Author's Introduction
The following poems, or rhymes, are a slowly growing collection that started with "Ode to the Psychomolecular Code" in 1980.
The "Pope's misconceptions about conception and science history" was written as an essay in 1983 and sent to all U.S. "Pontifical Academy of
Science" members at that time. Some are Nobel Prize winners and should be ashamed to lend their credibility to the Pope's science scam. To my
knowledge, I was the first to write an essay (or rhyme) on the church's fourth element connection and the fertilizer consumption per earth orbit dilemma.
"The Pope's misconceptions..." was published as an editorial in the Berkeley Daily Californian shortly after the pope visited San Francisco on September 17, 1987. This visit coincided with the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, which supposedly guarantees free speech and separation of church and state. Unfortunately, church and state united on that day and freedom of speech was suspended.
All other poems herein, with the exception of "Santa Cruz, California", were written between 1993 to 1997, in Mexico and Guatemala.
Just as an artist draws portraits that do not always please the subject, the wordsmith describes his or her subjects with words that are not always
flattering to the subject. If this is the case, I beg pardon and in lieu of normal freedom of speech, I invoke poetic license, or poetic justice. My medium uses words in the same manner political cartoonists use caricatures.
About the Essays:
Within a week of the publication of "Humpty Dumpty Syndrome," Dr. K.V. Thimann, with his lawyer, demanded an apology from the weekly, Santa Cruz Express, and myself. The paper yielded to the legal threat and refused to allow my further researched defense to be published.
Approximately two years later, Dr. Thimann was interviewed on University of California, Santa Cruz radio station (KZSC) and asked my question, "Where did the idea first arise to use 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, so-called Agent Orange, in chemical and biological warfare?" Thimann replied, "... it may have arisen out of our work in Cuba. It was tropical and all and we published our papers from there." (This was in pre-Castro years when Harvard had a botanical garden in Cuba).
While Dr. Thimann was not the only academic defending indiscriminate use of these chlorinated hydrocarbons at home and abroad, he was a walking advertisement for them for much of his academic career. So called scientists, blinded by the lure of technology, run the risk of not seeing some of the more profound truths of science.
It is paradoxical that since the time of Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring no one until recently suspected chlorinated hydrocarbons of being dangerous hormones, (prompting growth in reptiles, mammals etc.)Yet, that is precisely what 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T were being used for in the first place, on trees of Vietnam and other forests.
"Flush it back to the Farm" was published 20 years ago in Seriatim Journal of Ecotopia. It is basically a condensation of over 100 pages I had
written previously for a "food self-sufficiency" contest held by a magazine called Mother Earth News. After sending off my poem I was pleasantly
surprised to learn that a Dr. Howard Odum of University of Florida, Gainesville would be a judge. Coincidentally, the first page of my entree was a critique of Dr. Odum's energy modeling which showed solar energy captured by agriculture, but ignored the soil nutrients essential to plant growth and photosynthesis. In the end the contest was won by a sort of hog farm in Arkansas, (obviously not a viable alternative for Jews, Moslems or vegetarians). And a grad student of Dr. Howard Odum, received
academic credit for judging in Dr. Odum's place.
After traveling to Gainesville Florida, exactly when Three Mile Island was making headlines and almost melting down, I bought a stencil of Dr.
Odum's energy flow symbols. Back in California I added a nutrient flow symbol and showed an "agro-ecosystem" ' or plants, drawing elements from the air and also from soil, whose nutrient elements, particularly phosphate, must be replaced by mining operations (in Florida) for agricultural plants to absorb solar energy. In other words, I brought Dr. Howard Odum's model up to date with Dr. Liebig of the 1830's who said that for plants to grow and fix C02 (and solar energy) from the air they needed a minimum
of nutrients in their soil, (Liebig's law of the n-tinimum). This was then sent to Agro-ecosystems of the Netherlands-which always used Dr. Howard T. Odum's model as a standard. But lacking academic clout my modification was ignored. Confirming in my mind that the European academics can be at least as biased as our own, regarding good ol’ boy academic attitudes.
If I were to add anything in retrospect it would be to mention and emphasize the demise of the Catholic-Aristotelian "fifth-element" at the hands of Johannes Kepler and Galileo. Although they proved that the sun, planets and stars did not all revolve around the earth (particularly Kepler) and
that Venus had phases like the moon (Galileo's telescope observation), which demolished the catholic-Aristotelian "fifth element" - atoms were still not discovered until much later.
Although Galileo may have been chastised not only for advocating a belief in the earth's orbit, but also a belief in atoms (Re: Pietro Redondi's book Galileo:Heretic) - atoms had still not been discovered in their life-times. So only in recent times have we been able to quantify specific atoms that travel through the pope and everyone's bodies per year, or earth orbit, and to replace those atoms, lost from soil and our bodies, through mining operations.
And finally, gentle reader, if after reading my essay, "The pope's stance lacks scientific basis". or the "pope poem" and you know of another author(previous to 1983), who covered this subject, let me know. I will be glad to pass the torch of heretic-in-chief to him or her.
