08/22/2023
A permaculturist reflects on the cost of our food system
Though I have aspirations to be a tidy person, permaculture suits my personality.
A permaculturist’s garden allows a graceful wildflower-like white campion to grow cheek to cheek with zinnia and bachelor buttons, and in the same bed as tomatoes, squash, dill.
How else are you going to justify the empty spaces left open in a bed while your berry bushes achieve their maturity as shrubs? My daughter’s red poppy seeds give the entire garden gaiety until the time comes to tear them out and plant tomatoes and squash. My black and red currants and gooseberries will give me another year of favoring herbs and flowers before they crowd out diversity. The blackberries will occupy an entire bed next year.
I am approaching eighty and how did that happen?
I spent twenty plus years of my life writing a trilogy of novels on what happened here in the Northeastern United States in the nineteenth century.
Why is that important?--admittedly an expensive use of my time.
Over the course of the 19th century, our species moved from the agricultural craft-based village—where we had evolved for millennia-- to the factory city, and a culture fueled by petroleum and its pension for fulfilling consumer demands (among them speed) with petro-chemicals. Shelf life and predictability through homogeneity govern our farmer-to-supermarket food system. During covid, I had to applaud that system for putting diverse and healthy foods on our tables reliably.
But sensory authenticity has given way to the necessity of homogeneity and shelf life.
Are restoring flavor and fragrance worth the risk of re-booting our efficient food system? Systems, as we have found, have only so many replaceable parts before they break down. Our food system accommodated “organic,” accommodated the extreme segmentation of pleasing so many different "target audiences.” Oner of the costs has been the plague of factory farms, whose homogeneity requires many toxic inputs.
Permaculture bids us to look at the margins and to value what occurs there, at the corner of our eyes.
A return to nineteenth century values does NOT mean foreswearing antibiotics (for example along with other practices and discoveries of the 20th century.) If it were not for my knee replacement, I would have been wheelchair bound for the past thirty years. I can’t imagine writing the Textile Trilogy without a computer. Making a personal list of what we couldn’t do without from this modern age still allows us to imagine cutting carbon-burning practices.
While restoring a network of electric public trolleys depends on public policy and spending, my willingness to grow many of my own vegetables, to support my neighbors’ flock of happy, free range chickens by buying eggs, to restore and reuse rather than submit to fast fashion, and to use public transportation as it materializes, all happens first in my imagination as well as at the grassroots, so I am ready when the means of living carbon-free asks
Will Mother Earth be as generous with us as she is with her other children, even though we are the most willful and ignorant species? Does our lack of balance, our need to satisfy our every whim, mean that we can’t call up what is in our bloodstream, the knowledge of what it means to be indigenous? Because surely every immigrant being remembers, if only at a cellular level, what the indigenous being knows about sustainability.
The best intention of the continent’s invisible hand in genetic engineering was certainly to tame the hot headed and greedy colonist through intermarriage with native Americans. This didn’t happen. Or did it?
In the first several centuries after Europeans arrived in both North and South America, Dutch and French men for instance took native wives, a good start on a metis culture. Every disturbance of this magnitude, experts say, takes one thousand years to absorb and rebalance. Climate scientists and direct observation tell us we don’t have one thousand years to play this out. Another pandemic?
Nature herself is so impressive in her ability to restore the insults we visit upon her, when the insults stop.
Look at the Hudson River. Even carbon pollution in the atmosphere is brought to earth when the clouds are seeded with carbon particulates through burning, for instance. The AQI drops overnight with a climate-induced rainstorm. Her steady state is paradise.
When I am anxious or fearful or angry, I walk outside and am, myself, restored.
Ask myself: what do YOU need to do personally to reassure Mother Earth that the insults are lessening, that we value her generosity?
