Our international trade reliance on food alone should be a big red flag. Here in Western Washington, we can at least source local food year round- because of our amazing temperate climate, and a lot of inputs on farms that do. Livestock operations can only scale to the size of inputs they earn, and the vast majority of what you buy in a store is not 100% pasture raised. Though most of our grains go abroad, well, did go abroad, but that’s changing here in the US because of our current administration at the federal level. This same chaotic admin threw out clean water protections at the EPA and stopped oversight testing, encouraging industry to pollute away. The microplastics are in us, our water, soil, air, everything, and we’re not slowing our plastics intake. In my ’73 trailer, the floors are plastic, the walls are painted in plastic, kitchen counters, appliances, and spice lids are all plastic. All this will shed for the rest of its existence. It’s blowing out through the door onto the porch and into the gardens. But it’s falling in our rain, hanging in the clouds as they circumnavigate oceans and continents, interconnected around this finite globe.
I’ve been asking myself a lot about what’s left of our forests here in Washington. It’s part of a very important ecosystem that holds our lungs, the purest air in America, some say, except during fire season, which is getting longer each year. The water I rely on for my farm is pumped from an aquifer that is also finite. Only so much water can be taken out, only so much put in. These cycles of boom and bust are part of nature’s balancing act. Living scales of this planet determine when it rains and when drought sets in. These cycles can be followed, with a bit of forecasting, but we don’t know what’s coming next, and even if we did, we could not stop it. This is the way of a living system, and our hubris to keep thinking we can rule it, rather than work with it in a smart way, dumbfounds. Here is a timeline of recent cutting on The Olympic Peninsula, there are countless tree harvesting operations across this state, but this peninsula focus is in an area where watershed buffers and some of the last older trees vanish. I used Mapquest for this, simply zooming in and out to see a frightening time-laps just south of The Olympic National Park.
There are so many already cleared and replanted timber plantations all around, yet these more recent cuts are targeting edges of protected areas where buffers were drawn half a century ago. When we cut these last buffer areas, where natural re-seedings are still happening, we are letting go the last of the recovering forests that struggle to bank our water, clean the air, and keep soil in place on the ground. Plantation forests can’t do the work properly, as there is no building soil, diversity of species, or lasting habitat for long term regeneration. The timber plantations do not naturally reseed with much, the ecology keeps being stripped back to bare earth, now sprayed with harsh chemicals, preventing the last of native plants to retreat and die out. This madness is our undoing here in what was one of the most pristine, regenerative temperate rainforests on earth. The original forests here acted like a giant sponge to hold all the rain in the ground; slow sinking the rains into aquifers.
Our finite aquifers are being drained now more than ever, around the world. More and more straws pushed into Mother Nature’s skin, the living, breathing landscape, sucked dry. When we play vampires to this planet, we loose our paradise home, consuming it in greed with the aid of distraction from our screens. Then whole neighborhoods loose their shared well, while other’s on municipal water structures, see the bills climb higher and higher. Your other utilities are mounting too, with electricity, one of our favorite conveniences, climbing into the top spot, though water is life, and no matter how much electricity we have, we’re not drinking it.
Anyone happily going down the road of desalinization plants and reverse osmosis on the scale we’ll need for the whole world, knows nothing of finite still. Leftover brine from saltwater purification kills the ocean when it’s released back in, and the power to generate such ambitious industrial processing, consumes more than each of us ever needs in a lifetime, several times a week. It’s crazy town, and we’ve all bought in, choosing to live there through our participation. Wheels on fire indeed. Then we pour chemical cocktails all over what’s left of our natural world; fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, and all the fuel to get it to us, into our fields, and on the food we eat. Seeds are coated in these chemicals before planting, the soil is doused in it several times a year, and the food keeps loosing taste and nutrition. We keep expecting to get something while giving nothing back, nothing alive.
Imagine trying to live off plastics and artificial chemical drenches? Then cut and remove the majority of our living biomass. The math does not add up. We will not get away with this much longer, and that’s where understanding the situation of food and water in our world today is so important. The happy little hippy places like Leafhopper farm can’t suddenly produce enough non-chemical food for the community. We’d all have to start cultivating. If the world turned to providing its own basic needs, we’d suddenly realize how little most have, no matter the money in the bank.
Perhaps those with a lot of land could grow a lot of food, but not without the people to help with all the work on so much land. That’s why big farming equipment and the fuel companies run agriculture, at least the agriculture that lets you go to the store and buy anything out of season. Everyone wanted to grow stable crops and livestock will need water, and clean water if they want our eating of said crops and animal products safe. It’s not right now, not unless you’re able to afford local hand crafted. That’s not where most of us stand in the grocery store. How many of you are clicking a shopping list online and picking up or having it delivered? That’s another great way to hurry along consumption in our communities, eating away at the leaf like the fat little caterpillars we are, until there are no more leaves, and we can’t keep having them shipped in from abroad. International instability through climate change, wars, political corruption, power hungry madness, has already destabilized much of global trade.
I’d also like a moment to mention how much abuse USA inflicts on Central and South America for the sake of the fruit industry. This includes the berries you eat, having pineapple in the store at all, and any other kind of juicy sweet fresh things out of season. Our economic hit men and covert military operations to control local governments, to take over, have led to some of the cheapest, most readily available food ever brought to the store. We complain about “those people” coming in through our southern boarders one way, not ever acknowledging the destabilization wrought on them by our own government, to create the illusion of prosperity in US. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, and we’re letting ICE pick pick pick our communities apart.
The layers involved in keeping the lights on, taps running, and food on the table has become utter lunacy. With all that withdrawing without returning in good condition, we’ve spent out our collateral and are now running on fumes and distracted by data centers. That’s the specter of capitalism haunting us. Corporations are wealthy important people now, so your little town, city, democratic right gets put on the back shelf, but you get more streaming options, and tokens for your little play thing A.I., trained by megalomaniacs of social media addiction. A dash of sports betting never hurts. With a country running at a 40 trillion deficit, we’re all doing just fine.
What can you do? Grow something at home and start learning about seed saving and seasonal eating. Discover more about your wild water, options for filtration, and what your community is doing to protect its water table. You might need to move to a better water source, and check forever chemical levels in your area. There are no maximum levels in our current national inspection system, which is a full reversal from research released just before 2025, that showed the great harm in forever chemicals, and recommended maximums to help keep people safe. Most highly populated areas are contaminated- especially near military instillation. Stop drinking bottled water if you can, it’s often as bad as tap water, or worse. Our courts recently ruled that safe drinking water is not a fundamental human right, so what comes out of the tap can be toxic, and that’s now ok. Test your water and invest in filtration while you can.
I can’t stress enough what’s coming down the pipe, we’re living in a land of insanity, and corporate greed continues to drive us deeper into complete ecological collapse. I won’t spend much more time breaking this down for you, but one more nail in the coffin of our food systems is the price of diesel fuel. Trains, planes, and trucks bring your food to the grocery stores- because they aren’t growing it out back, that’s for sure. Refrigeration revolutionized the food industry, and brought fresh produce, dairy, and meat to people across the country. Now the refrigerated transport, which runs on diesel fuel, is collapsing because it’s too expensive to move trucks around. It’s economy before environment, and when both fail, we’re up that nasty polluted creek without a paddle. Find your local grower now and start helping them plan for next year’s crop. Learn what’s local and where to invest so you’ll have a food source when the store shelves are empty. Supply is going to dwindle, no matter the demand, act now to make sure you know where your next meal is coming from.
