|
The Poop on Poop: Transformation from Crop Food to PoisonCoprolites from today's world will prove to future archeologists that we poisoned ourselves.by Heidi Stevenson19 September 2010 
Any real gardener will tell you that the very best fertilizer is poop: rich natural excrement from all sorts of animals that's been aged into the best plant food ever created. Now, though, we live in a world in which poop is villified. Horror of horrors, it's found near food crops! It causes disease! We have to eliminate it! The sad truth is that poop from factory farms is every bit as dangerous as we're led to fear. It's responsible for the massive outbreaks of E coli and salmonella and listeria that have been headlining in papers around the country and the world. So, what went wrong? Why is poop—the wonderful stuff that, when aged, is the gardener's pride and joy—now a devastating purveyor of disease and death? All animals produce poop. We recognize its great importance through the huge number of synonyms: bowel movement, buffalo chips, cow flops, cow patties, crap, droppings, dung, excrement, fecal matter, feces, guano, jakes, manure, muck, shit, shite, stool, turd, waste, worm castings. We all produce it. Gardeners love it, though most ignore its source, focusing on what it becomes after it's been aged or passed through the guts of worms. In fact, the last item on that list of poop synonyms, worm castings, is both poop and the stuff gardeners love, naturally rich fertilizer. In India, cow patties are collected and mixed with bits of this and that, then aged and spead on the fields. It's done as a gathering of people and mixed with their hands, with resultant abundant health. In real farms, as opposed to those monstrosities created by Agribusiness, chickens wander around in fields with cattle and...yes, their flops. If you want truly healthy eggs or chicken meat, this is where it comes from—not from some imagined immaculate production, which exists nowhere other than marketing impressions. Reality is that good poop comes from healthy animals. Animals that are overbred, removed from nature, crowded into inhumanely tight spaces, stacked on top of each other, standing in and over their piled-up excrement, stuffed with food that isn't natural to them, health faked with antibiotics...these animals are sick, and they produce sick poop. Sick poop is not composed of the same stuff as healthy poop. We all know that our own varies with what we eat, and when we eat something that doesn't suit us, it becomes unhealthy—either as diarrhea or constipation. Cattle, pigs, and chickens are no different. When they eat foods unnatural to them, their poop is abnormal. Agribusiness poop is filled with chemicals, especially antibiotics. These antibiotics kill off the good bacteria, the ones that break poop down into wonderful fertilizer and soil. They can't kill off all the bacteria, so drug-resistant and more virulent forms develop. The sick poop is not spread out, as it is in nature, where it can naturally decompose into the soil. Instead, it's piled high. It can't decompose properly. Dangerous bacteria—antibacteria, so to speak—makes it home. This is where poop becomes poison. It comes from maltreated sick animals. Sick animals cannot produce healthy poop. Massive production of animals, à la factory farms, can produce only sick animals and sick poop. So, instead of becoming the gardener's delight, factory-farmed poop has become a modern nightmare. It's now poison. A coprolite is fossilized poop. It's poop that didn't make it back into the cycle of life. Future archeologists are sure to find enormous piles of coprolites that won't have returned to the earth. From it, they'll know that we went crazy, that we literally poisoned ourselves. They'll know that, for all the evidence of scientific knowledge, we didn't learn the most important lesson of all: that we are part of this world, that we are part of Gaia. 
|
|