I am disgusted with Safeway as they are delivering to us non-food, as are most grocery outlets who are supposedly delivering so-called sustainable food. I live along a corridor that is abundant in wild blueberries. We cannot sell these in the open market (neither can we sell our local salmon or any other fish — or foods, without being run through and regulated by agriculture restrictions and alterations to be nuked as safer than safe — fish not so longer in abundance as a main staple food here, along with the loss of the forests and with the monopolization of industry who holds sway with 100/150 years of mining and logging) but we have to pay a whole lot for shipping or trucking or freighting in what are being called blueberries but are not blueberries at all, only the skins would allow them to be called a blueberry — the flesh is a disgusting white — suspiciously gmo’ed. I’ve already had a run in with the seedless watermelons, that the produce manager is outright ecstatic for me that I don’t have to deal with seeds. I wiped the smile off his young adult face by saying he needs to consider his seeds are next to go.
It is by intent we are a one road in one road out corridor monopolized/exploited by industry with mining and logging camps throughout, a large Indian reserve and small Dutch community (think potentially Johannesburg and South Africa). We were never encouraged to be self-sufficient along this corridor as industry held full sway. No large community was encouraged to block them from their free-for-all exploitation. Little did the system know we would finally understand the First Nations ideology, reciprocity; reciprocity is a Canadian/native term, that has been tacked onto free trade, and there is nothing at all free about it; we give all our raw resources like electricity, timber, fish, to the States and China and they sell it back to us in packaged form. We need now to gather together along this corridor and discuss how to best become self sufficient. We have the ability to do so, but not under this corrupt system.
The world is a global marketplace and yet we must pay the exorbitant freight fees to get our stuff returned to us — this is insane.
I am off the grid. I want to tell people this is not difficult and industry would keep us in fear to believe it is. We, the people with our two feet on the ground, are not responsible for the devastation of the reduction of our forests to kindling and vulnerable to bugs. We have allowed industry and government to be swayed monetarily by industry to reduce all to waste. And it burns as such. We are cutting down standing timber to make toothpicks and toilet paper with the appeasement that industry is reforesting, re-planting, but it will never be replaced, our global biosphere, ecosystem, it takes thousands of years to build nutrient efficient worm-healthy soil. The nutrients are mostly in the canopy, and this is what feeds the soil, creates the soil — we have and are destroying what we once called ‘home.’
There is no ‘away.’
No Planet ‘B.’
Only this Earth Planet,
Planet Be.
The whole of the natural world is a biosphere, an ecosystem that will support us if we treat it with respect. We don’t take more than we need. We support and strengthen it where we can. We return to it in kind. This equals reciprocity or ubuntu. It is time to become self-sufficient. We need to end this need for kumquats on our breakfast table at the expense of exploiting other countries, poverty ridden, starved out and left for dead under the title of democracy.
Aileen Norton Swift
Smithers
