♉︎ Taurus

Taurus is charged with food security, agricultural systems, and nutrition. This includes things like safeguarding biodiversity, conducting research on changing soil and weather conditions, developing crops better suited to grow in those difficult conditions, using plants to stabilize and improve landscapes, retain and filter water, prevent erosion, etc. Anything falling under farming, landscaping, terraforming, foraging, husbanding, forestry, things of that nature (hehe see what I did there).The first thing we must do is dissolve the notion of unlimited growth. Soil can be very quickly destroyed and depleted with improper practices, and we are now facing a crisis with GMOs and the fertilizers and pesticides that accompany them. We are making what was once fertile land unusable by literally salting our own fields. Ironically, there may be great need in the future to engineer crops that will be more tolerant to salt in order to try and reverse what has been done, and try to retake some of the desert that is being created when land is used up within a couple growth cycles and then abandoned in favor of new fields made available by burning what were once habitats. But this must be done organically to prevent further contamination, and whether we genetically modify or selectively breed, the traits we promote must be ones that leave the organism fit to participate in an ecosystem and not just serve our preferences.

Abundance is trust in the process, not an unrealistic expectation that everything is going to be automatically resupplying for our convenience. In order for natural processes to be perpetual, there have to be seasons or cycles which restore the conditions necessary for their fertility. For most plants and crops we see this in seasons of the year and disparage the ones that are not productive or desirable to us. But it is these periods of rest which makes explosive growth possible, and as omnivores we should be able to source our dietary needs from a variety of places year round but instead have opted to interrupt this by importing food from farther and farther away.  This destroys the nutritional value as transit takes a toll on the quality, fruits must be picked before their prime ripeness in the hopes that they are at a desirable stage by the time they meet their market, and it puts undue pressure on the environments and economies of the places of their origin. We rely on preservation and processing to make things available in seasons when they shouldn’t be, simply put it’s not good for us or the planet. Our food is  making us sick with overuse of pesticides, harmful fillers, and chemicals oriented toward quantity over quantity.  

A primordial duty was placed on Taurus for the sourcing of food. Each iteration of the evolution of the bovine, from auroch to buffalo to our present day guernsey has played a crucial role in feeding humanity.  So it is fitting that this right and responsibility now falls to the Bull to redefine what that relationship will be and what will come to make up the bulk of our diet. I myself have been doing extensive research on plant based diet principles, and the conclusion that I have come to is we need to get our proportions under control and dismantle the agro industrial complex; but as omnivores I think there will always be a need for symbiotic relationships with other animals such as the ethical farming of dairy. To me the classification of honey as non vegan is beyond absurd, in all of nature you see agreements and trades of protection for food offerings, and the pressure is on us to be creative and use this codependence for the benefit of animals and the environment they live in. Bees are at the very top of this priority list for obvious reasons, making beekeeping more profitable is the single best thing we can do in the interest of pollinating plants everywhere. During the transition, as long as things are profitable and education is made available on how to go about monetizing good things, people will be able to step up on a local level. That was the attitude I really held to when I began this over a decade ago and spent a lot of resources and energy on local business mentorship, I now know that it’s too little too late and more needs to be done on a wide scale to address the severity of the problem. But without building in this local resilience we could lose many more talented people to poverty. So it’s still very much worth doing. Even if it doesn’t seem to make a wide impact at a glance, like bees, we are socially cooperative and make our way in this by accumulating tiny acts of kindness over months, years, and generations.

Habitats are largely endangered by our farming habits and wild animals have been marginalized to make room for our domesticated ones. We shoot coyotes to protect our chickens and throw the proportions of hunter and prey completely out of balance for the sake of our own convenience and consumption. The cardinal rule of hunters in nature is that they do not wage war on or eliminate their competition entirely. They will defend the boundaries of their own territory as appropriate, and fight over resources when direct contact is made, but they will not organize hunting parties to go and wipe out another predator just so they won’t be in competition over the same quarry any more. But we do that. So until we can figure out how to be in right-relation with nature, an important part of land restoration involves reintroduction of keystone species, and recognizing the role they play in terraforming their environments. Efforts to reestablish populations of bison in both America and Eurasia are having a profound effect on the ecosystem. Learning their techniques to create productive prairie and steppe biomes could help us implement effective permaculture.