PLANET EARTH HAS A SKIN DISEASE!
I’m going to share a couple of stories with you from my past, some which I’m not particularly proud of and in reality they were probably the building blocks to a turning point in my life and a big reason why I find myself where I am today.
I’ve been a gardener all my adult life and I was brought up in a gardening household and more broadly, I’m a farmer's daughter having spent my first decade and a half in overalls and running around in paddocks and driving tractors.
But it’s been an evolution. The practices I once readily relied on are now something I look back on in shame and I willingly share them with you today not from a place of esteemed higher moral ground but rather a place of learning.
Many years ago I was out building fences with my Dad. Part of the process was to ensure that white ants didn’t eat the timber, so you’d paint the bottom of the posts with Creosote. It’s pretty nasty stuff, so much so, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the EPA has more recently determined that it is a probable carcinogen to humans. It burns! My Dad went through all the precautionary measures of how to use it safely but being a “know it all” teenager, I went about completing the job with little care factor, carelessly splashing away.
I managed to get a fair bit on my trousers and it seeped through onto the inner part of my thigh. I was instructed to wash it off with water immediately. On our trip home my thigh started to get pretty hot. No less than 2 hours after returning home my thigh was bright red and had started to blister. Essentially, the creosote was burning my skin. Days after, it was still a big welt of blisters and it hurt big time!
Many years later, and now I was a “know it all” adult, we’d bought a house and we had a bit of an outbreak of pesky weeds on the front driveway. It bothered me to see the “mess” and so out I went with my RoundUp. It was the concentrate version so I had to mix it up with water and get it into my handy dispenser. The wind was starting to pick up so I kicked into second gear and got a move on. The job took about 15 minutes and before long I was up in the kitchen looking down at my handy work.
My scalp started to itch a bit. I immediately thought, “Oh bother, Nits!”seeing as we had two young girls in primary school but very suddenly, it started to get really full on and was spreading to my face as well. My daughter came out to the kitchen and exclaimed, “Mum, your face is all red and blotchy!”. Within a matter of seconds I was on the floor scratching all over my entire body and my breathing had started to become laboured. I knew what was happening - I was having an anaphylactic experience. My husband called the ambulance and they arrived within 7 minutes.
I recovered within an 1 hour with some high dose steroids and a couple of antihistamine tablets, but it was very scary to say the least. The diagnosis was that the wind had spread the RoundUp onto my skin and potentially I had breathed some of it in causing the anaphylactic shock.
Both creosote and glyphosate are widely accepted now as dangerous chemicals that are harmful to humans. To this day I do not have either on my property and I refuse to buy any products of this kind.
Our skin is the largest organ on the human body and has a total area of about 2 square metres. It protects us from harmful pathogens, helps regulate body temperature, and permits the sensations of touch, heat, and cold. When our skin comes in contact with harmful chemicals, it reacts! It’s sending us a message that something is wrong and that we need to fix it.
The burn on my thigh and my anaphylactic experience was my skins way of telling me that I had been in contact with some harmful chemicals that was killing my own ecosystem.
Does this sound familiar?
The Earth’s topsoil is akin to the human layer of skin, the epidermis. The Earth's forests like our hair and it’s river and oceans the veins in our body. When we put harmful chemicals on the Earth’s surface, the Earth is having the same reaction I was having. It is being burnt and having adverse reactions to the chemicals.
Now there are both harmful and beneficial bacteria on Earth (and on our human body) but the harmful pathogens (bad bacteria) only make up about 15% of them. A healthy ecosystem is made up of approximately 85% good bacteria and are the good guys that keep the bad ones at bay. Problem is, if you go about trying to kill the pathogens you’ll likely also kill the good bacteria creating a disturbance in the whole ecosystem. Sure you’ll get rid of the bad guys, but you’ll also get rid of the good guys and this unbalance will mean the bad guys will come back with greater numbers and gusto.
What goes largely unnoticed is the critical role that bacteria play in keeping us and the soil healthy.
Humans harbor over 100 trillion bacteria in and on our body if you look after them you are guaranteed better health and well being. Harm it and you risk slipping into disease.
The exact same can be said for Earth. A teaspoon of healthy soil contains over a 1 billion beneficial microbes. If you use chemicals, fertilisers, pesticides and other synthetic products you can disturb the unique balance of microbes and the whole ecosystem starts to break down. This only exacerbates the original problem you were trying to get rid of, so you use more chemicals and now we just have an endless cycle of disease.
My plea to everyone reading this blog is please do not use synthetic chemicals, fertilisers and pesticides in your garden. Even the over use of some organic, naturally occurring chemicals and minerals can disturb the force. You are breaking a system that for millions of years has been able to look after itself. Instead learn how to work with nature and start the process of restoring the ecosystem that lives within your soil. Your garden will slowly repair itself and start to require less attention from you and in turn you will eat more nutritious food, not to mention the chemicals won't be in your shed as a ticking time bomb ready to wreak havoc on your family.
