There’s an expression in the physical environment that you use to entertain each other. (it doesn’t serve you very well) that says, “I worry that I’ll go down to the dock, and that my ship will have already come and gone. I’ll miss my boat.” And we say, another boat, another boat, another boat. You have no idea how many boats are coming to your dock. It’s a steady stream, and it doesn’t matter how many of them you’ve missed. The only thing that matters is what are you doing right now in your vibration? And you can tell what you’re doing right now in your vibration by the way you feel.

— Abraham

Excerpted from the workshop in Los Angeles, CA on Saturday, August 4th, 2001 # 330

Our Love,
Jerry and Esther

If you’ve been to the grocery store lately, then you know just how much food prices are skyrocketing. In fact, the money that got you four bags of groceries last year will get you only three bags this year. And now that gas prices are going up almost daily, food prices will shoot up even more.

But now there’s another, far more ominous reason to home garden. There’s a threat emerging that is so potentially catastrophic, it could literally mean the collapse of commercial agriculture.

The honeybees are disappearing. In the past few years, we’ve been hearing more and more about something called Colony Collapse Disorder – it’s a fancy way of saying that the honeybees are dying, and we don’t know why. But if the decline isn’t reversed, the honeybee could well go the way of the dinosaur.

Some commercial beekeepers are losing as much as 90% of their bee population each season. Bees are essential to the pollination of over 90 different commercial crops.

If that happens, our industrial farming system will completely collapse.

Commercial farming depends on healthy honeybees. Bees pollinate over 90 different commercial crops. Without bees, we would not be able to enjoy things like grilled summer squash, crisp cold cucumbers, or sweet, delicious melon. Many people take good food like this for granted … and now those foods are at grave risk.

Giant farm conglomerates rent bees from commercial beekeepers to pollinate their hives. The hives are trucked to one region, released from the hive to pollinate the crops, and are packed up again and taken to the next region. But since 2003, more and more often, farmers have been opening up their hives to find dead bees or, more often, bees that just don’t return to the hive. That means there are fewer bees to do more work … which stresses the bee population even more.

For a long time, despite numerous theories, nobody knew what the real cause was.

But now we know.

“Highly toxic” pesticide causing mass extermination of honeybees

Late 2010, a brave whistleblower leaked a memo from secret files at the Environmental Protection Agency. That memo was a smoking gun. For years, the EPA has known the true cause of the honeybee extinctions. The culprit is a chemical pesticide, clothianidin. Here’s what the EPA’s own internal memo said:

“Clothianidin’s major risk concern is to non-target insects (that is, honey bees). Clothianidin is a neonicotinoid insecticide that is both persistent and systemic. Acute toxicity studies to honey bees show that clothianidin is highly toxic on both a contact and an oral basis. … Information from standard tests and field studies … suggest the potential for long-term risk to honey bees and other beneficial insects.”

This pesticide was approved by the EPA, despite warnings from some of its own best and brightest scientists. And today, it’s used just as much as ever.

If clothianidin were outlawed tomorrow, could the damage be reversed? We don’t know. But we do know this: if the honeybee population isn’t restored to healthy levels – and quickly – our nation, not to mention the world, could lose over 90 different crop varieties, because they could no longer be pollinated on a large scale.

Look, you already know all the great reasons to grow your own food:

You save hundreds of dollars a year on groceries
The food you grow yourself with heirloom seeds is more nutrient dense than anything you can buy at the store
Home-grown food is free of all the toxic pesticides and insecticides found on grocery store produce
You can freeze, can, or dehydrate your surplus to provide a year-round supply of food for your family.
But of all the reasons to plant a home garden, the risk to commercial agriculture is probably number one. And here’s the thing about a home garden:

Even if the bees completely disappear, you can still grow the same wide variety of crops you’ve always grown.

Here’s why. The areas hardest hit by the bee epidemic are those vast tracts of land devoted to industrial monoculture. And that makes perfect sense because that’s where the toxic pesticide clothianidin is mostly heavily used. The bees that buzz around home gardens don’t seem to be as affected … at least not yet.

But what if they were? What if your local neighborhood hive were hit by Colony Collapse Disorder? You’d still be okay, and here’s why. There’s a little known secret about pollination that most home gardeners don’t know.

Produce like this, including tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, and more, could disappear from grocery store shelves within the next few years.

You can actually hand pollinate anything a bee can pollinate!

Giant corporate farms with millions of acres can’t pollinate by hand, of course. It would take an impossible amount of manpower. But home gardens? They’re small and manageable and can easily be hand pollinated.

Imagine this. A few short years from now, you go to the store, and the colorful produce that once filled the shelves is no longer there. No beets … no cabbage … no cucumbers, onions, or carrots. No melons, no chard, no tomatoes, or peppers. No squash or eggplant. They’ve become a rare and valuable commodity. (Beans and peas would be in short supply, too, because although they’re self-pollinating, bees help them produce even more.)

But when it comes to vegetables, you’re the richest man in town. Thanks to non-commercial bees that thrive nearby, or help from the kids with manual pollination, you’ve grown a bumper crop of these vanishing vegetables in your backyard using the heirloom seeds from your Survival Seed Bank. Can you imagine how valuable the produce from your own back yard would be? (In fact, with the heirloom crops you’ll produce in your home garden, you’ll have yourself the makings of a nice little home business.)

That’s what makes the Survival Seed Bank such a wise investment. It includes 22 varieties of heirloom, non-hybrid seeds – enough to produce a full acre of nutrient dense food. 12 of those varieties (beets, cabbage, cucumbers, onions, carrots, melons, chard, tomatoes, squash, eggplant, and two types of peppers) are currently endangered by the disappearance of the honeybees. They could all but vanish from commercial production.

With the Survival Seed Bank, you’ll have an unending supply of seeds. Because these seeds are non-hybrid, non-GMO seeds, you can save seeds from each harvest and plant them again the following year. You can’t do that with most commercial hybrid seeds.

Seeds from the Survival Seed Bank are easier to grow

Our seeds have extremely high germination rates, far above government-required standards. That means you don’t have to overplant just to get an adequate harvest. And no wasted seed, either. You plant only what you need, and save the rest.

Plus, each Seed Bank comes with Nitro Starter Solution. When you soak your seeds in Nitro Starter just before planting, it gives your seeds a germination and growth advantage. Every Seed Bank also comes with the e-book Survival Gardening With Heirlooms. The book gives you complete, step-by-step instructions for planting, cultivating, harvesting, and even storing your crops.

People say, “The joy is in the journey,” but they rarely understand what they are saying. You are in this focused time/space reality with goals and objectives that call you because as you identify a desire it literally summons life through you. Life summoning through you is what it’s all about, not the completion of anything.

— Abraham

Excerpted from the workshop in Chicago, IL on Sunday, November 1st, 1998 # 329

Our Love,
Jerry and Esther

Arizona lawmakers banned schools in the state from teaching “ethnic studies” classes. Unless public schools canceled classes that included racial and ethnic themes, the state could block schools from receiving millions of dollars in critical classroom funding.

But Arizona state officials pushed one school district too far: Tucson Unified School District not only cancelled its vibrant ethnic studies classes, but also banished any book that dealt with “race or oppression.”

As a result, students and teachers say dozens of books — including Shakespeare’s The Tempest — can no longer be taught in class, and some have even been removed from classrooms and locked up in school storage.

Now students and teachers are fighting back in order to draw attention to the ban and keep those valuable books available in schools. Norma Gonzalez is a teacher in the Tucson school district whose class about Mexican American culture was canceled after the state’s ban. She started a petition on Change.org asking the Tucson school district to take the banished books out of storage and put them back in school libraries. Click here to sign her petition.

Arizona has been a hotbed of controversy for the nation’s immigration debate. But a secondary casualty of what many see as the state’s intense anti-immigrant focus has been Arizona’s students. For many of these students, ethnic studies courses were proven to close the achievement gap like nothing else had.

Norma sees the ban unfairly hurting her students’ education. “Before the ban, I taught my students that, regardless of where you come from, you deserve respect and should love who you are,” Norma said. “Now, I can’t teach that. My students are angry and confused because they see the ban for what it is: discriminatory.”

The literary purgatory of Tucson’s school storage facilities now contains dozens of books that have race as a central theme. In addition to the boxed-up books about Chicano and Mexican American history and literature, classics by authors like Thoreau, Shakespeare, and Atwood are seen as too controversial by school officials.

Many are fighting to repeal the ban completely, but the school board fears the state may pull $15 million in funding in response. While several students are fighting a lawsuit to challenge this ban, many books are still stored away. Norma and her fellow teachers want to make sure the banished books are made available in each school’s library, so students can read the books that teachers are barred from teaching.

Click here to add your name to Norma’s petition asking the Tucson school district to immediately take these books out of boxes and put them back on school shelves.

Thanks for being a change-maker,

- Jackie and the Change.org team

Nothing needs to be fixed. Everything is unfolding perfectly. So when you stand in your now accepting that all is well, then from that vibration, you become surrounded by more and more evidence that all is well. But when you’re convinced that things are broken, that there is pollution, or that things have gone wrong, or that the government is doing conspiracies… then what happens is you get caught up in that vibration, and you begin to manifest that kind of stuff, and then you say, “See, I told you that things were going wrong.”

— Abraham

Excerpted from the workshop in North Los Angeles, CA on Tuesday, March 7th, 2000 # 328

Our Love,
Jerry and Esther