by Brian Brett
THERE’S A SLIM BOOK by Homer W. Smith called Kamongo: The Lungfish and the Padre, where I first encountered the concept of entropy, which can be loosely defined as a measure of the transfer of information of all life, or its “degradation”— but you have to think of degradation in its scientific sense, not as a negative. You can think of it as a measure of degrees of freedom. It can also lead to complexity—diversity, the thrill of the world so many of us worship and strive to protect; and that’s why, when looked at in this way, it’s known as evolutionary entropy—what gave us those rosebuds and giraffes and opera.
The thin plot of Kamongo, a 1932 bestseller, consists of a scientist and a minister, both unable to sleep, meeting at the rail of their steamer ship on a hot night as it navigates the Suez Canal. The scientist explains his research on the kamongo, or lungfish, and meditates on the meaning of life. The kamongo has reached an evolutionary dead end. It’s slowly going extinct, and he wonders if the human brain is merely another development similar to the fish’s lung. He believes that we are like the lungfish—evolved into our own progress traps or feedback mechanisms—and that evolution consists of creatures breeding in the spinning eddies of a stream flowing to the sea. The two men debate this, but the minister is not convinced the world is so mechanical and remorseless. He believes in the need for mystery, for magic, the ineffable, a guiding hand, even though the scientist insists entropy is that ineffable, guiding hand—the whirlpool is the mystery the minister demands. Then they go their separate ways.
Smith is talking about not only natural selection but the second law of thermodynamics: the law that tells us energy is not lost. It merely flows to a more degraded, more diffuse form, or a more complex form in a closed system. Evolutionary entropy is the spinning whirlpools in the stream—the will to diversify and procreate in order to fill an ecological niche in a flowing environment. Understanding entrophy might be as close to knowing God as we’re going to get.
Most environmentalists worship the products of the second law unconsciously. Diversity! It’s the wonder of the small farm and the ocean deeps. How can we not love the exotic, enormous variety of the universe? One evening I was talking to the artist Robert Bateman about how diversity grows, and he mentioned that he considered life a river—of arts and animals and music and plants—flowing out of key tributaries along this river, until everything reaches the delta where it spreads like countless grains of sand. In many ways this is the evolution of science. Beginning with a number of simple and beautiful theories and natural laws, science has evolved into discoveries so complex only experts in the field can understand them.
WHAT DOES THIS HAVE to do with small farming and my three blind mice? Everything, of course. There’s good reason for believing that the factory farm is our version of the lungfish. The distance between our mouths and the farm that grows our food has telescoped exponentially. We have gone from munching on an edible vine, to Mendel’s discovery of genetics, to genetic modification and the industrial production of rice on another continent. Sometimes it seems like we’ve raced straight from the digging stick to the combine-harvester.
As ugly as it can be, globalization is also a wonder of human ingenuity. First came the spinach, then came the varieties, then came the hydroponic factories thousands of miles away, and the mechanical sterilization and packaging in plastic containers injected with carbon dioxide so you can eat a “fresh” spinach salad—untouched by human hands— that is forty-three days old. With or without the salmonella. Then the packaging is shipped to China for recycling.
Such an intricate food system needs regulations respectful of the whole environment, not just the multinational agribusiness industry. Since our regulators are unable to see beyond this system, the ordinances, whether health or agricultural, are approaching an evolutionary dead end. The lungfish meets the feedback mechanism of Wallace, the progress trap of Wright. This is why small farming is being legislated out of existence, despite an inspired guerrilla war by the defenders of small farms and real food. So far our legislators can’t see beyond this progress trap we’ve inflicted upon ourselves. One of the main reasons why is that our species hasn’t evolved as quickly as the tools we have created. We’re gorillas with machine guns riding a fast train to oblivion.
Thus the farm joke about regulation I once ran into. According to this joke—whose accuracy I doubt, though I love it—the Lord’s Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, and there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but the U.S. government regulations on the sale of cabbage take up 26,911 words.
This is the world of my three blind mice at the head table. They belong to the school that designed the laws that define the cabbage.
CONSIDER HEALTH REGULATIONS RELATED to farm production. Each is individually good, all implemented for rational reasons, but incrementally they are unhealthy. Now we have health cops shutting down community barbecues or seizing the eggs from a farm stand or some old lady’s muffins made with real farm eggs. All sense of proportion has been lost. It used to be that a few people got sick at a picnic. Now 7 million pounds of potentially toxic meat or truckloads of infected spinach can cross nations within days. Yet this is what health and agricultural officials and the designers of manufactured food regard as progress. Since 1994 meat factories have recalled on average 8,500 tons of meat annually. The recalls are generally issued long after the food has been eaten. This is because there is none of the immediate feedback that occurs with local produce.
Meanwhile, because of the power shift in government, health regulators can harass small farmers, but in some American states meat inspectors assigned to visit agribusiness slaughterhouses actually have to make written applications for permission (which has been refused more than once) to inspect on a specified time and date. This explains those many tainted-meat scandals.
ANOTHER PROGRESS TRAP IS the so-called green revolution. The use of new hybrid seeds and pesticides and fertilizers and monoculture allowed many Asian nations to increase cultivation of crops from rice to cotton for decades, but now as the land becomes sterile, the insects immune, the chemicals too expensive, and traditional farming unviable in the era of globalization, the bankrupt farmers of India are suffering an epidemic of suicides as the farmers drink their own pesticides, illustrating too well what ruined them.
Our regulatory infrastructure can lead to the saddest consequences. In Poland swallows are symbols of good luck and favoured in barns, where they eat flies and insects with gusto. Yet entry into the European Union entails obeying its health regulations—and one of the edicts is that swallows must be exterminated in the Polish barns, since birds are potential disease carriers. The farmers are instructed to hang special plastic bags filled with chemical toxins that flying swallows will stick to and die, poisoned, thus creating the modern, healthy Polish barn.
Agribusiness originally assumed cheap food would attract customers, which it did, but as information spread about the production technologies and their dangers, consumption shifted toward organic produce, which also tastes better. Once organic produce grew into a major industry, it began transforming into what’s become known as “Big Organic”—mass-produced organic food using the factory methodology. That’s why people have lately taken up local food, bringing us full circle to the nutritious, more environmentally friendly, tasty diet provided by the local small farm in season. The trick is to not lose sight of the goal—good food.
Every agrarian society has traditionally offered what’s now termed farm-gate sales. On Salt Spring, until the last three years, farm stands were a booming trade. Islanders are environmentally conscious and fans of organic, local food. Unfortunately, the regulators have begun systematically targeting traditional community food. First they pursued our pie ladies, banning all bake sales and homemade pies. After the near-rioting died down they limited the ban to cream pies, but we know they’ll be back.
During the great forest fires in Kelowna, on the British Columbia mainland, several ye
ars ago, a small army of beleaguered firemen fought back the flames and saved hundreds of homes, orchards, and vineyards. An outpouring of thanks erupted from our elders, and thousands of homemade food items were mailed or delivered to the firemen, everything from pies to cookies to sandwiches. All of this food—truckloads of it—was dumped because it hadn’t been inspected and wasn’t prepared in approved kitchens, and was probably made by little old ladies who hadn’t taken a foodsafe course. That’s how a community is strangled. Whether it’s local barbecues and benefits, pie ladies, or candy apples on Halloween, we’re witnessing the alienation of ourselves from our neighbours.
Personal responsibility, relationships with your neighbours, and the traditional defences of small communities against bad practices have been replaced by food manufactured in thousands of countries from China to Mexico and a byzantine regulatory structure restricting real food and promoting factory farming. It’s taken North Americans several hundred years to begin learning to respect the traditional cultures of aboriginal peoples. Yet our governments have lost their respect for the traditional cultures of our own farmers.
These three blind mice were ostensibly sent here to protect us and our livestock. Their regulations ended up destroying us by banning all traditional slaughter. Within two years of this meeting, the most famous gourmet market lamb in the world, Salt Spring lamb, was effectively destroyed. Gone. The few surviving sheep farms have to book their slaughter off-island and four months in advance, paying more for the slaughter than for all the other costs of raising a lamb, guaranteeing its unprofitability. Nor can we provide the cuts our customers desire, and almost all local farmers fear that their babied, organic lamb is going to be switched and come back from a distant slaughterhouse as some scuzzy commercial lamb from a factory farm. We’re finished. Just about wiped out. Today, for now, we’re the lambs. Hopefully, not tomorrow.
And what of my three mice? They were changing in front of my eyes, morphing . . . . The anger began to flow like a infection through my blood as the discussion went around in circles, so I got up and left before I could utter words I would regret. Sometimes, you just can’t argue with a lungfish.
22
LOCAL LIVING,
LOCAL COMMUNITIES
WHO’S THAT?” SHARON asked as I lifted my finger off the steering wheel in the standard country wave to an unfamiliar pickup truck passing us on our dusty gravel road. We’d just finished dinner and were rushing our produce into the Farmers’ Institute before the deadline closed on the annual fall fair competitions. He waved a finger back.
“
“I have no idea,” I said.
“So why did you wave?”
That’s not hard to explain. If he was on our road, he was likely a neighbour who’d bought a different truck, or a new neighbour, or someone visiting a neighbour, or a tradesman coming back after dinner to finish some project for a neighbour, or a lost tourist. In any of these cases he deserved a friendly wave.
I enjoy living on an island where we greet each other, where not saying hello can get you lectured for unneigh-bourly behaviour—though a stroll between the bank and the hardware store can cost two hours in small talk and drive me wild with desperation to get home. Yet how outlandish is today’s urban world, where people walk past people every day without even acknowledging their presence.
People working together will work things out, as Jane Jacobs noted. You only have to watch the wonder of the human interactions at ferry time in our tiny village of Ful-ford Harbour during summer: the ferry overflowing with cars disembarking and boarding, locals picking up milk or a video in the small store or jawing about a bear sighting as they sip a soy cappuccino, while tourists stroll through the cluster of unorthodox shops that sell everything from Balinese mirrors to beads and wood-oven bread. It’s chaos, cars and foot traffic wandering in every direction, yet hardly ever do I see glass from a broken tail light. Everyone knows the place is a hazard, and they watch out for each other. It’s a kind of choreographed conversation among the community, performed with grace and good cheer.
Once I honked at a man’s car straddling the parking lot entrance. Then a neighbour hollered at me, “Hey, Brian, he’s only waiting to get gas!” I immediately understood why the car was trapped in its awkward spot. I turned red with shame at my rudeness. Another time, a friend of ours got stuck in a freak snowstorm and managed to block both loading and unloading ferry traffic, creating a fabulous jam-up, which soon had everyone in the harbour guffawing, while a crew of Fulford irregulars shoved her car into position in the icy snow.
Tonight was another community event. The fall fair is the culmination of the forging of relationships between musicians, farmers, car enthusiasts, bakers, growers, cooks, bead stringers, and blacksmiths. We all show up. When we arrived at the fair and began organizing our produce I noticed Sam, the border collie, in the back seat with a guilty look on her face and what appeared to be a bean stem dangling from her muzzle. Sure enough, there were only eleven green beans in the basket that was supposed to hold twelve, so as soon as we entered the hall, not even having enough time to wonder why a dog would eat a raw string bean, I rang up Bev Byron on the pay phone and explained the crisis as the deadline for entry neared. I knew she’d soon be on the way with her own produce. So she drove up to our house and picked a half-dozen of our pole beans. Once she arrived we found a bean that matched our specimens and finished our entry. Those cobbled-together beans won the trophy for grand champion of vegetables. That’s what community is all about.
LAST CENTURY, AS THE mixed farms were rolled over by the banks, the corporate bone collectors picked them up for a song. The towns began fading, their population migrating toward the cities, as they have done throughout history when small farming collapses. Our great web of little towns winked out like bedroom lights at night. Yet recently, there’s been a reverse flood of often wealthy immigrants, connected electronically and more educated about local living, finding themselves in conflict with the developers eager to cash in on the outer regions and ruin the communities with success. Salt Spring Island is a forward-looking community where people demand local food from their shopkeepers— yet we don’t supply 10 percent of our own food today.
Living locally, you soon learn that at least the historic modes of exchange of labour and goods still thrive, annually at the fall fair and weekly at the local craft and farmers’ market in Ganges, which shuts down only in the winter months and is a fine conduit for supplies, culture, and eccentric community conflicts. Our island newspaper estimates it has received more letters to the editor about the market than about any other subject. There also may be hundreds of farm-gate stands. Small farmers are an integral link in the rural social structure, whether pulling cars out of mudholes with their tractors, providing land or buildings for community gatherings, or scaring local hooligans up to no good in the fields or woods.
Gifting and helping flow around our island like water. There’s a subtle ritual attitude to debt—a pass-it-on mentality that can grow deliciously eccentric as oddball instruments like a burdizzo (a tool used for gelding male livestock) or a honey extractor travel the island. Although the extractor, donated to the community by a couple who’d given up bees, has become an increasing challenge to track down every year during its migrations.
Tool- and help-swapping can lead to a complicated, amusing, lively web of debts between neighbours—relationships built upon mutual need and mutual gifting, and sometimes mutual annoyance. This is what Pyotr Kropot-kin talked about with his argument that mutual aid was necessary for evolutionary survival. The trick about getting caught in this cycle is to remember that giving is more important than selling. You give tools or help—safe in the knowledge that they will return someday. Theoretically (hey, every system has its failings). If your neighbour needs something, you give it to her. It doesn’t matter who it is. You give, and you keep on giving, never expecting a return. In The Gift, Christopher Hyde contrasts the market economy, which has made acquisit
ion the core of society and led to the manufacturing of wants that can never be satisfied, with a “gifting economy,” where, as in Native communities, especially of the coast, self-worth is measured not by what you have but by what you have given.
As Hyde points out, now we have entered the kingdom of the consumer—a kingdom easily manipulated by the manufacturing of wants, so that our economy succeeds only if we are continually wanting, and thus unfulfilled. Gifting rarely goes off the rails, as it did with potlatches for a brief, confused period before they were banned. It’s true that an escalating pattern of gift giving bankrupted chiefs. They also knew that most of the gifts would come back, one way or another, for that is the way of potlatching, which the government officials couldn’t comprehend; and I love how my Native friends rely on the ceremony for community good order. Several times I’ve heard the remark “He won’t complain. I’ve potlatched him more than he’s potlatched me.”
But the “gifting wars,” as I call them, have their drawbacks— such as figuring out who has that honey extractor, which can cost time spent on social calls and lead to excessive dinner invitations or requests for community service, like weeding all those invasive Scotch broom plants from the nearby park. You can also inherit monumental social debt from generous individuals. Farmers have long learned that the more help you give another farmer, the more help he will owe you, and help is always needed on a farm. So I grow twitchy when I realize I’m falling behind, because there are certain farm chores you’d do anything to dodge, like helping clean out a plugged septic system or castrating baby pigs.
If gifting doesn’t always work, there’s barter. Before you know it, you can find yourself in a complex mixture of debts and barter where you end up trading your cow (there goes Betty) for a truck and a load of hay, or an old canoe for five broiler chickens. It’s the glory of a rural community that such dealings remain possible.
