I fear it's too late

I've been told that all the research I do and the fighting against GMOs is a waste of time. The GMOs are in the invironment and can't be stopped. The end is inevitable. The link I posted(if it works) makes it sound like they are right. But I will never stop the fight.


http://www.leaderpost.com/technology/Canadian+canola+escapes+into+wild+study/5509327/story.html

I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "the end." The end of what? Of humankind? Of society as we know it? Of all the species that have had gmo versions released into the environment?

I guess it would be the end of the ability to produce uncontaminated organic grains. And an end to conventional agriculture as the chemical agriculture  system collapses.

An end to conventional agriculture seems like a good thing to me, seeing as conventional agriculture has so many bad effects.  Of course it would be good to have something with which to replace conventional agriculture, like, say, permaculture. 

Having a permaculture world makes sense to me, but to the average farmer it won't happen. Farmers will keep putting more and more chemicals on the land until nothing will grow. The resulting loss of crops will inflate the price of food and cause world wide panic, riots and starvation. We can't convert dead land back to what we know it can be fast enough to avoid a period of upheaval.

This culture of chemical farming has been with us for so long that the farmer has lost the ability to think for themselves. I know this first hand from farmers I grew up with and who are my neighbors now.

In the US, farmers make up about 1-2% of the population.  It's the other 98-99% I think we can reach with permaculture.  In my opinion there is plenty of non-dead land available to practice permaculture. 

One can concentrate on the panic, riots and starvation if one wants to.  Personally I don't think it's of much benefit to do so.  I'm about as doomeristic as a person can be, but I try not to lend too much of my time or emotional energy to doom any more.  There are plenty of places on the internet to discuss doom, but I don't spend much time there anymore, because it wasn't helping anything and it was making me ill. 

H Ludi Tyler wrote:
One can concentrate on the panic, riots and starvation if one wants to.  Personally I don't think it's of much benefit to do so. 

I agree. I am also a half-empty glass sort of person.  still...

Seems to me I can have one of 2 pov's:
I can imagine the possibility that the world will improve, and that I can contribute to that-
or
the world is doomed, we're doomed.

The first scenario leads me to positive action and to embracing postive philosophies, thoughts and people. I like that. It makes me feel good.

Maybe in the end it will turn out I am fooling myself.

But either way -  I have a life to live, and I have to choose how to live it, so this is what I have chosen. Altho I am not pollyanish. For sure we've got a lot of struggles to make the world better.

We can start be making our lives better, then work on our communities. If enough people do that, then the world will be better.

If the world is going down, I'm going down fighting.

100% agree. 

I'll add my favorite Buckminster Fuller quote (he saw the current dilemma quite clearly - sort of like my generation's Sepp Holzer - I'm 65 -

'You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.'

So, we'd better get busy with our permaculture end-run around the MoU's

Brent, I too spend all day, every day trying to get the word out about the dangers of GMO's - both to the biosphere and to our health.  It's very easy for me to get caught up in panic & fear because the fight does appear hopeless, and the cause already lost.  That having been said, I am still committed to stopping the spread of GMO's (what of it I can stop) and informing people who may not already know exactly *what* is in the food they are already eating. 

As all have said, by far the best step we, ourselves, as individuals can do is create our permaculture spaces and habitats - feed ourselves in a manner that supports the biosphere.  Sustain our own and as many other lives and we are willing and able to sustain. 

(and hunker down in our hide-y holes and wait for it to all blow over) Sorry, my paranoia knows no bounds sometimes. 

Monidew, you put that so well

nancy sutton wrote:
I'll add my favorite Buckminster Fuller quote (he saw the current dilemma quite clearly - sort of like my generation's Sepp Holzer - I'm 65 -

'You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.'

So, we'd better get busy with our permaculture end-run around the MoU's

I really like that quote Nancy.

"Bucky" Fuller was a man way ahead of his time.

He once said that he wanted to build a spaceship big enough to hold all of our politicians, and send it on a one way trip to the moon.