Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
To transmit is to empower – as many people as possible to be trained to become farmers; as many people as possible saving and adapting seeds to their own conditions.
While the links and mechanisms are not totally apparent, the introduction of synthetic fertilizers broke most of the links between the land, the animals and the people. This separation has many results and impacts on what we eat.
Nitrogen (N) is on the one hand an essential nutrient for all life forms and the building block for proteins, and on the other hand a pollutant causing many negative environmental and human health impacts.
From the banks of Wounded Knee Creek to the White Earth reservation, this spring, more seeds will be planted for the New Green Revolution. Bringing life back to the soil is work, but these farmers are doing it. Fields of dreams, indeed.
At the Old Growth table, we honor the ingredients as the wisdom keepers they are. And we humbly nod to the Ancestors who have kept our birthrights and lifeways intact.
An immediate halt to chemical fertilizing and returning to the use of compost instead would turn degeneration into regeneration.
Methane belching by grazing ruminants should not be seen as “emissions” that have to be mitigated.
The chemical soup we live in every day is a major cause of chronic disease including obesity that no weight-loss drug can address.
What impresses me about Cooking Sections’ art and activism is their ability to show that climate change is not something distant and abstract, something that politicians and experts will somehow take care of. The CLIMAVORE work shows that climate is utterly personal and local.
I think the reason that gardeners and small-scale farmers have such passion about their calling is that their deepest needs are satisfied. I am calling it beauty but it is more than that. It is fullfilling a longing.
The truth is that when this nation chose to eliminate four million farmers (with their families, hired help, buildings, and boundaries) on the advice of the colleges of agriculture, the agricultural bureaucracy, and the agribusiness corporations, it committed a sort of cultural genocide.
The land wisdom of peasants and indigenous people is ultimately the land wisdom we moderns have to learn, not by some magic process of technology transfer but by long cultural development, starting now.
