Environmental Commentary: "Fighting Nature"

This 1992 FoxSense graphic has often been criticized as being a bit of an overstatement. 

For me, the overstatement originates from the enthusiastic marketing, sales, and use of toxic chemicals for a  wide variety of reasons and uses, including spraying poisons on our crops (our food) and watersheds (drinking water).

And then, of course there's a global amphibian decline, colony collapse disorder (bees), and biological magnification of toxic chemical concentrations in food chains everywhere (including the Arctic).

For an expanded discussion, please read "The Safe, Non-toxic Garden" essay in the spring 2013 issue of EdibleWastatch. 

If you have a choice, which overstatement would you like to base your health on?

 "Fighting Nature" from Foxsense. © 1992 Fred Montague

Gardening: The Natural-Non-toxic Garden

My essay for the Spring 2013 issue of edibleWASATCH centers on gardening in the chemical age. It is an argument to keep toxic chemicals out of the ecological garden.

Here are the concluding paragraphs from that piece.​

"In terms of dealing with the novel chemical environment that increasingly affects our landscapes, neighborhoods, work places, homes, and bodies, my advice is to avoid any unnecessary, avoidable exposure. In industrialized countries, we have immersed ourselves in a chemical milieu with which we have had very little biological experience and essentially no evolutionary experience. We cannot wishfully adapt to tolerate exposures to toxic substances. And we, as a population, can't immediately breed fast enough to adapt genetically."​

"In some ways, it's choosing for ourselves and our families not to be test animals. The experience we have had in the past 68 years is alarming enough to justify exercising some commonsense skepticism. In the face of possible risk and with insufficient information about that risk, avoid the risk. Avoid the dangerous, the expensive,and the uncertain, especially if safe, economical, and certain methods are available."​

"Take responsibility for your food. Grow as much as you can, and grow it organically. Make your natural, safe and non-toxic garden the foundation of your approach to health."​

The section immediately below is from Gardening: An Ecological Approach where I briefly describe a dozen ecological concepts as they apply to gardening. The Edible Wasatch essay expands on this "no toxics" concept.

​The "no toxics chemicals" concept, excerpted from ​Gardening: An Ecological Approach. © Fred Montague

Environmental Commentary: "The Great Global Chemistry Experiment"

The page below (from my 1992 FoxSense book) describes the chemical consequences of the industrial progress we have chosen (or acquiesced to) . Widespread dissemination of synthetic toxics distinguishes our modern times.  ​

Since 1992 we have added many more formulations and categories: BPA, problematic substitutes for previously banned toxics, VOC's (volatile organic compounds), POP's (persistent organic pollutants), and many more. Some of the chemicals we now regulate in the U.S. we continue to manufacture for export. We then import finished manufactured products and agricultural produce to complete what environmentalists call the"circle of poison."

The lab report (in 200 years) will be interesting.​

​"The Great Global Chemistry Experiment" from Fred Montague's Foxsense​. © 1992 Fred Montague