We are facing great economic and political challenges as we enter in the second decade of the twenty first century.
Unemployment has peaked to disturbing highs, the investment banking sector has lost the confidence of the people and both public and private debt have spiraled beyond our ability to pay it off. Facing all of these crises at once, what are we to do in order to secure a future worth living in for our children? What miracle could possibly bail us out of this disaster of our own making? The answer is simple: Hemp.
There is only one plant on Earth with a quarter of a million known applications. It promises new prosperity for massive corporations and private citizens alike. It could replace many of the toxic synthetics we now see damaging our planet in ways we cannot repair. It is a panacea for our ails and yet, somehow, it remains illicit to cultivate or utilize it for all its myriad applications. The time has come to embrace the sheer utility of hemp for our own salvation and that of future generations.
The logging industry in Europe is a thing of the past. As such, wood and pulp products must be exported at great expense from abroad. Even in North America where trees seem fairly abundant, old growth forests that yield the materials we need for wood and paper are growing increasingly thin as the logging industry culls the best trees and leaves the scraps behind. It takes hundreds of years for large trees to grow, even when they are replanted as they are culled it fails to replenish this vital resource at a pace sufficient to meet demand. As with many natural resources, we are reaching the breaking point and new solutions need to be found. Once again, hemp could be our savior.
Hemp yields more useful fiber per acre than any other form of plant life. With the most robust growth cycle and the smallest impact on soil fertility, hemp is the only way to replace traditional logging methods while still retaining all of the wood products that we rely upon to this day. With global warming increasingly a concern, we need every acre of forest we have left. Without trees to absorb and convert the growing levels of CO2 in our atmosphere the melting of ice caps and resultant rising sea levels threaten civilization on a global scale. Hemp not only provides more profit for less effort, it also helps fight the battle against climate change.
Cotton farming is inefficient and damages the alkalinity of the soil it is grown in. As such, land used for cotton farming becomes less and less viable over time, requiring volatile chemical fertilizers to maintain production standards. Hemp does not suffer from these shortcomings, and can replace all the fibers and textiles that we create from cultivated cotton fields. As useful as cotton is, it can’t be grown effectively in many parts of the world whereas hemp can be grown almost anywhere there is soil and water. Aside from the sustainability of the hemp farming process, it also yields more useful fiber from each plant and thus increases both productivity and profit margins for those engaged in such agriculture. Sustainability has become the watchword in a world with growing population and dwindling resources. Cotton farming mortgages our future; hemp makes an investment for our children.
With growing populations and famines resulting from global climate change, the issue of how to feed the masses needs to soon be addressed. Nothing creates more desperation than hunger, and in a volatile world the last thing we need is more hungry and desperate people. In many places the question of feeding livestock or people is become more and more dire. We need to find solutions that could help feed both ourselves and the domesticated animals that we rely upon for our own comfort and survival. Once again, the only plant that can help solve both of those problems simultaneously is hemp. Hemp seeds and the oil extracted from them can be used to manufacture a variety of food products both for human and animal consumption. Rather than let ourselves face starvation on the basis of outdated propaganda, shouldn’t we be growing hemp?
While you have certainly heard of the threat of Global Climate Change, it is unlikely you are as familiar with the concerns regarding the acidity of our oceans. Over time, dumping of toxic chemicals into our oceans has changed the natural acidity and is beginning to threaten life forms like plankton. While it may not seem significant on the surface, plankton is the base upon which our global food chain is built. It also provides upwards of one third of the world’s breathable air and helps to process the CO2 that we all know is a serious threat to life as we know it. Many of these toxic chemicals, like industrial solvents and chemical fasteners, could be replaced with hemp products that have a small environmental footprint and do not serve to threaten oceanic life in the dire fashion that our current synthetic products do. Even if you thought we could live in a world without fish, we can’t live in a world without air. In yet another way, hemp helps us to breathe. It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, you need to have air, and hemp can help ensure the supply of fresh oxygen remains abundant into the future.
Perhaps the greatest crisis in resource management is the global supply of oil. While most oil is converted to fuels in order to heat our homes and drive our cars, the rest is used to manufacture plastics. There are few things left in the world that don’t have at least a few plastic parts in them, what would we do when the oil ran out and this diverse material suddenly became scarce? Not to exhaust the point, but again hemp could solve this problem for us. Organic polymer compounds manufactured from hemp oil are as robust as those made from crude oil, but leave far less of an environmental footprint and allow for sustainable growth. Many scientists fear we are reaching “peak oil”, the point when consumption becomes greater than our capacity for production, and hemp is one of the only ways to prevent this nightmare from destroying our modern industrial capacity.
In a time where we are increasingly aware of the threat of disease, the use of personal hygiene products is growing around the globe. More and more personal cleansing products are consumed as people become more aware of the presence of millions of dangerous pathogens in our environment. Many of the soap products we use are toxic in nature and require even more dangerous chemicals to manufacture. Again, in places like China these byproducts are dumped into the ocean by the ton. Hemp can be used to manufacture non-toxic, environmentally friendly cleaning products that do not threaten our lives while they protect them at the same time. Again, because of traditional propaganda and paranoia about any form of hemp we are putting ourselves in danger on unsupportable evidence. It is time to utilize hemp to keep both our planet and ourselves clean.
The UK is facing both economic and ecological disasters on many fronts. The combination of threats seems almost completely overwhelming on the surface, unless you realize the sheer utility of hemp products. Providing jobs to people domestically and replacing many expensive products that must be imported, hemp could do much to revive the grandeur and status that Great Britain once enjoyed. We are at a turning point in our collective history and hemp provides an opportunity to turn around the downward trend that we have suffered for so many decades.
The public must speak out now before it is too late. You must write to your local representatives and implore them to support hemp for the prosperity of Great Britain. It is the keystone of our survival as a nation and as a people moving into the future. In a democratic state, the government works for us, and it’s time to tell them what we want them to do for our own economic, ecological and personal security. Do you want to be the one to tell your children that we could have done something, but we simply chose not to?
Please contact your elected representative asking if they are aware of the benefits hemp could bring to the U.K. You can use this service to contact them www.writetothem.com
Email: jj.mcdubie@gmail.com
