Industrial farming; stealing the good to give us fake "perfection"

There's so much wrong with the way we Modernians do agriculture, it's hard to know where to begin. One thing he mentions is the poverty of varieties in most Anglo countries that have gone big into industrialised ag-business. You have one kind of broccoli, one kind of cauli, one or maybe two kinds of carrots, if you're VEry lucky, four kinds of apples. And as he says, what is grown have to be "perfect" crops, even for the gigantic and hugely expensive, highly specialised machines to work. And of course, produce sellers won't touch "imperfect" goods, so huge amounts of what is grown gets thrown out because it's not sellable. So when you go to the shops, you're presented with a tiny fraction of the food varieties - and of course, an extremely narrow range of food nutrients (not forgetting that these highly hybridised varieties ALWays sacrifice nutrient-density for appearance and pest/disease resistance and other purely producer-oriented advantages). So, honestly we're just not getting nearly the food value we used to from fruits and veg.

This has been countered a little bit by the fad for "organic" produce, but most regular people don't shop at Whole Foods or whatever the equivalent is. There are very few farmer's markets, and none at all if you live in a city. Urbanisation, industrialisation, Henry Ford's mass production mindset, has left us in a state of poor health and cultural poverty.

But I know that in Italy, small scale farming - a lot of family farms doing mixed growing - is still a pretty strong thing. It's being strangled by government interference and EU-based agri-industrial gerrymandering, but one of the reasons Italy is still famous for food is this national growing culture. Everyone has a little orto, everyone grows veg and is accustomed to a much wider array of varieties. I don't know how many times I've had to explain that the "weird" stuff I'm growing in my garden is actually perfectly normal for Italians. (And everyone knows what to do with them. Today I snipped off the flowerets off my Cavolo Nero, sauteed them with some shaved carrots in olive oil and garlic for dinner.) Being only one or two generations away from an agricultural economy - in Norcia they only "modernised" the farming practices in 1950! they were still using oxen in 1965 - people are a lot more accustomed to the realities of farm life. People expect the vast array of brassicas every year because they grew up with Nonna pulling it out of her orto for them. There are little mini-farmer's markets in the city centres - a dozen in Rome, some of them no more than three tables worth, but everyone knows where they are and goes to them.

The other thing that survives here is what I call the "housewife culture" in which women generally get married and stay at home. The shopping is done several times a week, early in the morning (all public markets are closed by one pm) and does the cooking for the family who come home from work for the national mid-day break. Feminist politicians complain about women not being in paid employment, but I htink there's still an awareness here that the nation's economic and social health rests on the well-being of the home. And that's where women rule. Food is at the centre of that culture.



~

Dream home

I'll have this one.

It was built by Paulina Wojciechowska, a Polish architect living in the UK who gives workshops in natural building techniques in Poland.

She and her natural building buddies have a Natural Building foundation sort of thing in Britain, and also give workshops in Spain.

Straw Bale workshop near Gatwick airport, (believe it or not)

This workshop is a wonderful opportunity to gain hands-on experience of constructing and plastering a real straw bale building that will be used for visitor accommodation.

The straw bale workshop will be held in a lovely farm set in rolling english countryside 15 minutes drive from London Gatwick airport. Paulina has designed a dream home which will be built from natural materials at the workshop site of Oaklands Farm over the next two years.
What You Will Learn

Hands-on experience of all the stages in straw bale wall construction, and an introduction to the plastering of a real structure:

Straw Bale Workshop UK (5 days)

-Raising straw bale walls
-How to tie the straw bale walls together
-Making a wall plate and compressing a wall
-Installation of door and window frames
-Managing the use of bales to maintain wall strength
-Recognizing the clay found on our land and understanding how to use it for building
-Preparation and application of the first 2 coats of clay plaster onto the straw bale wall

And another "Planning your dream natural building home" that involves all the down-to-earth stuff like

Choosing your site
Preparation of a site plan
Dealing with the site’s characteristics such as earth types, ground topology, etc.
Creating a house design to suite your lifestyle
The balance of costs: money, time, quality.
How to find your balance point and cost your project in a realistic way
Working with architects, builders and volunteers
Fitting the project into your life.
A design example: the amazing 5 bedroom house being built at Oaklands Farm.

Technologies choices for the house structure:

Foundations: types of foundations, pros and cons, which to use in different site situations, relative costs and effort involved.
Roof structures: types of roofs, pros and cons, how to choose the best roof structure for your project, relative costs and effort involved.
Insulation: a discussion of different solutions and their relative effectiveness.
Walls: an overview of natural building wall technologies: straw bale, cordwood, earthbag, cobb, rammed earth, old tyres.
Floors: an overview of the different technologies, their pros and cons.
Guidelines for designing wall structures using different technologies
Balancing your idealogical ideas with your building inspector’s logical, legal ones.
Hands-on experience: building walls for the Oaklands Farm project from cordwood, earthbag and cobb.

An overview of planning and installing services, with an emphasis on specific considerations for houses built from natural materials:

Electrical systems
Plumbing systems
Heating systems.
Waste water drainage systems
Rainwater drainage systems
Internal shelving and structures.

~

I do rather wish that this whole thing weren't so inordinately tied up with silly hippie pseudo-spirituality... "Earthmother Dwelling: Listening to the elements, exploring inner freedom"..."earth mother"... Srsly?

"In my ‘Earthmother Dwelling’ that I built at Cal-Earth, these are some of the things that I aimed to achieve. The ‘Earthmother Dwelling’ was built in a close dialogue with the essence of the site. Listening to the elements, letting the earth tell me what it wanted to become. Being from the architectural icons of traditional cultures. Listening openly to my inner voices, letting them guide me to achieve coherence and happiness."

...

Um...Yeah, ok. Whatever.

But I don't suppose that you'll necessarily catch a case of Hippie-dum if you live in a straw bale house you've built yourself. And just imagine going to one of these workshops and being the only nice, friendly Trad Catholic these people ever meet. I find that with these kinds of hippies, they tend to be more innocent than mean about beliefs, and more open-minded than you might at first think. Sing the Divine Office in Latin and Gregorian three times a day in your off hours and see what they do. Might be an interesting experiment.

And it's pretty easy to get behind other aspects of the... err... philosophy (I suppose you could call it):

At the moment, my ideal house is one which lives in such harmony with its environment, a house that is difficult to notice, like an animal that blends into its surroundings. So many houses appear like warts on our landscape.

Though you wouldn't know it from all the (ahem) sharing I do online, I am actually pretty keen on that idea of Philip Neri's: "Amare nescire," to "Love to be unknown."




~

Save the humans and the whales?

I ask again, is there, can there be, such a thing as a genuine Christian environmentalism? I'm really just asking the questions here in order to think out loud. I invite anyone smarter than I to answer them, or at least to take the questions I put here and apply some more disciplined thought towards them than I can manage and re-frame them.

I ask again, though, because this, clearly isn't it. If this is all environmentalism is and can be, then the question is answered already. No.

Stephen Harper's prayerful posture and traditional words of commemoration for the lost souls of a barbaric era reveal a sensibility noticeably out of sync with the religion of environmentalism that presently dominates our culture.

The contrast was illuminated in the coincidence of Mr. Harper's expression of reverence for human life with the contempt for human life displayed by Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society chief. In reaction to the March 29 maritime deaths of four seal hunters, Watson declared the deaths of seals a "greater tragedy."

Publicly discomfited, Green party leader Elizabeth May resigned from the advisory board of Sea Shepherd, but tellingly (rather like Obama with his racist pastor, Jeremiah White) wouldn't distance herself personally from Paul Watson. As a faithful adherent to their mutual church -- Our Gaia of all that is Non-Human -- to which she remains fully committed, May elected to stand by Watson for the sake of his "good work."

But what "good work" can compensate for Watson's advocacy of a population-decimating cap of one billion people, or calling human beings "the AIDS of the Earth?"

But I am reluctant to just shrug and leave the questions surrounding the proper care and use of the physical natural world up to the thugs, children, pagans and fools who seem to dominate the issue now.

After about ten years, give or take, activity in the pro-life movement in which my working hours have been taken up with close examination and application of questions of Catholic ethics applied to terrifying questions of life and death, I keep wondering in my off hours where the Christian ethicists are on these other, slightly less dire questions.

I'll agree that when the world is engaged in a global determined slaughter of the innocents, a grisly and macabre determination to continue committing this suicidal crime, it is hard to take a moment to look at anything else.

When the entire medical establishment, heavily backed by education, government and media, are engaged in a massive global slaughter of what are now doubtless billions of totally innocent children, questions about whether we ought to expend public funds creating protected habitats for hedgehogs, seems absurd. When it is no longer wise in many places to send your grandparents to the hospital for treatment of pneumonia, one tends to push the fate of the bittern to the back burner.

But pretend for a moment that we are not doing this.

Before I was a Christian, before I was aware of the other problem, I was terribly exercised about what we then called the ecology.

If I have learned one thing about Catholicism, and questions of ethics, it is that everything, every question that ends with "so what ought we to do, then?" is connected to all the others. Are some of the questions about the spotted owl, whaling, the appropriate use of resources, the dependence on oil and the internal combustion engine...all that stuff that environmentalists go on about, connected in some way to the questions we so-called 'social conservatives' ask? Are the two conversations actually one conversation divided artificially (and I suspect malciously) along an unnecessary ideological line?

I am coming to believe more and more that the divide between 'left' and 'right' in ethics is arbitrary and artificial.

The 'extreme left' has stolen the environmental issues, it is clear. They have invented an entire terminology in which to talk about them, a language that makes all sorts of political and ideological assumptions. It is not possible for Christians to use the language of environmentalism without acknowledging its political foundation. It is one of the ways that any other point of view has been locked out of the issue.

Christianity, that is, orthodox Christianity, has rightly concerned itself with the more urgent issues of the vast conspiracy of murder that is abortion, and its related issues of the destruction of family life (another form of murder). Peter Kreeft has recently identified the two sides in the Culture War as those of Christ and the devil. Fair enough, but we are not in heaven and do not have heaven's perspective. The actual battle grounds on earth seem irrevocably laid down. Christians and their very few traditionally minded allies continue to insist that the issues of whether human beings are being killed by our doctors with the collusion of our governments, is more important than those of habitat destruction.

But is there not some counter point to be made that the 'right' has equally stolen the Life Issues, making it impossible for those on the other side of the divide to talk about them?

Now, I'm not drawing an equivalence between 'left' and 'right' as the terms are commonly used, and often misused. I do not believe, for example, that most liberals are so because they have followed any rigorous process of thought. Most 'liberals' of our time are so because they have never closely examined the proposals. In fact, most 'conservatives' I know started out as brainless liberals, and through an often long and painful process came to opposing conclusions, frequently greatly against their personal preferences. Liberalism is not 'an equally valid worldview'.

A couple of days ago, I wrote to a fellow blogger that, having started out in the same condition of unexamined liberalism of most of my generation, the more I dedicated myself to the pursuit of the Real in Catholicism - the more I rejected the absurd and contradictory articles of 'liberal' or cafeteria Catholicism - the more politically 'conservative' I became. I believe that liberalism in politics as well as religion is a system dedicated to the creation and maintenance of comfortable fantasies. Lies. And I have witnessed many times, most painfully in my own family, what dedication to maintaining a comforting fantasy life can do to a person's soul and character.

So, I do not adhere to the belief that 'liberalism' and 'conservatism' are equally 'valid' political points of view with 'equally valuable' things to say about how we ought to live and allocate our political and economic resources. This idea, apart from being inherently self-contradictory, is itself a liberal belief. It sounds nice and comfortable if it is not examined too closely and allows people to carry on in their fantasies. Lotus for the Lotophagi.

But is there something here we are not getting in this divide?

Is anyone asking if the environmental issues are not in fact merely lesser manifestations of the great evil that is more immediately threatening in the life issues?

That is, are we anti-choice extremists and those environutters actually unwittingly fighting the same war?

No, that is too simple, since the theology of Environutterism is directly opposed to Christianity.

But here's Ted Turner saying something absurd, that there are "too many people using too much stuff" and being mocked gleefully for it. Properly so because he has absurdly concluded that the solution is to kill (and eat) the humans in order to save the humans.

But did anyone else notice that he had the second part right? There may not be "too many people" but there is certainly too much stuff.

It is not malice (well, maybe not entirely malice) that inspires the Environutterists to propose the extermination of the human race, or half the human race, to solve the problems we face. It is disnformation. Call me hopelessly romantic, but I don't believe that the sweet-faced hippie girl from Lancs who was handing out pamphlets on behalf of a Save-the-Gorillas campaign in Chester a few weeks ago, was really a genocidal maniac.

I'm not even convinced that Ted Turner is either. He's quite clearly just making String Noises, garbled recordings of slogans written for him by others smarter, and probably more evil, than himself. He's a puppet, albeit, probably a willing one.

No, I'm not ready to believe that the will of the greater number of Environutterists is bad. As I'm not willing to believe that all the will of my fellow Anti-Choice Extremists is all good (don't forget, I've met them).

Something that makes me think this is the experience I had a number of years ago doing the lobbying for the general election. My job was to phone all the candidates running for every party in every riding in the country and ask them what they thought about the life issues.

To my surprise I found that not infrequently the Greens were also moderately on our side on abortion and euthanasia. They were, like nearly everyone else, even those firmly on our side, dismally ignorant of the issues, but the ill will, the kneejerk bigotry we usually encountered from the more dedicated career politicians in the Liberal party (and Conservatives) was mostly absent. I had a conversation with one of them, a nice family man from Saskatchewan, in which I said, "Don't you know that, being a Green, you're on the left, and that being on the left, you are supposed to be wholly in favour of abortion 'rights' and stem cell research and euthanasia and all that?"

"Well, no one told me," he replied.

I would probably have voted for him myself if I had lived in Deepest Darkest Saskatchewan.

More on this later.

"Intoxicating Vanity"

I said it below, but, naturally, he said it better:

A Stopped Watch...

Here's some hippie-originated stuff I actually agree with.

The Slow Food movement was founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy as a resistance movement to combat fast food. It claims to preserve the cultural cuisine and the associated food plants and seeds, domestic animals, and farming within an ecoregion. It was the first established part of the broader Slow movement. The movement has since expanded globally to over 83,000 members in 122 countries.

(from Wiki):

The Slow Food movement incorporates a series of objectives within its mission, including:

* forming and sustaining seed banks to preserve heirloom varieties in cooperation with local food systems
* developing an "ark of taste" for each ecoregion, where local culinary traditions and foods are celebrated
* preserving and promoting local and traditional food products, along with their lore and preparation
* organizing small-scale processing (including facilities for slaughtering and short run products)
* organizing celebrations of local cuisine within regions (for example, the Feast of Fields held in some cities in Canada)
* promoting "taste education"
* educating consumers about the risks of fast food
* educating citizens about the drawbacks of commercial agribusiness and factory farms
* educating citizens about the risks of monoculture and reliance on too few genomes or varieties
* developing various political programs to preserve family farms
* lobbying for the inclusion of organic farming concerns within agricultural policy
* lobbying against government funding of genetic engineering
* lobbying against the use of pesticides
* teaching gardening skills to students and prisoners
* encouraging ethical buying in local marketplaces

Although, I've got to admit, a pressure cooker is a great fast-food thing. I did a batch of Scotch broth today in a total of two hours in the P.C., a process that can take as much as five hours.

Scottish Power should lobby to ban pressure cookers.

What Christian Environmentalism Isn't

Ok look. I'm all Nature Girl and everything, but for Pete sake, aren't there better things to do with our money and scientific knowledge than create and fit a prosthetic flipper on a green turtle?

I mean, you know, plenty more green turtles in the sea.

She's pretty cute, I'll admit, but that's kind of the point hey? The non-Christian kind of environmentalism seems to mostly be motivated by sentimentalism. "We all really loved her" so we're going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on fitting the cute disabled turtle with a specially designed prosthesis.

If it were me, I'd just eat it.

But I guess that's why I couldn't get a job with PETA.

Sentimentalism about animals, BTW, is a characterisitic of middle class white urban dwellers. The kind who march in support of a "woman's right to choose".

John Muggeridge told me once that in his experience, "animal rights" people, as well as vegetarians, are invariably utilitarians who think that the human species is the one that has no right to be here. It turned out to be exactly accurate. Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, was also well known as an advocate of "animal rights". To him, the animals had rights, but the humans none.

Pertinent also, was the fact that he was one of the first advocates of welfarism.

It was a pretty cute turtle though. Have to admit.

Christianity and the Environment III

Just a flicker of a thought...

A single phrase from the Anglicans:
"Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made..."

is usually taken to mean we sinners.

But it is an absolute. He who hateth nothing that He hath made... goes for the voles and periwinkles too does it not? And these same creatures are given for safekeeping and good use into the hands of His deputies here on earth, yes?

Christian Environmentalism II

Just a very shorty short expansion on the previous introductory thoughts on how Christians should approach “environmentalism”.

What happens to our brains when we go for a walk in the woods or fields?

Mine slows down. I relax my head more than my body. The ten-mile-a-minute thought processes and the scatterbrain flitting from one set of ideas to another shuts off and I can concentrate on one thing at a time.

My mind drifts, like lying in the sun on a floating log at the beach at Nanoose Bay when the tide is low, the water warm and steady, your bare feet trailing in the water, just brushing the shale on the bottom of the bay, the gulls calling and the waves making a noise like a million whispered voices over the pebbles of the beach...

I find that this is the mental condition I need to communicate with God. I have almost no capacity to resist temptations to distraction when I'm at home. I fight my brain in Church. I'm at war with my thoughts in almost every other situation.

But walking the fields, looking deep into the mysterious depths of hedges for the source of a bird's call, watching the steam of the cows' breath blowing out of their big square noses...

those are things that have an autonomy, an independence from my thoughts and ideas, that makes it possible to take myself out of myself for a moment. And not being wrapped up in our little selves, and our little ideas, is what prayer is supposed to accomplish, and where it is supposed to start.

A Christian concern for the environment, for nature and the world's systems, then, must start with an acknowledgement of the otherness of natural things. It may be a hint at a way to start understanding the otherness of God.

Nature is real. So real that it does not respond to you, your preferences, your ideas or opinions. It is so implacably real that all your actions in regards to it can themselves only be based on real things. The natural world is one of the best cures for ideologies there is, if it is taken honestly. Nature can teach us that we are not as in charge of things as we often like to think.

Once free of those delusions about our powers that grow in our cozy, safe, controlled un-natural environments, we might be able to clear away some of the mental rubbish and start asking questions about The Real. The implacable otherness and realness of nature where we are stripped of our illusions of power, may, possibly, lead us to questions about origins, and the real nature of our relationship with the world, and our responsibilities to it.

* * *

Right. If any of that made sense, please let me know.

That's all the free-floating stuff for today.

Christian Environmentalism

Is the idea of Christian Environmentalism an oxymoron?

I'm interested to see the great emphasis in Britain on the preservation of the land and wildlife.

This country spends a simply enormous amount of its time and money looking after the ground and the things growing out of and living on it. A great deal more than the Canucks. In fact, it amounts to something of a national obsession. I've always known from my own upbringing that Brits are completely dotty about gardening, and I've observed that the entire country is one enormous cultivated garden. When my plane was first over England, there was a brief gap in the cloud cover and the thing that struck me was the endless expanse of green patchwork quilt we were flying over.

There are records of some form of land management/nature conservancy in this country going back to before the Saxon period. The Benedictine monks started it when everything was still covered in forest. The Saxon farmers who moved in after the Romans pulled out were just cutting trees down willy nilly. When the Benedictines showed up, they converted them not only to Christianity, but to responsible husbandry too. The monks invented the whole idea, in fact, having done more or less the same trick on the continent.

It seems clear that in Britain the concern has yet to be transformed, as it has in Canada, into some quasi-mystical earth goddess religion. It looks, from the superficial internet evidence at least, to actually be about land, wildlife and resource management. Something very important when you've got as little land as we do and as many people.

I grew up with my mother teaching me taxonomy and marine biology as she learned it in university. Of course, since then, the religious and social/political questions have taken over my thoughts, but I have been expanding those thoughts a bit since. But now I want to know if there is a genuine Catholic understanding, how important it is in relation to everything else that we have to pay attention to, and what our response ought to be.

I think while we rightly reject the neo-pagan Environmentalism that seems to have taken over the business of science, we mustn't be caught by the temptation to pendulum away from the issues altogether. There must be a genuine Catholic response to the use of natural resources. (Sorry, Gillian: I know "pendulum" isn't a verb.)

I'd like to start thinking about what that should be.