http://ccritz.com/media-admin.php One of Richard Rohr’s spiritual dicta is that how you do one thing is how you do everything: that there tends to be an organic unity to people, and even to cultures. The same problem tends to resurface everywhere.
Bắc Giang Another of his dicta is that you don’t think your way to a new way of living, you live your way to a new way of thinking. Action really is what is transformative: a change in lifestyle, an alteration of habits. That changes your thinking, in the end.
And so one of the observations I would like to make is that if the United States merely solved its agricultural problems, it would in the process probably have to solve all its other problems. The problems of agriculture today are: 1) consolidation of the entire food supply into the hands of few corporations 2) elimination of middle-class farmers and failure of small farms 3) government regulations which vastly favor megacorporate farms over small farms; the ownership of government by large corporations 4) exploitation of immigrant laborers without any legal rights 5) expansion of machinery and displacement of workers 6) extensive reliance of that machinery on finite petrochemicals 7) use of additional petrochemicals as fertilizers in place of natural replenishment of the soil 8) use of chemicals in place of interspecific and intraspecific diversity as a means of preserving the health of food plants and animals 9) massive amounts of pollution caused by the production and application of all those chemicals 10) destruction of surrounding ecology due to those chemicals – including, as we now know, the pollinators on which the entire system is based.
I could go on, but that will suffice. All these problems are present merely in the meals that you and I eat every day, just as the problem of slavery was present every morning in the 19th century when Americans got up to put on their clothes, or gave a piece of candy to a child, or put sugar in their tea or coffee.
And here is another way that agriculture is symptomatic of all the ills of our contemporary society: 80% of our agricultural land is taken up by annuals. In other words, four-fifths of our efforts are put into the short-term, and the immediate, with tremendous input requirements of chemical fertilizers, and the like: sacrificing the future for the present. Annuals by nature do not cover the soil for almost half the year, causing tremendous wastage of topsoil. In nature, annuals appear in disturbed, damaged land as a mere band-aid, and are quickly replaced by other vegetation. But we are a culture of band-aids and short-term investment. Wendell Berry (in this fine interview) says that we really need to change our agriculture to have four-fifths of our agriculture provided by perennial plants, and only one-fifth in annuals. There should be more pasture grasses, more fruit orchards, more nut orchards, more crops that require long-term investment and stabilize the soils and require fewer inputs. But that would require us to focus four-fifths of our being on the long-term, which would be a complete cultural revolution. As Berry says, “for Americans to talk about sustainability is a bit of a joke.”
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