Issue 17

One fact should not be in dispute: TV is violent! Guns, shootings, murders, hitting, punching, slapping, screaming, kicking, stabbing, explosions, car chases, car smashes, disasters and death are shown daily throughout TV programming. Most violence is not even in nightly news programs and most of the violence on television is fake. TV presents violent acts through acting—with fake guns and fake blood.

It was the radical ecologist James Lovelock and his “Gaia Hypothesis”, which — in the mid-90s — persuaded me that Global Warming was in fact, a myth perpetuated by ignorant greenies who had only themselves to blame for not listening to the planet.

South Africa ’s nuclear industry is known for its dirty tricks, the least of which was keeping an atomic bomb programme under wraps for decades. Now the industry would like us to believe that we are going through a “nuclear renaissance” in which atomic power will become a “safe and reliable source of energy”, and uranium is the next miracle resource in terms of jobs and foreign investment.

This place, South Africa, how do I describe what she means to me? There are days when my thoughts turn to those friends who have left, all for reasons they justify in this ever-changing land. Yet I choose to stay. When questioned, mostly by my own fears, I find myself thinking of her. My country. My home.

Many years ago, the writer and wilderness advocate Laurens van der Post wrote poignantly that “We have to become once again not only the voice and the reason of this wounded earth of ours, but also its healer and defender…” and through these words, encapsulated an urgent environmental issue of our time.

I was watching out of an upstairs window when I noticed that one of the horses in my neighbour’s paddock wasn’t there anymore. Instead of that mare, there was a new horse. The first question that popped into my mind was: how long is this horse going to last?

The excuses… It’s too boring. It’s too difficult. It’s too cold. It takes too long. It’s antisocial. It’s fanatical It can’t be healthy. It’s too healthy. I won’t be full (or fulfilled). I’m too old. It’s too much effort…

The latest spate of deaths owing to contaminated pet food has highlighted the importance of understanding your pet nutrition and correct feeding. Do you really know what goes into your pet food?
Do you fully understand the medical dangers of incorrect feeding?

The secret of sustaining life lies in the act of living sustain-ably: the sacred contract with nature that all life on the planet is imbued with. This innate intelligence – ability to live sustain-ably has been gambled with as different modes of ‘progress’ set in motion, especially with the onset of the modernist — post -industrial era.

If you want to get some idea of what much of the Earth might look like in 50 years’ time then, says James Lovelock, get hold of a powerful telescope or log onto Nasa’s Mars website. That arid, empty, lifeless landscape is, he believes, how most of Earth’s equatorial lands will be looking by 2050. A few decades later, and that same uninhabitable desert will have extended into Spain, Italy, Australia and much of the southern United States.

Johnson & Johnson™ the well-known baby care brand have now come out with a range of what they are claiming to be “natural”. Nothing could be further from truth! It has some ingredients which — according to independent researchers — are dangerous and should not be applied to any skin, especially that of babies. Babies’ organs are underdeveloped and do not excrete toxins as easily as those of adults.

For Gottfried Müller, his trip to the orient was a crucial experience. As he knew Kurdistan from a former visit and had found friends there, he was, on Marshall Keitel’s instructions, on a secret mission during World War II. In Kurdistan, which was at that time occupied by the British, the German Armed Forces wanted to come into possession of Persian oil.

Over centuries, people had discovered that the star gods sometimes communicated with human beings through these sacred fields. Time and again, strange circular depressions were seen in the centre of these fields. These depressions were called ‘Izishoze Zamatongo’, the great circles of the gods.

Blaming cholesterol for atherosclerosis (hardening and thickening of arteries) makes as much sense as blaming paramedics for the carnage they face after arriving at a road accident scene. It is therefore time for the unifying perspective of coronary heart disease (CHD), found in the nutrition oriented theory as explained by Thomas E. Levy, a board certified American cardiologist and world expert on vitamin C.

It is Soil for Life’s mission to give poor and hungry people access to nutritious food which will allow them to live healthy active lives. This is done not by giving out food, money or vouchers, but by giving people simple, low-cost, environment- friendly skills to grow their own food. We strive to teach them how to grow a lot of food in small spaces, to conserve water and to make use of all available resources.

A bountiful crop of roundish, velvety, bright yellow fruits with thick succulent flesh carpeted the ground beneath a tree in the grounds of a hospital on the Cape Flats in the Western Province this past autumn. Unusual in this part of the world, the Kei-apple tree had done itself proud, yet no humans had discovered this rich source of food on their doorsteps.

The 17th of July 2007 was an extraordinary day: the day when millions and millions of light workers around the planet collectively got together and meditated on intense love, light and healing for the Earth. It was done simultaneously at 11.11 GMT (13.11 here in South Africa).

An invitation to send “letters with balls” closes each of these columns, as you may have noticed. So why am I surprised when our readers send them? Letters I mean — although I suspect it’s going to take a fine pair of cojones to answer this particular challenge.