Good and evil come in the same package. How does a craftsman bungalow dilettante survive in a Dwell world?
Raising the red lanterns
When the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, does he catch up with the chicken on the other side?
Author Michael Pollan lives by a simple motto: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. He advocates that humans give up their self-important assumptions that consciousness means superiority. In some respects, his epiphany came as he watched a bee work the blossoms on his backyard apple tree as he prepared to plant potato seeds. His exercise had been a intellectual one: research seeds, buy seeds, improve soil, while the bee knew innately what to do. Which, therefore, was more effective: nature or nurture.
Pollan also cites an example of the Lima bean, which when attacked by spider mites emits a chemical that attracts a spider mite competitor. “We have consciousness; they have biochemistry,” he says.
Perhaps his most telling observation involves the evolution at Polyface, a family farm in Virginia’s Shenendoah Valley. The farm has taken rotation to a new level, with a chicken mobile that follows the grazing cows, to munch on maggots in their dung and, in the process, both sterilize that dung and fertilize the grassland with their own nitrogen-rich manure. Joel Salatin, whose parents started Polyface in 1961, describes his farm as “a farm of many faces.”
“If you begin to take account of other species, take account of the soil…We can take the food we need from the earth and actually heal the earth in the process,” Pollan concludes.
Results of this survey so far:
