In the beginning, WWII talked big - promising to put a Gas Chamber and Crematorium on the Moon and a Chicken in Every Pot, but as usual it was all just talk.
In the end it couldn't even do the simplest of things, like taking the garbage out and getting all the kids fed and on to school on time.
Amidst the HIGH TECH disaster that was WWII, there was one LOW TECH (agricultural) success, a quiet triumph of courage, hope and chivalry:
Martin Henry Dawson's PEN "G" project was New York's LOW TECH counterpart to the much better known HIGH TECH Manhattan Project.
Only this time it was humans working with Nature, not against it ; an effort to save lives, not take them.
Dawson grew mold, not food.
Millions of the kids who owed their lives to his natural systemic penicillin would not have really needed it if they had adequate food.
Nevertheless he did his best, he did his bit - and above all he did it Nature's way, not Modernity's way.
When it came to making penicillin, his Natural approach batted One and Modernity's synthetic approach ended up batting Zero....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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