellowing with rye,
And the corn upon the hill-top lifts its banners to the sky!
Gone the wagons, gone the drivers, and the road is grown to grass,
Over which the incalescent Bourbon did aforetime pass.
Pikeville (that's the name they've given, in their wild, romantic way,
To that irrigation district) now distills, statistics say,
Something like a hundred gallons, out of each recurrent crop,
To the head of population-and consumes it, every drop!
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
776:Though it’s best not to be born a chicken at all, it is especially bad luck to be born a cockerel. From the perspective of the poultry farmer, male chickens are useless. They can’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy, and they’re ornery to the hens that do all the hard work of putting food on our tables. Commercial hatcheries tend to treat male chicks like fabric cutoffs or scrap metal: the wasteful but necessary by-product of an industrial process. The sooner they can be disposed of—often they’re ground into animal feed—the better. But a costly problem has vexed egg farmers for millennia: It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old, when they begin to grow distinctive feathers and secondary sex characteristics like the rooster’s comb. Until then, they’re all just indistinguishable fluff balls that have to be housed and fed—at considerable expense. Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the sex of a day-old bird. When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide. The professional chicken sexer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe. Chicken sexing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity. The bird is cradled in the left hand and given a gentle squeeze that causes it to evacuate its intestines (too tight and the intestines will turn inside out, killing the bird and rendering its gender irrelevant). With his thumb and forefinger, the sexer flips the bird over and parts a small flap on its hindquarters to expose the cloaca, a tiny vent where both the genitals and anus are situated, and peers deep inside. To do this properly, his fingernails have to be precisely trimmed. In the simple cases—the ones that the sexer can actually explain—he’s looking for a barely perceptible protuberance called the “bead,” about the size of a pinhead. If the bead is convex, the bird is a boy, and gets thrown to the left; concave or flat and it’s a girl, sent down a chute to the right. ~ Joshua Foer, #NFDB
777:Kemmer is not always played by pairs. Pairing seems to be the commonest custom, but in the kemmerhouses of towns and cities, groups may form and intercourse take place promiscuously among the males and females of the group. The furthest extreme from this practice is the custom of vowing kemmering (Karh. oskyommer), which is to all intents and purposes monogamous marriage. It has no legal status, but socially and ethically is an ancient and vigorous institution. The whole structure of the Karhidish Clan-Hearths and Domains is indubitably based upon the institution of monogamous marriage. I am not sure of divorce rules in general; here in Osnoriner there is divorce, but no remarriage after either divorce or the partner’s death: one can only vow kemmering once. Descent of course is reckoned, all over Gethen, from the mother, the “parent in the flesh” (Karh. amha). Incest is permitted, with various restrictions, between siblings, even the full siblings of a vowed-kemmering pair. Siblings are not however allowed to vow kemmering, nor keep kemmering after the birth of a child to one of the pair. Incest between generations is strictly forbidden (In Karhide/Orgoreyn; but is said to be permitted among the tribesmen of Perunter, the Antarctic Continent. This may be slander.). What else have I learned for certain? That seems to sum it up. There is one feature of this anomalous arrangement that might have adaptive value. Since coitus takes place only during the period of fertility, the chance of conception is high, as with all mammals that have an estrous cycle. In harsh conditions where infant mortality is great, a race survival value may be indicated. At present neither infant mortality nor the birthrate runs high in the civilized areas of Gethen. Tinibossol estimates a population of not over 100 million on the Three Continents, and considers it to have been stable for at least a millennium. Ritual and ethical absention and the use of contraceptive drugs seem to have played the major part in maintaining this stability. There are aspects of ambisexuality that we have only glimpsed or guessed at, and which we may never grasp entirely. The kemmer phenomenon fascinates all of us Investigators, of course. It fascinates us, but it rules the Gethenians, dominates them. The structure of their societies, the management of their industry, agriculture, commerce, the size of their settlements, the subjects of their stories, everything is shaped to fit the somer-kemmer cycle. Everybody has his holiday once a month; no one, whatever his position, is obliged or forced to work when in kemmer. No one is barred from the kemmerhouse, however poor or strange. Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion. This is easy for us to understand. What is very hard for us to understand is that, four-fifths of the time, these people are not sexually motivated at all. Room is made for sex, plenty of room; but a room, as it were, apart. The society of Gethen, in its daily functioning and in its continuity, is without sex. Consider: ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
778:Kestrel set her cup on its saucer. “I didn’t ask to see you,” she said.
“Too bad.” Arin claimed the chair across from her table in the library in a manner unbearably familiar to her. It was as if the chair had always been his.
He slouched in his seat, tipped his head back, and looked at her from beneath lowered lids. The morning light fired his profile. “Worried, Lady Kestrel?” He spoke in Valorian, his accent roughening his voice. He always pronounced his r’s too low in his throat, so that when he spoke in her tongue everything came across as a soft growl. “Dreading what I’ll say…or do?” He smiled a grim little smile. “No need. I’ll be the perfect gentleman.” He tugged at his cuffs. It was only then that Kestrel noticed that they came too short on his arms and showed his wrists.
It pained her to see his self-consciousness, the way it had suddenly revealed itself. In this light, his gray eyes were too clear. His posture had been confident. His words had had an edge. But his eyes were uncertain. Arin fidgeted again with his cuffs as if there was something wrong with them--with him. No, she would have said. You’re perfect, she wanted to say. She imagined it: how she would reach out to touch Arin’s bare wrist.
That could lead nowhere good.
She was nervous, she was cold. Her stomach was a flurry of snow.
She dropped her hands to her lap.
“No one’s here anyway,” Arin said, “and the librarians are in the stacks. You’re safe enough.”
It was too early for courtiers to be in the library. Kestrel had counted on this, and on the fact that if anyone did turn up and saw her with the Herrani minister of agriculture, such a meeting would excite little interest.
One with Arin, however, was an entirely different story. It was frustrating: his uncanny ability to unsettle her plans--and her very sense of self. She said, “Pressing where you’re not invited seems to be a habit with you.”
“And yours is to put people in their place. But people aren’t gaming pieces. You can’t arrange them to suit yourself.”
A librarian coughed.
“Lower your voice,” Kestrel hissed at Arin. “Stop being so--”
“Inconvenient?”
“Frankly, yes.”
His smile came: quick, true, surprised by itself. Then changing, and slow. “I could be worse.”
“I am sure.”
“I could tell you how.”
“Arin, how is it for you here, in the capital?”
He held her gaze. “I would rather talk about what we were talking about.”
“Arin, how is it for you here, in the capital?”
He held her gaze. “I would rather talk about what we were talking about.”
She arranged her fingers along the studs that pinned green leather to the tabletop. She felt each cool, small, hard nail. The silence inside her was like those nails. What it held down was something sheer: a feeling like fragile silk, billowing up at the sound of his voice.
If she and Arin were to talk about what they had been talking about, that silk could tear free. It would float up. It would catch the light, and cast a colored shadow.
What color would it be, Kestrel wondered, the silk of what she felt?
What would it be like to let it go, let it canopy above her? ~ Marie Rutkoski,#NFDB
779:Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning.
Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica.
[M]en will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.
The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes.
“[H]ighways … in the more advanced sections of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground.
[V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for particular destinations … that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver.
[W]all screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible.
[T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that!
There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect.
Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors.
The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction…. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary “Fortran".
[M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014.
[T]he most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work! in our a society of enforced leisure. ~ Isaac Asimov,#NFDB
780:The situation was similar in the Soviet Union, with industry playing the role of sugar in the Caribbean. Industrial growth in the Soviet Union was further facilitated because its technology was so backward relative to what was available in Europe and the United States, so large gains could be reaped by reallocating resources to the industrial sector, even if all this was done inefficiently and by force. Before 1928 most Russians lived in the countryside. The technology used by peasants was primitive, and there were few incentives to be productive. Indeed, the last vestiges of Russian feudalism were eradicated only shortly before the First World War. There was thus huge unrealized economic potential from reallocating this labor from agriculture to industry. Stalinist industrialization was one brutal way of unlocking this potential. By fiat, Stalin moved these very poorly used resources into industry, where they could be employed more productively, even if industry itself was very inefficiently organized relative to what could have been achieved. In fact, between 1928 and 1960 national income grew at 6 percent a year, probably the most rapid spurt of economic growth in history up until then. This quick economic growth was not created by technological change, but by reallocating labor and by capital accumulation through the creation of new tools and factories. Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. ~ Daron Acemo lu, #NFDB
781:II L'Association bretonne. Il est une institution qui distingue la Bretagne des autres provinces et où se réflète son génie, l'Association bretonne. Dans ce pays couvert encore de landes et de terres incultes, et où il reste tant de ruines des anciens âges, des hommes intelligents ont compris que ces deux intérêts ne devaient pas être séparés, les progrès de l'agriculture et l'étude des monuments de l'histoire locale. Les comices agricoles ne s'occupent que des travaux d'agriculture, les sociétés savantes que de l'esprit; l'Association bretonne les a réunis: elle est à la fois une association agricole et une association littéraire. Aux expériences de l'agriculture, aux recherches archéologiques, elle donne de la suite et de l'unité; les efforts ne sont plus isolés, ils se font avec ensemble; l'Association bretonne continue, au XIXe siècle, l'oeuvre des moines des premiers temps du christianisme dans la Gaule, qui défrichaient le sol et éclairaient les âmes. Un appel a été fait dans les cinq départements de la Bretagne à tous ceux qui avaient à coeur les intérêts de leur patrie, aux écrivains et aux propriétaires, aux gentilshommes et aux simples paysans, et les adhésions sont arrivées de toutes parts. L'Association a deux moyens d'action: un bulletin mensuel, et un congrès annuel. Le bulletin rend compte des travaux des associés, des expériences, des essais, des découvertes scientifiques; le congrès ouvre des concours, tient des séances publiques, distribue des prix et des récompenses. Afin de faciliter les réunions et d'en faire profiter tout le pays, le congrès se tient alternativement dans chaque département; une année à Rennes, une autre à Saint-Brieuc, une autre fois à Vitré ou à Redon; en 1858, il s'est réuni à Quimper. A chaque congrès, des questions nouvelles sont agitées, discutées, éclaircies[1]: ces savants modestes qui consacrent leurs veilles à des recherches longues et pénibles, sont assurés que leurs travaux ne seront pas ignorés; tant d'intelligences vives et distinguées, qui demeureraient oisives dans le calme des petites villes, voient devant elles un but à leurs efforts; la publicité en est assurée, ils seront connus et appréciés. D'un bout de la province à l'autre, de Rennes à Brest, de Nantes à Saint-Malo, on se communique ses oeuvres et ses plans; tel antiquaire, à Saint-Brieuc, s'occupe des mêmes recherches qu'un autre à Quimper: il est un jour dans l'année où ils se retrouvent, où se resserrent les liens d'études et d'amitié. [Note 1: Voir l'Appendice.] Le congrès est un centre moral et intellectuel, bien plus, un centre national: ces congrès sont de véritables assises bretonnes; ils remplacent les anciens États: on y voit réunis, comme aux États, les trois ordres, le clergé, la noblesse et le tiers-état, le tiers-état plus nombreux qu'avant la Révolution, et de plus, mêlés aux nobles et aux bourgeois, les paysans. La Bretagne est une des provinces de France où les propriétaires vivent le plus sur leurs terres; beaucoup y passent l'année tout entière. De là une communauté d'habitudes, un échange de services, des relations plus familières et plus intimes, qui n'ôtent rien au respect d'une part, à la dignité de l'autre. Propriétaires et fermiers, réunis au congrès, sont soumis aux mêmes conditions et jugés par les mêmes lois; souvent le propriétaire concourt avec son fermier. Dans ces mêlées animées, où l'on se communique ses procédés, où l'on s'aide de ses conseils, où l'on distribue des prix et des encouragements, les riches propriétaires et les nobles traitent les paysans sur le pied de l'égalité; ici, la supériorité est au plus habile: c'est un paysan, Guévenoux, qui, en 1857, eut les honneurs du congrès de Redon. Voici quatorze ans que l'Association bretonne existe; l'ardeur a toujours été en croissant; les congrès sont devenus des solennités: on y vient de tous les points ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
782:Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.
Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?
Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.
It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.
To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat?
Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space.
We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment.
But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one.
And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars? ~ Peter Watts,#NFDB
783:It was the general opinion of ancient nations, that the divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men... and modern nations, in the consecrations of kings, and in several superstitious chimeras of divine rights in princes and nobles, are nearly unanimous in preserving remnants of it... Is the jealousy of power, and the envy of superiority, so strong in all men, that no considerations of public or private utility are sufficient to engage their submission to rules for their own happiness? Or is the disposition to imposture so prevalent in men of experience, that their private views of ambition and avarice can be accomplished only by artifice? — … There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous; yet nothing can be inferred from it more than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature: and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven, any more than those at work upon ships or houses, or labouring in merchandize or agriculture: it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses. As Copley painted Chatham, West, Wolf, and Trumbull, Warren and Montgomery; as Dwight, Barlow, Trumbull, and Humphries composed their verse, and Belknap and Ramzay history; as Godfrey invented his quadrant, and Rittenhouse his planetarium; as Boylston practised inoculation, and Franklin electricity; as Paine exposed the mistakes of Raynal, and Jefferson those of Buffon, so unphilosophically borrowed from the Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains those despicable dreams of de Pauw — neither the people, nor their conventions, committees, or sub-committees, considered legislation in any other light than ordinary arts and sciences, only as of more importance. Called without expectation, and compelled without previous inclination, though undoubtedly at the best period of time both for England and America, to erect suddenly new systems of laws for their future government, they adopted the method of a wise architect, in erecting a new palace for the residence of his sovereign. They determined to consult Vitruvius, Palladio, and all other writers of reputation in the art; to examine the most celebrated buildings, whether they remain entire or in ruins; compare these with the principles of writers; and enquire how far both the theories and models were founded in nature, or created by fancy: and, when this should be done, as far as their circumstances would allow, to adopt the advantages, and reject the inconveniences, of all. Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind.
[Preface to 'A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America', 1787] ~ John Adams,#NFDB
784:The Four Ages Of Man: 04 - Middle Age
Childhood and youth forgot, sometimes I've seen,
And now am grown more staid that have been green,
What they have done, the same was done by me:
As was their praise, or shame, so mine must be.
Now age is more, more good ye do expect;
But more my age, the more is my defect.
But what's of worth, your eyes shall first behold,
And then a world of dross among my gold.
When my Wild Oats were sown, and ripe, and mown,
I then receiv'd a harvest of mine own.
My reason, then bad judge, how little hope
Such empty seed should yield a better crop.
I then with both hands graspt the world together,
Thus out of one extreme into another,
But yet laid hold on virtue seemingly:
Who climbs without hold, climbs dangerously.
Be my condition mean, I then take pains
My family to keep, but not for gains.
If rich, I'm urged then to gather more
To bear me out i' th' world and feed the poor;
If a father, then for children must provide,
But if none, then for kindred near ally'd;
If Noble, then mine honour to maintain;
If not, yet wealth, Nobility can gain.
For time, for place, likewise for each relation,
I wanted not my ready allegation.
Yet all my powers for self-ends are not spent,
For hundreds bless me for my bounty sent,
Whose loins I've cloth'd, and bellies I have fed,
With mine own fleece, and with my household bread.
Yea, justice I have done, was I in place,
To cheer the good and wicked to deface.
The proud I crush'd, th'oppressed I set free,
The liars curb'd but nourisht verity.
Was I a pastor, I my flock did feed
And gently lead the lambs, as they had need.
A Captain I, with skill I train'd my band
And shew'd them how in face of foes to stand.
If a Soldier, with speed I did obey
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As readily as could my Leader say.
Was I a laborer, I wrought all day
As cheerfully as ere I took my pay.
Thus hath mine age (in all) sometimes done well;
Sometimes mine age (in all) been worse than hell.
In meanness, greatness, riches, poverty
Did toil, did broil; oppress'd, did steal and lie.
Was I as poor as poverty could be,
Then baseness was companion unto me.
Such scum as Hedges and High-ways do yield,
As neither sow, nor reap, nor plant, nor build.
If to Agriculture I was ordain'd,
Great labours, sorrows, crosses I sustain'd.
The early Cock did summon, but in vain,
My wakeful thoughts up to my painful gain.
For restless day and night, I'm robb'd of sleep
By cankered care, who sentinel doth keep.
My weary breast rest from his toil can find,
But if I rest, the more distrest my mind.
If happiness my sordidness hath found,
'Twas in the crop of my manured ground:
My fatted Ox, and my exuberous Cow,
My fleeced Ewe, and ever farrowing Sow.
To greater things I never did aspire,
My dunghill thoughts or hopes could reach no higher.
If to be rich, or great, it was my fate.
How was I broil'd with envy, and with hate?
Greater than was the great'st was my desire,
And greater still, did set my heart on fire.
If honour was the point to which I steer'd,
To run my hull upon disgrace I fear'd,
But by ambitious sails I was so carried
That over flats, and sands, and rocks I hurried,
Opprest, and sunk, and sack'd, all in my way
That did oppose me to my longed bay.
My thirst was higher than Nobility
And oft long'd sore to taste on Royalty,
Whence poison, Pistols, and dread instruments
Have been curst furtherers of mine intents.
Nor Brothers, Nephews, Sons, nor Sires I've spar'd.
When to a Monarchy my way they barr'd,
There set, I rid my self straight out of hand
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Of such as might my son, or his withstand,
Then heapt up gold and riches as the clay,
Which others scatter like the dew in May.
Sometimes vain-glory is the only bait
Whereby my empty school is lur'd and caught.
Be I of worth, of learning, or of parts,
I judge I should have room in all men's hearts;
And envy gnaws if any do surmount.
I hate for to be had in small account.
If Bias like, I'm stript unto my skin;
I glory in my wealth I have within.
Thus good, and bad, and what I am, you see,
Now in a word, what my diseases be:
The vexing Stone, in bladder and in reins,
Torments me with intolerable pains;
The windy cholic oft my bowels rend,
To break the darksome prison, where it's penn'd;
The knotty Gout doth sadly torture me,
And the restraining lame Sciatica;
The Quinsy and the Fevers often distaste me,
And the Consumption to the bones doth waste me,
Subject to all Diseases, that's the truth,
Though some more incident to age, or youth;
And to conclude, I may not tedious be,
Man at his best estate is vanity.
~ Anne Bradstreet,#NFDB
785:Aspirants Three
DRAMATIS PERSONAE.
_QUICK_:
DE YOUNG _a Brother to Mushrooms_
_DEAD_:
SWIFT _an Heirloom_
ESTEE _a Relic_
_IMMORTALS_:
THE SPIRIT OF BROKEN HOPES. THE AUTHOR.
_MISCELLANEOUS_:
A TROUPE OF COFFINS. THE MOON. VARIOUS COLORED FIRES.
_Scene_-The Political Graveyard at Bone Mountain.
DE YOUNG:
This is the spot agreed upon. Here rest
The sainted statesman who upon the field
Of honor have at various times laid down
Their own, and ended, ignominious,
Their lives political. About me, lo!
Their silent headstones, gilded by the moon,
Half-full and near her setting-midnight. Hark!
Through the white mists of this portentous night
(Which throng in moving shapes about my way,
As they were ghosts of candidates I've slain,
To fray their murderer) my open ear,
Spacious to maw the noises of the world,
Engulfs a footstep.
(_Enter Estee from his tomb._)
Ah, 'tis he, my foe,
True to appointment; and so here we fight
Though truly 'twas my firm belief that he
Would send regrets, or I had not been here.
179
ESTEE:
O moon that hast so oft surprised the deeds
Whereby I rose to greatness!-tricksy orb,
The type and symbol of my politics,
Now draw my ebbing fortunes to their flood,
As, by the magic of a poultice, boils
That burn ambitions with defeated fires
Are lifted into eminence.
(_Sees De Young._)
What? you!
Faith, if I had suspected you would come
From the fair world of politics wherein
So lately you were whelped, and which, alas,
I vainly to revisit strive, though still
Rapped on the rotting head and bidden sleep
Till Resurrection's morn,-if I had thought
You would accept the challenge that I flung
I would have seen you damned ere I came forth
In the night air, shroud-clad and shivering,
To fight so mean a thing! But since you're here,
Draw and defend yourself. By gad, we'll _see_
Who'll be Postmaster-General!
DE YOUNG:
We willI'll fight (for I am lame) with any blue
And redolent remain that dares aspire
To wreck the Grand Old Grandson's cabinet.
Here's at you, nosegay!
(_They draw tongues and are about to fight, when from an
adjacent whited sepulcher, enter Swift._)
SWIFT:
Hold! put up your tongues!
Within the confines of this sacred spot
Broods such a holy calm as none may break
By clash of weapons, without sacrilege.
180
(_Beats down their tongues with a bone._)
Madmen! what profits it? For though you fought
With such heroic skill that both survived,
Yet neither should achieve the prize, for I
Would wrest it from him. Let us not contend,
But friendliwise by stipulation fix
A slate for mutual advantage. Why,
Having the pick and choice of seats, should we
Forego them all but one? Nay, we'll take three,
And part them so among us that to each
Shall fall the fittest to his powers. In brief,
Let us establish a Portfolio Trust.
ESTEE:
Agreed.
DE YOUNG:
Aye, truly, 'tis a greed-and one
The offices imperfectly will sate,
But I'll stand in.
SWIFT:
Well, so 'tis understood,
As you're the junior member of the Trust,
Politically younger and undead,
Speak, Michael: what portfolio do you choose?
DE YOUNG:
I've thought the Postal service best would serve
My interest; but since I have my pick,
I'll take the War Department. It is known
Throughout the world, from Market street to Pine,
(For a Chicago journal told the tale)
How in this hand I lately took my life
And marched against great Buckley, thundering
My mandate that he count the ballots fair!
Earth heard and shrank to half her size! Yon moon,
Which rivaled then a liver's whiteness, paused
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That night at Butchertown and daubed her face
With sheep's blood! Then my serried rank I drew
Back to my stronghold without loss. To mark
My care in saving human life and limb,
The Peace Society bestowed on me
Its leather medal and the title, too,
Of Colonel. Yes, my genius is for war. Good land!
I naturally dote on a brass band!
(_Sings._)
O, give me a life on the tented field,
Where the cannon roar and ring,
Where the flag floats free and the foemen yield
And bleed as the bullets sing.
But be it not mine to wage the fray
Where matters are ordered the other way,
For that is a different thing.
O, give me a life in the fierce campaignLet it be the life of my foe:
I'd rather fall upon him than the plain;
That service I'd fain forego.
O, a warrior's life is fine and free,
But a warrior's death-ah me! ah me!
That's a different thing, you know.
ESTEE:
Some claim I might myself advance to that
Portfolio. When Rebellion raised its head,
And you, my friends, stayed meekly in your shirts,
I marched with banners to the party stump,
Spat on my hands, made faces fierce as death,
Shook my two fists at once and introduced
Brave resolutions terrible to read!
Nay, only recently, as you do know,
I conquered Treason by the word of mouth,
And slew, with Samson's weapon, the whole South!
SWIFT:
182
You once fought Stanford, too.
ESTEE:
Enough of thatGive me the Interior and I'll devote
My mind to agriculture and improve
The breed of cabbages, especially
The _Brassica Celeritatis_, named
For _you_ because in days of long ago
You sold it at your market stall,-and, faith,
'Tis said you were an honest huckster then.
I'll be Attorney-General if you
Prefer; for know I am a lawyer too!
SWIFT:
I never have heard that!-did you, De Young?
DE YOUNG:
Never, so help me! And I swear I've heard
A score of Judges say that he is not.
SWIFT (_to Estee_):
You take the Interior. I might aspire
To military station too, for once
I led my party into Pixley's camp,
And he paroled me. I defended, too,
The State of Oregon against the sharp
And bloody tooth of the Australian sheep.
But I've an aptitude exceeding neat
For bloodless battles of diplomacy.
My cobweb treaty of Exclusion once,
Through which a hundred thousand coolies sailed,
Was much admired, but most by Colonel Bee.
Though born a tinker I'm a diplomat
From old Missouri, and I-ha! what's that?
(_Exit Moon. Enter Blue Lights on all the tombs, and a circle of Red Fire on the
grass; in the center the Spirit of Broken Hopes, and round about, a Troupe of
183
Coffins, dancing and singing._)
CHORUS OF COFFINS:
Two bodies dead and one aliveYo, ho, merrily all!
Now for boodle strain and striveBuzzards all a-warble, O!
Prophets three, agape for bread;
Raven with a stone insteadProvidential raven!
Judges two and Colonel oneRun, run, rustics, run!
But it's O, the pig is shaven,
And oily, oily all!
(_Exeunt Coffins, dancing. The Spirit of Broken Hopes advances, solemnly
pointing at each of the Three Worthies in turn._)
SPIRIT OF BROKEN HOPES:
Governor, Governor, editor man,
Rusty, musty, spick-and-span,
Harlequin, harridan, dicky-dout,
Demagogue, charlatan-o, u, t, OUT!
(_De Young falls and sleeps._)
Antimonopoler, diplomat,
Railroad lackey, political rat,
One, two, three-SCAT!
(_Swift falls and sleeps._)
Boycotting chin-worker, working to woo
Fortune, the fickle, to smile upon _you_,
Jo-coated acrobat, shuttle-cock-SHOO!
(_Estee falls and sleeps._)
Now they lie in slumber sweet,
Now the charm is all complete,
Hasten I with flying feet
Where beyond the further sea
A babe upon its mother's knee
184
Is gazing into skies afar
And crying for a golden star.
I'll drag a cloud across the blue
And break that infant's heart in two!
(_Exeunt the Spirit of Broken Hopes and the Red and Blue Fires. Re-enter
Moon._)
ESTEE (_waking_):
Why, this is strange! I dreamed I know not what,
It seemed that certain apparitions were,
Which sang uncanny words, significant
And yet ambiguous-half-understood
Portending evil; and an awful spook,
Even as I stood with my accomplices,
Counted me out, as children do in play.
Is that you, Mike?
DE YOUNG _(waking):_
It was.
SWIFT _(waking):_
Am I all that?
Then I'll reform my ways.
_(Reforms his ways.)_
Ah! had I known
How sweet it is to be an honest man
I never would have stooped to turn my coat
For public favor, as chameleons take
The hue (as near as they can judge) of that
Supporting them. Henceforth I'll buy
With money all the offices I need,
And know the pleasure of an honest life,
Or stay forever in this dismal place.
Now that I'm good, it will no longer do
To make a third with such, a wicked two.
_(Returns to his tomb.)_
DE YOUNG:
185
Prophetic dream! by some good angel sent
To make me with a quiet life content.
The question shall no more my bosom irk,
To go to Washington or go to work.
From Fame's debasing struggle I'll withdraw,
And taking up the pen lay down the law.
I'll leave this rogue, lest my example make
An honest man of him-his heart would break.
_(Exit De Young.)_
ESTEE:
Out of my company these converts flee,
But that advantage is denied to me:
My curst identity's confining skin
Nor lets me out nor tolerates me in.
Well, since my hopes eternally have fled,
And, dead before, I'm more than ever dead,
To find a grander tomb be now my task,
And pack my pork into a stolen cask.
_(Exit, searching. Loud calls for the Author, who appears, bowing and smiling_.)
AUTHOR _(singing):_
Jack Satan's the greatest of gods,
And Hell is the best of abodes.
'Tis reached, through the Valley of Clods,
By seventy different roads.
Hurrah for the Seventy Roads!
Hurrah for the clods that resound
With a hollow, thundering sound!
Hurrah for the Best of Abodes!
We'll serve him as long as we've breath
Jack Satan the greatest of gods.
To all of his enemies, death!
A home in the Valley of Clods.
Hurrah for the thunder of clods
That smother the soul of his foe!
Hurrah for the spirits that go
To dwell with the Greatest of Gods;
186
_(Curtain falls to faint odor of mortality. Exit the Gas_.)
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
11 Occultism
9 Integral Yoga
8 Christianity
6 Fiction
3 Philosophy
2 Poetry
1 Science
1 Psychology
1 Hinduism
1 Baha i Faith
1 Alchemy
10 James George Frazer
6 H P Lovecraft
5 The Mother
5 Satprem
5 Saint Augustine of Hippo
3 Sri Aurobindo
3 A B Purani
2 Walt Whitman
2 Plotinus
10 The Golden Bough
6 Lovecraft - Poems
5 The Secret Doctrine
5 City of God
3 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
2 Whitman - Poems
2 Agenda Vol 11
2 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
0 1960-08-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
But L has enlarged the program. (Mother indicates the plan) This is only a small part of his extensive total program. He is planning to have a school of Agriculture, a modern dairy with grazing landtheres a lot of Agriculture, really a lotfruit orchards, large rice fields, many things. And then a ceramics factory. My ceramics factory will be at the far end of the lake, so as to utilize the clay the government has agreed; as they have to dig out the lake one day, we shall use the top soil for the fields. First well remove all the pebbles (you know, there are hills over there), which can be used for constructionits a mine of pebbles. After removing the pebbles, there will be holes which then well fill with earth from the lake. And below this earth is a thick and compact layer of clay which is so hard it cant be used for farmingits impossible but its wonderful for making ceramics. So right at the very end, in Indian territory,4 well have a large ceramics industry. On the other side, well have a little factory for firing clay.
All this is huge. A tremendous program.5
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In Bengal this weakness has gone to the extreme. The Bengali has a quick intelligence, emotional capacity and intuition. He is foremost in India in all these qualities. All of them are necessary but they do not suffice. If to these there were added depth of thought, calm strength, heroic courage and a capacity for and pleasure in prolonged labor, the Bengali might be a leader not only of India, but of mankind. But he does not want that, he wants to get things done easily, to get knowledge without thinking, the fruits without labor, siddhi by an easy sadhana [discipline]. His stock is the excitement of the emotional mind. But excess of emotion, empty of knowledge, is the very symptom of the malady. In the end it brings about fatigue and inertia. The country has been constantly and gradually going down. The life-power has ebbed away. What has the Bengali come to in his own country? He cannot get enough food to eat or clothes to wear, there is lamentation on all sides, his wealth, his trade and commerce, his lands, his very Agriculture have begun to pass into the hands of others. We have abandoned the sadhana of Shakti and Shakti has abandoned us. We do the sadhana of Love, but where Knowledge and Shakti are not, there Love does not remain, there narrowness and littleness come, and in a little and narrow mind there is no place for Love. Where is Love in Bengal? There is more quarreling, jealousy, mutual dislike, misunderstanding and faction there than anywhere else even in India which is so much afflicted by division.
In the noble heroic age of the Aryan people4 there was not so much shouting and gesticulating, but the endeavor they undertook remained steadfast through many centuries. The Bengalis endeavor lasts only for a day or two.
0 1969-08-23, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Theres a place (Promesse and Auro-orchard, all that area which is concerned with Agriculture), with French people, Swiss people, Italians (even Indians!), and theyre all busy quarreling all the time. From every side they complain to me, asking for my support. So its prodigiously instructive. As for me, I stay like this (Mother crosses her fingers on her lips), and now and then I let a drop fall. The Xs, for instance, would regularly, once or twice a week, send me a complaint against the people living there (now some, now others, all of them in succession). The first time, I didnt say anything, but after a while (laughing), I simply said (I dont remember the exact words, only the meaning) that the true consciousness needed to live in Auroville is to look at ones own faults first, before complaining about others faults, and to mend ones ways before demanding others should mend theirs (I put it in a more literary manner). And I sent it. Since then, silence, complete silence: I no longer exist I dont go and give support to all their little quarrels, so I no longer exist.
But thats a way of kneading the dough. They will have either to change or to gowithout telling them anything, without having to tell them anything, with the pressure of the Consciousness alone. Either they will have to change, or they will be compelled to go.
0 1970-01-17, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If you knew all that takes place, youd find it very funny. The whole side of Agriculture, same thing; the whole side of education, same thing; everywhere the same thing. The international side, same thing: everywhere, everywhere, Man (Mother inflates her cheeks), Man puffing himself up.
FIRST they must understand: abdicate. Then we will see.
0 1970-03-25, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The difficulty is the appreciation of the value of things. You understand, that requires a very wide vision. Moneys convenience was that it became mechanical. But this new system cannot become quite mechanical, so For instance, the idea is that those who will live in Auroville will have no moneythere is no circulation of money but to eat, for instance, everyone has the right to eat, naturally, but On quite a practical level, we had conceived the possibility of all types of food according to everyones tastes or needs (for example, vegetarian cooking, non-vegetarian cooking, diet cooking, etc.), and those who want to get food from there must do something in exchangework, or Its hard to organize in practice, on a quite practical level. You see, we had planned a lot of lands around the city for large-scale Agriculture for the citys consumption. But to cultivate those lands, for the moment we need money, or else materials. So Now I have to face the whole problem in every detail, and its not easy!
There are some who understand.
1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
We know not much about them. It is remarkable that _we_ know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in Agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. But why do men degenerate ever?
What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?
--
England, who have no means to build farmhouses at first according to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth; floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green sods, so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire families for two, three, and four years, it being understood that partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the size of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England, in the beginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling houses in this fashion for two reasons; firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not to want food the next season; secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers from Fatherland. In the course of three or four years, when the country became adapted to Agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses, spending on them several thousands.
In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now? When I think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to _human_ culture, and we are still forced to cut our _spiritual_ bread far thinner than our forefa thers did their wheaten. Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the shellfish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with.
1.02 - SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
dustry and Agriculture; we must forget our history; we must assume
that even language does not exist. In short, we must get as close as
1.03 - Meeting the Master - Meeting with others, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: No. It will have to produce more things because all its needs cannot be supplied by itself. It will have, therefore, to keep connection with the capitalist world. Agriculture is the mainstay. The community must try to be self-reliant with regard to food.
NOVEMBER or DECEMBER 1920
1.03 - The Sephiros, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Astrologieally its planet is Venus $. It should follow in consequence from this that the gods and qualities of Net- sach relate to Love, Victory, and to the harvest. Aphro- dite (Venus) is the Lady of Love and Beauty, with the power of bestowing her beauty and charms to others. The whole implication of this Sephirah is of love - albeit a love of a sexual nature. Hathor is the Egyptian equivalent and is a lesser aspect of the Mother Isis. She is depicted as a cow goddess, representing the generative forces of Nature, and she was the protectress of Agriculture and the fruits of the earth. Bhavani is the Hindu goddess of Netsach.
Rose is the flower appurtenant, and Red Sandal is the perfume. It is common knowledge that in some diseases of a venereal ( $ ) origin oils of sandalwood are employed.
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
said, to wound or cut, to tear or scratch our common mother by working at Agriculture. And he added:
You ask me to dig in the earth? Am I to take a knife and plunge it into the breast of my mother? But
1.04 - The Paths, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
The Tarot card is III. - The Empress, who bears in her right hand a sceptre, being a globe surmounting a cross, the astrological sigil of Venus, $. Her robe repeats this symbol, and at the side of her throne is a heart-shaped shield bearing also the sign of Venus. Facing her, is a field of corn, emphasizing the fact that she is a Goddess not only of Love but of Agriculture. She wears a green garl and upon her head, and a necklace of pearls.
For some slight explanation as to how Agriculture could be associated with the Goddess of Love, I must refer my
74
1.13 - Posterity of Dhruva, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Prithu accordingly uprooted the mountains, by hundreds and thousands, for myriads of leagues, and they were thenceforth piled upon one another. Before his time there were no defined boundaries of villages or towns, upon the irregular surface of the earth; there was no cultivation, no pasture, no Agriculture, no highway for merchants: all these things (or all civilization) originated in the reign of Prithu. Where the ground was made level, the king induced his subjects to take up their abode. Before his time, also, the fruits and roots which constituted the food of the people were procured with great difficulty, all vegetables having been destroyed; and he therefore, having made Svāyambhuva Manu the calf[8], milked the Earth, and received the milk into his own hand, for the benefit of mankind. Thence proceeded all kinds of corn and vegetables upon which people subsist now and perpetually. By granting life to the Earth, Prithu was as her father, and she thence derived the patronymic appellation Prithivī (the daughter of Prithu). Then the gods, the sages, the demons, the Rākṣasas, the Gandharbhas, Yakṣas, Pitris, serpents, mountains, and trees, took a milking vessel suited to their kind, and milked the earth of appropriate milk, and the milker and the calf were both peculiar to their own species[9].
This Earth, the mother, the nurse, the receptacle, and nourisher of all existent things, was produced from the sole of the foot of Viṣṇu. And thus was born the mighty Prithu, the heroic son of Veṇa, who was the lord of the earth, and who, from conciliating the affections of the people, was the first ruler to whom the title of Rāja was ascribed. Whoever shall recite this story of the birth of Prithu, the son of Veṇa, shall never suffer any retribution for the evil he may have committed: and such is the virtue of the tale of Prithu's birth, that those who hear it repeated shall be relieved from affliction[10].
1.25 - Temporary Kings, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
Heavenly Hosts." He is a sort of Minister of Agriculture; all
disputes about fields, rice, and so forth, are referred to him.
1.38 - The Myth of Osiris, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
civilisation and Agriculture wherever he went. In countries where a
harsh climate or niggardly soil forbade the cultivation of the vine,
1.39 - The Ritual of Osiris, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the operations of Agriculture are all in harmony with this
supposition. Thus we may take it as fairly certain that from 30 B.C.
1.43 - Dionysus, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
was conceived as a deity of Agriculture and the corn. He is spoken
of as himself doing the work of a husbandman: he is reported to have
1.46 - The Corn-Mother in Many Lands, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
peoples engaged in Agriculture. It is probable, therefore, that
Demeter and Persephone, those stately and beautiful figures of Greek
1.47 - Lityerses, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
invented Agriculture, and, dying an untimely death, was thus
lamented by the people. It appears, however, that the name Maneros
1.49 - Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
regard to its utility in Agriculture; for, according to him, when
the Nile had subsided, herds of swine were turned loose over the
1.52 - Killing the Divine Animal, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
progressed so far as to subsist mainly by Agriculture have been in
the habit of killing and eating their farinaceous deities either in
--
the animal seems to have no relation to Agriculture, and may
therefore be presumed to date from the hunting or pastoral stage of
1.56 - The Public Expulsion of Evils, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
given in all ceremonies connected with Agriculture. Here he receives
a little of each kind of seed and some feathers. He then takes the
1.63 - The Interpretation of the Fire-Festivals, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
of their herds, and when Agriculture as yet played a subordinate
part in their lives. Witches and wolves are the two great foes still
1.75 - The AA and the Planet, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Apply this measure to society; there must be an optimum relation between industry and Agriculture, between town and country. When the proper balance is not struck, the community must depend on outside help, importing what it lacks, exporting its surplus. This is an unnatural state of affairs; it results in business, and therefore ultimately in war. That is, as soon as the stress set up by the conditions becomes insupportable. So long as "business" is confined to luxuries, no great harm need result; but when interference with the flow of foreign trade threatens actual necessities, the unit concerned realizes that it is in danger of strangulation. Consider England's food supply! Switzerland, Russia, China, the U.S.A. can laugh at U-boats. England must support a Navy, a wealth-consuming, not a wealth-producing, item in the Budget. Similar remarks apply to practically all Government Departments. The minimum of organization is desirable; all artificial doctrinaire multiplication of works which produce no wealth is waste; and for many reasons (some absurd, like "social position") tend to create fresh unnecessary necessities. Ad infinitum, like the fleas in the epigram!
When laws are reasonable in the eyes of the average man, he respects them, keeps them, does his best to maintain them; therefore a minute Police Force, with powers strictly limited, is adequate to deal with the almost negligibly small criminal class. A convention is laudable when it is convenient. When laws are unjust, monstrous, ridiculous, that same average man, will he-nill he, becomes a criminal; and the law requires a Tcheka or a Gestapo with dictatorial powers and no safeguards to maintain the farce. Also, corruption becomes normal in official circles; and is excused. I refer you to Mr. J. H. Thomas.*[AC53]
1f.lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
mainly urban, some Agriculture and much stock-raising existed. Mining
and a limited amount of manufacturing were also practiced. Travel was
1f.lovecraft - The Curse of Yig, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
which are as old as human Agriculture itself. Lafayette Smith, who came
from southern Missouri and had a cabin about three miles east of
--
time, had they but known it, of a lineage older than even Agriculture;
the dread Witch-Sabbath of the primal pre-Aryans, kept alive through
1f.lovecraft - The Man of Stone, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
mounting menace as the familiar marks of Agriculture and civilisation
grew fewer and fewer. At last the beginning of a narrow, neglected path
1f.lovecraft - The Mound, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
principal occupation seeming to be Agriculture. The soil is decently
fertile, and the oil boom has not reached this part of the state. My
--
Agriculture and stock-raising. Long travel was abandoned, and people
went back to using the horned, half-human beasts instead of maintaining
1f.lovecraft - The Shunned House, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Etienne Roulet, less apt at Agriculture than at reading queer books and
drawing queer diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse at
1f.lovecraft - Till A the Seas, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Agriculture was at a standstill, the world fast became too arid for
crops. This was remedied by artificial substitutes, soon universally
1.whitman - As I Sat Alone By Blue Ontarios Shores, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Surrounding the multiform Agriculture, mines, temperature, the
gestation of new States,
--
thrifty, building populous towns, encouraging Agriculture,
arts, commerce, lighting the study of man, the Soul, health,
1.whitman - Carol Of Occupations, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Agriculture itself?
Old institutionsthese arts, libraries, legends, collections, and
2.17 - December 1938, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Denmark and Ireland organised their Agriculture in the same way. Only now they are going to suffer because other nations are trying to be self-sufficient. I don't believe in that sort of self-sufficiency. For that is against the principles of life. It is not possible for nations to be self-sufficient like that.
Disciple: What do you think of Hindi being the common language? It seems to me English has occupied so much place that it will be unwise and difficult to replace it.
2.18 - January 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: Co-operative farming is an excellent thing; it would develop Agriculture. But dictatorship of the proletariat is a different thing. It may have a very fine constitution on paper, but it is quite different in practice. In such a system all men are made to think alike.
Religion is a different affair, it is voluntary; but the country is quite different from the church. You can't choose your country. If you make all people think alike there can't be any human progress. If you were to differ from Stalin you would be liquidated.
--
Sri Aurobindo: That was also my idea when I proposed to Motilal to have a spiritual commune. I did not call it a commune but a Sangha a community based on spirituality and living its own economic life; it would have its own industries and Agriculture. And a network of such communities spread all over the country would exchange their products among themselves.
Disciple: You gave him the idea of the paper also?
--
Sri Aurobindo: Possibly. Ido not know what they are doing now. I heard that some plots were bought in the Sunderbans to start Agriculture. But as people were getting malaria, it had to be given up.
Disciple: Is it something like Dayalbagh? I don't know what spirituality they are having there. It seems as if all their energies are directed to external work and industries.
3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Turning back now to Figure IV-l, the second Period has two inter-locked braces: the lower one includes most first Period tools and foods, though usually somewhat modified; and the upper brace adds new ones: some seeds are planted and grown instead of just eaten; some small animals--such as pigs, sheep, fowls--are tended and bred. New kinds of equipment for this Agriculture are represented by the upper brace. The society consists of a few nomadic villages, and two social Strata.
Genetic Basis of Human Straticatifion.
Turning again to Figure IV-2, our explanation of how this came about is this: The first Stratum consists of the unmutated descendants of Period 1 people--though somewhat modified by the new foods and technology. (Unmutated descent is symbolized by the solid leftward arrows.) The much smaller upper Stratum, however, consists of a few descendants who have undergone a complex of so-called pleiotropic mutations, producing the psycho-physiological capability of conceptualizing and executing the new and more complex relations which we call Lower Agriculture and Higher Hunting. It also produces the capability of helping the unmutated relatives and neighbors, the Majority, to participate in, rather than to sabotage, these slow, difhcult and often tedious operations. This new psycho-genetic set of capabilities is summed up and called (for now) a higher level of abstraction, though other factors are involved besides abstraction.1
This second human abstraction level appears phenotypically by way of an additional ontogenetic stage, and is symptomatized by what Johnson O'Connor calls a higher vocabulary ceiling, presently to be described.5 (Mutated descent is symbolized in our figure by dotted rightward arrows.) Period 2 thus consists of two social Strata: the big, ancient, unmutated yet modified Majority, undergoing one human ontogenetic development-stage; and the small mutated Minority, undergoing two development stages. These are the two Sub-strata of Sub-stratum 2, and are labeled 1 and 2 respectively.
--
It is because of the unification of the sciences (nested braces), that inter-translatability not only of scientific, but also of literary and managerial background theories and languages can be effected. This inter-translatability is represented by the convergence of the arrows originating in the left-hand brace (government, business, modern Agriculture) which are deeply influenced by the Literary culture (the Division of Humanities) through whose brace the arrows pass (art, philosophy, religion). In the New University these non-scientific aspects of mankind are in harmony with Unified Science, whose nested braces govern the arrows' directions: like theirs, the dominant value-premise of all three sub-cultures is positive.
These three (rather than just two) categories are implicit in C. P. Snow's following statement:
--
Technogeny (coined term) Forms of control (q.v.) such as manufacture, transport, Agriculture, communication, simulation, etc. the capacity to do which is transmitted, not mentally, but genetically. E.g. nest construction by termites. C.f. Technology.
Technology The application of thought, primarily of scientific thought, to the solution of practical problems. Technology acts as a major empirical verifyer of scientific theory. (Figure V-1). C.f. Technology.
3.8.1.02 - Arya - Its Significance, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the early days of comparative Philology, when the scholars sought in the history of words for the prehistoric history of peoples, it was supposed that the word Arya came from the root ar, to plough, and that the Vedic Aryans were so called when they separated from their kin in the north-west who despised the pursuits of Agriculture and remained shepherds and hunters. This ingenious speculation has little or nothing to support it. But in a sense we may accept the derivation. Whoever cultivates the field that the Supreme Spirit has made for him, his earth of plenty within and without, does not leave it barren or allow it to run to seed, but labours to exact from it its full yield, is by that effort an Aryan.
If Arya were a purely racial term, a more probable derivation would be ar, meaning strength or valour, from ar, to fight, whence we have the name of the Greek war-god Ares, areios, brave or warlike, perhaps even aret, virtue, signifying, like the Latin virtus, first, physical strength and courage and then moral force and elevation. This sense of the word also we may accept. We fight to win sublime Wisdom, therefore men call us warriors. For Wisdom implies the choice as well as the knowledge of that which is best, noblest, most luminous, most divine. Certainly, it means also the knowledge of all things and charity and reverence for all things, even the most apparently mean, ugly or dark, for the sake of the universal Deity who chooses to dwell equally in all. But, also, the law of right action is a choice, the preference of that which expresses the godhead to that which conceals it. And the choice entails a battle, a struggle. It is not easily made, it is not easily enforced.
Aeneid, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Ce'res goddess of Agriculture, especially of grain (therefore, English "cereal"), she was the daughter of Saturn, sister of Jupiter,
and mother of Proserpina, i, 248.
--
Pi'cus Italian god of Agriculture, grandfa ther of Latinus, father of
Faunus, son of Saturn, first king qf Latium. Circe changed him
BOOK II. -- PART I. ANTHROPOGENESIS., #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
The book of the Chinese Y-King, attri butes the discovery of Agriculture to "the instruction given to
men by celestial genii."
--
one with Hephaestos or Vulcan; Jabal is taken from the Kabiri -- instructors in Agriculture, "such as
have cattle," and Jubal is "the father of all those who handle the harp," he, or they who fabricated the
--
make brass-work, to cut canals, and improve Agriculture. As usual, it is Huschenk, again, who is
credited with having written the work called
BOOK II. -- PART III. ADDENDA. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
engraving, writing, an established priesthood, the mode of worship, Agriculture, and the construction
of roads and canals; and it is reasonable to suppose that the same correspondence extended down to all
BOOK II. -- PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
NAMES such as Adam-Adami, used by Mr. Chwolsohn in his "Nabathean Agriculture"* and derided
by M. Renan, may prove little to the profane. To the Occultist, however, once that the term is found in
--
ever-incredulous and flippant Europe under the innocent title of Nabathean Agriculture. In the opinion
of the translator that archaic volume is "a complete initiation into the mysteries of the pre-Adamite
--
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 453 "NABATHEAN Agriculture."
http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sd/sd2-2-02.htm (1 von 7) [06.05.2003 03:36:27]
--
Nabathean Agriculture should not be the fraudulent work of some Jew of the third or fourth century of
our era? It can hardly be otherwise -- argues the romancer of the "Life of Jesus." Since, in this in-folio
--
The "Nabathean Agriculture" is a compilation indeed; it is no apocrypha, but the repetition of the
tenets of the Secret Doctrine under the exoteric Chaldean form of national symbols, for the purpose of
--
famous is the Book 'The Agriculture of the Nabatheans,' which has been translated by Ibn Wahohijah.
This book is full of hea thenish foolishness. . . . It speaks of preparations of TALISMANS, the drawing
BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
of Agriculture" (Collect. de Reb. Hibern., No. 13, Praef. Sect. 5) is as absurd as his assertion that
OEon, Kronos, Saturn and Dagon are all one, namely, the "patriarch Adam." The Kabiri were the
instructors of mankind in Agriculture, because they were the regents over the seasons and Cosmic
cycles. Hence it was they who regulated, as planetary Spirits or "Angels" (messengers), the mysteries
of the art of Agriculture.
* Who dread Karma-Nemesis would be better.
BOOK I. -- PART II. THE EVOLUTION OF SYMBOLISM IN ITS APPROXIMATE ORDER, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
It is such sentences, however, in the "Nabathean Agriculture," that
[[Vol. 1, Page]] 395 SOLAR-LUNAR WORSHIP IN THE CHURCH.
--
'Nabathean Agriculture' as a romance and a pack of superstitious nonsense," complains the
memorialist. "In their perverted opinion Qu-ta-my's 'idol of the moon' and the statue of the Madonna
--
esoteric theogony (see Chwolson in NABATHEAN Agriculture, Vol. II., p. 217), both Schemal
and Samael represented a particular divinity. With the Kabalists they are "the Spirit of the Earth," the
BOOK VII. - Of the select gods of the civil theology, and that eternal life is not obtained by worshipping them, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
But what shall men do who cannot find anything wise to say, because they are interpreting foolish things? Saturn has a pruning-knife. That, says Varro, is on account of Agriculture. Certainly in Saturn's reign there as yet existed no Agriculture, and therefore the former times of Saturn are spoken of, because, as the same Varro interprets the fables, the primeval men lived on those seeds which the earth produced spontaneously. Perhaps he received a pruning-knife[Pg 283] when he had lost his sceptre; that he who had been a king, and lived at ease during the first part of his time, should become a laborious workman whilst his son occupied the throne. Then he says that boys were wont to be immolated to him by certain peoples, the Carthaginians for instance; and also that adults were immolated by some nations, for example the Gaulsbecause, of all seeds, the human race is the best. What need we say more concerning this most cruel vanity? Let us rather attend to and hold by this, that these interpretations are not carried up to the true God,a living, incorporeal, unchangeable nature, from whom a blessed life enduring for ever may be obtained,but that they end in things which are corporeal, temporal, mutable, and mortal. And whereas it is said in the fables that Saturn castrated his father Clus, this signifies, says Varro, that the divine seed belongs to Saturn, and not to Clus; for this reason, as far as a reason can be discovered, namely, that in heaven[274] nothing is born from seed. But, lo! Saturn, if he is the son of Clus, is the son of Jupiter. For they affirm times without number, and that emphatically, that the heavens[275] are Jupiter. Thus those things which come not of the truth, do very often, without being impelled by any one, themselves overthrow one another. He says that Saturn was called , which in the Greek tongue signifies a space of time,[276] because, without that, seed cannot be productive. These and many other things are said concerning Saturn, and they are all referred to seed. But Saturn surely, with all that great power, might have sufficed for seed. Why are other gods demanded for it, especially Liber and Libera, that is, Ceres?concerning whom again, as far as seed is concerned, he says as many things as if he had said nothing concerning Saturn.
20. Concerning the rites of Eleusinian Ceres.
--
The one earth, then, on account of this fourfold virtue, ought to have had four surnames, but not to have been considered as four gods,as Jupiter and Juno, though they have so many surnames, are for all that only single deities,for by all these surnames it is signified that a manifold virtue belongs to one god or to one goddess; but the multitude of surnames does not imply a multitude of gods. But as sometimes even the vilest women themselves grow tired of those crowds which they have sought after under the impulse of wicked passion, so also the soul, become vile, and prostituted to impure spirits, sometimes begins to loa the to multiply to itself gods to whom to surrender itself to be polluted by them, as much as it once delighted in so doing. For Varro himself, as if ashamed of that crowd of gods, would make Tellus to be one goddess. "They say," says he, "that whereas the one great mother has a tympanum, it is signified that she is the orb of the earth; whereas she has towers on her head, towns are signified; and whereas seats are fixed round about her, it is signified that whilst all things move, she moves not. And their having made the Galli to serve this goddess, signifies that they who are in need of seed ought to follow the earth, for in it all seeds are found. By their throwing themselves down before her, it is taught," he says, "that they who cultivate the earth should not sit idle, for there is always something for them to do. The sound of the cymbals signifies the noise made by the throwing of iron utensils, and by men's hands, and all other noises connected with agricultural operations; and these cymbals are of brass, because the ancients used brazen utensils in their Agriculture before iron was discovered. They place beside the goddess an unbound and tame lion, to show that there is no kind of land so wild and so excessively barren as that it would be profitless to attempt to bring it in and cultivate it." Then he adds that, because they gave many names and surnames to mother Tellus, it came to be thought that these signified many gods. "They think," says he, "that Tellus is Ops, because the earth is improved[Pg 290] by labour; Mother, because it brings forth much; Great, because it brings forth seed; Proserpine, because fruits creep forth from it; Vesta, because it is invested with herbs. And thus," says he, "they not at all absurdly identify other goddesses with the earth." If, then, it is one goddess (though, if the truth were consulted, it is not even that), why do they nevertheless separate it into many? Let there be many names of one goddess, and let there not be as many goddesses as there are names.
But the authority of the erring ancients weighs heavily on Varro, and compels him, after having expressed this opinion, to show signs of uneasiness; for he immediately adds, "With which things the opinion of the ancients, who thought that there were really many goddesses, does not conflict." How does it not conflict, when it is entirely a different thing to say that one goddess has many names, and to say that there are many goddesses? But it is possible, he says, that the same thing may both be one, and yet have in it a plurality of things. I grant that there are many things in one man; are there therefore in him many men? In like manner, in one goddess there are many things; are there therefore also many goddesses? But let them divide, unite, multiply, reduplicate, and implicate as they like.
These are the famous mysteries of Tellus and the Great Mother, all of which are shown to have reference to mortal seeds and to Agriculture. Do these things, then,namely, the tympanum, the towers, the Galli, the tossing to and fro of limbs, the noise of cymbals, the images of lions,do these things, having this reference and this end, promise eternal life? Do the mutilated Galli, then, serve this Great Mother in order to signify that they who are in need of seed should follow the earth, as though it were not rather the case that this very service caused them to want seed? For whether do they, by following this goddess, acquire seed, being in want of it, or, by following her, lose seed when they have it? Is this to interpret or to deprecate? Nor is it considered to what a degree malign demons have gained the upper hand, inasmuch as they have been able to exact such cruel rites without having dared to promise any great things in return for them. Had[Pg 291] the earth not been a goddess, men would have, by labouring, laid their hands on it in order to obtain seed through it, and would not have laid violent hands on themselves in order to lose seed on account of it. Had it not been a goddess, it would have become so fertile by the hands of others, that it would not have compelled a man to be rendered barren by his own hands; nor that in the festival of Liber an honourable matron put a wreath on the private parts of a man in the sight of the multitude, where perhaps her husb and was standing by blushing and perspiring, if there is any shame left in men; and that in the celebration of marriages the newly-married bride was ordered to sit upon Priapus. These things are bad enough, but they are small and contemptible in comparison with that most cruel abomination, or most abominable cruelty, by which either set is so deluded that neither perishes of its wound. There the enchantment of fields is feared; here the amputation of members is not feared. There the modesty of the bride is outraged, but in such a manner as that neither her fruitfulness nor even her virginity is taken away; here a man is so mutilated that he is neither changed into a woman nor remains a man.
25. The interpretation of the mutilation of Atys which the doctrine of the Greek sages set forth.
BOOK VI. - Of Varros threefold division of theology, and of the inability of the gods to contri bute anything to the happiness of the future life, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
But what kind of distinction is this which he makes between the religious and the superstitious man, saying that the gods are feared[238] by the superstitious man, but are reverenced[239] as parents by the religious man, not feared as enemies; and that they are all so good that they will more readily spare those who are impious than hurt one who is innocent? And yet he tells us that three gods are assigned as guardians to a woman after she has been delivered, lest the god Silvanus come in and molest her; and that in order to signify the presence of these protectors, three men go round the house during the night, and first strike the threshold with a hatchet, next with a pestle, and the third time sweep it with a brush, in order that these symbols of Agriculture having been exhibited, the god Silvanus might be hindered from entering, because neither are trees cut down or pruned without a hatchet, neither is grain ground without a pestle, nor corn heaped up without a besom. Now from these three things three gods have been named: Intercidona, from the cut[240] made by the hatchet; Pilumnus, from the pestle; Diverra, from the besom;by which guardian gods the woman who has been delivered is preserved against the power of the god Silvanus. Thus the guardianship of kindly-disposed gods would not avail against the malice of a mischievous god, unless they were three to one, and fought against him, as it were, with the opposing emblems of cultivation, who, being an inhabitant of the woods, is rough, horrible, and uncultivated. Is this the innocence of the gods? Is this their concord? Are these the health-giving deities of the cities, more ridiculous than the things which are laughed at in the theatres?
When a male and a female are united, the god Jugatinus presides. Well, let this be borne with. But the married woman must be brought home: the god Domiducus also is invoked. That she may be in the house, the god Domitius is introduced. That she may remain with her husband, the goddess Manturn[Pg 250] is used. What more is required? Let human modesty be spared. Let the lust of flesh and blood go on with the rest, the secret of shame being respected. Why is the bedchamber filled with a crowd of deities, when even the groomsmen[241] have departed? And, moreover, it is so filled, not that in consideration of their presence more regard may be paid to chastity, but that by their help the woman, naturally of the weaker sex, and trembling with the novelty of her situation, may the more readily yield her virginity. For there are the goddess Virginiensis, and the god-father Subigus, and the goddess-mother Prema, and the goddess Pertunda, and Venus, and Priapus.[242] What is this? If it was absolutely necessary that a man, labouring at this work, should be helped by the gods, might not some one god or goddess have been sufficient? Was Venus not sufficient alone, who is even said to be named from this, that without her power a woman does not cease to be a virgin? If there is any shame in men, which is not in the deities, is it not the case that, when the married couple believe that so many gods of either sex are present, and busy at this work, they are so much affected with shame, that the man is less moved, and the woman more reluctant? And certainly, if the goddess Virginiensis is present to loose the virgin's zone, if the god Subigus is present that the virgin may be got under the man, if the goddess Prema is present that, having been got under him, she may be kept down, and may not move herself, what has the goddess Pertunda to do there? Let her blush; let her go forth. Let the husb and himself do something. It is disgraceful that any one but himself should do that from which she gets her name. But perhaps she is tolerated because she is said to be a goddess, and not a god. For if she were believed to be a male, and were called Pertundus, the husb and would demand more help against him for the chastity of his wife than the newly-delivered woman against Silvanus. But why am I saying this, when Priapus, too, is there, a male to excess, upon whose immense and most unsightly member the newly-married bride is commanded[Pg 251] to sit, according to the most honourable and most religious custom of matrons?
BOOK X. - Porphyrys doctrine of redemption, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
For this is the worship which is due to the Divinity, or, to speak more accurately, to the Deity; and, to express this worship in a single word, as there does not occur to me any Latin term sufficiently exact, I shall avail myself, whenever necessary, of a Greek word. , whenever it occurs in Scripture, is rendered by the word service. But that service which is due to men, and in reference to which the apostle writes that servants must be subject to their own masters,[365] is usually designated by another word in Greek,[366] whereas the service which is paid to God alone by worship, is always, or almost always, called in the usage of those who wrote from the divine oracles. This cannot so well be called simply "cultus," for in that case it would not seem to be due exclusively to God; for the same word is applied to the respect we pay either to the memory or the living presence of men. From it, too, we derive the words Agriculture, colonist, and others.[367] And the hea then call their gods "clicol," not because they worship heaven, but because they dwell in it, and as it were colonize it,not in the sense in which we call those colonists who are attached to their native soil to cultivate it[Pg 384] under the rule of the owners, but in the sense in which the great master of the Latin language says, "There was an ancient city inhabited by Tyrian colonists."[368] He called them colonists, not because they cultivated the soil, but because they inhabited the city. So, too, cities that have hived off from larger cities are called colonies. Consequently, while it is quite true that, using the word in a special sense, "cult" can be rendered to none but God, yet, as the word is applied to other things besides, the cult due to God cannot in Latin be expressed by this word alone.
The word "religion" might seem to express more definitely the worship due to God alone, and therefore Latin translators have used this word to represent ; yet, as not only the uneducated, but also the best instructed, use the word religion to express human ties, and relationships, and affinities, it would inevitably introduce ambiguity to use this word in discussing the worship of God, unable as we are to say that religion is nothing else than the worship of God, without contradicting the common usage which applies this word to the observance of social relationships. "Piety," again, or, as the Greeks say, , is commonly understood as the proper designation of the worship of God. Yet this word also is used of dutifulness to parents. The common people, too, use it of works of charity, which, I suppose, arises from the circumstance that God enjoins the performance of such works, and declares that He is pleased with them instead of, or in preference to sacrifices. From this usage it has also come to pass that God Himself is called pious,[369] in which sense the Greeks never use , though is applied to works of charity by their common people also. In some passages of Scripture, therefore, they have sought to preserve the distinction by using not , the more general word, but , which literally denotes the worship of God. We, on the other hand, cannot express either of these ideas by one word. This worship, then, which in Greek is called , and in Latin "servitus" [service], but the service due to God only; this worship, which in Greek is called , and in[Pg 385] Latin "religio," but the religion by which we are bound to God only; this worship, which they call , but which we cannot express in one word, but call it the worship of God,this, we say, belongs only to that God who is the true God, and who makes His worshippers gods.[370] And therefore, whoever these immortal and blessed inhabitants of heaven be, if they do not love us, and wish us to be blessed, then we ought not to worship them; and if they do love us and desire our happiness, they cannot wish us to be made happy by any other means than they themselves have enjoyed,for how could they wish our blessedness to flow from one source, theirs from another?
BOOK XVIII. - A parallel history of the earthly and heavenly cities from the time of Abraham to the end of the world, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
But they regard these as poetic fancies, and assert that the father of Picus was Sterces rather, and relate that, being a most skilful husbandman, he discovered that the fields could be fertilized by the dung of animals, which is called stercus from his name. Some say he was called Stercutius. But for whatever reason they chose to call him Saturn, it is yet certain they made this Sterces or Stercutius a god for his merit in Agriculture; and they likewise received into the number of these gods Picus his son, whom they affirm to have been a famous augur and warrior. Picus begot Faunus, the second king of Laurentum; and he too is, or was, a god with them. These divine honours they gave to dead men before the Trojan war.
16. Of Diomede, who after the destruction of Troy was placed among the gods, while his companions are said to have been changed into birds.
BOOK XXII. - Of the eternal happiness of the saints, the resurrection of the body, and the miracles of the early Church, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
It is He, then, who has given to the human soul a mind, in which reason and understanding lie as it were asleep during infancy, and as if they were not, destined, however, to be awakened and exercised as years increase, so as to become capable of knowledge and of receiving instruction, fit to understand what is true and to love what is good. It is by this capacity the soul drinks in wisdom, and becomes endowed with those virtues by which, in prudence, fortitude, temperance, and righteousness, it makes war upon error and the other inborn vices, and conquers them by fixing its desires upon no other object than the supreme and unchangeable Good. And even though this be not uniformly the result, yet who can competently utter or even conceive the grandeur of this work of the Almighty, and the unspeakable boon He has conferred upon our rational nature, by giving us even the capacity of such attainment? For over and above those arts which are called virtues, and which teach us how we may spend our life well, and attain to endless happiness,arts which are given to the children of the promise and the kingdom by the sole grace of God which is in Christ,has not the genius of man invented and applied countless astonishing arts, partly the result of necessity, partly the result of exuberant invention, so that this vigour of mind, which is so active in the discovery not merely of superfluous but even of dangerous and destructive things, betokens an inexhaustible wealth in the nature which can invent, learn, or employ such arts? What wonderfulone might say stupefyingadvances has human industry made in the arts of weaving and building, of Agriculture and navigation! With what endless variety are designs in pottery, painting, and sculpture produced, and with what skill executed! What wonderful spectacles are exhibited in the theatres, which those who have not seen them cannot credit! How skilful the contrivances for catching, killing, or taming wild beasts! And for the injury of men, also, how many kinds of poisons, weapons, engines of destruction, have been invented, while for the preservation or restoration of health the appliances and remedies are infinite![Pg 526] To provoke appetite and please the palate, what a variety of seasonings have been concocted! To express and gain entrance for thoughts, what a multitude and variety of signs there are, among which speaking and writing hold the first place! what ornaments has eloquence at comm and to delight the mind! what wealth of song is there to captivate the ear! how many musical instruments and strains of harmony have been devised! What skill has been attained in measures and numbers! with what sagacity have the movements and connections of the stars been discovered! Who could tell the thought that has been spent upon nature, even though, despairing of recounting it in detail, he endeavoured only to give a general view of it? In fine, even the defence of errors and misapprehensions, which has illustrated the genius of heretics and philosophers, cannot be sufficiently declared. For at present it is the nature of the human mind which adorns this mortal life which we are extolling, and not the faith and the way of truth which lead to immortality. And since this great nature has certainly been created by the true and supreme God, who administers all things He has made with absolute power and justice, it could never have fallen into these miseries, nor have gone out of them to miseries eternal,saving only those who are redeemed,had not an exceeding great sin been found in the first man from whom the rest have sprung.
Moreover, even in the body, though it dies like that of the beasts, and is in many ways weaker than theirs, what goodness of God, what providence of the great Creator, is apparent! The organs of sense and the rest of the members, are not they so placed, the appearance, and form, and stature of the body as a whole, is it not so fashioned, as to indicate that it was made for the service of a reasonable soul? Man has not been created stooping towards the earth, like the irrational animals; but his bodily form, erect and looking heavenwards, admonishes him to mind the things that are above. Then the marvellous nimbleness which has been given to the tongue and the hands, fitting them to speak, and write, and execute so many duties, and practise so many arts, does it not prove the excellence of the soul for which such an assistant was provided?[Pg 527] And even apart from its adaptation to the work required of it, there is such a symmetry in its various parts, and so beautiful a proportion maintained, that one is at a loss to decide whether, in creating the body, greater regard was paid to utility or to beauty. Assuredly no part of the body has been created for the sake of utility which does not also contri bute something to its beauty. And this would be all the more apparent, if we knew more precisely how all its parts are connected and adapted to one another, and were not limited in our observations to what appears on the surface; for as to what is covered up and hidden from our view, the intricate web of veins and nerves, the vital parts of all that lies under the skin, no one can discover it. For although, with a cruel zeal for science, some medical men, who are called anatomists, have dissected the bodies of the dead, and sometimes even of sick persons who died under their knives, and have inhumanly pried into the secrets of the human body to learn the nature of the disease and its exact seat, and how it might be cured, yet those relations of which I speak, and which form the concord,[1020] or, as the Greeks call it, "harmony," of the whole body outside and in, as of some instrument, no one has been able to discover, because no one has been audacious enough to seek for them. But if these could be known, then even the inward parts, which seem to have no beauty, would so delight us with their exquisite fitness, as to afford a profounder satisfaction to the mind and the eyes are but its ministersthan the obvious beauty which gratifies the eye. There are some things, too, which have such a place in the body, that they obviously serve no useful purpose, but are solely for beauty, as e.g. the teats on a man's breast, or the beard on his face; for that this is for ornament, and not for protection, is proved by the bare faces of women, who ought rather, as the weaker sex, to enjoy such a defence. If, therefore, of all those members which are exposed to our view, there is certainly not one in which beauty is sacrificed to utility, while there are some which serve no purpose but only beauty, I think it can readily be concluded that in the creation[Pg 528] of the human body comeliness was more regarded than necessity. In truth, necessity is a transitory thing; and the time is coming when we shall enjoy one another's beauty without any lust,a condition which will specially redound to the praise of the Creator, who, as it is said in the psalm, has "put on praise and comeliness."[1021]
ENNEAD 04.04 - Questions About the Soul., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02, #Plotinus, #Christianity
Architecture and the fine arts, fulfil themselves in such an object. Medicine, Agriculture and similar professions, however, are auxiliary arts, and obey the laws of nature, assisting their efficient production so as to make them as natural as possible. As to rhetoric, music, and other arts of refinement, which serve the education of souls in improving or degrading men, it remains an open question how many there are of them, and what power they possess. In all these things, we will have to examine what may be of use to us for the questions we are treating, and we will have to discover the cause of the facts, as far as possible.
ABSURDITY OF PTOLEMEAN ASTROLOGY.
ENNEAD 05.09 - Of Intelligence, Ideas and Essence., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01, #Plotinus, #Christianity
The arts which produce sense-objects, such as architecture and carpentry, have their principles in the intelligible world, and participate in wisdom, so far as they make use of certain proportions. But as they apply these proportions to sense-objects, they cannot wholly be referred to the intelligible world, unless in so far as they are contained within human reason. The case is similar with Agriculture, which assists the growth of plants; medicine, which increases health, and (gymnastics) which supplies the body with strength as well as vigor,145 for on high there is another Power, another115 Health, from which all living organisms derive their needed vigor.
OTHER ARTS ARE INTELLIGIBLE WHEN APPLIED TO THE INTELLIGIBLE.
Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (text), #Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
but a merchant who has recently taken to Agriculture is discouraged by one season of drought, The
true believer is never discouraged, even if he fails to see God in spite of lifelong devotion.
Sophist, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
STRANGER: There is Agriculture, and the tending of mortal creatures, and the art of constructing or moulding vessels, and there is the art of imitationall these may be appropriately called by a single name.
THEAETETUS: What do you mean? And what is the name?
Tablets of Baha u llah text, #Tablets of Baha u llah, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
Fourth: Everyone, whether man or woman, should hand over to a trusted person a portion of what he or she earneth through trade, Agriculture or other occupation, for the training and education of children, to be spent for this purpose with the knowledge of the Trustees of the House of Justice.
Fifth: Special regard must be paid to Agriculture. Although it hath been mentioned in the fifth place, unquestionably it precedeth the others. Agriculture is highly developed in foreign lands, however in Persia it hath so far been grievously neglected. It is hoped that His Majesty the Sháh--may God assist him by His grace--will turn his attention to this vital and important matter.
Were men to strictly observe that which the Pen of the Most High hath revealed in the Crimson Book, they could then well afford to dispense with the regulations which prevail in the world. Certain exhortations have repeatedly streamed forth from the Pen of the Most High that perchance the manifestations of power and the dawning-places of might may, sometime, be enabled to enforce them. Indeed, were sincere seekers to be found, every emanation of God's pervasive and irresistible Will would, for the sake of His love, be revealed. But where are to be found earnest seekers and inquiring minds? Whither are gone the equitable and the fair-minded? At present no day passeth without the fire of a fresh tyranny blazing fiercely, or the sword of a new aggression being unsheathed. Gracious God! The great and the noble in Persia glory in acts of such savagery that one is lost in amazement at the tales thereof.
Talks 176-200, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Later, the questioner went up and round the hill and wandered about fifteen miles between twelve noon and eight p.m. He returned tired and gave a very lucid speech on Agriculture, social conditions, caste system, spiritual quality of the Indians, etc.
10th March, 1936
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
spiritual commune. I did not call it a commune but a Sangha, based on spirituality and living its own economic life. It would develop its small-scale industries, Agriculture, etc., and have an interchange of products with other
communes.
--
glad to find that he has such a grasp over things like Agriculture.
SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, his personality is many-sided and various. He has done
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
was found on cultivated ground indicates that she is a symbol of Agriculture; (3) the Kshatriyas were really the ones responsible for the growth of
culture and civilisation while the Brahmins were only its preservers.
The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The ancients often called alchemy the celestial Agriculture, because it offers in its laws,
circumstances and conditions the most intimate of connection with terrestrial Agriculture.
There is scarcely a classical author who does not draw his examples from, and does not
--
practice of celestial Agriculture: so much for profit and utility; a few laurel twigs, of such a
discrete relief that they are barely noticed: so much for the honor of the hard-working artist.
--- Overview of noun agriculture
The noun agriculture has 4 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (4) agribusiness, agriculture, factory farm ::: (a large-scale farming enterprise)
2. (1) farming, agriculture, husbandry ::: (the practice of cultivating the land or raising stock)
3. Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Department, Agriculture, USDA ::: (the federal department that administers programs that provide services to farmers (including research and soil conservation and efforts to stabilize the farming economy); created in 1862)
4. agriculture ::: (the class of people engaged in growing food)
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun agriculture
4 senses of agriculture
Sense 1
agribusiness, agriculture, factory farm
=> commercial enterprise, business enterprise, business
=> commerce, commercialism, mercantilism
=> transaction, dealing, dealings
=> group action
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
farming, agriculture, husbandry
=> cultivation
=> production
=> industry, manufacture
=> commercial enterprise, business enterprise, business
=> commerce, commercialism, mercantilism
=> transaction, dealing, dealings
=> group action
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Department, Agriculture, USDA
=> executive department
=> federal department, federal office, department of the federal government
=> government department
=> department, section
=> division
=> administrative unit, administrative body
=> unit, social unit
=> organization, organisation
=> social group
=> group, grouping
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 4
agriculture
=> class, stratum, social class, socio-economic class
=> people
=> group, grouping
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun agriculture
1 of 4 senses of agriculture
Sense 2
farming, agriculture, husbandry
=> animal husbandry
=> arboriculture, tree farming
=> dairying, dairy farming
=> gardening, horticulture
=> hydroponics, aquiculture, tank farming
=> mixed farming
=> planting
=> ranching
=> strip cropping
=> subsistence farming
=> truck farming
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun agriculture
4 senses of agriculture
Sense 1
agribusiness, agriculture, factory farm
=> commercial enterprise, business enterprise, business
Sense 2
farming, agriculture, husbandry
=> cultivation
Sense 3
Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Department, Agriculture, USDA
=> executive department
Sense 4
agriculture
=> class, stratum, social class, socio-economic class
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun agriculture
4 senses of agriculture
Sense 1
agribusiness, agriculture, factory farm
-> commercial enterprise, business enterprise, business
=> tourism, touristry
=> fishing
=> butchery, butchering
=> storage
=> industry, manufacture
=> field, field of operation, line of business
=> employee-owned enterprise, employee-owned business
=> finance
=> discount business
=> real-estate business
=> advertising, publicizing
=> publication, publishing
=> printing
=> packaging
=> agribusiness, agriculture, factory farm
=> construction, building
=> transportation, shipping, transport
=> venture
Sense 2
farming, agriculture, husbandry
-> cultivation
=> aquaculture
=> beekeeping, apiculture
=> farming, agriculture, husbandry
=> culture
=> tilling
Sense 3
Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Department, Agriculture, USDA
-> executive department
=> White House, EXEC
=> Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Department, Agriculture, USDA
=> Department of Commerce, Commerce Department, Commerce, DoC
=> Department of Defense, Defense Department, United States Department of Defense, Defense, DoD
=> Department of Education, Education Department, Education
=> Department of Energy, Energy Department, Energy, DOE
=> Department of Health and Human Services, Health and Human Services, HHS
=> Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security
=> Department of Housing and Urban Development, Housing and Urban Development, HUD
=> Department of Justice, Justice Department, Justice, DoJ
=> Department of Labor, Labor Department, Labor, DoL
=> Department of State, United States Department of State, State Department, State, DoS
=> Department of the Interior, Interior Department, Interior, DoI
=> Department of the Treasury, Treasury Department, Treasury, United States Treasury
=> Department of Transportation, Transportation, DoT
=> Department of Veterans Affairs, VA
=> Department of Commerce and Labor
=> Department of Health Education and Welfare
=> Navy Department
=> War Department
Sense 4
agriculture
-> class, stratum, social class, socio-economic class
=> world, domain
=> age class
=> agriculture
=> brotherhood, fraternity, sodality
=> estate of the realm, estate, the three estates
=> labor, labour, working class, proletariat
=> lower class, underclass
=> middle class, bourgeoisie
=> booboisie
=> commonalty, commonality, commons
=> peasantry
=> demimonde
=> underworld
=> yeomanry
=> caste
=> caste
=> upper class, upper crust
=> ninja
=> firing line
=> immigrant class
=> center
=> old school
=> market
=> craft, trade
=> womanhood, woman, fair sex
--- Grep of noun agriculture
agriculture
agriculture department
agriculture secretary
department of agriculture
food and agriculture organization
food and agriculture organization of the united nations
scientific agriculture
secretary of agriculture
Wikipedia - 2020 Indian agriculture acts -- Acts of the Parliament of India
Wikipedia - Acharya Narendra Deva University of Agriculture and Technology -- University in Kumarganj, Uttar Pradesh India
Wikipedia - After the Development of Agriculture -- Calendar era, according to which 2000 CE is 10000 A.D.A. (M-bM-^@M-^fter the development of agricultureM-bM-^@M-^])
Wikipedia - Agreement on Agriculture
Wikipedia - Agribusiness -- Agriculture-related industry
Wikipedia - Agricultural machinery -- Machinery used in farming or other agriculture
Wikipedia - Agricultural policy -- Laws relating to domestic agriculture and foreign-imported agricultural products
Wikipedia - Agricultural Research Service -- Research agency of the US Department of Agriculture
Wikipedia - Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators -- Studies in agriculture research and development
Wikipedia - Agricultural wastewater treatment -- Farm management agenda for controlling pollution from surface runoff in agriculture
Wikipedia - Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department -- Hong Kong government department
Wikipedia - Agriculture, forestry, and fishing in Japan -- Sector of the Japanese economy
Wikipedia - Agriculture in ancient Greece
Wikipedia - Agriculture in California -- Overview of agriculture in California
Wikipedia - Agriculture in China
Wikipedia - Agriculture in Georgia (country)
Wikipedia - Agriculture in Germany -- Aspect of German economy
Wikipedia - Agriculture in India -- Agriculture in India
Wikipedia - Agriculture in Indonesia -- Major industry in Indonesia
Wikipedia - Agriculture in Pakistan
Wikipedia - Agriculture in Poland
Wikipedia - Agriculture in Puerto Rico -- A primary sector of the economy of Puerto Rico
Wikipedia - Agriculture in Romania
Wikipedia - Agriculture in Scotland
Wikipedia - Agriculture in Singapore -- Description of agriculture in Singapore
Wikipedia - Agriculture in South Africa
Wikipedia - Agriculture in Svalbard -- Svalbard's agriculture
Wikipedia - Agriculture in Taiwan
Wikipedia - Agriculture in the Philippines
Wikipedia - Agriculture in the Soviet Union
Wikipedia - Agriculture in the United States -- Major industry in the United States
Wikipedia - Agriculture in Vietnam
Wikipedia - Agriculture -- Cultivation of plants and animals to provide useful products
Wikipedia - Agrochemical -- Any chemical used in agriculture
Wikipedia - Agroecology -- The study of ecological processes in agriculture
Wikipedia - Agway -- U.S. agriculture company
Wikipedia - AlterAg -- American agriculture company
Wikipedia - Ancient Egyptian agriculture
Wikipedia - Animal agriculture
Wikipedia - Animal-free agriculture
Wikipedia - Arab Agricultural Revolution -- Arab transformation of agriculture in Medieval Spain
Wikipedia - Arthur Young (agriculturist) -- English writer on agriculture (1741-1820)
Wikipedia - Bangladesh Institute of Nuclear Agriculture -- Research institute in Bangladesh
Wikipedia - Biodiversity in agriculture -- Increasing biodiversity in agriculture
Wikipedia - Biodynamic Agriculture
Wikipedia - Biodynamic agriculture
Wikipedia - British Agricultural Revolution -- Mid-17th to 19th century revolution centred around agriculture
Wikipedia - Category:Agriculture ministers of Albania
Wikipedia - Catherine Woteki -- American agriculture official
Wikipedia - Cellular agriculture
Wikipedia - Central Philippine University - College of Agriculture, Resources and Environmental Sciences -- Agricultural school at Central Philippine University
Wikipedia - Ceres (mythology) -- Roman goddess of agriculture
Wikipedia - Challenger Tractor -- Rubber tracked agriculture tractor
Wikipedia - Chamber of Agriculture -- British agricultural organisation
Wikipedia - Charles F. Brannan -- American politician, Secretary of Agriculture 1948-1953
Wikipedia - Christianity and agriculture -- Christianity and agriculture
Wikipedia - Civic agriculture
Wikipedia - Climate change and agriculture -- Climate change's effects on agriculture
Wikipedia - Columella -- 1st century AD Roman writer on agriculture
Wikipedia - Commercial agriculture
Wikipedia - Committee on Environment and Agriculture -- Swedish parliamentary committee
Wikipedia - Community-supported agriculture
Wikipedia - Corporate farming -- Large-scale agriculture driven by big business
Wikipedia - Corteva -- American agriculture company
Wikipedia - Cowspiracy -- 2014 documentary film exploring the impact of animal agriculture on the environment.
Wikipedia - DeKalb Genetics Corporation -- Agriculture company purchased by Monsanto in 1998
Wikipedia - Demeter -- Greek goddess of the harvest, grains, and agriculture
Wikipedia - Dennys Lascelles Ltd -- Australian agriculture company
Wikipedia - Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs -- Agriculture ministry of United Kingdom (British ministerial department)
Wikipedia - Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (Queensland) -- State government department in Queensland, Australia
Wikipedia - Department of Agriculture appointments by Donald Trump -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (Isle of Man) -- Former department of the Isle of Man Government
Wikipedia - Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (Niue) -- Federal department of Niue
Wikipedia - Department of Agriculture (Philippines) -- Government department in the Philippines
Wikipedia - Dmitry Patrushev -- Russian politician; Minister of Agriculture (2018-present)
Wikipedia - Domesticated plants and animals of Austronesia -- Ancient expansion of agriculture
Wikipedia - Draft:Narayanarao Bhogapurapu -- Indian researcher working on microwave remote sensing and agriculture applications
Wikipedia - Ecological agriculture
Wikipedia - Ecological sanitation -- An approach to sanitation provision which aims to safely reuse excreta in agriculture
Wikipedia - Economy of the Republic of Ireland -- Survey of knowledge, services and agriculture-led economy
Wikipedia - Ed Schafer -- 29th United States Secretary of Agriculture
Wikipedia - Energy efficiency in agriculture
Wikipedia - Extensive farming -- Agriculture systems that involve low inputs and outputs relative to land area
Wikipedia - FarmBot -- Open-source precision agriculture CNC farming project
Wikipedia - Farmer -- Person that works in agriculture
Wikipedia - Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture
Wikipedia - Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta -- University in Nigeria
Wikipedia - Flour Mills of Nigeria -- Nigerian agriculture company
Wikipedia - Food and Agriculture Organization
Wikipedia - Food Programme -- Plan to improve Soviet agriculture
Wikipedia - Food security in the Central Valley, California -- Widespread issue where most of the nation's agriculture is produced
Wikipedia - Freight Farms -- Agriculture tech company
Wikipedia - Genetically modified crops -- Plants used in agriculture
Wikipedia - Glossary of agriculture -- List of definitions of terms and concepts commonly used in agriculture
Wikipedia - Great Depression of British Agriculture -- Economic depression
Wikipedia - Helene Lapierre -- Research scientist for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Wikipedia - History of agriculture in the Indian subcontinent -- Overview of the history of agriculture in the Indian subcontinent
Wikipedia - History of agriculture -- notable events in the history of how plants and animals were domesticated and how techniques of raising them for human uses was developed
Wikipedia - Horticulture, Agriculture and Forestry Union -- Former West German trade union
Wikipedia - Horticulture -- Agriculture of plants
Wikipedia - Incan agriculture -- Agriculture by the Inca Empire
Wikipedia - Index of agriculture articles -- Wikipedia index
Wikipedia - Information and communications technology in agriculture -- Agricultural and rural development
Wikipedia - Intensive farming in Almeria -- Greenhouse agriculture in southern Spain.
Wikipedia - Intensive farming -- Type of agriculture using high inputs to try to get high outputs
Wikipedia - International University of Business Agriculture and Technology -- Private university in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Wikipedia - Isaac Newton (agriculturalist) -- First United States Commissioner of Agriculture
Wikipedia - James Richardson & Sons -- Canadian agriculture corporation
Wikipedia - James Wilson (Secretary of Agriculture) -- Scottish-American politician
Wikipedia - Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology -- Kenyan university
Wikipedia - Kharkiv Petro Vasylenko National Technical University of Agriculture -- Ukrainian university
Wikipedia - Li Jiayang -- Chinese agronomist, Vice Minister of Agriculture (born 1956)
Wikipedia - List of agriculture awards -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Agriculture Commissioners of North Dakota -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of agriculture ministries -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of documentary films about agriculture -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Federal Ministers of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (Germany) -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Ministers for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries (Denmark) -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Ministers of Agriculture and Land Reclamation of Egypt -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Ministers of Agriculture of the Netherlands -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Ministers of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fisheries (Uruguay) -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of North Dakota Commissioners of Agriculture and Labor -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of sustainable agriculture topics
Wikipedia - Lodging (agriculture) -- Agricultural term, bending over of the stems near ground level of crops
Wikipedia - Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture -- Business advocacy group in Pune, Maharashtra, India
Wikipedia - Mars (mythology) -- Roman god of war, and guardian of agriculture
Wikipedia - Martin Reaney -- Professor of the College of Agriculture and Bioresources at the University of Saskatchewan
Wikipedia - Meat industry -- Modern industrialized livestock agriculture for production, packing, preservation and marketing of meat
Wikipedia - Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food -- Minister in the Cabinet of Canada
Wikipedia - Minister of Agriculture (New Zealand) -- New Zealand minister of the Crown
Wikipedia - Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (South Korea) -- Cabinet-level division of the government of South Korea
Wikipedia - Ministry of Agriculture (Albania)
Wikipedia - Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (Poland) -- Agriculture ministry of Poland
Wikipedia - Ministry of Agriculture (Bangladesh) -- Government ministry of Bangladesh
Wikipedia - Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries
Wikipedia - Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (Japan)
Wikipedia - Ministry of Agriculture (Kaduna State) -- Ministry of Kaduna State
Wikipedia - Ministry of Agriculture (Zambia) -- Government ministry in Zambia
Wikipedia - Molico -- Submerged aquatic vegetation collected for use in agriculture
Wikipedia - Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture -- Manga, anime and live-action television series
Wikipedia - National Agriculture and Food Research Organization -- Japanese agricultural and food research organization
Wikipedia - National Agriculture Training Academy -- Research institute in Bangladesh
Wikipedia - Neftali Soto -- Former Secretary of Agriculture of Puerto Rico
Wikipedia - New Holland Agriculture
Wikipedia - Nimbe Adedipe Library -- Academic library of the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta
Wikipedia - Normal crop acreage -- United States agriculture policy
Wikipedia - Northern Cape Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development -- Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development of the Northern Cape
Wikipedia - Organic farming -- Method of agriculture meant to be environmentally friendly
Wikipedia - Outline of agriculture
Wikipedia - Padfield v Minister of Agriculture -- 1968 UK constitutional law case
Wikipedia - Paludiculture -- Wet agriculture and forestry on peatlands
Wikipedia - Philippine House Committee on Agriculture and Food -- Standing committee of the House of Representatives of the Philippines
Wikipedia - Philippine Senate Committee on Agriculture, Food and Agrarian Reform -- Standing committee of the Senate of the Philippines
Wikipedia - Pioneer Hi Bred International -- American producer of hybrid seeds for agriculture
Wikipedia - Portal:Agriculture
Wikipedia - Precision agriculture
Wikipedia - Puerto Rico Department of Agriculture -- Government of Puerto Rico
Wikipedia - Rajiv Khosla -- Indian-American scientist and professor of precision agriculture
Wikipedia - Regenerative agriculture -- Conservation and rehabilitation approach to food and farming systems
Wikipedia - Religion and agriculture
Wikipedia - Rhizophagus irregularis -- Species of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus used as a soil inoculant in agriculture and horticulture
Wikipedia - Rick Pate -- Commissioner of Agriculture, Alabama
Wikipedia - Robert Mellors -- English expert in tropical agriculture
Wikipedia - Roman agriculture
Wikipedia - Royal Agricultural Society of England -- Society; promotes the scientific development of agriculture
Wikipedia - Rural Community Advancement Program -- Agriculture improvement program in the United States
Wikipedia - Rural Housing Service -- Governmental agency belonging to the United States Department of Agriculture
Row cover - In agriculture and gardening, row cover is any transparent or semi-transparent, flexible material, like fabric or plastic sheeting, used as a protective covering to shield plants, usually vegetables, primarily from the undesirable effects of cold and wind, and also from insect damage.[1] In addition to reducing the drying effect of wind, row cover can provide a limited amount of warming by the same effect that cold frames, greenhouses, and polytunnels produce, creating a microclimate for the plants.
Wikipedia - SAARC Agriculture Centre -- Research institute in Bangladesh
Wikipedia - Seleucid agriculture -- Topic in Seleucid economic history
Wikipedia - Shattering (agriculture) -- Dispersal of seeds upon ripening
Wikipedia - Shevi'it (tractate) -- Talmudic tractate about the Sabbatical year regarding agriculture and debts in the Land of Israel
Wikipedia - Shifting cultivation -- Method of agriculture
Wikipedia - Shishi-odoshi -- Japanese devices made to frighten animals which pose a threat to agriculture
Wikipedia - Simon Haley -- American agriculture professor and father of Alex Haley
Wikipedia - Simplot -- American agriculture company
Wikipedia - Sindh Irrigated Agriculture Productivity Enhancement Project -- Government agency in Sindh, Pakistan
Wikipedia - Soil compaction (agriculture)
Wikipedia - Sonny Perdue -- 81st Governor of Georgia; 31st United States Secretary of Agriculture
Wikipedia - Stephen Vaden -- General Counsel of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture
Wikipedia - Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture -- Agriculture and educational organization in New York
Wikipedia - Subsistence agriculture -- Farming which meets the basic needs of the farmer and family
Wikipedia - Sukunabikona -- Kami of hot springs (onsen), agriculture, healing, magic and sake
Wikipedia - Sustainable Agriculture Innovation Network -- Sustainable agriculture Network launched in 2008 to provide a framework for collaboration on agriculture and climate change between the UK and China
Wikipedia - Sustainable agriculture
Wikipedia - Tennessee Department of Agriculture -- State agency in Tennessee
Wikipedia - The Nabataean Agriculture
Wikipedia - Theodore Sedgwick Gold -- 19th-century American farmer and Connecticut state secretary of agriculture
Wikipedia - Timeline of agriculture and food technology -- History of crop and animal domestication
Wikipedia - Tom Vilsack -- 40th Governor of Iowa; 30th United States Secretary of Agriculture
Wikipedia - Topping (agriculture)
Wikipedia - Ukanomitama -- Japanese deity of agriculture
Wikipedia - United States Department of Agriculture -- Department of United States government
Wikipedia - United States House Agriculture Subcommittee on Biotechnology, Horticulture, and Research -- Subcommittee of the House Agriculture Committee
Wikipedia - United States House Agriculture Subcommittee on Commodity Exchanges, Energy, and Credit -- Subcommittee of the House Agriculture Committee
Wikipedia - United States House Agriculture Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities and Risk Management -- Subcommittee of the House Agriculture Committee
Wikipedia - United States House Agriculture Subcommittee on Nutrition, Oversight, and Department Operations -- Subcommittee of the House Agriculture Committee
Wikipedia - United States House Agriculture Subcommittee on Rural Development, Research, Biotechnology, and Foreign Agriculture -- congressional subcommittee
Wikipedia - United States House Committee on Agriculture -- Standing committee of the United States House of Representatives
Wikipedia - United States Secretary of Agriculture -- Head of the US Department of Agriculture
Wikipedia - United States Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry -- Standing committee of the United States Senate
Wikipedia - University of Agriculture, Dera Ismail Khan -- University in Khyber Pakhunkhwa, Pakistan
Wikipedia - University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food, and Environment -- College of Agriculture, Food and Environment of University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY, USA
Wikipedia - Urban agriculture -- The practice of cultivating, processing and distributing food in or around urban areas
Wikipedia - USDA Rural Development -- Mission area within the United States Department of Agriculture
Wikipedia - U.S. Department of Agriculture
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:WikiProject Agriculture/Beekeeping task force -- Sub-project of WikiProject Agriculture
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:WikiProject Agriculture -- Wikimedia subject-area collaboration
Wikipedia - William Gates LeDuc -- Fourth United States Commissioner of Agriculture
Wikipedia - Winter sowing -- Agriculture planting strategy
Wikipedia - Women in agriculture in the United Kingdom -- History of British women in agriculture
Tom Vilsack ::: Born: December 13, 1950; Occupation: United States Secretary of Agriculture;
Ann Veneman ::: Born: June 29, 1949; Occupation: Former United States Secretary of Agriculture;
Dan Glickman ::: Born: November 24, 1944; Occupation: Former United States Secretary of Agriculture;
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1199194.New_Roots_for_Agriculture
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1371668.Dancing_at_the_Dawn_of_Agriculture
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20406730-general-view-of-the-agriculture-of-hertfordshire
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22501071-depolarizing-food-and-agriculture
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29385391-agriculture-urbaine
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39358875-religion-and-sustainable-agriculture
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77140.Chicken_Little_Tomato_Sauce_and_Agriculture
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/938477.Civic_Agriculture
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16197769.John_H__Walton__Agriculture
Goodreads author - U_S_Department_of_Agriculture_Forest_Service
https://greekmythology.wikia.org/wiki/Category:Agriculture_Deities
wiki.auroville - Food_Systems_and_Urban_Agriculture
wiki.auroville - Ritam_"Agriculture_in_Transition:_An_Auroville_view"
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallToAgriculture
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Agriculture
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_India
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Agriculture
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Centres_of_origin_and_spread_of_agriculture.svg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Agriculture
Saving Grace (2000) ::: 6.9/10 -- R | 1h 33min | Comedy, Crime | 1 September 2000 (USA) -- A small-town English widow, facing financial troubles after her husband's suicide, turns to agriculture of an illegal kind. Director: Nigel Cole
Saving Grace (2000) ::: 6.9/10 -- R | 1h 33min | Comedy, Crime | 1 September 2000 (USA) -- A small-town English widow, facing financial troubles after her husband's suicide, turns to agriculture of an illegal kind. Director: Nigel Cole Writers: Mark Crowdy (story), Craig Ferguson (screenplay) | 1 more credit Stars:
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2020 Indian agriculture acts
Acadmie d'Agriculture
Acharya Narendra Deva University of Agriculture and Technology
African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development
After the Development of Agriculture
Agreement on Agriculture
Agriculture
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Agriculture and aquaculture in Hong Kong
Agriculture and Consumer Protection Act of 1973
Agriculture and Development
Agriculture and Fisheries (constituency)
Agriculture and Fisheries Council
Agriculture and Food Act of 1981
Agriculture and Forestry University
Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board
Agriculture commissioner
Agriculture Development Bank
Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment
Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department
Agriculture, Fisheries, Mining, Energy and Construction (constituency)
Agriculture, forestry, and fishing in Japan
Agriculture Hall
Agriculture in Albania
Agriculture in Algeria
Agriculture in ancient Greece
Agriculture in ancient Rome
Agriculture in ancient Tamil country
Agriculture in Angola
Agriculture in Argentina
Agriculture in Armenia
Agriculture in Australia
Agriculture in Austria
Agriculture in Azerbaijan
Agriculture in Bahrain
Agriculture in Bangladesh
Agriculture in Belarus
Agriculture in Benin
Agriculture in Bhutan
Agriculture in Bolivia
Agriculture in Brazil
Agriculture in Bulgaria
Agriculture in Cambodia
Agriculture in Canada
Agriculture in Central Asia
Agriculture in Chad
Agriculture in Chile
Agriculture in China
Agriculture in Chinese mythology
Agriculture in Colombia
Agriculture in Communist Czechoslovakia
Agriculture in Connecticut
Agriculture in Cuba
Agriculture in Cyprus
Agriculture in East Germany
Agriculture in England
Agriculture in Estonia
Agriculture in Ethiopia
Agriculture in Germany
Agriculture in Ghana
Agriculture in Greece
Agriculture in Guinea
Agriculture in Guyana
Agriculture in Haiti
Agriculture in Iceland
Agriculture in Idaho
Agriculture in India
Agriculture in Indonesia
Agriculture in Iran
Agriculture in Israel
Agriculture in Ivory Coast
Agriculture in Jordan
Agriculture in Kazakhstan
Agriculture in Kentucky
Agriculture in Kenya
Agriculture in Kyrgyzstan
Agriculture in Laos
Agriculture in Latvia
Agriculture in Lebanon
Agriculture in Liberia
Agriculture in Libya
Agriculture in Lithuania
Agriculture in London
Agriculture in Madagascar
Agriculture in Malawi
Agriculture in Malaysia
Agriculture in Mauritania
Agriculture in Mesoamerica
Agriculture in Mexico
Agriculture in Moldova
Agriculture in Mongolia
Agriculture in Morocco
Agriculture in Mozambique
Agriculture in Myanmar
Agriculture in Nepal
Agriculture in New York
Agriculture in New Zealand
Agriculture in Nicaragua
Agriculture in Niger
Agriculture in Nigeria
Agriculture in North Korea
Agriculture in Nova Scotia
Agriculture in Oman
Agriculture in Pakistan
Agriculture in Panama
Agriculture in Paraguay
Agriculture in Pennsylvania
Agriculture in Poland
Agriculture in Portugal
Agriculture in Qatar
Agriculture in Romania
Agriculture in Russia
Agriculture in Saskatchewan
Agriculture in Saudi Arabia
Agriculture in Scotland
Agriculture in Scotland in the Middle Ages
Agriculture in Senegal
Agriculture in Serbia
Agriculture in Seychelles
Agriculture in Sierra Leone
Agriculture in Somalia
Agriculture in South Africa
Agriculture in Spain
Agriculture in Sri Lanka
Agriculture in Sudan
Agriculture Insurance Company of India
Agriculture in Syria
Agriculture in Taiwan
Agriculture in Tajikistan
Agriculture in Thailand
Agriculture in The Bahamas
Agriculture in the Classroom
Agriculture in the Comoros
Agriculture in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Agriculture in the Empire of Japan
Agriculture in the Middle Ages
Agriculture in the Philippines
Agriculture in the Russian Empire
Agriculture in the Soviet Union
Agriculture in the United Arab Emirates
Agriculture in the United Kingdom
Agriculture in Turkmenistan
Agriculture in Uganda
Agriculture in Upper Canada
Agriculture in Uruguay
Agriculture in Uzbekistan
Agriculture in Venezuela
Agriculture in Vietnam
Agriculture in Wales
Agriculture in Zimbabwe
Agriculture of Bihar
Agriculture on the prehistoric Great Plains
Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act of 2013
Agriculture Retention and Development Act
Agriculture Risk Protection Act of 2000
Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2015
Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries
Ancient Egyptian agriculture
Andean agriculture
Animal-free agriculture
Animal genetic resources for food and agriculture
Asia Network for Sustainable Agriculture and Bioresources
Association of International Research and Development Centers for Agriculture
Association of Uganda Professional Women in Agriculture and Environment
Bachelor of Science in Agriculture
Banda University of Agriculture and Technology
Bangladesh Institute of Nuclear Agriculture
Berkshire College of Agriculture
Biodiversity in agriculture
Biodynamic agriculture
Biointensive agriculture
Biosaline agriculture
Board of Agriculture (17931822)
Botswana University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (BUAN)
Building-integrated agriculture
Cahiers Agricultures
California Agriculture
California Department of Food and Agriculture
Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture
Canada Agriculture and Food Museum
Canadian Census of Agriculture
Canadian Federation of Agriculture
Canna Agriculture Group
Cedara College of Agriculture
Cellular Agriculture Society
Census of agriculture
Central Philippine University - College of Agriculture, Resources and Environmental Sciences
Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture
Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International
Chamber of Agriculture
Chandra Shekhar Azad University of Agriculture and Technology
Chaoda Modern Agriculture
China Green Agriculture
Christianity and agriculture
Civic agriculture
Climate change and agriculture
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College of Agriculture
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College of Agriculture and Natural Resources
College of Agriculture Business Management, Latur
College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise
College of Agriculture in Gonbad
College of Agriculture, Latur
Colorado Department of Agriculture
Columbia Agriculture Park
Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
Committee for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs
Committee on Agriculture
Committee on Environment and Agriculture
Committee on Rural Economy, Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Environment
Community-supported agriculture
Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture
Conservation agriculture
Consumers, Health, Agriculture and Food Executive Agency
Controlled-environment agriculture
Core Historical Literature of Agriculture
Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Coulter (agriculture)
Council of Agriculture
CPA (agriculture)
Dalhousie University Faculty of Agriculture
Data mining in agriculture
Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture
Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (Queensland)
Department of Agriculture and Food
Department of Agriculture and Food (Western Australia)
Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs
Department of Agriculture and Water Resources
Department of Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fisheries (New Brunswick)
Department of Agriculture (Australia, 197475)
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Department of Agriculture (Australia, 201920)
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Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (Niue)
Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development
Department of Agriculture (New Brunswick)
Department of Agriculture (Philippines)
Department of Agriculture (Sri Lanka)
Department of Agriculture v. Moreno
Department of Agriculture (West Bengal)
Development-supported agriculture
Digital agriculture
Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development
Directorate-General for Agriculture, Fisheries, Social Affairs and Health
Don B. Huntley College of Agriculture
Drainage system (agriculture)
Drapers Professor of Agriculture
Dr. Rajendra Prasad Central Agriculture University
Earmark (agriculture)
Economics of English agriculture in the Middle Ages
Emergence of agriculture in the Philippines
Energy efficiency in agriculture
Enumamula Agriculture Market
Environmental impact of agriculture
EU Commissioner for Agriculture
European Parliament Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development
European System of Cooperative Research Networks in Agriculture
Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996
Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act of 2013
Federal Crop Insurance Reform and Department of Agriculture Reorganization Act of 1994
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Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta
Feminization of agriculture
Field (agriculture)
Florida Commissioner of Agriculture
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Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990
Food and Agriculture Act of 1965
Food and Agriculture Act of 1977
Food and agriculture in Nazi Germany
Food and Agriculture Organization
Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database
Food and Agriculture Policy Decision Analysis
Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University
Future Harvest Consortium to Rebuild Agriculture in Afghanistan
Gauteng Department of Agriculture and Rural Development
G. B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology
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Gwebi College of Agriculture
History of agriculture
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Holidays with Pay (Agriculture) Convention, 1952
Holistic management (agriculture)
Horticulture, Agriculture and Forestry Union
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Illinois Department of Agriculture
Index of agriculture articles
Information and communications technology in agriculture
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
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Institutes of Agriculture of Bydgoszcz
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Invalidity Insurance (Agriculture) Convention, 1933 (shelved)
Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines & Agriculture
Islamic Azad University, Roudehen Branch Faculty of Agriculture
Italian Minister of Agriculture
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Jnos Szab (Minister of Agriculture)
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Journal of Central European Agriculture
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Julius Nyerere University of Agriculture
Kansas Department of Agriculture
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KRAV (agriculture)
Labour Inspection (Agriculture) Convention, 1969
Lasbela University of Agriculture, Water & Marine Science
Learn from Dazhai in agriculture
List of Agriculture Commissioners of North Dakota
List of agriculture ministries
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Mechanised agriculture
Medal "For Work in Agriculture"
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Minimum Wage Fixing Machinery (Agriculture) Convention, 1951
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Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture (Saudi Arabia)
Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture (Iceland)
Ministry of Forestry and Mining and Ministry of Agriculture and Waterworks Building, Belgrade
Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fisheries
Minnesota Department of Agriculture
Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce
Missouri Department of Agriculture
MNS University of Agriculture
Mobile agriculture
Modern agriculture
Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture
Multifunctionality in agriculture
Muse qubcois de l'agriculture et de l'alimentation
Nanotechnology in agriculture
National Agriculture Awards
National Agriculture Imagery Program
National Agriculture Training Academy
National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development
National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC)
Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture
Newcastle University Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering
New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts
New Holland Agriculture
New Jersey Department of Agriculture
New World Agriculture and Ecology Group
Nizamabad Agriculture Market
Normal yield (agriculture)
North Carolina Commissioner of Agriculture
North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services
North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner
North Dakota Commissioner of Agriculture and Labor
North Dakota Department of Agriculture
Norwegian Union of Forestry and Agriculture Workers
Obihiro University of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine
Odisha University of Agriculture and Technology
Ohio Department of Agriculture
Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry
Oklahoma Secretary of Agriculture
Old-Age Insurance (Agriculture) Convention, 1933 (shelved)
Ontario Federation of Agriculture
Open Agriculture
Open Agriculture Initiative
Oregon Department of Agriculture
Otley College of Agriculture and Horticulture
Outline of agriculture
Outline of sustainable agriculture
Padfield v Minister of Agriculture
Plmi Jnsson (Minister of Agriculture)
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru College of Agriculture and Research Institute
Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries
Partnership for Enhancing Agriculture in Rwanda through Linkages
Payment limitations (agriculture)
Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture
Peri-urban agriculture
Philippine Council for Agriculture, Aquatic, and Natural Resources Research and Development
Pir Mehr Ali Shah Arid Agriculture University
Portal:Agriculture
Portal:Agriculture/Selected article
Precision agriculture
Puerto Rico Department of Agriculture
Quaker Agriculture missions to the Miami
Rainfed agriculture
Rare breed (agriculture)
Regenerative agriculture
Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture
Religion and agriculture
Remunerative Approach for Agriculture and Allied sector Rejuvenation
Renault Agriculture
Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems
Research Institute of Organic Agriculture
Right of Association (Agriculture) Convention
Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry
Royal University of Agriculture
SAARC Agriculture Centre
Safety and Health in Agriculture Convention, 2001
Sam Higginbottom University of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences
Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel University of Agriculture and Technology
Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (Mexico)
Secretary of Agriculture of Iowa
Sex and Agriculture: The Very Best of The Exponents
Sheaf (agriculture)
Siberian agriculture
Sickness Insurance (Agriculture) Convention, 1927
Simn Bolvar United World College of Agriculture
Sindh Agriculture University
Sindh Irrigated Agriculture Productivity Enhancement Project
Sintal Agriculture
Slovak University of Agriculture
Sokoine University of Agriculture
South Bangla Agriculture and Commerce Bank Limited
Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture
Special Accession Programme for Agriculture and Rural Development
Sri Karan Narendra Agriculture University
Sri Karan Narendra College of Agriculture
Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture
Subsistence agriculture
Survivors' Insurance (Agriculture) Convention, 1933 (shelved)
Sustainable agriculture
Sustainable Agriculture Innovation Network
Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education
Sustainable intensive agriculture
Swedish Board of Agriculture
Tanzania Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture
Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture
Temple of Agriculture
Tennessee Department of Agriculture
Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Texas Department of Agriculture
The Museum of Agriculture
The National Agriculture and Trade Show (Belize)
This Week in Louisiana Agriculture
Three Sisters (agriculture)
Timeline of agriculture and food technology
Tokyo University of Agriculture
Topping (agriculture)
UIUC College of Agriculture, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences
Under Secretary of Agriculture for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services
Under Secretary of Agriculture for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services
Under Secretary of Agriculture for Food Safety
Under Secretary of Agriculture for Marketing and Regulatory Programs
Under Secretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and Environment
Under Secretary of Agriculture for Research, Education, and Economics
University of Agriculture, Faisalabad
University of Agriculture, Peshawar
University of Agriculture (Tirana)
University of Arkansas Agriculture Building
University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture
University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food, and Environment
University of Saskatchewan College of Agriculture and Bioresources
University of Sydney Institute of Agriculture
University of Tennessee Agriculture Farm Mound
University of the Philippines Los Baos College of Agriculture and Food Science
Urban agriculture
Urban agriculture in West Oakland
Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets
Vietnam Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development
Vietnam National University of Agriculture
Vocational Agriculture Building
Vytautas Magnus University Agriculture Academy
Warping in agriculture
Water Agriculture and Health in Tropical Area
Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection
Women and agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa
Workmen's Compensation (Agriculture) Convention, 1921
World Federation of Agriculture and Food Workers
Yellow goods (construction and agriculture)
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