Mad Agriculture Reader 2021
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Mad Agriculture Reader 2021 A collection of books, essays, poems & wisdom keepers that have inspired the work and philosophy of Mad Agriculture. This Reader is for educational purposes only. - 1 - Foreward Dear Reader, We need a cultural revolution at the global scale that liberates us into a more vibrant and collective belonging on Earth, where humanity and the Earth system live in a deeper reciprocity and equity. This revolution must be founded on the virtues of good and true economy that discovers a new harmony between human and ecological wellbeing. I am often asked, ‘why mad?’. Mad is inspired by the Mad Farmer poems of Wendell Berry, which call us to rework society and agriculture with love, community and lots of radicalism. In Wendell’s words, ‘I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.’ The world that I’m striving to create is so vastly different than the world that is, that nearly everything that I do bears certain madness. The wisdom of our elders and ancestors, the progress of science and technology, the support of community, and the songs of our places will guide the way. Mad Agriculture doesn’t have all the answers, nor do we try to have all the answers. Our work is in pursuit of a collective liberation into something greater. Philip Taylor Co-Founder & Executive Director - 2 - TAble of Contents Elders & Wisdom Keepers . 4 Place . .. .5 Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, Wendell Berry . .6 Wild Geese, Mary Oliver . .8 Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold . .9 Climate . 13 Why I am Afraid of Global Cooling, Charles Eisenstein . .14 Can Dirt Save the Earth, Molses Velasquez-Manoff . .23 Evolution of Agriculture . 34 Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People? Charles Mann . 35 The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture . .47 Earl Butz Versus Wendell. 58 Agriculture’s Role in Society . .68 My Work is That of Conservation, Mark D. Hersey . 69 Community & Culture . .104 Small Gods, Martin Shaw . .105 Economy . 113 A 50-Year Farm Bill, The Land Institute . 114 An Ecodernist Manifesto . 133 Ecology . 164 Thinking in Systems, Donella H. Meadows . 165 Thinking Like a Mountain, Aldo Leopold . .173 Food Justice . 175 Being Human, Naima Penniman. .176 - 3 - Elders & wisdom keepers Adrienne Maree Brown Leah Penniman Alan Savory Yvon Chouinard David Abram Michael J. Meade Daren Doherty Martín Prechtel Carol Sanford Marion Nestle Charles Eisenstein Martin Shaw Clarissa Pinkola Estés Naomi Klein EF Schumacher Octavia Butler Eric Schlosser P.A. Yeoman Gary Nabhan Rowen White Gary Snyder Stuart Chapin Herman Daly Terry Tempest Williams Jane Goodall Vandana Shiva Joanna Macy Wendell Berry Konda Mason Wes Jackson - 4 - Place: Place-based thinking is a central tenant in our farm planning work. Books Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture - Wendell Berry Sand County Almanac - Aldo Leopold An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field - Terry Tempest Williams Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place - Terry Tempest Williams Wisdom Sits in Places - Keith H. Basso Essays & Articles Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture - Wes Jackson Poetry & Novels “Mad Farmer Liberation Front” - Wendell Berry Turtle Island - Gary Snyder “Wild Geese” - Mary Oliver - 5 - Place Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus - 6 - that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion — put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection. - 7 - Place Wild Geese You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things. Mary Oliver - 8 - Place Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold There are two spiritual dangers of not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue. To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the weekend in town astride a radiator. * * * The particular oak now aglow on my andirons grew on the bank of the old emigrant road where it climbs the sandhill. The stump, which I measured upon felling the tree, has a diameter of 30 inches. It shows 80 growth rings, hence the seedling from which it originated must have laid its first ring of wood in 1865, at the end of the Civil War. But I know from the history of present seedlings that no oak grows above the reach of rabbits without a decade or more of getting girdled each winter, and re-sprouting during the following sum- mer. Indeed, it is all too clear that every surviving oak is the product of either rabbit negligence or of rabbit scarcity. Some day some patient botanist will draw a frequency curve of oak birth-years, and show that the curve humps every ten years, each hump originating from a low in the ten-year rabbit cycle. (A fauna and flora, by this very process of perpetual battle within and among species, achieve collective immortality.) It is likely, then, that a low in rabbits occurred in the mid ‘sixties’, when my oak began to lay on animal rings, but the acorn that produced it fell during the preceding decade, when covered wagons were still passing over my road into the great Northwest. It may have been the wash and wear of the emigrant traffic that bared this roadbank, and thus enabled this particular acorn to spread its first leaves to the sun. Only one acorn in a thousand ever grew large enough to fight rabbits; the rest were drowned at birth in the prairie sea. It is a warming thought that this one wasn’t, and thus lived to garner eighty years of June sun. It is this sunlight that is now being released, through the intervention of my axe and saw, to warm my shack and my spirit through eighty gusts of blizzard. And with each gust a wisp of smoke from my chimney bears witness, to whomsoever it may concern, that the sun did not shine in vain. My dog does not care where the heat comes from, but he cares ardently that it come, and soon. Indeed he considers my ability to make it come as something magical, for when I rise in the cold black pre-dawn and kneel shivering by the hearth making a fire, he pushes himself blandly between me and the kindling splits I have laid on the ashes, and i must touch a match to them by poking it between his legs.