What Is Our Tipping Point?

What does it take to make us believe? This is a question I ponder on many levels, in many areas of my life. What makes us believe something we read or see or hear? Why are we skeptical of one statement and not another? Is it a gut thing? Or a heart thing? I think maybe it’s a trust thing.

I need to trust the source from which the information comes. I don’t trust Fox News, pretty much any politician, the check-out clerk at Wal-Mart, or the passionate volunteer on the phone. I don’t trust the crazy right-wing driven blogs or the looney-tunes left-wing e-newsletter. In fact, most times I don’t trust information I’m given until I’ve poked and prodded and tested it myself.

We have an electric fence in our horse pasture. I tell all the kids who visit that it will shock them, but there are always those who must find out first hand.I remember touching fences myself when I was a child. I’d lay a long piece of grass to the wire and listen close. I’d hear that little zzzzpt and know that, yup, it’s hot.

Eight years ago, when my youngest child developed an autoimmune disorder seemingly out of the blue, my world shifted. My heart cracked wide open and my beliefs about what was safe and good and healthy all became suspect. Life seemed more fragile. Almost overnight I saw the world and our food supply in a completely new way. I didn’t trust anything that came in a package or out a drive-thru window. My motivation grew out of a desperation and pain that was all new to me. I would do anything to heal my child. I entertained all manner of wacko experts and obscure studies and stifled my skeptical soul. But sometimes the information I gathered made sense.

Book Club! My thoughts on Organic Manifesto by Maria Rodale

Maria Rodale’s book, Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe, presents a clear blueprint for change. In plain language she explains the dangers of chemical farming, the misconceptions of organic farming, and calls out the government on its irresponsibility towards our health and well-being in favor of corporate influence.

“Farmers are caught on a treadmill” she writes in her compassionate defense of many farmer’s reluctance to return to organic farming. They and their land have become dependent on the chemicals, GMO seeds, and tax breaks generously offered for chemical farming. She offers two scenarios – one of a farmer trapped in a chemically dependent farming system and another that follows an organic model of farming. Painting these two drastically different pictures she calls to task all those who say it can’t be done profitably. She further disputes the tale told by big business that the world would starve without chemical farming.