Listening to the Music

Daniel, Jennifer, Ellen, and Arianna were in Charlotte this weekend for a visit. We stopped by the Matthews Farmers Market and paused to listen to the musicians who were playing:

Three Cheers for Wendell Berry

On August 6, 2009, the USDA announced a recall of approximately 825,769 pounds of ground beef products that may be linked to an outbreak of salmonellosis. Yes, that's a small amount, relatively speaking, but it should give meat-eaters pause yet again concerning their own health and safety.

Connect that fact to this report in the current issue (August 2009, pp. 5, 73) of Acres USA magazine. It concerns the testimony of (farmer, poet, writer, elder-statesman, Christian) Wendell Berry before a government panel on the proposed National Animal Identification System (NAIS) in which all farmers, big and small, would be forced to register every single animal they own with the government by means of an imbedded chip in order to track that animal's movement as a way to monitor outbreaks of disease. As one might imagine, Mr. Berry isn't having any of the government's plan. In his words (below), watch for the connection between the problem government has allowed (factory farming of animals in CAFOs [Confined Animal Feeding Operations] where disease outbreak is widespread), the government's solution (registering animals to track disease instead of doing what would prevent disease), and Berry's counter-solution (putting the animals back on pasture where they belong and where diseases are controlled by nature):

The Acres USA article:

Leave it to family-scale farming's own Wendell Berry, the award-winning author and essayist, to wrap up the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) in a mere 250 words. During testimony in one of the USDA "listening sessions," in which officials didn't hear what they wanted, Berry clearly stated that he will go to jail before his livestock will be tagged, registered, and monitored by the government.

He also noted that this was the first agricultural meeting he has attended which had the police present. But he called their presence premature.

[Said Berry] "If you impose this [NAIS] program on the small farmers, who are already overburdened, you're going to have to send the police for me. I'm 75 years old. I've about completed my responsibilities to my family. I'll lose very little in going to jail in opposition to your program—and I'll have to do it. Because I will be, in every way that I can conceive of, a non-cooperator."

The need to trace animals was made by the confined animal industry—which is, essentially, a series of disease-breeding operations, [Berry] said.

Berry continued: "The health issue was invented right there. The remedy is to put animals back on pasture, where they belong. The USDA is scapegoating the small producers to distract attention from the real cause of the trouble. Presumably these animal factories are, in a too familiar phrase, 'too big to fail.'"

In the end, these animal factories are failing. Failing in the marketplace of good ideas, failing environmentally, and failing to provide nutrition to nurture the minds of our citizens.

In 1644 the nonconformist English Presbyterian theologian Samuel Rutherford published a book titled Lex, Rex ("the law and the king" or "the law is king"). The thesis of the book was that the laws of man apply only insofar as they conform to the laws of God. Since God has appointed civil rulers (Romans 13), those rulers are obliged to institute laws that are consistent with God's. When man's laws become inconsistent with God's, man is not only free to disobey but has an obligation to do so.

Modern Christian theologian (the late) Francis Schaeffer used Rutherford's thesis as the basis for his 1981 book A Christian Manifesto, a book that fueled the short-lived efforts of some Christians to civilly disobey America's abortion rights laws and be arrested and go to jail for protesting at abortion clinics.

In the case of abortion, it can be said that man's laws violate one of God's written laws (the prohibition against killing another human being in the Ten Commandments). But what about God's natural laws -- such as taking animals out of their natural environments and lifestyles and confining them in disease-rich environments where the animals not only suffer but where diseases produced therein ultimately cause human suffering as well?

I thought of this question when reading Wendell Berry's public statement to the government that he would go to jail before he would allow the government onto his property to do something totally unnatural: implant a computer chip in his animals for purposes of counting and controlling them.

I go a step beyond Berry in believing that it is unnatural for man to eat animals (Genesis 1:29). But for those who insist on eating meat of any kind, if you are unfamiliar with acronyms like CAFO and NAIS then you deserve whatever illness or calamity befalls you. If that sounds harsh, it's only because I, like Wendell Berry, have little to lose at my stage of life from speaking and acting truthfully. To make the blind assumption, when it comes to a foundational area like food, that it is the government's job to protect your health . . . it is a naive assumption. It is the government that has either created or allowed CAFOs and the NAIS (and others), systems which nurture and allow the spread of the diseases that harm animals and people. When government agencies are routinely staffed by individuals with histories in and ties to the profit side of American agriculture, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how priorities get skewed.

Again, if you insist on the unnatural activity of eating meat of any kind, you should buy it from the person who raised it and slaughtered it him/herself; who can prove to you why it is safe. To consume meat from the factory-farm system (your local grocery store or discount warehouse or restaurant -- remember, that's where the 800,000 pounds of polluted beef mentioned earlier was headed) is to perpetuate a system that is unnatural, unhealthy, and worthy to be opposed.

Three cheers for Wendell Berry.

Farm Visit

Another CSA share pickup today from New Town Farms. Note the two different varieties of okra in the plastic bag (green and purple):

The plants bearing the purple okra are six to eight feet tall, though you can't really tell in this picture:

Here's the same picture with me standing right next to some of the tallest plants; they were about eight feet tall. The picture is cockeyed because I had set the camera on a rock:

Here are the plants bearing the green okra -- about five feet tall. Quite a difference in the height of these two varieties:

I was struck by this beautiful, majestic, tall (over eight feet) stalk of amaranth growing up "wild" in the midst of the cherry tomato patch. Besides its beauty (and other practical uses in different cultures) Sammy had told me a couple years ago that amaranth is a good trap crop for Japanese beetles. (Wikipedia has a good article on amaranth.)

Before I left I took a little video of the chickens in the coop, primarily to record the noble crowing of the rooster as he watched over his harem, and the gentle clucking of the hens. Such lovely sounds. If I ever have the opportunity to have chickens, I will. Don't know what I'll do with the eggs, but I am drawn to the birds -- especially because of their ruthlessness in keeping the yards free of bugs, adding their natural fertilizer to the soil, and constantly turning up the top inch or so of the soil by their scratching.

Little Buggers

As mentioned in an earlier post, the white cabbage butterfly is an annual menace in North American gardens and fields, attacking the Brassica family (broccoli, kale, cabbage, brussels sprouts, turnips, etc.). They appear in spring and can go through several life cycles until overwintering in the fall. I think I'm in my third cycle and this latest one has been a bear.

The life cycle is: butterflies hatch from their overwinter cocoons in the spring; they lay single eggs on plant leaves; the eggs hatch into tiny caterpillars; the caterpillars feed voraciously on the leaves and grow rapidly for a few weeks; the caterpillars spin themselves into cocoons; from the cocoons a new butterfly emerges. In the fall, the last cocoons of the season remain dormant (overwinter) until they hatch in response to the spring warmth—and the trouble starts all over.

Here's a (fuzzy) picture of a kale leaf silhouetted against the sky:

This bed of kale was shredded earlier this summer, grew new leaves, and has been shredded again:

Yep, that's caterpillar poop all over the skeleton of the leaf:

Amazing how bugs have specific tastes. I have a concrete planter with a nice Swiss chard plant in the middle and two kale plants on either end. You can see the chard is untouched and the kale in the lower left corner and the upper right center of the pic is shredded:

The caterpillars crawl on to the adjacent chard leaves but don't eat them:

Actually, these caterpillars may be from another species of cabbage butterfly, a brown one. Notice the brown striations on this caterpillar. The white cabbage butterfly produces (I think) a pale green caterpillar with a velvet appearance. I have seen both the white and brown butterflies flying about and laying eggs:

The caterpillars don't eat the chard but they don't mind storing their cocoons there. (I believe these are the cocoons of the butterfly life cycle, but stand to be corrected): I stand corrected! Daniel led me in the direction of these cocoons being probably those of a parasitic wasp that lays its eggs on the caterpillar. The eggs hatch, leave the host caterpillar, and the larvae spin cocoons on the leaf. That is a common lifecycle (as with the white cocoons on the back of tomato hornworms, so that could be what is happening here. Bottom line, these cocoons are too small and numerous to be the white cabbage butterfly cocoons.)

More of the little buggers:

Not sure why these have congregated at the base of the kale stalks:

In all fairness, I have laid out an all-you-can-eat buffet for these guys by having Brassicas growing in the middle of the summer. Normally, one would grow and harvest cool-weather Brassicas in the early spring (before the butterflies are active) and again in the cool of the fall (when they enter their overwinter period). But this kale has done well through the heat of the summer so I've let it stand, and am now paying the price for it.

The only remedies are hand picking the caterpillars (a losing battle, for sure), putting floating row covers over the crop to keep the butterflies from laying their eggs on the leaves (a good solution for small growers), and the use of Bt (bacillus thuringiensis), a bacteria that can be sprayed on the leaves. The caterpillars ingest the bacteria and it shuts down their feeding and they die off in a couple days. Bt is used extensively by commercial organic growers since it is not harmful to humans or other animals. I've used it before and it does control the caterpillars well. But the best solution is to grow the Brassicas early in the spring and in the fall so as to avoid the life cycle (or most of it).

Saturday Bike Ride

Joined the 9:00 a.m. group from my local bike shop this morning for a 58-mile ride. I went on this ride because it averages a slower speed (17-18 mph) than the 7:00 a.m. group (20-22 mph). But, of course, there were a half dozen in our group of 20 that should have been in the 7:00 a.m. group -- very fast! I was among the last to finish, of course, but glad for the marginal success. Riding in a group is a different experience than riding alone which is why I'm venturing out and trying to learn the rules of the road: "Clear!" "Car back!" -- along with pointing out potholes, taking a turn pulling at the front of the line, etc. Fortunately, it's a "no drop" ride meaning everyone stops and regroups every 10-12 miles, providing a few minutes of rest each time. Very thankful for that.

This is Richard Moody, the leader of the weekly ride and a shorter Tuesday evening ride as well (didn't get the young lady's name -- she was parked near me so I told her to get in the pic):

Richard's son, Mitch -- 15 years old, 115 pounds -- was on the ride. Looks like Alberto Contador (winner of this year's Tour de France) when he rides -- he led the fast group all day, just floated up the hills. Amazing kid who has his USA Cycling license and is beginning to race in his age group. Wouldn't be surprised to hear of him again some day.

After the ride Richard and I were talking -- related how I hadn't been able to finish my birthday ride earlier in the year (61 miles) due to a crash. Since we had done 58 today he rounded up his son, Mitch, and a couple other riders and made us go for a three-mile spin around downtown Matthews so I could have a 61-mile ride in the books for this year's birthday. Nice guy!

While recovering at home I sliced up my extra tomatoes to put in the dehydrator. I'll freeze the dehydrated slices and use them this winter in hummus, pasta sauce, and crumbled up in salads. The flavor is so intense when they're dried as the sugar in the slices gets concentrated in the absence of water/juice. I love the colors of these different slices. Can you believe the depth of the reds in these vine-ripe tomatoes compared to the anemic colors of the average "store bought" red tomato?

The green slices on this tray aren't unripe tomatoes. They're fully ripe -- a green variety of tomato. There are so many varieties available to be grown but which never show up in "the store."

Do Not Be Deceived

The Bible cautions us about the possibility of being deceived in spiritual matters, but the same warning can be applied to other areas. For instance, I heard a report on NPR the other day about the way the Obama administration (but every administration has done this) has recast various aspects of policy to make them sound better to the public. In other words, wordsmithers (in all areas of life, especially government and advertising) labor long and hard to pick just the right words (e.g., less clear = less offensive) by which to elicit the response they are seeking.

Here are some examples I jotted down while listening to the report . . .

• "special interest groups" are now called "stakeholders"
• the "war on terror" is now an "overseas contingency operation"
• a "mandate" is now "shared responsibility"
• a "toxic financial asset" is now a "legacy asset"

Ah, I feel better already.

Be not deceived. When nothing changes but the words, nothing changes.

Bees, Berries, Bikes, and Brandywines

The bees love the mint that is flowering and going to seed in a container on the front sidewalk:

Okay, these aren't berries, but it was the only "B" word that would work in the title of the post. They are a colorful assortment of "cherry" tomatoes from this week's CSA share. Such beautiful colors and shapes. The large, round purple ones are the best-tasting cherry tomatoes I've ever eaten. (There were more of these but I'd already inhaled them before I took the picture.) It's such a delight to stand at the counter when I get home with my CSA box and sample all these different varieties, noting the subtle differences in texture and flavor:

Did a 33+ mile ride this morning with Sammy Koenigsberg (my CSA farmer) and his friend, Scott. Scott is on the left and Sammy on the right:

I know, I need a haircut. Note the Road ID bracelet on my right-hand wrist. It has my name and blood type for emergency use, then an 800 number and web site address where emergency responders can go to get complete information on me should I be, ahem, unresponsive after a crash.

Some nice heirloom Brandywines that are looking strong. This is actually two plants that seeded right next to each other in the seeding tray and I didn't have the heart to thin them so planted them both in the same hole:

Back in the Compost Biz

Having closed down my rather involved compost-making operation a few years ago, I've been burying vegetable scraps in the flower beds since then (with good results -- pretty rich soil in the flower beds). But with all available space being taken up by summer veggie plants, I had resorted to just burying the scraps in the area where the compost bins used to sit -- not very productive, but I couldn't bear to throw them in the garbage.

So today I used a couple rolls of wire fencing a neighbor had given me and created four new compost bins. I'll have a good many spent plants that can go into the bins as I pull up tomatoes, etc., toward the end of the summer. I had a big container full of veggie scraps to start with, so I made the bins and then got a bale of hay from Home Depot and started the first bin this afternoon. (The hay is, I'm sure, replete with pesticide residue. Sammy Koenigsberg uses large quantities of hay to mulch his plants, and since he's certified organic the hay he uses has to be organic as well. So I'll try to find out his source and get some to use going forward.)

The new compost outpost: The bins are a bit hard to see, but they're almost four feet tall and about 3.5' wide. The tarp is covering the hay bale to keep it from getting soaked in the rain. (What rain?)

Organic alfalfa to use as food for the bacteria that decompose the green and brown matter in the pile:

Started with a layer of straw on bare earth, then a layer of household veggie scraps, then a layer of soil to add microorganisms to the mix, then a sprinkling of alfalfa meal, then another layer of straw, then a soaking of water. This won't come close to heating up until many more layers are added and the pile grows in mass. But it's a start:

P.S. Here's today's juicing content. The red chard, beets, and curly green kale are from my beds. The beets were pulled previously, but the chard and kale I cut just minutes before juicing. Those long red chard stems are full of juice! Makes me feel like the juice is all the more nutritious when it is extracted just minutes after being cut:

Forty Farmers Under Forty

Nice article here profiling the "young farmers" movement around the U.S., including popular singer/songwriter Jason Mraz who has a small avocado farm in California. Pictures and brief bios are included of each of the forty. What a great time to be young!

Some Weddings Are More Fun than Others

End of the Week Veggies

My too-small garden continues to offer up a bit 'o fruit. Not too sure about these eggplants—they seemed to have stopped growing so I pulled 'em. Hard as a rock. One of the things I enjoy most is standing around eating cherry tomatoes. I have several different kinds growing so it's a nice variety. I have a big basket of them on the counter which I never seem to be able to empty.

Sammy's Veggies

A quick pic of today's CSA goodies: several varieties of potatoes, baby squash and zukes, peppers, eggplant, cukes, and a bag of beautiful heirloom tomatoes -- notice the different varieties. I laid the 6" ruler across the top of one just to give an indication of their size. One slice out of the middle would cover a piece of bread for a summer tomato sandwich. (Note: the basket of potatoes on the upper left corner was not from today but from the last couple of weeks from the CSA share. Only the ones in the plastic bag are from today. I can't eat them fast enough!)

I walked around in Sammy's gardens a bit before coming home and was just astounded at the sheer size of what he grows. Tomato plants 7-8 feet tall in a forest of vines. I don't even see how he gets down the rows to pick, so long and large have the vines grown horizontally, all dripping with fruit. And no sign of yellow leaves (wilt disease). Just amazing.

The summer squash leaves stand 4-5 feet high -- it looks like you could climb up on them and walk on top of the solid green surface of the leaves blending together. I have never seen yellow squash flowers so big -- as broad as a bread plate or soup bowl with bees trafficking in and out. I saw cucumber beetles (like ladybugs, but green with black spots) on the squash plant leaves but saw no damage to the plants at all.

The years Sammy has spent nurturing the soil on his farm have paid off. The plants he grows are hard to believe. Wish I had taken my camera.

Caught this little guy sunning on top of the kale in front of my house:

Reverence for Life

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a German theologian, musician, medical doctor, and philosopher (two earned doctorates, many more honorary). He was awarded the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on human ethics under the controlling rubric of "Reverence for Life." He had worked for years to arrive at a controlling theme that would unify humanity's responsibility to itself and the rest of creation, to no avail. He described how, in 1915, "I was wandering about in a thicket, in which no path was to be found. I was leaning against an iron door, which would not give before me . . . ."

In his 1933 (English edition) book Out of My Life and Thought he described how he found a path and how the iron door opened. He was in equatorial Africa, working as a missionary doctor among the natives. That same year—1915—he was required to travel 200 kilometers upriver on a slow steamer from the coast of Africa to attend to a sick missionary. On that slow trip his "Reverence for Life" epiphany took place:

Slowly we crept upstream, carefully picking our way among the sandbanks—it was the dry season. Lost in thought, I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal notion of ethics, which I had not discovered in any philosophy. Sheet after sheet of paper I covered with unconnected sentences, just in order to keep my mind concentrated on the problem. At sunset on the evening of the third day, as we were passing through a herd of hippopotamuses, there came to me suddenly, unpresaged and unsought, the words "Reverence for Life." The iron door had given way; the path in the thicket had become plain. I had now forced my way to the idea in which world- and life-affirmation and ethics were both contained! Now I knew that ethical world- and life-affirmation, along with its ideals of civilization, was founded on thought. (From pp. 135-136 of Out of My Life and Thought, quoted in The Animal World of Albert Schweitzer—Jungle Insights into Reverence for Life, a collection of Schweitzer's writings, p. 165).

I first read this in 2003 and was moved by Schweitzer's idea of "Reverence for Life." It's biblical, practical, and all-encompassing. I was also reading at that time books by and about Dr. Max Gerson (1881-1959), the German medical doctor who discovered plant-based, nutritional healing therapies for cancer and other major diseases. Fleeing Hitler's Germany, Gerson came to the U.S. with his family where his nutritional protocols were shut-down and he was blacklisted by the American Medical Association in the 1940's. In 1949 Albert Schweitzer made his first visit to America to lecture and receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago. On that trip, he quietly visited Dr. Gerson who prescribed a plant-based therapy that cured Schweitzer's Type-II diabetes. (Gerson had already healed Schweitzer's wife of tuberculosis and his daughter of a jungle-acquired skin disease with the same plant-based protocols.) This was when Schweitzer was 75 years old; following Gerson's plant-based diet, he lived until age 90, free of diabetes.

Reading about these two men—Gerson and Schweitzer—made a terrific impact on my thinking. Both amazingly brilliant, they struggled for years to find solutions to practical and philosophical issues that arose in their professional lives. And endured significant (Gerson) and sometimes (Schweitzer) opposition for their efforts.

I was reminded recently of Schweitzer's "Reverence" revelation when reading From My Experience—The Pleasures and Miseries of Life on a Farm, the last (1955) of the 29 books of American novelist and farmer Louis Bromfield, who I profiled in an earlier post. I would put Bromfield's impact in his day in the same category as Gerson and Schweitzer (in whose "day" he lived). Indeed, Louis Bromfield's books on Malabar Farm and natural farming methods were read with great attention by Max Gerson (along with the works of American J. I. Rodale and British Sir Albert Howard) as he struggled to connect human health to the health of the soil—the health of the former being dependent on the health of the latter.

Near the end of his multifaceted life, Bromfield was searching for a purpose. He had lived expansively for decades as a writer and helpfully as a farmer developing natural techniques for reversing the ecologically destructive and unsustainable methods of farmers in his day. Near the end of his life he was, like Schweitzer had been a few years earlier on another continent, searching for a way to summarize his own tireless efforts to elevate plant, animal, and human life in all its dimensions. On a trip to Brazil, Bromfield had taken along Schweitzer's Out of My Life and Thought, having meant to read it previously. And when he came across Schweitzer's "Reverence for Life" revelation the loose ends of his own personal life and philosophy were suddenly tied together. The following excerpts describe Bromfield's own "eureka" moment as he read (picking up with his thoughts after reading the first half of Schweitzer's book):

It was only when Schweitzer, trained as a theologian and preacher, arrived at the point where he felt that he must do more than merely preach and teach within the orbit of Christian doctrine, that the book took fire. Here was something I could understand . . . a Christian who felt that he must do something tangible about being a Christian and decided that he could do most good and best satisfy his spirit by studying medicine and going into the work of actively and materially helping the more unfortunate members of the human race [in Africa]. It was at this point that for me the book began to have a real and significant meaning of great importance. . . .

As I read on in the pages Schweitzer had written often painfully, and frequently when he was ill and exhausted from the labors of his day's work, the book grew more exciting and impressive. It seemed to me that here I found a man who had not only realized the talents and potentialities with which most men are endowed to some degree, but also a man whose philosophy was needed bitterly in this Age of Irritation and Frustration.

And then I came upon that passage which for me illuminated a whole new world of philosophy and religion and brought to me the clarification and the formalization of all the chaos which had been troubling me for years.

I will simply quote the passage in which Schweitzer created a phrase which provided me with the long-sough illumination. The scene is a barge on a river in the midst of Africa. [Bromfield then quotes the passage from Schweitzer's book I quoted above.]

In this very great phrase, "Reverence for Life," I too found what I had sought for so long. It explained not only my thoughts but the emotions and instincts which I had long experienced as a man. It is one of those phrases which, stimulating thought to an almost unbearable degree, illuminates the darkness like the switching on of a powerful light bulb—a phrase which is fecund and keeps breeding thought upon thought, conception upon conception upon conception. It was like the bursting of a rocket high in the darkness of the night air.

The phrase "Reverence for Life" brought the elements of the mechanistic and the material together with the ethical and even the spiritual, something that the church, in all its forms [as Bromfield knew it in his day], has long since been unable to do and the attempt at which it has apparently abandoned. It asserted the principle of affirmation rather than denial; it restored dignity to man. In a sense it defined God for the first time, for if God is not Life, He is merely a vaporous figment of the imagination and the delusion of the weak and the frightened and of those very weak and fearful and ignorant who are so profoundly in need of help not from God so much as from their fellow men who are stronger, more intelligent, perhaps even more favored. . . .

And still one more quotation [from Schweitzer] which touched me very closely: "A Man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help."

I began to understand what it was that had taken increasing possession of me for fifteen years, indeed for nearly a generation, why I had committed what some of my fellow men regarded as follies but which were not follies at all, why I had poured out time and energy and money in very large amounts for things on which there could not possibly be any material return. It explained to me why I have rarely said no to life and to experience, and why my sense of sin is notably deficient by the standards of most church dogma; why I have always enjoyed to the full the five senses which are a part of the glory of life, why there were certain shabby things, certain cheating and short-cutting, I was never able to practice without a sense of degradation and the violation of principles which I until now have never fully understood or put into words.

There are things which one does or one does not do, and in his heart even the savage knows what these are, and each time one violates this principle, the individual becomes more brutalized and sinks a little lower, not only in the esteem of others but in the secret knowledge deep in his own heart—a knowledge which in time grows into a face which repels warmth and friendship and respect and makes of any man an outcast on sight from his fellow men, and above all from discerning, intelligent, and good men.

Michelet knew this when he wrote . . . "In damnation the fire is of little importance. The real punishment is the steady progression deeper and deeper into vice and crime, while the spirit grows steadily more calloused and more depraved, lost constantly in the evil of the moment in a geometric progression into eternity."

Without realizing it, Louis Bromfield (and French historian Jules Michelet) was describing (in part) what the apostle Paul describes in Romans 1-2—how every person has the law of God written on the heart, but when that law is repudiated over and over there is a "steady progression deeper and deeper" into depravity. God's judgment on such rejection of His ways is evident in how He allows man to suffer by his own doing now and by His ultimate, consummating settling of accounts at the end of the age. Surely many of mankind's modern afflictions are the result of our own "steady progression" away from God's design.

Modern man's lack of "Reverence for Life" is the point of these various half-century-old threads that I have identified and brought to bear here. The Holocaust that Max Gerson fled, the American dehumanizing of African slaves, the modern aborting of tens of millions of unborn children in America, and the inhumane treatment of non-human animals in our world all point to a radical deficiency in "Reverence for Life."

Though the Bible doesn't say so specifically, I have always thought that this verse in Genesis—"Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence" (6:11)—must be descriptive not only of man's violence toward man but man's violence toward animals as well. God's distaste for that violence led to the Great Flood and the fresh start fathered by Noah and his family. Sadly, we've done little better with our second chance. Few would deny that today's earth is "corrupt and full of violence" against man, beast, and the earth itself.

Which brings me to the point of this post: A movie was made a couple years ago which is only now gaining traction—or at least, I have only now heard about it. (My California son, Stephen, knows the producer/director and says it is well-known among his contemporaries, but I only learned about it recently.) Titled Earthlings, it is a 90-minute overview of man's lack of reverence and respect for the lives of non-human animals. It is at once the most graphic, and the most philosophical, of any films or exposés I've seen on the inhuman treatment of animals. Narrated by actor Joaquin Phoenix, with a soundtrack by Moby, the movie covers five areas in which animals are mistreated: pets, food, clothing, entertainment, and medical/military research.

It's interesting that Earthlings was released in 2005 and Al Gore's Oscar/Nobel-winning movie was released in 2006. Gore made no mention in his lecture of the number one contributor to environmental pollution: factory farming of animals for human consumption. This is a fact that the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and others have documented extensively. So why didn't Gore mention it? Probably because he was picking his battles and didn't want to run the risk of turning off a meat-eating world with a cut-back/abstain message on behalf of the animal kingdom. (My opinion, not the movie's.)

I said this movie is graphic—many people will not be able to watch it all the way to the end. But it simply illustrates the fact that "if slaughter houses were made of glass," or "if people had to butcher their own meat" most people would be vegetarians. In other words, animals no longer represent "life" to the average person, they represent "meat." The notion of "Reverence for Meat" seems silly, but that's what "Reverence for Life" has become. Most moderns—moral, well-meaning, intelligent, but woefully uninformed—have no idea how animals are actually treated in the five areas covered by this movie (animals for food being only one of the five, all of which are covered equally). It is brutal, inhumane, and sickening in many instances. Sadly, too many people don't want to know. Many will even be afraid of seeing a movie like Earthlings because of what it reveals. But for lack of grainy World War II footage, the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, Schindler's List, and other affronts to our consciousness, there might have been more than one Holocaust. So bad stories do need to be told—and heard and seen.

Because the movie had a hard-time finding a commercial distributor it is not as well-known as it might have been (in spite of being screened at several prominent film festivals). It was more than any distributor was willing to risk promoting. But it is being seen, slowly but surely, nonetheless. And I encourage you to see it. I can't speak for the producer/director's "anything"—I'm not recommending him or his organization. But after watching the movie, I am going to recommend it for the way it highlights how the modern world has lost its "Reverence for Life."

The movie can be purchased in standard DVD hi-res format, but it can also be viewed in its entirety on the movie's web site. Perhaps because of the length of the streaming, the audio and video get separated in the second half of the movie, but it is still intelligible. To watch the movie, go to this page and scroll down to the bottom and click on "Full Movie."

If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and I hope you'll view the movie. I hope it will encourage you to incorporate and extend "Reverence for Life" to the non-human animals that surround us.

Young North Carolina Farmers

The current issue of Mule magazine has an article about three examples of a growing breed of young farmers—individuals and couples—who are creating small (sometimes micro) farms, in this case right here in North Carolina. I've posted the "reader" below to highlight the growing technology of being able to read magazines online, and in this case to embed the article on a web site or blog. You can use the scale (percent) adjuster (and other tools) in the top margin of the frame to make the article more readable. Or if you'd prefer to read it online you can go here. If you don't read the whole article at least take a look at the nice photos. (Thanks to Chatham County, NC, [organic] extension agent Debbie Roos at Growing Small Farms for the heads-up on the article.) (Disclaimer: Mule magazine is not something I read regularly or recommend. This article is the first time I've heard of it. My recommendation is only for the article, not for the mag itself.)

Lovely Tomato

I've taken a lot of yard pics in the last couple of weeks but haven't had time to post them. So I'll put this one that I took this morning of my favorite tomato plant. I've kept the suckers trimmed off it and it has reciprocated by putting a lot of energy into fruit-bearing. I thought it was an heirloom Brandywine that I started from some saved seeds, but seeing its prolific output I'm not sure -- though it does have the large potato-type leaves of an heirloom. There are 19 tomatoes growing and no sign of the soil-borne virus that attacks tomatoes so frequently. I'll definitely save some of these seeds to try to duplicate it in the future.

How to Peel a Banana

Alone in the Midst of the Land

Found a striking contrast between these words from Isaiah 5:8 . . .

Woe to those who join house to house;

They add field to field,

Till there is no place

Where they may dwell alone in the midst of the land!

. . . and this description of the land surrounding Malabar Farm in Ohio in 1940 as described by Louis Bromfield's daughter, Ellen, in her book The Heritage, remembering the land as it was when her family first moved onto the property:

The road we followed was impassable to cars. Sheltered by the trees, its earth was always damp and cold, even in the drought of August, and in many places it was worn away to a bare shelf of sandstone and shale over which spring water trickled from somewhere deep in the earth. Walking along this road in the shade of the tall trees, one had the sensation of having come unexpectedly upon a part of a great, enclosed world which had avoided, or perhaps even defied, progress. It seemed almost as if the noise and clatter and brassiness of the modern age were prohibited here and, knowing this, one felt extremely grateful. At the top of that road, we passed through a sagging gate and came upon the great dome of wind-swept grass that was the Ferguson Place, high above the Ohio country. (italics added)