mom, part 1
Michael Pollan TED-Talks about plants and animals and humans. And Polyface Farm and closed-loop agriculture that generates fertility instead of depleting it.
There is an essential incompatibility between the Polyface philosophy and industrial agriculture. Pollan suggests it has something to do with the modern person/corporation’s anthropocentric insistence that we’re other than animals, and separate from nature. I tend to agree. The ecosystem is not a resource on which the economy runs. The economy runs inside the ecosystem. Duh. On the other hand, we can’t have Polyface farms in downtown Manhattan. Or can we?
I’m really loving The Omnivore’s Dilemma and there is some lengthy blog post coming out of it sometime soon. I’m in fact flying to New York tonight on a red-eye, will probably not be able to sleep, etc, so maybe then …
February 9th, 2008 at 4:14 am
Polyface Farm is indeed an awesome place from what I’ve read about it in TOD (hoping html tags work here). But it’s going to be tough/impossible to convince the population to spread out into local, self-sustained communities rather than gather at metropolitan centers like NYC. It would be viewed as a step backward for many. Not to mention the fact that some places will be practically deserted because the land is not farmable.
I haven’t looked through the Vertical Farm site (it’s down at the moment, though the cached pages on Google give some good hints as to what it’s about), but I’m rather skeptical of their ability to replicate the mind-bogglingly complex ecosystem that makes places like Polyface Farm actually work. Some alarm bells go off in my head when I view this from the perspective of yet another attempt by science to simplify and cut-and-control something that’s inherently complex.
Short of physically migrating entire ecosystems into the vertical environment, I don’t see how we’d get away with building a vertical farm *without* making some reckless abstractions.
February 9th, 2008 at 8:33 am
The concept of democracy extended into the natural landscape in a kind of one species, one vote organizing principle makes perfect sense to me. It puts man where he belongs in the pecking order, which is taking your turn at being boss and then stepping aside for a cycle. (Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug–Mary Chapin Carpenter)
As for unfarmable land, this arrangement makes unfarmable land farmable. Consider that one group of cooperating farmers could feed thousands. Not everyone –in fact, only a small percentage of the population — neeeds to farm to make this work.
I like it. It is not so different from the farms I visited as a child, where all of the animals lived in the same space. We called those hardy farming souls “dirt farmers,” which is only one step down the evolutionary scale from the grass farmer. They produced some of everything with 40 acres and a mule. It was the introduction of the “cash crop” that ruined that smelly but organically organic paradise.
Is there a kit I can order on the ‘net to get started? : )
(You can lead a man to the verge of real system awareness, but you can’t make him give up his technological vanity–read “species arrogance”.)