I am presently writing a proposal to write a policy paper about rural land rights, to that end, I watched a BBC documentary about sustainable farming last night. It got me thinking about how all of these issues are deeply connected and how the only way to make progress in securing a food supply that will last beyond the fossil fuel age is also a land-use issue.
Since most of the people concerned about property rights in Canada are farmers or ranchers and most of the time their autonomy over their land is threatened by resource exploration or expropriation and or changes to zoning and the subsequent loss of monetary value that comes from new environmental legislation, it makes sense to have a closer look at the land they are holding, their livelihoods and the prospects for the future. (Expropriations are all about the future.)
Turns out agriculture as a practice at the present time, is a very high consumer of fossil fuels. Chances are good that the group of angry farmers who want to keep the value in their land or want to keep the land itself are probably not going to be able to keep farming the way they do into the next generation anyhow. I suppose what I am saying here is, if the government doesn't take it from them then chances are very good that they will be faced with the choice of making radical changes to how they use the land or they will have to sell it to survive.
What we are talking about is survival here - for all of us. For that reason, I do think it is important that we start thinking about farmers not as the kind of loopy guys who get hot under the collar and surround Parliament Hill with their tractors because they are just generally unhappy. Rather we should try to see them as a group of people, mostly elders, who are, in all likelihood, the canaries in our collective coal mine. They are telling us they are about to collapse and that should worry all of us very much no matter how we view the ways they frame their grievances. When someone keeps telling you they're in pain, they are not lying. (even if they're faking, they're not lying - psychological pain is still pain, there's a reason behind even the whiniest of human complaints.)
One of the things pointed out in this Documentary was that farming is stripping the land of the nutrients it requires to produce food. The filmmaker's proof of that was pretty compelling but if you need more a comprehensive outline of the same issue can be found in Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery.
As a culture, we use a lot of fossil fuel based fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and of course all farm machinery is run on gas these days. This means that agriculture ends up tied very closely to the price of oil and it means that we are really in an interesting bind - if we're lucky for the long term, the oil will run out while the soil can still recover and we will have the opportunity to change, if we're lucky in the short term it won't and our generation will live and die without ever understanding what kinds of deep systemic changes we need to make to continue living comfortably on this planet. I think it's likely that being lucky in the long term is smarter than going for the immediate pay-off and doubtless, that will have an influence on how I see this paper.
One other thing I noticed was my own reaction - there seem to be instinctively recognizeable motifs in nature. Plants that are useful to humans seem to be designed to display visual cues that can tip us off to the idea that we can make use of them to survive. At the top of the page is a picture of a sweet chestnut taken from this website: http://tree-species.blogspot.com/2009/03/edible-chestnuts-vs-horse-chestnuts.html
It is followed by an image of a plant called "Traveller's Joy" also known as "Old Man's Beard" taken from this website: http://accipiter.hawk-conservancy.org/MeadowMuses/200601.shtml
And finally a sea urchin taken from here: http://blogs.menupages.com/boston/2008/02/amuse_bouche_craving_extraordi.html
OK - those are in reverse order, thinking backwards is difficult for me and there is not much intuitive about structuring a blog or at least not much intuitive to me, nothing ever seems to end up where I want it to be and since the point of it is to write, I haven't yet taken the time to spend a day choking down the impossibly dry instructions on how to make it work - I'm hoping technology will just catch up to the way most of us think - most of the time that turns out to be true so, my apologies for the reversal but until this blog serves some specific purpose, it is unlikely to change.
Anyhow - my point here is that these three things that all look so much alike are all things we can use moderately to our benefit. (Horse chestnuts, before you ask, don't resemble these things, at least they don't summon up the same response - these spines or feathers are all very tightly packed - horse chestnuts look and feel very different)
Furthermore, our use of them does not threaten anything. Sea urchins become a threat only when they become overly abundant when sea otter numbers decline to dangerous levels. At that point, they begin feeding on living kelp forests and if they threaten the kelp beds that can be disasterous. When we overuse a resource nature gives us ample warning. Sea otters are important because they feed whales, sharks and eagles. It's all about balance and we are a part of it but moderation is the key. You can't live on sea urchins.
Traveller's Joy (aka Old Man's Beard) is a herbal medicine for a few things and is also used in basket weaving. I'll bet, once the research is done, someone will find they do something important to the soil but not if they get completely out of hand - so make the baskets, use the seedheads - that's what they're there for. (You can also use it as a visual representation of how sperm look while trying to penetrate an egg - which is interesting but really only useful if you are trying to bore a 5 year-old into giving up pestering you with questions about where babies come from - which, granted, can be pretty useful but only in very limited circumstances)
Chestnuts can make enough flour to replace another starch, like rice, for a family with a chestnut tree as long as they don't eat rice every day. They have roughly the same nutrient value as rice (the brown stuff) and they don't require cultivation past the occasional pruning.
Of couse, most people are aware of how important species diversity is for stands of trees so deciding to make some kind of industrially produced starch from chestnuts just will not work. And that could turn out to be a benefit - a kind of self-regulating mechanism.
I think it is quite possible that the signs for how we should be approaching the issue of food production are already there, already visible. I think we have the ability to recognize symbols because it is a survival tool, more than a survival tool - it is a tool we can use to thrive. And yes, crazy at it sounds to some people I think it is possible to bring the farmers, the public, First Nations communities and environmentalists into one group around the issue of rural land and our rights to it as the people who live and work there every day.
I believe it is possible to stop suppressing and begin expressing common interests. In the end, it all comes down to the elimination of fear, it all comes down to having the courage to say so and that is my job for the day.
Rebecca Hosking's excellent film, "A Farm for the Future" may be found on the CBC Radio program "Dispatches" website for the time being - that's here: http://www.cbc.ca/dispatches/
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