NATURE IN THE MIDDLE

During a podcast last week, I had a bit of a revelation.  Nothing stimulates us to think things through better than a good question-answer period.  I can always tell when I'm guesting on a truly ground-breaking podcast because the interview teases out of me things I'd never thought of before.  Or at least, new ways to articulate old concepts.

                  Such was the case in a spirited discussion about nature and farming.  Anyone who follows me knows I'm a fan of the archeological and anthropological fact that pre-European North America produced more food than it does today.  And that fact has nothing to do with the amount of land devoted to cities and asphalt, even as much as it is.

                  No, it had to do with how animals and plants interacted across the landscape.  Oh, yes, and Native Americans:  fire and hunting.  Bigger than human action, the predator-prey relationship created a choreography ensuring maximum sunbeam capture by photosynthesis.  Beavers and bison wallows ensured a healthy hydrology.

                  So here was the new idea, or at least a new way, to articulate the nature vs. human tension that drives the radical environmental anti-people mentality.  What I call "environmentalism by abandonment."  At its extreme, it promotes "rewilding" as a cure-all for everything that ails the landscape.  But Biblically, wilderness is always symptomatic of God's judgment on a nation.  Isaiah and Jeremiah repeatedly note brambles and wilderness are the result of punishment. 

                  On the podcast, as I was doodling with my thoughts on a paper, I ended up drawing three columns.  The one in the middle was nature--wildness.  On the right was good human management; we could call it good farming.  On the left was bad human management; we could call it bad farming.

                  Now that I've been properly chastised for saying "bad farmers" and "good farmers," I'm trying to stay in the charitable lane with a "good farming" and "bad farming" distinction to keep the people out of it.  Yes, they're there by inference, but it's a more gentle indictment.

                  Bad farming, which dominates North America, is less productive than nature.  For a moment, let's assume the Native Americans did not, or could not, dominate nature the way modern industrial chemical farming can and does.  Even if they had wanted to.

                  But good farming accelerates all the positive synergies of natural, or wild, systems.  Complexity, movement, dietary integrity, decomposition, and other foundational ecological principles find duplication and even leverage in good farming.  I've struggled for many years to place nature in the proper framework whenever I discuss agriculture with either radical cow-hating, farm-despising environmentalists or Monsanto-loving Conquistadors.  Both claim to be friends of nature, but neither is in the preferred column.  

                  Those of us on the ecological side of farming must go beyond organics and natural; we must espouse good farming.  Perhaps that should be the new category.   And it's certainly much easier to say than "regenerative."  You can't build a movement around a multi-syllabic word.  ha!

                  The truth is that nature beats bad farming.  But good farming beats nature.  The problem with the radical environmentalists is that they refuse to recognize the difference between good farming and bad farming.  It's the same fatal flaw exhibited by industrial chemical farming. Let's start promoting good farming and see what kind of discussions that may facilitate.

                  What are characteristics of good farming?