CONTRIBUTE
FALL 2019
REGENERATION By Marcus Sheffer with contributions from John Boecker
The entirety of our world is alive! We are a part of, and integral to this living, breathing, moving, speaking, listening, touching, defecating, squirming, decomposing, growing, interacting, complex whole of Life. We are surrounded by, immersed in, and a part of the living world. We co-inhabit a living planet in reciprocal relationship with all other living beings. Without our fellow beings we would not long survive. We depend on other beings to pollinate plants, produce food, provide air to breath, clean water, regulate climate, decompose waste, make edible matter from sunlight and living soil, manifest beauty, and soothe our souls. It seems, though, that we have forgotten this, as if we are trying to remake our living world into one almost bereft of life, one we are not even sure can survive. This invites pause to acknowledge the implications; over the past 40 years, more than 50% of our fellow beings on the planet have disappeared. During the same time period, our human population has doubled. Trees, insects, birds, and animals of countless species are in decline or have ceased to exist. We are practicing ecocide at a global scale. Our agriculture, rangelands, suburbs, and cities appear purposely designed to reduce – or virtually eliminate – the diversity of life that embraces and sustains us. Agriculture, for example, is increasingly dominated by largescale monocultures dowsed in herbicides and pesticides designed specifically to kill competing plants and all insects, including those who are beneficial. Organic agriculture often simply replaces these chemicals with others that may not be quite so lethal or persistent. Our rangelands and pastures are managed to benefit only a few select domesticated grazing animals. Their grazing mutually reinforces dramatically reduced diversity, favoring a few select plant species across the vast majority of our remaining agricultural lands. The planet’s diversity of life is purposely designed out of these agricultural systems, which comprise more than 50% of the land area of the US. The abundance and diversity of our living world is increasingly being converted to scarcity and monocultures that minimize and concentrate the flow of resources into a stream of money.
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