Brings to mind an interesting (perhaps) true life story. In the mid 1970s, when I was just a lad working for the Illinois Central Gulf RR in Chicago, the Chicago Sanitary Sewage District and the ICG participated in the development of a sludge train service, where processed sewage would be loaded into railcars for transport to central and southern Illinois. The sewage was to be provided to farmers for use as fertilizer.
Apparently these guys had read Engels and decided to do their part to heal the "metabolic breach," or maybe it was just the chance to make money, or maybe both, because we all know that nothing is more natural than capitalism... In those days there were peace trains, love trains, soul trains, and we had our shit trains, dubbed, by some genius in the marketing dept., as ICBMs. Well, didn't work as planned, and not because of the excess quantities of toxic chemicals-- lord knows that never would have stopped our dedicated entrepreneurs-- no, it was something far more insidious and immediately visible-- tomatoes. Yes, tomatoes. It seems tomato seeds not only pass through the human digestive track sullied but unscathed, but also through the chemical and heat treatments designed to eliminate pathogens of the bacterial, viral, fungal, protozoan type. So when the farmers spread this stuff on their fields of corn and soybeans (Illinois being no. 2 I think in the production of each), guess what? Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of tomato plants sprouted, strangling the cash crops in their cradles. End of experiment, end of trains. So much for that early adventure ecological alchemy. dms
