Rock Dust Revealed A Glimpse Of Eden

By James Donahue

A story in the UK Guardian a few years ago told of an English couple that discovered how super-rich the dust from a rock quarry can be in their garden and dramatized just how much our planet has been stripped of its nutrients by human encroachment.

In 2005 retired school teachers Cameron and Moira Thomson used rock dust and compost to convert six acres of open and infertile land near Pitlochry into what they called a modern Eden.

The soil was enriched so much that the two claimed they were growing cabbages the size of footballs, onions bigger than coconuts and gooseberries as big as plums.

Somewhat misguided, however, the Thomsons had the idea that the Earth might be saved if everybody grinds up rocks to rejuvenate the land. They believe replacement of the minerals lost in the soil over the past 10,000 years might grow super plants and perhaps even halt climate change.

While this kind of enrichment of the soil might make things green again we have to think the giant rock crushing machinery it would take to grind up enough stones would consume so much energy, the effect would have to be even more damaging to the environment. The whole picture seems somewhat absurd when we think about it.

The Thomson experiment, however, reveals just how much damage the human race has caused to the Earth during the many thousands of years that we have farmed and exploited it.

Instead of keeping the covenant and being stewards of the magnificent Mother who gives us life, we collectively raped and pillaged her until we drained her life energies beyond all chance of recovery.

It hasn’t always been this way. Farmers for hundreds, if not thousands of years, understood the importance of rotating crops and using natural compost, harvested plant remains and animal manure to maintain soil nutrients.

When the human population was relatively low and there was lots of new land to settle, however, many civilizations thought nothing of cutting down the forests and farming the land until it no longer produced. After that it was relatively easy to move on and settle new lands.

Consider the planet as it was when we first arrived. A plush rain forest, with giant trees, and fruit so large you could make a meal on one picking. When white settlers first came to the Great Lakes only a few hundred years ago, the lakes were literally teeming with fish. The early fishermen were scooping them from the waters by the net full.

Most of the damage was done within the past century. The advent of factory farming has been the most damaging. Now with big corporations like Monsanto dominating the seed industry and forcing farmers to buy company produced and patented genetically modified seeds the rape of the Earth has intensified.

We could have stopped it as recently as the 1970s during the campaign to pass environmental protection laws and do everything we could to save the planet. The few environmental laws that were passed as a result of that movement were stripped of their potency during the years George W. Bush and his administration controlled the White House.

Even though the people voted for change, replacing Bush with Barack Obama, the zombies appear to remain in control. While Mr. Obama has reversed many of the actions of the Bush Administration, and revitalized some of the power of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the problem of industrial farming goes on.

Something very dramatic needs to happen if humanity ever hopes to return to Eden, as it was in the beginning. Before we can have this, however, a majority of the people in the world must agree that this is what they truly want.