Hemp Eco-Education 101
There's A Lot To Grow
Hemp/Cannabis is a Latin word meaning 'cultivated'. The more we learn, the more fascinated we are with this amazing plant, and the more we realize we need to learn. However, there's one thing we can say for certain; Cannabis is "nature's gift to humanity" and we will share what we have learned and are learning here at Hemp Eco-Ed101 and on our Blog & Podcast over at HempLife News.
So what makes hemp such a great gift to us humans. We can give you four reasons; hempfiber, hempseed, hempcbd resin and hemproots. Each of these raw hemp plant parts makes valuable, sustainable products for our everyday use. If we make our products from natural bio-degradable fiber, we can have our modern products while still maintaining Earth's "life support system" wind, water, soil, sunlight, flora and fauna.
As we have been witnessing for the last few years with climate change, upsetting the "balance-of-nature's life support system can be devastating and is completely unnecessary because there is plenty of plant based renewable fiber in the world. We simply don't need to use petro-chemical none compostable fiber like nylon or plastic to make our products.
The Products Of Hemp
Hempseed: Hemp seeds are super nutritious containing all eight essential amino acids which are easily digestible pure proteins, balanced omegas 3-6-9, both soluble and insoluble of digestive fiber, and a host of minerals. Its also one of the best wood preservative oils and used to make paint and is a clean burning bio-diesel fuel.
Hempfiber: Hemp fiber has two commercially valuable types of fiber - bast & hurd - which can be woven, pressed, or formed into many common products. It can replace many of our modern ecologically destructive products such as synthetic textiles, plastic, fiberglass, wood paper, concrete, etc. with carbon reducing, earth-friendly sustainable products.
Hempflower cbd resin: Hemp flower resin contains 100's of cannabinoids - CBG, CBD, CBN, CBC etc. - terpenes, and flavonoids that work on homeostasis (inner chemical balance) providing relief for a host of illnesses by triggering chemical signals acting on the bodies endocannabinoid system. And all without side effects. (go to projectcbd.org for all the information)
Hemproots: beneficial cannabinoids and terpenes for medicinal supplements, soil rebuilder, Phyto-remediation.
Hemp has the greater potential than any other industry to reduce our carbon and ecological footprint and mitigate our climate change and global pollution crisis.
Hemp Equations 101:
Hemp Products = Healthy People & Healthy Planet
Hemp = Healthy Eco-Minded People
Here at hempnetmarket.com and HempLife News we have decided to embrace hemp's nearly magical properties through educating ourselves and sharing the knowledge, the products, and the businesses that are working in this vital new industry. We begin this work by offering solutions to mitigate 50 years of industrial toxic petrochemical products and synthetic plastic waste that is choking out the natural processes of Earth and disrupting the balance-of-nature.
Society is learning to live sustainably as stewards of the land. Or perhaps we should say "re-learning", as it's only been 75 years of toxic plastic petrochemicals. Throughout history societies have existed organically and sustainably. All products were made of plant bio-fiber and were organic because petrochemicals and petroleum fibers did not exist.
While petroleum products are very useful for many things, we have to differentiate between the convenience of these toxic chemicals vs the destruction of our planetary systems. We have to adopt a plan, other than the "profit motive", to make decisions about what to produce and how to produce it because each product we purchase has an effect on the Earth's ability to sustain life; the life of every living organism.

Looking back at the last 90 years during cannabis prohibition, one can conclude that the race away from natural plant products to synthetic drugs, food and plastic products - our so called "modern society" - has created massive health problems for people and ecological disaster for our precious planet. Just 50 years ago, the world's billions of wild diverse species were still in great abundance. Now 60% of wilderness and wild species are gone, "due to human activities, including habitat loss and degradation, deforestation and the excessive use of wildlife such as overfishing and overhunting"(WWF).
Can society make the necessary changes to fix these massive problems? Experts say it can be done but the time is urgent and the changes are dramatic. It means everyone needs to get involved; individuals and all levels of the public and private sectors.
Mother nature contributes "125 trillion dollars/year" to the economies of the world (WWF). Our modern economic system was build on a pretense that Earth's resources were boundless and that the world economy, based on food production and oil & gas, could continue to grow indefinitely. Now we know that that is not the case, yet we still act like there are no limits to such unsustainable growth.
We know now that this practice is causing unprecedented environmental and climate chaos, mass extinction, and threatening basic survival.
A fundamental change in thinking is required, at every level, from the largest corporation, to governments, nations and to each individual . Our "life support system" has simply got to take precedence over our profit motive.
The Unsustainable Profit Motive
A false "Capitalist" notion has been driven into our minds by the propaganda of an economic system that is based on the idea of using capital, Earth's resources, to gain profit through the supply and demand economic system. The goal then, of a corporation is to use Earth's natural resources as capital to exploit and create, what is considered by modern man, to be profit.....which is a measure of the amount of money that the exploitation can accrue.
In this profit motivated capitalist system the health of the eco-system, which provides all the resources to the tune of $125,000,000,000,000.00/year to run the capitalist system, is not ever considered and has no rights under the laws-of-man. It is an economic system where the laws-of-man work in complete opposition to the laws-of-nature.
Why is it that in our man-made laws and capitalist's system, people have rights and corporations have rights, but natural eco-systems and wild life, which represent the basis of our life-support-system, have no rights . Our economy considers Earth's eco-systems, that-which-gives-us-life, as either a commodity for exploitation or a place to dump garbage.
This is an unfortunate result of modern science and technology coupled with our economic supply and demand economic model that is now old and outdated and causing massive environmental chaos.
Supply and demand worked very well when the Earth's resources were abundant but it's the worst system when resources are depleted because the value of a product goes up as the supply goes down.....so when highly valued resources, like blue fin tuna, becomes depleted their value goes through the roof, which makes it profitable to continue to exploit the resource until it can no longer recover.
Aligning Our Laws with Nature's Laws
Aligning our laws with the laws-of-nature is not as hard as one might think. It begins with a simple mindset, which is the decision to consider "nature" in each and every desision we make, at every level of governanace, from individuals to municipal, state, natioanl and world levels. That there is no other way to think which will create a sustainable world! We start by respecting nature; by giving natural systems the same rights, or rights above, that which we give to citizens and to corporations.
To live within natures laws means we make products from nature's bounty; from natural fibers. We stop using synthetic products and chemicals wherever and whenever possible. We become integrated with the laws-of-nature and re-learn how to live sustainably within them.
While this may seem daunting at first, it is quite liberating once you spend some time with the idea. To live a life that has zero impact on the natural world is of great relief to the mind and to the notion of freedom & liberty; there is simply nothing closer to freedom!
What Is Sustainable Living?
What does sustainable actually mean.....what is a sustainable society? Well in it's simplest form it means your footprint, or the amount of resources that you use, is equal to the amount of resources the planet is able to provide in order to sustain your life. Your life, as a gift from nature, utilizes only the resources nature has to sustain it. A sustainable society is a population of people where the sum of all resources used is, equal to or less than, the available recourses.
Modern western thinking is predicated on the notion that a person may consume as much of the planets resources as that person desires, or can afford, based on the modern capitalist notions of ownership of land, free recourses, free markets, cheap labour and not considering in the cost of waste disposal. So, if you can afford extra homes, cars, toys and travel etc. than, by god, you shall have it, no matter what the impact is on the Earth's life-support-systems.
Can Capitalism Adapt to a Sustainable Society?
While Capitalism was a great system to bring the west out of post war depression, it's continuous growth, profit motive and lack of moral or environmental compass, has lead us straight to our global environmental crisis in a matter of a few short generations. All of our climate, pollution and extinction problems have only been generated since the end of WWII, and the dramatic onslaught to nature is mearly 50 years in the making. So reversing this trend is not as difficult as it might seem. It is more of a change of mindset and a willingness to give up a few modern conveniences.
Our global environmental crisis is not new. The green house gas phenomena has been known and documented for well over 40 years. We have only been extracting oil and gas for 80-90 years. Our technological advances in petrochemicals combined with a capitalist corporate model of R&D, and a propaganda machine fixed on manipulating the consumer to buy, buy, buy has been a model for the environmental crisis we now face.
Why then, have the governments running our modern capitalist system failed to alter the course of society, allowing this crisis to continue to unfold with only Band-Aid solutions to climate change, plastic pollution and mass extinction? Is capitalism just not adaptable enough? Can capitalism be altered and made to adapt quickly to change?
What does global pollution and the climate crisis tell us? Could it be that we can't have everything we want, no matter how hard we work, because there's just not enough of Earth to go around. Can the basic tenet of Capitalism change from a profit motive to an Earth sustainable motive. If the focus of our capitalist society changed from focus on resource capital in monetary terms for personal wealth, to a capitalist model of an Earth Economy where the profit is eco-system balance and the profit is freedom.....the freedom to live sustainably.
In other words, can capitalism change its basic tenet from the profit-of-man to the profit-of-nature. If society worked toward the benefit of nature, as hard as it works for the benefit of itself, then our capitalist system could be used to rapidly bring about the changes that will allow our future to thrive in harmony.
Why throw out the baby with the bath water. If the bath water is the baby we call profit. Profit is a man-made idea, a result of thought processes of many people over time. What is considered profit is different for different cultures and has changed many times throughout history. Since the profit ideal of the modern age has resulted in enormous ecological disaster why not simply change the "profit motive" to a "Earth Motive" using the Laws-of-Nature as a guide that will create an "sustainable societies" for the future generations.
Can We Learn from the Past.. Have We Lost Respect?
Ethnic peoples, past and present, believe that Earth's resources are gifts to be respected and cherished. The industrial revolution, advanced science and technology, combined with the global economies profit motive and the growth of global multi-national corporations and their propaganda machine, has managed to alter the mindset of society. In a mear century, western culture has gone from thinking of Earth's recourses as "respected gifts", to thinking of them only as commodities that represent "money, power" and extraction at all costs, leading us to a state of greed unpresedented in society.
The monetization and commodification of Earth's resources, turning the gifts of Earth into profit, distinguishes respect. Respect is the most prized of human traits and has been the basis of the success of human evolution. Loss of respect for Earth's resources in the modern age has trickled down to a general loss of respect in society....such as respect for elders, respect for other cultures, respect for race and equality, gender equality etc.
What About Waste?
Exponential growth in product consumption with complete disregard for Earth and the toxic effects of consumer products on the air, land, and water, has lead to the massive environmental crisis we call climate change, global plastic pollution and mass extinction.
What this means is, for example, if you buy your child a plastic toy truck for his birthday, you pay for the cost of producing the truck; getting the oil out of the ground, refining the crude, manufacturing and shipping etc......but you don't pay for the disposal and for the breakdown of the plastic, which over time becomes micro-plastic and is taken-up into the terrestrial and marine environment then taken-up by wild organizmes causing a multitude of biological problems and birth defects and often death.
It is a simple fact, known since plastic was invented, that nature cannot reabsorb plastic. It remain for 100's of years, slowly breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces.....and the smaller it gets, the more toxic it is to organic life systems on Earth.
But one must ask....Why! Why do we continue to produce billions of tons of plastic each year knowing that plastic is killing our organic environment.
Bio-Circular Economy
Plastic products are cheap, and fit within our budget as consumers so we can buy what we want. But if you factor in the cost to the environment, the cost rises considerably as the products are only cheap because the environmental cost of processing the waste is not considered. The actual cost of returning the product to natural organic material would make plastic products extremely expensive.
By adopting a Circular Economy, where all products are made from materials that can be, reused, recycled, re-made and are biodegradable, as opposed to the linear, pollution based economy that drives our modern capitalist society, left graphic, we can begin to tackle our pollution and climate crisis.
The Paradox
The great paradox of humankind in the 21 Century is the difference between the notion that modern man considers himself to be most intelligent creature to ever have existed in the universe, on one side of the paradox. On the other side lies the fact that all this intelligence has simply lead to more expedient means of planetary destruction and annihilation for the short term monetary gain of a few individuals. Crazy!
The cost of thinking this way is toxic to our soil, our water, our air, our wilderness, our children's future, and the very soul and fabric of society! Our cheap goods are not very cheap when all the consequences are considered. When the actual cost of destroying Earths fragile ecological systems, which have taken billions of years to develop to the point where a world in the universe is even possible for humans to exist.
What's This All Got To Do With Hemp?
Hemp offers a unique opportunity to transition away from harmful, toxic plastic and petrochemicals, to life enhancing natural products that promote health for people, the Earth, and the wilderness. Products that actually have a "negative carbon footprint".
By adopting and establishing the ideas of a circular economy using compostable products, keeping in mind the real cost of products production, and about their effect on the other millions of diverse plants and animals of the wilderness, we would make better choices about what we do and what we purchase.
If we educate ourselves about the effect we as individuals have on the Earth's environment, climate, and species, we can make better choices and turn this climate chaos into a lesson learned.....and the lesson is:
Is NATURE A Commodity or Our "LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM"?
Why purchase a toxic, plastic, Earth destroying product when there's a recyclable or compostable metal or natural plant fiber product available. Instead of buying what "corporations want us to buy" based on the corporate model of profit and propaganda, shouldn't we be buying what "we need to buy" based on the model of "we want to preserve the Earth for our children and their children and......all future generations".
THE BOTTOM LINE
If we buy nature, wear nature, build with nature, eat nature, bath with nature, sleep with nature......we will be happier and healthier, and the World will be a better place.....bar none! Lets turn this WorldOurHome back into a place of beauty, balance and abundance. Through respect for Mother Nature and all her species; by buying sustainable products; and by living sustainably we can take destiny into each of our own hands.
HempNetMarket is a catalyst for thought and action toward a sustainable future; one that we can all be proud of. Becoming a member gives you access to a community that is striving to make a difference through all aspects of producing/growing the raw hemp materials, processing it into products and getting the products to consumers. The beauty is, "it can all be done locally" and boost local economies.