The world of commercial seeds has reached the point in a Monopoly game when one person owns everything and everyone else is paying rent.

To understand how we got here we have to understand the relationship between humans and plants through the millennia. At first, 100,000 years ago, people were just eating what they could find. Then around 10,000 years ago the Earth entered a steady state with regular seasons and people started deliberately planting things and eating what they had planted.

At first, some settled down and formed little communities while others traveled with the migratory animals. Domestication of grain enabled Catalhoyuk to rise about 7,000 years ago, a neolithic city of more than 5,000 people now in present day Turkey. Catalhoyuk had no fortifications. Until humans started working with iron there was no need for defense.

The behavior of the migrating group changed. They started attacking the cities. We can see in the book of Numbers 31:2, Moses raises an army to “avenge the people of Israel on the Midianites.” Numbers 31:14 “and Moses was angry with the officers of the army…… he said to them. Have you let all the women live? …..Now kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by lying with him…. But all the young girls keep alive for yourselves.”

In his book “Plagues and Peoples” William H. McNeill describes the social construct of macroparasitism “A conqueror could seize food from those who produced it, and by consuming it himself become a parasite … on those who did the work”

This rent the overseers exact from the producers in “Civilized” Europe was in full force as the divine right of kings when Columbus bumped into the American Continents. Not long after that, Europeans discovered the grand banks. A fishing ground of historic proportions. English people were on Cape Cod fishing as early as 1524. They would come in the summer, fish then go back to Europe in the fall.

There is a fundamental difference between the European divine right of kings to own everything and the First Nations People’s philosophy of the common bowl. The eastern woodland First Nation was living in a functioning democracy. Our Founding Fathers lifted the preamble to the Constitution from the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace. “We the people” govern ourselves. We decide on our laws that we make for ourselves. We choose our own leaders. If they displease us we replace them.

The Europeans were from a macroparsitic culture. They imposed that on the First Nations people. Without much success until the residential schools.

Starvation is a tool of macroparasitism. It’s being used now in Gaza. It was used against the First Nations People as we took their land. We were so threatened by their philosophy that we started the residential schools to “Kill the Indian and save the man.” All First Nations people today bear the psychological scars of the abuse endured in those “schools”. We are finding unmarked graves of children as young as 3.

For 10,000 years people have been gathering seeds and planting the best ones. Year after year breeding plants for food, fiber and fuel. In 1900 there were over 1,000 different seed companies in the United States. There were three right here in Fredonia. Each seed company carried hundreds of varieties of flowers, fruits and vegetables and on average 10 varieties that only they were growing. Those varieties were resistant to whatever microbes (blights, funguses, molds) lived in their local environment. So ConAgra and Stokes have bought over 1,000 independent seed companies. They have dropped over 10,000 plants those companies once carried — plants resistant to thousands of microbes just gone. An extinction of vast wealth, a heritage lost.

We have planted millions of acres in a single variety of genetically identical grain. Genetically manipulated to work with certain chemical inputs of fertilizer and pesticides. It’s only a matter of time before a blight wipes out all those millions of acres.

There are going to be food shortages this fall. 1/3 of the world’s fertilizer is stuck in the Strait of Hormuz and crops are already in the ground.

Fortunately it’s still legal for people to save seeds in their own garden. We can all grow a few tomatoes or cucumbers with the flowers. We can also go to the farmers’ market and keep local farmers in business

Monsanto will go after any farmer trying to plant a field in saved seed. The love of the garden is in a race with the greed of the corporations.

There is a Cree saying “Only when the last tree is cut down, the last fish is caught, and the last river is poisoned, will you understand that you cannot eat money”

In capitalist philosophy a forest has no value until it is cut down. The work the forest does in purifying water alone should give it value, not to mention everything that lives in it.

The farm bill is coming up. Call U.S. Rep. Nick Langworthy at 716-488-8111 and tell him we want more money for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and conservation.

Marie Tomlinson is a Fredonia resident.