Spiritual reconversion and Agricultural innovation

Spiritual reconversion and Agricultural innovation

We are so used to tackling the problems of our world from a purely technical or financial point of view, to mention only the most recurring approaches, that in recent times in human history we have often lost the compass of our path.
A path that since the first spark of reasoning has led humanity to ask questions, to seek answers, including the most profound: the true meaning of life.
Yet in recent times it would seem that this civilization (with all its obvious multiplicity) has stopped pursuing these questions, pushing itself only to obtain the maximum profit from its existence, obviously not only in economic terms. A pathological selfishness, son of this corrupt thought.
Thus was born that culture of increasingly uninhibited liberalism, of reductionism and market policies and of that capitalism which, seen favorably by many economists in its birth, is showing all its cracks and gaps.
Suddenly our planet, with everything that inhabits it, including human beings, has become an object and no longer a subject.
Otherwise, even with the necessary extreme synthesis of this brief reflection, colonialism with the massacre of entire populations (think of the American Indians, the Aborigines in Australia and so on), the submission of entire peoples and not last is the great ecological and social crisis we have entered and from which we can only emerge with a new way of being.
It is worth quoting A. Einstein’s famous phrase: “We cannot solve problems with the same kind of thinking that we used when we created them”.
Which is equivalent to saying that we must pass from the vision of Reality as an object to that of a subject, all included and involved within it.
So everything that revolves around one of the great diseases of our time: agriculture, with all its annexes and connections, cannot be solved only from a technical point of view, of means, of hypothetical markets and innovations, without change the focus of the question. And the center of the question is not materialistic but spiritual, that is, the human conscience with all its behaviors, from when it puts a seed in the ground to when it is transported or eaten.
All this, without ignoring the fact that we are drops of an immense ocean which, by isolating ourselves, we dry up, risking giving a definitive end to civilization, at least as we know it until now.
We recall, for greater clarity of reading, that it is correct to understand that, to quote another great scientist of the past, namely I. Newton: “What we know is just a drop, what we ignore is an ocean”.
All this entails a different approach to the planning and programming of this great patient, to which the European Union itself tries to give solutions but with a language full of cobwebs and polluted by too many interests.
Without mentioning the new CAP, with the two great pillars of the European Agricultural Policy, the issue is much deeper and more complex.
The first clarification to be made is that we need to get out of the (artfully studied) terrorism of multinationals and correlated media systems, which continually try to convince us that by abandoning the so-called “Conventional Agriculture”, where the conventional term itself can be defined as the first Greenwashing in history , we will not be able to feed the planet, with all its logical consequences.
It is an affirmation without any scientific foundation to which, among other things, the research of recent times and the numerous meta-analyses of various Research Institutes of the World, demonstrate, on the foundations of the ecology of dissipative systems (which are precisely the ecosystems, natural or agricultural), that the primary productivity of a system increases with the increase in biodiversity and not vice versa. This is equivalent to saying that Agroecological Systems are considerably more productive and resilient than specialized agricultural systems.
Obviously, we well understand that, since agroecological systems are circular and thermodynamically more closed models, the needs of external inputs (such as fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, hormones, etc.) decrease considerably (almost to the point of being able to cancel), multinationals, and some sympathetic agricultural organizations do not welcome this transition, continually rushing to publish false data and information that end up confusing helpless citizens, farmers and technicians, thus opening a chasm between us and the ever-growing planet.
At this rate, therefore, the issues cannot be resolved and, in defiance of all the proclamations of Agenda 2030, of the Green Deal, and of many other strategies in favor of the eco-sustainability of human activity, given that we are talking about spirituality, they will go to “get blessed ”.

To get out of this apparent state of loop and vicious circle it is necessary, as mentioned in the introduction, that the attitude of each person changes, understanding that the first revolution is made by moving from considering the things that surround us not as objects but as parts of a single Subject (a bit retracing the concept of Mother Earth, dear to many cultures).
In a nutshell, we have to move from the value of the repercussions on the ego, of all our actions, to the value of us; which is no small matter due to the cultural, political and even economic consequences.
Precisely in this direction we must understand that it cannot be just one factor that drives both policies and individual actions, i.e. profit, with all the variants disguised as eco-sustainability; it’s like solving a complex equation by entering a single known parameter.
This new approach must push us, from every single person to world politics, to understand that the Living Planet is a unique living being, and that only actions that synchronize with it can make us live in a new well-being, at peace with us and between all of us (remember that every bad action, up to wars, is linked to the erroneous production of entropy which, introduced into the system, generates divisions, frictions, conflicts).
So we have to go through a conversion (which is valid for all sectors of our life) considering that in Nature and with It (which is the most perfect thermodynamic organization of the Universe) there are all the secrets and the best principles of coexistence and, therefore, of also do agriculture.
Various enthusiasts, researchers and scientists have worked on these issues for decades; who have gradually intuited and understood this great truth, proposing various production systems, such as permaculture, synergistic agriculture, and various forms of truly eco-sustainable agriculture which, then, go under the great hat of Agroecology.
That new way of being (which for the avoidance of doubt, is by no means a return to the past, another falsehood spread by multinationals) and therefore not only of producing, had and has, especially in recent times, an increasingly large number of followers , but often not understood and, in some cases, even laughed at.
This path, once started, has not only produced concrete economic benefits but, above all, has led the people who follow it into a new and true peace, that peace which makes us integrate, like drops in that immense ocean which is Life . What then we want to define as spirituality, religiosity or in another way, belongs to the intimate world of every person in which, even here, to have respect and plurality.
However, in all of this, there is this common denominator, without which no innovation, no discovery nor, much less, new frontiers, such as precision agriculture for example, can solve a much deeper and, indeed, more spiritual and non-material nature.
How can we fail to mention the great innovators and researchers of this new way of being; let’s think of the various Bill Mollison, David Holmgren, Rudolf Steiner, Emilia Hazelip, up to the current Miguel A. Altieri and a large number of researchers who, for various reasons, are converging towards a single denominator. A new substance that is slowly taking shape, with ever greater harmony and synchrony.
At the conclusion of this reflection, I firmly believe that the fusion and integration of all this (truly innovative) knowledge and concrete experiences will represent the basis, not only of a new agri-food model, but also a scientific and cultural one, which will lead us towards a World which, at the end of this path, it will be completely different in its forms and substances from the current one, because we would have solved the problems with a different type of thought, becoming clear drops in the great Ocean of Life.

Guido Bissanti