From the Publisher Archive

The Court of Your Own Opinion

Rendering judgement in the court of your opinionSometimes it’s hard (if not impossible) to tell what’s really going on in the world. It’s human nature for individuals and organizations to promote themselves in a favorable, self-serving way. Research, PR and advertising firms have made profitable industries out of this. They work hard to find out what you want to hear, and feed it back to you with a high degree of polish. That’s why we have clean coal, fruit loops, fast food, the benefits of GMOs, the sweet surprise of high-fructose corn syrup, and politicians for the people.

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What’s So Special about Specialization?

On the assembly lineIndustrialization brought many of us a standard of living the likes of which have been enjoyed only by royalty and the most privileged upper classes. The magic formula that kicked Earth’s productive capacity, and our good fortune, into high gear is specialization, economies of scale and trade.

It’s all about efficiency, and that begins with being a specialist (“What do you want to be when you grow up?”). You do your part (man your station) and others will do their parts, and like interlocking gears, these specialists work together and out of this process comes the stuff we have all grown to know and love.

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Will Big Food work in the natural market?

Pizza and friesAmerica has been on a long binge. We’ve consumed vast quantities of the fruits of mass production. We’ve grown up with the siren song of more, more and more for less.  But now we find ourselves in an economically troubled world where cheap food has taken its toll on our health, the environment is in trouble, and we depend on a continuous stream of globally sourced stuff produced by people at the very bottom of the economic food chain.

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Factory mass-market conformity is dead

Back in 1964 (my apologies if you weren’t born then) Bob Dylan sang about changing times. In one of his most famous songs the singer-poet wrote, “The order is rapidly fadin’, and the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changin’.”

No question that the sixties shook things up (yes, I was there), but it turns out that it took industrialized America until the end of the millenium to witness real status quo-altering change.

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Land of the free and home of the brave

Standing up to GMO business as usualSometimes it takes bravery to maintain your freedom. But in everyday life freedom doesn’t seem to be much of an issue. We have a lot of advantages as Americans, and life’s routines seldom bring challenges significant enough to require that type of courage.

Unfortunately, while most of us are occupied one way or another with the pursuit of happiness, economic and political forces are stoking the moneymaking machinery of our society without regard for our welfare.

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You don’t have to be Einstein

EinsteinAlbert Einstein was credited as defining insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Sometimes it takes quite a while to fully understand the results of our actions. Things we’ve done or items we’ve consumed repeatedly that were considered good or benign may reveal themselves as damaging in the longer term.

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Time to Upgrade Our Mental Software

Human Thinking 2.0Human Thinking 1.0 (Western Edition) was overall a pretty nifty mental operating system. Testament to this is the fact that we’re still here after all these years. But of course there are bugs that we can’t continue to ignore. We seem to inevitably end up periodically in armed conflict and have made rather a mess of our economy, our environment and our health.

The biggest problem with the system is that, while we are all interconnected in a myriad of ways, Human Thinking 1.0 is not a networked system. It functions on the basis of what’s good for me or us and largely ignores the resultant effects created in other areas.

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The detoxification of America

You’ve probably heard the term toxic asset from media covering the financial crisis. Here’s a quick refresher for those not fluent in economic-speak. An asset is anything that is capable of being owned or controlled to produce value and that is held to have positive economic worth. Something toxic is harmful, injurious, poisonous or even deadly. A toxic asset is an asset whose value has fallen significantly and for which there is no longer a functioning market. The asset can’t be sold at a price satisfactory to the holder. If, for example, you bought a car and later it turned out to have a manufacturing defect that rendered it dangerous to drive, your car would have become a toxic asset, sellable only for parts.

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Who’s doing what to whom and why

If you’re proactive about living a healthy life and desire the same for your family, friends and others, today’s America forces you into the role of an activist. Now, I’m a child of the sixties, so this comes fairly naturally to me. But when you have to fight over not getting poisoned or sick or genetically modified by the food you eat, and the government giving free rein to chemical, biotech and food companies to conduct human biological experiments on us for profit, you’ve got to wonder what the hell is going on? (pardon my “French”).

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Why do we have to fight for sustainability?

Good people are making positive changes in the world today. It seems that many of humanity’s best and brightest have understood that we have been heading down a dangerous path. They observed the warning signs in our environment, in our food supply, in our health and the health of our children. They are rising to the occasion and, by their own efforts, helping alter our course from certain destruction to laying the foundation for a sustainable planet and sustainable living.

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The positive power of non-conformity

One of the great things about America is that we have the freedom, as individuals, to come up with ideas and act on them. We don’t need to apply for a license to proffer a better way of doing things or launch an enterprise that, even in some small way, would make people’s lives better.

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The capacity to redesign our lives

I invite you to consider that, with the exception of severe weather and natural disasters, the troubles in our world are man-made. But most of us are good people and very few of us actually set out to do bad things—in fact, quite the opposite. So how do we, as the most intelligent inhabitants of this planet, end up moving from one potential disaster to another as chronicled in the subject we call history?

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The exploitation of our future

The word exploitation means “use (of a situation or person) in an unfair or selfish way.” Much to our collective shame, we have permitted our children to be exploited as a market niche. Under the advertised benefits of convenience and lower cost, this experiment in free-market capitalism has resulted in the enrichment of mega food corporations and a disaster for our future generation.

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Are we getting what we pay for?

Americans love cheap food. We spend less of our incomes  on food now than ever before. In 1949, we allotted 22 percent of our incomes to food. In 2009, that figure dropped to only 10 percent (about half of what the Japanese and French spend). Seems good until you correlate another set of statistics. Back in 1959, only 4 percent of children were overweight. Today that figure has climbed to 19 percent. In 1979, 28 percent of adults were overweight. Now it’s a shocking 64 percent.

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Are we heading into the future or the past?

When it comes to the direction our lives in this society are going to take, future or past may be the question.

The past, with roots extending back to the Industrial Revolution, is represented by a paradigm (a model, approach or underlying assumption) in which man and technology subjugate nature. Natural resources are used up and mountains of waste disposed of without regard to consequences, while assembly-line principles of “efficiency” are applied to food production, human health, and life in its many forms.

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Putting your money where your mouth is

America’s love affair with cheap food has landed us in ninth place on the obesity scale out of 194 countries ranked by the World Health Organization. According to the New York Times, two-thirds of the US population is overweight.

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The good, the bad and the unsustainable

To quote Charles Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….” This seems quite applicable to the present state of affairs in our fair country. We are living in an age of both wisdom and foolishness.

I suggest that at the root of this dichotomy lies bad, or simply unworkable, technology. How do you know a technology is bad? By its observable results—not by its promises or “scientific” justifications. Good technologies lead us toward the best of times. Bad ones give us newspaper headlines and top stories on the 6 o’clock news.

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Celebrate diversity or mandate uniformity?

Life isn’t always neat. Just ask any parents with young children. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Nature doesn’t come in just one size or one color. Neither do people. English poet William Cowper once said, “Variety’s the very spice of life.” Do we want to revel in nature’s bounty or see Earth become one giant clean room?

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Whose country is it anyway?

I recently returned from a trip to our nation’s capital to do some lobbying on behalf of the natural products industry. It was a wake-up call for me, as I haven’t been all that interested in politics.

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The science lab vs. Mother Nature

Despite the fact that the airwaves and print media are blanketed with advertisements telling you to “ask your doctor about ——” or “ask your doctor if —— is right for you,” the Pharma marketing message isn’t reaching half of the US population who prefer taking vitamin and mineral supplements. There is a growing preference for natural remedies versus powerful laboratory creations with long lists of alarming side effects. In fact, a recent survey found that 72 percent of physicians (nearly 3 out of 4) take vitamin and mineral supplements for their own health.

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The war of intelligence versus arrogance

The dictionary defines arrogant as “having or revealing an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance or abilities.” It comes from the Latin root meaning “claiming for oneself.” Why is this of interest? Because it helps to explain some of what we see around us. Rather than seeking to live with one another in a civil civilization, some opt for power and wealth (claiming for themselves) no matter the cost to others.

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Why life isn’t as easy as it should be

If this headline got your attention, it was purely by design. I believe that life isn’t inherently hard. It gets made that way.

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Now isn’t the time for business as usual

Alot has been said about the environment and once you’ve seen pictures of the polar ice melting and learn of the potential consequences, you’re either a believer or you haven’t been listening. The good news is that many people have been listening. But the situation facing our planet calls for emergency response—not business as usual.

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A new vision of health begins in the soil

We named this magazine Organic Connections because of our belief that life is interconnected. We don’t live in isolation from our neighbors, our fellow humans across the planet or from the environment. The principle of cause and effect applies in each of these areas and is just beginning to be recognized on a global basis.

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The folly of relying on authority

Throughout history there has been no lack of prevailing wisdom. The bad news is that it has often proven to be more prevailing than wise. Authorities of the day held that the earth was flat and tried to ban the notion that the earth orbits around the sun.

Lest we believe that such errors are consigned to the distant past, we have only to look at the history of “modern” medicine.

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