HOW TO LEARN FROM NATURE AND WORK WITH NATURE, SO AS TO RESTORE OUR COMMUNITIES AND BODIES TO HEALTH
A conversation with Virginia-based farmer, ecologist and poet Daniel Griffith, please click on the link.
HART HAGAN: What are your hopes and desires for farms in the eastern United States?
DANIEL GRIFFITH: Ecosystem resilience and biodiversity are interesting, but bringing the entire community together to form a more beautiful and more resilient world is what we are focused on.
Can biodiversity exist if the human community is degenerating around it? I don't think it can. Can a community have healthy soils if the SOULS of those communities are not healthy? I don't think so.
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN NATURE AND THE HUMAN COMMUNITY: SOILS VERSUS SOULS
For a long time, the rhetoric in regenerative agriculture is focused in a reductionist way around different individual parts of health.
True abundance exists where we stand back and we start to understand that soil health is just as important as social health, farmers working together, farmers having access to land, farmers working in reciprocity and community with one another to achieve a greater abundance that is far beyond the potential of any individual farms in isolation.
DO WE CHANGE CONSUMERS OR FARMERS FIRST?
HART HAGAN: I think that there are at least two leverage points. One of them is getting consumers to want to buy locally and regeneratively. And the other thing is empowering producers (farmers) to do the work and do it profitably. So how can that happen?
DANIEL GRIFFITH: I wish I had a magic wand or at least a perfectly clear mind to answer them. We are trying to co-create potential solutions, within our community in the mid-Atlantic. We're facing hurdles. We have problems. We're co-creating around those problems.
Consumerism is overwhelming to me. I don't think we have a regenerative future ahead of us if consumerism doesn't soon die. I think consumerism is the most degenerative aspect of modern life. Period.
HART HAGAN: What do you mean by that? And what do you mean by consumerism?
DANIEL GRIFFITH: Consumerism is consumption of life without the return of life.
If you are someone who goes to a farm and buys from them and you don't support them in any other way, you're a consumer. You are consuming their goods but you're not a part of the system. It would be as if you harvested every Autumn Olive or blueberry bush that you ever saw. You saw a black bear and you said, “Get the hell out of here, black bear! These are MY blueberries!”
That's a consumer.
HART HAGAN: The impact of our consumption is out of sight out of mind. We don’t see the impact, so we don’t think about it.
DANIEL GRIFFITH: Totally. It's disconnection. It's a story of separation. This is the brilliance of Charles Eisenstein.“The Story of Separation” is his term.
We have two diverging systems--or “mothers”--today. We have Mother Culture and Mother Earth. And you can only have one mother. Consumerism is out of sight, out of mind, disconnectedness, bifurcation of these different aspects that should be integrated into a state of “interbeing.”
Consumerism lies in mother culture. Consumerism is where industry produces toys in China. They ship it over here, and we give it away at Christmas. This is consumerism.
I’m not saying don’t give a gift at Christmas. I'm saying there is no system that can survive when its members are disconnected.
That's not a system. That's an industry.
[Earlier in the interview, Daniel explains a scientific experiment where an alder tree and a cedar tree were growing side by side. The researcher covered the cedar tree so that it could not get energy from the sun, but the alder tree lent its energy to the cedar tree, through the roots.]
HART HAGAN: So let's make an analogy between people and plants. Plants know that they need to form communities. The alder tree you were talking about supports the cedar tree. The cedar tree at that point in time does not have any independent source of energy, but the alder tree does. And the alder tree knows--maybe instinctively--that what goes around comes around. If the alder tree gives, then there's going to come a day when the cedar tree gives back.
And there are many, many facets of that. The fungi give to the plants, the bacteria, etc. But human culture, I agree, has become competitive and disconnected.
DANIEL GRIFFITH: Does my landscape’s regeneration mean anything if my neighbors die of hunger? And I don't mean not eating. I mean they're dying of nutrient deficiencies.
Does my landscape’s regeneration matter if I my neighbors die of nutrient deficiencies? This is a question that has to be asked.
We do not have a regenerative future if we don't start thinking from the community's perspective. Regenerating Timshel Wildlands (Daniel’s farm) means nothing if the Wingina community of Central Virginia isn't regenerating. And I mean that economically. I mean that socially. I mean that equitably. And I mean this ecologically.
System regeneration has to pertain to both ecology and human society, all of it.
CAN WE HAVE CHANGE WITHOUT PAIN?
HART HAGAN: What does regeneration at the community level look like?
DANIEL GRIFFITH: We live in a weird time where my neighbors do not believe that Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) grain-fed, grain-finished beef, standing in muck and mire and manure their entire life is a bad thing. The reason they don't think it is a bad thing is that it's out of sight, out of mind. This is consumerism, but in addition to that, they are not yet experiencing pain.
On my own podcast “Denusion” the Daniel Griffith podcast, I just interviewed Abbey Kingdon Smith, the global network coordinator of the Savory Institute. The whole podcast was basically around this question: “How do we instigate true transformation and change without pain?”
It's very hard to do. If you're not dying and losing your bodily function and your life isn't ending--like mine was--do you raise a hundred chickens in the backyard, like I did? I would not have. I simply would not have done that. The impetus behind my change was pain. How do we instill a new paradigm in a community that is not open for new paradigms? This all has to happen patiently.
WE NEED THE PATIENCE OF NATURE
We're going back to this idea of patience. Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “On Nature” said, “We must accept the pace of Nature, and her secret is patience.” This natural patience isn't just informing biological succession and thereby community resilience. It is informing and undergirding all life. It is the paradigm for all life, all social and community-based development in the human sector, requires patience.
It requires letting go of control. It requires emergence. All of these things matter, on both sides, the human and the ecological sector, because there is no two sides. It's all one whole. It's one ecosystem. We are all a part of the same ecosystem.
There's one world. There's not the human world and the natural world. It’s all one world. That's my point. All of the lessons and understandings of ecology extend to the social scene as well, in their own way, in their own time.
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Daniel goes on to talk about solutions being implemented in the mid-Atlantic region, through the Commonwealth Network, a farmers’ cooperative and learning community.
For the entire conversation with ecologist, farmer, philosopher and poet Daniel Griffith, please click on the link