Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/957/en

gestalt. In these its etheric-living formative processes, the plant is healthy through and through; it is the bearer of all healing forces; it cannot, by virtue of its own formative forces organisation, actually fall ill. What modifies — or even distorts, or wholly destroys — its outward appearance as the pure image of its type are influences from without. These are gathered today under the vague concept of environmental effects. Whenever these slide into extremes, the harmony of the relationship between cosmic and earthly workings is lost; imbalances arise. These can occur naturally through fires, storms, floods and earthquakes — or, increasingly, through the egoistic actions of the human being: through claims of possession and power, through ruthless exploitation and the like. The influences wrought by the human being manifest in global warming, climate change, the littering of the earth, the oceans and the stratosphere. Electrosmog envelops the plants on all sides, cutting them off from the workings of the cosmos. In the cultivation of crop plants, this extreme form of influence is intensified still further through life-alien technologies of every kind: the excessive fertilisation with nitrogen salts synthesised from the air, hydroponics (cultivation in nutrient-salt solutions), pesticides, herbicides and the rest. The plants are wrapped in foreign substances and radiations that weaken their etheric organisation. It is no longer in full measure capable of building up — or maintaining — its physical bodily organisation in accordance with its species-specific predisposition. The physiological consequence is that the plants contain a greater quantity of water — enlarged cells and intercellular spaces — and salts dissolved within it than they are able to convert into the building of their form-building tissues. All of this calls onto the scene a broad spectrum of plant and animal organisms: bacteria, fungi, mites, insects — beings that render useful services in the right place and at the right time within the household of nature, yet in the wrong place, at the wrong time, proliferate explosively in a one-sided manner and become harmful organisms. A special case within this canon are the viroses. Viruses constitute a kind of sub-nature of the plant kingdom, as radioactivity constitutes such a sub-nature of the mineral kingdom. Viruses have no metabolism of their own. They insert themselves into the metabolism of living organisms — from bacteria upwards — and can develop and multiply only through that metabolism. Whereas all that is living lives itself forth in rhythms, the virus conducts itself arhythmically. It is viruses above all that bring about, within the kingdom of cultivated plants, the ever more rapidly proceeding deterioration of varieties.