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Contents
4 Earth Rights – Without Earth Rights, there can be no human rights.
ISSN: 1179 - 5298
Earth Matters is a New Zealandbased Journal for the Renewal of AgriCulture through science, art and spirituality. It is a not-forprofit publication and proceeds will be used to help fund The Land Trust, registered charity CC37781 Earth Matters PO Box 24-231 Royal Oak Auckland 1345
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The rising future world of the Sun… Nuclear Radiation and Christianity. Hartmut Borries.
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Editor: Elisabeth Alington Assistant Editor: Mary Vander Ploeg Administrator: Paula Kibblewhite Australian Distributor: Heather Weiss Design and Marketing: Zoe Carafice Layout: Karl Grant Earth Matters is published three times a year; April, August and December. Subscriptions of $NZ 35.00 local / $NZ 45.00 overseas may be purchased on-line at www. earthmatters.co.nz or by direct credit to Earth Matters Kiwibank account 38 9010 0519122 00 or by sending a cheque to the above address. Please make sure you supply postal details and notification of payment to info@ earthmatters.co.nz. All material published in these pages is Copyright Earth Matters 2010. For permission to use material from this publication, in any form, please contact the editor info@earthmatters.co.nz Opinions and statements expressed in this journal are the responsibility of the contributing authors. The Journal accepts no responsibility for results arising from advice offered in good faith through its pages. Readers who wish to contribute articles or express views are invited to submit content for consideration to the postal address above or via Word document to: info@earthmatters.co.nz
Vanadana Shiva.
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E Alington.
Seedlines No to Nuclear Energy – the future of our children and grandchildren is at stake. Make the Earth Glad… Collette Leenman. Radioactive Material Free for All. Leuren Moret. Of Star … Taurus the Bull. … and Flower. Sunflower.
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Chalk and Cheese and CPP – Remediating the effects of radiation on the Earth.
Editorial
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Wood-fired or microwaved – how do you like your pizza? Wendy Cook. Irradiated Food. How radiant are you? Dr J. W. Rohen. Ferretti Growers – Flavour and Freshness. Helen Lagerstedt. One Year in the Making. C. Moginie . Avondale Community Gardeners. A Welcome Outbreak of Sanity – The Crafar Farm Court Decision. Murray Horton.
Radiation from Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Spreads. Yuri Wilson. Food Bill 160-2 leaves a bad taste. Autumn-made. Margaret Colquhoun. Atomic Bombs – experiments without prayers. E Alington.
Front Cover: Leek seedlings at dawn. Photo: Earth Matters
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Editorial
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Pic: J Bruce-Gordon
hat makes a living cat different from a dead cat? Is radiation a substance or a force? The way the world’s going, we urgently need to learn to think in terms of life ‘forces’ and not just lifeless substances. Many biologists are finding that the laws of physical matter can explain a corpse but they can’t penetrate the mystery of living organisms. Like the life forces, nuclear radiation poses a conceptual challenge to most of us. It cannot be sensed with our physical senses any more than life force can be seen through our eyes. Earth Matters 7 takes a look at some of the phenomena that have emerged since radiation became a man-made reality in the world. Vandana Shiva calls for legal protection to the earth; without Earth Rights there can be no human rights. Opposing that earthly-logic, the harm wrought by the nuclear industry is intensifying. 25 years after the meltdown at Chernobyl, Fukishima is in trouble. Less visible to the western world are the victims of depleted uranium warfare. Earth Matters doesn’t ignore these ugly sides, but we don’t give them all the ink. For we think there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye… Hartmut Borries leads us to a fresh way of thinking about the earth with his empowering and hopefilled view of humanity’s task. He ends with a remarkable account of what’s happening in Chernobyl where meditative ‘radiation’ seems to be having a redeeming quality upon that of nuclear. Just here does it become clear how intimately World and Man, Matter and Spirit belong together. We share Dr. Arden Anderson’s view on irradiating your food; Dr. Rohen’s account of the radiant powers carried by your blood; Wendy-the-Cook’s praise for the woodstove in place of the microwave. We revel in the dedication of Avondale community gardeners and Ferretti growers who put fabulous fresh food on our tables; of people like Avaaz and CAFCA and Foodbill.org who organise a movement – a life force – for the sake of people and planet. We invite Nature to speak to us through autumnal artistry and we end on a quiet reflective note from a Japanese doctor. We welcome Zoe Carafice to our team. An accomplished landscape designer, Zoe has an eye for design and a heap of enthusiasm for what really matters. Indeed, Earth Matters and so do our efforts. Here’s to yours, together with a poem from Rumi to keep you inspired this winter.
Lis Alington The Waterwheel. Stay together, friends Don’t scatter and sleep. Our friendship is made of being awake. The early birds get all the worms. The Biodynamic Market is a fledgling event that opens once weekly on Sundays from 11.15 am until sold out, which is often before 12.30. We invite your expressions of interest. If you live in Auckland and would like to shop at this market regularly for freshly harvested, certified-biodynamic produce, then please let us hear from you by emailing lisalington@gmail.com It takes time to grow vegetables. A wide choice of seasonal produce doesn’t happen overnight. For the grower, there is some financial risk in shifting the product line from one or two high-return crops to a variety of products suitable for a local market. If we can build a group of committed consumers from which to support a committed grower then we have really started to make food security a reality. We look forward to hearing from you.
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People today are altogether unaware how the minutest quantities will often work with great intensity, precisely where living things are concerned. Therefore we need to treat our manure or compost ‌ in ways that will give it the right living property so that it will retain of its own accord as much nitrogen and other substances as it requires. It is not a question of merely adding substances to it that we think will be of benefit to plants. No, the point is that we should add living forces to it. The living forces are far more important for the plant than the mere substance-forces or substances. Though we might gradually make our soil especially rich in one substance or another that would not help the plants unless our fertilising also enabled them to absorb what the soil offered. That is the important thing. Rudolf Steiner, Agriculture, Lecture Five.
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Earth Rights
e need a new paradigm for living on the Earth. An alternative to the present paradigm is now a survival-imperative for the human species. And the alternative that is needed is not only at the level of tools or technologies: it is at the level of our worldview. How do we look at ourselves in this world? What are humans for? Are we merely a money-making and resourceguzzling machine? Or do we have a higher purpose? The world order built on the economic fundamentalism of limitless growth and on the technological fundamentalism that maintains there is a technological fix for every social and environmental ill is clearly disintegrating. The collapse of the economic system in 2008, and the continuing financial crisis, signal the end of the paradigm that values fictitious finance above the real wealth created by Nature and humans, profits above people, and corporations above citizens. This paradigm can only be kept afloat with limitless bailouts directing public wealth to private rescues instead of using it to rejuvenate Nature and economic livelihoods. It can only be kept afloat with increasing violence to the Earth and people. It can only be kept alive as an economic dictatorship. This is clear in India’s heartland, where the limitless appetite for steel and aluminium by the global consumer economy (and the limitless appetite for the profits generated by the steel and aluminium corporations) is now clashing head-on with the rights of tribal people to their land and homes, their forests and rivers, their cultures and ways of life. Tribal people are saying a loud and clear ‘no’ to their forced uprooting. The only way to get to the minerals and coal that feed the ‘limitless growth’ model in the face of democratic resistance is the use of militarised violence. Operation Green Hunt has been launched in the tribal areas of India with precisely this purpose –
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by Vandana Shiva
even though the proclaimed public objective is to clear out the ‘Maoists’. More than 40,000 armed paramilitary forces have been placed in tribal areas that are rich in minerals and where tribal unrest is growing, demonstrating that the current economic paradigm can only unfold through increased militarisation and the undermining of democratic and human rights. The technological fundamentalism that has externalised costs, both ecological and social, and blinded us to ecological destruction has also reached a dead end. Climate chaos – the externality of technologies based on the use of fossil fuels – is a wakeup call, a warning that we cannot continue on the fossil-fuel path. The high cost of industrial farming is running up against limits, in terms of both the ecological destruction of the natural capital of soil, water, biodiversity and air, and the creation of malnutrition, with a billion people denied food and another two billion denied health because of rampant obesity, diabetes and other foodrelated diseases. We are all members of the Earth family, and our first and highest duty is to take care of Mother Earth: Prithvi, Gaia, Pachamama – however you name her. And the better we take care of her, the more food and water, health
A physicist by training, Dr. Vandana Shiva has written more than 20 books and had over 500 papers published in scientific and technical journals. She is a leading activist in the global solidarity movement.
and wealth we have. ‘Earth rights’ are first and foremost the rights of Mother Earth. Earth rights are also the rights of humans: the right to food and water, health and a safe environment and the right to rivers, seeds, biodiversity and an unpolluted atmosphere. I have given the name Earth Democracy to this new paradigm of living as an Earth Community, respecting the rights of Mother Earth. Earth Democracy enables us to create living democracies which enable democratic participation in all matters of life and death: the food we eat or do not have access to; the water we drink or are denied through privatisation or pollution; the air we breathe or are poisoned by. Living democracies are based on the intrinsic worth of all species, all peoples, all cultures.
Earth Democracy protects the ecological processes that maintain life and the fundamental human rights that are the basis of the right to life, including the right to water, the right to food, the right to health, the right to education, and the right to jobs and livelihoods. Ahimsa, or nonviolence, is already the basis of many faiths that have emerged on Indian soil. Translated into economics, nonviolence implies that our systems of production, trade and consumption do not use up the ecological space of other species and other people. Violence results when our dominant economic structures and economic organisation usurp and ringfence that space.
According to an ancient Indian text, the Isha Upanishad, ‘The universe is the creation of the Supreme Power meant for the benefit of all creation. Each individual life form must, therefore, learn to enjoy its benefits in close relation with other species. Let not any one species encroach upon others’ rights.’ Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns that take more than we need, we are engaging in violence. Non-sustainable consumption and non-sustainable production constitute violent economic order. APRIL 2012 Issue 7
The rising future world of the Sun… Nuclear Radiation and the Christ Impulse by Hartmut Borries What has Christianity to do with nuclear radiation? In his work in Auckland as priest of The Christian Community, a new movement for religious renewal based on an esoteric understanding of the Christ-impulse in world evolution, Rev. Hartmut Borries upholds a view that is neither Protestant nor Catholic or Orthodox. He periodically travels to meet with communities throughout New Zealand. The article is based on one of his talks.
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hen I was in Europe for our synod last year, it was the 25th anniversary of the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. One of the leaders of our Movement for Religious Renewal, Rudolf Frieling reminded us that “This is the Christian awareness of life; knowing that you are at the beginning, not the end; looking with hope into the rising future world of the Sun.” Now this is a grand image. Let’s look for a few everyday ones!
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(1) Several people each holding some earth in their hands - it’s an image that we can understand in different ways, one being that the earth needs to be helped not only in our consciousness but also through our hands. What is it that we allow to grow? (2) Another; you’re driving behind a car and something is thrown out – a burning cigarette, takeaway rubbish, a banana skin. What gathers at the roadsides and
what does this tell about our relationship with the earth? That it’s a place where we can discard things which the earth has to deal with one way or another? (3) Lastly, remember how in the 60s and 70s when the rockets were going into space; how the astronauts were amazed to see what the earth looked like from afar. What does this mean, to see our planet of sublime beauty surrounded by dark space?
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The appeal of fundamentalism and its great advantage is that you know what’s right. It offers you clear directives about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, good and evil, heaven and hell. These polarities are very strong in fundamentalism and they are gathering momentum among the world’s religions, particularly Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Yet you can be fundamentalist about anything; within political and
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economic spheres as well, because fundamentalism is basically about how one thinks. It’s about thinking in terms of polarities – black or white, good or bad, in or out. What does fundamentalism mean for our relationship with the earth? I grew up in Germany during the time of the Cold War. We had more nuclear warheads stacked up on our borders than anywhere else in the world. What did fundamentalists say to that? According to Geering they were for nuclear armament. In their thinking, it becomes necessary to prepare for war because, before Christ can come again, there has to be the war of all against all. Preaching that communist Russia was the great Satan who would invade the Middle East and initiate the nuclear war which would be the prelude to the return of Christ, televangeists actually encouraged people to look forward to the prospect with joyful expectation. Such views were expanded in Hal Lyndsay’s book The Late Great Planet Earth, read by literally millions of people. President Ronald Reagan even invited one of these televangelists to security meetings at the White House. So fundamentalist Christians, believing in nuclear conflict and armaments, were part of security discussions at the highest level. Now Geering is a wonderful researcher. Whereas Thomas Aquinus said God has no body. Geering says God is a nobody! He’s witty. He goes on to say that Jesus was not
Credit: nasa-apollo8-dec24-earthrise
Credit: httpnaturenet.net
Credit: cityofpflugerville.com
The cosmonauts knew that their lives depended on finding their way safely back to earth. Nowadays many people forget that if we don’t look after this earth we don’t survive. Which brings me to my next point; I want to speak about fundamentalism because it is widespread, growing very rapidly, and has a lot to do with how we treat the earth. In his booklet, Fundamentalism, A Challenge to the Secular World, NZ theologian Lloyd Geering writes that between 1909-1915 there were two oil billionaires in America who were very concerned about the increase of liberal Christianity. They took upon themselves to publish 3 million tracts outlining the fundamentals of Christianity and exhorting people to submit to divine authority as revealed by the Holy Bible. In other words, the human freedoms of western enlightenment regarded by many people worldwide as immensely significant, were to be looked upon with skepticism because they encouraged people to think for themselves. Instead people were to accept that the truth is revealed in books like the Koran, the Old Testament and the Bible.
divine but was a human person and that “God is a symbolic term.” Now you know why fundamentalists fight people like Geering. I would say to that, “Yes that’s Jesus, but what about Christ?” It’s the same with the resurrection. Geering would say it’s symbolic, that there’s no life after death so forget about it. All these people who have near-death experiences – that can all be explained physiologically as a condition made up by your brain. To me, this has nothing to do with the spiritual experience of light and of the being of love. In another booklet, The Greening of Christianity, Geering suggests we need a new ethic whereby the new God is our planet Earth. Here the essence of Christianity is lost altogether for now there are no spiritual worlds, no spiritual beings, no pre-existence before birth, no post-existence after death. The entire spiritual side of things disappears, which is why fundamentalists have a point. This is the other extreme, the opposite pole to that of the fundamentalist viewpoint. In both, real spirituality disappears. Geering would call himself a liberal theologian. But a theologian without God? That’s how far you can go these days! For many people today, the earth is merely a planet of resources, there for the taking; for us to plunder, pollute and destroy without concern for the future because we live only once. Economic life without morality leads to rampant consumerism and this is part of our everyday experience. APRIL 2012 Issue 7
I would now like to come to a possible Christian way of looking at all this, starting with Diederich Bonhoeffer. He was a German theologian who died in 1945 just a few days before World War II ended. He was condemned to death in a concentration camp for his part in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler – yes that, even as a Christian theologian. He had been in political circles in Berlin where people knew what was happening to the Jews and he’d helped save many lives, working as a double agent during the war trying to create a future for Germany. In his Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer expressed how, even today, Christ suffers what humanity is doing to him and to the earth while we are all still asleep. We’re really being asked to wake up and begin a spiritual life. The question is will we fail him again today and repeat what happened 2000 years ago, or will we wake up and take responsibility? At the last supper, Christ took earthly substance – bread – lifted it up and united himself with it. He did the same with wine – “take with the wine, my blood”. Earthly substance becomes a vessel, an instrument for the body. He continued; “do this from now on, re-membering me by taking bread and wine into yourselves and allowing my being to work into you”. Then came the crucifixion where his blood streamed into the earth. There’s an old legend about the bees coming to the cross and consuming Christ’s blood as if it were the nectar of flowers. Like the green sap of flowering plants, Christ’s blood was totally selfless substance; there was no egoism working in it. Jesus was an exceptional human being but he was further transformed by the Christ. Through the being of Christ his blood took on a totally different quality. This blood now enters the earth from the cross. Then the body is put into the tomb and it too enters the earth when, as a result of the earthquake, the earth opens up and APRIL 2012 Issue 7
receives Christ’s body. Here we have the new communion of the earth. Now the whole earth becomes Christ’s body. Christ’s death was different from ours. When we die we put our body aside and a separation takes place between body, soul and spirit. While the body decomposes or is burnt to ashes with which to fertilise the earth, soul and spirit take a different journey. They do not stay connected to the body. That was different for Christ. Because his body was already transformed, his death was different; he stays connected with the whole earth. So fundamentalists do have a point in that we must, to some degree, leave the earth (ie) soul and spirit leave. However, they forget that we have to come back. We cannot leave the earth for good. Our future depends on our connection with this earth. Indeed, life after death depends on our relationship with the earth. What we’re able to perceive spiritually, in life after death, depends on what we’ve learned in life before death; it depends on the organs of perception that we have developed throughout life. Let’s look at this more closely. One of Jesus’ parables1 makes it clear that whatever we do to one another we do to Christ. Christ – you could also say the Creator or the being of love – dwells in the heart of every human being. But this depends on how much we welcome it; on how we develop our religious activity in the sense of reconnecting with the divine within one another. If I look for the divine within myself the danger is that I become self-centred and fall into illusion. In order to meet the divine in the other I must develop empathy, love and compassion. Only then will I meet what is divine in myself. Against the background of how Christ died into this earth, making it the place for future development, then it also means that whatever 1 Matthew, verse 25.
we do to the earth we do to Christ. That realisation could change our relationship to the Earth. It can also change any dualistic thinking about heaven and earth. Heaven is not some place far removed; heaven and earth need to come together. How they come together depends on our work here on earth. The heavens want to find their home in our hearts, in our communities, on this earth, not somewhere in outer space or on another planet. Fundamentalists who maintain that they can enter heaven and eternal life by bombing themselves or others will discover that any action causing physical death or death of soul only leads to spiritual blindness. We know something of this from Near Death Experiences (NDE), (eg) a woman who tried to take her life with medication and describes finding herself among many young people who had committed suicide. Remarking flippantly, ‘oh are you all the other guys who took their own lives?’ she experienced how no one heard her, no one saw her – they all remained gazing blankly in one direction. All were cut off from consciousness, from light, from the ability to perceive. The same you can read in George Ritchie’s Return from Tomorrow. On his journey he meets deceased alcohol and drug addicts, who could not ‘see’ the being of life, known by name as Christ. What we perceive in life after death depends on our organs of perception. These we form only while inhabiting the physical body given to us by this earth. They are not organs of clairvoyance or powers of insight associated with being an initiate. We don’t all have to be highly developed – those who had NDE could see and they weren’t initiates. But some see and some don’t. It all depends on whether you’ve learned to love and whether you have become aware that there is more to life than physical existence alone; that there is spirit and there are spiritual beings.
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I’d like to mention something that Rudolf Steiner spoke about early in 1911,2 around the time fundamentalism began. He described how we need to develop a new awareness; namely that we know, whatever we do, there is one spiritual being who shares everything – our whole life – and that is Christ.3 And this awareness – that I am continuously living in the presence of spiritual beings and of that spiritual being of love – that this awareness becomes a source of light. Our consciousness, our awareness becomes a source of light. We begin to radiate light like a candle. We become a source of light which is the light that is needed to perceive. We need to create a source of light in order to see the light. He went on to say how, in our time Christ will come to be perceived in a wholly new way. Christ will not come again in a physical body for that’s already happened. The second coming will be in the realm of the ‘clouds’ which is symbolic language for the etheric4 or the life realm of the earth. In order to perceive the etheric Christ, we must learn to cultivate this light of awakened conscience and consciousness. How we enter life after death depends on the life we have led – it depends on how we have learned to care, to be interested, to love. We become a source of light when we become conscious of what we do to Christ and his body, this earth. The future of this earth, including all the joys and sorrows of the Creator being of love – all this has to do with our development. Furthermore, our future development also depends on this earth. It’s an illusion to say that what we do to matter doesn’t matter because we’re on our way to paradise
in the after-life. No, we need to come back here. And we will meet the consequences of what we are creating now. This is the necessity of karma. (The word means deed).
Transformation of the Earth
A scientist at our seminary in Stuttgart, Dr Friederich Benesch could explain in detail how a nuclear reactor works. He was also a theologian and he used to emphasise how the Bible begins with nature – Paradise is a heavenly garden – and ends with a city built by human hands. You might well ask what sort of paradise is found in a modern city but the point is there’s a significant transformation of the earth taking place. How does this happen? Benesch used to answer with one word, eating. The transformation of the earth takes place by eating! We have to eat it up, not by greedily consuming all its resources, but through communion – through our baking bread, making grape juice, lifting them up in blessing and eating them. The earth needs to go through the human being. You can also understand it metaphorically; that we penetrate the earth with our consciousness. It also matters how we work with the earth, which is why the biodynamic preparations are important. It’s not about leaving nature to fend for itself, as if the earth would be better off without human beings. It’s about learning how to work transformatively with matter. Even when we speak we are transforming substance for we take in and breathe out refined matter. The earth is waiting to be transformed through the conscious activity of human beings. How long will this take? It will take as long as we need to learn to love. Once humanity has
learned to love, the earth will have been transformed from a planet of war to a planet of love. Then the transformation of the earth will have come to an end. As long as we continue to struggle as we do, we will continue to need the earth. There’s no other planet that will provide for us.5 We can’t leave it behind, saying, ‘now we will learn the rest in Paradise.’ No, the learning takes place here. This is our school, where we learn to love and our love must extend to the earth.
Chernobyl
Another colleague of mine knew a lot about the Sun and also about nuclear energy. He used to say that wherever there’s a nuclear reactor there also needs to be an altar because the two work as opposites. The nuclear reactor radiates. This radiation is not sense-perceptible – even animals cannot perceive it. Yet it works with deadly power. What takes place at the altar is also unknown to us through our organs of sense perception. But it too radiates. It radiates light, only you don’t see this light with your eyes; you must learn to ‘see’ it with your heart. Today there are more and more people who have this ability. Nuclear substance is the heaviest substance on earth, so heavy that it exists for a short while only before it falls to pieces. The altar it is all about levity, about taking earthly substance and lifting it up, into another realm. At the synod we heard of a journalist from Berlin who visited Chernobyl 25 years after the accident. He told of his meeting with a Russian engineer by the name of Nikola Jakushin who was living in Chernobyl at the time of the meltdown in 1986. When Nikola saw all the cars, ambulances and
2 Steiner, R. From Jesus to Christ, 3 Oct. 1911. 3 Christ is not owned by Christianity. The world’s initiates know the being of the Sun by name as Christ. Prior to the physical incarnation he was known by indigeneous seers throughout the world by other names, Ahura Mazdao, Great Spirit etc. 4 We can learn to understand etheric life by observing the processes and activities associated with water; clouds refer to the subtle uniting of air and moisture such as found in breath and heartbeat – or the uniting of light and sap in photosynthesis. 5 ‘For all that there are many planets, Gaia is, if not unique, extremely rare. Of the billions of stars that make up the galaxy only the Sun …has an orbit that places it in the habitable zone of the galaxy where life is possible.’ Seth Borenstein, Science Writer, The Associated Press. Schwartz Report 12.01.12
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fire engines going to the reactor he knew something was up. It was Holy Week; on Easter Monday everyone was evacuated and a fence built around the reactor, officially containing the worst pollution within a 30 km radius. A concrete mantle was built to cover the reactor. Today that mantle is cracking up, even though it will have to be maintained for some 50,000 years. It costs billions to renew and this is only the mantle around what we can see – beneath it there’s nothing to stop the radiation from spreading into the earth.
Nikola – “when you pray, when you celebrate the sacraments there is no pollution. You heal that pollution.”
Radiation levels are also significantly lower in the homes where people pray regularly. No one living in Chernobyl ignores the question of life after death because sooner or later each will have their own health problems. All 450 residents are intensely aware of the necessity for a religiousspiritual life. Everybody knows they must care for their eternal soul’s life beyond space and time.
In Chernobyl, a priest Chernobyl had been of the Russian Orthodox inhabited for a thousand Church is keeping the years. Ten years after altar alongside the nuclear the accident, many old reactor. Currently there people chose to return are research projects to their homes, knowing underway exploring how they hadn’t long to live an active spiritual life can anyway. Nikola also help to counter the effects The ikon of the ‘Chernobyl Saviour’. The unusually shaped tree used to went back and discovered exist near the nuclear reactor. In April 2011, in an act of compassionate of nuclear radiation. solidarity with the suffering people of Japan, the ikon was sent to an that the old church, in Christ, the earth, Orthodox Japanese church. which his grandfather the human being – we and great-grandfather had create the future. We come back to which healings have since been been priests, was becoming derelict. to this future here on earth. The attributed. Nikola went to the bishop to ask more we learn to love and the more “What do you drink here?” asked for a priest for Chernobyl and, after we become a source of light, the the journalist. some haggling, eventually the bishop move we too will take the earth into agreed to look for someone. However Nikola replied, “the water from the our hands and make new growth he couldn’t find anyone willing to river”. possible. work in the devastation. So Nikola “The river that flows past the trained for ordination and became reactor?” a priest of the Russian Orthodox “Yes of course. We have no other church. Using his engineering skills water. But no one here will drink or he soon had the church scaffolded eat anything without blessing it. You and the renovation underway. Shortly Hartmut draw your crosses, you bless what after, someone who had been living Borries works you consume and then you can eat in Chernobyl during the meltdown from his church and drink it.” experienced a vision of Christ at 10 Rawhiti appearing in the (nuclear) clouds, A walk around Chernobyl with a Rd, One Tree Hill, Auckland. and beneath him were all those who Geiger counter will show irregular He is available had worked on the reactor and had readings all over the place. Enter the for personal died at Chernobyl, wearing their gas church though, and the readings drop consultation by appointment, ph 09 masks. This vision was subsequently to zero. There is no radiation in the 525-2305. For further information painted and is now a consecrated ikon church whatsoever. see www.thechristiancommunity.net APRIL 2012 Issue 7
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Photo: Thomas Simonson
23,000 cherry trees are being planted along the 500 km length of ravaged coast as a memorial to those who died in the 2011 Japanese tsunami.
No to Nuclear Energy – the future of our children and grandchildren is at stake.
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n November 2011 Avaaz delivered a petition to Japan’s Prime Minister Noda asking that immediate action be taken to support Fukushima City’s children still trapped in highly contaminated areas and to provide urgent assistance to those wanting to relocate to safer areas. In the face of mounting evidence of brutal levels of soil and food contamination, more than 300,000 children remain at risk across Fukushima Prefecture. Their brave mothers are crying out for help, having started a 10 month,10 day sit-in to demand government action. Initially, the government ignored them, hiding behind a virtual wall of media silence. Then on 26th January 2012 Japan’s Minister of the Economy ordered the eviction of the Fukushima mothers peacefully camped outside METI to demand a radiation-free future for their children. Minister Edano was bowing to pressure from the powerful nuclear industry, furious that the brave mothers’ efforts were working. Their struggle has captured public attention and throughout the country, people have been speaking out to end unsafe nuclear energy. With the help of an Avaaz petition and worldwide publicity, emails flooded the Minister’s office urging him to reverse his decision to evict the brave Fukushima mothers and
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other activists camped outside the ministry to demand a radiationfree future. On 30th January, the police came and left, without saying anything. Avaaz staff were also there, standing in solidarity with the mothers. Meanwhile, the French government is preparing to start financing the world’s largest nuclear plant in a high risk earthquake-zone in Jaitapur, India. Local and international experts have confirmed the likelihood of devastating tremors right underneath the plant site. Dr Vandana Shiva, physicist, says that “the highest cost of nuclear energy in India is the destruction of democracy and constitutional rights. Nuclear power must undermine democracy. We witnessed this during the process of signing the US-India Nuclear Agreement. We witnessed it in the ‘cash for votes’ scandal during the no-confidence motion in Parliament. And we witness it wherever a new nuclear power plant is planned. …The world has potential for 17 terra watt nuclear energy, 700 terra watt wind energy and 86,000 terra watt of solar energy. Alternatives to nuclear energy are a thousand times more abundant and a million times less risky. To push nuclear plants after Fukushima is pure insanity.”
But this is big business for France. Avaaz encourages people to join forces with citizens in France and create a massive international outcry, scaring President Sarkozy who knows that another scandal could ruin his chances of re-election. Despite the best propaganda efforts of the French nuclear industry, it appears the French people are not convinced. In a poll conducted post-Fukushima by Journal du Dimanche, 77% of French people said that they would like to see nuclear phased out. From people-powered revolutions in the Middle East to national anti-corruption movements, directdemocracy is on the march. The Times of London have named them ‘One of the most important new voices on the global stage’; Avaaz. org is a multi-million-person global campaign network. It works to ensure that the views and values of the world’s people shape global decision-making. (‘Avaaz’ means ‘voice’ or ‘song’ in many languages.) Avaaz members live in every nation of the world; their team is spread across 13 countries on 4 continents and operates in 14 languages. Get involved at www.avaaz.org
APRIL 2012 Issue 7
Make the Earth Glad Little One…
Children love anticipation and this is an important part of creating the mood for any festival. Because Easter is determined by the moon, watching the night sky for a while before bed and observing the slight changes in the moon can be an important step in the build-up towards Easter for children and adults. Children often find it hard to grasp time frames. Eleven days doesn’t mean much to a young child but watching the moon grow from a
tiny sliver, and knowing that it will be Easter when it has grown into a bright golden round ball, is something they can grasp. This is a much more tangible picture for a child than an abstract number.
The Seed in the Cave
One way of bringing the Easter picture to young children, without burdening them with intellectual explanations, is to plant seeds or bulbs with them. A seed often has a hard, contained, dead look about it and gives no clue to the abundant life which will spring from it. Just as Christ’s dead body was placed in a cave in the earth, so too, the children can dig a hole or even a little cave in the earth and plant their seeds or bulbs in it. And just as Christ later overcame death to give abundant life to us, so the ‘dead’ seed or bulb will blossom into joyful life. With this in mind, Good Friday could also be an appropriate time for families living in the Southern Hemisphere to look for and collect seeds, as this time of year provides us with plentiful seedpods. Where
Credit ehow.com
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lthough Easter is a global festival, it is a moveable one. Its date is determined by the moon. Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the autumn equinox (when day and night are of equal length.) Those who are new to the Southern Hemisphere or who return after having been away in the north for a long time are often astonished by the brightness of the blue sky and the sun in the south. Similarly at night the stars can seem incredibly vivid. This gives us ‘southerners’ a great opportunity to include the night sky as part of our festival build up.
by Collette Leenman
I live, we are often woken in the early morning by the sound of our native kauri tree cones falling on the woodshed roof. See what is around you. Maybe there are sunflower seeds, acorns, flax pods and all manner of native seeds to be found. Collecting some of these can bring to mind the inner aspect, the germ of life in that which appears dead. Collette Leenman is a retired kindergarten teacher and has written several books on celebrating seasonal festivals with children. They may be ordered directly from the author collette.leenman@clear.net.nz
Maria Thun died in February this year, aged 89. She was a remarkable torch-bearer, lighting the way for our understanding of plants in relation to the wider cosmos and gifting us the results of her enormous practical experience based on meticulous research. Her annual planting and sowing calendar is widely used by biodynamic-organic gardeners and When Wine Tastes Best – a biodynamic calendar for wine drinkers, is used by several leading UK supermarkets for timing their wine promotions. Thun also wrote a number of books including The Biodynamic Year; increasing yield, quality and flavour. Temple Lodge 2007.
APRIL 2012 Issue 7
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Radioactive Material Free for All
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I’ve toured and gone all over Japan with a pediatrician from Basra and an oncologist, a cancer specialist. These poor doctors — their whole families are dying of cancer. He has 10 members of his family with cancer now that he’s treating, and this is just from the Gulf War. They’ve used much, much, much more in 2003.
hrough the continued use of depleted uranium, which is essentially a nuclear weapon, the USA has conducted four nuclear wars since 1991. The calculated number of atoms discharged into the atmosphere, to be transported by dust storms across the globe, is estimated to be equivalent to 400,000 Nagasaki bombs.
“DU goes straight into the blood stream. It’s carried all throughout the body into the bones, the bone marrow, the brain. It goes into the fetus. It’s a systemic poison and a radiological poison.
Lauren Moret is an expert on atmospheric dust. “We have huge dust storms that transport millions of tons of dust and sand around the world every year. “The main centres of these dust storms are the Gobi Desert in China, which is where the Chinese did atmospheric testing, so that’s all contaminated with radiation, and it gets transported right over Japan, and it comes straight across the Pacific before dumping all its sand and dust on North America. It’s loaded with radioactive isotopes, soot, pesticides, chemicals, pollution — everything is in it — fungi, bacteria, viruses. “The Sahara Desert is another huge dust centre, and what it generates goes north all over Europe and straight across the Atlantic, to the Caribbean, and up the East Coast. “The third region is the Western United States, which is where the Nevada test site is located. We did 1,200 nuclear weapons tests there, so all this radiation that is already there, which is bad enough, has caused a global cancer epidemic since 1945. All of that radiation was the equivalent of 40,000 Nagasaki bombs. We’re now talking about 10 times more since the use of DU as a weapon of war. “These dust storms remobilise all the radiation, but those are the larger chunks. The depleted uranium (DU) burns at such high temperatures – it’s a pyroforic metal which means it burns so the bullets and big calibre shells are actually on fire when they
Leuren Moret is an American geoscientist. A whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after witnessing fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project1, Moret now works as an independent citizen scientist and radiation specialist in communities around the world. She testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan in Japan in 2003, presented at the World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany, and spoke at the World Court of Women at the World Social Forum in Bombay, India, in January 2004. Her article “Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War” in the June 2004 World Affairs Journal was translated at the request of the Kremlin for distribution throughout the Russian government. She has been invited to speak in Japan on more than twenty occasions. come out of the gun barrel because they are ignited by the friction in the gun barrel. Seventy percent of the DU metal becomes a metal vapour. So it’s actually a radioactive gas weapon and a terrain contaminant. “In 1942 under the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Grove dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, but they didn’t use the DU weapons because they thought they were too horrific.
“There are two purposes in the military use of weapons. One is to destroy the enemy soldiers, and the other, which is just as important, is to destroy the enemy civilian population. By causing illnesses and disease, long lingering illnesses really have a detrimental impact on the productivity and economy of a country. “Depleted uranium is a very, very, very effective biological weapon. This is the primary purpose for using it. It’s just a slow death sentence. In Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan it is clear from the birth defects and the illnesses that things are pretty severe. Each year the number of birth defects and illnesses will rise because of the total contamination levels in all living things that will increase because they are breathing air and drinking water and eating the food from contaminated soils. They will have fewer and fewer healthy workers. “The impact of atmospheric testing is also clearly apparent from the percentage of population investigated for some form of mental illness. We’ve collected 6,000 baby teeth around nuclear power plants and measured the radiation in them. You have to look at how much bomb testing material was released into the atmosphere, and there’s a direct
1 Yucca Mountain, a mountain range of volcanic origin in Nevada, USA, was going to be used as an underground nuclear waste repository.
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correlation of the decline in SAT2 scores for all teenagers in the U.S. to the amount of radiation that was released into the atmosphere the year their mother was carrying them. These are delayed effects of radiation exposure in utero. It is at low levels, and the main pathways are drinking water and dairy products. “In Japan the incidence of mental illness is 8.8 percent. Nigeria is very low — 4.7 percent. They have almost no radiation in Nigeria. In the Ukraine where they had the Chernobyl accident, it is 20.4 percent. Spain is at 9.2 percent. Italy is 8.2 percent. It’s pretty low because they don’t have nuclear power plants. France is 75 percent reliant on nuclear power, so you have mental illness in 18.4 percent of the population. Mexico is at 12.2 percent, and the United States is at 26.3 percent — the highest rate of mental illness in the
Life magazine Nov 1995 published a photo essay which is still on the Internet. ‘The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm’ http://du101. org/09/112995life/1195life1. html shows the post-Gulf War babies playing with their brothers and sisters who are normal. Pictures of the Chernobyl children are on the internet. Ed.
destruction, and they are illegal under all international laws and treaties. In November 2007 the UN passed, by a land-slide vote of 122:6 (the six who voted against were US, UK, France, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Israel), a resolution calling for member states to re-examine the health risks associated with the use of uranium weapons. In December 2008, 141 states in the UN General Assembly ordered the World Health Organisation, International Atomic Energy Agency and United Nations Environment Programme to update their positions on the long-term health and environmental threat posed by the use of uranium weapons. “I call DU the ‘Trojan Horse.’ It’s the weapon that keeps killing. This is like smoking radioactive crack. It goes right in your nose. It crosses the olfactory bulb into your brain. It’s a systemic poison. It goes everywhere. “These particles that form at very high temperatures are nanoparticles. They are one tenth of a micron or smaller. They get picked up in the lipids and go right through the cell membranes of the cell. They screw up the cell processes and mess up brain function. The DU issue affects every single living thing on this planet. What else has that impact? “The Pentagon people say, “You’re exaggerating or you use the uranium word to scare people.”
“I don’t care if people believe me or not. All I can say is that over time what I am saying will actually be an underestimation of the long term effects.” From an interview given on 30th May 2005 sourced at: http://www. thewe.cc There is growing consensus among civil society groups, scientists and some military organisations that the health risks from DU have been seriously underestimated. Establishment scientific bodies have been slow to react to the wealth of new research into DU and policy makers have been content to ignore the claims of researchers and activists. Deliberate obfuscation by the mining, nuclear and arms industries has further hampered efforts to recognise the problem and achieve a ban. The past failure of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons to deal with landmines and cluster bombs suggests that an independent treaty process is the best route to limiting the further use and proliferation of uranium weapons. The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons http://www.bandepleteduranium. org has prepared a draft treaty which contains a general and comprehensive prohibition of the development, production, transport, storage, possession, transfer and use of uranium ammunition.
world.
“In 1996 the United Nations passed a resolution that depleted uranium weapons are weapons of mass
Photo: edwardkhoo.com
“The only countries we know that have used DU are Britain, the U.S., and Israel. It is now clear that DU was used on a large scale by the US and the UK in the Gulf War in 1991, then in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo, and again in the war in Iraq by the US and the UK in 2003.
Hydrogen Bomb Explosion
2 The SAT Reasoning Test is a Standardized Assessment Test for college admissions in the United States. APRIL 2012 Issue 7
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Chalk and Cheese and CPP
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Remediating the effects of radiation on the Earth. by E Alington
ollowing the 1986 accident at Chernobyl, it was reported in Germany that many biodynamic farms registered lower radiation counts than their conventional neighbours.1 Whereas most farms couldn’t sell produce owing to contamination levels, some biodynamic farms were allowed to continue selling milk and other food products. Those farms were later found to have been using a special mix of cow manure, basalt and eggshells known as CPP – Cow Pat Pit – in addition to standard applications of biodynamic preparations. While published, peer-reviewed research on biodynamics is increasing, the subject of radiation amelioration by soils hasn’t been researched. Anecdotal accounts, based on farmers’ experience, suggest it ought to be.
Chalk and Cheese – Dietary Calcium and Radiation Sea vegetables such as kelp, wakame, arame and kombu contain high amounts of sodium alginate. Sodium alginate promotes calcium absorption through the intestinal wall while binding and excreting strontium. 2
Like plants, our bodies are primed to make use of sunlight. They aren’t equipped to deal with ionising radiation from nuclear fallout. When it happens, vegetables are an essential therapy for it seems that calcium, carried by the living plant stream, has a central role. In our bodies calcium is concentrated in bones and teeth – places where life processes have slowed down or ceased. Calcium acts to reduce rampant proliferation (eg) rapidly multiplying cancer cells, so that formative activity can shape growth according to the organism’s ‘blueprint’. Radiation is particularly harmful to this ‘form’ impulse to which rapidly dividing cells and DNA respond.
After hundreds of sap tests, researchers found that many food plants suffer from calcium deficiency. Calcium contributes to maintaining the acid-alkaline balance in plant sap. No matter whether the plant is a pumpkin or a pear tree, a sap pH* of 6.4 or greater is correlated with its health. 3
In human health too, pH 6.4 is ideal – blood, saliva and urine are less acid, more alkaline. If pH drops, toxicities
become acid-waste; the immune system suffers, digestion and assimilation are impaired and the body becomes ripe for cancer. Calcium, therefore, plays a significant role in maintaining the health of organisms; of plants, people, livestock and the farm as a whole. Acid sap is the result of cation shortage which farmers counter by adding lime (calcium carbonate) to their fields. But ‘phosphorus drags calcium’. Soluble phosphorus is an anion, meaning it has a negative charge. So any free, positively-charged calcium in the soil reacts with phosphorus to form insoluble (or very slowly soluble) Ca-P compounds that are not readily available to plants. Likewise, in our intestines, phosphorus ties up calcium, making it less available to our bodies. This is why some dietitians will tell you milk isn’t the best source of calcium because it comes with too much phosphorus (the calcium: phosphorus ratio in breast milk is 2:1 cf cows’ milk 1:2). Much better sources of calcium are to be had from leafy, dark green vegetables, nuts and legumes. We should also note that the main pathways for radiation exposure in-utero are water and dairy products consumed by the mother.4
Farmers spend money putting NPK and superphosphate on their land. They spend more money spreading lime. We should ask ourselves how much acid-inducing fertiliser has been spread over our farms? What happens to the plants grown from those soils; to the cows forced to eat them; to the people drinking the milk?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to maintain farms in a balanced state, like we want for our bodies, based on mineralisation through living processes rather than on inorganic, industrial amendments? After all, what happens on the farm is intimately connected to our bodies. One of the defining characteristics of biodynamics is the ‘middle ground’. Over time, a biodynamic farm approaches a state of homeostasis; producing neither maximum nor minimum yields, internalising its waste and closing its energy cycles. In particular, biodynamic farms have an extraordinary affinity to calcium which may help explain their lower radiation levels following the Chernobyl meltdown.
* pH is a measure of hydrogen ion concentration; of the acidity or alkalinity of a solution. A pH less than seven is acidic; a pH greater than seven, basic or alkaline. A pH of 7.0 is defined as neutral.
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Research from a 21 year long trial in Switzerland has shown that biodynamic farms are sustained by high levels of calcium while their conventional neighbours rely on inputs of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium (NPK). 5 Average input of nutrients in kg/ha/yr.
3 Treatments L-R; Biodynamic, Organic, Mineral. Control; manure plus mineral fertilisers = 100%
‘Inputs’ refers to what was generated by the farming system and/or the addition of amendments. Corg is higher in the organic system because more organic material (compost) was brought in. Total NPK was 40 – 50% lower in the organic systems. The stable humin fraction was significantly higher in the biodynamic soils as was the calcium surplus.
Cow Pat Pit
In Germany, Maria Thun has extensively researched the effect of biodynamic preparations on plant health. Since the 1970s she has sought a means of countering the effects of atmospheric testing and fall-out from nuclear accidents. Thun outlines the history of the Manure Concentrate Preparation (Cow pat pit or CPP in NZ) that she developed between 1958 and 1972 with the help of Dr. E Pfeiffer*, after numerous experiments and trials: “In the 1950s several nations had performed atmospheric atomic bomb tests leading to the pollution of many parts of the world with radioactive Strontium 90. Many research institutes in the USA, Britain and Germany have measured this. Plants of the same kind grown on different soil have been investigated at a research institute in Treiburg, Germany. Plants grown on silica-rich soil contained high residues of Strontium 90, while plants grown in the Rhein valley contained less. The same kind of plants grown on lime soil contained only traces of radioactive Strontium. In the USA Dr Ehrenfried Pfeiffer performed similar investigations and obtained comparable results. After discussions with him we planned to perform joint experiments, he in Spring Valley (New York) and we in Marburg (Germany). We decided to grow plants on organic lime soil and study the influence of Strontium 90 incorporation. An unambiguous result was obtained: plants grown with eggshells and ground basalt did not incorporate or store any radioactive Strontium 90. So we thought a lot about a way to bring these two substances to the biodynamic farms. Research with hourly ground substances showed a new way. We chose cow-pats as
a base material, added chicken eggshell and ground basalt, and dynamised the mixture by turning it over in a circular movement for one hour. Then we put it into a barrel from which the bottom was removed, and which was dug into the ground, and added the five compost preparations, one gram each and ten drops of the valerian preparation. (At the same time, the same procedure was performed but with compost preparations added prior to mixing. This method did not prove to be good.) After four weeks the content of the barrel was mixed by turning over thoroughly with a spade, and after a further four weeks the cow-pat preparation was ready for use in new trials. In 1986 the Chernobyl disaster happened. Radioactivity was measured at many farms. An article in Lebendige Erde showed that bio-dynamic areas were equally contaminated as all the others. However, in some distinct areas, the experts measuring the radioactivity had the feeling that there was something wrong with their instruments. They came back with new instruments the next day but these only worked as expected on the land belonging to the neighbour. Meanwhile employees of a government research institute got hold of manure concentrate, produced after the disaster by different farmers and gardeners in the contaminated region. The results were incomprehensible to them — it was not radioactive except for a very small amount of old Caesium (old meant that it did not stem from the Chernobyl disaster but from fallout of earlier atomic bomb tests). However they did not give any written confirmation of this to avoid the claim that a means against radioactivity exists. I told them something about ‘life-promoting radiation’ mentioned by Rudolf Steiner in the context of the compost preparations.”6
CPP for your garden
Radiation remediation using biodynamic preparations has by no means been proven. But after decades of practical experience, users have surmised that they work by ‘radiating an enlivening impulse’ throughout the farm or garden. And CPP is an easy way to bring this effect to your patch of planet earth. Stir a portion of CPP in a bucket of rain water. Stir vigorously in one direction until a deep vortex is formed. Then reverse the flow and stir vigorously in the opposite direction until another vortex is created. Carry on like this – first one way then the other – for 20 minutes. Then simply take a hearth brush and flick the liquid throughout the garden, particularly onto the soil. You don’t have to cover every inch as the preparation will ‘radiate’ outwards. You can also work wonders with stirred CPP in lots of other ways. One especially rewarding practice is using it to water-in newly transplanted seedlings. Next morning they’ll all be standing up straight and waving at you! CPP can be ordered from info@earthmatters.co.nz or www.growbiodynamics.co.nz SOURCES 1 Lebendige Erde reported by thebovine.wordpress.com 2 http://www.oasisadvancedwellness.com 1964 McGill University study published in the “Canadian Medical Association Journal,” 3 Sait, Graeme. Nutrition Rules! Jan 2005. Soil Therapy Pty Ltd. Aus. 4 Leuren Moret http://www.thewe.cc 5 Results from a 21 year old field trial; Organic Farming enhances soil fertility and biodiversity. FiBL #1 Aug 2000. 6 Thun, M. Results from the Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar. Floris Books 2003.
* Dr. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer was a German biochemist who moved to the USA in 1940 where he established a research laboratory for studying agriculture, nutrition and medicine, in particular the contribution of biodynamics to all three. He was awarded a doctorate in the USA, for his medical work. APRIL 2012 Issue 7
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Blossfeldt
Of Star…
Taurus – the Bull
On old star-maps Taurus, the Bull, is depicted with lowered head and horns, as if caught up in a powerful charge. Yet there’s more to Taurus than the ‘bull at a gate’…
T
Credit: public domain.
Credit: public domain.
Credit: Zodiac Atlas Celeste De Strabov.
he Zuni of New Mexico called the Pleiades cluster that forms the back of the Bull, the ‘Seed Stars’ and these they used as an agricultural calendar. When, in spring, the Pleiades disappeared into the west at dusk they knew it was safe to plant seeds for the danger of frost had passed. The Zuni weren’t alone in using the Pleiades for a planting calendar. In the southern hemisphere, Maori used their appearance at winter solstice to determine the best time for planting kumara. Taurus is one of the more spectacular sights in the night sky. With two bright stars, Aldebaran and Elnath, and two fine star clusters, the Pleiades and the Hyades it is one of just a few constellations renowned for timekeeping, celebration and storytelling. The (northern hemisphere) spring equinox hasn’t always occurred when the Sun stands in Pisces. When, by precession of the vernal equinox, the Sun stood before the stars of Taurus it was the height of the Egyptian civilisation. During this epoch humans sought increasingly to master the outer, material world as well as their inner world of animal instincts. Just as oxen were harnessed to shift the weighty substances of earth, so was the Bull symbolic of all that required great strength, in both a material and spiritual sense. The divine Hathor-Isis forces were venerated; Hathor, imaginatively experienced as the world-cow, gave sustenance to all while Isis represented a primal, creation-energy – the divine feminine, the Holy Spirit of the universe. Isis later took on aspects of Hathor and is represented wearing a pair of cow horns with the sun disk between them. To those who approached her in the temples of the Mysteries, Isis spoke: “I am the All that has been,
that is and that will be...” She was experienced as the Great Mother of all that had come into existence and that will come in the future. This is how, in their own language, the Egyptians expressed knowledge of the world-creative powers working through the constellation of the Bull In Greek mythology, Taurus commemorates the time when Zeus changed himself into a beautiful white Bull to woo the affections of the Phoenician princess Europa. After hopping onto the Bull’s back, the Bull swam across the Mediterranean Sea, abducting Europa – after whom Europe is named – to the island of Crete. Creativeness through the Bull-forces is an archetype found in all ancient mythologies. Ancient star-wisdom saw in the constellation Taurus, the source of archetypal formative forces giving rise to the human larynx and the capacity for speech. Those same forces were also understood as being active in nature. In the Bull there lie forces related to the beginning of creation (ie) the manifestation of the Divine Word in the physical world, in the biblical sense of “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God....All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” Thought becomes creative when it is grasped by the active strength of the word. Essentially, the Bull represents the divine larynx. With the passing of the vernal equinox into Aries, the cultural significance of the Bull gave way to other lifemyths. However a last vestige of the Bull as a mystery religion was perpetuated by the Romans in the Mithraic Mysteries, AD1-4. In the Mithras legend, the bull is sacrificed so that man’s development may be furthered. The Bull came to be associated with the capacity for complete surrender; after the Christ-deed it became the symbol of the Gospel of St Luke. On a clear summer’s night you will see Taurus accompanied by Orion the Hunter and the dog-star, Sirius. The cluster of stars forming the Bull’s back is called the Pleiades. Known to Maori as Matariki, the Little Eyes, their rising at dawn at winter solstice announces the return of the light, the start of a new year.
Taurus the Bull.
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The World Cow, Hathor.
Isis
Sources: W Sucher, Isis Sophia, an outline of new star wisdom. Floris Books 1974. N Davidson, Sky Phenomena. Lindisfarne Books, 2004.
APRIL 2012 Issue 7
Blossfeldt
…and Flower
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Sunflower
ho doesn’t love the bright yellow sunflower, its strong stem bearing a giant nodding head above most people’s heads?
Not only in shape and colour does the sunflower ‘speak’ of the sun; the whole plant has an unusual affinity. While still growing, its leaves and buds ‘track’ the position of the sun: a phenomenon known as heliotropism. The buds face east in the morning and west in the evening. During the night they turn back again, in readiness to greet the sun at dawn next day. Only when the buds finally bloom and the seeds ripen do the flowers come to a standstill – generally facing east – as the sun’s power is harnessed for oil production.
The sunflower is the largest member of the aster family (from the Greek aster; star). The flower is really a solar community of many tiny individual florets cohabiting on a broad plate-like inflorescence. An array of outer florets is modified to bear what appear as petals. In this way there can be anything from 100 to 8,000 individual flowers in one sunflower. Native to Mexico and Peru, this striking flower has been cultivated for over 4,000 years. The Aztecs revered it as an image of their sun god, giving it ritual significance and decorating their temples with pure gold representations of the sacred flower. It later thrived on the North American prairies where it grew wild among the high prairie grasses, often to a height of more than two metres. It is remarkable how the plant manages to neutralise the effect of gravity despite accumulating more and more weight in the flower at the top end. Unlike most plants, where the largest leaves are produced close to the earth, sunflower leaves grow progressively larger the higher they emerge up the stem. The hollow stem is well-suited to weight-bearing, being better suited to the task than a fleshy one. Rather than an elaborate inflorescence, the plant forms a single flowerhead whose compactness also serves to concentrate the sun’s energy into oil-formation.
calcium, and confuses calcium with radioactive cesium, will absorb a lot of radiation. Grown near Chernobyl after the 1986 nuclear disaster, sunflowers were found to have absorbed radioactive cesium and strontium from their roots. One Japanese villager, whose home is near a radioactive hot spot, found that sunflowers helped reduce radiation to levels well below government safety recommendations.
Radiation is countered by water – radioactive fuel rods must be stored in water. The sunflower’s relationship with water enables it to handle waterlogged soils – for years, the Dutch have used sunflowers to turn damp, muddy swathes of land into habitable sites. This wonderful plant, with its combined affinity with water and capacity for absorbing solar radiation, exemplifies how the death forces of nuclear radiation are countered by the uplifting power of the life ‘stream’. Sources; http://www.wala.de http://www.infiniteunknown.net http://www.healthalternatives2000.com http://www.oasisadvancedwellness.com
When 80,000 people had to abandon their homes after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, Buddhist monks took to planting and distributing sunflowers in an effort to lift spirits and lighten the radiation impact. At least eight million blossoming sunflowers are attributed to the efforts of a single monastery.
Scientists in Japan, and elsewhere, have begun testing the effectiveness of sunflowers in reducing radiation levels. Apparently every plant that absorbs high levels of APRIL 2012 Issue 7
Credit: orchidflowers.files.wordpress.com
Sunflower oil and seeds are highly nutritious. The oil is an excellent source of essential linoleic acid and Vitamin E while its polyunsaturated fatty acid content is significantly higher than olive oil. Given the sunflower’s unique relationship to the solar ‘heart’ of our universe, it’s not surprising that its seeds strengthen the heart and improve circulation. Less clear is how the plant appears to reduce radioactive fallout. Sunflower; Helianthus – from the Greek helios, sun and anthos, flower.
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Wood-fired or microwaved – how do you like your pizza?
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s a child living with an oldfashioned kitchen fire with a range, occasionally used for baking bread, I grew up with the realisation that heat coming from wood or coal was qualitatively different from that of an electric fire. Although the calorific value might be equivalent, there is a huge difference, as is a flame from gas. Later on in my life I had the opportunity to experience cooking with a range (cast-iron, solid fuel or oil-fired), whose qualities, once mastered, had real advantages. Such cookers have a real presence in the home; they also often heat the water and the radiators and transmit a quality to food that will be appreciated. Then, when living on a farm in Mallorca, our bread was made several times a week with a naturalrise fermentation process and cooked in a wood-fired stone oven, into which other dishes were placed after the bread came out. This was the best bread I’ve ever tasted. It would be covered with flecks of wood-ash and eaten with olive oil, garlic and ripe tomatoes—unbeatable! Our guests immediately spotted the difference to most commercial bread; but it was a real art to get the temperature correct. Most fire that we have traditionally used, whether released from wood, coal or gas, is directly or indirectly, a gift of the sun. All these substances come from a kind of ripening process that has taken place in growing organisms to produce usable energy, so when we cook with awareness we should be continuing that ripening process, making our foods more flavoursome and digestible. How does electricity compare as a heat source? John Davy, in his book Hope, Evolution and Change, described electricity as being like a meeting with a mysterious and foreign will,
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by Wendy Cook
which can shake our body in strange contortions. It is like a trapped energy emerging from the hidden depths of nature, full of tension and buried ‘violence’. Despite our seeming array of choices, some people only have access to electricity. Even so it is possible to produce excellent meals using skill and love. I have great reservations however, about the use of microwave technology The invention dates from the Second World War and began to be marketed to the public with vir tually no research until the 1970s, when histological studies showed what molecular changes took place in food. Swiss food scientist Dr Hans Ulrich-Hertel conducted some of the early research, and he concluded (in 1989): Any food eaten that has been cooked or defrosted in a microwave oven can cause changes in the blood indicative of a developing process that is also found in cancer.’ He continued, ‘When food is microwaved the oven exerts a power input of about IOOO watts or more. The resulting destruction and deformation of food molecules produces a new radiolytic compound, unknown in nature.’ The results of this research were suppressed following a complaint by the Swiss Association of Dealers for Electro-apparatus for Households and Industry. In a microwave oven, a device called a magnetron tube causes an electron beam to oscillate at a very high frequency. Microwave radiation at 2.45 gigahertz is produced. As water absorbs electromagnetic energy quickest at this frequency, food containing water is heated more rapidly. The molecules in the food are forced to align themselves with the very rapidly alternating field and to oscillate around their
axis. Heat is produced from intense intermolecular friction. Microwaves are beamed from the magnetron in the oven compartment where they heat the food from the inside out. Apart from being the counter-picture to what we have described in a normal cooking/ripening process, this heating from the inside can give rise to cold spots, hence the need to constantly rotate the dish. Space will not allow more recent research to be shared here, but I urge you to consider carefully whether the microwave has a place in your kitchen. As wife of satirist, the late Peter Cook, Wendy Cook was formerly a well-known hostess in London and New York, When their daughter developed severe allergies, Wendy began exploring the connection between food production and health, discovering how the macrobiotic and biodynamic approaches to nutrition can be life-changing. Article from The Biodynamic Food and Cookbook by Wendy Cook, Clairview 2006, used here with the author’s permission.
Copper chloride crystallisations of extracts from chicken – left, raw; right above, fried; right below, microwaved. The multiple centres visible in the latter suggest an inferior product; this sort of crystalline image normally correlates with poor keeping quality, inferior flavour and diminished nutritive quality. From the book Sensitive Crystallisation by C Marcel, published by Floris Books 2011, available from Humanity Books – see advertisement inside back cover. APRIL 2012 Issue 7
Photo: Earth Matters
Irradiated Food While Dr. Arden Anderson suggests the best use for a microwave oven in the kitchen is as a vasestand, others keep them well away from food! (Above) Having observed farmers becoming ill from pesticide use during his time working as an agricultural consultant, Arden Anderson became a doctor of Medicine. He now juggles work as an Air Force surgeon, farm consultant, lecturer and author in a specialised field of soil-crop-human health that could be called ‘medical agronomy’. Graeme: I understand the US government is set to introduce largescale irradiation of meat. How do you feel about that proposal? Arden: I think it’s crazy. Again, they’re not looking at the associated degradation of food. Again, it’s the paranoia thing that you mentioned in relation to the national psyche. They are either trying to prevent deliberate contamination and/or inadvertent con tamination with things like salmonella and E-coli. If you look at root causes you must ask “why do we have so much APRIL 2012 Issue 7
E-coli present? “ It’s because the nutrition is screwed up in the animals. We are feeding them grain and loading them with antibiotics. The meat is already contaminated when it leaves the farm. It’s the same deal with chickens and salmonella. It’s really just another ploy to address the symptom rather than the cause. It’s also another political ploy of “how do we dispose of or make use of nuclear waste? … Let’s use it for irradiating food”. Then we have to pay for the service, rather than them having to pay for disposal. It will decrease food
quality and increase health problems without a doubt. Having observed farmers becoming ill from pesticide use during his time working as an agricultural consultant, Arden Anderson became a doctor of Medicine. He now juggles work as an Air Force surgeon, farm consultant, lecturer and author in a specialised field of soil-crop- human health that could be called ‘medical agronomy’. From an interview with Anderson, published in Nutrition Rules by Graeme Sait, Soil Therapy Pty Ltd. 2005.
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How radiant are you? by Dr J W Rohen
Dr. Rohen suggests that the warmth in our blood carries forces of intentionality; it is the bridge between body and soul processes. Does this suggest a physiological basis for how health can be strengthened through spiritual as well as physical exercise?
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he heart’s muscle contractions increase blood pressure from near zero to 80 to 120mm Hg. Because of this fact, the heart has always been described as a mechanical pump, a view that does not do full justice to its function. What is the real significance of blood pressure? Isn’t it an indicator of our soul’s activity, our desire to be active in space, and our confrontation with the earthly world? Ultimately, the will activity that arises in the heart and radiates into the entire body originates in the human individuality itself. This willactivity triggers metabolic processes that in turn, through the blood’s respiratory capacity, support very subtle ‘combustion’ processes, (ie) warmth processes and life processes. Warmth makes the transition between bodily and soul processes possible. Under normal circumstances, core temperature remains constant in the torso, which houses the heart in its centre. In contrast, body temperatures fluctuate widely in the skin and limbs. Thus streams of warmth, generally following the pathways travelled by the blood, are present in the body. If we consider the qualities of the four ‘elements’— earth, water, air, and warmth — we can say that cells and organs (especially bones) are the most solidified and ‘earthly’.
At the boundary with interstitial or extracellular space (which has a total volume of approximately ten to twelve litres), these relatively solid features give way to fluid. Because the circulating blood transports respiratory gases, the entire body is also pervaded with the element of air. Blood, however, is also the organ of warmth transportation. In metabolic processes in the organs, and especially in the muscles, energy transfers take place constantly. To a certain extent these transfers are temperaturedependent. Metabolic intensity can be increased by warmth and reduced by cold; fevers and hypothermia are impressive examples. It is conceivable that the will, the actual driving force in metabolic processes, makes use of the warmth in order to manifest its intentions in the form of physical movement. If this is so, the warmth transported by the blood is the actual bridge between bodily and soul processes. Conversely, it is also conceivable that the warmth energy released through metabolism is taken up by the soul and ‘radiated’ into our surroundings in the form of love, empathy, compassion, or devotion. In this case, the blood and circulation serve not only the regulation of
physical warmth but also the actual transformation of physical forces into soul-spiritual forces. The heart organ, which lies in the centre of the circulatory system, is then the place where physical warmth is transformed into soul warmth and vice versa. After all, our language is full of expressions such as ‘warmth of heart’ or ‘a warmhearted person’. Perhaps what the blood carries into the interior of the organism is more than simply gaseous components (oxygen, etc.) that serve the ‘combustion’ of energy-rich compounds in the tissues. Perhaps the blood also carries forces of intentionality, mediated by warmth. Ultimately, this view could lead to an understanding of psychosomatic processes that originate in the soul but cause bodily health or illness. Dr. Johannes Rohen spent most of his scientific career studying the physiology of the eye. Until his retirement in 1989 he lectured in anatomy and embryology at the Universities of Marburg/Lahn and Erlangen/Nurnberg. He is author of many textbooks which reflect his standing as one of the founders of functional anatomy. This article from his book Functional Morphology, The Dynamic Wholeness of the Human Organism, Adonis Press 2007 used with kind permission of the publishers. Available from Humanity Books, see inside back cover.
“The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone; our home that must be defended like a holy relic.” Aleksei Leonov, USSR Astronaut.
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APRIL 2012 Issue 7
Photo: H Laegerstedt
Feretti Growers in action at a Coromandel farmers market.
Ferretti Growers – Flavour and Freshness Pulling up to a gorgeous wooden shingle house, Helen Lagerstedt is about to find out what makes Ferretti Growers tick. Signs of small children, busyness and vegetables poking out from all available spaces intrigue her. Jars of pickles and preserves, freshly made from excess produce, line the kitchen bench. Sprouts are draining, bursting full of enzymes and vitamins, nearly ready for market. Here’s what she found out...
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very weekend, without fail, Ferretti Growers put their wares on display at the local farmers markets around the Coromandel Peninsula. Wooden boxes and crates are filled with brightly coloured, freshly picked vegetables. As the day warms up, happy punters flow in and out snapping up what they need, and stopping for a natter. Dom Ferretti and Jeanette Ida are the steam behind ‘Ferretti Growers fresh organic produce’. The pair bought a piece of land just out of Whitianga five years
APRIL 2012 Issue 7
ago, with the dream of supplying fresh organic vegetables to the local markets. They could see a demand for locally grown produce, because the majority of vegetables sold on the peninsula were trucked in from the Bay of Plenty and Auckland. Ferretti Growers sell their vegetables through farmers markets, veggie boxes, organic shops in Whitianga and Tairua, restaurants, cafes and Ceres Organics in Auckland. Dom says “we supply to a variety of buyers because sometimes one market drops right down, and another picks up”.
It’s not at all surprising that Dom dived into the market gardening trade; his grandfather came out from Italy as a market gardener, his father and six brothers were market gardeners in the Hutt Valley, and his cousin, Brent Ferretti, is an organic market gardener in Nelson. Jeanette’s face lit up when she told of Brent’s role in inspiring them to grow nutritious vegetables for local markets and of continuing the family tradition. When Dom remarked, “I had always been around people and family
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who were growing vegetables”, I realised he was living his calling; vegetable growing is in his blood. His hands-on experience, right from day dot, has been the driving force behind their successful crop production each year. Before Dom and Jeanette became the fully fledged Ferretti Growers they are today, Dom was an uncontrollable seed sower. When he was sowing a few seeds for their home garden, he couldn’t help but sow the whole packet – and then try a range of varieties, ending up with hundreds of plants. The pair sold excess vegetables from their home garden at weekend markets, giving them a feel for what customers might like to buy. Dom and Jeanette’s passion for growing nutritious vegetables moved them permanently from their previous lives; Dom as a scientist for NIWA (National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research), and Jeanette a physiotherapist. Ferretti Growers can proudly display their OFNZ (Organic Farm NZ) certification with their produce, but more lies behind their label than meets the eye. A few years ago Dom was given some Earth Matters magazines by the organisers of the Whitianga Biodynamic Group, Rob Middleton and Erin Morgan. Rob would often ‘pop’ by and chat about biodynamics with them. Then, one day Rob offered to run a biodynamic workshop on Dom and Jeanette’s property. It was a busy day of activities, making a compost heap, a cow pat pit and mixing and spreading preparation 500. At first, Dom and Jeanette were rather sceptical about biodynamics, wondering what astronomy had to do with growing vegetables. Now, through their observations and monitoring, Dom and Jeanette can see how biodynamic growing is all-encompassing; taking into account the effects of both macrocosm and microorganisms on plant growth. At this stage of their business (with two years experience behind them), Dom and Jeanette focus on mastering
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the organic method, while including biodynamic principles when they can. Dom enthusiastically described how feeding microorganisms to the soil through compost helps make nutrients more available to plants, giving their vegetables the flavour-burst they are striving for. They make their own compost on site using crops grown for carbon content, grass clippings, cow manure, fish and seaweed. They add the biodynamic preparations when available. Regular foliar feeding with homemade fish fertiliser is part of their schedule as well. Around the back of the house, soaking in warm afternoon sun, lies Dom and Jeanette’s acre of garden, including two 50 metre tunnel houses. One tunnel house is a tomato lover’s dream. As I walk down the path, tomato plants tower over me, dripping with delicious tomatoes at various stages of ripeness. Most of these tomatoes come from Dom’s father’s original heritage seed collection. Brushing past basil plants and tomato leaves in the warm sun takes my mind off to Italy with its fine wine and fresh olive oil. I can’t help but pick a bright red cherry tomato and pop it into my mouth – its a flavour sensation. This is real food. I mention that my tomatoes taste quite watery compared to theirs, Dom suggested all the rain we’ve been having causes this effect. I stopped watering my tomato plants that day. This tunnel house pumps out about 300kg of tomatoes every week for the summer growing season. Soon Jeanette will be making her famous tomato kasundi, which was such a hit at last year’s markets she already has orders waiting for when the tomatoes ripen! I spy volunteer courgettes and leafy greens peeking out from behind the tomatoes; every available space is exploding with life, it feels so abundant. A big seller for Ferretti Growers is their mesclun salad mix. This is grown in the second tunnel house along with cucumbers climbing up strings, bright purple eggplants and hot chillies. Dom explains the profound difference between their mesclun mix
and supermarket mesclun – time and simplicity! Dom and Jeanette pick, wash, bag and sell their mesclun within 12 hours, it couldn’t be fresher. Meanwhile, supermarket mesclun is picked, processed, bagged, flushed with nitrogen (to keep it ‘fresh’), transported to a distributer, transported to a shop, stored, packed on shelves, then goes to a fridge at someone’s home. Spot the difference! It’s not only the time factor that Ferretti Growers are focussing on, but also the taste. They choose varieties for flavour over volume and productivity. Most consumers say they like Ferretti Growers’ produce because it’s fresh out of the ground and so tasty. Looking to the future, Dom and Jeanette intend to increase their growing area. This will allow them to provide a continual supply of staples as well as a few specialty items to restaurants. They aim to entice new customers to become regulars by providing the produce which the customer is looking for. In terms of biodynamics, Dom and Jeanette are bringing the biodynamic calendar into their daily routine. Jeanette says the calendar helps them focus on what needs to be done each day. They are not striving for Demeter certification at this stage. It is their intention to supply locally, rather than trying to get a market share of biodynamic distributers in Auckland. What inspires Dom and Jeanette to keep going? Simply the pleasure of growing a tiny seed and nurturing it into tasty vegetables they can offer at the market “The whole process is a satisfying occupation” said Dom, grinning from ear to ear. Jeanette adds, “It’s hugely rewarding hearing customers and chefs say Ferretti Growers grow the best vegetables they’ve eaten or served. At the end of the day, it’s all about people enjoying good, tasty, local, organic food”. Helen Lagerstedt has been living in Whitianga. In the coming months she intends to travel. APRIL 2012 Issue 7
One Year in the Making
Auckland’s Vortex Creative Wellbeing Centre is located in Michaels Ave, Ellerslie. Owner, Christine Moginie describes the abundance she has coaxed from a small strip of roadside verge using biodynamic methods in just one year.
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gentle, misting rain danced briefly through the garden as morning sunshine slipped in and out of the clouds. It was a lovely calm, slightly cloudy morning when I got up at 4.30-ish and I wondered, “why don’t I get up earlier more often…?”
I started the garden at Vortex this is the ‘magic’ that has occurred in abundance. Many wonderful helpers have donated time, soil, plants, sleepers, recycled timber. Others help with weeding, planting, watering, shoveling soil. We are all inspired by what emerges.
A friend and I were about to spray the second application of biodynamic silica preparation 501. This week the message had come loud and clear – I must catch the tail- end of the ascending moon phase and put the 501 on so as to support the budding and almost unfurling leaf growth that was already underway. Two weeks earlier I’d applied the third lot of cow manure preparation 500 and before that, the cow pat pit and seaweed fertiliser when the warm, wet winter tricked the plants into thinking spring was already here. Even back then, there was a feeling of expectancy in the air.
Many people comment on how wonderful the garden looks and feels. Others begin to help themselves as they realise a community garden is there for everyone and it is absolutely okay to pick whatever they like to take home. Children from the nearby crèche and Kindergartens come by often to see what’s growing and take something back for their lunch or morning tea.
I sit musing while stirring the rainwater in my copper cauldron with bits of bluetack plugging the holes in its bottom! Here am I, in New Zealand, stirring BD preparations and eating home-made muffins with a cup of Earl Grey tea. It’s a world of difference from sitting on rocks in the pre dawn light at Mittagong, NSW Australia, taking turns to stir the copper resting near the fire; a steaming billy of tea coming to the boil, and buttering warm scones… Different people, different countries, different energies; different climates, plants and soils; so many differences yet the same activity has been going on for decades, all over the world. There is something wonderfully familiar, simple and uncomplicated about sharing the stirring with others; something that warms more than just the physical, no matter where you are, or who you are with. Community; common-unity is, for me, the special ingredient. Since APRIL 2012 Issue 7
Our third compost pile is ready to use. We have made the soil ourselves and two of our garden beds overflow with vegetables, herbs and flowers. Our enriched earth makes clear to people who haven’t seen ‘proper’ compost before, the difference between store-bought, kiln-dried and tumbled compost that is almost devoid of life forces, and the living humus-like soil we’ve developed. For a small area, not much larger than the average roadside grass verge, there’s a lot growing here broccoli, snow peas, fennel, miners lettuce, NZ spinach , silverbeet,
dill, coriander, rocket, parsley, broadbeans, radicchio, thyme, sage, rosemary, chamomile, yarrow, valerian, dandelions, rhubarb, blueberries, raspberries, a lemon tree, and a persimmon. All co-habit cheerfully in their north-facing recycled timber beds, interspersed with tulips, daffodils, freesias, dutch iris, lavender, canterbury bells, sweet peas, echium, borage, phaecelia, calendula, gaznaias, cyclamen, poppies, marigolds, nasturtiums, pink lachanalias, gaura, primroses, marguerite daisies, and an outof-season self-seeded sunflower, smiling happily amongst the riot of vegetables and herbs. Bees, bumblebees and wasps buzz in the borage and calendulas; swallows have nested in the roof of the shops and help to keep the bad bugs at bay; the sacrificial broccolini plant - gnawed to pieces by slugs, snails, and whitefly - has helped keep the rest of the garden in good health. There’s a family of weta, often found in the waterbin (a recycled wheelie bin connected to the downpipe) or in the bark pile, and there are even a few early monarch butterflies to be seen. You can really feel the difference in a biodynamic garden where everything is alive and working in harmony; it’s an example of how the whole world could be.
From this… …to this. Vortex Centre shows what’s possible from a small strip of roadside verge, in just one year, using biodynamic methods.
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A neighbourly, cooperative gardening culture, based on the core value of companionship...
vondale Community Gardeners specialises in Socially Inclusive Design models for community. Made up of pioneer volunteers, who banded together in February 2009 to support local street initiatives that today include Heron Park Heritage Orchard, Lifespace Lunch Park (Tait Park improvements) and Biodynamic Community Food Garden (Rangi Matariki project) this volunteer-based, neighbourhood group has recently found support and assistance in the form of a research project on Community Mapping led by the Unitec Design Department.The original co-founders of Avondale Community Gardeners (ACG’s) brought together the social influences of New Zealand’s Whole Earth Movement, America’s Growing Communities Principles, with the urban Biodynamic and Permaculture programme in Auckland. ACG’s special interest in biodynamics began when members discovered handbooks in cupboards and biodynamic home gardens in backyards left behind by former residents of Avondale and Rosebank. In 2010 ACG’s rallying of community support to protect remnant historic trees and the much forgotten horticultural legacy of the Rosebank Peninsula, revealed another layer of New Zealand’s early Plantsman history. Hayward Wright, who was best known for kiwifruit research lived in the area and records of key trials by DSIR were also found in Avondale. Here too our familiar kumara variety was developed as well as a municipal composting programme, chemical fertilisers, and technology for the industrialisation of horticulture.
Community Gardeners’ submissions on a range of concerns relating to Council Planning, have also helped to highlight matters of spiritual, cultural, and ecological significance in Avondale within a contemporary social and economic context. Our Soil Stewards course, launched in February 2012, follows on from a series of 25 home-garden workshops begun at ACG’s public launch in July 2009. The community outcomes of the Soil Stewards course are: • to develop neighbourhood cooperatives, • to understand our bioregional heritage • to actively practise sustainable gardening and land management The courses are designed to help local residents relearn technical skills in horticulture, local knowledge and cooperative economy within a community setting. Workshops are held monthly with seasonal home garden visits in the area. Sampling new developments in local cuisine is another creative outlet for the group and it operates alongside ACG’s maintenance teams for orchards, compost, flowers and herbs, vines and shrubs. ACG would like to help members develop `lifespace gardens’ as centres from where religious inspiration, cultural enlightenment, and social cohesion can radiate. As part of a modern renewal of AgriCulture, the Lifespace philosophy of Avondale Community Gardeners is being put into practice through the Biodynamic Home Garden Cooperative and Community Food Garden. The proposed Rangi Matariki garden project, on a patch of Council Reserve in Rosebank, is being serviced by the Soil Stewards programme and the creative talents of its tutors, participants, and Trustees with the support of The Kete Ora Charitable Trust. For more information about ACG, contact Imi on: 828-5854 or avondalecommunitygardener@gmail.com
Originally, open fields were cultivated by Maori. In mid C19th, Pakeha introduced agriculture, orcharding, and family market gardens to Auckland. Although extensive property development and modernist interests have been occurring in Avondale since the 1960s, there remains a cultural memory of the days before we became totally reliant on machines. Despite the transition from rural, to industrial and residential subdivisions, remnants of horse stables, early State house sections, and large pockets of undeveloped wild zones, particularly shelter belts, still remain in Rosebank. Recently, local residents and ACG successfully nominated a dozen more local trees onto Auckland Council’s Schedule of Notable Trees. Avondale
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“The best compost we’ve ever seen”- making biodynamic compost at an Avondale Community Gardeners workshop in 2011. APRIL 2012 Issue 7
A Welcome Outbreak of Sanity
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The Crafar Farm Court Decision
he announcement of Ministerial and Overseas Investment Office approval of the sale of the bankrupt Crafar Farms to Chinese buyers was no surprise to the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA). The only surprise was that it took them so long to rubber stamp it. This was all to have been a done deal back in 2010 when it was supposed to be sold to the first lot of would-be Chinese buyers. That all turned to custard because of an even greater lack of good character than usual among the company’s principals, who are now facing serious criminal charges in Hong Kong (but nothing in New Zealand, which tells you a lot about the diligence of NZ’s ‘regulatory’ authorities).
The lily is being gilded by the announcement that Landcorp will manage it on behalf of the Chinese buyers. Everyone knows that there is the world of difference between being the owner and the property manager. Ownership is power; owners make the decisions (including onselling it); owners get the profits. The lily is being further gilded by the conditions attached to it (Labour, when it was in office, set the precedent for this in regard to the equally controversial Shania Twain land purchases); conditions such as the buyers remaining of good character (this could be renamed the May Wang clause) and paying millions of dollars to various worthy causes. These should be taken with a well deserved grain of salt. Why? Two words – Kim Dotcom.
The Prime Minister keeps issuing soothing noises about foreign land purchases only totaling around 1% of the total land area. He is being disingenuous. What is important is what percentage of the total area of commercially productive land is foreign-owned. These statistics are no longer issued by the Overseas Investment Office but when they were, last decade, CAFCA calculated the figure at 7% - and it was never officially denied or disputed. We’ve seen no evidence of that figure having gone down, quite the opposite. APRIL 2012 Issue 7
by Murray Horton
Plus the Prime Minister is stressing quantity when, once again, the key factor is the quality of the land being sold. Foreign buyers are cherrypicking, not buying the rubbish (that’s left for the locals). In 2010, when controversy was raging about the original Chinese proposal to buy these farms, that same The Prime Minister said he didn’t want to see New Zealanders become tenants in our own land. A commendable sentiment, one with which CAFCA completely agrees. But his Government’s decision has since ensured that is exactly what is happening.
What is important is what percentage of the total area of productive land is foreign-owned. However, Justice Miller’s decision to order a review of the decision to approve the sale of the Crafar Farms to the appropriately named Milk NZ, owned by Shanghai Pengxin of China, is a welcome outbreak of sanity in this whole sorry saga. Not to mention a two fingered judicial poke in the eyes of the Government and its rubber-stampers, the Overseas Investment Office.
Only a few weeks ago the Government was trumpeting the ‘strict conditions’ attached to the approval. They have been swept aside by the judge for the load of piffle that they are. The decision recognises that the would-be foreign owner has no dairy farming experience, thus failing the legislative requirement that it have relevant business expertise. The Chinese company, and the Government, aimed to get around this inconvenient law by contracting Landcorp to manage the Crafar Farms. The appellant’s lawyer pointed out that this would set a precedent for future land sales as any “well-resourced overseas conglomerate could come and buy dairy farms in New Zealand provided it had a contract with Landcorp”. This attempt to sugarcoat the bitter pill of loss of yet more of our land could be described as a policy of phony New
Zealandisation. Landcorp would be nothing more than a property manager for the Chinese owners. The judge recognised the central fact that the sale would bring no discernible benefit to New Zealand, as required under the Overseas Investment Act, saying that the benefits were likely to accrue regardless of who owns it. “If a given benefit will happen anyway, it cannot easily be described as a substantial consequence of the overseas investment”. CAFCA stresses that the nationality of the buyers is irrelevant. Selling the Crafar Farms to off-shore investors is reprehensible regardless of whether the foreign buyers are Chinese, Americans, British or Australians. CAFCA doesn’t carry a flag for Sir Michael Fay and his merry men either. If his consortium succeeds in buying the Crafar Farms there is nothing to stop it on-selling them overseas for a tidy profit. The opportunity to have the Crafar Farms genuinely stay in local hands was lost when the receivers rejected Landcorp’s bid to buy them outright. The recent judicial decision provides a chance to halt this whole policy of flogging off the country’s agricultural land (of which they ain’t making any more), which is New Zealand’s comparative advantage in the global market. New Zealand is, first and foremost, an agricultural country. And we’re very, very good at it, which is why foreign buyers want to snap it up. As a bare minimum first step, freehold sales of such land to foreign buyers should be stopped as soon as possible, allowing them lease-hold rights only, as is common practice overseas. And all such leases should be subject to much stricter conditions and scrutiny than is the case now. Murray Horton is Secretary of Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa. You can subscribe to CAFCA’s efforts for $20.00/yr. Send a cheque and your details to CAFCA, P O Box 2258 Christchurch.
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Radiation from Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Spreads
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hen the nuclear reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan were severely damaged by the earthquake and tsunami in March last year1, it was my wake-up call to the issue of nuclear radiation and energy. Not quite reassured by the Japanese government’s statement that ‘It will not immediately affect your health’2, I began to search for information through the various online media and websites, in order to make some sense of the situation in my country. The more I searched, however, the more I began to get the impression that many people in Japan are experiencing psychological chaos, largely due to the wide-ranging and often conflicting views on radiation risks.
Whilst some are asserting the relative safety of the situation3, others are warning that the situation is extremely serious4. So, what is going on? I believe that we will not know for sure how the Fukushima incident will actually affect the people and the environment until much later, and only after extensive independent surveys. Moreover, in my view, we cannot necessarily rely on our previous experiences of nuclear incidents, such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, as the Fukushima incident is qualitatively different from previous incidents. In Chernobyl, for example, the major radiation leak was more or less contained within 10 days, whilst in Fukushima the radiation leak went on for months at least5. The Fukushima incident has also caused a significant amount of radioactive substances to leak into the Pacific Ocean6. Nevertheless, aside from the debate of whether the situation in Japan is safe or not, there is already data suggesting that the radiation from Fukushima has spread far and wide. This worries
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by Yuri Wilson
people, as some of the radioactive isotopes emit potentially harmful rays for a considerable period of time7. Please note, the information I provide here is by no means a comprehensive summary8.
Air
Although there are discrepancies among the studies regarding the amount of radioactive emissions, they nevertheless seem to suggest that a significant amount has been released into the air9. Radioactive particles from Fukushima have been consistently detected across the globe10 and one study has found radioactive cesium in car air filters in Japan11.
Soil & Ground
It is now known that the soil in many areas in the Fukushima prefecture is radioactive. Whilst the current no-entry zone is within a 20 km radius area of the nuclear power plant, radioactivity has been measured beyond this zone. For example, high levels of cesium were detected outside of the 30km radius12, within a 40 km radius13, and at 60km14 from the power plant. Strontium, which has a long half-life and tends to accumulate in bones, was detected in the soil as far as 36km northwest of the plant15. One report estimates that the total area contaminated at the level of the Chernobyl evacuation zone is about 800 square kilometres16. The soils beyond Fukushima are also contaminated17. High levels of cesium have been detected in neighbouring prefectures as far as 250 km.18,19,20,21,22. Radioactive strontium exceeding normal levels was found in Yokohama (250km away) and south of Tokyo23. One study estimates that the radioactive iodine and cesium may have spread across a wide area encompassing 15 prefectures24.
Marine and Inland Water Unsurprisingly, as radioactive water was released into the ocean, radioactive substances have been found in seawater. High levels of iodine25 and strontium26 were detected in the sea around Fukushima after the incident. One group of scientists estimates that high quantities of radioactive cesium 137 leaked into the sea from the Fukushima plant27; another predicts that cesium will not only disperse in the Pacific Ocean but also flow into the Indian Ocean and eventually reach the Atlantic28. According to the State Oceanic Administration of China, one survey found cesium -137 at 300 times higher than normal levels and Strontium-90 up to 10 times higher than normal in seawater in China, which suggests that the radioactive contaminants have already spread further afield29. The contamination seems to have affected inland waters as well. In March 2011 radioactive iodine and cesium were detected in tap water in 14 prefectures, and in 5 prefectures (including Tokyo) people were advised not to use tap water for infants for a brief period of time30. In June highly radioactive strontium was detected in the groundwater around the Fukushima plant31.
Food
Radioactive contamination has been found in various foods. On several occasions the Japanese government has had to ban the shipment and consumption of several kinds of food such as kakina and komatsuna (both green vegetables), spinach, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, turnip, celery, parsley, milk, green tea, beef, wild boar meat, chestnut, yuzu (citrus), bamboo shoot, salmon, ume (plum), and several kinds of mushrooms produced in different regions32. APRIL 2012 Issue 7
The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) reports that between March and September 2011, varying amounts of iodine 131, cesium 134, cesium 137 were detected in beef, pork, hen egg, and sheep meat produced in 22 prefectures33. They also found radioactive iodine and cesium in raw milk across 14 prefectures34, and in various vegetables, grains, and fruits in over 10 prefectures35. Again, not surprisingly, much seafood obtained from the sea around Japan has been found to be contaminated. Greenpeace has been conducting independent surveys since the incident and reports high levels of contamination in seafood including several types of seaweed, shellfish, and fish which are commonly eaten in Japan36. The Japanese Fisheries Agency has also been monitoring radiation levels in seafood and report that, so far, they have found various amounts of radioactive iodine and cesium in various marine fishes, inland freshwater fishes (both wild and artificially bred), shellfish and seaweeds in and around 15 prefectures37.
Human Bodies In March 2011, a medical survey checked 1,080 children up to 15 years of age in three towns within 50 km of the reactors. They found some thyroid radiation exposure in 45% of these children38.
Household Waste Radioactivity has entered into household wastes as well. Radioactive cesium has been detected in ash from garbage disposal facilities in Kashiwa City43, from household wastes in Matsudo City, and by September 2011, Nagareyama City was storing about 360 tons of radioactive ash at their incineration facilities44. By mid-October 2011 the volume of radioactive ash in a number of cities and municipalities in the northern part of Japan was growing at a rate of 360 tons per day45.
Exports
Goods exported from Japan have also been found to be radioactive, although this has been reported only sporadically. Singapore reported low levels of radioactivity in parsley, rapeseed, mustard and perilla imported from Japan in March 201146. In May 2011, Dutch authorities found traces of radiation on 19 containers originating from Japan. Five of the containers, scanned on arrival at the Port of Rotterdam, were quarantined because the level of contamination was above the permissible threshold47. Again in May, custom agents in Chile detected radioactivity on cars shipped from Japan48,49 and in June, French authorities confiscated 162 kilograms
of green tea imported from Shizuoka Prefecture, central Japan, because radioactive cesium had been detected at levels exceeding EU limits50. While, in recent years, pressing environmental concerns may have encouraged the use of nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels51, a major problem lies with the fact that a single accident can potentially affect vast areas of the earth and human lives. Spreading radioactive isotopes are elusive to our senses, yet humans and our planet may suffer for many generations. Many countries around the world are starting or continuing to use nuclear energy52. We may be inclined to think that this is ‘their’ issue and not ‘ours’, yet it is clear that in our globalised world we are all interconnected – economically, materially and relationally. We all share the responsibility for the preservation of our shared space. I believe it is crucial that we keep track of the continuing spread of radioactive substances and that we keep an eye on their effects as much as possible, so that we may learn the lessons from Fukushima and together build a safer, more sustainable future. Yuri Wilson lives in Christchurch with her husband and young son. She has family in Japan. For the extensive list of footnotes and references that accompany this article please email the editor info@earthmatters.co.nz.
Radioactive iodine and cesium were detected in 7 of 23 breast milk samples provided by mothers living in Fukushima, Ibaraki and Chiba prefectures in April 201139, and cesium was found in 4 of 41 breast milk samples from mothers living in Fukushima, Ibaraki and Tokyo40. Traces of radioactive cesium were found in all 10 urine samples taken in May from children in Fukushima city (60 km away from the plant)41, and in June, it was reported that radiation had been detected in the urine of 15 Fukushima residents between the age of 4 and 7742. APRIL 2012 Issue 7
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APRIL 2012 Issue 7
Food Bill 160-2 leaves a bad taste
“None are more hopelessly enslaved that those who believe they are free”
Food Safety Minister Kate Wilkinson says high risk businesses such as baby food manufacturers and restaurants will fall under a stringent food control plan. Mediumrisk businesses – pre-packaged food manufacturers and bakeries – will have more flexibility under a national programme. The low-risk categories of farmers markets, roadside stalls and charity sausage sizzles will incur no extra cost, but will receive food handler guidance information. That all sounds fairly innocuous and indeed, it’s easy to see how people could overlook the small print; don’t we all agree that ‘safe’ food is in everyone’s best interest? But it seems there’s a lot more than food safety at stake here. Which is why more than 15,000 people have already signed a petition against Food Bill 160-2. “There are a lot of positive things about the bill”, Green Party MP and spokesperson for soil and health New Zealand, Steffan Browning told TV One in January this year. “But it really drives down far too far bureaucratically into what is really kiwi culture. The Green Party certainly wants healthy safe food, affordable food, local food, so that’s positive. But this bill discourages rather than encourages people that are small growers.” He said not enough has been said about this bill. Most people were unaware of how far it has progressed and that a submissions process was already in place. APRIL 2012 Issue 7
Browning also noted, “There’s huge power to the minister that you wouldn’t expect in terms of regulation and we actually need to push back a bit and have more people exempt.”
What can you do about the Food Bill?
Foodbill.org.nz is a community project for raising awareness about the issues with the proposed new Food Bill 160-2, introduced to New Zealand’s Parliament on 26 May 2010. The bill has been through a public submission process and is now waiting to proceed through the House. Go to www.foodbill.org.nz for help with the following;
1. Write a letter to all members of NZ Parliament (see sample letters & instructions at www.foodbill. org.nz) 2. Write a letter to your local MP
3. Write a letter to the Food Safety Minister. Addressed to: Hon Kate Wilkinson, Freepost Parliament, Private Bag 18 888, Parliament Buildings, Wellington 6160
4. Write a letter to Green Party MP Steffan Browning. Addressed to: Hon Steffan Browning, Freepost Parliament, Private Bag 18 888, Parliament Buildings, Wellington 6160
5. Contact your local Green Party candidate 6. Contact your local Green Party branch
7. Distribute Food Bill Flyers into letter boxes. 8. Sign the online petition
9. Contribute to or comment on the Food Bill Issues List
10. Tell your friends and family spread the word about what Food Bill 160-2 means for Kiwis 11. Organise or attend a peaceful public protest
12. Write an article for foodbill.org. nz (email to buzzybee@foodbill. org.nz) 13. Add your concerns & stories as comments to existing articles on foodbill.org.nz 14. Direct informed people that you know to foodbill.org.nz to participate in evolving the wiki
15. Follow the Natural Health Products bill (and write letters government, blog, comment etc), which has also passed first reading in Sept 2011
16. Subscribe to NZ Parliament Alerts so that you’re aware of other new legislature that may be accepting submissions. Then make a submission.
Photo: public domain.
W
e’re told by the NZ Food Safety Authority that the aim of the Food Bill is to “provide an efficient, effective and risk-based food regulatory regime that manages food safety and suitability issues, improves business certainty and minimises compliance costs for business.”
J W von Goethe.
How come we weren’t told that ‘seed controls’ are part of the Food Bill? Is the Food Bill really about food safety or has it more to do with facilitating capital acquisition by multinational food corporations?
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T
Autumn-made by Margaret Colquhoun
he interpenetrating cycles of life are even more profoundly experienced if we look at something like the apple tree in all its autumn activity. We see the final culmination of this year’s growth hanging in heavy, ripe apples and falling as pale goldenyellow leaves. A few inches away, all that will grow next year is already developed in the new buds. Even the number of leaves for each twig, together with the potential flowers, are tightly packed inside the two different sorts of buds. Fig. 1 shows an apple twig with both leaf and flower buds. The larger, more rounded, fat buds will develop into flowers and bear fruit next year. The thinner, more pointed ones will become vegetative, long, leafbearing shoots and bear no flowers or fruit. If you look at our drawing - or better still at a fruit-bearing tree outside at this time of year - you will be able to ‘live into’ the whole cycle of the year since last autumn as it has unfolded for this tree. Let the buds rest all winter in your imagination, swell and burst in spring into that soft apple-green rosette of rounded leaves surrounding the flower bud which then opens into blossom; white with a tinge of pink. Imagine the insects humming around the flowers, pollinating the carpels and ‘see’ the subsequent setting of the fruit. At the same time the leaves are growing, the long shoots form, twigs thicken, new buds form and fruits swell. Eventually autumn tinges the leaves and fruit with gold and yellow and red and finally we
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Fig 1 Branch of apple tree. [pencil]
arrive back where we started - one year, one cycle of time later. Try living with these thoughts for a moment while contemplating the apple twig. A feeling of gratitude might awaken in you for all that led to the final culmination of growth, the fruit, which the plant offers to the world. The tiny seeds which the fruit harbours within itself, as well as the tightly-packed buds, can awaken in us a sense of hope and anticipation for all that will develop and come to fruition in the coming year. With thoughts like these, we realise how time is never still, how life is always changing and transforming
itself. Opposite and contradictory processes (the seasons, dying and becoming) and places (the two sides of the earth) work continuously, hand in hand.
“What has been formed is immediately transformed again, and if we would succeed, to some degree, to a living view of Nature, we must attempt to remain as active and plastic as the example she sets for us”.
Margaret Colquhoun, PhD, lives in Edinburgh where she leads the Life Science Trust, that helps people to rediscover their physical and spiritual connection with the natural world. The article comes from Colquhoun, M. New Eyes for Plants and is used here with permission of the publishers, www.hawthornpress.com Available from Humanity Books, see advertisement inside back cover. APRIL 2012 Issue 7
Photo: www.abc.net.au
I
Atomic Bombs – experiments without prayers by Elisabeth Alington
n the book A Song for Nagasaki*, author Paul Glynn tells of the life of Doctor Takashi Nagai, a professor of radiology at the University of Nagasaki who died of atomic disease six years after the second atom bomb incinerated his wife and home. It’s a moving biography of a dedicated man who devoted his life to medicine and science which, particularly in the last years of his life, called for great courage. After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Japanese doctors had to call upon great reserves of fearlessness in mind and deed with which to meet the suffering of Japan’s people. Their creativity was frequently called upon; lacking blood for transfusions, they injected patients with sap from seaweeds.
creation” must be approached “with profound respect and a certain chastity. A real scientist experimenting in his laboratory is like a monk in his cell. Yes experiments become prayers!”
Being Japanese, rice was a feature of daily life for Nagai with the grain featuring symbolically as much as gastronomically. His mother used to tell him to “look at the rice carefully and discover behind it the countless generations of farmers who pioneered wild land and nurtured rice paddies through droughts and floods, poverty, war and pestilence.”
After the bomb these few words held an immense significance for Nagai. He noted that wheat exposed to radiation started sprouting everywhere. Corn did too but yielded no grain. Morning glories immediately put out new tendrils but flowers were small and leaves deformed. Green vegetables thrived whereas sweet potatoes sprouted immediately but produced no edible crop. The leafy part of plants, the place where light is transmuted into substance, continued to give of itself to the world. However reproduction, the fruiting and seeding processes, were rendered impotent.
She continued, “See generations of artisans too, in the simple practical beauty of the bowl and chopsticks, and all the merchants who handled them. See your parents too who worked hard to be able to buy and cook the rice.” Before eating, her family would offer prayers to Amidha Buddha, expressing gratitude for the food and for the universe that provided it. Her son embraced the Catholic faith. On clear nights from his mountain home Nagai would frequently gaze spellbound at the celestial fields laden with astral grains. [aster = star. Ed.] He often experienced a profound sense of gratitude for the world; a sense of exhilaration because “we are in pursuit of truth which is eternal”. He saw the research laboratory as a threshold to the house of God. Once, while studying a kidney patient’s case, he felt a deep urge to kneel at the sight of the brilliant formation of urine crystals! Men of science were his mentors, but only those who were free enough to allow themselves to look at creation with humility and understanding; people like Pascal, Copernicus, Pasteur and Marconi. It annoyed him intensely to read that science and faith occupied polar camps; “if you read what the great scientists actually said it is not so. Social and literary critics, that is men who have held pens but never test tubes, are the ones who make that claim.” Nagai maintained that “the study of any part of God’s
By the end of 1948 people all over Japan were reading Nagai’s writings. His book We of Nagasaki was the first book published in English by a survivor of nuclear bombing. In 1949 he was declared Nagasaki’s first honorary citizen. To this he replied with characteristic humility that “the moon that lights the night sky is nothing but a cold lump of matter reflecting the sun’s light!”
“In your light we see light” Psalm 36
It’s well known that not all living cells are equally sensitive to radiation. As became clear in Japan, Chernobyl and more recently, Iraq (depleted uranium warfare) the invisible, radioactive forces bearing death primarily affect the invisible forces of coming-into-being. Interfering with the germinal, embryonic material, they deprive life of its formative capacity. Immature cells and rapidly dividing cells (cells that are actively reproducing) are more sensitive to ionising radiation than mature cells. The blood-forming cells, located mainly in the bone marrow, are both immature and rapidly-dividing. They are highly susceptible to radiation injury. By contrast, most mature blood cells are relatively radio-resistant. A curious exception to this rule is the lymphocyte, a particular kind of mature white blood cell which is extremely radio-sensitive. “Goodbye my flesh. I must now journey beyond, as the fragrance must leave the rose.” Nagai died from extremely reduced white and red blood cell counts as the ‘astral grains’ in his blood were rapidly extinguished. He ended his days living in a small hut beside a busy street, just metres from a bus stop, where he was accessible to people who needed to speak with him.
* Paul Glynn; A Song for Nagasaki. Marist Fathers Books, Aus. 1997. APRIL 2012 Issue 7
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Eating is an agri-cultural act…. your health, economic and cultural wealth start with seeds sown in the field, the ‘ager’
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APRIL 2012 Issue 7
Hidden Geometry of Flowers; Living rhythm, form & number
Floris Books 2011 448 pages, paperback
Keith Crithchlow
$74.95
Can we imagine a world without flowers? Flowers are beautiful, offering us delight in their colour, fragrance and form, as well as their medicinal benefits. Flowers also speak to us in the language of the plant form itself, as cultural symbols in different societies, and at the highest levels of inspiration. In this beautiful and original book, renowned thinker and geometrist Keith Critchlow has chosen to focus on an aspect of flowers that has received perhaps the least attention. This is the flower as teacher of symmetry and geometry (the ‘eternal verities’, as Plato called them). In this sense, he says, flowers can be treated as sources of remembering away of recalling our own wholeness, as well as
awakening our innerpower of recognition and consciousness. What is evident in the geometry of the face of a flower can remind us of the geometry that underlies all existence.
Humanity Books & Fine Arts ph 06 870 7069 email: humanitybooks@xtra.co.nz
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