Mine Olde Mind

WARNING: HOT TOPIC

• the work of producing crops and raising livestock; farming (Webster's 2003)
• the art of cultivating the ground; husbandry (Webster's 1877)

Holy COW!!!! (no pun intended) Have we as of yet seen such a discrepancy between definitions??? This goes from ART to WORK. What a tremendous shift.

When did this happen??

When American began to over produce (around WWI it really hit home, though it had been tough on farms since then) they switched to monoculture rather than sustenance farming, the excess of which were occasionally sold at market. After the WWI farming boom (caused by people in Europe were waging a war and had not time to fight, therefor opening that market to American produce) there was a farming depression. Farms were hit hard by the fall out of prices when the war ended effectively beginning the great depression over a decade early for farm families. Many factors play into this, such as an unregulated banking system, and an unregulated stock market, but in the end it led to thousands of small farms being converted into large land holdings. These large land holdings were worked by fewer people due to the efficiency of mechanization. Larger and larger machines worked the land until all hell broke loose and the top soil just blew away. (The Great Dust Bowl)

Do you see what happened??? People, real people, not people on machines, not people in offices far far away, but people, whose life and livelihood depended on that soil... LEFT. They were uprooted just as the land was. That is when the switch happened. That is when "cultivation" turned into "production", that is when art turned into work and husbandry into farming.

The Dust Bowl

Yesterday in Soil Science 210 lab (a class I am in right now) we watched DIRT! the movie! It was an awesome documentary about how a a global entity humans are constantly moving farther and farther away from the land. Soil in particular was the focused upon part of the land in this film. After all, our whole lives exist because of the soil. Think about it... what do we eat, where do we go when we die, what is the most fun for a kid to play in, what are our houses made from. All of these things come from the soil.

More than just soil, we as a culture have become distant from every aspect of the land. The trees, the hills, the wildlife, growing things, water, and how all of these things interact to make an ideal environment. Not many people these days can go out and trek into a wilderness and find themselves content. Often they would need toilet paper or a dishwasher and all of the conveniences that come between. There are as always exceptions to the rule, and those people are to be learned from. Note: I am not advocating isolation from society and just living alone in the wilderness, but rather a happy medium where you can care for your land and for yourself in a social community.

Lets look at the Native American lifestyle. They knew that they relied on the land, and look at how well they cared for it. They knew that a forest would be healthiest if burned periodically. They knew that they should take only what they needed. They knew how to leave hardly a trace of their existence. Those things, that knowledge has all but disappeared from our society. Notice that it is a thrill to find pottery, or a piece of worked flint that was made by Native hands. Why is it such a thrill...? It is because those things, the signs of their impact are not the most common things. It was not even that long ago that they lost the majority share of the land on this continent. Now look at our signs. Our bright flashing neon signs. We have impacted everything. We leave a track like a wounded elephant through a bamboo forest. There is no way that in the same relatively short amount of time, our traces could be so imperceptible, so valuable to find.

We are an exploitative society. We take an take and give nothing back. We must start giving back to the land, caring for it, realizing that our livelihoods come from it. The signs of our bleeding earth are everywhere... smog, the great pacific trash patch, erosion, deforestation, etc. These aren't even the greatest of the signs.

One of the definitions for land is "to come to rest". I believe that this is exactly what will happen when we come back to our land. Ashes to Ashes, dust to dust. Lets get back to the land.