Once you define a process, a functional application or approach as applicable to some kind of intended outcome, it becomes a product of our consumer market economy. In other words any term which has the potential for increasing profitability on a broad level will become co-opted by the system. (See below). Marketing has become a form of psychology lobbying. It's a tactic to inundate consumers with of a myriad of meanings so that anything can mean anything. Once in the mainstream any root intent becomes diluted or lost. Culturally,everything has to be "coined" in order to be talked about in any public discourse: being green (oil companies), saving the environment, organic, natural - having no viable cultural meaning. Even Ecoforestry (which is a primary focus of mine) is being usurped. Once permaculture reaches a certain level ($$) of public awareness it will be co-opted.
So what can Beyond Organic mean so that it remains vital,fruitful and maintains useful intent? Perhaps keeping/developing complex multilayer meaning(s). This does go against the "keep it simple stupid" principle which is in vogue. When one is "dealing with Nature", in totality, it is a complex interaction. Wendell Berry is one of the best spokesmen regarding this understanding. I see in his writings a trilogy approach: there's you, the land, and the community. All three need to be considered as an interactive whole, with the land as the primary guide and not thought of as primarily a resource. Whatever Beyond Organic becomes pointing,showing, seeing, touching,tasting may be the best way to explain it...........
----------------------- This is excerpted from:
http://www.science20.com/challenging_nature/what_meaning_organic_and_inorganic_food-676
Chemists now use the word organic to describe all complex, carbon-based molecules—whether or not they are actually products of an organism or products of laboratory synthesis. But many educated people in Western countries think that only some crops and cows are organic, while all others are not. How can one simple word -- organic -- have such different meanings?........
This movement first acquired the moniker organic in 1942, when J. I. Rodale began publication in America of Organic Farming&Gardening, a magazine still in circulation today.
According to Rodale and his acolytes, products created by—and processes carried out by—living things are fundamentally different from lab-based processes and lab-created products. The resurrection of this prescientific, vitalistic notion of organic essentialism did not make sense to scientists who understood that every biological process is fundamentally a chemical process. In fact, all food, by definition, is composed of organic chemicals.
As a result, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) refused to recognize organic food as distinguishable in any way from nonorganic food.
The “organic food” movement was not taken seriously by U.S. government agencies until 1990, when lobbyists convinced Congress to mandate the establishment of a certification process for organic foods. Twelve years later, organic farmers finally obtained rules they wanted to prevent impostors from siphoning off market share. But as the USDA emphasizes, the "basis of these standards is on process, not product."
In other words, organic food is defined not by any material substance in the food itself, but instead by the "holistic" methods used on organic farms. Furthermore, the physical attributes of the product and any effects it might have on environment or health are explicitly excluded from U.S., European, and international definitions.
The implicit, unproven assumption is that organic agriculture is -- by its very nature -- better for the environment than so-called conventional farming. The European Commission states as a matter of fact that "organic farmers use a range of techniques that help sustain ecosystems and reduce pollution." Yet, according to self-imposed organic rules, genetic modification in the laboratory is strictly forbidden, even if its purpose is to reduce an animal's negative impact on the environment. (Canadian scientists have already engineered pigs to secrete an enzyme in their saliva that reduces the polluting phosphorous content of their manure by up to 75%.) On the other hand, spontaneous mutations caused by deep-space cosmic rays are always deemed acceptable -- without any testing -- since they occur "naturally."
In reality, laboratory scientists can make subtle and precise changes to an organism's DNA sequence, while high-energy cosmic rays can break chromosomes into pieces that reattach randomly and sometimes create genes that didn't previously exist.
Even more than a concern for the environment, organic producers and consumers are driven by faith in the presumed health benefits of their holistically produced food. In The Future of Food, Canadian farmer Marc Loiselle explains, “the underpinning of my conversion to organic food is not so much the economic point, it’s the health point, to protect my health, to protect my family’s health and my neighbors’.”
Irrespective of whether they buy into the health rhetoric or not, western consumers have been led to believe that organic farmers are never allowed to use toxic chemical pesticides. In fact, this carefully cultivated beliefs is simply false. Pyrethrin (with the formula C21H28O3) is one of several common toxic chemicals sprayed onto fruit trees by organic farmers (even on the day of harvesting); another allowed chemical is rotenone (C23H22O6), a potent neurotoxin, long used to kill fish, and recently linked to Parkinson's disease {Betarbet, 2000 #1258}.
How can organic farmers justify the use of these chemical pesticides? The answer comes from the delusion that substances produced by living organisms are not really chemicals. Since pyrethrin is extracted from chrysanthemums and rotenone comes from a native Indian vine, they are deemed organic instead.
However, the most potent toxins known to humankind, including ricin and strychnine, are all natural and organic. In fact, all currently used pesticides -- both natural and synthetic -- dissipate quickly and pose a miniscule risk to consumers. As the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences explains,
while pesticides may be found in many products, the levels at which they are present fall far below the levels known to not cause any health effects. The fact that they are found at all is only due to the significant advances in analytical chemistry. The tests are now so sensitive that the detection level that can be easily reached is equivalent to detecting one teaspoon of salt in one million gallons of water. Levels even lower than that can sometimes be detected.
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nicely expressed.
