Here’s the neighbourhood Royal Gala orchard, seen from above. The dark green stripes are grass, the brown stripes are the hedgerows trees, the black stripes are weed-killed soil, and the pale green stripes are weed-sprayed plants that didn’t quite die and, because of this long season, are struggling back out of their roots. They are wounded in some deep way. They have almost no chlorophyll.

This looks like a social illness to me:

• an illness of human-Earth relationships,
• an illness of plants,
• an illness of human society,
• and a personal social illness, the illness that considers life as a war.

I say this because this killing and half-killing within this particular approach to mechanizing farming does not increase production. It does decrease human labour. Look at those yellow strips of poisoned grass. That’s us. As far as we are a community goes here in Cascadia, we give people the private right to Earth, so they can purposefully kill it in order to put us out of work. We eat the result and call it food. This is not the behaviour of a healthy society. Normally we don’t see this, as it is cold, the ground is covered with leaves, or with snow, and by spring-time, the sick grass is green again. Here’s what it looked like before the storm that flooded the canyons and valleys to the west and brought us wind, rain and a pre-winter spring.

As you can see, the zombie grass hadn’t yet appeared. It’s all very disturbing. We have changed the Earth. She is now feeding the changes back to us. Right here.