Cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,
And you shall eat the herb of the field, in the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
Till you return to the ground.
In 1970 glyphosate, a product primarily used to remove calcium and other scale from pipes, was discovered to also kill weeds. That should not actually have come as much of a surprise — lots of chemicals kill weeds. But glyphosate was considered non-toxic to humans, and it’s action in killing plants was identified as blocking an enzyme necessary to the process of biosynthesis in plants, a biological process that is not shared by animals. By 1974 glyphosate was patented as Roundup by the Monsanto Corporation, and marketed to both consumer and commercial users. By all appearances it was a miraculous labor saver, and grew quickly into the single most used agricultural chemical worldwide. Another win for science and human ingenuity over the oppressive forces of nature. The curse be cursed.
The genius (and it is) of Monsanto went further, as they began developing crop plants to be resistant to the actions of their own herbicide. The implications of such a combination would be revolutionary if it could be pulled off. A substance that would not only kill weeds but leave crops unharmed. Business quite naturally boomed.
Humanity shares the amazing impulse to life that characterizes everything we see in the biological world. We want to live, as long as possible, as strong as possible, with as little effort and trauma as possible. Glyphosate, in a certain way, can be seen as a human adaptation borne out of this will to life. Maybe. The problem is that the thorns and thistles that have continued with stellar success for centuries to adapt to the open soil plowed by humans, can adapt to glyphosate as well, just like those glyphosate resistant good plants. So, it was not too long before selection had identified traits resistant to glyphosate in the weeds themselves. Roundup resistant weeds required more Roundup, and the weeds that survived higher doses seeded the ground with ever more resistant strains.
Business was booming ever more, but biologically it was a stalemate at best. But a stalemate only if you discount any health threat from the massive quantities of glyphosate that now show up in our ground water and food products. And the presumed effects on non-target plants and animals. The arguments over glyphosate toxicity are heated and partisan, but the outlook does not appear to be rosy.
The enzyme blocking action of glyphosate on plants also works on certain bacteria, especially some very beneficial and necessary bacteria that colonize the human gut, as well as bacteria necessary for the health of other mammals. Conversely, some harmful bacteria (strains of Clostridium and Salmonella) have been shown to be resistant to glyphosate. This is troubling. Investigations continue into neurological effects, carcinogenic effects, and hormone disruption. Glyphosate has been shown to be toxic and an endocrine disruptor in human cell lines. The narrative that it is harmless to humans is rightly in shambles. In animals I have my own anecdotal evidence as I’ve converted all my poultry and pig feed to certified NonGMO. More eggs, far fewer die offs, better feather quality, and even less feed consumed overall, the latter being opposite what I might have expected.
Glyphosate is a brute strength solution to mankind’s thorns and thistles and nasty perspiration problem. It is possible there may have been a way for it to be used very moderately and modestly, but moderation and modesty are not traits that can be ascribed to our scientistic technocratic savior class. They are constantly pursuing the solution to all our problems, and there are more, and very contemporary examples.
The easiest examples to point to are the highly touted mRNA vaccines that have been pushed out in the largest human experiment in history. They have clearly failed to live up to the promises that were made. If you don’t yet know this, you will. If you want to know this now, just search out what we were sold at the outset and compare that with the current narrative, which is not to be considered any more stable than the prior narratives. If you don’t have a huge prejudice against Alex Berenson, his reporting and documentation will be a sufficient source. If you have a huge prejudice against Alex Berenson, ask yourself why, and begin to read him directly to see if his critics are justified.
The mRNA vaccines have quite predictably produced mRNA vaccine resistant virus. The virus contains the same will to life as the rest of the biological world. Applying therapies that do not kill all of the virus merely selects for the stronger strains. Sound familiar to glyphosate resistant weeds? It should, because it’s exactly the same thing. The vaccines represent the same kind of brute force solution, and the results are even more disastrous. The only thing that’s mitigating this is that unlike weeds viruses are parasites, and a clever parasite needs live hosts. Diseases that quickly kill their hosts burn out quickly as a rule.
The best response to Covid, or disease in general, is optimized human health. We know this already because we see that obese, and even overweight people are suffering more from the virus, as they do many other maladies. We see that older folks whose bodies are becoming weaker are losing the immune function that comes with human health. Not the “I’m not currently diseased” sort of health. The sort of health that seeks, and gains or maintains, physical strength and mobility. This is mainly a result of physical effort to appropriately stress the body, and sound nutrition to feed an appropriate and strengthening response to that stress. Its not complicated.
And it’s the grace in the curse of thorns, thistles and sweat. Because the most elementary and primal response to thorns and thistles is in fact sweat. And sweat is what happens when physical effort is applied, say, in a garden.
The myth of modern agriculture, the green revolution and all that, is that we’d all be starving but for the purveyors of chemicals and heavy equipment. But the history of starvation reveals that it is not a result of a lack of competence or technology, but human conflict — warfare, that has produced the most notable famines, far above the intermittent natural disasters of drought or flood. Were we not so busy fighting and killing, food production could be at least a part of every man’s life. (It’s not an argument against it that it’s hard work. You can pay, as many do, for hard work in a gym. You can put the hard work in the income column.) This is not an argument for pacifism, because as long as their are aggressors there must be defenders. That’s just how it is. Plowshares can be turned into swords, and food productivity into warfare just as readily as the opposite can happen. That opposite is worth praying for, even in a small way, as we stand on this cursed, yet still blessed ground.
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
And their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
Neither shall they learn war anymore.
The Prophet Micah