From the Farm to the Table by Gary Holthaus

Author:Gary Holthaus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2009-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

IN A NESTED UNIVERSE

Everything exists inside a system larger than itself. There is an ecology for everything. In the world of sustainability, so much larger than the world of biology, ecology is not only a scientific concept but an appropriate metaphor for the myriad relationships of our human experience, and even for the ideas we hold. Thus sustainability is a concept that comprises many interrelated ideas, an ecosystem that includes many species of thought. One of its primary ideas is, simply, that everything is related. That idea is related to two more: that you cannot do any one thing, and that what we do in this place reverberates through and affects every place. And those ideas, in turn, are related to the idea that everything needs to be treated with respect. If I have respect for any part of creation, then self-interest might act as a brake on destructive behavior toward it, because everything is related to me. One outcome of this line of thought is this: If I am disrespectful toward anything, I reveal my disrespect for myself. If any one of those ideas becomes unhealthy through my failure to observe it, then the habitat for sustainability becomes unhealthy and unsustainable—and I myself become unsustainable sooner rather than later. Therefore, if we have any self-respect, we show it best through our respect for everything else.

This is true in every sphere of life, not just the environment. It applies to economics, a system in which the wealthy impoverish the poor and are, in turn, impoverished by their poverty. Lack of respect for the poor is one indication of our lack of respect for ourselves, an admission that we are not people of enough character to take care of our own. Yet a universe in which “we are all related,” as the old Lakota song has it, is one in which rich and poor are relatives, and what kind of a family does not see to its relatives?

There is also an ecology of agriculture. Farmers are a species in an environmental, economic, social, psychological, and spiritual ecosystem that includes all the species from soil microorganisms, creatures small and large, and plants to neighbors, nearby towns, institutions like schools and churches and merchants, and large urban areas, as well as wilderness, geological formations, and light from distant stars. The water we depend on for agriculture and sustenance is related to it all too, never quite contained, even in the quiet sloughs and backwaters of our major streams. Where rain meets the welcoming hospitality of biomass, it seeps down into the soil through root systems, percolates through porous limestone, fills hidden aquifers or slides along impervious strata of shale, and eventually pools where our wells can reach it, or it bubbles, pours, and seeps out onto the surface again to become springs and streams that feed trout or pike and water our cattle and our children. It becomes the thread, like air, that unites us all and is our common heritage.

That buried shale

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