![]() And just as a society lacks richness and resilience without the thoughtful consideration of all walks of life, so the quality of life in an agricultural space proves equally vulnerable. We’ve erected stratified societies on the back of social Darwinism, isolating people of color and nature alike, bending both to our will, in lieu of humanity’s rightful place within the natural order. We know a thing or two about quantitative gain as evidenced by a skyrocketing population. All to keep this one crop in isolation for quantitative gain. We exchange nature’s fuel for our own, via chemical warfare no less egregious than napalming a jungle, while marching over the earth on gasoline-powered tanks that compact, turn over, and oxidize the lifeblood of our soil. And when medicinal plants we like to call weeds come back to heal the stressed earth, much like our manicured lawns, we marginalize them, mistaking their presence as an encroachment, rather than the fuel of cooperative alliance in a given space. The trees cleared, along with the energy they once delivered from the biomass of a mingled ecosystem old growth forests whose giant, wide trunks were better equipped in their maturity to withstand the ravages of fire. She sees the life stripped around it, the grasses of the field that once fixed the soil and stored precious carbon. ![]() She sees one crop, often one species or variety. And our version of agriculture, a far cry from the stewardship of indigenous people, uprooted from that very land, mirrors our own colonial mindset.įrom the eyes of a perched hawk, it’s simple. We lament a pandemic wrought from our own hand, behind a roof and four walls, anchored to land that belonged to someone else. When will we realize we cannot divorce ourselves from societal integration any more than we become the widows of the natural world? Both are sides of the same environmental coin whose urgency rises with each fallen oak.Īnd yet we build, and accumulate, and ‘advance’, and ‘progress’ at Mother Nature’s expense. One we’ve attempted several times throughout human history and, in many ways, still latch on to. The antithesis of which is a master race scenario. Today, America still, rather clumsily, navigates what Leonard Cohen called “the laboratory of democracy.” In our desire to couple, we are learning to de-couple structures of colonization and the false narratives of our dated oral traditions, in hopes that mankind might find equal footing and the richness and resilience that a variety of cultures imparts. Our society in my parent’s generation was overtly segregated. The thing about letting nature in is it does not work without diversity. Was it a sign? Nature pleading with our species to rejoin the world we once knew. As she gazed down from her perch on a half-naked human, slumped on a couch, pecking away at an aluminum laptop. I wonder what this feral creature with its impeccable vision saw fit to relay. It spoke a few words to me, as hawks do, and then flew away. As I’m writing, a hawk just landed on a branch, a few feet away from my outdoor office.
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