Mother Nature's Call To Humanity
by Don Weaver
(earthdon@yahoo.com)

If you have read my past articles for Remineralize the Earth and Living Nutrition magazines, stressing the soil-human-Earth health connection, or have read the free Hamaker/Weaver books at www.remineralize.org, you are aware that human health and planetary health are so thoroughly interdependent that to think and speak of them separately is dangerously misleading. To do so just contributes to the health care crisis of "both." If we agree there really is no "both," I think we'll immediately start to feel better, more whole, empowered by a foundational truth.

A related truth is that there is plenty of room for personal-planetary health improvement, and Mother Nature is now loudly and clearly calling out for humanity to generously help Her regenerate the Earth we all share as our biological home. Fortunately, if we commit our minds, hearts, bodies and "sacred honor"--applying our current knowledge of health and ecology--we can reverse the current global degeneration process! While the term "sacred honor" is borrowed from America's Declaration of Independence, we can now more fully understand, honor and declare our Interdependence with all life.

Is anyone not yet aware that Nature is sending us increasingly frequent and obvious wake-up calls to transform our lives and create a healthy future? The following information summarizes only a few of these dramatic calls to awakening we should be taking quite seriously:

"The General Accounting Office conservatively estimates that 65 million acres of national forest are currently at high risk of catastrophic fires; one in three acres is either dead or dying." (Wall St. Journal, 1/12/01)

"Natural disasters killed 76,806 people in 2003, three times the number of victims in 2002, a rise due in part to extremes in the global climate...In all, a quarter of a billion people were affected by drought, floods, and earthquakes, which caused at least $56 billion in damage in 2003, twice the cost of the previous year, the Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in its annual World Disasters Report." (PlanetArk.com, 1/11/04)

"2004 will be the costliest year for the insurance industry worldwide, so it will be a new world record...Overall destruction costs will surge as high as $95 billion worldwide...based on the first ten months of the year." (PlanetArk.com, 12/16/04)

The massive tsunami that killed over 285,000 people in Dec. 2004 would send that estimate far higher, while storms in the U.S. alone did about $43 billion damage.

"The total number of tornadoes reported in the U.S. reached a record high in 2004, surpassing the previous record by almost 300...One tropical storm and five hurricanes affecting areas from Florida to the mid-Atlantic states...contributed to the year's total number of 1,717 tornado reports in the U.S., said Dan McCarthy, NOAA Storm Prediction Center warning coordination meteorologist." (NOAA Home Page, Dec. 30, 2004)

"Climate change researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream---the mighty ocean current that keeps Ireland and Europe from freezing. They have found that one of the 'engines' driving the Gulf Stream---the sinking of super-cooled water in the Greenland Sea---has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength...Paradoxically, it could lead to Ireland, Britain and northwestern Europe undergoing a sharp drop in temperatures. Such a change has long been predicted by scientists but the new research is among the first to show clear experimental evidence of the phenomenon." (Sunday Times of Ireland, 5/8/05)

Update 12/12/05: I want to acknowledge Time magazine environment writer Michael Lemonick for his 12/12/05 article, "Is Europe Due For A Big Chill?" in which he may be the first major media writer to state that the increasing North Atlantic freshwater input may be due to increased precipitation, not just from "melting." Other articles say the Atlantic Conveyor current has slowed by about one-third in just the past 12 years.

"Floods and landslides killed about 140 people in western India on Wednesday, and scores more were feared dead after a wall of mud flattened a village...In Bombay, meteorologists said heavy rains and high winds were forecast to continue for another 48 hours, after a record 37 inches of rainfall in the north of the city during the previous day." (Epoch Times, 7/28/05)

"Glaciers in southern New Zealand have begun to advance over the last two years...The country's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research used aerial photos to reveal that some of the 50 newly advancing glaciers are gaining as much as 3 feet in length per day." (S.F. Chronicle, 9/24/05)

As I write this on Oct. 18, 2005, KTVU Ch. 2 News reports on the latest hurricane, Wilma, which ties the record of 12 major Atlantic hurricanes in one year since records began in 1857. This one, too, is heading for the U.S. mainland, and with a barometric pressure of 26.05, it also becomes the most intense hurricane every recorded. 2005 has seen 3 of the 6 most intense hurricanes on record in Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, and with 6 weeks left in the Atlantic hurricane season, 2005 has already tied the 1933 record for most tropical storms in one season, 21.

10/23 update: Alpha, the record-breaking 22nd named storm, is underway. It is said that eight hurricanes have hit Florida in just 15 months, the Gulf of Mexico was five degrees warmer than normal in August, and Category 4 and 5 storms have almost doubled from about 10 per year in the 1970s to 18 per year the past decade. Also, from Sandi Doughton's 10/9/05 Seattle Times article, "Is warming making hurricanes more ferocious?":

"Atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also calculated a power index for hurricanes in the Atlantic and North Pacific back to 1949. Beginning in the 1970s, he found, destructive power began climbing and is now nearly double what it was four decades ago."

And here is a related 9/15/05 BBC News article by Helen Briggs, "'Warming link' to big hurricanes," which says: "Between 1975 and 1989, there were 171 severe hurricanes but the number rose to 269 between 1990 and 2004." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4249138.stm)

11/30 update: We've now seen a record 26th tropical storm, and a record 13th hurricane, with the damage estimate from Katrina alone being at least $80 billion, shattering Andrew's 1992 record of $26.5 billion. ("2005 Hurricane Season Rewrites The Record Books," Reuters News Service, 11/30/05, via www.planetark.com)

12/07/05 update: Britain's The Independent online edition, today carries Science Editor Steve Connor's article, "The worst weather ever? At $200 billion, it's certainly the costliest." Consider this excerpt:

"Severe weather around the world has made 2005 the most costly year on record with unprecedented levels of insurance claims on damaged property, the United Nations Environment Programme says. Early estimates made by the insurance company Munich Re Foundation put the year's financial losses at more than $200 billion (117 billion pounds) with insurance claims running at more than $70 billion. In 2004, the previous most costly year for weather-related incidents, losses totaled about $145 billion and claims reached $45 billion....Thomas Loster, chief executive of Munich Re Foundation and a member of the finance initiative of the UNEP, said the global weather in 2005 was exceptional in many ways: 'There is a powerful indication from these figures that we are moving from predictions of the likely impacts of climate change to proof that it is already fully under way.'"

As I've pointed out before, it would cost less money to follow John Hamaker's prescription to Regenerate the Earth via global soil remineralization and planting the needed billions of new forest trees, biomass energy plantations, and revitalized food crops, thus saving ourselves and the Biosphere, than it costs to suffer the ravages of the growing loss of our life-support systems and "the balance of Nature" on Earth---including our deteriorating interglacial climate. (Robert Felix attempts ongoing documentation of this deterioration at his website: www.iceagenow.com.) This loss of balance is confirmed by the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, reported on by Steve Connor in the UK's The Independent (3/30/05) in "The State of the World? It is on the Brink of Disaster," which begins:

"Planet Earth stands on the cusp of disaster and people should no longer take it for granted that their children and grandchildren will survive in the environmentally degraded world of the 21st century. This is not the doom-laden talk of green activists but the considered opinion of 1,300 leading scientists from 95 countries who will today publish a detailed assessment of the state of the world at the start of the new millennium. The report does not make jolly reading. The academics found that two-thirds of the delicately-balanced ecosystems they studied have suffered badly at the hands of man over the past 50 years."

The report says that reversing the ongoing degradation of ecosystems is possible but "will require radical changes in the way nature is treated at every level of decision-making and new ways of cooperation between government, business and civil society." Apparently, as with previous planetary health assessments, this one doesn't recommend the specific solutions obvious to those of us focused on personal-planetary health-building and regeneration: global soil remineralization and tree planting to re-stabilize CO2 levels and climate, growing enough biomass energy crops to replace the increasingly counter-productive fossil fuels, and general adoption of healthful, ecological diets and lifestyles. Nor does it acknowledge the critical need to grow an abundance of the highest-quality mineralized plant foods so humanity can thrive in disease-free health, while wisely eliminating the wasteful, destructive and unnecessary drug crops for tobacco, opium, alcohol, cocaine, refined sugar, coffee, cocoa, etc.

I think the 6 million children dying of malnutrition and starvation annually would be grateful if we would use Nature's lands and resources more wisely, as might the people of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, where "the number of malnourished people grew to 203.5 million in 2000-02 from 170.4 million 10 years earlier," according to the U.N.'s slow-to-awaken Food and Agriculture Organization. (S.F. Chronicle, 11/23/05---"Malnutrition, hunger kill 6 million kids") Elsewhere it has been documented that at least 2 billion human beings suffer from serious malnutrition, while John Hamaker and I have asserted it is closer to 6 billion, reasoning that truly well-nourished people would already be working hard to regenerate the soils and Earth for current and future generations. That we are neglecting this work may prove the greatest of tragedies.

Let us re-focus (as often as needed) on those things and qualities that truly promote health and life!

Returning again to our soil foundation, a 7/6/05 San Francisco Chronicle article reminds us how Mother Nature loves to bring together the key elements of life to produce abundance and make a natural spectacle of herself. From the article, "Despite Small Farming Profits, Alaska Has Texas-Size Veggies,"(Alaska is actually bigger than Texas) we read of growers like John Evans in the glacially-fertilized Matanuska Valley:

"Evans, 54, certainly knows how to pick 'em---the man holds 14 all-time records at the fair, and he's had produce in the Heaviest Fruit and Vegetables category in the Guinness World Records book seven times....'You wouldn't believe what a fantastic feeling that was,' Evans said of his 1998 feat. 'It's the biggest high you could imagine, to pull a 19-lb. carrot out of the ground.'

"So perhaps he exaggerates---Guinness lists his carrot as 18 lbs., 13 ozs. It's a Bunyanesque stretch of a core truth that belies Alaska's frozen-North image: Alaska's an ideal place to grow really, really big vegetables. As in, a 75.75-lb. rutabaga. A 63.3-lb. celery. A 39.2-lb. turnip. World records all."

Later on the article refers to a 64.8-lb. cantaloupe and an Alaska record 105.6-lb. cabbage. What are the primary keys to such production and why aren't soil scientists and growers and people worldwide climbing over themselves to find out? The simple keys:

"With rich, glacier-ground volcanic soil and summer days that have 20 hours of sunshine---a lot of photo to go along with the synthesis---the fertile valleys attract big-league growers the way Mount Everest attracts climbers."

While most farmers and gardeners don't have the luxury of 20 hours of sunlight per day, there is no good reason for any of them to be without affordable access to the ground rock dust that is (along with adequate soil organic matter and water) the key to high fertility and quality high production.

Cal-Organic of Grimmway Farms, the largest organic produce farm in California and the world, has decided it likes the results of remineralizing its organic acreage and has ordered 1350 tons of the Summa Minerals rock dust, including 768 tons in a recent 12-month period, according to Dennis Curran of Summa Minerals (702-256-2990). He also told me they're going from using the rock dust on 20% of their organic acreage to 100%. As Remineralize the Earth President Joanna Campe points out in the Forum at www.remineralize.org: "This is exciting because Grimmway is utilizing soil remineralization as a highly successful way to transition from mainstream to a highly mineralized organic agriculture. It is likely that many other mainstream farmers will become aware of this path to sustainable agriculture through their example." This was my hope when I sent copies of The Survival of Civilization to most of California's certified organic farmers, including Grimmway, in the 1980s and 1990s. The Grimmway Farms brands include the Cal-Organic and Bunny Luv organic vegetables seen in most natural food stores.

Dennis Curran also reports that "prominent vintner" Joseph Phelps in St. Helena has changed his fertility program to include Summa Minerals on 300 of his 400 acres. Dennis thinks this is a pretty big event "due to his prestige in the industry," and that other big growers, including food growers, will be impressed by his example.

Dave Nielsen could be one so impressed. According to AP's 10/19/05 story by Emily Fredrix, "Farmer's Fret Over Fertilizer Costs":

"Dave Nielsen just spent nearly $14,000 to fertilize his crops, an amount he never could have imagined when he started farming 20 years ago. But the $410 a ton Nielsen paid is symptomatic of the crunch farmers are feeling this year as the cost of fertilizer soars. While rising natural gas prices are causing concerns about heating costs this winter, farmers are wondering how they'll pay for fertilizer, which uses the energy source to produce its main ingredients, such as ammonia or nitrates...In the early 1990s, prices hovered around $200 a ton...Last year, it was about $335 a ton."

Farmer Nielsen expresses concern that if he and his fellows on the chemical treadmill cut back too much on the forcing chemicals, "then you start robbing your soil." I admire his concern, and will see if I can reach him near Lincoln, Nebraska to gently break the news that he has likely been robbing it of most elements plus organic matter for 20 years.

I bought a 2200-lb. supersack of Summa Minerals in Spring and added some to my new garden plot of about 20' x 60', and to some other garden beds. I also added a sprinkling of Opti-Min C90 sea solids from SeaAgri.com, another source of 90 or more mineral elements. I was quite impressed by the eight cucumber plants that became a jungle, producing over 100 excellent cucumbers, most being thick and 8-12" long. They were a big hit among those who saw and ate them during my talks at Rawstock III natural health conference in Sebastopol, California, providing pure, delicious evidence of the value of soil remineralization. More recently, speaking to the Marin County (California) raw food potluck group, my garden's massive 2-foot long and delicious collard leaves were also persuasive and helped inspire the audience to keep me an extra hour to answer questions and plan new gardens.

Also remarkable in my garden was the height of the delicious mineralized sweet corn of four varieties, their stalks ranging from 8-14 feet tall with a spectrum of good-sized ears, best eaten raw right in the patch before various four-legged fresh produce connoisseurs pounced on them. The best tomato plants in the first-year garden are large, healthy, and producing well, the cages proving too small to help them grow beyond 7 feet before turning back downward. I'll be enjoying great fruits daily at least well into November. I am deeply grateful to the late great John Hamaker for teaching me how to feed the soil organisms their complete natural diet. After 29 years eating only fresh raw plant foods, including as much as I can grow or find from mineralized soils, I feel as healthy as ever after my first 50 trips around the Sun!

Another recent breakthrough toward public enlightenment regarding soil remineralization as the basis of a truly "sustainable" culture and green growing Biosphere is the October 8, 2005 San Francisco Chronicle publication of Deborah Rich's article on the ecologist Lee Klinger's work, "Scientist takes holistic approach to sudden oak death." Lee is reversing tree diseases like the "fearsome" sudden oak death (SOD), now widely manifesting disease symptoms in California, through soil remineralization with rock dust. John Hamaker, Joanna Campe and I informed Lee about remineralization back in the 1980s while he was at NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) and was one of the rare scientists writing of the threat of re-glaciation, with emphasis on the degeneration of global forest cover due to soil demineralization/acidification.

From this Chronicle article, millions of readers can learn Lee Klinger's remineralization method, now used on more than 5,000 trees afflicted with malnutrition, SOD, and other disease conditions in the last three years, with "all but a handful" responding with a flush of healthy canopy growth. Hundreds of before and after photos are available and Lee is "developing a following among property owners and managers."

"As a preventive treatment or when trees are only mildly stressed, Klinger applies a 'soil sweetener' to the surface of the soil beneath the tree from the trunk out to the drip line...He prefers a product called Azomite, a mined natural crushed rock that contains potash, calcium and more than 50 trace minerals. For trees that have fungi and mosses growing on their trunks, that have bleeding cankers or whose canopy tops are dying back, Klinger also applies a lime wash to the trunk of the trees (from the root crown up to an extended arm's reach) using a mixture of lime, sea salt and volcanic ash. Klinger recommends applying the treatments once a year for the first two or three years. After that, he expects that the soil and trunk treatments will be necessary only once every several years. Labor and materials for the treatments generally cost $50-100 per tree, depending on its size."

Naturally, we should expect the honorable public servants and wise land stewards in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its Forest Service to be thrilled by and grateful for this work by such a respected scientist as Lee Klinger, who holds a doctorate in biogeography, has authored over 50 publications in ecology, geochemistry, and Earth system science, and who has held scholarly positions at Oxford, University of Colorado, University of East London, NCAR, etc. Unfortunately, the terms "naturally" and "USDA" continue to fit poorly, to the detriment of all. If only it had originally been founded as the U.S. Department of Natural Agriculture and been declared free of influence by the chemical conglomerates and Big Agribusiness power and money, the national and global health status could be so far advanced, not sadly degenerated.

"Klinger has so far been unable to secure a portion of the $30 million in federal funds spent to date on SOD research to test his theory. He has submitted three proposals to the U.S. Forest Service in the past three years, all of which have been denied despite his academic qualifications.

For those of you who do have open minds and wish to learn more about all available means to save and regenerate yourself and local-global life-support systems, I suggest including Lee Klinger and his website: Lee Klinger, Sudden Oak Life, POB 664, Big Sur, CA 93920; (831) 917-7070; info@suddenoaklife.org; www.suddenoaklife.org.

Jeremy and Kim White, an intelligent, Nature-loving couple from Corseaux, Switzerland sent a follow-up letter to the editor, published in the Chronicle October 19, 2005:

"We live on Lake Geneva next to Montreux, where the Montreux Jazz Festival is held every July. Our property is called La Crottaz and is one of the few 19th century gardens left in Switzerland. It is an important garden with more than 70 varieties of trees. We have treated our old pines (200 to 300 years old) along with the 70-plus variety of trees in our garden with the treatment suggested by Lee Klinger ('Scientist takes holistic approach to sudden oak death,' Oct. 8), which has shown good results.

"We have seen tremendous recovery to some of our old pine, tulip and chestnut trees. Even the flower beds that received his medicine have flourished. Flora and fauna are very important to the Swiss people, and keeping our country free from pesticides has always been our aim."

Hippocrates urged us to "First do no harm," a key part of the commonly broken Hippocratic Oath of drug-oriented physicians. He also advised, "Let food be your medicine." By now it should be obvious to us all that health---from soil to psyche---requires the generous provision of natural foods for the Earth and its great diversity of "willing workers," the soil microorganisms which can bring it to such magnificent abundant life!

How long before this soil- and tree-saving information will reach other countries in crisis, such as Germany, where Karin Strohecker submits the January 25, 2006 report, "Germany's Mighty Oaks Threatened by Pollution." Excerpts:

"Germany's oak trees --- famed for their strength and a much-loved national symbol --- have alarming levels of pollution damage, with one in two showing severe symptoms, a government report said on Tuesday. An Environment Ministry report on the state of Germany's forests said the number of oaks with damaged crowns (upper section including branches and leaves) had nearly doubled in the past 11 years to 85 percent in 2005. Even more dramatic was the rise in trees with severe treetop damage, up to 51 percent in 2005 from 9 percent in 1984...The number of trees in total with severe damage to their crowns stood at 29 percent, the ministry said." (www.planetark.com)

I've said this before and it bears repeating: we the human species --- Homo sapiens or "wise man" --- need to fulfill our wisdom potential by becoming the consciously generous species, enabling the soil and whole spectrum of living Earth creatures to thrive in health within a renewed planetary Balance of Nature. That could be a "heaven on Earth," which I think every sane person will vote for over the current direction toward an eco-climatic "hell." We cast our vote with the entire way we live our life.

See you in the Garden. (Don't forget the rock dust.)