Looking back forty years or so to the beginnings of our current agricultural excesses, knowing what we know now about the earth, it would be easy to condemn people for having made a lot of wrong choices. But condemning our grandparents is too glib, and pointless besides; our grandchildren will no doubt condemn us for our short-sighted stupidity. Since our grandparents had no spaceship vision of Gaia to contemplate in their moral debates, and we do, our sins shall be deemed the greater. The fact is that, wishful thinking aside, people are short-sighted by nature, and the most we can expect from ourselves is to make the best decisions we can based on current knowledge – knowing that our knowledge is always incomplete and that it is a sign of wisdom and strength to be able to change you mind when faced with new evidence or arguments.

I believe there was a time – and I don’t think I’m romanticizing this – when we as society had a coherent view of livestock rearing. Animals had their place in agri-culture, the culture of farming. If we no longer have such a coherent view, I think it is largely because of two things. In the first place, animal agriculture itself has become fractured into two basic camps, the centralized, urban consumer and money-driven agribusiness, with it’s related chemical industries, and the decentralized, increasingly marginalized, rural , farmer-driven agriculture. A recent issue of the magazine The Ram’s Horn: A Monthly Newsletter of Food Systems Analysis, has a front page headline: “If you ask, who speaks for agriculture” You also have to ask, what “agriculture” do they speak for?”

In the second place, we as a culture have displaced millions of people from the countryside, where they were either on the farm or close to the farm, into cities, where a whole generation is now growing up with no sense of the reality of livestock agriculture. Modern urban consumers – and that, after all, is most of us – have only images selected in the service of competing ideologies to go on. And, as with the three blind men and the elephant, we have different groups in society with opposing views of animal agriculture in the environment, each of them claiming to have the right and while image.

Political and economic leaders have taken great pride in saying that some 3% of our population can now feed the other 97%, with enough surplus left over to service the national debt. The implication is that there have been too many farmers. This quite frankly, is stupid. I don’t think it’s a good thing that only 3% of our people are working the land. I think it’s a tragedy. I think we’d be much better off all around if that number were 30%.


I think people… should consider more carefully how to help farmers to farm better, more in keeping with the essential life cycles of the planet. I think this will lead us away from the “bigger is better” philosophy that we’ve had foisted on us in the last few decades. From the point of view of disease control and animal health, from the point of view of the quality of both individual and community rural life, from the point of view of caring for the earth, all the evidence I’ve seen seems to say that smaller, complex systems are usually better than bigger, simpler ones. We’ve gone the way of the Holsteins and Leghorns not because, ultimately, it’s better for agriculture, or animal life, or for the humans that care for them, but because it’s the easiest, slickest road to short-term profits. And intensive monoculture has been profitable because we’ve structured our economy in such a way that the major real costs of intensive animal production – waste disposal, dislocation of human populations, environmental degradation, urban sprawl, Third World dependency, etc. – are externalized and paid for by society at large, a kind of “hidden tax” on other people, including our own children.


Unless urban dwellers have a direct stake in agriculture, unless they know in a real physical sense where food comes from and how it ties us to the rest of life on this planet and to the environment, why our rural spaces are important, the farming community will find itself increasingly forced into enslavement to urban-based agrifood business.


A few common-sense aphorisms are as good criteria as any to guide our quest. If you do no good, at least do no harm. In a polluted world, there is no safe place. Be vigilant. Moderation in all things. Often the best treatment for a sick animal is loving personal care and attention. Everyone’s truth is a partial truth. Leave well enough alone.
- One Animal Among Many: Gaia, Goats and Garlic
By David Walter-Toews, DVM

Saturday, September 8, 2007
I’m always writing doom and gloom, most of the time it’s how I feel. I spend a lot of time thinking of going home, and giving up on this cinematic process. Doubting my capacity for change is a constant and ongoing battle. But this morning, after the long cleansing rainstorms of yesterday, I awoke to sunshine and an overwhelming sense of purpose.

I’m not sure that I can change the world, or that I have any idea of how to go about such a daunting mission, but I know today that I feel purpose and residing somewhere in the purpose is my faith. Keep on keeping on. Don’t question or doubt things beyond your realm of understanding. Just feel strong, be honest, and move forward as a warrior would, with good intentions to make the world a better place.

I may not succeed in changing the world, but really none of that matters, what matters is that I change myself and in the process, I leave every place better than when I first arrived.

peace,
d

Friday, September 7, 2007
Two simple questions:

What are you doing to heal yourself, the planet, or the people around you?

Are you leaving every place better than you found it?

These are questions I recently asked myself. I think they are important in the fact that they hold the key to life. I think in all honesty, without sounding like a flake or fanatic, life is all about the service industry. It’s all about serving others and making the world we live in a better place. If we all, both individual and multinational, lived in such a manner I’m certain we’d find ourselves in a beautiful place.

Help don’t hinder.

peace,
d

Tuesday, September 4, 2007
I was just doing dishes and thinking about water. We’ve built such efficient systems that as I do dishes it becomes extremely difficult to not take water for granted. Here in Alberta everyone is facing a serious water crisis. Meanwhile everywhere I’ve been I see sprinkler systems fighting diligently to maintain a perfect circle of green in the center of a long brown lawn.

Even as I’m conscious of water and the fact of it’s disappearance, I still find it hard to not leave the tap running. I think I’m just like anyone else, and in the end this leads me to the notion that the only way we’ll slow down, is by a breakdown of our infrastructure, ironically caused in the end by the efficiency of the infrastructure itself.

peace,
d

Saturday, September 1, 2007
I had a conversation with a good friend of mine recently in which he expressed his deep discontentment with the materialistic lifestyle built up around him. He was telling me that despite his dissatisfaction with the way things are, he feels that there are few alternatives available within our capitalist framework.

He expressed to me that he doesn’t have a choice.

On some level I see where he’s coming from. When we consider that most people alive today were raised in a post industrial revolution reality, we also have to consider that we haven’t ever really known any other program. As my friend tried to justify his choices, or lack thereof, he blamed everything on 200 years of programmed responses. It’s just the way it is, the way it has been, the way it will always be.

I would never begin to argue with the idea that many of our responses are programmed into us. I think when it comes to the daily grind, we have so many thought processes occurring simultaneously that our routine actions have simply become unthinking mindless responses, instilled into us by the larger system that surrounds us. Most of us don’t ‘think’ about where to buy gas, where to shop, the impact of our actions on a global reality, etc. There is just too much else going on, and it’s always easier to go with the flow.

This idea of going with the flow spurs on another interesting idea. I always argue that we need to go with the flow, but the question becomes, what happens when the institutions around us begin to capitalize on our flow. In other words, what happens when the things in life that were intended by nature to be rote decisions, become part of a bigger machinery that cares nothing about us or the wellbeing of our planet.

The more I think about it, I believe our flow has been subjugated into the realm of big business. We need to take back the natural flow, and then go with it.

Living with the Blackfoot over the past few months I’ve had countless conversations about assimilation by the white man. But more and more these days I’m not looking at assimilation at the hands of the white man, but instead assimilation OF the white man AND everyone else by our capitalist superstructure. We’re all being molded into good corporate citizens, into good consumers, good environmental plunderers, good mindless unconscious organisms.

In the past 200 years we’ve been deprogrammed of our connection to nature and programmed on the laws of the industrial revolution and capitalism. We no longer have any idea how to live in this world. Honestly, think about it, most of us no longer have any idea how to live in the world. Sure, we know how to live in the world we’ve created, we know how to shop till we drop and make sure to grab hold of the newest hottest trend, but if we were cut off from fossil fuels, electricity, and all the infrastructure that puts food on our tables we’d probably last a little over a week.

This was one of the statements made by my friend, “I don't even know how to grow or hunt my food, so I must comply with these big stores to survive??”

I think he’s right, but also wrong, I think in the immediate situation most of our world is frankly F$$$D! ;-) but at the same time I think we DO have the power of consciousness and conscious choice. We have the power to plant gardens, eat locally, work less, spend more time with family, and grow up. And I think every one of these choices we make, brings us closer to one of two potential outcomes; either a sustainable vibrant world, or environmental disaster and human distress,

we make the decisions around here.

peace,
d