by Brian Brett
Running a farm or cultivating a garden means accepting life within a cat’s cradle of fertility and rain and sun and weeds and deer. The insistence on perfection is the habit of the human mind. The drive to make sure that each crop is as good as or better than the last is the direct route to artificial fertilizers, pesticides, single-cropping, and gm seeds, even though they eventually diminish the entire system.
These measures have not only led to desertification and poisoned fields where our food is grown; they’ve also affected the flower industry. Store-bought roses carry a legacy of ruined gardens, toxic greenhouses, and ill workers in the Third World, where environmental and labour regulations are nearly nonexistent. A few flowers from a local field or greenhouse sold at the corner store have been replaced by an enormous $40-billion-a-year multinational industry in which the flowers have travelled far more than the young couple buying them at the corner market.
To combat this phenomenon a wave of environmentalists have been working on the ethical and ecological flower trade. You can avoid the whole issue by either growing your own flowers (what an innovative idea!) or, if you can’t because of your living circumstances, buying real flowers from local growers at farmers’ markets. Common sense is most uncommon in our species. Meanwhile, Valentine’s Day has become a toxic festival. Fifty million greenhouse roses wilt around the world each year in order for us to celebrate this day. Ninety percent of them are purchased by men. It has been calculated that more than £22 million is spent on flowers for Valentine’s Day in England alone. This news made me stop and consider the madness of our society, gearing up for an annual extravaganza of supply-and-demand globalized economics at its kookiest excess. The majority of sales are geared toward perfection on a single day. Imagine the cost of the lighting, heating, fertilizers, and pesticides necessary to force a flower into reaching its prime on a single day. The rest of the world might be collapsing from starvation and aids and ecological catastrophe, but we are putting our romantic shoulders to the wheel, keeping that skewed economy blossoming.
On Trauma Farm we soon learned about that cat’s cradle weaving together many fingers and criss-crossing patterns of string, and learned to celebrate it. I start cutting firewood. I have to get the sheep out of the field so that I don’t drop a tree on them, especially if it’s a maple, because they’re mad for the sugar in the maple and if they see me with the chainsaw they will follow me in hope of maple leaves. To get the sheep out of the pasture I need to fix the cross-fencing, which involves splitting a couple of new cedar rails or removing them from another fence. Then I need to mow the field before the broken branches make a mess. With all that done, I discover some of the junk wood is very beautiful filigreed maple—a crime to waste for firewood. It needs milling. But by now I can’t get the mill in until fire season is over. It’s a multidimensional chess game always in process. There are no solutions. Farming is life itself: the means are more important than the end—the means are the end. As Oswald Spengler noted: “Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast.”
The natural world is a miracle: mystery after mystery. Though it is full of wonder, it’s not necessarily wise or nice, as the Gnostic heretics noticed. I wouldn’t call liver disease, tooth decay, anal maggots in sheep, and stillbirths wise or nice, even as I recognize the natural systems and the evolutionary beauty of how they arose. Though I’m amused by the teleological argument—that nature is like a watch designed by a watchmaker—or its new variation, intelligent design, I would have wished for a more kindly designer.
Nature actually is the complicated watch of teleology, only one designed not by a god but by blind and amoral natural forces. And though I worship its beauty I recognize it’s just as twisted as we are. Living inside an ecology and meditating upon it deeply—the gore, the parasites, the gorgeous birthings, those green leaves after a rain, the rusty nail in the foot, a nasturtium blossom close up, and the babies born headless while a tidal wave approaches—we can only suspect that if this is intelligent design, the designer is a devil indeed. That’s not my kind of god. But maybe the god is the energy to break away, the energy behind the whirlpool, the need to perpetuate itself, breeding and changing—entropy—and that’s why we recognize and worship the insanity of diversity and why I’ve long admired the cosmologist Brian Swimme’s remark “You take hydrogen gas, you leave it alone for 14 billion years—and it turns into rosebuds, giraffes and humans.”
Besides rosebuds and giraffes, you also get succulent strawberries at the height of their season, and that’s how I end up back in the garden, remembering that we haven’t picked any for a few days. We have to cover them with netting or remay cloth to keep away the birds. We grow two varieties, the fat, one-shot wonders of early summer, and the perpetuals, which really aren’t that perpetual. They just have a second burst of fruit later in the summer. They are smaller, not as lush, like little jewels compared with the tasty fat boys of this time of year. The taste of either is so superior to those big woody things in the supermarkets. This has been a good year for strawberries. We fended off the birds and the slugs, and the weather was perfect. But sometimes the farm takes away our dreams. We wait for crops all winter and then they die on us or don’t fruit well during days of rain, or they shrivel and burn under a malicious sun. Farming, like foraging, is as much about hope as about accepting what you receive.
Sharon and I engage in our share of good-natured, amusing disputes in the garden. They are usually all about memory, which is why we keep a gardener’s log to resolve the extended differences of opinion. My short-term memory is so bad I can never remember where I left the garden hoe, which frustrates her no end, yet when she announces the lemon cucumber is useless I remember that it was spectacular last summer, and it was only a late planting and poor weather that made it perform so badly this season. Over the years, like all domestic couples, we have learned the benefits of banter, and also when to quietly ignore a disagreement. Her one habit that still breaks my heart is when I’m facing the imminent demise of one of my thirty-year-old bonsais, which I’ve accidentally moved into some corner where it didn’t get watered for a week. Sharon will look at it and tell me, “It’s getting better.” This remark, I’ve long ago learned, is the kiss of death. She unconsciously has that nurse’s knack for recognizing when death is near. There’s a brightness in the dying human eye and the struggling leaf—just before everything gives up and the life fades. That brightness in the dying leaf always gives her hope.
Tonight the flowers are humming with butterflies, and the slanting, golden light of the late afternoon is bringing out the luminosity of flowers. The bumblebees are working them as if there will be no tomorrow, though the honeybees are already bedded down. I prefer my flowers in the garden. Sharon loves them both in the house and in the garden. I always have a moment of horror if I see the decapitated stems of slaughtered delphiniums, but I know they will appear on a table or a counter in the house in an elegant vase, surprising me again, and making me look closer. Despite living in this jungle of colour I keep forgetting to stop and live with beauty. Sharon’s spectacular talent as an arranger, her true calling in life, reminds me of the beauty I sometimes miss.
We bought an elegant little ikebana dish, which we keep on the table in the sunroom, where we usually sit in the evening. This allows us to show off a small flower and interesting leaves. The art of sparsity in flower arrangements is not a tradition of the West, which prizes overflowing bouquets. Big and more is always better here, until you go farther west and encounter the Oriental philosophy of less.
One of the delights of the farm is that we tiled our bathtub surround white. This gave Sharon the opportunity of a corner where she can arrange small bouquets out of range of the hot spray of the shower. A couple of times a week she changes them, so that every bath or shower has a little surprise to encounter and contemplate. I’ve often thought of photographing that corner of the bath enclosure over
the years, recording the seasons and the changes in her sense of design with time. Beauty is as close as that, observing original displays of flowers you have known all your life.
Contemplating these beauties reminds me of the Zei-garnik effect, the thesis that the human brain is better at remembering incomplete tasks (naturally) than it is at recalling completed ones. This is all for the good when living simply in a simple environment, but faced with the overwhelming information and distractions of today, the brain falls into a miasma of unconcentrated energy, addicted to stimulus shock, lost in cognitive dissonance. As a result a growing number of people have rebelled and joined the recent drive toward simplicity. We have to shut off the news and look at the single flower again. And that’s why it’s our daily duty to wander our garden from spring to winter, searching for a flower or leaf or branch that suits the day’s arrangement.
BENEATH THE BIG STUMP crowned with the small stone Buddha peeking out from a huckleberry shrub, the voodoo lily has fallen over, and I go to the barn for the stakes I left by the table saw. Suddenly I am confronted by the fledgling swallows in the nest above the saw. At least tonight I don’t need to cut a board, but they’re still indignant at the interruption, and they fly chattering through the door after buzzing my head several times. One of them bangs against a wall and temporarily stuns itself. This is the scary time of the year for birds, as nestlings take their first flights, bouncing off walls, crashing into each other, performing goofy acrobatics. This is also when the newly hatched nighthawks come down off the mountain—the electric whir of their wings startling us as they hunt the insects above the ponds, completing the circle of the garden where we live.
21
REGULATING A
REBELLIOUS UNIVERSE
I WAS SEATED IN a rickety chair at a Farmers’ Institute meeting one evening with thirty other annoyed farmers, drinking coffee that tasted like tar infected with particles of artificial whitener. A trio of government managers were lecturing us about the steps they were taking to help us, but these three blind mice couldn’t comprehend that, despite our protests, it was their help that was killing us. Bored, I made a few calculations based on what I knew of my neighbours, and I realized the combined salaries of those officials, none of whom had ever run a farm, was probably greater than the net earnings of all the farmers in the room. That’s when I felt the numbing sadness of someone being trampled by his government, and I finally understood what Karl Marx meant when he said that human labour had become merely another commodity doomed to increasing specialization and alienation from the human condition and that modern economics was producing “its own gravediggers.” In this faceless room, we were being lectured by our gravediggers.
Max Weber studied the expansion of bureaucracy and, more importantly, its inbuilt dysfunction. He understood that rational systems, implemented by bureaucracies, can’t deal “with individual particularities, to which earlier types of justice were well suited.” In other words the tribe would always be more flexible than a federal trial. According to Weber, the “iron cage” of bureaucracy would prevent us from ever living in the Garden of Eden, where we were born, a garden we still crave, even as the natural world comes crashing down around us. These three managers facing the crowd were that iron cage, and it was difficult not to feel glum as they lectured farmers about farming. We all knew they were here to shut us down, yet like sheep we sat in the room and attempted to learn why—hope is an impressive instrument of control.
Listening, I understood why every year Sharon and I spend days filling out forty-three pages of income tax documentation for a farm with a gross income of half the national poverty level, and why we are forced to spend hours filling out compulsory census forms designed to promote the agribusinesses crushing us. I am a poet, and Sharon is a nurse. Together, we earn enough money to feed our farming habit. Even though I consider poetry one of the highest callings, I think there’s something bizarrely wrong with our economy when writing poetry helps sustain traditional farming.
Farming, they say, is the only occupation where you buy retail and sell wholesale and pay the freight both ways. Mike Byron told me that in his early days of farming there were several years he was grateful to sell his apples for enough money to buy apple boxes for the next year. How do you make a small fortune at farming? Start with a large fortune.
The rural life has weathered many a storm from pests and plagues to blights and scorched-earth warfare, but it has never encountered anything like the outlandish experiment in food production that began with the Industrial Revolution and the shift from small farming to the globalized factory farm—an experiment with few safety measures, where the term “precautionary principle” is regarded by the likes of these bureaucrats as a threat concocted by ignorant vegetarian cultists and scummy environmentalists (not that there weren’t a couple of them in the room).
These officials were all victims of what Ronald Wright, in A Short History of Progress, has called progress traps, which I mentioned earlier: they’re failures in logic or, more aptly, products of failed reductive logic—tunnel vision, in which an idea, a trail, is followed because it appears to be progressive, only there’s a big bear waiting at the end of the tunnel. An example Wright uses is the development of weapons technology through the centuries. Each improvement, from the stone point to the spear thrower to the high-calibre scoped rifle of today, allowed the easier hunting of game, but the end result is the extinction of game and, finally, the creation of the atom bomb. This is what’s also occurring with agriculture, with the loss of tens of thousands of small farms, livestock and plant extinctions, and, until recently, the abandonment of rural communities. Will the eventual destination of agriculture become strips of meat grown in trays in laboratories, and vats of algaelike soups or dried cubes for vegetables?
Progress traps are what happens when scientists and health officials convince themselves they can control the natural world whose glow we walk within, though nature has always been reluctant to accept our regulation. Hence our inept attempts at “wildlife management.” We have a cultlike belief that we can ultimately improve ecosystems that didn’t need much improvement until we came along. Technology has had millions of fabulous successes, obviously, but these successes have blinded us to our many failures, which have harmed our environment, ourselves, our children, the food we eat, and the communities we create.
Friedrich Nietzsche notes that since the Renaissance, Western society has become possessed by “optimistic rationalism”—a pathetic obsession with the myth of progress.
Gone is the companionship of the logical and the ecstatic worlds. The Dionysian and the Apollonian, the yin and yang. Logic, rationalism, specialization, individualism; all of these are extremely useful but they need to be balanced with instinct, intuition, tradition, ecstasy, community, a healthy distrust of authority, and, most of all, the patience of an old farmer. Sometimes our scientists and economists just need a good dose of common sense.
This kind of thinking will give agricultural and health bureaucrats lizard eyes and send them to sleep. I know; I tried to point out to my three blind mice at the head table a few of these issues. “Aren’t your health regulations destroying small farms while promoting toxic factory farms, which are spreading infections on a massive scale?” I watched their eyes glaze over, as if I’d dusted them with pesticide.
THE MODERN CORPORATE AND governmental knack for destroying environments by trying to fix them also comes from a generally confused understanding of evolution. Darwin titled one of his books, perhaps too aptly, The Descent of Man. He wasn’t kidding. He understood what “progress” meant. Most creatures that rose out of the brew of evolution have gone extinct. Things change. Blind alleys are created, as when we inbred the turkey into a creature so deformed it can no longer mate naturally. It’s entirely possible the human race is another evolutionary blind alley. It might make our behaviour more understandable if we considered our evolution a form of devolution.
Alfred Russel W
allace, the co-discoverer of natural selection with Darwin, theorized that natural selection operates as a kind of feedback mechanism, diverting creatures into either evolutionary blind alleys or successful adaptations to protect general ecosystems over the long term. “The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure soon to follow.” If this is true it doesn’t augur well for our relatively short-lived species. In fact, in a weird way, Wallace might well be saying that the avian flu is nature’s answer to the factory farming of chickens.
Evolution has nothing to do with “survival of the fittest,” a term more suited to the social system propagated by the industrial tycoons of the Victorian era than to the natural world. Many creatures survive in mutually supportive social structures. In his book Mutual Aid, the great anarchist philosopher Pyotr Kropotkin claimed that mutual aid was also a driving force for natural selection of landscapes and creatures—it’s about adaptation more than competition. Evolution, like farming, is an interactive way of life, not a goal.
