Our Special Earth Day Issue
Earth Day High
From the Farm to Your Baggie, Mother Nature Abides
~ by Ron Garmon ~
Homegrown’s all right with me.
Homegrown is the way it should be.
Homegrown is a good thing.
Plant that bell and let it ring.
American holidays ought to come complete with a rustic Jeffersonian hymn or two and Neil Young’s canniboid dirt-ditty celebrates the wake’ n’ bake spirit that rang in the first Earth Day. Proclaimed in San Francisco in 1970 as a temporal container for growing eco-awareness, April 22 inevitably became fixed in the public mind with the aligned cultural horrors of free love, burning reefers and self-respect, with no less a bulwark of patriotic correctness than the Daughters of the American Revolution, with one matron warning Time magazine that “subversive elements plan to make American children live in an environment that is good for them.”
Well, as noted linguist Sam Goldwyn once mourned, “We’ve passed a lot of water since those days,” much of it into plastic bottles for employers to sniff for illicit substances, chiefly marijuana. Urine-testing as a condition for employment is a $4 billion a year industry spun off from the War on Drugs, a gigantic federal effort seeking to do the same execution on dope-sucking as the War on Terror does on anxiety. Still, as bad environmental news continues to match ongoing physical and economic deterioration visible everywhere, awareness of the limits of industrial enterprise have become acute and we are back to 1970, an anno horribilis John Lennon proposed renaming Year One.
Partisans of industrial hemp and other green-futurists point to the near-miraculous handiness of this non-psychoactive cousin to cannabis, with uses in plastics, packaging, construction, clothing, wood-pulp and biofuel. These glassy-eyed utopians have proven remarkably successful in convincing hard-headed farmers and bucolic libertarians in Kentucky, Michigan, South Dakota and elsewhere to unite in attempts to legalize cultivation. Results have been meager, but their efforts appear to be less product of the long countercultural march through the national mores than the first tentative steps toward a way out of the post-industrial impasse America has reached before any other country.
Indeed, the stuff I’ve been smoking of late gives the lie to the myth of American sloth and ineptitude. Tribute to some unknown Cali hydroponist’s illegal art, this is thick, rancorous-smelling booj lightly bristling with purple fuzz, a last chunk wedging with difficulty into the hollow of a pipe already packed with the baggie’s last sweepings. Application of flame soon kindles an un-Bushian fire in the mind and I can see the broad swaths of hemp verdantly rolling over the former Rust Belt. Acres of greenhouse cultivation spread across the inside of my eyelids, all tended by resettled urbanites grown fat and prosperous as so many nosering Babbitts. Traditional Open Door trade policy will push U.S. strains of marihooch into the eager lungs of all humanity and a cheeba-based dollar will reign supreme over an increasingly blissed and distracted global market.
This Earth Day, I urge Americans to toke for a better tomorrow.
Published: 04/16/2008
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