TOP SOIL

Can an object have conflicting characteristics simultaneously?
• Could an object be strong and flexible at the same time?
• How about an object that is soft and rigid simultaneously?
• Could something drain and retain all at once?

Well, in fact, these kinds of objects are quite common. Almost all biological objects are combinations of attributes, often in opposition to each other. Wood is strong and flexible. Sponges are soft and rigid. Good top soil both drains and retains water.

Man-made objects are often quite different. Humans tend to focus on the characteristic they need for a given task and engineer for that task over everything else. Modern industry simply doesn’t know how to make top soil. It can make steel that is strong and inflexible, or steel cables that are flexible, but lack the same strength. And modern agriculture usually practices water retention and water drainage as two separate issues, never practiced at the same time, in the same place, or in the same way.

Modern humans have bedroom communities in which to live, but they have to work many miles away. Men have stores where they get their food, but the food must be shipped long distances. Mankind has an extended learning period to function in the world, so they put their children into school far away from home, work or the natural world to learn.

Could it be possible for people to live in small communities scattered across the land, live and work in their own fields and businesses close by, and educate their children in their own homes or businesses? That was the way it was for centuries. Many now believe that is impossible because we are now too big. But there is reason the world must be structured the way in is in the United States now. In fact, most of the world is not structured in the modern way at all.

Our present world of full of these odd behaviors developed only after World War II through government programs and incentives. The government purposely encouraged the movement of people off the land and into towns in order to benefit large industry. This was part of the progressive dream. Society would take care of us all and the efficiency of society was all that was important. Not the sanctity of freedom and human life. In fact, our country accomplished this massive reallocation of the population, greater than Pol Pot or Mao Tse Tung ever dreamed of, in the course of a single generation.

The world could be more like top soil, more organic, more able to retain and drain water simultaneously, if it were more organic.