This is a guest post by Steve from Virginia. Steve is an artist, writer, photographer, horticulturalist and economic dilettante. He has first hand knowledge of fertilizer prices from his work growing orchids. In this post, Steve gives us his interpretation of our current situation.

Our world is changing, but we don’t always understand how. We describe the situation in words, and the choice of words changes how we think about things. In the comments to Sharon Astyk’s Down the Rabbit Hole post, commenter “x” expresses his frustration with the EROEI concept:

This where I am coming from when I criticize abstract concepts like EROEI and other arguments involving abstractions so often posted on TOD. There seems to be an inability to differentiate an abstraction from the real. Energy is seen as real while the concrete forms of energy with all their differences are treated as subserviant to the abstract. . .

There is a paradox: Language annihilates what it describes. It is impossible to escape the subjective; our world is constructed in analog - by us - described to ourselves in our minds with language. The world we inhabit lacks the potency of the real which lurks fruitlessly out of reach. Because of our immersion in language, we have abstracted ourselves. The more 'successful,' the more intelligent, the 'smarter' we become, the less relevant to anything else we become. Behind the facades of 'reality' are more facades. The harder we try to get 'to real', the more elusive real becomes.

In this post, I try to look through some of what is hidden by language with respect to the financial system, and how this is affecting fertilizer prices, which in turn can be expected to affect food supply.