This past Spring, a friend of a friend, who runs a local nursery, introduced me to Moringa Oleifera when he was kind enough to give me some seeds for planting. Moringa, also known as the Drumstick Tree, is native to Southeast Asia and the Himalayas. It has a wide array of uses, including culinary, health, cosmetic, and industrial. The more I research Moringa, the more I am tempted to compare it's versatility to, dare I say it, that of Hemp.
Particularly fascinating, though, is it's great utility for water purification. As it's Wikipedia entry details:
"Moringa seed cake, obtained as a byproduct of pressing seeds to obtain oil, is used to filter water using flocculation to produce potable water for animal or human consumption.[36][37] Moringa seeds contain dimeric cationic proteins[38] which absorb and neutralize colloidal charges in turbid water, causing the colloidal particles to clump together, making the suspended particles easier to remove as sludge by either settling or filtration. Moringa seed cake removes most impurities from water."
When I read of things such as this it bolsters my sense that all of the synthetic, petroleum-based products that have been created through modern science and chemistry are poor (and often toxic) substitutes for things that nature already provides in a more organic form. Further, so much of the advancements in modern-day industrial technology seem aimed at solving problems which were only created as a byproduct of our technological progress in the first place - a fool's errand.
Consider for example, the pressing need to develop and implement more adequate water filtration in many parts of the world. One must ask, where has all the pollution come from, after all?
Recently I purchased a ProPur water filter for my own home. As I comparison shopped to find the best system on the market, I was frustrated not to find a single such system that did not use at least some parts made of synthetic rubber or plastic which came directly into contact with the water the system is meant to purify. (Often it was o-rings and washers that were the offending parties).
Have you noticed too, as I have, that copper plumbing is used less and less in new home construction and renovation? In it's place is some form of plasticized 'flex' pipe. This reminds me of the story about how the Romans supposedly went mad from using lead pipes to supply their drinking water. Just what will happen to our culture, then, as a result of the plasticization of our environment?
Many plastics are known endocrine disruptors which mimic some variant of the hormone estrogen, and have lead to such things as amphibians (which can be considered as the canaries in the environmental coal mine) in various rivers, estuaries and ecosystems found to have elevated numbers of sexual and reproductive abnormalities. I hear too, that sperm counts in men have been declining worldwide for decades, and that on average more and more adolescent boys are experiencing delayed puberty, while girls are entering it at an earlier age. James Corbett recently ran an episode related to this topic, that is worth the watch.
In spite of all this, there are those in the media today who attempt to demonize the word natural as if its somehow 'crazy'. It would perhaps be better to refrain from delineating those things that mother nature provides as natural, and rather, start referring more commonly to all that she does not provide as unnatural.