BILL GATES VS. TED TURNER

            Some of us are old enough to remember when Ted Turner, media mogul, became the largest owner of agricultural land in the U.S.  His love of the west generally and bison specifically led to a massive accumulation of ranch lands. 

             It was such a large acreage that environmental groups began chirping about a Buffalo Commons--remember that?  The plan would expel all private land owners and turn much of the far west into a publicly owned preserve for bison. 

             Today we have another rising star, but it's a far different situation.  A couple of weeks ago the media was abuzz about Bill Gates being the new largest farmland owner in the U.S.  Unlike Turner, Gates is buying cropland (farmland) not ranch land.  The difference is important.

             Whereas Turner loved the historical animals, migratory patterns, and biomass accumulation vectors of the ancient prairie ecosystem, Gates wants nothing to do with historical norms.  He wants nothing to do with animals.  He wants nothing to do with perennials.  He wants nothing to do with soil building, hydration, or biomass accumulation.

             Gates now owns 242,000 acres of cropland which is far different than the rugged range land and prairie ecosystems Turner loved and wanted to restore.  Gates' accumulation has nothing to do with restoration; it has everything to do with exploitation.  It's the Conquistador mentality, dressed up in Impossible Burger and Beyond Beef parlance, managed by artificial intelligence, and growing material reminiscent more of the Matrix than the Native American mystique.

             Gates' investment portfolio includes fake meat, artificial intelligence, genetically modified organisms, and pharmaceutical companies.  What do all of these threads have in common?  A mechanical, manipulative, Machiavellian approach to the living world.

             Gates believes in chemicals, mono-crops, genetic modification, vaccination and artificial everything.  Unlike many of my friends, I'm willing to give Gates the benefit of the doubt and assume he means well and truly believes he's helping humanity.  I don't question his motives.  But as we know, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions. 

             At the least, Gates is simply a shrewd business player who is positioning himself to be the biggest supplier of a plant-based diet.  In his new enlightened future, when nobody would dare touch real animal protein, he'll cash in by being the purveyor of humanity's food.  That's not insidious; it's just shrewd business positioning to take advantage of a prophetic belief.

             This is why he's not buying ranch land.  He's counting on the demise of the American livestock industry as the food system becomes more dependent on annual crops grown only on good land.  Interestingly, this crop land became fertile only after centuries of perennials under herbivorous choreography.  Gates doesn't seem to worry about fertility; he'll just figure out an artificial chemical approach to that too.

             Despite being smart, he appears to have no respect or intellectual capacity to appreciate that we've only named 10 percent of the soil biota.  Fully 90 percent of the organisms in the soil are unnamed and uncharted.  Just like Conquistadors swashbuckled onto foreign lands with an ownership mentality, Gates claims ownership over a creation he doesn't understand nor appreciate.  Heaven have mercy on his soul.

             What do you think will be the ultimate breakdown of Gates' agenda toward universal artificiality?