Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35.2 Sept. 2009: 337-354

Working with Nature: David Masumoto and Organic Farming Discourse

Shiuh-huah Serena Chou Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan

Abstract David Mas Masumoto, a third generation organic farmer, reflects on his experience substituting pheromones for chemicals in his organic peach and suggests that organic cultivation is a practice through which farmers respond to the rhythmic order of nature. Like many organic enthusiasts, Masumoto defines organic farming as the antithesis of industrial ––a mode of production that relies on synthetic , fertilizers, and other technological control of nature. However, this powerful dichotomy that Masumoto establishes between the organic and the industrial becomes less tenable when his stance against chemical and fertilizers comes into conflict with his attempt to work with nature’s order. Working with nature, Masumoto finds his organic approach depends as much on controlling nature and its irregularities as industrial ones, and his vision of a pristine organic farm devoid of human traces an unattainable dream. His fascination with organic naturalness manifests an obsession with the supposed pastoral innocence and moral order of the organic landscape in popular belief.

Keywords David Mas Masumoto, organic farming, nature writing, pastoral literature, ecocriticism

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Nature is the supreme farmer and , and . . . the study of her ways will provide us with the one thing we need––sound and reliable direction.1 —Sir Albert Howard (1873-1947) 18

Upon monitoring his peaches, third-generation Japanese American farmer David Mas Masumoto reflects on his experience substituting pheromones for pesticides in his organic orchard, and suggests that organic agriculture is a cultural practice through which farmers respond to the intricacies and rhythms of nature. Recounting his experience of “giving up on [his] feeble attempts to control the natural chaos,” and “grow[ing] accustomed to the diverse patterns and changes” of nature in Harvest Son (1998), Masumoto’s nature writing reiterates vocabularies of pioneers of the organic movement, such as Sir Albert Howard’s postulation in the epitaph above (285, 19). In a nutshell, organic farming serves as the antithesis to modern industrial agriculture, which relies on synthetic herbicides, chemical fertilizers, genetic engineering, and other technological control of nature in the production process. Contrary to the beliefs of ardent organic consumers, “organic farming” has existed for centuries, and the origins of the organic movement can be traced to the 1840s as a response to the introduction of artificial fertilizers. As an alternative method of cultivation, the organic approach is a trenchant critique of chemical and energy-intensive food provision system of the West. Beyond preserving soil fertility from the outset, organic farming has encouraged what Phillip Conford argues is the public’s “positive acceptance of the natural order and the intention to work with its laws” (17). What is striking about Masumoto’s and Howard’s remarks is not so much their similar idealist aesthetics, but the extent to which organic agriculture provides a common grammar and narrative shape for both literary and cultural criticism, and reconfiguration of natural landscape. Most notably, as organic enthusiasts have done for decades, Masumoto speaks confidently of his farming according to the immanent order of cosmological holism, even though the concept of “nature” has been proclaimed a complex material reality and an unstable concept, loaded with socio-historical implications. 2 Despite recognizing “chaos” and “change” as

1 See Howard’s introduction to the 1945 edition of Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould. 2 As Raymond Williams writes in “Nature,” “[n]ature is perhaps the most complex word in the language” (219), and in Problems in Materialism and Culture, nature, the idea, “contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history . . . both complicated and changing, as other ideas and experiences changed” (67). In the introduction to Uncommon Ground,

Chou / Working with Nature 339 characteristic of organic landscape, Masumoto celebrates nature’s order, practicing the teachings of Lady Eve Balfour, founder of the first organic agricultural society, the Soil Association (1946), declaring that “[d]isorder and chaos are not natural phenomena. Left to herself, Nature always produces order. It is Man who causes chaos by his persistent attempts to resists or ignore natural laws, an attempt doomed to failure from the start” (qtd. in Merill 181). The supposed oppositions between conventional and organic systems of production reveal that popular conceptions of the “organic” have replaced “nature” in their manifestation of a mystic, if not naïve, reality of stability and order. The wide appeal of organic food, however, also encourages the commodification and industrialization of organic farming, which, for advocates, undermine the ecological and social implications of the ideal of farming in nature’s image. Organic cultivation, paradoxically, has become “less dependent on how a farmer manages production than on what he or she grows” (Guthman 173).3 Why then has the organic persisted in utopian visions of pastoral harmony so compelling for consumers, writers, and ecocritics alike, despite their interrogations of nature as the locus of pristine landscape and moral purity? In what ways has an organic imaginary like Masumoto’s remained more or less an ahistoric, transcendent concept, and an uncontested material reality that revives the nature-versus-culture binary popular in pastoral literature? Growing organic Sun Crest peaches in California in the 1990s, Masumoto contends that “[i]f there is any [farming] tradition in California, it is a tradition of innovational change” (Epitaph 19). Redressing a tradition that idealizes the “organic,” this article intends neither to dismiss organic landscape as an objective material reality devoid of valuation; nor does it advocate the organic imaginary as a simple, contemporary environmentalist repackaging of the pastoral mode as it evokes romantic images of rural landscapes. Rather, this article questions the much taken-for-granted concepts such as “nature” and “natural order” through Masumoto’s narratives to pinpoint the cultural fantasies and limits of organic farming discourse. environmental historian William Cronon makes a similar point on the perception of the transparency of nature when he contends that “[p]opular concern about the environment often implicitly appeals to a kind of naïve realism for its intellectual foundation, more or less assuming that we can pretty easily recognize nature when we see it and thereby make uncomplicated choices between natural things, which are good, and unnatural things, which are bad” (25-26). 3 National Organic Standards Board’s emphasis on the standardization and simplification of organic production and marketing has ascribed organic farming to the centralized, capitalist food production mechanism that it first set out to curtail. See, also Nicolas H. Lampkin’s “Organic Farming: in Practice” 5-7 and Vijay Cuddeford’s “When Organics go Mainstream” 4.

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The extent to which harmony and order serve as key metaphors/principles for an environmental discourse that encourages the healing of the land and the purification of human spirits remains a point of contention and has been tackled by environmental writers with great ambivalence. Literary scholar’s concerns over the social or “practical” functions of environmental literature also call attention to the credibility of the much-revered “natural order” in addressing the dynamics of the ecological and socio-cultural household.4 Concerning the belief in an ecological system of grand design, Masumoto’s nature writings that ennoble the virtue of “working with nature’s pattern” echo the rhetoric of the organic movement. His narrative not only foregrounds the normative principles of, and assigns ethnical values to, what is an essential, inherent natural law, but also finds the holistic underpinning of organicism both a means and an end to an ecologically benign and socially just agricultural practice and mode of life. In the opening of Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My family Farm (1995), Masumoto constructs a geographical and moral landscape of the organic that relies on such pastoral tropes as loss, alienation, and nostalgia:

The family farmer is a tough species, and we will find ways to continue. But when I think of that Sun Crest orchard, it hurts to see a slice of my life ripped out, flavor lost along with meaning. Life will be different without Sun Crest peaches, and with the loss of variety consumers will be the ultimate losers. (xi)

In this passage, Masumoto reveals organic cultivation as a ritual through which farmers cultivate both the land and their own spirits, sustaining the momentum of nature as well as the farming community. Distinguished by its opposition to industrial agricultural practices––a product of an alleged contaminating, materialistic society––organic landscape is closely bound up with idyllic visions of a lost, paradisical felicity through the supposed innocence of nature, the simplicity of rural environment, and the authenticity of a distant past. Celebrating organic

4 In Practical Ecocriticism, Glen Love reflects on his role as an ecocritic, maintaining that he chose the term humanistic thinking to “test ideas against the workings of physical reality, to join humanistic thinking to the empirical spirit of the sciences, to apply our nominal concern for ‘the environment’ to the sort of work we do in the real world as teachers, scholars, and citizens of a place and a planet” (7). Karl Kroeber made a similar point earlier in Ecological Literary Criticism. He encourages the development of an ecological-science oriented literary criticism that “escape[s] from the esoteric abstractness that afflicts current theorizing about literature, seizes opportunities offered by recent biological research to make humanistic studies more socially responsible” (1).

Chou / Working with Nature 341 farming, Masumoto’s quixotic quest for a new social and environmental order in a countryside sheltered from the monopoly of agribusiness is rooted in the pastoral, in what Leo Marx notes in The Machine in the to be the “yearning for a simpler, more harmonious style of life, an existence ‘closer to nature’” (6). The moral authority of Masumoto’s organic landscape, like that of pastoral literature, is prefigured in the geographical and epistemological distance that he creates between “nature” and “culture.” Within Masumoto’s conceptual map, the organic, as a source of environmental stability and social cohesion, depends first and foremost on the fetishization of nature as an object of desire. Interestingly, neither the acclaim nor the complaint about Masumoto’s vision as an idyllic contrast to the urbane is very persuasive. For reviewers who read Masumoto’s accounts as allegories that reclaim modern Arcadia through “working with nature,” the most promising, and, arguably, most disturbing aspect of organic imaginary is the moral and aesthetic distance established between the organic and the hegemonic agricultural paradigm. Despite its “sentimentality,” its “naïve, lyrical and . . . repetitive” style, writes poet Maxine Kumin in The New York Times, Epitaph for a Peach is an important book on the legacy of American family farming, whose stoicism “elicit[s] sympathy and admiration” (13). The Los Angeles Times, similarly, aligns Harvest Son with Thomas Jefferson, St. John de Crevecoeur, and philosophers of pastoral and agrarian traditions, but regrets its “romanticism” amidst the peril of tending peaches and raisin grapes (Groves 1). Often compared to Santa Barbara organic farmer Michael Ableman, Vermont dairy farmer Charles Fish, and farmer and professor of classics Victor David Hanson, Masumoto and these writers are portrayed as ascetic icons, fighting to “restore luster to small-scale, diversified farming, and develop a mutually supportive relationship with local communities” (Groves 1).5 Scholarly investigations of Masumoto are also torn between those who give prominence to the apparent moral significance of the organic landscape and those who overlook the significance of Masumoto’s idealism living in close communion with the organic order. His narratives have been championed by critics as authoritative testimonies to farmers who have come to terms with not only the ecological but also the ethnic and class dimensions of agricultural history. In her investigation of the sprawl of organic industries, for instance, anthropologist Laura B. Delind draws on Masumoto’s prophetic vision of “working with nature” in

5 Although these writers share the same goal, Martha Groves points out that while Hanson “seeks to shock people into awareness that family farming is essentially a goner and that the nation is worse off because of it,” Masumoto and Ableman rely on “a strong dose of romanticism” (1).

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support of her critique on technology-centered federal regulations.6 The intricacies of Masumoto’s notion of natural order have also been overlooked by scholars interested in formulating a green discourse that moves beyond simple nature-culture binaries, and beyond dichotomizing nature writing as either romantic, pastoral epiphanies or covert political pamphlets. 7 Few have engaged Masumoto’s narratives in serious critiques at the level of the writings of Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, and other agrarian writers. These contradictory responses to Masumoto reflect literary critics’ ambivalence toward pastoral literature’s romantic impulses, especially since the collapse of country-city borderlines and literary studies’ overemphasis on the social constructiveness of “nature.”8 In Masumoto’s highly stylized country living, however, voices of the disenfranchised find little resonance. The political limits of Masumoto, like his aspiration, spring from a romanticism that while denouncing the hegemonic, retreats to a landscape of seeming innocence and simplicity. With regard to the increasing marginalization of pastoral literature and its idealization and abstraction of nature, Lawrence Buell notes that “new scholarship stresses even more than the older scholarship did nature’s function as an ideological theater for acting out desires that have very little to do with bonding to nature as such and that subtly or not so subtly valorize its unrepresented opposite (complex society)” (35). This rising skepticism originates from an inherent conflict between “the literary representation of nature” (or, “the textual evidence”) and “the material reality” (or, “the economic reality”) of pastoral literature (Gifford 2). As Gifford asserts, “[a] farm worker might say that a novel was a pastoral if it celebrates a landscape as

6 DeLind’s argument that “[o]rganic growers have long recognized a need for standards to ensure the integrity of their methods and products,” one that devotes to the ecological processes, is supported by a quotation from Masumoto’s Epitaph for a Peach. “Organic growers work in conjunction with natural systems,” she writes, “utilizing ecological relationships and balances and accepting the fact that having nature as a dance partner means ‘constantly . . . switching leads’” (132). 7 Alice E. Ingerson’s reading of Masumoto as a realist who takes pride in Japanese philosophy of “learning to fail” in a world of changes remains unconvincing with respect to the popular perception of Masumoto as a romantic, self-reliant American yeoman (255). The Norton Book of Nature Writing also recognizes Masumoto’s “Japanese-American perspective,” but fails to explain its complexity (1047). 8 In The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx identifies two kinds of pastoral literature: the “pastoral ideal” and the “pastoral design” (24-25). Unlike the more popular and sentimental pastoral ideal, pastoral designs refer to more imaginative, complex literary works that critique society’s progressive quest for power and wealth through the image of “the machine in the garden.” Gifford finds that the collapse of the country-city borderline challenges pastoral literature’s celebration of rural landscape, and asks the question: “Does the pastoral still exist in contemporary writing?” (3-4).

Chou / Working with Nature 343 though no one actually sweated to maintain it on a low income” (2). Unreserved enthusiasm for nature and for reading literature as reality has instigated pejorative remarks that “pastoral vision is too simplified, and thus an idealization of the reality of life in the country” (Gifford 2). Just as the idealization of nature likely conceals the appropriation of the land as a resource for acting out desires that may be self-indulgent, the insistence on reading pastoral ideology as either “projective fantasy” or “responsiveness to actual environments” likewise undermines the ideological potential of the pastoral, with regard to its very “double-edged character” (Buell 54). The fine line between the two, however, is sometimes difficult to discern. In “Pastoralism in America,” Leo Marx argues that pastoral convention’s double-edgedness––its self-reflexivity and ideological potential as “a nascent left-wing ideology”––lies within its liminality, rather than the apparent contrast between the rural and the urban, and between the visionary and the actual (36). For Marx, it is a pastoral figure’s in-betweenness, his/her being both “a part of, and apart from” nature as well as society, that first initiates the desire for retreat from the hegemonic society, and that, later on, dispels his/her former illusions for rural landscape and eventually helps gain a critical distance from both the country and city (“Pastoralism” 43). While this conceptual paradox demonstrates exceptional reflexivity in its manipulation of cultural stereotypes, the space created through the process of distancing constructs a safely sequestered vision of nature instrumental to the advancement of ecological consciousness. The divergent critical responses to Masumoto discussed earlier call forth a closer study of organic imaginary’s highly embellished celebration and appropriation of “nature.” When positioned as a direct contrast to industrial forms of production, the logic of Masumoto’s organic imaginary parallels that which essentializes “nature” and “culture” and dichotomizes “nature” and “culture” into a simple “nature-as-good versus culture-as-evil” binary. For organic practitioners such as Masumoto, however, this self-conscious break from what is cultural (i.e. chemical, artificial, industrialized, and urban) suggests something more than a positive acceptance of the organic as an environmentally friendly food provision system. Masumoto’s notion of organic farming, in fact, enacts an ethics and mode of life through which individuals respond to “an eternal feature of the natural order” known as “the Rule of Return” (Conford 48). “I find comfort in returning the wood back to the soil, part of a natural cycle of farming. The woody fiber adds organic matter, which quickly decays and becomes food for worms, microorganisms, and other wonderful creatures I can’t see,” writes Masumoto (Epitaph 188).

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The characterization of organic nature as balanced and self-regulatory, in fact, prevails in the writings of organic pioneers and practitioners. Enthusiasts worldwide argue for the fertility and health of the soil, defining the organic from the very start as a philosophy that looks up to nature as the supreme farmer. Foregrounding its theoretical basis in holism, the organic movement draws on ecological and religious metaphors and concepts, such as “the wheel of health,” “the Natural Order” (Collis 62), and the “trinity” of “health-wholeness-holiness” (Massingham 217).9 These various manifestations of “the law of return” are best illustrated by G. T. Wrench’s summary of Sir Robert McCarrison’s organic principles: “[t]ransference, transference, transference––three transferences, that is the secret of health. These three transferences––soil to vegetable, vegetable to animal, animal and vegetable back to the soil––form the eternal wheel of health” (129). Mandating nature as an autonomous, self-sustaining system that constitutes in itself a set of normative rules, the organic argues for the corrective and remedial potential of “working with nature” through the theory of ecosystemic energy (re)cycling of which humans are a part. In this sense, organic discourse has powerfully articulated a holistic cosmology that moves beyond the positioning of the organic as a binary opposite of what disenfranchised industrialized society represents. While the ethic of “working with nature” in pastoral scenarios implicates a yearning for harmony, the feasibility of such precept brings to the fore problems regarding the enactment of nature (and hence nature’s order) as a vital component of a subversive environmental ethic. Aside from the fact that “working with nature” serves as a laudable vision, the ideal of “working with nature” is a concept that is constantly undermined by organic farmers’ anxiety over the degrees of “naturalness” retained when putting the organic principle into practice. Masumoto writes of his ambivalence toward the plausibility of the organic doctrine of “working with nature,” casting doubt on the moral imperative of organic agriculture. He writes, “I water my farm artificially, so I don’t think my vines or trees really feel the drought . . . Farmers all manipulate nature, some more than others. And some practices are more destructive than others” (Epitaph 14). Here organic farming is presented as an agricultural practice marked by a sense of instrumentality,

9 The notion of the virtuous circle is made explicit by the title of G. T. Wrench’s The Wheel of Health. The “Order of Nature” is mentioned when John Stewart Collis suggests that a mountain slope consisting of soil without any vegetation on top never happens “in the Natural Order” (62). And in “Reverence for God’s Law,” H. J. Massingham writes that “health-wholeness-holiness, only the very rarest man of science is aware of this trinity, a three-in-one. Average science will not stop men from preying on the soil as the plumage—traders preyed on birds in the breeding season for the milliners” (217).

Chou / Working with Nature 345 coerciveness, and profit-driven orientations not unlike that of the industrial paradigm. Masumoto begs pardon for using technologies and chemicals that “won’t harm humans,” realizing that the gesture of farming, whether applying state-registered organic fertilizers or not, involves human interference (Epitaph 80). The instrumentality, and, hence, artificiality and anthropocentricity of organic cultivation come particularly to the forefront for Masumoto, a Californian organic farmer who learned that the survival of his family farm depended on alterations of the natural landscape on a large scale involving federal, state, and individual powers. In the East Valley where Masumoto’s family farm is located, the arid land was brought into productivity by clearing layers of hardpan, private implementations of localized hydraulic systems, and the Wright Act of 1887, which paved the way for the establishment of irrigation districts. For Masumoto and ardent environmentalists, organic cultivation appears as much about changing the landscape and human innovation and intervention as industrial practices. Modifications of nature go hand in hand with the mentality that exploits and interrupts the stability and self-sustaining system of the natural environment. The burden of an organic farmer’s guilty conscience, as California organic farmer and writer Michael Ableman rightly observes, derives from the fact that using these biological sprays “come[s] from the same mentality of solving problems with a miracle cure” (81), which gave the farmer “a sense of power and control” (78). Assertions that even the slightest human presence in nature manifests, to some degree, the humanization, domestication, and contamination of the natural environment, underscore organic farmers’ anxieties over the naturalness of organic methods. As Masumoto remarks, organic practice is about “allowing nature to take over,” “as if the farmer died” (Epitaph 28, 38). The association of organic farming with good health and environmental integrity is embedded within the conception of nature as a dynamic but unified web of eco-organisms, whose inherent value exists independently of human interests and valuations. Driving these presuppositions, however, is the easy link forged between what historian Richard White points out to be “productive work in nature” and “destruction” among environmentalists, which leads to either the condemnation of “all work in nature,” or the celebration of the sustainability of “archaic work” (171). As White contends in “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?,” the environmental imaginary holds that “certain kinds of archaic work, most typically the farming of peasants, provide a way of knowing nature,” and that “work on the land creates a connection to place that will protect nature itself” (171). Like historian Lynn White, Jr., who, in his controversial article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (1969),

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traces modern environmental deterioration to not only the anthropocentric orientations of Judeo-Christian theology but also the Enlightenment advancement of science and technology, Richard White attests that the notion that “work is a fall from grace” has given rise to the denunciation of intense labor and modern technology (175). The biblical Garden of Eden’s pastoral simplicity also encourages the celebration of play and pre-modern forms of production in mainstream environmental discourse. This “white man’s” environmental story engenders the romanticization of non-industrial agriculture, and other regional, local forms of labor in nature through devaluing the works of modern man (Richard White 180). Although Richard White’s investigation of the ethnic and cultural connotations of the story of The Fall ended with his critique of Lynn White’s scapegoating of the white man as the first and ultimate environmental manipulator, his attention to the role of the pious “Indian peoples” discloses an undercurrent of orientalism in organic imaginary’s pastoral pursuits (175). For both Masumoto’s critics and admirers, Masumoto’s public confession is legitimate; the validity of his moral assertions, in fact, had been affirmed by empirically confirmable evidence from South and East Asia. American soil scientist Franklin H. King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries, or, Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan, and G. T. Wrench’s The Wheel of Health: The Source of Long Life and Health Among the Hunza, for instance, have all argued that modern technology and the skillful maneuvering of Western industrial agriculture, as history has demonstrated, are more destructive than the agricultural methods practiced by the Far Eastern peasantry. Mourning the loss of the pastoral past, Wrench celebrates unreservedly McCarrison’s philosophy on the primitive––and “organic”––approaches of non-Western agriculture, a farming practice that has sustained the livelihood of millions over the centuries in The Wheel of Health. Wrench writes, “[i]t is possible also that in this form of culture there is an excellence of vegetable health which can be obtained by no other means––in Hunza, for example, there is that excellence, and disease is significant. It is possible that by full repayment to the soil we alone get a full return” (121). Organic supporters’ indictment of agribusiness’s profit-driven, mechanized system of food production is carefully illustrated through incidences of the American Dust Bowl on the one hand, and the celebration of the “rule of the return” of the East, on the other. This pseudo-historical and ecological evidence succeeds in establishing tangible, legitimate testimonies that sanctify “labor done without modern machines” (Richard White 178); it prevails, however, through a fancy for the supposed oppositional qualities between what is a “modern,” “industrial” agricultural practice

Chou / Working with Nature 347 of the West, and a “conventional/primitive,” “organic” method of the East––for what Michael Soule contends is “the myth of western moral inferiority” (147). For Wrench, agriculture was the “real desire” of the Tibetans of Baltistan, Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese, and these “true agriculturalists” are not only “conspicuously ahead of all their neighbours in brain and sinew,” but also “not military” (15-16). This idealization of the East as a Shangri-la, a utopia where everyone enjoys self-sufficiency, poses a sharp contrast to Pearl Buck’s portrayal of Chinese peasants in times of drought and famine in The Good Earth (1931), a novel also published in the early 20th century and for which she won the Nobel Prize. Most intriguing, however, is the continuous consumption and resuscitation of images of noble-savage farmers. In recent years, King’s Farmers of the Forty Centuries (1911, 2004), Lord Northbourne’s Look to the Land (1940, 2005), Howard’s The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture (1881, 2006), and Wrench’s The Wheel of Health (1983, 2006) have been reprinted.10 Masumoto himself, too, dwells on his identity as a Japanese American farmer at a highly romanticized level throughout his nature writings.11 Alice E. Ingerson also encapsulates Masumoto’s Japanese heritage, “learning to fail,” in the face of change, like a diligent Zen acolyte (255). As an earthly paradise “not there,” the mystique of organic landscape, in revealing “working with nature’s rhythm” a moment of transcendence and escape, subsumes the organic imaginary to that of popular, sentimental pastoral ideal. The organic imaginary’s “use-abuse” equation is pivotal, especially when prompted by the need to address the aftermath of technological and industrial powers. Masumoto and organic farmers’ accusatory tone aimed at industrial agriculture, however, is marked by their inattention to the historical and material realities of farming. Their reinstatement of the doctrine, “working with nature” thus relegates organic agriculture to a nature-versus-culture binary and the domain of an exotic, orientalized Asia. A clear antagonist to industrial farming’s centralized and mechanized means of production, Masumoto’s vision of small-scale, diversified, family farms that

10 Wrench’s The Wheel of Health was reprinted in 1990 and retitled A Hunza Trip with Dr. Bernard Jensen. 11 Although Masumoto claims that “[t]raditions can be lively and evolving, not a nostalgic memorial to the past,” his attempts of “becoming American” remain superficial in terms of the complexity of Japanese culture and Japanese American history (Letters 62-63). He writes, “I sought the authentic taste of Japanese Americans, a fusion of two worlds and two palates: I wanted turkey dressing we ate with hashi (chopsticks) and a green lettuce salad with shoyu (soy sauce) dressing” (Letters 62). This quotation is one of many that capture the exoticism of Japanese culture and the romanticism of cultural assimilation. See my discussion in “ the Past, Shaping the Future: David Mas Masumoto and Organic Nothingness” in MELUS.

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conform to nature’s cycles was also envisaged by proponents of the American agrarianism movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The battle cry against centralized state powers can be traced to Thomas Jefferson, who finds, in the small family farm, the key not only to the new republican democracy and egalitarianism, but also moral refinement and self-reliance. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), he writes, “[t]hose who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue” (217). Jefferson’s political and moral vision was rooted in the belief that one could discover God by developing an intimate relation with nature. The convergence of “nature and piety,” a literary trope that conveyed anti-modernist sentiments, was also shared by Henry D. Thoreau, who made explicit, in his pursuit of spiritual enlightenment at Walden Pond, that economic and moral frugality go hand-in-hand (Buell 129). Similarly, in the works of contemporary agrarians such as Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, this claim for decentralized, primitive subsistence and the critique of mechanized and intensified agriculture are most lucidly defined by contrasting imageries of alienated, morally deprived farmers and urban laborers with self-sufficient farmers, whose gesture of working with nature’s way suggests a transcendent passage toward spiritual sanctity and harmony. What is at stake for organic farmers, then, is not so much their belief in nature’s order as their confidence to “farm in nature’s image,” and make “farm in nature’s image” a vital element of the organic imaginary. Although relying only seasonally on the employment of migrant Mexican wage labors, Masumoto was reminded of his father’s warning that “[o]nce you start hiring a lot, you’re not just a farmer anymore” (Epitaph 23). For Masumoto, farmers who conflate husbandry with the bookkeeping of farm productivity and costs are “farm managers,” who exploit both human labor and nature through modern technologies in disguise (Epitaph 23). In their replication of the reductionist and capitalist rhetoric of industrial agribusiness, organic farmers have abandoned the changes and patterns of each agricultural year, and from their identity as “poets” (Scofield 3). Traditional, small-family farming, and the virtues of industry and thrift make a farmer, but the devotion of a farmer to cultivate “a way of life” concerning the harvesting of “taste, texture, and aroma, accompanied by stories” is what defines organicity (Four Seasons 4, 20). Giving prominence to an organic farmer’s role as a poet, the modalities formulated in Masumoto’s organic imaginary evoke images of the pastoral artist-yeoman.

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Aside from the fact that ethical claims grounded in scientific and empirical facts may be themselves value-laden, the rational assessment of the respect for nature’s intrinsic value, a value that is independent of human use and judgment, as a vision for organic discourse remains doubtful. Two ambiguous moral and metaphysical speculations made about “nature” in Masumoto create this critical tension. First, Masumoto’s conception of organic agriculture as the ultimate agriculture method depends on the notion of nature as a supreme ruler, superior to, and distinguished from, the acquired and the artificial. This epistemological meaning of nature, however, challenges his celebration of (organic) nature as a given norm––a guiding principle to which all things, including humans, should conform to and be a part of. As John Stuart Mill suggests,

there still exists a vague notion that, though it is very proper to control this or the other natural phenomenon, the general scheme of nature is a model for us to imitate; that with more or less liberty in details, we should on the whole be guided by the spirit and general conception of nature's own ways; that they are God's work, and as such perfect; that man cannot rival their unapproachable excellence, and can best show his skill and piety by attempting, in however imperfect a way, to reproduce their likeness. (93)

The belief that humans should emulate nature’s ways, on the one hand, denounces those who run counter to what nature commands and approves, undermining the creativity and autonomy of humans; it also questions the role of humans as embodiment of “nature,” on the other. As environmental ethics, Holmes Rolston III rightly insists, an intrinsic, non-instrumental value exists in the natural world despite that value always require a valuing subject. In his search for a natural way of farming, Masumoto is deeply disturbed by the fact that “[v]alue in nature [is] always ‘anthropocentric,’ human-centered, or at least ‘anthropogenic’ (generated by humans)” (Rolston 79).12 Given that the organic practice is no longer natural and occupies supposedly a better ecological or environmental position than industrial

12 In “Naturalizing Values: Organisms and Species,” Rolston argues that “[i]ntrinsic value in the realized sense emerges relationally with the appearance of the subject-generator. This is something like opening the door of a refrigerator, when things previously in the dark light up. But axiologically speaking, nature is always in the dark—unless and until humans come (79-80); in other words, “[n]ature is actually valuable only when it pleases us, as well as serves us. That seems to be the ultimate truth, even though we penultimately have placed intrinsic value on nature, and take our pleasure enjoying these natural things for what they are in themselves” (80).

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practices, the pivotal question for Masumoto and the organic discourse, then, becomes how their conviction to “work with nature’s intrinsic order,” a cultural behavior, can be attained and justified without defying that human beings are not a part of a “supreme order.” One could dismiss the controversies over the valuations of organic farming by labeling Masumoto a rhapsodic radical, whose frustration derives from his idealization of organic cultivation as a corrective practice that could radically rectify the supposed unnaturalness, and hence the shortcomings, of modern industrial agriculture by emulating nature and its assumed moral goodness. Others, however, agree with Masumoto’s claim but continue to celebrate the autonomy of nature, especially taking into account humans’ increasing dependence on machines. With regard to the positions of agribusiness and non-/pre industrial models of food production, literary critic William Conlogue notes:

Farm industrialization is not simply synonymous with the use of machinery or scientific methods; preindustrial farmers used machinery––horse-drawn seeders, for example––and scientific methods such as fertilizers and selective breeding. Agricultural industrialization requires farmers to conceive of plans, animals, land, and people through a narrow mechanistic frame that tends not to see them as living things. The industrial farm works towards ever-greater control over nature as a factor in production rather than working with it. Profit is the measure of the new farm, not a family’s continuance on the land, its quality of life, or its relations to the larger community. (16)

In Conlogue’s and Masumoto’s remarks on farming “business,” the carefully established binary between industrial and traditional/organic farming is challenged by the fact that both models involve the use of machinery and fertilizers––even though, as Masumoto evinces, the levels of human interference and industrialization differ markedly. The ways in which these two models intersect and cross boundaries is significant. While for Conlogue the shared qualities between the two models demand a more realistic and objective assessment of each, these shared qualities also cast doubt on Masumoto’s idealization of “working with nature” as an environmental vision and a means to sustenance. Yet in neither of their remarks does the breakdown of this distinction instantiate an understanding of the industrial and traditional organic models that surpasses conventional premises, or forges an ethical claim that could legitimize organic farming as a “natural” and ecological

Chou / Working with Nature 351 without further positing it as primitive, non-Western, and natural. The collapse of the binaries between organic and industrial methods, for organic supporters, only seems to reinforce the organic as a mode of life that reckons natural order as its normative principle. One may contend that the validity of the organic gospel, “working with nature,” and the manner through which “natural order” is conflated with, and defined by, “change” in Masumoto unsettle the apparent moral and epistemological solidity of the organic movement. Yet his insistence on the organic, as both a dynamic material reality, whose existence is simultaneously projected with fantasies and ideologies, and as an environmental enterprise equally configured by multiple sets of values, corresponds to what ecocritic Terry Gifford claims to be a post-pastoral critique: an appreciation of both nature’s beauty and immanence (152-153); a recognition of “a creative-destructive universe equally in balance” (153), and an awareness of “nature as culture and culture as nature” (162).13 Masumoto’s organic farm, while serving as a medium through which reverence for nature’s “order” is articulated, proclaims the organic imaginary as an environmental discourse that surpasses its own presumptuous idealism and ideological neutrality. Ecocritic Glen Love once argued that the ephemerality of the Arcadian vision is a reminder of the striking, original meaning of Et in Arcadia Ego: “[e]ven in Arcadia there is death” (83). The process of death, extinction, and environmental degradation, for him, “helps us ponder our relationship to the human and natural world” (84). If Love’s insights on the notion of death are manifestations of the transience of pastoral order, Masumoto’s notion of change in what appears to be a landscape of order registers an amplified version of post-pastoral narrative. Although Masumoto preoccupies himself with the notion of chaos as the new natural “order” and conflates his desire for order with his endeavor to cope with an unattainable order, his narratives redirects the organic imaginary’s attention to “order” back to the process of working with nature. The paradoxical notion of the organic as a landscape, whose order is defined by change, from the perspective of pastoral tradition, enacts Masumoto’s liminal position in-between and yet trapped simultaneously in two places.

13 “A mature environmental aesthetics,” Gifford argues, achieves a vision of the post-pastoral that includes six qualities, though not all necessarily present in one text. In addition to those Masumoto encapsulates is the recognition that “the inner i-s also the workings of the outer” (156-162), that “with consciousness comes conscience” (163-165), and that “the exploitation of the planet is of the same mindset as the exploitation of women and minorities” (165).

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About the Author Shiuh-huah Serena Chou is Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. She did her M.A. in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY-Buffalo). Her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature were taken at the University of Southern California. Her teaching and research focus on American as well as Taiwanese/Chinese environmental literature. She is currently at work on Asian American agrarian experience and images of Asia in environmental literature. Email: [email protected]

[Received 22 Oct. 2008; accepted 26 June 2009; revised 21 July 2009]