Itineraries Spring 2008
Contents:
“Is That Your Father?” Thomas Berry as Mentor by Ted Purcell
Earth Corps Councils by Eric Utne
The Earth as a Sacred Garden by David Wann
What I Learned in an Ecovillage by Françoise Ducroz
Earth Elders: An Invitation by Fred Lanphear
Elders and the Earth: Return to the Future by John G. Sullivan
Two Bestsellers About Eating in America by Barbara Kammerlohr
Three Poems
Windflowers by Nancy Corson Carter
(Upon finding a field of anemones
above the Medici Villa a Castello)
Listening
as red, white, violet
anemones untangle
from winter husks
Listening
for Persephone’s voice
in the wind’s
cool whispers
Her footprints fill
with windflowers
springing from
below the earth
Listening
as it begins:
the fragile music
of renewal.
//
Living by Denise Levertov
The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.
A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily
moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go,
Each minute the last minute.
from The Life Around Us
//
Elders by W. S. Merwin
we have been here so short a time
and we pretend that we have invented memory
we have forgotten what it is like to be you
who do not remember us
we remember imagining that what survived us
would be like us
and would remember the world as it appears to us
but it will be your eyes that will fill with light
we kill you again and again
and we turn into you
eating the forests
eating the earth and the water
and dying of them
departing from ourselves
leaving you the morning
in its antiquity
Speaking for the Earth: The Role of Elders in Caring for the Planet by Bolton Anthony
This Earth Day 2008 issue of Itineraries is dedicated to Fr. Thomas Berry, a historian of cultures and a prophetic voice whose work and life personify the role of the elder as “Spokesperson for the Earth.” Fr. Berry — who turned 93 last November — is the proponent of a new “Universe Story.” His daring and visionary cosmology unites science and the humanities in a celebration of an unfolding — and beneficent — universe and the human role as its consciousness.
Berry believes we stand at a defining moment in history: “A new way of seeing the world, human life and the future is emerging… The clockworld of Newton; the manipulative, exploitative world of high-energy technologies; the quantitative value system” — this now-bankrupt view of the world is being superceded by an emerging “awareness of the inter-dependence of all the living and non-living forces of the planet.”
The need to act is urgent: “The changes wrought in the past century are not simply changes in cultural adaptation, in economic institutions, or in political regime. [They] are changes of a geological and biological magnitude… Many living species have disappeared forever. Tens of thousands of species could disappear before the end of the century.” Elders living in such time have, according to Berry, a special responsibility, namely, “the historic task of sustaining the human vision at such a moment of transition.”
The articles in this issue include a personal memoir by Ted Purcell of the mentoring role which Thomas Berry played in his own life and how, in turn, that has shaped his own work with university students. The remaining article explore different facets of our role in creating a sustainable futures for the generations that follow.
Eric Utne, the publisher, educator, and social entrepreneur who founded the Utne Reader, unveils an exciting new initiative, Earth Corps Councils.
David Wann, in an excerpt from his recent book, Simple Prosperity, celebrates “The Earth as a Sacred Garden.”
Françoise Ducroz recounts her 3-year experience at Findhorn, the world’s premier ecovillage in Scotland.
Fred Lanphear sounds a reflective call to action to all “Earth Elders.”
Finally, poet Nancy Corson Carter (left) has embellished the issue with an appropriate selection of short poems by Denise Levertov, David Ignatow, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, W.S. Merwin, Thich Nhat Hanh, and her own original contribution. These are on this page and at the end of articles throughout the issue.
Among our recurring features:
Our resident philosopher, John G. Sullivan, asks how might we live as if we had everything we need, and
Book page editor Barbara Kammerlohr reviews two recent bestsellers about eating in America, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.
Enjoy!
— Bolton Anthony
“Is That Your Father?” Thomas Berry as Mentor by Ted Purcell
The picture of Thomas sits in my home office on the top of a bookshelf, next to that of my granddaughter and beneath a large map of the world. Adjacent to the map is the Native American flute given to me for my 55th birthday by a Cherokee medicine man, Hawk Littlejohn. There are stories attached to each of these items; but in recent years several visitors to my office, noticing the photo of Thomas and rightly assuming that this is someone who is special to my life, have said, “Is that your father?” The first time this happened I said that he was not my father, then went on to identify him as a “geologian” (theologian of the earth) who has lectured widely and written on the intersection of cultural, spiritual, and ecological issues. Several times since I have answered the same question with both a “No” and a “Yes.” No, Thomas is not my biological or adoptive father. “Yes, Thomas is a father to me in the sense of a mentor and a spiritual guide whose loving wisdom has had a profound effect on my vocation for more than twenty years.”
//
My first live exposure to his thought came when I heard him speak in 1987 at the first gathering of the North American Conference on Christianity and Ecology, where one of the ways he got the attention of this once-Southern Baptist was to suggest that Christianity is too preoccupied with personal salvation, too focused on redemption. At the time I had no inkling of what mind-stretching and imaginative insights lay beneath his heretical-sounding comments, or how the wisdom I later came to discover in his thought would help me appreciate how Thomas was calling for a conversion in the human relationship to the earth.
One might say that Thomas was presenting to me in his own unique way a gospel which would enable me, in the language of my own tradition, to make a connection between “being saved” and “saving the earth.” He was inviting me to surrender myself to a transformative process which requires the “re-invention of the human” in terms of our role within the sacred earth community; he was inviting me to enter into a more mutually-enhancing relationship with our endangered planet.
Some months later his brother, Jim Berry, himself a passionate voice for the earth, arranged for Thomas and me to visit at Jim’s home in Raleigh, NC. I was pondering a momentous decision to abandon the safety of my full-time position as a campus minister at N.C. State University — a position I’d held for 15 years — for a half-time position at Duke University, I shared my process of discernment with Thomas: I would give up half my salary to buy back half of my life; in exchange I’d have more time to devote to the vocation of caring for the earth. He listened patiently, asked a few questions — the only one I can remember is “What are you reading?” — and confirmed me in my desire and intention to follow my calling.
Soon after coming to Duke in 1989, I invited Thomas to speak on campus. A few years later, I extended a second invitation. In the spring of 2002 he returned for a lecture series on “The Role of the University in Human-Earth Relations.” In a Harvard lecture six years earlier Thomas had said: “The university, as now functioning, prepares students for their role in extending human dominion over the natural world, not for intimate presence to the natural world. Use of this power in a deleterious manner has devastated the planet. We suddenly discover that we are losing some of our most exalted human experiences that come to us through our participation in the natural world about us.”
Well-ensconced here at Duke University, I was clearly a part of the system — and, therefore, part of the problem. What could I do to change things at Duke? Open yourself to opportunity, and it presents itself: the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences had been a sponsor of Thomas’s visit; a conversation with its dean, Bill Schlesinger, led to my proposing a course for graduate students that would explore the fundamental and compelling question inspired by Thomas Berry: How may we as human beings develop a mutually enhancing relationship with the earth?
The course, “Spirituality and Ecology: Religious Perspectives on Environmental Ethics,” was offered for the first time in the Fall of 2002 and has been offered annually since. In the classroom experience and beyond, students are encouraged to examine and clarify the basic values, assumptions, attitudes, and beliefs that underlie our human relationship with the natural world. Special attention is given to the evaluation of religious and spiritual values, concepts, and practices in light of the ecological crisis of our time. A regular feature of the course has been to include a brief introduction to the thought of Thomas Berry.
Although only one of the classes actually took a “field trip” to visit with Thomas in his Greensboro home, their weekly journals, classroom discussions, and environmental ethics papers reflect their wonder and appreciation for this “student of the earth and the human condition.” When these students — all of them already committed to environmental professions — view “The Great Story,” a documentary about Thomas, his suggestion that “the universe is not a collection of objects, but a community of subjects” comes as a startling invitation to them to embrace the earth more intimately than science alone might allow. It begins to register that ecology alone is not the answer, because it too is a “use” relationship to the natural world.
They hear Thomas describe his boyhood experience of a beautiful meadow at age 11, and they marvel at how this became, for him, “the basic determinant of my sense of reality and values. Whatever fosters this meadow is good. What does harm to this meadow is not good.” Thus, he argues, “A good economic, or political, or educational system is one that would preserve that meadow, and a good religion would reveal the deeper experience of that meadow and how it came into being.”
I am not surprised, then, when these students attempt to articulate the basis of their own environmental ethic and their understanding of their vocations, they connect them to their own experience of beauty in the natural world. As the poet Rumi wrote: “Let the beauty you love be what you do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
After 19 years on the Religious Life Staff at Duke, I serve now as advisor to a new student organization, the Interfaith Dialogue Project, and as a mentor-facilitator for Duke Chapel’s Pathways Program for vocational discernment. The particular focus of the Pathways group in recent years is how their spirituality inspires, informs, and motivates the calling to an environmental vocation. As an elder who can “retire” from this work at any time, I too am in regular discernment about what is next, beyond Duke.
I sometimes wonder what business I have teaching this class — a campus minister, not an academic, with precious little science background, and old enough to be the grandfather of most of my students. Perhaps what the Talmud says is true: We teach best what we most need to learn. Certainly I learn from my students; mostly, however, I am inspired by them, inspired by these mostly twenty-somethings who open their hearts and their minds as they prepare for vocations of caring for the earth, who tell their earth-connecting stories to one another and share their numinous experiences at the risk of being identified as “nature mystics,” who discover anew that “feelings,” not just “facts,” are a valid part of their vocational equipment. Why am I teaching this course? Part of the answer is in the joy of helping to introduce Thomas Berry. While I make no claim to representing adequately or even understanding the enriching profundity of his thought, I gladly and audaciously claim him as a mentor whose inspiring life and vocation fills my heart with thanksgiving.
And yes, the next time someone notices his photo on the bookshelf in my office and says, “Is that your father?,” I will say “Yes,” and tell the story again.
//
Ted Purcell , M.Div., D.Min., is a campus minister at Duke University, where he serves on the Religious Life Staff as advisor to the Interfaith Dialogue Project. His work in spiritual guidance includes facilitating student vocational discernment groups through the Duke Chapel PathWays program, and he teaches a course on Spirituality and Ecology in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.
//
An Appalachian Wedding
Look up at the sky
the heavens so blue
the sun so radiant
the clouds so playful
the soaring raptors
woodland creatures
meadows in bloom
rivers singing their
way to the sea
wolfsong on the land
whalesong in the sea
celebration everywhere
wild, riotous
immense as a monsoon
lifting an ocean of joy
then spilling it down over
the Appalachian landscape
drenching us all
in a deluge of delight
as we open our arms and
rush toward each other
all of us moved by that vast
compassionate curve
that brings all things together
in intimate celebration
celebration that is
the universe itself.
— Thomas Berry
Earth Corps Councils by Eric Utne
Eric Utne was founding publisher and editor of the New Age Journal, now owned by Martha Stewart/Omnimedia. In 1984, he founded Utne Reader, of which he was chair for 15 years. In June 2006 the magazine was sold to Ogden Communications, publisher of Mother Earth News, Natural Home, and ten other special interest publications. Eric is the father of four Waldorf-educated sons and was integrally involved in the founding, growth, and development of City of Lakes Waldorf School and Watershed High School. In November 2006 he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Nobel Peace Prize Forum.
On July 18, 2007, Nelson Mandela announced the formation of The Global Elders, an idea brought to him several years earlier by entrepreneur and adventurer Richard Branson and recording artist Peter Gabriel. According to Branson, since the world is now a global village, “it’s time we had our global village elders.” Among the group are Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Mary Robinson, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Muhammad Yunus, and several others.
As President Mandela put it, “Let us call them Global Elders, not because of their age, but because of their individual and collective wisdom. This group derives its strength not from political, economic or military power, but from (their) independence and integrity…They can help foster and introduce innovative ideas and little known solutions to connect those who have real practical needs with those who have something to give.”
I believe that every city, town, and village in the world needs its own Council of Elders. Building on the success of Utne Reader’s Neighborhood Salon movement and the “Let’s Talk America” initiative, my colleagues at the Utne Institute and I are launching local Councils of Elders, called “Earth Corps Councils,” throughout North America. The Earth Corps Councils are designed to:
- Train young and old participants in the arts of council, mentoring, and social entrepreneurship;
- Discuss common interests and concerns;
Inspire and equip the participants to create solutions to social and environmental problems; and - Link them to worthy organizational partners and promising projects, both domestic and international.
//
Utne Salons
In 1991 Utne Reader published a cover story titled, “Salons: How to Revive the Endangered Art of Conversation and Start a Revolution in Your Living Room.” Readers were invited to send in their name, address, and daytime phone number if they wanted to meet other readers in their zip code. The magazine got over 10,000 responses and eventually set up 500 salons, with 20 people in each, all across North America. Within a year 20,000 people had joined the Neighborhood Salon Association, meeting at least monthly in office conference rooms, church basements, coffee shops, and mostly, in each other’s living rooms.
The Blue Man Group met each other and formed in an Utne Salon. Countless marriages, businesses, and non-profit initiatives got their start there too. Several schools and co-housing projects trace their genesis to Utne Salons. Shortly after the issue came out a number of large daily newspapers, including all 77 properties in the Gannett newspaper chain, started discussion circles for their readers. The salon movement was born.
In 2004 Utne Institute joined with several other organizations to launch “Let’s Talk America,” a nationwide movement that brought Americans from all points on the political spectrum together in cafes, bookstores, churches, and living rooms for lively, open-hearted dialogue to consider questions essential to the future of our democracy. Again, many new initiatives for the common good came out of these gatherings.
We think the world is ready for “Earth Corps Councils” — the next generation of citizen gatherings; this time, however, we intend to gently encourage and support participants to move beyond talk to action.
//
The Role of Elders
Most traditional cultures have had councils of elders. One of the primary roles of these councils was helping young people identify and affirm their unique gifts and find their place in the community. While some cultures are still relatively intact in this regard, for many the guidance of youth into fulfilling and purposeful roles in society is accomplished superficially or haphazardly, if at all.
Malidoma Somé, who was born in 1956 in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), was initiated in the ancestral traditions of his people, the Dagara tribe of West Africa, by the tribe’s council of elders. Holding two Ph.D.’s in literature from the Sorbonne and Brandeis, he describes the results of his initiation:
When I was twenty-two, my elders came to me and asked me to return to the white man’s world, to share what I had learned about my own spiritual tradition through my initiation. For me, initiation had eliminated my confusion, helplessness, and pain and opened the door to a powerful understanding of the link between my own life purpose and the will of my ancestors. I had come to understand the sacred relationship between children and old people, between fathers and their adolescent sons, between mothers and daughters. I knew especially why my people have such a deep respect for old age, and why a strong, functioning community is essential for the maintenance of an individual’s sense of identity, meaning, and purpose.
According to author Terry Mollner, eldering is a verb, the act of helping another grow to his or her next level of maturity. A young person can elder an older person as well as the other way around. Like mentoring, eldering is a reciprocal relationship, a vehicle for mutual exchange and learning.
//
Thinking Globally
A common lament these days has to do with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” It goes something like this: “I’m convinced that global warming is a fact, there’s simply no denying it. But, besides changing my light bulbs and lobbying my representatives to pass more eco-friendly legislation, what can I do?”
This is what the global climate crisis feels like to most people: “I can make personal lifestyle changes, and lobby for legislative changes, but there’s little I can do with my neighbors, on the community level.” Enter the Earth Corps Council.
Earth Corps Councils, as their name implies, are groups of local citizens united in their desire to heal, steward, and sustain the Earth, socially and environmentally, locally and globally. They are local responses to a host of planetary crises, not just climate change. Each Earth Corps Council is unique, generating its own activities according to the ideas, interests, resources, and abilities of its particular mix of members.
Our fundamental premise, or theory of change, is that engaging young people and elders in thoughtful, heartfelt conversation about their interests and concerns will enable and encourage them to take meaningful and productive action together. We want to bring diverse groups of young and old together and help them get to know each other. And we want to equip them with a variety of tools and practices that will empower them to act together to address both local and global environmental and human needs.
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Acting Locally
Here are some steps you can take to start an Earth Corps Council in YOUR neighborhood:
- Begin by inviting a group of 8-10 elders (50+ years old). Ask everyone to commit to meeting at least once or twice a month (or even weekly) for 9-12 sessions. Toward the end of this period you will create a public event or launch a project “for the greater good.” It can can focus on any social or environmental need your group chooses to address.Take some time to get to know each other before welcoming the youngers (16-28) or rushing to discuss possible projects. The American Leadership Forum of Silicon Valley, which is one of the models for the ECCs, starts their year-long leadership program with a six-day wilderness retreat. The retreat includes lots of individual and group challenges as well as time for solo reflection. A day-long or weekend retreat can serve the same community-building ends. If a retreat is not possible for your group, then take at least three or four meetings to simply get to know each others’ life stories, your personal successes and failures, and hopes and dreams, before discussing projects.
- Welcome the youngers. We suggest that each elder invite one young person to join the group. Start by meeting the young person individually, getting to know their background and interests, with an eye to really seeing who they are, what special gifts they may have to give. Of course, one meeting is not enough time to really get to know anyone, but having the intention to really see another’s special gifts (and challenges) can help. Then, introduce them to the group in a special, council-forming meeting. Again, take some time for everyone in this new, multi-generational group, to get to know each other before moving to discussion of possible projects.
- Conduct a community needs assessment.
- Brainstorm and choose an event or project. This may take several sessions.
- Implement the event or project.
- Share your group’s experience.
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For more information — The Utne Institute, originator of the Earth Corps Councils initiative, is a think-tank and social enterprise incubator. It has attracted the support of a Board of Advisors including vital aging experts Rick Moody, Richard Leider, and Jan Hively, authors Paul Hawken and Frances Moore Lappé, polar explorer Will Steger, and Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the Peace Corps (’93-’95) and UNICEF (’95-’05).
In the near future, the Institute will be unveiling a new website, www.EarthCorpsCouncil.org, where you can find ideas about organizing an Earth Corps Council, finding and incorporating young people into your group, conducting a community needs assessment, brainstorming, choosing, and implementing possible projects, and links to other Earth Corps Councils and related initiatives and resources.
The Earth as a Sacred Garden by David Wann
A popular speaker at conferences and college events, David Wann is an author, filmmaker, and speaker about sustainable design and sustainable lifestyles. His most recent book, Simple Prosperity: Finding Real Wealth in a Sustainable Lifestyle, is a sequel to the best-selling book he coauthored, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic. David is the president of the Sustainable Futures Society and a fellow of the national Simplicity Forum. His forthcoming book, The New Normal: Agenda for a Healthy Planet — scheduled for publication in January — looks at how dysfunctional our current mega-systems have become due to their focus on quantity and profit, rather than quality, fairness, and balance.
When I was four or five, I wandered into the woods near our house with a young friend. My recollections of that distant morning include splotches of bright sunlight projected through the trees onto the dark forest floor; the earthy fragrance of leaves and rich Illinois soil; and knowing what it must feel like to be a butterfly. We fluttered further and further away from our yards, clueless that back home our moms were beginning to panic. After an hour or more of frantic searching, someone drove to the other side of the forest and found us near the highway, still in the throes of discovery and exploration. I seem to remember that everyone was very agitated, insisting that we’d gotten lost and could have been killed! But we didn’t see it that way. All we had lost was a sense of time, and a sense of imposed boundaries.
About fifty years later, I experienced a similar, unbounded feeling in a Costa Rican rainforest north of San José. I’ve always thought of myself as a nature guy, a backpacker and fanatical gardener who’s learned about the cycles and meaning of nature by observing them directly — on switch-backed mountain trails or in rich garden beds teeming with vegetables. But I wasn’t prepared for what I encountered at Rara Avis, a biological reserve that is true, undeveloped wilderness. I was like that delighted young preschooler again, fluttering into the woods in search of anything. My girlfriend had gone home, and I stayed in a casita without electricity for eight days by myself, drifting further and further from the pace of life back home, where four feet of snow was falling on Colorado and the President, tragically, was sending the first troops to Iraq.
//
The story of that experience begins with a rigorous 3-hour, tractor-drawn wagon ride over boulders and potholes, the exact opposite of “luxurious.” (Probably a little like having a baby in an earthquake.) But the other travelers and I somehow survive it, and within minutes of arriving near Waterfall Lodge and its outlying casitas, the forest begins to speak to us! A tiny, strawberry poison-dart frog hops across the trail; his bright red skin contains toxins so strong that he has no predators. He just hangs out in his territory — he needs no more than 100 square feet — and waits for females to come to him. What a life!
A little further up the trail, a boa constrictor wraps around the trunk of a small tree, in no hurry to get out of our way. Instead she relies on her camouflage, ability to constrict, and (maybe) trust in humanity for protection. A regiment of leaf-cutter ants ascends the trunk of a 100-foot tall tree to prune its leaves, increasing by a third the light that reaches the forest floor. The leaf fragments they bring back (like surfers carrying bright green surfboards) are composted underground to fertilize the fungus crop they find so tasty — an operation that puts nutrients back into the soil. En route, some ants become snacks for birds and other insects, so their niche provides several basic resources the rainforest needs — sun, soil, and food. Thousands of other species make similar contributions, weaving the rainforest together like a tapestry. Creeping over the forest floor toward the shadows is a Monstera vine, which “knows” that by climbing the tallest trees that cast the darkest shadows, it will ultimately bask in full sunlight.
Rara Avis is like a 2,500-acre lungful of fresh air — a masterpiece of biological abundance that provides undisturbed habitat for 362 different species of birds! Twenty different species of orchid were recently counted on a single fallen tree. In a way, this virgin parcel of land is a living self-portrait — the rainforest is painting itself in the bold colors and shadowy nuances of its many species, for example, the red, green, yellow, orange, turquoise and black of a keel-billed toucan (called a “flying banana” by another traveler); the dark, iridescent blue of a Morphos butterfly; and the dappled red of a stained glass palm.
I walk down to dinner one evening in the foggy twilight, and my flashlight beam falls on the orange and black stripes of a coral snake. I’m startled, knowing she’s poisonous, but fascinated that she’s slithered into my life. As I bend closer to get a better look, she retracts from the path into the bushes, like the scene in the Wizard of Oz where the Wicked Witch’s striped sock melts away under the house that smashed her. With the hair on the back of my neck still bristling, I step gingerly from one stepping stone to another, watching the miniature headlights of fireflies hovering in the descending darkness, lit only by a rising crescent moon.
After dinner in the big log cabana, biologist Amanda Neill explains why she puts her energy into studying a single species of rainforest flower: the bright red gurania, or jungle cucumber. “Think what might happen if the taxonomists mistakenly lump two similar species together,” she says. “We might assume that there are plenty of these — don’t worry about saving their habitat — when really there are only a few of each species left, that have traveled a billion years to get here.”
The sense of ecological urgency in this blond-haired 30-year-old woman mixes well with her sense of delight. Even in her narrow niche of study, she’s traveled widely — to Ecuador, Belize, Peru, now Costa Rica — to study the taxonomy and ecology of her focus species. In effect, she’s found her own symbiotic niche in the rainforest, trading her skills at cataloging and protecting the gurania for the privilege of living a month at a time under the lush, protective canopy of the rainforest.
That night, when the cicadas, tree frogs, trogans, owls, howler monkeys, and hundreds of other species all join the chorus, the forest sounds like a smoothly-running factory — “Taca, taca, taca… sissit, sissit…” Given that the mission of each call is to be heard among a symphony of other calls, there are all varieties of pitch and syncopation — creating an incredibly rich and complex symphony. Over the eons, rainforest species don different colors and improvise different shapes so all nutrients will be used, and all niches occupied. (They utilize information and design, rather than superfluous resources, an important lesson for our civilization). In the morning I’m awakened by a cuckoo clock that turns out to be a bird with a very complex, mechanical-sounding call. I count the hours, groggily, but even in half-sleep, I know it can’t be nine o’clock already…
//
On a remote jungle trail toward the end of my retreat, I’m dressed only in shorts and rubber boots. I’ve taken off my T-shirt to feel the rainforest on my skin, despite the warnings that deadly fer-de-lance snakes could strike from overhead branches and vines. I’m thinking, “Remember this moment. Remember the way you feel, right now, as howler monkeys growl like lions way off in the distance, and the sun filters through the dense foliage onto your stupefied, grateful face.”
Sure, we can read about the rainforest and see it on TV, but until we spend quality time there, letting ourselves slow down, we don’t really grasp what tropical biology is all about. It struck me on that Costa Rican rainforest retreat that we over-consuming humans need to somehow absorb these colors, this bold brilliance, into our hearts, and re-value nature’s wealth all over the planet. There’s so much more to life than the gray of concrete and the drab green of paper currency! My feeling is that until we acknowledge the butterfly, orchid, maple, and wisteria colors inside each of us, we can’t feel truly at home in ourselves. We can’t see the deficiencies of our economic system clearly enough — that it isn’t programmed to preserve nature, or to optimize human potential.
Until we launch an unwavering Mission to Planet Earth, we’ll keep postponing the homecoming until there’s not much left to come home to. In that rainforest, I saw and felt complexity-in-balance, and realized how far out of balance our industrial complexity is — infantile and clunky by comparison, with only thousands of years of experience as opposed to billions. Rather than cooperating to make the overall system sustainable, our industrial species compete to attain their own, narrowly defined goals. The name Rara Avis comes from a medieval poem containing the phrase, “Rara avis in terris.” The poem refers to a rare bird in the world — or figuratively, something new and fresh happening in human civilization. And so there is! From the tail-end of the Industrial Revolution — the highest peak of consumption — we now will transition to an Era in which the Earth is treated as a Sacred Garden.
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What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone,
in the forest, at night, cherished by this
wonderful, unintelligible,
perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world,
the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges,
and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it.
It will talk as long as it wants, this rain.
As long as it talks I am going to listen.
— Thomas Merton
What I Learned in an Ecovillage by Françoise Ducroz
Françoise Ducroz works internationally (in French, English, and Spanish) in the fields of environmental sustainability and personal development. She teaches a contemplative form of yoga and consults on green living and the ecovillage movement. She recently spent three years at the premier intentional community and environmental center, the Findhorn Foundation Community in Scotland, where she worked in guest departments and fundraising; she also helped establish a United Nations-affiliated environmental program. Françoise holds a Master’s degree in Art Therapy from the College of New Rochelle in New York.
In September 2004, my husband Wolfe and I left our Connecticut home to live in an ecovillage, spiritual community and education center, near Inverness in Scotland. We knew and loved the place from years of holidays there, where we attended workshops and volunteered in various guest departments. Each visit had felt inspiring. Now, we were going to live there.
We signed up for a three-month intensive group process in community called the Foundation Program. We came to this complex international organization through the front door, as guests paying hard currency for deep transformation, and in our case as a couple. We barely survived the pace of transformation. For three months, we lived on the edge of our comfort zone, examining values, beliefs, and habits. At times, we all aired our dirty laundry. In turn, I felt moved, exalted, inspired, mortified, frustrated, or simply too exhausted to care. Regularly, a few of us would run down to the local pub for an evening of fish and chips washed down with strong ale.
Yet, Wolfe and I did better than survive, we changed. In addition to the personal development curriculum of refocusing on my Yoga practice and deep life purpose, I gained an inside appreciation for the values of community life and the ecological principles of living lightly on the earth.
//
The Findhorn Foundation Community is a founding member of the ten-year-old Ecovillage Movement. While I was living there, a community-wide ecological footprint study was underway. Reporting on that study, Jonathan Dawson, one of its principals, wrote: “The results are out and are mighty big news.” Findhorn’s ecological footprint was the lowest ever recorded for any community in the rich, overdeveloped world. Dawson saw three factors contributing to this success:
- “Communality” — that is the high levels of sharing and of holding possessions in common.
- The relationships people have with their food — their mostly vegetarian diet of organically grown local produce.
- A vibrant enough economy for residents to be employed where they live. “What one sees in Findhorn is the evolution of a cooperatively owned economy with community residents as shareholders.”
Dawson concludes that greater well-being comes, not through the lonely consumption of more stuff, but through the sharing and the building of meaningful relationships within human-scale communities.
Small is Beautiful, the book by E. F. Schumacher which helped inspire the green movement, was my own introduction to the importance of scale to human life. Returning to the scale the village offers (and what is a neighborhood other than the urban adaptation of the village which is a traditional model the world over?) makes other choices easier. One can live a simpler life (less stuff, less debt, less waste), minimize your ecological impact and maximize human well-being.
An ecovillage is a rich and diverse modern settlement where humans strive to live in harmony with nature and with each other. There, new experiments, technologies, and skills designed to create more peaceful and diverse ways of life are tested. The needs of daily life are locally fulfilled with mutual benefit for the individual and the community. Residents shop from organic farmers, organize and attend cultural events, practice their creed in freedom, educate their children, care for their elders, exchange services with their neighbors, and of course reduce consumption and recycle their waste.
Ecovillage life is designed around:
- Environmentally friendly production of goods and food
- Ecologically benign jobs and working condition
- Ecological buildings that enhance health
- Transparency and consensus
- Space for personal development
- Celebration, ritual, and art
- Outreach to the larger surrounding community
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So, can the lessons learned by small-scale communities be applied to the more mainstream society? I think yes. Some say that it is too late. George Monbiot, in his book Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, challenges policy makers and big polluters to change their practices of greed and destruction. Nothing less will do, he says. Yes, and of equal significance is the need for every one of us to “be the change.” In so doing, we empower ourselves, sustain our courage, and make a difference. There is plenty to do for every child, teen, and adult, regardless of resources or temperament. The scientist and the poet, the visionary and the pragmatist, the banker and the teacher, the child and the elder… all are needed in walking our talk, making responsible and conscious choices in our sphere of influence.
Living in an intentional community, I learned that my trash and my complacency are my responsibilities; no one else is to blame for my waste or is responsible to pick up after me. In a small settlement, I cannot hide behind anonymity. I also discovered how joyful and light the task can be when a group of people support, encourage, challenge, and inspire each other.
So, call a meeting with family and friends. Sit around the kitchen table. Find a questionnaire that helps you assess your own ecological footprint. (It will probably come as a shock!) Then decide what are the realistic next steps for you. Decide how often your group is going to meet and schedule the meetings. Last but not least, celebrate your commitment in a fun and appropriate way, such as preparing a meal together. Now is the time.
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It was the wind that gave them life.
It is the wind that comes out of our mouths now
that gives us life.
When this ceases to blow we die.
In the skin at the tips of our fingers
we see the trail of the wind;
it shows us the wind blew
when our ancestors were created.
— Navajo Chant
Earth Elders: An Invitation by Fred Lanphear
The author worked for 20 years with the Institute of Cultural Affairs (an NGO), empowering villagers in remote African and Asian communities to participate in and direct their own development. On his return to the U.S. in 1989, he became president of the Northwest Institute of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. He lives at Songaia, a cohousing community in Bothell, WA, which he helped co-found.
Although recently diagnosed with ALS, I do not fear my impending mortality, but I do fear for the fate of our home, Planet Earth, and for future generations whose lives will be impacted by the consequences of climate change, species destruction, and the general decline of the health of the planet. I ask myself, what can I do? It is out of my hands. This is an issue that the next generation must address.
To the contrary, our generation has been a major contributor to the actions that are compromising the health of the planet and we must be accountable and do all that we can to correct the disastrous trajectory we are on. As an elder, who has 70+ years of experience and observation, I have a unique perspective to share with my peers and more importantly, with the generations that will follow me. I have decided to take on the mantle of Earth Elder, one who speaks and cares for Earth and future generations.
In my lifetime, science has begun unraveling the amazing story of the universe. We now know that it began about 13.7 billion years ago and that it is still expanding, evolving, and that as a species, humans have become a major force in the unfolding process. The impact of population and technology are critical factors in this phenomenon. This story has changed my reality, or my perception of the way life is.
Many of my earlier assumptions have been challenged and radically changed. In the past I arrogantly believed that science and technology would ultimately provide solutions to all our human needs. The focus on human needs without consideration for other species and our common habitats is the contradiction that we are finally recognizing. We are integrally connected and can no longer isolate or elevate ourselves apart from other life forms.
As an agricultural scientist I once contributed to the development and promotion of pesticides. Since discovering the consequences of continual use of pesticides, I have now dedicated my agricultural practices to being totally organic. I continue to discover that many practices that I considered sacrosanct are now of questionable value. It is particularly challenging to be faced with your past errors of judgment, but also freeing to be able to accept what has happened and take action to correct and/or change those practices. As Earth Elders, we can help others do the same.
With the new understanding of our interconnectedness with all things that has come from the prophetic voices of honorary Earth Elders Thomas Berry and Joanna Macy, I have come to recognize and renounce the anthropocentric bias that has dominated our economic, political, and cultural values and practices. The time has come to acknowledge our proper place in the universe. As a species we are the universe becoming conscious of itself and the sacred journey it has been on. With this new understanding of our integral relationship to all of our universal connections we must re-examine our ancient assumptions and change our ways of knowing, doing, and being. It is the great work that we have been called to perform.
As an Earth Elder, I invite you to join me and others who are learning, appropriating, and telling the great story of the Universe, who are facilitating celebrations of the evolutionary epic, who are mentoring others on the journey, and who are advocates for the care of the Earth.
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One leaf left on a branch
and not a sound of sadness
or despair. One leaf left
on a branch and no unhappiness.
One leaf left all by itself
in the air and it does not speak
of loneliness or death.
One leaf and it spends itself
in swaying mildly in the breeze.
— David Ignatow
Elders and the Earth: Return to the Future by John G. Sullivan
The poet Rilke tells this story about God. In an early time, when people prayed with arms extended, God loved to reside in the warm, dark, mysterious human heart. Then, as time passed, people began to pray with hands folded like church steeples. God saw all the tall civic towers, castles with battlements, and churches with great steeples pointed up like armaments. They frightened God who retreated even further into space. But the earth is round, and one day God noticed that the round earth was dark and fertile and mysterious — so like the welcoming human heart of old. So God entered into the heart of the earth and became one with the earth. One day, Rilke says, perhaps as we too notice the earth, while digging to the depth, we shall again find the mystery, that is also the source. “There is nothing wiser than the circle,” says Rilke.1
From ancient India, we find a pattern for life — four stages, four tasks: in the first half of life, Student and Householder; in the second half, Forest Dweller and Sage. In the pattern of the seasons, Student and Householder follow the rising energy of Spring and Summer; Forest Dweller and Sage follow the falling energy of Autumn and Winter.
In our culture, Student and Householder are all about striving, achieving, making one’s mark, growing, having more and being more. Onward and upward. Progress and growth. World without end. Amen.
But what if, in the third age of our lives, we could give up striving — both in the outer world of power, possessions, and prestige and even in the inner world of so-called “spiritual growth.” Suppose we already have all we need. Suppose the Kingdom of the Spirit is all around us, if we have but eyes to see. Could it be so simple after all?
So the first clues for us are the stage of Forest Dweller and the season of Autumn. Already the earth beckons. The earth as dark, fertile, deep, and mysterious. Of old, those in India taking this path literally became forest dwelling ascetics, engaging in self-disciplines for the sake of an ongoing state of blissful unity with all things. Today, for us to cross over into the time and condition of Forest Dweller means many things. Here are four:
- A New Possibility — Exchanging a mode of striving for a mode of coming home, of circling, of turning and returning to what is already present.
- New Danger/Opportunity — Being willing to encounter a new danger: entering the downward energy of autumn and winter, willing to know fear, even depression, and to learn from these challenges.
- New Companions — Returning to nature and learning from the ancestors how to find our place in the Great Family of all creatures and how to receive help from them.
- A New Commission — Standing between the ancestors and the children, letting go and letting be, we are called to become custodians of a past recovered and guardians of a future simplified.
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A New Possibility
First, I am suggesting that to enter this third age of life through the door of the Forest Dweller is to exchange the straight line of time — the time of achieving — for the circle of returning — returning to what is and always has been at a deeper level. In other words, to enter the second half of life can be to liberate ourselves from striving and achieving. In the language of the Taoists, it is to act without acting — wei wu wei. Here we have a paradoxical new way of acting. We act, yes, but with less attachment to the fruits of our action. We act, yes, but in ways that align with the deeper currents already at work in our personal and communal life. We act, yes, but without producing needless static. Then, as the classic of Taoist thought, the Tao Te Ching, puts it, everyone will say: “We did it ourselves.”2
When asked how to make a great sculpture, Michelangelo replied that it was easy. Just see the beautiful statue within the marble and remove what does not belong. Such is the way of letting go and letting be. This mode of living does not center on striving or achieving, nor does it even focus on time and steps. It is more like realizing that we exist at two levels: (a) the surface level of our fears and desires, wherein we compare ourselves with others using the prevailing cultural measuring sticks, and (b) a deeper level wherein we already are all we seek to be and we already have all we truly need. Imagine yourself as a ripple on the surface of a lake waking up to the fact that all is water.
Or perhaps look at it this way: Imagine that we are all the sons and daughters of a great king and queen. Then suppose we grow bored and wish to put on a play. So we decide on the roles we will take on in this play. Some become the king and queen within the play. But because we are blessed with enormous resources for our game, we choose a segment of the realm and have a palace constructed for the “king” and “queen” of our play and we provide them with servants and courtiers and all that the roles would have. And so it is with each one of us. One chooses to be a monk and gains a monastery. One becomes a merchant with shops and ships and tradesmen of all sorts. One becomes a thief. Another a prostitute. And on and on. As the roles are chosen, so are the costumes and indeed all accoutrements of such a role in “real life.” And so the play goes on and the longer we play our roles, the more deeply we become what we pretend to be. Finally, imagine a resounding clap or call. Our father and mother — the true king and queen — call us — their royal children — home for dinner. The play ends. Everyone — heroes and villains — takes a bow. And we, the children, wake up to the fact that in our deep nature we are indeed the sons and daughters of royal lineage.
Coming to a dual awareness of our surface identities and our deep, mysterious, unrepeatable worth — that is a new possibility as we cross over into the autumn stage of Forest Dweller. Nothing to strive for, nothing to achieve. Sufficient to let go into our true nature and find a world of gratitude and grace.
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New Danger/Opportunity
To leave the ordered work of human civilization and enter the forest is to face danger and know fear. Who am I now — when all the structures that have defined me fall away? Who am I now — when my ordinary ways of making meaning and measuring value are relinquished? Of old, the forest was a place of danger, beyond the civilized world, beyond the fires of our camp. Here resided a place of testing, of confrontation with the wilderness around and within us, or, as we might say today, an encounter with our personal and collective “shadow.”
From this perspective, entering retirement is like going cold turkey after a lifetime of addiction to the cultural patterns of power, possessions, and prestige. Is it any wonder that many experience depression and some seek to go back to work? Of course, there is no blame in this. However, I want to offer a new way to enter this phase, so that whatever we do, we are invited into a new form of consciousness from which to do it.
How do we come to terms with ourselves — now moving toward death, now experiencing another part of the cycle? Can we learn to dwell at a deeper place, still operating on the temporal surface of the lake and yet already beneath the water and living a new life?3 What are the simplifications of Forest Dweller? And how can we enter this stage with earthy, good humor? The danger is withdrawal from the world. The opportunity is to dwell more deeply. Then we can recognize what is important and what is passing. Then we can encourage creativity. Then we can bless the young.4
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New Companions
To become a Forest Dweller is to consciously learn from the wider natural world. St. Francis considered the elements and plants and animals his brothers and sisters. Our shaman ancestors realized that we could truly ask the elements and the plants and the animals for their help, their wisdom, their companionship. When we return to our true nature, we find in the natural world a reminder that we are not alone. We can reverse the word “alone” to recognize we are “all-one.” We are not sealed off in a spell of separateness, rather we are interconnected in space and time. To return to the earth is also to return to our place between generations. But this opens the possibility that, as Rick Moody suggests, elders might be both preservers of the past and guardians of the future.5 For who will speak for the grandchildren, if not the grandmothers and grandfathers?
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A New Commission
In all of this, we return not via the upward path of striving, but via the downward path of letting go and letting be. We already have all we seek. Heaven and hell are here and now depending on how we relate to life. In the Forest Dweller stage of life, when the energy is moving downward and inward, we return to the present moment, return to simplicity for the sake of living the oneness of all things. We recognize the great witness in living simply so that others may simply live. Yet we do not do this in the spirit of renunciation but rather in the spirit of reclaiming sufficiency and experiencing joy in simple living, in living each day with gratitude and mindfulness, with peace and joy — as if we were discovering the ordinary in an extraordinary way.
Sufficiency, or better perhaps intersufficiency, rests on the declaration that we have all we need in ourselves and those who companion us — all we need to live a life of quality right here and right now.6 This loosens the grip of “more” in the sense of accumulation. We shift to living more fully, coming to life more fully. We shift from quantity of consumption to quality of living — living together with the ancestors and children of many species, living together with the living, the dead, and those not yet born. Companioned within a larger family.
We return to the circle. The new challenge is to find a way other than striving and accumulating more. And the way is letting go and letting be. In the process we face the dangers of the forest and we claim the benefit of a wider family of all beings that dwell there. This is what poet Gary Snyder calls “The Great Family.”7 Our motto throughout is “We already have all we seek.”
Thus, we return to simple things. The earth, the water, the fire, the air. The birds of the air. The dolphins and whales and the fish of the sea. The animals of the earth who are our brothers and sisters, as St. Francis knew. Our lives are “simple in means and rich in ends”8 — those ends that can be shared without diminishment — friendship, ideas, delight in family, poetry and art, and the entire earth and sky. A universe before us and within us.
So God entered into the heart of the earth and became one with the earth. One day, Rilke says, perhaps, as we too notice the earth, while digging to the depth, we shall again find the mystery, that is also the source. Coming back to the earth we find a new spirituality suitable for the future. In fact, by coming back to earth, we return to the future. “There is nothing wiser than the circle,” says Rilke.
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Earth brings us into life
and nourishes us.
Earth takes us back again.
Birth and death are present in every moment.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
//
Notes
1 See Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. M.D. Herter Norton, Stories of God (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1963), “A Tale of Death and a Strange Postscript Thereto,” pp. 87-96.
2 See Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, 25th anniversary edition (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1972, 1997). The notion of wei wu wei — acting by non action — occurs throughout. My allusion to the people saying “We did it ourselves” refers to chapter 17.
3 I am alluding here to a poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez called “Oceans.” See Light and Shadows: Selected Poems and Prose of Juan Ramon Jimenez, trans. Robert Bly et al., ed. Dennis Maloney (Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1987), p. 32.
4 The poet Robert Bly once remarked that in the mythic way of speaking, the king and queen had three tasks: to keep first things first (or alternately, to keep the little things little and the big things big); to encourage creativity; and to bless the young. I take these three tasks as especially apt to define a way of being for elders.
5 Moody references Marty Knowlton, founder of Elderhostel, who had a dream to create another organization called “Gatekeepers of the Future.” All this stresses learning to take the long view, becoming both custodians of the past and gatekeepers for the future. See Harry R. (Rick) Moody, “Environment as an Aging Issue.”
6 For more on the move from the spell of separateness to a sense of interbeing and intersufficiency, see my Living Large: Transformative Work at the Intersection of Ethics and Spirituality (Columbia, MD: Traditional Acupuncture Institute, 2004).
7 See Gary Snyder, “Prayer for the Great Family,” in his book of poetry Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1969, 1974), pp. 24-25.
8 I take the phrase from the book of Bill Devall, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City, Utah: Peregrine Smith Books, 1988).
Two Bestsellers About Eating in America by Barbara Kammerlohr
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver
with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
Harper Collins, 2007
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
Penguin Books, 2006
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Close on the heels of our global warming shock comes the cultural conversation about the threat to the safety of our food supply. The books we review in this issue, focused on Elders and the Earth, are important parts of that conversation. This danger to our existence happened on “our watch”, during the years we had the most power in society. It is the legacy we leave our children if we do not act quickly.
Unaware of the changes in agricultural policy implemented by our government, regulatory agencies, and industrialized farming, we have become isolated from the reality of what we are eating, where it came from, and conditions under which it was produced. In the past, most of us had some association with farms and gardens, learned about farms and the products that graced our dinner table, and even sang songs about Old McDonald’s farm with its happy animals. We saw the conditions under which our food was grown and we continue to believe those conditions exist today.
WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Nothing could be further from the truth. During the past 50 years, much has changed. Industrial farming, agriculture politics, and the practice of shipping food across continents has forever changed what we eat. The books by Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan focus on food, where it comers from, how it is produced, why we must be concerned, and ways enlightened consumers are dealing with their own dinner tables. Together, Kingsolver and Pollan make a convincing case that our food supply is in grave and imminent danger. Some of their facts:
- The food on most American plates travels an average of 1500 miles to get there.
- Genetic diversity disappeared from our supply when we accepted industrial farming as our source of food. “Humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent changes, three quarters of all human food now comes from just eight species.”
- Our food animals spend the last months of their lives in very toxic conditions that could easily migrate to the human consumer.
- Practices of industrial farming harm the soil and erode its ability to produce quality food for our tables.
- If more of us were aware of the brutal treatment of the creatures that feed us, our moral conscience would be seriously challenged.
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In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan accomplishes his mission of telling us what we are eating and where it came from. His message is that what to have for dinner has been, for centuries, an important question for omnivores. This dilemma, however, has never been so pressing as it is today. What is the best choice: organic or conventional; imported or local; wild or farmed fish; carnivore or vegetarian; cage fed or free range?
In search of answers to those questions, Pollan traced several kinds of food on his plate back through its production. A fast food hamburger took him to horrific, filthy feedlots where cattle, never genetically intended to digest corn, spent their last months before slaughter, eating an unnatural diet and standing in piles of manure.
The free range chicken on an organic industrial farm fares only slightly better. His description of the chicken coop where the birds lived out their days told all: “The air was warm and humid and smelled powerfully of ammonia; the fumes caught in my throat. Twenty thousand is a lot of chickens and they formed a gently undulating, white carpet that stretched the length of a football field. Compared to conventional chickens, these organic birds get a few more inches of living space… Running along the entire length of each shed was a grassy yard maybe 15 feet wide, not nearly enough to accommodate all twenty thousand birds.”
After a few chapters in Pollan’s book, the realization dawns that what to have for dinner is a much more complicated matter than the labels on super market food would lead one to believe. This is a call for our society to wake up and pay attention to our food supply before it is too late.
The bright spot in this extended essay on food production is the description of small, organic farms that serve local consumers who buy poultry, meat, and produce knowing exactly where it came from and who produced it. Farmers associated with this growing movement raise animals and poultry using natural and more humane practices. They are also true stewards of the land and soil, rotating crops and using other practices that assure viable farmland for years to come.
Michael Pollan is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the previously published books, Second Nature, A Place of My Own and The Botany of Desire. A new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, has just been published. Interested readers can discover more about Pollan and his work at michaelpollan.com,
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In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, best selling author Barbara Kingsolver shows us how her family dealt with many of the dilemmas described by Pollan. Long an advocate of the principles of the slow food market and farming practices that protect our planet, the author moved with her family to a farm in Appalachia, vowing to eat only food raised in their neighborhood where they could know the farmer and practices used in the production of food, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. This highly entertaining account of the adventures of their first year is interspersed with the author’s insight into our society’s alienation from the source of our food and her belief that our collective embrace of fast food and industrial farming places our food supply in grave danger.
Kingsolver is at her best as a storyteller, and moving from Tucson, Arizona to southern Appalachia is great material for a story. Her focus on food life and how to eat nothing but locally grown food in a climate where the land is frozen solid three months of the year provides the plot. After all, neither home gardens nor farmers’ markets offer much for the palate during winter and early spring when children, used to the warm climate of Arizona, beg for fresh fruit.
The author devotes the most entertaining pages to the challenges faced by family members as they attempt to fulfill their vow. One such challenge came when Barbara Kingsolver, a great writer with absolutely no experience raising turkeys, set out to develop a naturally breeding poultry flock from baby turkeys. Months later as her charges entered adolescence, she realized that information about normal turkey sexual behavior was not readily available. She wrote this of her experience helping the flock mature into self -respecting adult turkeys:
“The first hen who’d come into season was getting no action from either of the two males whom we had lately been calling Big Tom and Bud Tom. These guys had been fanning their tails in urgent mating display since last summer, but they directed the brunt of their show off efforts toward me, each other or any sexy thing I might leave sitting around, such as a watering can. They really tried hard with the watering can. Lolita kept plopping herself down where they’d have to trip over her, but they only had eyes for some shiny little item. She sulked and I didn’t blame her. Who hasn’t been there?”
Undergirding the Kingsolver family’s enthusiasm for their adventure is the passionately held belief that our food supply is in grave and imminent danger. I quoted two of Kingsolver’s facts at the beginning of this article. For Kingsolver, who holds a Master’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Arizona, the cost of transporting our food an average of 1500 miles does tremendous damage to our environment, and the fact that genetic diversity has all but disappeared from our food supply is a biological time bomb waiting to explode. Her solution to these problems is to eat only locally grown food, know the farmer’s practices, and embrace the basic tenets of the slow food movement and sustainable agriculture practices.
The story of the family’s experience during their first year on the farm gives readers important insight into how to become more informed about food. Near the end of the book, there are resources, names and addresses of organizations that advocate for the local food movement, and recipes for using local food that is “in season.” Daughter Camille also writes of the experience from her perspective and offers a few recipes for eating locally grown food.
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There is no doubt that some of the ideas put forth by Kingsolver and Pollan are controversial, but they also make an important contribution to the conversation about our relationship with our food supply. As such, the books are worthy of consideration. They are both also valuable sources of information for readers searching for ways to become more involved with their own food supply and to begin eating locally grown food.
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Best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver has published over a dozen books, including such popular novels as Animal Dreams (1990), Pigs in Heaven (1993), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), and Prodigal Summer (2000). Those who enjoy Animal, Vegetable, Miracle will also find her earlier collection of essays, Small Wonder (2002), compelling reading.