Over a century ago, the first seeds were being sown for a change that would transform human society on Earth. With the development of the first traction engines, man gained a power over land that had been entirely unimaginable before that point. Where a good plowman before might have done around five acres in a day, tractors brought the power to increase that by an order of magnitude. The awesome power of machinery and chemistry ushered in a new era of agricultural productivity that eventually became known as the green revolution. With this new power, mankind decided that it was finally time to bring the full force of human rationality to bear on the design of food production systems.
The future of the early 20th century’s imagination was one of infinite progress, liberation from sweat and toil by the use of machines, and eventually a life of leisure and fulfillment for all. The dream was never strongly questioned, even when early hints were offered by the natural world that all might not be well. Everyone knew that the trend of increasing productivity could be projected forward in a straight linear fashion to reach a future where needs would be met with virtually no effort, and mankind would bring order to the natural world.
Western civilization has always had a love affair with the linear. Things that can be predicted, ordered, and understood are exalted in our society. It’s a side effect of limitations of the cognitive process — we are not generally capable of understanding things that can’t be understood linearly, so our focus tends toward those things we can understand. This is such a strong preference that it unconsciously influences the topics of scientific research and is also projected, however erroneously, onto fundamentally nonlinear systems. The green revolution is a dramatic example of the second of these influences. For the first time in history, a human being had the power to eradicate all life but a single species (often genetically nearly identical) over huge swaths of land. This had the effect of eliminating many of the variables that before this time had been famous for making agriculture difficult; more of an art than a science. By restricting the number of elements in the system to something very near to one, we were able to gain a toehold in the predictability game. We took a living system, which is among the most non-linear of non-linear systems, and crushed it into linearity. The consequences of this action are just now beginning to be understood, but we have some powerful clues we can use to get a mental picture.
In the 1930s, America faced a new enemy that had been previously unknown. The new power to till the land on a huge scale led to massive areas of bare soil being perpetually exposed. When combined with a severe drought and windy weather, the resulting dust choked the entire nation into a state of submission. Dust mountains over 30 feet high were not uncommon. To put that into perspective, a 30 foot dust pile would completely bury a three story house up to the eaves. The plow had loosened the soil, and the soil then took to the air. The problem continues today, with topsoil leaving farmland at 40-60 times the rate at which it can be replenished, polluting bodies of water and air with grit and toxic agricultural chemicals at the same time.
We took the power of the tractor to a new level with the addition of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and genetic modification of crop plants. The full repercussions of all of these combined weapons in the war of linearizing life are even less completely understood than the dangers of the plow, but again we have hints. Biocides (collectively, herbicides and pesticides) are implicated in everything from cancer to obesity, honey bees are in terrible danger (30+% hive death per year), and the complex system of life and evolution are still working their way around all of our defenses. Superweeds and superpests are becoming common, leading to ever stronger doses and the creation of even more toxic chemicals. Racing against evolution is a fool’s game. It is time to abandon the strategy of forcing living systems to conform to an ideal created by minds that can only hold five to seven things simultaneously. We can take a few steps back, gain some distance from the issue of productive systems, and look at them from a wider perspective. At this remove, we still have the power to influence systems and make them extremely productive, but we do it with more subtle adjustments to the already working system. In short, we work with nature instead of against it.
Widdershins farm is dedicated to bringing about this green counterrevolution. We aren’t interested in returning to the past, or fighting industrial agriculture. Industrial agriculture is doomed, and it will struggle valiantly to keep the world fed until its successor arrives. It’s practitioners are good people who work hard to provide for the world. We’re working to show them that there is a viable successor, and that we all have the power to make it happen.
Widdershins is an old word, meaning various things at various times, but mostly it means counterclockwise. We turn the other way. The counterrevolution is a thing whose time has come; let’s find a new way to keep food on the table without going head to head against nature and reality.
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