"Organic Pesticide" an Oxymoron is Not

Madu Sogoba: Fuck. Fuck! Fucking SHIT!!! GOD DAMN MOTHERFUCKING SON OF A FUCKING BITCH!!!

James Brown II: Hey Man! What’s the matter?

M: I spent six weeks hoeing and irrigating and fertilizing this garden plot so I can till this hard, rocky soil into something useful. And I had my parents send me seeds all the way from America so that I could plant zucchini and butternut squash. And then I spent the past ten weeks weeding and irrigating and fertilizing even more so that I could get a solid yield. And I did – I had more than a dozen squashes growing just about ready to be harvested. And fucking bugs got into them and laid their larvae in my squash!!! And now they’re all wormy and all that work I did was just a big WASTE of my life!!!

JBII: So whatcha gonna do about it?

M: Well, for starters I’m going to say FUCK this ‘back to the land’ shit and I’m going to go to law school and get a real job ripping people off for some big multinational corporation and make a gazillion dollars so that I can buy a big mansion with a fully-stocked a wine cellar so I can souse myself into oblivion and forget about this Third World development nonsense.

JBII: Take that BACK!!! That’s the most profane thing I’ve ever heard come outta yo mouth!!!! Whatever happened to dreaming the impossible dream?!?! Whatever happened to “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard”?!?! Whatever happened to yo soul and everything you believe in?!?!

M: I dunno, James. All those beliefs of mine have been taking a rather severe beating lately.

JBII: So bugs got in yo squash – big whup!!! When you look at all the other problems everyone in this village’s got, your gripe looks rather tame!!!

M: Yeah, well all those sick, poor, illiterate farmers in Sanadougou have better squash yields than I do because they spray commercial pesticides over their gardens. They even call it “poison”! There’s no way that I’m going to spray “poison” all over my food, so if it comes to a choice between eating vegetables laced with poison or just not farming vegetables altogether, I’m going to choose the latter!

BrrzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZAAAAAAAAAPPPP!!!!!



Al: This choice which you pose between conducting sound practices of organic agriculture and maintaining the security of your vegetable crops is a false one, for there are indeed proven methods of reducing crop spoilage which eschew artificial chemicals harmful for human consumption.

M: Al, you are absolutely the last anthropomorphic household appliance that I feel like talking to right now. Seriously, just keep that Whole Foods shit for your Norwegian hippie friends and leave me alone!!!

Al: Zachary, your attitudes of obduracy and militant anti-intellectualism are striking in their resemblance to the GOP obstructionists in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee with whom I cast blame for the apparent failure of the upcoming Copenhagen summit. There exist cost-effective means of restructuring your garden so as to protect your squash from harmful pests, means which require no sacrifice in agricultural output; in fact, though the entail new financial expenditures at the onset, in the end they will foster a more sustainable economy which creates more produce of better quality.

M: Like what? Paying someone else to do all my farming for me?

Al: No, you can implement more secure agricultural methods yourself. Tell me Zachary, have you had any pest problems with your tree crops?

M: No, my oranges, lemons, papayas and bananas are just fine. Worms have only gotten to my zucchini and butternut squash.

Al: Well, the distinguishing variable between your tree fruits and your squash is clearly that whereas the former are raised more than a meter off the ground, the fruits of the latter are so heavy in proportion to their weak mother plant that they sit directly on the topsoil – which is inhabited by worms, ants, beetles and just about every herbivorous insect on the African continent. If you were to apply a heavy layer of mulch above the soil and particularly beneath the plants in question, it would have an appreciable deterrent effect on the majority of these undesired species and protect your squash for human consumption.

M: Where the fuck am I supposed to get mulch? The nearest Home Depot is 5,000 miles away.

James Brown II: Hey Madu!!! What about all of your corn-farming neighbors? This time a year the streets of this village are just full of cornhusks!!! They’re just gonna burn ‘em!!!

Al: Though the application of all mulch impedes weed growth and moderates the soil’s temperature and humidity, organic mulch brings the additional benefit of directly improving soil quality¸ for when organic vegetable matters inevitably break down, their composite nutrients rejuvenate the soil and aid in the creation of fertile humus.

M: I think that can be very easily done…

BrrrrrzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!



M: Alright, I’m finished. Now I can sit on my ass and read about politics.

Al: Zachary, if you are indeed serious about protecting your garden crops from herbivorous insects and annelids, the mere application of organic mulching will not suffice. In addition, I would advise that you apply a batch of organic pesticides.

M: Organic pesticides? That’s an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one – almost as bad as “corporate culture” or “military justice”. I already told you, I’m not eating fucking poison!!!

Al: Your presumption of logical coherence in this instance is as unfounded as it is fallacious; there is a wide assortment of strong acids found in locally-grown foodstuffs which are so extremely unsavory to the pests in question that they will eschew any vegetable matter which they would otherwise find to be delectable. All you need to do is go to market and buy a large quantity of garlic, hot peppers and soap.

First, you take a bucket and fill it with approximately five liters of water.



Chop up three or four cloves of garlic. Do not worry about the skins, because this mixture is not intended for human consumption…



… then mash the garlic up with a mortar and pestle. Garlic cloves are composed of mesophyll cells which contain alliin – a cystein-base, sulfur-rich amino acid, and vascular bundle sheaths containing alliin’s counterpart alliinase. Alliin and alliinase react spontaneously, hence they must be separated by the garlic’s cellulose walls. Though upon slicing and mashing, alliin and alliinase mix to form a sulfenic acid which condenses to form thiosulphinates, particularly allicin – this is the compound which gives garlic its distinct flavor.



M: So I’m taking all of this delicious garlic and throwing it on the ground so no one can eat it? Though I haven’t chopped any onions, I’m starting to tear up…

Al: That is precisely the point – though the olfactory nerves of the species homo sapiens have gradually evolved to have a favorable reaction towards allicin, the sensory organs of insects and annelids have developed precisely the opposite response and thus this organisms are innately programmed to avoid this compound. However, we could make a dramatically more effective pesticide if it contained the acid capsaicin - the active ingredient in the species Capsicum frutescens.

M: What?

Al: In colloquial terms, organic pesticides would be most effective if they contained the acid of chili peppers.

M: NOOOOO!!!!!!!! Don’t tell me I have to throw away my delicious chili peppers too!!!!!

Al: If by “throw away” you mean “to waste”, you are categorically mistaken. This garlic and pepper acid could be more accurately described as being invested in your zucchini and butternut squash crops, for in the absence of allicin or capsaicin your crops would remain vulnerable to pests.

So take a handful of hot peppers, cut them into small pieces and mash them with the mortar and pestle like you did with the garlic.



Now take a ball of soap and shave about half of it into fine gratings. This must be added to the pesticides so that they will make a foamy lather which will adhere to the applied crops.



Add water and wait at least an hour for all of the acids and soap to disperse into a fairly homogenous mixture.



Now if you take a sponge and lay just a modest amount of pesticide to the garden crops in question – especially the flowers and fruits, then the vast majority of insect, annelid and even mammalian, reptilian and ornithological pests will be so thoroughly dissuaded by the acidic taste of your zucchini and butternut squash plants that they will not eat them. If you apply such pesticides consistently, the larger species might even learn to avoid any such crops planted in your garden in the future as an acquired behavior.

M: So basically organic pesticides work the same way as when I’m cooking and I feel really greedy and don’t want to share my food with anyone. I know that Malians hate vegetables, so when I’m feeling greedy in village I make myself big salads and eggplant with cumin and no one even asks me to share. And when I’m with other Americans I cook myself weird-ass foods like curry spaghetti which freak out all but the most intrepid eaters. Likewise, just as much as garlic, hot peppers and soap are amongst my most favorite of things, if I add them to my squash then I don’t have to share with bugs!

James Brown II: That’s why all your food is so spicy I can’t touch it?!?!?! Asshole…

M: Don’t give me that attitude – it’s not like you were going to eat my eggplant in the first place. Here, have some dried little bottom-feeder fish from the polluted Niger River…

Human Sanitation with Feline Inspiration

So I woke up one morning and let my kitten out to pee and set up my solar panel to bask in the rising Sun. Usually I start my days walking down the street greeting everyone in my village and try to get them excited about treating their wells and drinking water. But today I just felt like venting to my kitten.

“James Brown, what’s the point of it all? The people of Sanadougou tell the Peace Corps that they want me to help them with water sanitation, I spend all day teaching people about water-borne disease prevention and they don’t do a damn thing I tell them! Every day I tell people they should drink pump water instead of well water and how they should filter their drinking water with cloth and treat it with bleach and yet they continue to drink worm-infested well water because they say that it tastes better than pump water!!! And I know that they’re not doing anything differently because at night I can smell all the gaseous sulfur from the aggregate diarrhea of everyone in this village! Why do I do this?!?! Why am I here?!?! Why?!?! Why?!?! Why?!?!

James Brown replied, “Get a grip on yo self Madu! You gotta understand! The Bambara people have been living like this for thousands of years! Almost nuthin changes! You been here six months, and you frustrated cuz you ain’t changed nuthin yet? Take a chill pill!!! You gotta learn patience!!!

“You got a point there James. But I don’t understand how people who tell me every day how sick they are and how poor they are can be so resistant to change. It’s just absurd.”

“Put yourself in their position! You’re a Bambara peanut farmer, dig? And some white dude from the suburbs waltzes into your village and tells you you’re doing everything wrong! This honky tells you that diseases come from tiny animals that you’ve never seen! Then he starts tellin’ you that wizards ain’t real! You’d think that punk be talkin' Jive! You'd say ‘screw you, honky!’ You wouldn’t do a damn thing different!”

“But what am I supposed to do? Stop trying to teach people about giardia and amoebas?”

Al – my solar panel – chimed in. “No, Zachary, I would advise that you continue on your current course of action despite its lack of easily measurable achievement. For example, the other day Moustapha told you that he treated his well with liquid bleach like you told him to. I would consider that a success unto itself.”

“C’mon, Al, Moustapha is just one person! There are like 4,427 other people in this village! At this rate they’ll all be treating their drinking water in the year 6224!”

“I would not be so pessimistic, Zachary. When I presided over the first Senate hearings on global warming in 1988 I was received with such skepticism that I was practically laughed out of the committee chamber, for at the time this phenomenon was understood almost exclusively within the academic community. In my 1993 environmental treatise Earth in the Balance I explained the climatological science in relative layman’s terms, and my message reached a substantially larger audience. But it was not until 2006 when I produced and narrated the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth that public opinion was so roused in favor of a national campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and only now in the year 2009 does it look like public opinion has shifted to such a degree that the cap-and-trade program which I have advocated has a chance of passing both houses of Congress.”

“Al, you lost me. What does global warming have to do with diarrhea?”

“Actually, the two phenomena are not mutually exclusive, for methane actually constitutes one of the most significant biogenic greenhouse gases – and the amount of methane released by the human digestive system actually spikes due to cases of giardiasis and amoebic dysentery. If we could provide potable water supplies to the population of roughly 2 billion persons currently lacking, then that could make a consequential reduction in the annual tonnage of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. However, the point of my analogy between my campaign for sensible climate policy and your campaign for improved water sanitation practices is that you should look into trying new forms of media to broadcast your message to a wider audience. For example, I used cinema and the Internet...”

“No, Al, this has nothing to do with the Internet. The people in my village ooh and ah when I show them how the velcro on my sandals works. Three people in the Mayor’s Office know how to type birth certificates on a typewriter. Just forget about the Internet! If I am going to teach people anything about water sanitation and for them to actually do it themselves it has to be simple enough for a toothless, illiterate peanut farmer to understand. It has to be so simple and so obvious that they can see it for themselves with their own eyes. If it entails concepts that I learned in 9th grade Biology class then it is too complicated.”

“’Scuse me, fellas! I gotta take a pee!”

“You’re excused, James.”

James Brown proceeded to dig a little hole in the sand with his front paws, urinated, and then moved forward and with his back paws pawed sand back on top of his pee hole.

“James, what did you just do?”

“Nuthin! I just got to pee! And when I got to pee I got to dig a hole!”

“I know you dug a hole, but why?”

“I don’t know! I… I… I just got to pee! Every time I got to pee I got to dig a hole! That’s just the way it is!”

Al lectured, “The common house cat covers up its own liquid and solid waste because of its instincts as a carnivorous animal. The scent of feline urine is particularly strong due to its high concentration of urea relative to water and is used among the wild cat population to mark one’s territory; however, potential prey have over millions of generations learned to avoid areas marked by the scent of cat urine. Over time, cats began to realize this as wekk and hence they have likewise developed the instinctive behavior to bury their waste so as to hide the scent.”

“THAT’S IT!!! We need to build a network of rudimentary septic tanks!!! James Brown, you’re the most ingenious talking cat ever!!!”

“Damn straight! They don’t call me the Kitty Cat of Soul for Nuthin!”

So I emulated the ingenious water sanitation infrastructure designed by my kitten and began to build a soak pit. I went out in the back of my nyegen where the wastewater flows out into the garden and plotted out a hole. A soak pit should have a minimum of 1.7 m2 of volume for each person who uses it on an average day, and since I am the only person who lives in the mud mansion of Xanadu that meant that I had to dig a hole roughly 1.2 meters long, 1.2 meters wide, and 1 meter deep. Easy, right?


No. In the midst of dry season – six months since the last rainfall – the dirt is as hard as a rock. Before digging anything I had to take a pickax and smash the ground apart. But even a pickax alone did not do the trick – after smashing the ground for an hour, I would have maybe a couple centimeters of debris to excavate. It was a little easier if I dumped a bucket of water on it at night and came to smash the moistened dirt in the morning, but the water would only moisten about 5 cm below the surface each time. Eventually I was able to sit in my pit and use the ax head to chisel the walls flat. Never was I able to produce enough debris to fill a single shovel – I could only dig this pit with a small garden spade.

The most fascinating aspect of me digging a hole was… that it was so goddamn fascinating. Rumor quickly spread around the village; “Did you hear that Madu is digging a hole?” “Praise be unto Allah! This is the first time since he’s gotten off his fat bobaraba since he got here!” And unless you have been the only white guy living in an African village you’d never believe it, but pretty soon there was a crowd of people gathering around to watch me. Only to a people who enjoy watching shitty Brazilian soap operas dubbed into another Western language they don’t understand could this actually be entertaining. “Holy Goat Meat! Madu is digging a hole! I’ve never seen anything like it!” This actually made my work go significantly slower because every 15 minutes I had to stop and explain what I was doing “Well you see, I’m digging a hole…”

What was actually kind of encouraging is another phenomenon kind of like Tom Sawyer whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence – if you start a project out in public, other people want to finish it for you. Ten year old kids would point out that in comparison to their fathers’ thick, calloused hands hardened after decades of hard labor in the fields, my hands have the soft and delicate skin of an American who has worked in offices clicking buttons all of his life. “You can’t dig a hole!” “You should sit and rest!” and they would try to take the pickax from my hands and do it for me. After having my manhood called into question by ten year olds, I had to lock my gate so they could only watch from outside.

After two weeks of picking and chiseling downward I eventually I dug my 1.7 m2.

And me digging this hole seems to have done its job. Pretty soon everyone knew that I had a hole in back of my nyegen. Word eventually got around to the dugutigi, so he and his crew of old men came to inspect my hole. They thought that it was so awesome that they wanted one in back of every last nyegen in the village, and I was summoned to the gwa of the elders.

(dum dum DUUUUUUM!!!! To be continued!!!!!!)

Let There be Light unto Xanadu!

When I signed up for this gig, at first I was kind of apprehensive about housing because most Malians live in mud huts that collapse every rainy season. But my mud hut is awesome! A nice Christian NGO which once operated in Sanadougou built this structure for their employees, and so I have a bedroom, a kitchen, a mud room, a walk-in closet, and a completely empty room reserved for silent meditation. It is the perfect place for me to slowly lose my marbles over the next two years.

For the first time in my life, I think I should thank Jesus.

Just as Jesus gave me a home, he also gave me a tropical fruit and vegetable garden. As I gradually integrate into this community of subsistence agriculture I am learning to take care of my own plot of millet, corn, beans, okra, sweet potatoes, hot peppers, oranges, bananas, papayas and guavas which the Son of God gave me as a house-warming present. It is my own little plot of organic paradise. God has bestowed unto me water and firmament which brings forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind. And it is good.


Nevertheless, my homeboy upstairs was quite erratic when it came to bringing forth light. Between the hours of 10:00 in the morning and 2:00 in the afternoon the blistering African Sun is so strong that even the Malians do not dare leave the shade of their gwa – which is an overhang made out of sticks and millet stalks and palm fronds. I presume as punishment for all of those things I said about Him not existing and all back in my bar mitzvah sermon, God has punished me by leaving my yard completely bereft of shade. So I told God to go screw Himself and I built my own gwa and I tied a hammock underneath so I can hide from the noonday sun and read the works of Nietzsche just to spite the vindictive son of a bitch.



Just as He is overly generous with the Sun’s rays when they are needed least, God is rather stingy about letting there be light when I most need it – like when I wake up in the middle of the night and realize there’s a chameleon crawling on my mattress. I was able to go for months without direct current, and I have a headlamp so it’s not so bad. But the second time my semi-naked self woke up to a chameleon which somehow got inside of my mosquito net and had to catch it under my sheets in pitch blackness I decided that enough is enough. I want electricity.

One problem: the rural Malian village of Sanadougou is not yet connected to anything resembling a power grid. Many people have televisions to watch the god-awful Brazilian soap opera which dominates all cultural life between 7:00 and 7:30 P.M., and there is an interesting system going on here where people power their televisions with car batteries. There are a total of 3 cars in a village of 4,428 persons, but everyone seems to have a car battery.

So I went to the market and bought my own car battery, some wires, alligator clips and with the help of my friend who happens to moonlight as an electrician I set up a functioning circuit for a fluorescent light bulb. And I had light to read at night for about a week. And then my battery died. I was told there were two means readily available in town to recharge it:

Option 1: I could pay someone a day’s worth of food money to rev up their gasoline generator. I ruled out this option because I am earnestly trying to divorce myself from the fossil fuel economy which is a primary cause of America’s stagnation, funding terrorism, causing the aquatic genocide of the coral atoll nations of Kiribati and the Maldives, and driving the polar bear to extinction. Also, I would prefer to eat for a day.

Option 2: I could become a member of the church which has a solar array on the roof to power their loudspeakers with which they let the congregants charge their batteries on off-days. This option is completely renewable and environmentally friendly, so I actually considered it. But as grateful as I am to Jesus for my tropical fruit garden, Hell is going to freeze over before Zac Mason becomes a member of a church.

In so many words, I was told that if I wanted to charge my car battery, I would have to accept either Jesus or Petroleum into my life. Though as much as I want electricity, I do not value a charged battery more than my spiritual independence.

This was on the back of my mind one noon as I was sitting under my millet stalk gwa perusing through the Book of Exodus and reading about the Hebrews’ construction of the Pyramids to satisfy the vanity of a single earthly man. As I pondered Pharaoh’s enslavement of my people to labor in the sweltering Sun, I remembered that even though the Egyptian potentates thought themselves to be gods among men, even they believed that there was one deity in their pantheon supreme above all: Ra, the god of the Sun. I thought that maybe if I want to take ten steps forward to spiritual freedom, maybe I have to take a step back to Bronze Age polytheism. And that is how I decided to become a Sun worshipper.

So I went to the hardware store in the big city and bought my own 50-watt photovoltaic solar panel. Never before have I possessed an electrical appliance of such spiritual and political import. Before I had a little Solio which is fine for things you might bring on an extended camping trip like a cell phone, an iPod, a GPS locator. But this 50-watt solar panel is the real thing; I can use it to charge batteries, to power up fluorescent light bulbs, to power my computer – I could even blast a fan if I so desired. There isn’t a single comfort of the Electric Age that I could realistically want that I can’t power with my solar panel. In honor of my favorite advocate of renewable energy, I call him “Al”.


Now one of the first things that this born-again heliotheist does every morning is place my buddy Al in front of the powerful, direct radiation of the early morning Sun. I kneel before Ra in supplication of his dominion over my electrical consumption and also photosynthesis for Jesus’ papaya patch. And as I go about the day I adjust its angle ever so slightly to compensate for the rotation of the Earth. O Ra, bless me with sustenance! O powerful Ra, bestow unto me energy!

The next time a chameleon finds its way into my sleeping place, I can flick a switch and say “Let there be Light!” and squash it much easier. What is more, not one penny of my money ever has to line the palaces of the House of Saud ever again.

Back in the U.S.A., so-called “realistic” businesspeople tend to pooh-pooh the potential of solar energy as a silly gimmick and that the best we can hope for change in the energy market is find more oil in America. Such “realistic” individuals also told me that instead of joining the Peace Corps I should get a real job for a serious company like Lehman Brothers. Just to prove all of those naysayers wrong, from now on I am going to avoid at all costs charging my car battery, my light bulbs, my computer, my iPod or any other appliance with even a single electron released from the breakdown of fossil fuels. Even this blog is now powered with solar energy. From this point in time until the year Infinite I shall derive my electrical sustenance from the daily supplication of the Sun god Ra.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can suck on my photovoltaic generator.