July 4, 2014 – When I read the news this morning of how Home Depot and other major retailers are selling home gardeners plants which are treated with neonicotinoid pesticides, now known to be a principal factor in the collapse of bee populations, it sent me into a disquieted reverie.
As I’ve previously written about at length, the neonicotinoid poisons causing the collapse of bee colonies are a synthetic form of the sacred native plant tobacco.
For millennia here on Turtle Island (North America) tobacco has been known and respected as the chief, or most powerful, of what are spoken of as the four sacred herbs, which also include sage, cedar and sweetgrass.
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and other framers of the Declaration of Independence – which we celebrate on the 4th of July – smoked sacred tobacco when they met and consulted with representatives the oldest living participatory democracies in the world, the Haudenausenee, or Iroquois Six Nation and the Lenape. Used in a proper manner, native tobacco has potential for great good.
Out of those meetings, sanctified with tobacco, native traditions of democracy became a key influence on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This is a much-overlooked part of America’s history as detailed in Gregory Schaff’s book Wampum Belts and Peace Trees.
Later when the founders finally did constitute the US of A they made a grave omission by leaving out a core element of Native democracy: the role of women. Thus American democracy was not whole. Women had no voice in US government until the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920.
Likewise, when chemical corporations took up the tobacco plant as a model they overlooked the whole, sacred dimension of the plant and created a limited, synthetic version. They exaggerated the yang element of tobacco to produce nicotine analogs bearing names such as clothianidin, imidacloprid, nitenpyram, and thiamethoxam.
Rather than using sacred tobacco in a respectful manner to promote life, the chemical corporations manufactured life-annihilating poisons – the neonicotinoids – which are now killing off our bees and other pollinators. Tobacco has been perverted, chemically synthesized to an extreme yang (masculine) state, and has thereby become a major factor in collapsing the balance of nature – essential to our survival.
Gardeners who buy plants may become unwitting accomplices in this destruction of life. According to the Friends of the Earth, until further notice gardeners should assume the plants they buy from most garden centers contain neonicotinoid pesticides. We need to ask questions and continue to advocate for revolutionary change — a natural, healthy balance in our gardens and farm fields.
Otherwise, as the New York Times has editorialized, “nothing less than the world’s ability to produce food is at risk from these chemicals.”
Deep Agroecology - The Call of the Land 
Worth noting that tobacco is forbidden to be used in any form under the USDA NOP organic rules. I’ve always found that amusing, that the most sacred herb of the native people has been outlawed for organic growers. Why? Originally because J I Rodale hated tobacco. Secondarily because of the government propaganda against smoking.
It’s interesting that people around the world smoked tobacco for many centuries yet lung cancer was practically unknown. Lung cancer did not become a prominent disease until the 1950s, around ten years after atmospheric testing of atomic weapons began. Then, strangely enough, even those who had never smoked had about the same chance of getting lung cancer as lifelong smokers. This was then blamed on “second hand smoke”, rather than admitting the real cause: the inhalation of radioactive elements from atomic weapons testing and nuclear power plants.
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