Earth Matters August 2011

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Large selection of organic and Bio-dynamic flours, grains, nuts, beans, dried fruit, dairy products, bread, meat, tea, coffee, fruit juices and wines.

Plus gluten free products, Weleda remedies, organic skin care and cosmetics, (including Dr Hauschka), organic baby clothing and baby food, household cleaning products, organic seeds, seedlings and garden products and more.

A qualified Naturopath and Medical Herbalist available all day every day to assist.

We will always do our best to source items we do not have in stock. Come in and see us or phone.

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Contents

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

4 Beech Groves and Tropical Rainforests –

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Awakening Art – The work of Ai Weiwei.

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Editor: Elisabeth Alington Assistant Editor: Mary Vander Ploeg Administrator: Paula Kibblewhite Australian Distributor: Heather Weiss 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 2011 ISSUE 5

New Zealand’s landscape riddles.

Andreas Suchantke

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The Art of Slow Baking – What makes good bread?

Isabel Pasch

Editorial Seedlines Genes are not self-activating.

Squaring the Circle – How crop cicles are changing our worldview.

Make the Earth Glad. Using biodynamic compost preparations.

Maria Thun.

16 Of Star … Matariki.

17 … and Flower. Willow and mistletoe in medicine.

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Dr Johannes Wilkens.

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Proven Profitability – Organic-Biodynamic Farming Jon Morgan.

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The Collapse of the Middle Class. Elizabeth Warren.

Speculation in food markets is a crime against humanity.

Vaughan Gunson I M Fed Up. A bloody green revolution.

Food with Character – Grown with Integrity.

Book Review: Metamorphosis – Evolution in Action.

Living in your own world? Tom van Gelder.

The Book of Nature – Autumn and Spring. Margaret Colquoun.

Front Cover: Wilton Windmill, UK. A complex circular formation of twelve segments, with eight concentric lines of differing length and number in each segment, it is a close approximation of Leonhard Euler’s profound mathematical equation e^(hi)pi)1=0 Photo: Lucy Pringle 2010. Author, aerial photographer, researcher and world-wide lecturer, Lucy Pringle has amassed a comprehensive crop circle photographic library. See www.lucypringle.co.uk

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Editorial

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Pic: J Bruce-Gordon

ur worldview is often prescribed by what’s happening on our own patch. Waterlogged soils in Pukekohe; fires on Banks Peninsula; sea-to-sky snowfalls in Southland…what does rural weather matter to an urban population so long as it’s warm, dry and fed? Not until we want to eat salad again will it matter that lettuces are in short-supply and cost $5.00 each because of all the heavy rain that’s made Pukekohe soils too wet to plant.

In the last year, fresh fruit and vegetable prices have risen a whopping 15.7% in New Zealand.

Growers aren’t likely to have seen much of it. But food banks know all about it as requests for food parcels have risen steeply. For a significant part of our population, fresh fruit and vegetables are now priced off the menu.

Australian journalist and author of The Coming Famine, Julian Cribb visited Auckland last month, warning that global food shortages and price spikes are closer than we think. A lot of us have been lulled into thinking food is abundant, what with easy-pickings from supermarket shelves and so much to choose from. Yet it wouldn’t take much to double the price of our food if something caused a hiccup to the global supplies heading for India or China. And then what? Empty bellies, insatiable anger; food shortages were at the heart of several of the Arab Spring civilian uprisings.

Cribb recommended that we increase consumption of fruit and vegetables by 50% in order to get away from the energy-intensive, processed foods that reduce our resilience when it comes to matters of food security. But we are doing the exact opposite.

Most of us look at the view and see only the scenery, forgetting that reality is not just what’s in front of us. Something happens in our minds at the same time. Mind is always part of the reality of what we think we see. On a recent visit to the Auckland’s Stardome – the audience was asked if they believed in the existence of life elsewhere in the cosmos (as if our belief is a substitute for evidence).

Given that Earth Matters is focused on using our minds as well as our eyes, spirit as well as matter in a post-materialism, new science of life, I thought it might be interesting for readers to explore something equally ‘far out’ based on scientific objectivity rather than wishful thinking. In this issue we introduce two masters of the mind’s-eye; Harvard psychiatrist John Mack and ecologist Andreas Suchantke.

Both bring a new way of seeing to their fields of expertise; Mack to the so-called extra-terrestrial phenomenon of crop circles and Suchantke to evolutionary theory and New Zealand’s remarkable forests. Later in this issue we review his book – an exceptional account of how, with a new paradigm, we can begin to approach a coherent view of evolution.

How do we come back to our senses and how do we begin to think clearly about what’s real if we can’t afford to eat properly? The Paris-Berlin artisan Bakery consolidates what real food is all about.

Owner, Isabel Pasch writes about sourdoughs as if they were her best friends. If you still don’t ‘get’ organic farming then read what the farmers say. Wairarapa organic-biodynamic farmers, Heather and Ian Atkinson have a highly successful operation that makes for inspiring reading.

Introducing Paula Kibblewhite, a keen Hawkes Bay quarteracre biodynamic gardener who enjoys making compost alongside her companionable chooks, and is adept at typing spreadsheets.

Paula is our much appreciated data base manager who keeps an eye out for when your subs are due.

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Always, Earth Matters reminds us of our ground of existence, the soil beneath our feet. A new way of thinking, of growing the heart-mind, cannot properly develop without the soil that sustains us. So…. make compost with Maria Thun! She’s an expert at making the soil sing, having researched how to work in tune with the constellations. Speaking of which, Matariki has been at the forefront of our lives lately and we have a bit to say about that too. From star to flower; plants are the source of healing medicine and we read about a specialised European cancer treatment using willow and mistletoe.

Less palatable are a number of land-grab and food security issues; The International Monetary Fund – what really goes on behind its doors? In New Zealand, tax justice is on the agenda with a nationwide campaign to remove gst from food. Have a read too of what’s happened to the middle class in the USA; it might ring a bell. We’re led back to biodynamically grown Demeter certified food and what it offers by way of a high quality, sustainable food supply. Lastly, a practical exercise in nature-mind observation and a seasonal reflection complete the issue.

Wishing you a warm hearth, a cheerful heart and a renewable world view,

Lis Alington 2011 ISSUE 5

A Sleep of Prisoners Dark and cold we may be, but this Is no winter now. The frozen misery Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move; The thunder is the thunder of the floes, The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.

Thank God our time is now when wrong Comes up to face us everywhere, Never to leave us till we take The longest stride of soul we ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.

The enterprise Is exploration into God. Where are you making for? It takes So many thousand years to wake, But will you wake for pity’s sake!

Christopher Fry

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New Zealand’s Landscape Riddles

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Beech Groves and Tropical Rainforests Andreas Suchantke

he landscapes of New Zealand continually present the visitor with new riddles. How is it possible that vegetation types normally conti­nents apart are here found cheek by jowl in mosaic patterns? If one has just been in a sunlit beech forest that could easily have been some­where in central Europe, it comes as quite a surprise to find oneself not much later in the gloom of a thickly tangled jungle that feels dis­tinctly equatorial.

It is the overall impression of the southern beech woods that makes them seem European, and especially the quality of the light streaming through the great palatial spaces suffused by the emerald glow of the sunlit foliage. On more detailed observation the picture changes. Many of the tree trunks fan out at the base in a way reminiscent of but­tressed tropical forest trees. The leaves are small and look identical to those of the northern scrub birch (Betula glandulosa). They are leath­ery, tough, and, unlike birch leaves, evergreen.

Impossible to ignore also are the numerous epiphytes, especially the tree ferns, which lend the forest a certain aesthetic magic. In winter, however, when they are capped with snow, they look sad and out-of-place.

In all probability the southern beeches are not immigrants from the north, although it would seem reasonable to think they were. After all, the family of the Fagaceae—to which the oaks and chestnuts also belong—enjoys it greatest abundance and species diversity in the Northern Hemisphere; some genera even penetrating over the equator as far south as New Guinea, the northern limits of southern beech dis­tribution.

Nevertheless, no fossil pollen of Nothofagus has ever been found in the Northern Hemisphere, and if

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Symbols of the cold tropics: snow-capped tree ferns in southern winter mid-August, near Lake Waikaremoana, North Island.

fossil pollen finds are to be trusted it would appear that the southern beech emerges earlier in the Earth’s history than its northern relatives of the genus Fagus. Its occur­rence in a variety of species all around the lower Southern Hemisphere, together with pollen finds on the Antarctic continent itself, would argue for a southern origin. Quite possibly the ancestral group from which the beeches sprang split into a northern and a southern branch, each of which underwent a separate development as Gondwana and Laurasia (the great northern continental mass) drifted apart (George 1987).

THE COLD TROPICS OF NEW ZEALAND

A stronger contrast to the beech woods than that presented by the other type of New Zealand forest could scarcely be imagined. In place of open, light-filled spaces we now have the jumble of lianas and long trailing rhizomes of the ferns that climb the tree trunks, at least inso­far as the mosses and lichens allow them a foothold. Delicate filmy ferns cover

the trunks of the tree ferns in a thick layer. High above in the not-toodense canopy sit massive clumps of epiphytic lilies (Astelio), while from the branches hang long filaments of club mosses and white bunches of tender orchid blossoms. Trees follow the exam­ple of such growths to reach the light. Deposited by birds, their seeds sprout in the nest-like clumps of the astelias, and send long root strands down the trunk of the host tree.

While the crown of the young tree unfolds above, the twining, lianalike roots thicken; in some species they merge, thus strangling the host tree and eventually taking its place.

This form of growth is known in all the Earth’s tropical forests, and while it is usually seen in various kinds of fig tree (strangler figs), in New Zealand it appears in other plant families entirely: for exam­ple, various members of the genus Metrosideros, which belongs to the Myrtaceae and is therefore related to the eucalyptus (which does not occur in New Zealand), and Griselina, which, like dogwoods and bunchberries, is among the Cornaceae (Dawson 1988).

This vegetation type attains its climax as swamp forest on the west coast of South Island, the wettest area of New Zealand. The hordes of epiphytes, the thick carpets of mosses and ferns on the tree trunks, and the endless tangle of lianas and creepers create a picture that is comparable only to the rampant hypertrophic growth found in hot and humid coastal regions of the tropics. This picture is at first baffling—we are, after all, in a cool, temperate region. However, the abundant rainfall and constant humidity carried in off the sea by the 2011 ISSUE 5

green of the southern beech woods.

Should rain clouds pass overhead, everything sinks into deepening tones of gray. There are, of course, virtually no coloured blossoms. One feels transported back to very early times in the Earth’s prehistory, when the plant world was dominated by non-flowering species and, although some of the first conifers bore flowers (gymnosperms), full-­blown, colourful flower heads were unknown.

An old Matai tree Podocarpus spicatus, with its trunk completely covered by the liana-like roots of various bushy and treelike ‘squatter’ species, plus numerous climbers and epiphytes. Lake Kaniere,Westland, South Island, December 1994.

prevailing west wind prevent any chance of growth-inhibiting frost.

In these forests of the ‘cold tropics’ the trees are no longer broad-leaved, but rather conifers of the Southern Hemisphere. They belong to the yew family (Podocarpaceae) and are phylogenetically much older than the southern beeches, which figure among the angiospermous flowering plants. There can be no doubt that they are an ancient Gondwanian feature, since they exist today on all the landmasses that were once part of Gondwana: Australia, India, Africa, and South Amer­ica. In these last two their range extends north far over the equator, while in East Asia it even exceeds its Gondwanian limits.

One glance at these trees is enough to reveal that they have little in common with conifers of the Northern Hemisphere, showing no trace of the geometric regularity of a spruce or a young fir. Further­more, their great diversity of shape and their tendency to look very different as saplings from the way they do in maturity only serve to increase the confusion of any visitor wishing to learn how to distin­guish them.

From a distance a podocarpus forest appears olive or brownishgray totally different from the light

A little colour appears, if somewhat shyly, in clearings and at the forest margins in the form of emerald-green tree ferns and the muted red of the tall blossom stalks of New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax), an agave-like member of the lily family, so called because of its tough fibers that can be used to make ropes.

The very pinnacle of tropical vegetation in New Zealand is found on the northern half of North Island.

Here there are almost pure stands of the mightiest of New Zealand’s trees, the kauri (Agathis). It is a rel­ative of araucaria (monkey puzzle), but looks quite different: gray trunks of truly gigantic proportions rear up into the sky like great ram­parts. They have widely spreading branches that form a bushy but not too dense canopy, in which whole gardens of epiphytes can be accom­modated without even showing. Unfortunately, in the past these ven­erable giants have been subjected to such rapacious logging that not many of them are left. In Waipoua Forest stands the mightiest of them, Te Matua Ngahere,* the two-thousand-year-old ‘father of the forest.’ To this day this tree is revered by the Maoris and stands under their spe­cial protection. In New Zealand at present, as in many parts of the world, there is a sense of alarm at the destruction that has gone on, and this has led to vigorous attempts to save and care for what is left. The way these three vegetation types— the southern beech, podocar­pus, and kauri forests—exist side-byside in a mosaic-like pattern is one of the essential and most striking

features of New Zealand. Its unique significance resides in the fact that plant communities from different periods in the Earth’s history thus inhabit the same moment. The ‘cold rainforests’ undoubtedly belong to older (Cretaceous) epochs when the climate was considerably warmer.

The life that existed at that time on Antarctica adds weight to this view.

The spread of the southern beeches, by contrast, is of more recent date, as their still per­sisting tendency to encroach upon the territory of the podocarpus forests would seem to indicate. They are younger, more ‘upto-date’ with their closer adaptation to current climatic conditions (Walter 1968).

Of course, we must also include in the picture the vegetation of the high uplands with its contingent of northern migrants. It is younger still, bearing as it does the marks of the last ice age. And if we then add in the farmland plants brought in almost yesterday on the heels of agriculture, we have an incredible range of developmental phases that followed each other in time, but here share the same geographi­cal stage.

It might be objected that, far from being unusual, this is a commonplace, since everywhere in nature ancient and more recent forms of life are found in close proximity. A case in point might be an organism such as the earthworm, which is known to have existed from very ancient times, being eaten by another organism that has only been around since Tertiary times, the robin. But that is surely something other than the simultaneous coexistence of plant communities, each of a different age and with a wide distribution.

What makes New Zealand special is the fact that on its soil several complete landscape types, ecological ‘provinces,’ meet, which together document the development of this ‘microcontinent.’

From Eco-Geography by Andreas Suchantke, 2001 reprinted with kind permission of Lindisfarne Books.

*Te Matua Ngahere is a giant kauri (Agathis australis) in the Waipoua Forest, Northland. Although not as massive or tall as its neighbour, Tāne Mahuta, Te Matua Ngahere is stouter, having a girth just over 16 metres (52 ft) that is believed be the biggest in New Zealand.

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Bee on Sage. “Evolution is really a form of medieval preformism; failing to account for the dynamic interplay between organisms and the Photo: stingoperation.wordpress.com transformative effects of their environment.”

Genes are not self-activating

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“… ideas … are concretely present in every living organism as form-bestowing realities or archetype.”

ince insight and reason have not traditionally been the guiding lights by which we learn, we will no doubt have to wait until the predictably damaging side effects of tinkering with the elemental processes of life force us to take stock of our situation. Then we may see, if we are ever to learn how to treat Nature properly, that our actions must be based on a deep understanding of the true nature of living processes.”

When describing the formproducing processes in plants,

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ecologist, Andreas Suchantke uses the concepts ‘formative forces’ or ‘fields of formative forces’. He maintains that the many parts of an organism – organs as well as organic processes – are neither arbitrary nor independent in their development. From the moment of fertilisation an organism is an integrated entity, a unity. It remains so right into maturity. All its internal processes are complementary and mutually dependent. Taken as a whole, they bear witness to the existence of a comprehensive system in which their activities are regulated

and balanced. All this, he says, clearly implies the participation of super-ordinate, regulatory and coevolutionary tendencies.

This applies to the genes as well.

Genes are not self-activating. They become active only when required to do so by the organism. It’s the same for co-evolutionary phenomena such as the mutual adaptations between blossoms and pollinators (eg) meadow sage and bee or the synergies that exist in all ecosystems between predator and prey.

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Using the simple mechanism of chance as its primary explanation, neo-Darwinist theory is unable to explain the complexity of such interdependent realities. For chance can only destroy order, not create it. Modern interpretations of coevolutionary phenomena, such as bee and sage flower or dynamic feedback processes like the organism-geneorganism sequence, more accurately describe the reality of the situation.

However, there’s more to it than this.

Between the levels of consciousness on one hand and purely mechanical force on the other there lies a third level of activity, permeating all organic life. Suchantke’s view is that this level is the domain of the formative forces which, in their totality, constitute what can be called a ‘body’ of formative forces.

Chance can only destroy order, not create it!

Through the activity of these formative life-forces, the visible forms of plants and animals are, as it were, precipitated out of time-processes in accordance with ideas that are concretely present in every living organism as formbestowing reality or archetype.

When something lacks any inherent relationship to time we meet ‘dead’ matter, minerality. However, Suchantke is not suggesting that archetype is unchangeable; an idea established in perfection since the beginning. Were that so, then all talk of evolution would be in vain. Evolution would simply fall in line with Creation theory where something long in existence is merely unfolded over time. In fact, this is the original meaning of the word evolution. It’s really a form of medieval preformism; failing to account for the dynamic interplay between organisms and the transformative effects of their environment. On the other hand, deriving all plants and animals from rigid archetypes presents an insurmountable barrier to understanding the evolutionary process. Therefore Suchantke 2011 ISSUE 5

maintains that the archetype, whether plant, animal or man, is an exalted reality. “Exalted but nonetheless involved in development, the archetype is continually interacting with the forms through which it is expressed in our sense-perceptible world.” So long as we don’t get too attached to the finished forms but keep our thinking in the realm of formation and transformation, “there can really be nothing other than dynamic relationship between archetype and individual organism”.

“In the act of perceiving a living organism – plant, animal, or human being – we are granted only a fleeting glimpse, an artificially fixed extract. It is rather like trying to capture the flow of a river in a photograph – we are confronted from moment to moment by a different body of water. This being the case, the question arises as to whether we can apprehend an organism in its totality at all? Through external sense perception, evidently not.

Inwardly, however, things are different. Here, through the activity of the imagination, we can transform one phenomenon into another.

By taking a series of observations and mentally reconstructing it, we are able to make processes such as germination, maturation and aging into an inwardly perceptible metamorphic sequence. In thought, then, it is possible to immerse oneself in the river of time and achieve a state of imaginative participation in the processes of development, the formative movements of living organisms. Clearly this inner activity is of the same nature as the processes it renders observable: like apprehends like. What is described here could well be Goethe’s greatest contribution to natural science.” * *J Wolfgang von Goethe was an 18th Century German philosopher, biologist, poet and scholar of wide repute. His contribution to the field of science is only beginning to be taken seriously, as the Cartesian-Newtonian mechanical worldview fails to account for the wholeness implicit in the ‘real’ world.

Source: Chap 1, Footnotes 26 & 47 IN Suchantke, A. Metamorphosis, Evolution in Action. Adonis Press 2009.

Many leaves seen in the light of One idea.

In thinking we can learn to live imaginatively into the flow of life.

We pay attention to the outwardly visible features, like the different leaves below, and learn to move inwardly in pictures, accompanying what the plant has achieved through its invisible life-processes.

This use of imagination in this way leads to exact sensory participation; not to be confused with flight of fantasy. We “achieve a state of imaginative participation in the processes of development, the formative movements of living organisms.”

The richness of Goethe’s concrete way of seeing the Many in the light of One is markedly different from the ordinary external way of seeing unity as sameness, which is what any notion of an ideal plan boils down to.

The idea ‘leaf’, for example, becomes for us a living, mobile archetype. Imaginatively, we ‘see’ this one idea illuminating many different forms.

Leaf sequence of Field Poppy, Papaver rhoeas. Bockemuhl, J. In Partnership with Nature,1981.

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“how people’s minds change is the most precious thing.” Ai Weiwei

i Weiwei is China’s most famous living artist. He lives and works in Caochangdi, which used to be a village to the east of Beijing but is now well and truly part of the spreading metropolis that locals call Tan Da Bing, or spreading pancake. Ai Weiwei is the artist responsible for inspiring Beijing’s Olympic Stadium, making it look like a birds’ nest in collaboration with Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron. An outspoken critic of the government, he has never forgiven them for sending his father into exile.

Interviewed in the lead-up to the Games, he said he had ‘no interest’ in the Olympics or in the Chinese state’s propaganda and that he wouldn’t be attending the opening ceremony.

Ai Weiwei’s father was the wellknown Chinese poet, Ai Qing who, during the Cultural Revolution, was exiled to a desert labour camp for being the wrong kind of intellectual.

For many years his son lived in America in another kind of exile, returning to Beijing in 1993 to be with his dying father. The authorities might have hoped Ai Weiwei would retire quietly to his studio but they were wrong. In the years since, he’s been outspoken about many issues, focussing particularly on exposing an alleged corruption scandal over the construction of Sichuan schools that had collapsed during the 2008 earthquake. Caring little for complicity and hoping that his international reputation as an artist will keep him safe makes Ai Weiwei unlikely to remain quiet for long. Besides being an artist of international repute, he is also an influential architect, publisher and restaurateur and makes extensive use of the internet to communicate with the younger generation throughout China.

Beijing is growing with extraordinary speed, its new skyline permanently scarred with row upon row of building cranes. To Ai Weiwei it is like another revolution. “If

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you look at the scale of it, you can tell that no time has been devoted to thinking. It has not been done gracefully. It’s rough and shortsighted and temporary. Cities always reflect human history. We can’t really judge it now but I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of saying sorry later. Who’s building it? How do the developers get the land? It’s so political. In 1949 most properties lost their owners. They were either kicked out or killed. The nation owned the property. Since then the state has just sold it to people who can afford it.

So, (according to the government) property should be for the whole nation, yet the government takes the profit. No political, philosophical or moral aesthetic is involved. It’s just: let’s be rich first. Except that people are finally starting to question: who is getting rich?”

“I don’t mind material change but how people’s minds change is the most precious thing.” The best he has been able to do for people’s minds was to encourage the resurgence of contemporary Chinese art that followed the 1989 crackdown.

His move to Caochangdi led to the creation of what is now known as Beijing’s East Village, an enclave of artists and photographers – his architectural practice, Fake, designed several of the area’s galleries and studio spaces. He also published three books featuring interviews with artists from the underground, all of which are now considered seminal texts. Then in 1997 he co-founded the first non-commercial venue in China to show conceptual art projects, the Modern Chinese Art Foundation. In 2000 he conceived the bird’s nest design for the Olympic Stadium in Beijing and in 2008, despite being one of China’s most outspoken cultural and social commentators, Ai Weiwei received a lifetime achievement award at the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards.

Turn over just about any child’s toy, piece of electronic equipment

or kitchen utensil and chances are it will be labeled with a ‘Made-inChina’ sticker. An exhibition in October 2010 at the TATE Modern in London, titled The Unilever Series

by Ai Weiwei, calls attention to this cliché of industrialisation in the work Sunflower Seeds. Consisting of one hundred million porcelain ‘seeds,’ each individually hand-painted in the town of Jingdezhen by 1,600 Chinese artisans, the work was scattered over a large area of the exhibition hall. The artist was keen for visitors to walk across and even roll in the artwork in order to experience and contemplate the essence of his comment on mass consumption, Chinese industry, famine and collective work.

Alongside the work is a video detailing the process of creating the ceramic sunflower seeds and interviewing the workers. Everyone seems happy, for the artist did bring work to this quiet village. Yet there’s an underlying discomfort to the installation, a pointed commentary on the relationship between east and west – after all, big corporations perform this process year in and year out without anyone making a fuss, so why can’t Art? Sources: Guardian Weekly 6 July 2001, Wikipedia.

Public Domain

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Awakening Art

Outspoken Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei with some of the 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds on show at the Tate Modern in October 2010.

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Public Domain

A typical crop circle centre, Yatesbury.

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Squaring the Circle – Changing our Worldview

tep into Stonehenge, the pyramids, a Hindu temple or gothic cathedral and you will experience what is known as squaring the circle. To ancient geometers, the square symbolised the realm of Earth; the circle the realm of the heavens. In their conceptual design, these buildings adhere to principles of sacred geometry. In particular, the square whose perimeter is equal to the circumference of an accompanying circle was experienced as rendering the greatest harmony of proportion because it united and balanced all that was material and mechanical with all that was of mind and spirit.

Home to Stonehenge, Avebury, Silbury Hill, Glastonbury Tor and white horses carved in its chalky hillsides, Wiltshire, in Southern England, has long been considered a

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“God geometrises”

Plato

landscape temple. In recent decades however, Wiltshire has witnessed the highest level of crop circle activity in the world. Perhaps there’s a certain logic in that for standing stone circles and crop circles illustrate similar mathematical principles, representing what we know of the geometrical structure underlying the universe.

And they’ve also been known for years among indigenous peoples while as early as the 1700s they were being reported in Britain – many elderly farming folk recall having seen them as children. In 1880, Nature magazine published an account of a flattened, circular spot appearing in a field; a few stalks standing upright in the centre surrounded by prostrate stalks evenly lying inside an undisturbed outer wall of stalks.

Lately, crop circles have appeared in over 40 countries. In Britain alone, 35 formations were recorded in a single day; as many as 300 appear every year throughout Wiltshire, attracting busloads of viewers from all over the globe. The circles are a phenomenon to be reckoned with as people of all persuasion – philosophers and architects; psychics and songwriters; mathematicians and astrophysicists; educators, journalists, farmers and even a baroness or two attest to their significance. Few have been convinced by a series of clever misinformation campaigns – one was traced to the Ministry of Defence – intended to disprove the mysterious origin of the circles. On the contrary, people are making their own investigations based on the established physical parameters of the circles and their personal experiences.

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After visiting several crop circles, Holt’s assessment is that the man-made versions are relatively few and are composed of simple forms having very poor geometric precision compared with the uniquely amazing pictograms. A prominent mathematical feature of these pictograms is the squared circle, symbolic of the unity between spirit and matter.

Squaring the circle; the area of the square is equal to that of the circle.

Retired astrophysicist Mike Reed came across a photograph of an extraordinary crop circle formation and recognised its mathematical meaning which had stumped even the most knowledgeable among circle observers. The formation, situated near the Iron Age hill fort of Barbury Castle in Wiltshire, is the

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cropcircleessenses.com

Right: The Barbury Castle circle “shows a coded image representing the first ten digits of Pi. The tenth digit has even been correctly rounded up. The little dot near the centre is the decimal point. The code is based on ten angular segments, with the radial jumps being the indicator of each segment.” Mike Reed

Right: Mathematical codes and geometric patterns are a significant feature of crop circle formations. The designs solve Euclidian problems in an entirely new way; squaring the circle with a level of sophistication that is nothing short of extraordinary. One of the best known appeared in 1996; the highly complex set of shapes known as a Julia Set.

most complex crop circle ever seen in Britain. Inscribed into a field of barley, the 150 metre wide pattern is said to be a coded version or pictorial representation of the first ten digits of Pi.* So much for the astro-viewpoint – what of the biological? In his work on anatomical anomalies in crop formation plants, biophysicist Dr W.C. Levengood stated that crop circle energies affect the development of seed embryos. “It appears that when these energies hit plants prior to or during certain stages of maturation the seeds do not develop, and that when these energies cause formations in more mature plants they may significantly enhance or increase seed growth.”

On another level still, it seems that crop circle phenomenon may have the power to transform us as individuals, and the world, provided we let it.

There seems to be general agreement among investigators that the crop *A fundamental mathematical formula, Pi represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter. As Pi r2, it is used to calculate the area of a circle.

Public Domain

Alan Holt, a Project Manager for NASA’s International Space Station holds a degree in astrophysics. He thinks the crop circles are a truly astounding phenomenon unfolding in England and elsewhere in the world; “It’s very unfortunate that the unscientific thinking, and perhaps deliberate disinformation, of a few individuals has been picked up and accepted by a naive press worldwide. As a result millions of people have been deprived of the opportunity to experience a consciousnessexpanding phenomenon. It is our civilisation’s loss; but fortunately the apparently successful attempt to ridicule or ‘debunk’ crop circles will do nothing to stop what may be a major transformation ahead for humanity.”

circle phenomenon is something both physical and spiritual. Crop circles cannot be explained by known laws of nature. Whereas natural laws give rise to distinctive imprints (eg) tornado paths and sea shell forms, there is nothing in nature that matches the patterns appearing in the crop pictograms. It seems there is a ‘designer’ or mind at work behind the shapes.

At first this sounds impossibly far-fetched. Yet nowadays, many people seem to be experiencing events which deny Newtonian reality.

The challenge to Newton started with Einstein, who showed how we cannot separate ourselves from what surrounds us. Quantum physics and string theory have also helped to shift our understanding further so that now, scientists and mystics alike are approaching the same point of view although from opposite directions. At a time when our actions based on the Newtonian world view have put the entire earth at risk, it appears we are now facing a new mind-over-matter reality. The old ‘mind versus matter’ dualism is being challenged by a new ‘vibratory level’ of being.

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As a psychiatrist, Mack suggests crop circles tend to ‘smoke us out of ourselves’. We have trouble meeting them; understanding what they evoke in us is very difficult. The common response is ‘Oh my God – what has the power to do this?’ But some people react viscerally and won’t go near them. As for the hoaxers, claiming to be the whodunits, Mack suggests they are the shadow-side of what is, essentially, a transcendent experience. We have to integrate the shadow aspect but not give it undue focus nor allow it to detract from the power of the phenomena.

He continues; “…the matter of a worldview and how it works. It has always been referred to as a paradigm and that has more of a scientific flavor. But I prefer to call it ‘worldview’ because it refers to something bigger.

A worldview is the way we organise reality. It is the way we believe things work. In a way it is like an instrument of navigation. Our worldview is what holds the human psyche together. What I came to realise with that Harvard Committee was that I was threatening the scientific medical worldview by which they were living. What has been the dominant worldview in our society could be called Newtonian/Cartesianism or anthropocentric humanism. It is a worldview that puts the human being at the top of the cosmic hierarchy of intelligence. The simplest term for this is scientific materialism. In this worldview, matter and energy form the primary reality and there is no larger intelligence in the cosmos. The principle method of study is objective reality, which separates the investigator from the matter that is being investigated.

In recent years, this view, which until now has dominated our western societies, is failing. It is failing in every important element that our worldview is supposed to serve. First, there is a huge amount of phenomena which it cannot explain nor deal with. There is no method 2011 ISSUE 5

Public Domain

Mack; “It is ironic that things like crop circles … are called anomalies. In other words, in our culture what lies outside the realm of the cultural agreement about what is real is called anomalous. Therefore a huge amount of human experience is called anomalous. When I have discussed this with Native Americans, they say it is not an anomaly. We know about this. It is part of the human experience.”

“You can’t deny they’re there. It’s the most extraordinary cross-over from the other dimension in the history of the human race. It’s an unbelievable opportunity. What does it tell us about ourselves; about the harmonic relationship of the earth with the cosmos?”

Professor John Mack.

Mill Hill Crop Circles.

Public Domain

An American psychiatrist, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and professor at Harvard Medical School, Mack’s academic findings challenged the establishment at Harvard much as had Galileo’s upset the church of the 17th Century. Expanding his reality beyond the limitations of materialistic dualism enabled Mack to explore a series of para-normal events which were deeply affecting peoples’ lives. It also allowed him to accommodate their experience of crop circles.

of study for many things that we are talking about today.

Secondly, it leads to terrible destructiveness because it treats the entire planet as simply physical resources to fight over by the most powerful and most important countries. Thirdly, scientific materialism does not give human beings any real satisfaction. It leaves us without spirit and it leaves us with an empty feeling because all it has to offer are more and more material things.

Spinning Star, Wiltshire.

Public Domain

Leading the assault on our thinking is a highly reputable investigator, the late John Mack.

Cissbury Rings, UK.

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This change which is happening around us is met with enmity and a great deal of resistance because there’s a huge psychological, economic, and political investment in maintaining the old worldview.

How would this planet be different if the emerging worldview became the dominant worldview? We would be connected to all living beings, not just those around us, and with all nature and spirit, which would make it impossible for us to treat nature in such an exploitative way. For example, we would be able to identify with other peoples, other religions, and with all animals so we would not treat them just as products to consume. With this deeper reality, we could appreciate that we are connected to the divine, the creative principle which would be more fulfilling than the material focus that is so dominant today. So it would be like a global awakening of the heart instead of global exploitation.

As this emerging worldview takes hold we might become more responsible citizens of the galaxy instead of becoming the menace we appear to be!”

“This is intelligence very, very big” Credo Mutwa

At that, indigenous people must sigh with relief. South Africa’s respected healer, Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, says that crop circles and what they mean

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have long been part of Zulu worldview; “These things they happen to pass important messages to the people through the crops. The Izishoze* happen to appear many times when our people are planting the African crop that they called mabele - or sorghum in English. The Gods used to flatten the plants and not to break them. So that after a time when the people have read the message, the plants would stand up again and grow.

I have always wanted to have a farm of my own. To watch out for the writings of the Gods because this is intelligence very, very big and whatever these powerful beings are telling us even means that our minds are too stupid to understand. Our modern minds have been corrupted by western civilisation that is refusing to believe that things like the crop circles could be real and important. This is why we do not understand the simple messages anymore.

The crop circles also tell us about the situation of the Sun. But why - you may ask – is the Earth Mind telling us about the Sun? The crop circle phenomenon talks of a time of great activity of the sun. But why? Why does this great intelligence, this Mother Spirit, why does it tell us about this thing? When there is trouble in the sun – then what happens to the human beings down here? When there is trouble in the sun there will be also trouble down on earth. And this is why the crop circles are appearing. They even tell us things that will happen in the future. They can also be warnings.”

What on Earth, a recent documentary about the crop circle phenomena, ends with more questions than answers. Whether we like it or not, the circles definitely leave people with a sense they have been given a message from another dimension, whether of an outer material nature or from an ‘extraterrestrial’ realm of psyche. One person is heard to remark that the perpetrators of the circles appear to have been *The depressions were called Izishoze Amatongo, the great circles of the gods.

through an earth experience, given their mathematical genius. But why not phrase it according to a new world view? Instead of our anthropo/geocentric stance that ‘they’ seem to have been through an earth experience, why not ask whether Earth is and we are, more to the point, an integral part of some much larger existence? Perhaps what we are faced with requires a multi-dimensional appreciation for worlds seen and unseen? Whatever is happening to our wonderful, yet traumatised world, it is a relief to know there are still great mysteries to be explored. Also to know that our dominant worldview is undergoing major adjustment; that materialism is simply one strand among many -isms in the great web of life.

newscenter.berkeley.edu

Now, however, we have an emerging worldview that is different.

In this worldview, there is intelligence dwelling in the universe. The experience that happens to my clients is o­ne example and the beings that have come to my clients are another example. The crop formations are also evidence of this intelligence that is trying to communicate with us. Also it is a model of the universe and us which says that everything is connected with everything else, and we know that cutting edge physics is supporting this worldview. So it includes not o­nly new ways of knowing but it also involves a spiritual awakening.

“We have to act now. It’s not enough just to transform ourselves spiritually. If crop circles can ‘smoke us out’ of our lovesick preoccupation with ourselves to the detriment of all life on earth, then let’s have more of them.” Professor John Mack.

Sources: DVD What on Earth? Inside the Crop Circle Mystery. Mighty Companions 2009.

A well-executed documentary on the subject. Available on-line. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-1027178/Easy-pi-Astrophysicistsolves-riddle-Britains-complex-crop-circle. html#ixzz1PObkP1eC http://www.rense.com www.cropcirclescience.org www.theconversation.org Dr.John Mack, Establishing a new Science of Human Experience.

Anatomical Anomalies in Crop Formation Plants, Physiologia Plantarum, (Vol. 92, 1994), 356-363, Dr Levengood, BLT. 2011 ISSUE 5

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The art of slow baking

hat is inside good bread?

Really, the question should be ‘What isn’t?’

Good bread doesn’t need a lot of ingredients; flour, sourdough, salt, water and possibly some yeast.

One could add other grains, nuts, unsulfurised dried fruit or herbs.

Simple ingredients.

Easy to make? Not quite. Bread doughs are the diva’s of cooking; they require a lot of attention. The air temperature has to be just right - no drafts please. The water should not be too warm or too cold. Humidity also affects the sourdoughs. In the end, much rests on the baker making the right judgement-call as to whether dough is ready to be processed further. He then shapes the loaves,and lets them rise again to wait for exactly the right moment to go into the oven. Is the oven hot enough? Not too hot? The bread is then slashed - partly for decoration and partly because it’s necessary to release steam pressure and give it a nice crust. Some breads like a bit of steam, others don’t. Bread making requires knowledge of dough chemistry, skillful handling of the sensitive doughs, and knowledge of ovens and cooking times – all of which amounts

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Isabel Pasch

to a lot of experience that only comes with training, practice, observation and time.

Now take a look at the average supermarket bread. The list of ingredients is probably three times as long and most likely includes sugar, fat, dairy products, enzymes, and a number of artificial emulsifiers, stabilisers, preservatives – those infamous E-somethings. Why is all this necessary? Simply because these breads are made in large factories, by big machines which cannot handle sticky, wet doughs like sourdoughs.

More often than not, they are made by unskilled workers on minimum wages who pour bags labelled ‘1’ into machine labelled ’1’, press the button labelled ‘1’, and then that’s it.

No hands touch these breads - it’s all done by machines. They are quickrise, quick-bake, quick-into-the-bag breads. The time it takes to go from raw ingredients to finished product, ready to go on the supermarket shelf, is often less than two hours. These breads are soft and full of air; they lack a real crust and have no real taste.

If that’s not enough to put you off supermarket bread, consider

this: it is thought that these highly processed breads are contributing to the high levels of gluten intolerance found in western society. This disease is attributed to absorption of undigested wheat-gluten, a protein in the wheat germ, which weakens the villi lining the intestinal wall that are responsible for nutrient uptake in the small intestine. The effect of undigested wheat-gluten on the villi has been compared to the action of sandpaper on wood.

After prolonged exposure to wheatgluten, villi become completely blunt which results in undigested wheatgluten leaking into the bloodstream.

The poor nutrient uptake that accompanies the disease further leads to malnutrition. The potentially abrasive effect of wheat-gluten on the intestinal villi can be made worse by the consumption of food chemicals like stabilisers, emulsifiers and preservatives, which can also enter the bloodstream through lesions caused by the gluten. It may also be the case that irritation caused by the food chemicals themselves triggers gluten-intolerance. Over time, gluten/ wheat-intolerance and minor allergic reaction can lead to full-blown coeliac disease.

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About Paris Berlin, FrenchGerman Organic Bakery: At Paris-Berlin bread is made like it has been made for centuries, before preservatives, additives, ‘improvers,’ and the application of industrial techniques left us with the ‘bread’ found on our supermarket shelves today.

You will find traditional French crusty baguette, various types of seeded loaves, and of course classic dark German rye breads. There is a range of wheat-free breads, a selection of breadrolls, and yummy South German-style pretzels to choose from. All breads are made with certified organic ingredients and a lot of time.

At the shop you will also find a range of pastries, savouries for lunch, and a seasonally changing selection of cakes on weekends.

Everything is handmade on site, no premixes or artificial flavours are used.

Breads can also be purchased from various organic stores around the city and can be delivered straight to your doorstep. Please check the webpage for details. www.parisberin.co.nz Ph: 09 579 5240 Physical address: 64 Michaels Ave, Ellerslie, Auckland Opening hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 8.00am – 4.00pm

Paris-Berlin breads are not your average ‘quick-rise, quick-bake, quick-into-the-bag breads.’

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So why has this suddenly become such a common problem? Haven’t Europeans and middle-Eastern cultures been eating bread since ancient times? After all, bread is the biblical symbol for food and life! The difference lies in the way bread is made. Traditionally, central European breads were made from wholegrain flour, commonly rye, spelt, and oat. With increased use of artificial fertilisers, which dramatically increased wheat yields, wheatflour became widely available and affordable. Before then, wheat - especially the finely sifted, white, wheat flour - was food for the rich.

Only common people ate brown bread. The leavening of bread was done using sourdough cultures because yeast was either not available or else so expensive that bakers and housewives used it sparingly. Of course sourdoughs need a longer fermentation time than yeast doughs (up to 20 hours compared with 20 minutes for modern, fast-rising yeasts) but during this prolonged raising time, the microorganisms in sourdough break down the complex carbohydrates - they digest the gluten and other potentially troublesome grain proteins. Slowly, slowly, the carbon dioxide released by these organisms bubbles upwards, lifting the dough. Breads leavened by sourdough are more aromatic, more

porous and are significantly more digestible.

Sourdough breads don’t respond to our need for speed. That’s why they are not suited to factory production and hence are increasingly difficult to find. But growing numbers of people in New Zealand, and around the world, realise that the way food is being produced and processed –including the additives that come with conventional supermarket fare - is destroying their well-being.

Lucky for them, there are a growing number of small, specialist producers of original foods, who promote the use of food that is locally grown in an organic and sustainable way, and consumed slowly so as to relish its flavour and sensation. In the end, “The bitterness of poor quality is remembered long after the sweetness of a low price has faded from memory.” (Aldo Gucci).

For more information and inspiration visit these websites or read these books: Crust: Bread to Get Your Teeth Into, Richard Bertinet, Kyle Cathie; Har/DVD Nov. 2007 The Bread Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum, Norton & Company, 2003 Bread Science: the Chemistry and Craft of Making Bread. Emily Buehler, Two Blue Books (http://www.twobluebooks.com).

Handbuch Sauerteig: Biologie, Biochemie, Technologie. Spicher & Stephan, Behr’s Verlag, Germany http://www.slowfood.com http://www.slowbaking.de http://www.hofpfisterei.de/hpf_imagefilm.php A short film in German but the pictures tell the story.

Microbiologist and journalist-turned-baker, Isabel Pasch is owner-operator of Paris-Berlin, the artisan Ellerslie bakery that she established with her husband, Tim Hinchliff, on their return to New Zealand from Germany in 2010.

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Make the Earth Glad Using the Biodynamic Compost Preparations Maria Thun

The biodynamic compost preparations were developed in the 1920s. Even back then, farmers were concerned about diminishing food quality and yields. A group of them approached Dr. Rudolf Steiner asking for ideas on how to improve both. He showed them how to make these unique preparations by bringing specific plants together with particular animal organs and suggested they be used to improve compost and subsequently, plant growth and food quality. In the years since, international research has established the efficacy of biodynamic preparations, confirming the experiences of farmers and gardeners throughout the world.

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reparations made from six herbs are added to the compost heap, as you can see from the drawing. These preparations are made from yarrow, camomile, stinging nettle, oak bark, dandelion and valerian. In trials with these preparations we added very small quantities to plant soils and found very big differences in appearance and yield in all the plants thus treated.

Chamomile naturally develops the potassium process in the right way. At the same time it has also mastered the carbon process. Sprayed in the morning on fruit trees it strengthens the plant and enables us to do without copper sprays.

Stinging nettle: As a young girl I learned that stinging nettles are particularly good for geese. Many people like eating stinging nettles as a wild vegetable. It seems to have a positive effect on our iron, potassium and mag­ nesium balance. Spraying it on leaves stimulates the plant’s vitality.

Oak bark: To make this compost prep­a ration one needs the bark of old oak trees which is particularly high in calcium.

Dandelion: This plant, which many lawn-lovers regard as a blemish on their green carpet, plays an important role in natural remedies. We spray dandelion tea onto vine leaves to strengthen the silica process that leads to foliage having greater strength and resistance to diseases.

Parasites find it harder to penetrate the leaves, which can be a particular problem in wet years.

Valerian: We sprinkle this liquid preparation from a watering can over the top of the compost heap. With plants it has a positive effect on flower bud formation.

The tea also helps reduce damage from night frosts and we spray it directly onto plants after a frost, triggering a warmth process.

Living on a rural property in Germany, Maria Thun is a leading biodynamic practitioner and researcher. Source: Thun, M. The Biodynamic Year, Temple Lodge 2004 courtesy of the publishers.

They’re easy to use and they make a difference.

To discover how teas made from these preparation plants affect cultivated plants, we examined these herbs in greater detail.

Yarrow: the special action of sulphur comes to the fore in yarrow where it helps to stimulate the potassium process in organisms. We spray yarrow tea on the leaves of vines and fruit trees. This activates the potassium process and strengthens the plant. We know that a deficiency of potassium activity can lead to radioactive caesium being deposited in organisms.

Camomile: In nature camomile grows on compacted soils that can turn to mud. If we pull up a specimen the root smells of a mixture of sulphur and car­bon dioxide.

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Trials have shown that the preparations enhance the cation exchange capacity of organic matter, indicating better ripening and stabilisation of humus.

The preparations have also been observed to keep the compost pile warmer for longer while reducing the initial temperature peak slightly. They improve nutrient cycling, increase soil microbial activity and enhance plant vigour.* With balance comes health – biodynamic practices help achieve and maintain balance as the basis for sustainable yields of high quality food. *Koepf, H.H. The Biodynamic Farm. Anthroposophic Press 1989

Biodynamic Compost Preparations can be purchased from Earth Matters by emailing info@earthmatters.co.nz The Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association in NZ also sells preparations to members www.biodynamic.org.nz

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Blossfeldt

Of Star…

“When the Pleiades . . . are rising, begin your harvest [in May], and your ploughing when they are going to set [in November] . . . if you wish to get in all Demeter’s fruits in due season, and that each kind may grow in its season.” Hesiod, Works and Days 392

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ecognised and celebrated by nearly every known civilisation, the Pleides have played a unique role in cultural evolution. And not only in farming – the ancient Greeks timed their agricultural work in accordance with the May-rising and November-setting of the Pleides; also spiritually – to the Egyptians, the star cluster represented seven high priestesses who were linked to the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Later, in ancient Europe, the May to November cycle of the Pleides was marked by the Maytime feast of life and the November feast of death. A remnant of this is found in the Christian festival of All Souls Day, held on November 1st, when prayers are spoken for the dead.

Again, they have played a significant role in sacred geometry and the siting of temples. The pyramid and temple complex of Teotihuacan, near Mexico City, is oriented to the position on the horizon where the Pleiades set. Temples in Greece and Ancient Egypt were also oriented to these stars.

So too was the Great Pyramid at Giza built in alignment with the Pleiades. Temples, stone circles and other rock formations in Polynesia, and many other places on the planet show similar alignments.

These stars of Taurus have been recognised and celebrated for their importance as timekeepers in nearly every culture known to have lived on the Earth. They even get a mention in the Bible when the Lord challenged Job: “Canst thou bind the sweet influence of the Pleiades?”1 Today they’re known to modern Egyptians as the Seven Midwives while to Maori they are Matariki2 and her six daughters.

Their pre-dawn rising of Matariki can be seen in the last few days of May, marking the beginning of the Maori New Year. The actual New Year, however, isn’t until the arrival of the new moon sometime in June. Traditionally, the coming season’s harvest could be predicted by the clarity or otherwise of Matariki; if the stars shone brightly then the season to come would be warm and productive; if dimly, the season would be cool and lower yields could be expected.

The heliacal rising of the Pleides has long been regarded

by Maori as sacred. It’s a time for family gatherings, for reflecting on the past and looking forward to the future.

And, as for other cultures, it does seem that this cluster of stars holds spiritual significance related to midwifery and the birth of higher consciousness based on inner sight.

Matariki-Pleiades are a cluster of clearly defined stars lying in the shoulder region of the constellation of Taurus, the Bull. Six of the many hundreds of stars in this cluster are easily seen with the naked eye. A seventh star, often hidden, is usually included as part of the group. In the Southern hemisphere, they appear below and to the left of Orion, the Hunter.

In the constellation Taurus, where Pleides represents the bull’s shoulder, the Greeks experienced spiritual forces connecting them to the new European civilisation theirs was to give rise to. This becomes evident in the myth of Zeus and Europa, which describes how the Cretan civilisation was founded and became the first step towards implanting the focus of western civilisation into Europe.3 Just as Matariki holds profound spiritual significance for Maori, so also are the stars of Taurus spiritually meaningful for Pakeha, would we but reclaim them in a new way.

Photo: google.co.nz

1 Job 3:31 2 Matariki has two meanings; Mata Riki, Tiny Eyes and Mata Ariki, Eyes of God. 3 Sucher, W.O; An outline of a new star wisdom. Floris 1974

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Blossfeldt

…and Flower

illows like to grow in fresh, moist, deep soil and need a lot of light. They love flowing water and are often found beside rivers, watery meadows, ponds and lakes. Old willows have an ochregrey bark with furrows and rib-like markings. Young trees, on the other hand, have a smooth grey-white bark.

They produce a lot of pollen and are therefore loved by bees, especially in the spring. Cuttings for new shoots are often taken from willows: the flexibility and perpetual youth of the willow is demonstrated by the ability to braid its young branches and because they are quickly and easily regenerated – you have only to poke them into a moist soil.

The willow and its mistletoe have an analogy with patients who are lacking in life forces.

This is usually the case following chemotherapy when people’s bodies are weakened. The willow helps with all those ailments that need ‘regeneration.’ This applies particularly to patients who have become stultified in their thinking and spiritual life. The healing power of the willow became world famous with aspirin; this active substance regulates management of the fluids in the human body like hardly any other — and just like the acetic acid of the willow, its mistletoe also promotes circulation. It makes both body and spirit flexible again and helps to lift inward-looking people out of their social backwater.

Willow people often tend to bear grudges and feel bitter. With this negative attitude, they then blame other people for their own misfortunes. They envy others who are doing well, but otherwise show little interest in them — with the result that they often isolate themselves and, inwardly disappointed, they withdraw from social life. The willow mistletoe can help such patients to recover their positive attitude: taking control of

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Dr Johannes Wilkens

their lives and becoming architects of their own destiny, instead of being its victims.

So far we know that mistletoe preparations affect tumours in two ways: they directly destroy tumour cells or restrict their growth, and at the same time they stimulate defensive cells in the immune system, allowing the body to tame the carcinoma with its own strength and restore order and normal development.

Heraclitus’ axiom, ‘Everything flows,’ can be applied to the willow in a special way: in the human being it promotes the capacity to convert one’s ideas and aims into deeds, and even to transform conflicts and problems into living energy. Thus the willow helps those people who have become a shadow of their self to find a way out of the nether world and back into real life.

In an as yet inexplicable process, mistletoe substances induce apoptosis in the cancer cells, thereby promoting their genetically programmed selfdestruction. Cancer arises when apoptotic regulation becomes derailed and cells that would previously have been separated out remain in the body and continue to grow.

In cancer therapy willow mistletoe has proven itself above all with diseases of the bone marrow, with tumours of the ovaries and testicles, and with rheumatic ailments. Willow mistletoe is especially helpful in treating joint problems. With rheumatism, but even more with fibromyalgia (a painful disease of the muscle connective tissue), willow mistletoe possesses the greatest healing power of all mistletoes.

Today mistletoe therapy ranks almost as a classic supplement to the conventional treatment of cancer.

Although it’s still criticised by many physicians, who cast doubt on the numerous scientific studies now available, other scientists and physicians – in ever increasing numbers – accept mistletoe therapy because it has proven to be successful. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland more than half of all cancer patients are already being treated with mistletoe preparations, and confidence in this gentle method is growing.

Dr. Wilkens is a doctor at the Alexander von Humboldt Clinic in Bad Steben, Germany, where he specialises in classical homeopathy and anthroposophical medicine, including differentiated mistletoe therapy.

Photo: E Alington

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The use of Willow-Mistletoe in Cancer therapy.

Willow bud in Spring.

© Floris Books, Edinburgh 2010.

Reproduced with kind permission from Mistletoe Therapy for Cancer: Prevention, Treatment and Healing by Dr Johannes Wilkens and Gert Böhm. Available from Humanity Books, see advertisement inside back cover.

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Proven Profitability – Organic-Biodynamic Farming Farming organically can be more profitable than farming conventionally, say a Wairarapa couple, who have the figures to prove it.

Jon Morgan

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rganic farmers Ian and Heather Atkinson have done it all. In 25 years of breeding sheep, cattle and deer on their 240ha of rolling country at Pirinoa, South Wairarapa, they have taken an active part in changing the image of organics from crackpots to crack performers.

Since being BioGro-certified organic, they have created their own brand, sold their meat to specialist butchers, linked up with other organic farmers to market their meat, supplied lambs to a finisher, set up their own processing plant and sold their meat at the farmers’ market.

Now, with a thriving organic industry established, they have returned to what they consider they do best – farming.

And they have the figures to prove it.

As part of a presentation to a group of politicians by industry body Organics Aotearoa New Zealand recently, they benchmarked their farm against other east coast sheep and beef farms.

They found they were almost twice as profitable as the region’s average intensive finishing farm and even better than the top 20 per cent performers.

It is an answer to those who say organic farming is more costly and less profitable than conventional farming.

Using Beef + Lamb New Zealand figures for the past five years, they found the finishers’ average earnings before interest, tax and rent to be $259.74 a hectare and for the top 20 per cent to be $450.21 a hectare. In contrast, their earnings were $469.25 a hectare.

property is not a specialist finishing farm like those they compared themselves with. They have the extra costs of breeding their stock, as well as finishing, and they make all their own supplementary feed.

Mrs Atkinson says their performance is a reflection of her husband’s stock and pasture management. “That is what good organic farmers do best. They are very perceptive, ‘listening’ to their farms – continually observing and evaluating what is going on.”

She feels they are efficient, low-cost farmers who benefit from keeping their stock in good health. He adds that all this comes from two decades of building up rich, organic and biodynamic soils.

Their financial performance is aided by the margin organic lamb attracts from exporters, which over the years has ranged from 30 to 100 per cent above schedule prices. During the recent drought they were receiving $6 a kilogram at a time when the schedule had dropped to $3.

But they also point out they sell only 450 lambs a year and that their diverse income stream also includes deer, dairy grazing and feed grain. “This is the key to our success,” Mrs Atkinson says.

“Contrary to popular opinion, diversity in animal and pasture species is hugely

complementary. We’d love to see more farmers doing this.”

They took over Mr Atkinson’s 240-hectare family farm at Pirinoa in 1982, “young and idealistic”. After an initial experiment growing barley without using pesticides proved a success, they tackled the much harder task of stopping the chemical drenching they had relied on to kill strengthsapping internal parasites in their sheep flock.

It took eight years, but by breeding from the most parasite-tolerant ewes they were able to build up to a wellperforming flock.

By 1990, they had begun seeking outlets for their organic meat, ending up with Dutch butcher Daan Langstraat in Wellington. Demand gradually increased through the 90s, and Mr Atkinson found himself seeking out other organic farmers to meet a year-round market. After six years he leased out the farm and went into business procuring stock from up to a dozen organic sheep and beef farmers throughout New Zealand.

The couple also took their passion for organics into local supermarkets, holding cooking demonstrations to promote their Organic Essentials meat brand.

However, it wasn’t long before changing fashions caught up with them. Meat

The results were even more impressive during the drought years. In 2008, the third year in a row the region had suffered drought, their earnings were $530.95 a hectare, compared with the average intensive finishing farm’s $142.56 and the top performers’ $354.67.

What makes these figures more interesting is that the Atkinsons’

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Ian and Heather Atkinson planting native trees in a gully once home to a pine forest.

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exporters’ main clients in Europe, the big supermarket chains, began insisting on organic meat. The companies were forced to seek it out, creating seasonal competition for Mr Atkinson, and he decided it was time to quit the business and go back to the farm.

They took back 100ha and supplied organically bred lambs to a finisher.

They also bred deer and beef cattle and grazed dairy heifers for a nearby organic dairy farmer.

After a few years they decided to take back all the farm and to finish their own stock for the local market, becoming approved suppliers to Foodstuffs and to specialty stores including Commonsense Organics. At the same time they helped found the farmers market at Masterton and took a stall.

For a year, they took their lamb and beef to the market, attracting crowds to their barbecue. “It was hard work, like adding an eighth day to the week,” Mrs Atkinson says. “But it was great, really empowering, to come face to face with your customers.”

But the extra commitment eventually told on them and on a United States holiday they made the decision to concentrate just on farming and to supply meat solely for export.

They looked through the big Milwaukee store of natural and organic food chain Whole Foods and the 14-storey distribution centre for farmer-owned Organic Valley in a small Wisconsin town. “The size of the American organics market is unbelievable,” Mr Atkinson says, “And they want our stuff – as much we can send them. To see this for ourselves gave us a renewed purpose.”

He came home and began working on improving the biodiversity of his farm – “the interrelationship of the different aspects of the farm, recognising how each part complemented the others.”

With a scarcity of organic supplements available, he has to grow his own. He works a year ahead, building up supplies of hay and balage cut from his paddocks of lucerne and herbs. When the first drought came he was so well-stocked and had prepared his pastures so well, he was able to take in hundreds of animals from hard-hit farmers rather than join the exodus out of the region.

The farm has come out of the drought years in good condition, due, he says, to his deep-rooted pastures and their superior water-holding capacity, but, mindful of the extra pressure it was under because of the increased stocking rate, he has temporarily eased back on animal numbers.

He is grazing 400 dairy cows and 150-200 heifers, has 400 ewes, 120 hogget replacements and 300-350 deer and grows wheat and barley as feed grain for other organic farmers.

Their latest project is to replant a forested gully and link it to a 9ha QEII Trust-covenanted area of bush to add to a wildlife corridor from the Haurangi Ranges behind them.

The gully’s 37-year-old pines yielded 1700 tonnes of logs and at current prices represent a gross return of $603 a hectare a year. They are being replaced by 2000 seedlings of 14 species of natives, including manuka, kanuka, ngaio, red matipo, koromiko, lancewood, kowhai, cabbage trees and flaxes. These early colonisers of the

bush will be followed by other species.

Rata trees from neighbour Clive Paton’s Crimson Trust have also been added.

Advice on suitable trees has come from QEII Trust regional officer Trevor Thompson, with funding and planting help from local bacon and ham producer Premier Bacon.

The plantings are part of an ongoing plan that has seen 1300 shelter and shade trees go in the farm’s more exposed paddocks. Another 500 shelter trees will be planted this year.

All farm decisions are first weighed against the impact on the environment, Mr Atkinson says. His wife, who is an industry-farmer liaison officer for Organics Aotearoa, adds that her favourite saying is “Be the change in the world that you want”. “We try to model what we think is good environmental practice while still having a viable business.”

She says that over the years, from the early days of scepticism and derision by bankers, consultants and farmers to the widespread acknowledgment of the value of organics’ today, they have adapted. “We no longer feel the need to justify ourselves, we just get on with it.”

She quotes 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

“That sums up our journey. Through it all we have tried to think positively and expect the best outcomes at all times.”

Article and photo courtesy of Jon Morgan, Farming Editor, The Dominion Post.

“The world in which we live is more miraculous than we know. There are things which go on in our world about which we know nothing.“ Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa

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The Collapse of the Middle Classes

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an you imagine an America without a strong middle class?

If you can, would it still be America as we know it?

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can’t make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure.

One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago.

Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s.

But core expenses kept going up.

By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago – for a house that was, on average, only ten percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance.

To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce.

But higher housing and medical costs combined with new expenses for child care, the costs of a second car to get to work and higher taxes combined to squeeze families even harder. Even with two incomes, they tightened their belts.

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Elizabeth Warren

Families today spend less than they did a generation ago on food, clothing, furniture, appliances, and other flexible purchases - but it hasn’t been enough to save them. Today’s families have spent all their income, have spent all their savings, and have gone into debt to pay for college, to cover serious medical problems, and just to stay afloat a little while longer.

Through it all, families never asked for a handout from anyone, especially Washington. They were left to go on their own, working harder, squeezing nickels, and taking care of themselves.

But their economic boats have been taking on water for years, and now the crisis has swamped millions of middle class families.

The contrast with the big banks could not be sharper. While the middle class has been caught in an economic vice, the financial industry that was supposed to serve them has prospered at their expense. Consumer banking – selling debt to middle class families – has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts.

And when various forms of this creative banking triggered economic crisis, the banks went to Washington for a handout. All the while, top executives kept their jobs and retained their bonuses. Even though the tax dollars that supported the bailout came largely from middle class families -- from people already working hard to make ends meet -- the beneficiaries of those tax dollars are now lobbying Congress to preserve the rules that had let those huge banks feast off the middle class.

Pundits talk about ‘populist rage’ as a way to trivialise the anger and fear coursing through the middle class. But they have it wrong. Families understand with crystalline clarity that the rules they have played by are not the same rules that govern Wall Street. They understand that no American family is ‘too big to fail.’ They recognise that business models have shifted and

that big banks are pulling out all the stops to squeeze families and boost revenues. They understand that their economic security is under assault and that leaving consumer debt effectively unregulated does not work.

Families are ready for change.

According to polls, large majorities of Americans have welcomed the Obama Administration’s proposal for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). The CFPA would be answerable to consumers – not to banks and not to Wall Street. The agency would have the power to end tricksand-traps pricing and to start leveling the playing field so that consumers have the tools they need to compare prices and manage their money. The response of the big banks has been to swing into action against the Agency, fighting with all their lobbying might to keep business-as-usual. They are pulling out all the stops to kill the agency before it is born. And if those practices crush millions more families, who cares – so long as the profits stay high and the bonuses keep coming.

America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security.

Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantees economic safety. Paying for a child’s education and setting aside enough for a decent retirement have become distant dreams.

Tens of millions of once-secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, watching as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pink slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff.

America without a strong middle class? Unthinkable, but the once-solid foundation is shaking.

Elizabeth Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard University, USA. In the wake of the 2008-2011 financial crisis she became Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the U.S. banking bailout. She has long advocated for the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; signed into law by President Barack Obama on July 21, 2010.

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Speculation in food markets is a crime against humanity

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obin Hood has long been a “ symbol of grassroots justice, of the struggle against corruption and unequal wealth and power,” says Tax Justice campaign coordinator, Vaughan Gunson “which is why the international campaign for a Financial Transaction Tax that targets banks, speculators and the super-rich is being branded the Robin Hood Tax.” After the global financial crisis, which saw banks and other financial institutions bailed out with vast amounts of public money, there has been a growing global movement of people demanding that the banks and other financial institutions be made to foot the bill for the financial crisis, and not grassroots people through cuts to public spending. In March this year, MPs in the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of a Financial Transaction Tax to be introduced across Europe.

There’s a global food crisis. Almost three billion people worldwide – nearly half the people on the planet – don’t get enough quality food to sustain themselves.

Vaughan Gunson

from people is through financial speculation in world food markets.

Speculation – the purchasing of something solely in the hope that its price goes up, so you can then sell at a profit – is contributing to the global spike in food prices.

When the housing bubble in the US burst in 2007, the big financial players quickly went looking for a new market in which to speculate. They turned to another necessity of life; food. Rice – a staple for much of the world’s population – increased in price by 320% between January 2007 and June 2008. The price for wheat went up 240%.

In 2007-08, the number of people suffering from malnutrition globally rose from 800 million to one billion.

This was the direct result of financial speculation in food.

It’s no exaggeration to say that speculation in food prices is a crime against humanity. A crime facilitated by banks and other powerful financial elites, but given the green-light by governments worldwide.

But as Jomo Kwame Sundaram, UN Assistant Secretary for Economic Development, recently wrote: “Lack of food is rarely the reason that people go hungry. The world today produces enough food to feed everyone.” *

There are plans to set up a futures market for milk here in New Zealand, supported by John Key’s National government. This market will allow global speculators to bet on the future price of milk, therefore influencing its price at the supermarket.

The biggest problem is that the world’s poorest are increasingly been denied access to food, because food is locked into the profit drive of global capitalism.

The New Zealand Tax Justice campaign has a two-pronged strategy for combating rising food prices: take GST off food and tax the speculators instead.

The most evil way that today’s economic system is taking food away

Taking GST off food would give immediate relief to people struggling to pay their food bill. For many families the amount of extra tax they pay on food is significant. A weekly food bill of $200, for example, includes $26.09 in tax.

* Chronic hunger spreads as food prices hit record highs. http://www.nogstonfood. org/2011/05/26/chronic-hunger-spreads-asfood-prices-hit-record-highs/) 2011 ISSUE 5

At the same time as we’re paying a tax on our food, speculators operating in New Zealand’s financial markets pay zero tax on their windfall profits. The contrast is obscene.

Tax Justice believes New Zealand must join the global crusade against financial speculation. Introducing a tax on speculative money flows, known as a Financial Transaction Tax, would go a long way towards discouraging an economic activity that’s causing much pain for grassroots people, in this country and around the world.

If you would like to help with this important campaign over the next few months please contact myself, Vaughan Gunson, Tax Justice campaign coordinator, email: vgunson@xtra.co.nz or ph/txt 021-0415 082. We can send you copies of the Tax Justice petition for you to collect signatures. Every effort helps.

For more information on the campaign, visit our website www.nogtsonfood.org We’ve collected 40,000 signatures for a petition which requests Parliament to: 1) Remove GST from food; and 2) Tax financial speculation.

We’re hoping to get over 50,000 signatures by the time we present the petition to Parliament on Tuesday 16 August. Su’a William Sio, the Labour MP for Mangere, will be receiving the petition.

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ometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7 news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed.”

So wrote Jonathan Hari in a recent opinion piece about the rape accusation against Dominique Strauss-Kahn who, until recently, headed the International Monetary Fund. In a no-holds barred piece of journalism, Hari uses the case as a metaphor for the ‘serial rape’ that the IMF has been meting out to third-world countries for years. “Imagine,” he says, “that a prominent figure was charged, not with raping a maid, but starving her to death, along with her children, her parents, and thousands of other people.”

Which is, he suggests, what the IMF has been doing to impoverished people for decades.

The IMF was set up in 1944 by the countries poised to win the Second World War, who wanted to create a global financial system to ensure resources and wealth flowed their way. A series of institutions was designed to do the job; the IMF being one of them. Its official task was to ensure poor countries did not fall into debt. But, if and when they did, the IMF was there to ‘help’ lift them out with loans and economic expertise.

Isn’t this like asking a fox to guard the chicken coop? The IMF is answerable to the world’s richest countries and is run by their bankers and financial advisors.

It can’t help but look out for its own interests.

In the 1990s the small, southern African country of Malawi was facing severe economic problems after enduring a long-standing dictatorship and one of the worst HIV-Aids epidemics in the world. It had to ask the IMF for help. If the fund had acted in its official role, it would have given loans and guided the country to develop in the same way that Britain and the United States and every other successful country had developed - by protecting its infant industries,

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They concurred that the IMF “bears responsibility for the disaster”.

Photo: stopdown.net

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I M Fed Up

Malawi ended its famine by ignoring the IMF experts and putting the welfare of its own people first.

subsidising farmers, and investing in the education and health of its people.

Instead, however, the IMF agreed to provide loans to keep the country functioning on the condition that Malawi agreed to certain ‘structural adjustments.’ In the end, Malawi was forced to sell off almost everything owned by the state, slash its spending on public infrastructure and services and stop subsidising fertiliser – even though that was what made farming possible for most of the population.

Ultimately, the country was forced to prioritise giving money to international bankers over looking after its own people.

In 2001, Malawi’s president protested at being asked to sell the country’s grain stockpiles to private companies and use the proceeds to repay its loan from a large bank – which the IMF had told him to take out in the first place at an annual rate of 56% interest.

But he had little choice; the grain was sold and the banks were paid.

So when crops failed the following year and the government had nothing to hand out, the starving people were reduced to eating the bark off trees and any rats they could capture.

Meanwhile the IMF suspended its $50 million loan to Malawi because the government had ‘slowed’ its market ‘reforms’; the very reforms which precipitated the disaster in the first place. The leading provider of onthe-ground help to Malawi, ActionAid undertook an enquiry into the famine.

Then Malawi did something that poor countries are constantly being told by Western governments they must never do. It told the IMF to get out. Once it was free to answer to its own people rather than foreign bankers, it reinstated fertiliser subsidies and a range of public services.

Within two years, Malawi transformed itself from rags to riches. So abundant was its productivity that it was able to export food to Uganda and Zimbabwe.

The ‘structural adjustments’ imposed by the IMF on poor countries have left their mark all over the world.

From Ethiopia to Peru, Argentina to Thailand; whole countries have collapsed after following advice from the IMF. Hungary is a clear example. After the global financial crash in 2008 the IMF pressurised Hungary to honour its financial obligations by making further cuts to public services. The population responded by removing the government from office and installing a party that promised to make the banks pay for the crisis they had created. It introduced a 0.7% levy on the banks.

Heavy-handed, the IMF threatened to close down its entire Hungary programme. Meanwhile, instead of punishing her own people, Hungary installed a moderate programme of taxes on retailing, energy and telecoms, and took funds from private pensions to pay the deficit. The collapse it had predicted didn’t happen but still the IMF shrieked at every step, demanding cuts for ordinary Hungarians instead.

Hari concludes that not only DSK should be on trial but the whole of the IMF with him. Because, he says, “if we took the idea of human equality seriously, we’d speak up on behalf of the thousands who have been impoverished, starved and killed by this institution.

We would establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and we’d seriously explore how to disband the IMF entirely and start again.”

Source: Independent 2011 ISSUE 5

A bloody green revolution?

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Ethiopia is pursuing a ‘green revolution’ to boost its economy. But how it’s going about it is questionable.

The suffering of farmers in Ethiopia has gone from bad to worse. Under the guise of leasehold arrangements approved by the Ethiopian regime, neo-colonial land-grabbing by foreign investors is depriving Ethiopians of their ancestral lands. What is touted by the government as a new way of using ‘wasteland’ is proving more of a draconian and brutal take-over. In the space of a few months and often at just 30 days notice, Ethiopian peasants are required to relinquish farming and grazing lands they have owned for centuries. If peasants are unwilling to sell, the police are brought in.

More than 8400 foreign investors have received licenses for commercial farms since the regime change in 1991 and subsequent ratification of a Constitution (1995) that failed to restore any tangible land-ownership rights to Ethiopians. While some Articles provide farmers with the right to lease their land, others give urban authorities the right to confiscate and expropriate land for ‘public purpose and/or investment.’ In effect, this proclamation clearly marked the end of land-rights for farmers, serving instead to hold the door open to international investors.

In his speech to the World Economic Forum in Dec 2009, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi claimed that his government’s policy will bring new ‘technology’ and ‘development’ into Ethiopia.

On the face of it, this sounded promising. Yet if Ethiopia is ever to become food self-sufficient this is not the way to go about it. The new mega-farms rely on the same rudimentary methods used by typical Ethiopian farmers, the only difference being how the labour is organised. Peasant farmers, who had previously been self-employed, have become labourers – slaves to landlords who now possess their ancestral lands.

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All are exempt from taxes and leasing fees for the first five years of production while being allowed to export all they produce.

After it seized power in 1991 the government closed down several million hectares of state-owned farms.

All were mechanized units employing high-tech machinery, including aircraft.

Tractors, combines and billions of dollars worth of investments were left to rust. Thousands of employees lost their jobs – in one region alone 65,000 heads of families were thrown out on the streets, exposing their extended families to starvation and humiliation.

Today, those same farms could be generating thousands in foreign currency and feeding millions of people currently dependent on western aid.

Any resistance is labeled ‘antidevelopment’. The locals are instructed not to interfere with the projects; that they will benefit from new roads and employment and income opportunities.

However, neither the profits nor the majority of the produce will be shared with Ethiopia’s communities and, in all cases, the farmers and indigenous people receive little or no compensation for their land.

Public Domain

hile Ethiopia’s government offers 3 million hectares of its most fertile land to rich countries who will export most of the food it yields to their own populations, millions of Ethiopians are in need of food aid.

Ethiopia: Land is not only a vital source of life but also a symbol of identity.

This is state monopoly of land under the guise of public ownership. Previously, land was not only a vital source of life but also a symbol of identity; people were related to land, both individually and collectively. When reduced to a marketable commodity however, land no longer functions as a way to establish ‘roots’ and form stable communities. In a country where 85% of the population is subsistence farming this relation to the land is crucial – as vital as air, sunshine and water. To deprive someone of any of these is to render their death sentence.

A closer look at how the government is handling the issue suggests the reason behind its decision to lease and sell fertile farmlands to foreign investors for an indefinite or centurylong contract is neither a quest for technology nor wasteland improvement. What’s clear is that some regime officials are building personal empires; officials now own most of Ethiopia’s business enterprises and occupy decisive government or military positions.

As popular discontent grows, they worry about the future of their amassed wealth. Allowing foreign investors to cover for them is the reason land confiscation is such a heated topic.

The consequences are expected to be far reaching; land grabbing will fuel conflict, create political instability, uproot the indigenous peoples and generate widespread food shortages.

The impact on health, soil, water, and ownership rights are an expensive legacy for future generations. That’s why it is important for the international community to stand in unison with the people of Ethiopia and uphold their land ownership rights. Land deals that have not been agreed to by the nations and nationalities in Ethiopia will bring no lasting peace or stable development to the country or its investors. There can be no truly green revolution if it gets paid for in life-blood.

Who else benefits? More than half Ethiopia’s arable land has been leased to foreign investors; private and government-backed companies from Saudi Arabia and Germany, among others.

Source: www.landgrab.org Ethiopian ‘sacred forests’ sold to Indian tea producer 18 Feb 2011.

Land Grabbing and Its Dire Consequences 11 Feb 2011.

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2011 ISSUE 5

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Food with Character – Grown with Integrity

ou want your family to be eating food of the highest quality. But how do you choose what’s best? We know there’s a lot wrong with our industrialised food system yet most of us have no choice but to eat what it delivers.

Few of us can remember the flavour, texture and fragrance of food from our grandparents’ gardens.

But now there is a way you can discover the best food in the land and in doing so, come home to your senses.

A carrot isn’t just a carrot. It’s part of a wider environment that includes not only soil and water but also the sun, moon and even the stars. Many rhythms affect the growth of the plants we eat as food.

In their special way of caring for the earth, biodynamic farmers work closely with life rhythms using a solar-lunar calendar to fine-tune the sowing and harvesting of our food

and the application of biodynamic preparations.

What are biodynamic preparations?

Organic catalysts made from specially processed herbs, their vitalising effect on soil, compost and growing plants extends all the way to your table.

The bio-dynamos or life-energy in our food is just as important as the physical substance. Both are essential for high quality food. The complex sugars, proteins and oils that define good flavour and high nutrient density are enhanced by the use of biodynamic preparations. When crops are forced, using chemical fertilisers, to grow too quickly they don’t fully express their nutritional qualities.1 Eating biodynamic food helps keep you healthy. A controlled, one month-long study of participants eating only biodynamic food (85%

biodynamic, the rest organic) showed lowered blood pressure, reduced calorie intake, improved intestinal health and psychological wellbeing and an immune status indicative of lower stress levels.2 Because biodynamic food has more dry matter you feel replete after eating less. What’s more, you’ve paid for nutrition not water!

Biodynamic soils are better for the planet – they develop more humus than other methods of farming which means they can capture more carbon.3

Carbon Distribution among Humic Matter Fraction

Demeter-certified Biodynamic food – taste it and find out for yourself.

Left; Bush Beans grown without biodynamic preps. Right; with bd preps.

Source: IBDF

Demeter is the internationally recognised certification symbol for Biodynamic product. It’s your assurance that food has been grown to the highest standard possible and by farming methods that do the least damage.

1 www.louisbolk.org/downloads/1432.pdf 2 Monastery Study, Agricultural Section, Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. 2006 Source; FIBL 3 Soil Carbon and Organic Farming. Soil Assn Report UK 2000 2011 ISSUE 5

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2011 ISSUE 5

Metamorphosis – Evolution in Action

Andreas Suchantke

Adonis Press 2009 • ISBN 13:978-0-932776-39-6

Reviewed by E Alington

Available from Humanity Books, see advertisement inside back cover.

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omething is wrong – something fundamental and beyond the limits of current thinking seems to be missing from our concepts in the realm of biology.” That’s what scientist Rodney Brooks says.1 Working in the field of artificial intelligence at MIT, he’s adamant that the life sciences need a monumental shift in worldview to match what relativity theory has done for physics.

For as it turns out, evolution cannot be explained solely by the passive, chance-ridden process we’ve been given to believe.

It’s tempting to suggest Goethe could be biology’s answer to Einstein.

Although he’s still largely a closetgenius, dependent on modern interpreters to make him accessible, a growing number of scientists are taking his ideas seriously. One of those is Andreas Suchantke who, having spent a lifetime working with the Goethean approach, has recently produced Metamorphosis, Evolution in Action – a book that offers a fresh and penetrating response to Darwin’s evolution-in-theory.

Based on the twin notions of random arbitrary change occurring in genes followed by ruthless selection on the basis of survival of the fittest, ‘natural selection’ seems part of our intellectual furniture. Yet we’ve overlooked the fact that Darwinian Theory is, and has always been theory. Maybe it’s a good one but nevertheless, we’re treading on thin ice when theory becomes dogma, especially one that assumes laws of life are identical to the mechanistic laws of inanimate nature.

To Suchantke, natural selection

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and all it implies represents the “impregnable citadel of modern evolutionary and population biology….Because the two ideas are mutually reinforcing and the scientific literature so complex, it’s virtually impossible for the layperson to decipher where thinking may have ended and dogma taken over.”pvii His view is endorsed by UK philosopher, Mary Midgeley who suggests that science has become the new religion and Evolution the great western secular faith of our time.

Reality is rarely as simple as popular science suggests. While it’s easy enough to relate to fixed forms such as chairs or particles, most of us have difficulty thinking objectively of a moving wave or the changing form of an embryo. How do we make something that’s constantly in motion scientifically sense-able (ie) measureable? A new language is needed – verbs must replace nouns; static ‘forms’ of thought must give way to mobile, dynamic, processthinking. This is where imagination becomes a scientific tool. When used appropriately, to help uncover ‘what is’ (unlike fantasy which indulges whatever we ‘dream up’ next), imagination enables us to hold in mind two polar activities at the same time, giving rise to mobile images.

The old paradigm seeks explanation by way of ‘things’ such as genes. Genes call up the activity of specific proteins. But what summons the genes and co-ordinates their activities? Recently Christiane Nusslein-Volhardt was awarded a Nobel prize for discovering that the different parts of a fruit fly – front and rear poles, order and

differentiation of segments in the embryo – are all pre-determined by morphogenetic fields prior to the fertilisation of the egg. The organisation of the organism is present before its physical realisation. p24 How do we make sense of this?

We can’t – at least not with our old eyes of glass; we need new glasses.

Where many factors work together there can be no question of chance.

Highly ordered dynamics are intrinsic to evolutionary-biological processes; they show up with consistency and even ‘purpose’ throughout the biosphere. In this book, the author takes the view that the actual ‘organiser’ itself must have an existence independent of the material involved.

Nusslein-Volhardt’s findings appear to confirm his view that “The ordering cause of the organism is to be sought in the existence of a superordinate Whole, a composite body of formative forces, which is actively present prior to any kind of physical manifestation and which as ‘director,’ creates its own physical expression in the bodily development of the organism.”p25 In short, Suchantke maintains that the evolutionary development of plants and animals presents as a coherent dynamic process unfolding on a level more fundamental than natural selection can account for.

Metamorphosis, meaning ‘changing form,’ is basically a synonym for evolution. Originating with Goethe

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Archetypal thinking ascribes reality to the idea and overcomes that Cartesian thorn in our side – the split between spirit and matter.

Foliage leaf, sepal and petal of a species of Gentian showing how the petal with its primitive veins has remained at a more juvenile stage than the leaves.

Photo: E Alington

From A. Suchantke, Metamorphosis.

Petals and stamen are morphologically identical - one does not transform into the other but arise out of identical leaf primordia. The morphic field that brings forth petals expands from its normal area of influence into stamen formation. At the edges of the field, transitional phenomena appear – mixtures of the petal and stamen stage as illustrated in this rose.

and the German school of natural philosophy, metamorphosis offers an increasingly useful approach as contemporary Darwinian theory proves inadequate to explain new developments in genetics, particularly in the sub-discipline Evo-Devo.* Metamorphosis is central to * Evolution of Development explores the dynamic processes of embryology and development.

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understanding life in its ‘process of becoming’. But because it focuses on formative activity rather than finished forms, metamorphosis requires a new way of thinking. All living organisms, whether plant, insect, animal or human are characterised by a basic polarity of outward (sense) and inward (metabolic) activity. The author suggests that give and take impulses operate in tandem with

compensating counter impulses that hold back development in such a way to bring about processes of change and subsequent new forms. One such counter-process is juvenilisation.

The preservation of juvenile traits in maturity is known as neotony or fetalisation. Suchantke shows how it operates throughout the plant and animal kingdoms and can be applied to all ecological relationships.

In the evolution of plants and animals, fetalisation appears to be as significant as anagenesis (evolutionary progress) where simple structures become increasingly differentiated under the direction of the morphic body.

The plastic mobility of organs depends on their retaining some juvenile form. In blossoms for example, plasticity is evident in petals, stamen and stigma.p66 The morphic field that determines the petals appears to expand its normal area of influence into stamen formation, bringing undetermined leaf primordia under its control.

Although this process involves the activation of enzymes to call specific genes into action, the primordia themselves remain juvenilised, in an unspecialised state and therefore open to any direction of development.

What of juvenilisation in human development? Recent genetic findings suggest humans may owe more to what was lost along the evolutionary path than what gained.2 We share 96% of our DNA with chimpanzees; most of it genes coding for proteins, the building blocks of life. Yet we lack more than 500 short sections of DNA found in animals; bits that give rise to whiskers for example. One of these missing snippets was found to stifle the growth of brain cells in animals. Losing that bit of genetic material may have allowed the human brain to expand into the most complex organ known. From the viewpoint of juvenilisation however, our advanced mental capacity might well be the result of some ‘holding back’ counter-influence, rather than a mere ‘loss’ of genetic material.

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Indeed, as the author points out, natural progression based on chance only leads to degradation and loss of capacity, not to greater complexity.

Goethe constantly warned against becoming attached to finished forms; thinking must remain in the realm of formation and transformation.

Morphogenetic fields are implicit in this way of seeing. As is archetype.

Archetype can be expressed as the ‘universal idea’ shining through many different forms. For example, the plant family Ranunculaceae includes aconite, marsh marigold, buttercup, pulsatilla, anemone, hellebore and delphinium. Without ever becoming a fixed form itself, the ‘idea’ Ranunculus shines through all these forms; the One rendering the Many recognisable and distinctive.

By ascribing reality to the Idea, archetypal thinking overcomes that Cartesian thorn in our side – the split between spirit and matter. It enables us to unite them, within a scientifically methodical framework, “as distinct representations of one and the same thing”. P124 The dynamic nature of archetype as ‘ever-evolving potential’ is central to understanding evolution. p 12 By continually interacting with the environment, the archetype comes to expression in appearances and forms. Together the spiritual ‘idea’ and the material environment bring about the genesis of living forms.

Therefore the archetype must also be in a process of creative development.

If we maintain, like typological thinkers, that the archetype is unchangeable, then evolution is an impossible concept. Therefore the idea ‘Man,’ as archetype of vertebrate evolution, cannot be some crowning achievement, finished and complete.

Although the archetype comes to fullest expression in humans through the attainment of uprightness, the human being must nevertheless occupy a central position from which

animals, with their highly specialised forms, have devolved – specialisation having reduced their plasticity and hence their potential for further complexity.

Finally, the book addresses the issue of subjective projection. Are humans ever detached from anything they do? Can scientists really operate with pure objectivity? We all project familiar concepts or interpretations onto what we see or unconsciously wish to see. Rather than pretend otherwise, Suchantke’s lifetime work embraces and trains these egotistic tendencies in order to develop the uniquely human capacity of the ‘I’ to perceive outwardly while at the same time unite inwardly with Nature.

Only in imaginative thinking can we enter the river of time and participate in the processes of development in living organisms.

Gradually, our habitual associative thinking gives way to the real task of our imagination – to learn to accompany living processes in such a way that subjective experience can lead to new levels of objective understanding. This inner, imaginative, mental activity “is of the same nature as the processes it renders observable; like apprehends like.” p14 We become self-conscious by internalising ‘knowledge’ of the natural environment. If you trip over a stone on the path you soon ‘know’ something about yourself in relation to the outer environment.

This process of internalising the outer environment ‘lights up as the inner content of consciousness.’ And this, Suchantke observes, is the fundamental evolutionary message.

It’s not about the products of consciousness, such as thinking, but about the producer, about consciousness itself. pp 220,292 Beautifully illustrated with photos and line drawings by the author,

Metamorphosis must be considered an essential acquisition for schools, public libraries and institutes of higher learning. It’s also a book worthy of any coffee table. But, while not your average scientific text book, don’t expect it to be a light read. Not everything discussed is illustrated so it helps to have some familiarity with plants. Some basic biology also helps. The many footnotes are as stimulating as the text but the lack of an index makes it a bit awkward for reference.

No review can do justice to this wonderful book. Metamorphosis is, in my opinion, deeply satisfying for its intellectual rigour and provocative questioning. Andreas Suchantke has helped re-seed the human mind with ‘stem cells’ of reverence and wonder, essential if we are to approach the world in truth. Beyond materialism’s impasse, he leads us to make sense of, and develop a new sense for, all that is seen and unseen in the real world that is Life.

Humanising the sciences; “Personal, emotional involvement and inner conviction are essential if there is to be any readiness to help the biosphere for its own sake, rather than simply out of a desire to save our own skins.”

Biologist, Andreas Suchantke

1 Brooks, R. The relationship between matter and life. IN Nature vol 409, Jan 2001.

2 For Human DNA, Less may be More. The Guardian Weekly. 18/3/11 2011 ISSUE 5

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biologist, a forester, an artist and an architect approaching a woodland together will probably all see something different.

The biologist would see the species of trees and perhaps note all sorts of particularities. The forester would recognise the different tree species as well as the shape of the trunk, and be able to estimate the volume of wood.

The artist would see the many shades of green, brown and grey, while the architect’s attention might be drawn to the relationship between length and thickness of the trunk, and the span of the canopy.

In other words, they are all looking at the same thing, but they are all looking from a different perspective, with varying interest and a different set of concepts. When they return home, they will all have a different story to tell about their visit to the woods. The biologist will remember the lovely ash trees, the forester will talk about when the wood will be ready to harvest and what the yield will be. The artist and the architect, on the other hand, might not even be able to identify which species of tree had been growing in the woods.

Everyone’s observations are different because they are the result of personal interest and a personally developed set of concepts. As a consequence, everyone perceives the environment differently. So logically, it follows that everyone lives in a different world; a world shaped by personal interest and concepts and filled with personal observations. One person might live in a town rich with birdlife while another, living in the same town, might not have that impression at all.

In the same vein, studies have revealed that when people read newspapers which report frequently and extensively on crime, they perceive the world as more threatening than people who read very little about crime. Experiments have also shown that witnesses to an accident all report different versions of the event. They observe different things happening, but they also fill in the gaps that they missed in the sequence of events. Thus

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Tom van Gelder

Different observations

Photo: cepolina.com

A

Living in your own world?

These are all observations that can be made about one particular tree; It is an oak, about 10 metres high with a canopy of 8 metres across. The trunk splits up into three trunks quite close to the ground. There are grooves in the trunk. The branches are irregularly shaped. The tree has ample foliage and acorns. The leaves are lobed and a dull, mid-green (neither dark nor light) in colour. It is a beautiful tree. Some branches broke off once during a storm.

The tree’s surroundings are chaotic.

The tree looks vital and powerful, it dominates its surroundings. Seedlings are growing under the tree.

The reciprocal part that you yourself play in any observation is determined by: • the degree of your interest • the concepts • the way that you connect observations, generally or specifically • the way that you create images • the feelings attached to the observation

You can then categorise the observations: • Observations about the current state of the tree: it is a European oak tree, about 10 metres high with a canopy of 8 metres across. The trunk splits up into three trunks quite close to the ground. There are grooves in the trunk. The tree has ample foliage and acorns. The leaves are palmate and a dull midgreen in colour.

• Temporal observations concerning the tree in its seasonal course: some branches broke off once during a storm. Seedlings are growing under the tree.

• Observations containing a judgment: the tree looks vital.

• Observations that reveal what impression the tree made on the observer: the tree looks powerful, it dominates its surroundings. The tree’s surroundings are chaotic.

• Observations about the observer: it is a beautiful tree.

Observations are tied to an individual, they are subjective. It is important to keep in mind that everyone perceives the world differently. A conversation about any subject should really start by exploring where the other person’s interests lie, which concepts she uses and how she defines them.

On the other hand, you experience the conversation as if everyone inhabits the same world. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves why we insist on talking to each other about ‘reality’!

Tom van Gelder taught for 20 years at Warmonderhof, a biodynamic agriculture college in the Netherlands. See his website for an introduction to Goethean phenomenology www.dynamisch.nu Article courtesy of the author.

Ash Woodland

they unconsciously make things up, thinking they have observed them.

The way you shape your observations to form a concept is also personal. It does make a difference whether you use a schematic model or form a concept based on images. Feelings are also part of the observation. If you heard a blackbird sing during a defining moment in your life, the concept of blackbird will have a different meaning and content for you than for somebody else.

Try this exercise: Make thirty observations of an object or a situation then divide them into categories. Which categories can you distinguish and what do they tell you about your own way of seeing the world?

2011 ISSUE 5

The Book of Nature – Autumn and Spring Margaret Colquoun

It is an interesting exercise to compare the two polar opposite processes – to enter into a growing, developmental ‘spring-time’ plant and then to compare this with its (or another) ‘autumnal’ dying process; and to quietly let them reverberate in your soul. You might like to pay attention to that which rises up within you at each ‘season’ and compare this with the outer gestures of autumn and spring.

In autumn, as we conduct the traditional ‘clear-out’ and ‘burning of dead wood’, new creative ideas rise up in us, like seed points or buds, as plans for next year. They are mulled over through the winter and may finally take effect beginning in spring. In spring we shed our outer wrappings like leaf scales; we spring clean, make new our homes and selves like the trees in their spring adornment.

And, as the buds are born out of dying leaves, so do we also find, within each season of the year, something of the opposite one. In the colours of the leaves turning in autumn we are often reminded of spring; tones of soft yellow spring green mingle with autumnal fire reds and browns. In the ‘dying’ season we see an echo of the ‘growing’ one and vice versa; the first shoots of spring often have a tinge of autumnal red as they emerge. In the mid-winter stillness, the skies often hold a herald of

Credit: E Alington

Just as in human cultural evolution, in the dying of one civilisation is hidden the birth of a new one, so we find in all natural developmental processes, whether on a small scale or on a larger evolutionary one, that within the dying is always hidden the source of a new beginning. From a certain point of view, the dying of the leaves in autumn really represents an end whilst hidden at the very point of dying – next to the abscission layer between each leaf stalk and the twig – is the bud, a new beginning for next year.

Liquid Amber twig in Spring.

summer in their intense heavenly colours and in mid-summer, the death and hardening of the vegetation is reminiscent of the winter’s frozen sleep.

Something similar to this seasonal time-process is happening in space, between the two hemispheres of the earth. While we in the northern hemisphere celebrate Easter they, on the other side of the earth, are surrounded by golden autumn leaves. So our Easter is a balance in space to the opposite autumn; our wintry Christmas to the opposite mid-summer.

Our spring needs our autumn in time as a preparation and it needs the autumn of the other side of the earth as a balance.

Wherever we look in Nature we find such opposites and apparent contradictions. Even the sun and the moon mirror one another in their movements in opposite seasons. Throughout winter the moon is as high in the sky as is the sun in summer, and vice versa. In autumn and spring they hang in balance.

Credit: M Colquhpoun

We have to learn to hold the polarities of dying and becoming together inwardly at one and the same time – just as the earth bears autumn and spring together at once out of inner necessity – if we would understand the development of the plant or anything alive for that matter.

Horse Chestnut twig in Autumn.

2011 ISSUE 5

Margaret Colquhoun, PhD, is a Goethean scientist living near Edinburgh, hence the northern hemisphere slant to her article.

She is Chief Executive of the Life Science Trust, established in Scotland in 1992.

Article reproduced from New Eyes for Plants by Margaret Colquhoun with kind permission of Hawthorn Press www.hawthornpress.com Available from Humanity Books, see advertisement inside back cover.

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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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PURE ADVANTAGE LAUNCH Evening of July 7th 2011

The launch, in Auckland, of the Pure Advantage campaign by a group of business people who have set out to foster a green growth strategy for New Zealand. At the launch, Australian environmental scientist, Tim Flannery espoused his support for the initiative and Robert Swan OBE, the first man to walk to both the south & north poles, spoke passionately of his first hand experiences with climate change.

Chaired by Rob Morrison, its trustees are among some of the best-known names in business: Sir George Fistonich, Rob Fyfe, Chris Liddell, Philip Mills, Jeremy Moon, Lloyd Morrison, Geoff Ross, Justine Smyth, Sir Stephen Tindall and Joan Withers. Together they are introducing the country to their vision of a sustainable competitive advantage that will benefit all New Zealanders.

Pure Advantage wants our support - It’s looking to sign up members, preferably in their thousands, on the grounds that the more support it can muster the more likely politicians are to listen to it.

Potential supporters can find it on its website and on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – suggesting that it’s looking to attract a wider, and younger membership than most traditional business organisations.

“New Zealand’s clean, green brand is valuable but vulnerable, given the gap between rhetoric and reality.” says Rob Morrison “We can’t afford to let our reputation, and consequently our exporters, suffer for lack of environmental leadership. Nor should we miss the opportunity that the global shift to green growth represents for a country like New Zealand.”

For more information and to sign up in support go to: www.pureadvantage.org

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2011 ISSUE 5

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