Being an amateur botanist, among other things, over the years I’ve learned a great deal about plants, flowers and shrubs. I’ve learned what makes a plant grow, what can kill it, and what can make it grow healthy. The funny thing about gardening, and nature in general, is that sometimes it acts counter intuitively to what you might think is the best course of action.
I typically like plants to flower in the early spring. As most gardening people know, the best way to get a plant to produce plenty of flowers is to ‘stress’ the plant by slightly under watering it.
If you give a plant too much water it will produce too many leaves and under flower, eventually sickening and withering the plant. You can stress the plant a variety of ways, such pruning back the branches to a core bush, under watering it, or providing a rich fertilizer to give it texture and re balance the soil its growing in.
The reason for this is simple; as a plant is stressed it tries to procreate itself by creating more flowers to drop seeds and reproduce, thus ensuring the survival of not only itself by the species in general. Its Mother Nature’s built in defense mechanism.
Animals in the kingdom work on the same principle. If a predator is introduced into an environment where the prey is living, the prey typically starts overproducing in order to ensure survival of the species. Temperature changes, scarcity of food and other stressful factors give rise to higher birth rates and eventually, mutation changes which become higher forms of life. This is classic Darwinism.
The problem is that mankind seeks to better their condition through making life easier, rather than adapting and overcoming environmental and lifestyle changes.
The interesting thing is that when governments create artificial conditions and social constructs to protect and ensure mankind’s comfort, mankind begins to wither and self-destruct—much like many other animals kept in captivity. The is doubly true for predatory animals, such as man. Protect them and provide comfort in captivity and the animal lives an abbreviated life.
If you look at the world’s birth rates, you’ll find that most of the advanced or ‘first world’ nations which have provided social constructs for societies to live in, have astonishingly low birth rates compared to countries with few social constructs and entitlement systems. The lowest birth rates are in the highly socialized nations of Europe and Scandinavia,the highest rates are in the volatile nations of Africa and other third world locations.
This would also explain a lot of the reasons why nations that pursue extensive anti-poverty, hunger and social welfare programs have never been wholly successful in eliminating these social ills. Men and women that live in nations with cradle to grave protections from government typically underperform in birth rate, suffer from more societal ills and are generally less productive on a societal level. The United States with its partial capitalist, and partial socialist underpinnings, naturally falls right in the middle.
Like the proverbial captive predator, as Americans are placed under more governmental systems and protections, its society begins to fall apart. As stresses are gradually removed from the environment, men fail to bloom, and start to wither from overwatering. Stress from environmental conditions, and the natural difficulties of life are important to the development of man insofar as society is concerned. As governments attempt to reduce poverty, poverty increases. As it tries to reduce drug use, teen pregnancy, murder and violent crime with laws and programs, these ills become increasingly more common. Society becomes stagnant and refuses to grow. People don’t learn from their mistakes, and their mistakes become institutionalized and a way of life.
What cities are experiencing new renaissances in productivity? These are cities that have gone through the most turmoil. New Orleans, still recovering from Katrina, has almost entirely rebuilt its school system from the ground up using charter schools, with a resulting increase in test scores and graduation rates.Other great cities from the ancient city of Rome, to Chicago, to Paris, to San Francisco, all were rebuilt and achieved new heights of glory after they had suffered a catastrophe and were rebuilt from the ashes.
Out with the old, in with the new.
This is the cycle of life and the call of nature. Perhaps we should listen more to it, and let mankind flower, instead of wither in the captivity of the overwatering of government.
