Suffering is a kind of damage. It can of course be transformed into strength and resilience. But the suicide of a North Dakota or an Indian farmer is damage. While we farm organically, on a farm our size the cost of pesticides can cost well over a hundred thousand dollars a year. Farmers run themselves through a hay baler to get the insurance to pay off the kind of debt that those kinds of bills incur.
Suicide reverberates through the lives of children and grandchildren.
It forever changes the shape of a community. Salamanders dying in one county might not notable, but the world wide loss of amphibians, probably because of human action is a kind of suffering. The trees in my shelterbelts are dying because of the increase in pesticides some of which is due to the use of genetically modified organisms. My trees are suffering. In order to forecare - to care for the future, we need to bear witness and alleviate the suffering of trees, salamanders and farmers.