Steve Soloman wrote:
IMHO, what went wrong with the Organic movement began at its
very inception in the USA--with J.I. Rodale's intensely
ideological dogmatism.
So, in a nutshell, the American public was sold an oversimplified bill of
goods in that there is a dichotomy of chemical vs. organic.
Dear Steve,
First of all, your site is wonderful! What a resource. Thank you.
I am responding to your post because I agree with many of your
points but wanted to add one.
I believe you are quite correct about J.I.'s basic stance and that it was
injurious. But I also believe that it was necessary at the time to draw a
line. These were the days when people were walking through clouds of DDT to
show that it did no harm. People like my mother, who reasoned that "if it
hurts bugs, it hurts people," were not only rare, but also treated with
derision. This attitude persisted for decades. As late as the mid-1980's, I
was not able to get a loan from FHA because of growing methods. So
polarization took place.
However, IMHO, the major reason that organic has been misunderstood in
this country was a disrespect for the consumer's intelligence. When you were
writing for Rodale, you had to take out anything that smacked of "science,"
use an 8th-grade vocabulary, and make certain all your constructions were
simple. It was impossible to write as if you were writing to peers; you
had to write down, down, down. You couldn't even explain the science in simple
language. This was disastrous. It gutted the concepts, eventually eroding them
until all that was left was a narrow concern about human health. Rodale did
it because they wanted to popularize organic methods and they believed that
this was the way to do it. Maybe they were correct.
Again IMHO, Rodale's influence was eclipsed by the Organic
Certification Groups. Long before the National Legislation was
proposed, organic farmers developed standards to define what was and what
was not organic. During the late '70's, there was a debate about what the
consumer could understand. It was generally believed that the standards had to
be written so that Joe-on-the-street could have faith in them. Therefore,
rather than writing a set of standards based on soil health, they wrote a
set of standards based on a very superficial understanding of human
health concerns.
You might wonder what the difference would be. An example that springs to
mind immediately is the use of super phosphate. As most of you know,
super phosphate is rock phosphate that has been treated with a mild acid
to make some of the phosphate it contains immediately available. If it
does not get taken up by plants within a week or so, it reverts to an
unavailable form; it will not become available again until acids from
microorganisms or plant roots make it so. Early transplants
need more P than the soil--too cool for microorganisms to be working--can
deliver. So super-P is great stuff. If you band it along the planting row, you
are adding precious little of it. You are not damaging your soil. However,
because it is treated, i.e. is no longer in its natural form, it
falls into the category of a "synthetic." The people who wrote the
first standards, and developed the constructs that would later be used to
develop the Federal Law, truly believed that the general populace
was too ignorant to understand the distinctions between using a
couple of pounds/acre of super-P and using a ton, or even between super-P and
triple-P --which really is injurious to soil life.
I think this point is important because we are all still writing and
educating. We can still teach the science that people need to make informed
decisions. We do not need to treat our audience as if they are
incapable of learning. The materials that Steve has posted on his website are
a great beginning, too!
Miranda Smith
