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Over the course of the 2024 growing season, we surveyed over 150 naturalized, wild plants during a field botany course we hosted on the farm. In addition to identifying these plants we also discussed their anatomy, their physiology, and we chatted about their place within ecological succession. We discussed examples of different communities of plants, which live in differing areas of our small farm – mowed/grazed areas, woodland edges, hedgerows, headlands, and brush – as well as the managed vegetable fields. By my estimate, there are at least 50 additional naturalized species we did not have a chance to identify on the property.  We did not survey any of the commercial crops grown on the farm either, annual or perennial, some of which are native to Rhode Island. If we had done so, the total tally of plant diversity for our 11-acre farm would be around 250 different species.

This specious and ecologically dynamic landscape was not how we found it ten years prior.

About a decade ago when we first purchased the farm with a USDA line of credit the property had been unmanaged by primates for roughly three decades. Previously, from what I understand, the Land had been an open field used for horse shows and hay production. By the time we arrived it was an example of what New England ecologists refer to as a typical “abandoned field” habitat, a once agriculturally active landscape that was left for Nature to reclaim. In the decades preceding our arrival the property had become dominated by a narrow array of predictable species, such as white pine, multi-floral rose, autumn olive, red-osier dogwood, fox grape, and poison ivy. Along the edges of the property you’d find trembling aspen and grey birch as well as red cedar and red maple, some oaks, hickory, dying white ash, black gum and buckthorn. Goldenrod, spirea, Joe-Pye weed, and other herbaceous perennials were naturally scattered around haphazardly, as well as some grasses that had established themselves in the few sunny places that the trees had not filled in or the vast swathes of poison ivy had not covered up. In the far southern end of the parcel several wet-footed fern species held court. It was a clamoring, grasping landscape slowly moving towards unification with the woodlot of maturing forest that surrounded it.

The majority of the Land was uniformly filling in with young white pine and we immediately began removing these trees with chainsaws. Being only a couple of decades old at most (It would take several years before the newly abandoned hay fields would yield their first pine saplings), the white pines were easy to clear. The stray autumn olive was much sturdier and annoyingly gnarly, and the young, tall poplars would take several times more effort to cut than the soft pinewood. But as it was mostly pine that needed to come down by hand the work went quickly. Virtually everything else that was woody fell below the two-inch diameter mark that our brush-hog was graded for. We stacked up the cut trees and proceeded to mow the property, leaving two small groves of trees as a testament to nature’s efforts towards reclaiming the property for itself. These two groves I’ve since named after my mother and my mother-in-law.

That first year we mowed the north end of the Land, built several greenhouses and plowed three fields. The following year we cleared the southern half right up to the deer fencing we had put up the previous spring and continued plowing. We began the process of prepping our future vegetable fields by adding compost and rock dusts, and by sowing a blend of holding crops, or cover crops. Rocks were hauled and piled up by my mother’s grove, some requiring excavation by digging them out with my forklift. Two recalcitrant boulders still crest at the soil surface in two separate fields, unyielding to both forklift and mini-excavator. I’ve named these two underground mountains after my father and my father-in-law.

Encapsulating an 11-acre field requires about half a mile of fencing. On either side of the 8-foot tall fence we left a 20-foot buffer, providing strips between the farm and two stonewalls on the south and east, and two town roads to the north and west. This cost us a bit of square footage but allowed us to maintain the fence line on both sides, while also evicting the white-tailed residents that had been squatting on the property for a very long time. If deer intend to jump our fences these days they have to bring along trampolines in order to do so.

In the southwest corner there is a wet, rocky, wooded jog that juts into the otherwise rectangular shape of the land. Wet and uneven, this area was mostly spared the brush hog and has the most mature tree species on the property, mostly red maple with a smattering of oak, black gum, hickory, black locust, grey birch and red cedar. The deer fencing follows the pattern of this jog, jutting in and around the woods. Many an unfortunate tree that found itself within our fence line has been cut down, making way for vegetable fields, compost pads, chicken coops and pasture. We are still burning some of these old trunks today.

There are 3 gates allowing entry onto the Land. One gate is near this rougher area in the southwest where we have since put in a gravel pad for receiving compostable material such as leaves, chips and manure. Our chicken coop and main paddock abuts the pad making it easy to haul material to the birds to mix for composting. This corner of the farm is one of the wetter areas, where rainwater saturates a high seasonal water table and where drainage is naturally slow. By piling up leaves and chips in the paddock yard, the chickens have a dry area to scratch in during the spring, late fall and winter. All this chicken-shredded and manure-laden material is dredged up in the summer time to make compost piles, which the chickens are allowed to engage with again, before finishing. Once the pasture outside the paddock is mature enough in the spring we rotate the birds onto the green areas around the compost yard, sparing a large swath that was previously maturing red maple and cedar. That area, now clear of trees, has since exploded with wildflowers.

The two other gates are entry/exit points for the farm along two roads that box us in on the north and west. We arranged the roads like a right angle, the main entrance driveway coming onto the land about 300 feet, roughly to the middle of the property, and then heading west to a secondary gate allowing for a “round-about”, a nice channel for our customers. These two drives help divide the farm into four quadrants and were put in during the primary development push of our barnyard in 2017. As I’ve said, we spent the first year managing the property by primarily clearing land, plowing for vegetable fields, while also constructing two greenhouses. That was 2015. The following year we did virtually the same thing to the southern half of the farm, opened up the land, plowing and prepping two more vegetable fields, each about 3/4 of an acre, and built another greenhouse intended for seed propagation. At the same time we were still running the majority of our vegetable production at another property about thirty minutes away where we had been leasing land since 2008. It was a very busy, transitional time.

The Farm Service Agency (the loan-arm of the USDA) in those days had a $300,000 cap to its “farm-operating” loan packages. That is to say, if you wanted to buy a farm with a USDA-FSA line of credit you had to keep the cost under $300,000. Luckily for us we were purchasing in the post-recession, pre-pandemic window before real estate had gone completely insane. The reason that the Land, which has hundreds of feet of frontage on two roads, was not developed earlier was due to its high seasonal water table. When fall and winter set in and the trees go dormant ground water is no longer being extracted from the soil by plant roots. This process of evapo-transpiration slows to a halt until the spring when plant growth kicks in again and roots begin drawing up tremendous amounts of water to the tree canopies. This lag in ascendant, vertical plumbing that begins during the fall and continues until the spring in New England means that water continues to collect in the soil during the winter. A high water table makes it difficult, in some cases impossible, to develop land. In the case of our property it made the land less attractive to subdividing, as each consecutive subdivision would require the installment of very expensive septic systems and homes would have to be built without basements.

Since we were not interested in subdividing the property it was less daunting to us that, when we decided to move onto the Land, we would have to shoulder the cost of a high-tech, high-water table septic system. In fact the plans for such a system, along with the cost of the land, a barn, a small house, a well, and some shoddy gravel roads came in right on the nose of our FSA credit ceiling. By the winter of 2018 we were living in our 30×30 one-story, no basement home, and began operating solely off our own property for the 2018-growing season. We closed up shop on our leased land for good in late 2017, almost exactly ten years after starting our business there.

During these dramatic changes for me and my family, the other residents of the farm, the plants and animals, also went through some major transitions of their own. As I’ve mentioned, the landscape as we found it was well on it’s way to rejoining the relatively mature forest that surrounds us. Species diversity on the Land at this ecological step on the ladder was high compared to the Forest around it. That is to say it was less diverse, in terms of plant species, in the woods than on the Land before we arrived. The Land was a mix of species representing different stages of ecological transition, many waning as others became dominant. The new domineering species, for instance the adolescent white pine, would continue to grow, become massive, and eventually change the landscape to the point of excluding these lower stage species, like red clover for example. But for the time being there was a crossover of ecosystem types. You might say the Land at this time was a pseudo-meadow/pseudo-forest with each category presenting their own flavor of plant species to the property.

Red clover is a species at home in an open field with plenty of sunlight, preferring a soil with a balanced acidity and with a high degree of exchangeable nutrition. Red clover’s abundance should decline as the abundance of white pine increased, or as other established trees matured and cast shade. This points towards a future where red clover would be found perhaps only along the borders of the Land. The Land at this future point will have become the Forest, an extension of the ecosystem surrounding it.

Dramatic changes often come dramatically slowly. No change more consequential is the measure of sunlight reaching the soil surface, in this case declining as trees fill in the sky. Profound changes also occur within the soil itself, as microbial communities and root systems change and redirect resources within the strata of the soil. Simple, measurable examples are the chemical changes that can be observed through acidity vs. alkalinity testing, carbon cycling, and microbial respiration.

Soil microbial populations shift intensely during ecological succession as well. The most striking example being the abundance of root associating ecto-mycorrhizal fungi, organisms that symbiotically colonize the roots of forest trees and shrubs. These are fungal species that develop into much of the classic mushroom and toadstool species we see in the Forest. In the early transitional phases, like a meadow free of trees and shrubs, there are mycorrhizal species present as well. These fungi are of a different lineage however, are primarily microscopic, and do not produce above ground, spore casting fruiting bodies, like mushrooms. We observe that soil microorganisms like soil bacteria and soil fungi transition with the landscape. As the plant species change the microbial community that tends them changes as well.

Yet plants do not pack up and leave their habitats at the first sign of new, transitional species growing nearby. Nor do they disappear suddenly when new microbes appear or new chemical changes occur in the soil. Plant species cohabitat, coexist and compete until the development of one transitional stage finally reaches the point of excluding the other. This can take many, many years. Consider our examples of the white pine and the red clover: after three decades without management these transitional changes had still not yet divorced white pine and red clover from each other on the Land. The two species still mixed in a tentative equilibrium.

My arrival on the Land disturbed the process of transition intensely. The woody shrubs, trees, and lianas that were dominating the landscape were virtually wiped off the map over the course of two growing seasons. The tree species I mentioned were relegated to two small, intentional groves or confined to the borders of the property. The understory, a mix of mostly perennial herbaceous plants and lianas was suddenly reintroduced to the sun and put under a regiment of consistent mowing. The plant that most immediately and remarkably benefited from this change was poison ivy.

Poison ivy, perhaps the most notorious plant species in New England, is thoroughly ensconced in northwestern Rhode Island. For those who live in areas were poison ivy does not grow there is an idyllic quality to the landscape, and trouncing about carelessly is permissible. However, for those of us that must coexist with this hostile plant anytime off trail must be pursued thoughtfully and cautiously. Poison ivy is an edge plant, one of those species like bittersweet and fox grape that revels in the partial shade of borderlands where trellising is available. Ivy also is particularly adept at wiggling into and out of notches in buildings, breaks in rock walls, baseboards of greenhouses, and so on: difficult places, demanding thorough excavation in order extract recalcitrant roots.  However, given the opportunity to spread in an open meadow, poison ivy will form a tangle of lianas, woody-vines, more dense and deadly than an unkempt raspberry patch. Once the young trees were removed and the shrubs were mowed down, poison ivy suddenly was presented with its closest equivalent to a Caribbean vacation: unfettered access to sunlight.

The poison ivy of Big Train Farm is legendary at this point. Of course it’s still around, dangling like a venomous serpent from tree limbs along our borders, lingering around the edges of our fire pit and dug-in along the baseboards of our greenhouses. Though still a recalcitrant nuisance, poison ivy no longer holds sway over the popular imagination of the farm like it once did. Regarding square footage, it was almost literally everywhere and was unyielding for years. The headlands around our new crop fields were essentially poison ivy turf-lands, the vines sickly and yellow from repetitious mowing. Maintenance of our equipment yard was challenging.  Without constant trimming the poison ivy revitalized there, underneath and in between our plows and harrows, growing tall and resuming it’s healthy green color with foliage fully ornamented with the signature, terrifying and bizarre, pestilent, blemishing pustules. If while hitching up the plow I was unfortunate enough to drop a lynch pin into this fecund tangle of pain I would simply resign myself to it’s loss.

It took years to caress the majority of the land free from this stubborn plant. We began by spreading compost and high-calcium limestone all around the farm, inside the crops fields and in between, to change the dynamics of the soil. At the same time we spread mixtures of different species of clover around all the field headlands and mowed areas. We did this repeatedly for about three years before poison ivy was vanquished from the interior spaces of the Land. Now, other than some stubborn wet areas here and there, this worthy adversary is resigned to nipping at our heels around the borders of rock piles and greenhouses, and takes sanctuary in our mother’s groves.

In Susan and Lynda’s groves, the landscape is, not like a snap shot, but more like two small trains traveling alongside a track with a priority engine. This priority engine is the dominant ecosystem on the farm, managed with me as the engineer. The groves however, spared from the chainsaw and brush hog, have continued to grow alongside the larger, managed part of the Land, maturing along a very different trajectory. Other than some occasional thinning and browsing, these parcels, each less than a quarter of an acre, have grown without interference. I pause to write that, because of course they have been interfered with, simply by being mostly left alone. The trees that still stand and have grown substantially in the last ten years were once part of a crowded, competitive aspiring forest. Now they are something more like an exhibit in a zoo, their boundary edges mowed, their canopies kept free from grape and bittersweet.

Lynda’s Grove is thin; the trees spaced out and narrowly aligned. The soil gets an abundance of sunlight because of this choreography, resulting in a balance of wildflowers and poison ivy thickly filling in the understory. Susan’s Grove is a bit more “wild”, closer in aesthetic to the scrubby growth along our roads and the Forest edge. Poison ivy is well ensconced there, having retreated mostly from the occasionally mowed and very diverse meadow that abuts it. I love Susan’s grove because it is so rugged looking. Like I mentioned, the rocks we’ve excavated from the fields have been deposited there in a massive and beautiful little mountain. Unlike Lynda’s grove, which is a collection of seven sturdy white pines bundled together, Susan’s grove is a splash of pine, poplar, oak, willow, and cedar.

There is another species in our environment whose influence also produces dramatic changes on the landscape, and that is the American beaver. Extirpated from our woodlands for want of their precious pelts, beavers are now well ensconced in the ecosystem again, and there impact is great. Beavers are considered a “keystone species” in so much as they alter their habitat so dramatically their presence effects every species of plant and animal within that habitat. From an ecological perspective, where again biodiversity is the metric for health, beaver presence on the land is a net positive, producing an explosion of ecosystem activity. The flooded hulks of standing deadwood bring in birds and insects. New, wider wetland edges further diversify reptile and plant populations, and mammals are drawn to drink and hunt.

What is not well known is that beavers are a transient species. Beaver families depopulate their territories of living wood, their primary food source. These giant rodents first gnaw down the hardwoods along the pond edges before desperately scouting afield for more of these preferred, sweet-tasting trees. They have little use for saplings or conifers, so once their hardwood trees are gone the beavers must move on. Over the decades as beavers have become more successful and management of them more sound, the remnants of abandoned beaver lodges and dams now dot the wetlands of our forests, a happy epitaph to the bettering of our land.

Organic farmers share much with the humble, hardworking beaver. From being the default form of agriculture for generations in the past, our system of farming was almost eradicated from the country in the twentieth century in favor of an incentivized, unregulated chemistry experiment. Through the efforts of an odd assortment of curmudgeonly old farmers, environmentalists, and forward-thinking politicians, organic farms are now found in all fifty states again. We may often go unnoticed yet we are still here, bettering the environment in dramatic and potentially revolutionary ways.

Like the beaver we too need support and incentives to repopulate the countryside, yet unfortunately real organic farmers are once again beset with the prospect of extirpation. The organic market has become awash in fraudulently certified organic products. Those of us trying to stick to the original standards, enshrined with stewardship of not just the food we grow, but also the land, water, life, and sky we tend, are worried that we might ourselves soon loose our pelts.

Unlike beavers, which must move from stream to stream and leave their legacies behind them, a good farmer’s true stewardship creates an ecosystem that can persist with people in the keystone position. The farmers must come and go of course, but the quality of the environment can continue, and provide for people indefinitely as long as we follow the model that nature has given us: Diversity is king and Abundance is queen.

Eventually my family will leave this place, this special Land. I work for a world where land that is so loved and has given so much joy will be maintained in this state, this holistic agricultural vibe, where Abundance can still be queen and Diversity will continue to be king. There will be no more Kennys or Walls holding sway over the Lands trajectory eventually, so I work holding in mind that others must continue in a similar tradition, one of a modest stewardship, ever learning. The swelling diversity of the Land reminds me of a hot fire, or like an acid trip, both loud and quiet, demanding and forgiving, comforting and intimidating… perhaps like a good parent or guardian. Equally comforting is to know that if this fast moving, priority locomotive that we call Big Train Farm ever stalls out and the Land is spared the developer’s shovel, my mothers’ groves stand nearby ready to reseed the Land and begin the time-worn process of transition and succession all over again. A farm in balance is like the yin to the unmanaged Land’s yang. The hot engine of the priority train may someday cool, but the two smaller locomotives will proceed. They will be plodding and unnoticed by most, with no change in speed, and yet with only change to bring.

(This essay was originally given as a sermon at Bell Street Chapel in Providence, Rhode Island December 8th 2024 entitled Psychic Apologist or The Power Remains)

I’d like to speak today about the intersections between religion and science. In particular I’d like to explore the convergence of parapsychology, spirituality, and materialism. Materialism is the dominant paradigm in modern science today. Materialism is an attempt to provide a unified theory of the cosmos in which reality consists and is constructed wholly of matter. Materialism understands the cosmos as a derivative of biology, chemistry, and physics and everything, including consciousness, is a product of the material stuff of the universe, which can be reduced down from galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles.

Within materialism spiritual phenomena such as religious experiences or “supernatural” experiences can all be explained through psychology, sociology, modern medicine, etc. There is no literal such-thing as a human soul nor is there a dualistic nature to reality. Such spiritual concepts are at best simply metaphors for reducible aspects of the mind dictated by the brain, or at worst fits of fanaticism, enthusiasm, or hallucination. Atheism is the logical extension of materialism.

When I was a little boy I bought a copy of You Are Psychic! from Waldenbooks. The author Pete Sanders insisted that I, like everyone else had innate, untapped psychic potential. I was excited to read that according to Sanders I probably had strengths in several categories of psychic skill, whether it was psychic hearing (clairaudience), psychic seeing (clairvoyance) or psychic feeling (intuition). I was tantalized to learn that out of these three categories people typically were likely to be of greater skill in one rather than the others. What kind of psychic was I? As a comic-book fan I was disappointed that the book included no chapter on telekinesis, a psychic power like the Force in Star Wars, or mind flaying which was a skill exhibited by people like Professor X in X-Men, or some of the creatures in my Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manuals. Regardless of these blatant shortcomings I dutifully read the book because I figured I needed to start somewhere. Sander’s work seemed to be the most utilitarian book on the subject available at Waldenbooks in those days and frankly, I felt exhilarated to have it.

After a few introductory chapters of anecdotes relaying some examples of people’s psychic experiences and the author’s optimism about the universality of these powers the book arrives at several how-to chapters. After reading them all I decided that although clairvoyance and psychic intuition seemed like the more intriguing of the three powers psychic hearing, or clairaudience, would probably be the easiest psychic ability to unlock. All you apparently needed to do was meditate in a quiet place and follow some simple visualization instructions that Sanders laid out in the chapter.

I was about eleven or twelve years old and staying at my friend Mike’s house when a good opportunity presented itself to put my research into practice. Mike and his brother were out of the house somewhere while their parents were downstairs in their finished basement watching a movie. Alone upstairs with my You Are Psychic! book I decided to take advantage this un-chaperoned moment and try and flex my psychic powers.

I assumed the lotus position on Mike’s bed after shutting off the lights and closing the curtains. The bedroom was utterly silent. In the instructions on psychic hearing Sanders guides you into a meditative state while focusing your attention on an area of your head around your temples. He instructs you to visualize whirlpools spinning in this area, something like circular staircases descending into your head. The presumption was that if successful the person gifted with even marginal clairaudient ability would be able to hear things unavailable to the cochlea… things that are too far away or simply too quiet to hear naturally.

I did as I was told and after what seemed like a very long time I heard something quite shocking. The voice of an older woman abruptly boomed in my head. I heard quite clearly in a defensive voice this woman ask, “What are you doing here?” I can still remember how odd hearing this question felt because I was hearing it not so much with my ears as with my mind, similar to the way you might hear things in a dream. It was jarring as well because I was suddenly snapped out of the meditative state I was in, as if woken up abruptly. But I had not been asleep. And even more odd was that I knew exactly where the voice had come from. It had come from the television down stairs in the basement where my friend Mike’s parents were watching a movie. I was absolutely sure of it even though I had no audio-positioning information to base it on. I could not hear the television from where I was upstairs in Mike’s room. The sound of the voice had just popped into my mind as if it had come from inside my head.

I jumped up and ran downstairs where the movie Driving Miss Daisy was playing on Mike’s TV. Their basement was like a fallout shelter, down a deep staircase, a place where the kids could stay up late and never disturb the parents upstairs. On the screen the main character, Miss Daisy, was standing at her front door addressing some rather serious looking men who had come to see her.

“Did she just ask those guys ‘what are you doing here’?” I said.

They looked at me with shock.

“Yes,” they said. “How did you know that?”

I said something like: “Oh, I was just practicing psychic hearing in Mike’s bedroom and I heard her speaking inside my head.”

I don’t remember if they said anything to me but I was so excited at my psychic success that I turned and ran upstairs to call my parents. I got my dad on the phone and explained to him what I had done, what had happened. My dad listened patiently, as one might to someone recounting their dreams. This had been a thrilling experience for me but my dad was less than amazed by my psychic powers.  I was not getting the validation I was hoping for. My dad certainly did not shut me down or dismiss what I told him, as many people would be eager to do, but my story did not seem to impress him much. I received no encouragement to explore these strange powers more broadly. Instead on the whole I felt a bit exposed by what had happened and although I talked a little about it with my parents and friends nobody seemed particularly curious about it. Nobody wanted to see my You Are Psychic! book or explore their own psychic powers with me. Instead people regarded my story skeptically or with bored disinterest. As I’ve come to learn people typically regard these types of phenomena, even their own genuine psychic experiences, as they do their dreams: with little more than a shrug.

As a child I never attempted to unlock these skills further. I put my book about how to be psychic away. After all, if these powers required disciplined meditation that only allowed me to hear snippets of movies in distance places and offered no advise on how to float a television remote control from across the room or read people’s minds then it wasn’t terribly compelling. It was a typical sour grapes moment. Perhaps these phenomena were just not that interesting after all. This is what I told myself as a kid, and this kind of self-talk coupled with an absence of adult encouragement or guidance put me on a path of self-denial. Years of healthy interest in science and a thorough cynicism towards religion and metaphysics only continued to distance me from psychic phenomena. I eventually came to believe that my own experiences probably were not real at all or if they were had some rational, scientific explanation that would expose them as mere hallucination or pattern making. Because of this denial of my own experiences my imagination, curiosity, and skill regarding psychic phenomena atrophied in my teens. For decades I had dozens, probably hundreds of common, simple psychic experiences that I paid little to no attention to. My own validation of these skills wouldn’t be resuscitated again until my late thirties.

The realm of metaphysics is a broad one. It includes some of these so-called sixth sense phenomena, like clairvoyance, that you’ll find in books like Sander’s. It also includes things like spirit mediums, divination, near death experiences (NDE), inexplicable healings, animal communication, telepathy, astrology, ghost stories and so on. Some metaphysicians are familiar to many of us. Reiki practitioners are quite abundant and acupuncture is widely accepted as a means of productive bodywork. Acupuncture is even covered by some insurance policies making it perhaps as socially accepted as massage therapy or yoga. The traditional explanation for the effectiveness of acupuncture includes the metaphysical presence of channels in the body, known as meridians, where “life force” energy, or qi, is able to travel. Acupuncture supposedly manipulates these channels to benefit the patient. One of the things I appreciate so much about our local community acupuncture clinic is their humility around the mechanics of acupuncture. In their office there was a brochure available with insight into how acupuncture works. In the pamphlet they explain, in paraphrase, “we don’t know!”

This kind of metaphysical epistemological humility is rare and refreshing. If you dip your toe into this ethereal world you will find a wellspring of wild, disjointed, eclectic, conflicted, expansive and extremely confident explanations for the mechanisms of metaphysics. It’s quite interesting how syncretic the explanations can be. For instance I have visited with one psychic on several occasions that comes from an indigenous background. She identifies her practice very much with her ancestral, Native American roots, referring to herself as a multi-generationally reincarnated medicine woman. Never the less you will find her office decorated with multi-cultural metaphysical imagery, both western and eastern. For instance there are portraits of Jesus as well as chakra mandalas on her walls. She consistently refers to western style astrology and uses sound healing videos she pulls up on YouTube. To call her approach, or at least her aesthetic “traditional” sometimes seems like a stretch.

If we can refer to metaphysics as a discipline than we have to say it is an eclectic one. Some of the explanations for, say, divination or near death experiences, rest on assumptions of heavenly realms, in ways that sound quite Christian, while other psychics talk about personal relationships with classical, pagan deities. I know one young pagan, and I do not intend to dismiss or validate her, who has a daily correspondence with Aphrodite. More organized pagan religions, like Wicca for example, draw psychic power from traditional Celtic gods and goddesses while also infusing more ubiquitous western themes such as astrology into their practice. Guardian angels are a consistent theme and “teams” of personal protectors are almost ubiquitous in metaphysical discussions. These teams, often called “light teams”, are composed of different entities, usually divine beings but also can included ancestors from the subject’s past. In one visit with the psychic I mentioned she reportedly witnessed my light team hovering over me while she performed a “reading” or “scan” of me in a meditative state. According to my friend there were eight entities comprising my guiding team.

There is a very compelling, though certainly not ubiquitous metaphysical aesthetic, a “witchy” style that incorporates tarot art and astrology. People who display their interest in metaphysics by wearing Tarot symbols on their t-shirts or pentacle medallions around their necks are easy to spot and there for easy for me to talk to. I have found that if people are open to talking about such topics they soon will be referring to their protecting light team. These guardian angels provide many services, from the mundane to the profound. A light team can help the psychic avoid traffic jams, help make major life decisions and generally keep their charges safe from harm. Demons and ill-intentioned beings, some classical, some indigenous, also exist in this discipline. Some metaphysicians specialize in exorcism. The Native American woman I’ve visited offers demonic exorcisms as part of her general healing practice.

Some of these themes quickly strike the ear as antiquated and religious in nature. Angels and demons are of course found throughout world religions and the history of science has been the hard fought slog of demystifying irrational explanations for perfectly natural phenomena, such as disease or mental illness. Medicine, astronomy, and all liberal efforts have persisted from the Enlightenment to the present in the teeth of religious insistences to thoughtless conservatism and tradition. It’s interesting that many psychics see their gifts through traditional lenses such as Catholicism, traditions in which they were raised, while also adopting some of the more eclectic or “woo-woo” explanations that you find in psychic circles. Some metaphysical terminology is disorientingly modern however. Getting a “download” is a term psychics use to describe receiving information from the astral plane, the ether, or the “matrix”. The sound clip I heard in Mike’s bedroom from Driving Miss Daisy has been described to me as a “download” in as much as I was physically too distant to hear the sound naturally and received the sound by some extra-auditory method, which allowed me to hear it within my mind’s ear.

Coming from a household of agnostics and atheists and being of a rational, scientific bent it would come naturally to me to dismiss any and all of these explanations as utter nonsense. In the past I had never been confronted with anyone with anything close to a balanced, self-critical opinion on the subject. To my young eyes, people who subscribed to psychic phenomena and metaphysics seemed to be at best blinded by enthusiasm and at worst unhinged zealots. The religious overtones just made it easier to dismiss because to me anything associated with any religion was of course completely absurd. My own personal experiences with clairaudience, clairvoyance, and dream messages mattered less and less to me, as if they themselves were dreams or skewed memories, moments of enthusiasm or even hallucinations. By my adulthood I had dismissed Peter Sanders’ thesis of universal, democratic psychic ability and was a convinced atheist and materialist. I would have been very embarrassed if anyone ever suggested that I subscribed to such superstitions.

Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity was attacked by his contemporary, Enlightenment thinkers. In particular those who subscribed to the anti-Aristotelian ideas of Descartes considered Newton’s ideas a betrayal to Enlightenment progress. The Cartesians argued that Newton was just re-presenting old occult ideas about matter affecting matter from a distance. This was the superstitious approach to physics of the ancient Greeks and the modern Christians that said occult powers superseded the laws of nature, that unseen forces controlled our world, unavailable to scrutiny except through revelation. They said gravity was anti-enlightenment thinking, anti-science. Newton responded in his classic rebuttal of epistemological humility saying: “I do not feign a hypothesis.” That is to say ‘I do not know why it is so. I do not know how it has come to be or how it operates and yet I can demonstrate beyond any shadow of doubt that it is so.’ Gravity proved it’s own merits by its unfailing mathematical cogency and joined the ideas and proofs of Kepler and Galileo into a solid, mathematical law. “How can this be?!” demanded the Cartesians to which Newton replied “Look and you will see that it is so.” Just like Galileo before him Newton insisted that Aristotle and Ptolemy, if they had seen his work, would agree with him.

The metaphysical phenomena that I have been describing practiced by modern pagan religions and secular people has not been without scrutiny by science. The problem with modern metaphysics, or parapsychology to be more specific, is that it, like the early modern sciences of Galileo and Newton, does not fit into the worldview of contemporary science. Metaphysics on its face seems to intrinsically imply a kind of dualism, and often explicitly explains itself in terms of spirit, supernatural realms and beings, the afterlife and reincarnation. These types of trite explanations for natural phenomena (and to be clear if clairvoyance or reincarnation happen then they are, just like gravity, natural phenomena) are the antithesis to scientific modeling.

Modern scientists such Dr. Dean Radin, author of the book titled Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe, and Edward and Emily Kelly, authors of Irreducible Mind, lay out in their books research conducted by scientists over the decades proving time and again the statistical reliability of psychic phenomena; that they do in fact exist. There are now academic institutions that include parapsychology sub-departments, such as the University of Virginia’s medical department division of perception. Within this sub-department are scientists such as Dr. Bruce Greyson, Dr. J. Kim Penberthy, and others who study such phenomena as clairvoyance, past life regressions, near death experiences, and telepathy within the context of modern neuroscience. Some parapsychology researchers have worked for the government. The CIA ran a program that came to be known as Stargate, in which clairvoyant abilities were studied for the purpose of espionage and counter-espionage. Dr. Jessica Utts, a statistician from the University of California at Irvine who was also the president of the American Statistical Association is considered one of the most accredited and trustworthy parapsychology researchers. Dr. Utts has worked on the statistical analysis of “psi” or parapsychology for decades. She insists that there is simply no plausible reason to dismiss the existence of psychic phenomena. In fact parapsychology, as she puts it, is much more statistically codified than many other accepted scientific findings. She states:

‘If it were something more mundane we wouldn’t even be having a discussion about whether or not it is real. It would be so automatic because the results are so consistent over time, (by) different laboratories, (using) different methods, and so on. It’s just that people think that it can’t possibly be real because it doesn’t fit with their particular thinking about how the world works. The experiments are done really well. The results are very strong.’

            Neuroscientist Dr. Eben Alexander’s book Proof of Heaven recounts his near death experience after an extremely sudden and devastating bought of meningitis. Previous to Dr. Alexander’s NDE he counted himself as squarely in the atheist, materialist camp. However during his NDE he experienced a psychedelic experience of deep and profound clarity that propelled him after his recovery to explore these particular facets of parapsychology, in particular the nature of consciousness. The most compelling thing about Dr. Alexander’s experience is that during the time of his death his brain was so impacted from the meningitis that his doctor’s claimed that he could not have had the experiences he claimed to have had. That is to say that his sick brain was not capable of producing such profound visions. This insight brought Dr. Alexander around to the ideas that the Kelly’s promote in their book Irreducible Mind, essentially that we are more than brains and that consciousness exists outside our brains, persisting after the time of death.

Serious scientists and doctors like Alexander have looked to the world of quantum physics to provide some plausible explanations for these phenomena. The concepts of quantum decay and entanglement are avenues of hypothesis they explore. Funny enough over the last several years I had the opportunity to discuss my own psychic experiences with a PhD student of quantum physics who was volunteering on my farm. I described to him a psychic dream I had of a coworker who, in the dream, was some kind of mushroom expert or enthusiast. I saw her surrounded by large, sprawling tangles of fungal hyphae, large toadstools and clumps of colorful molds. I immediately texted her after I woke up, saying something like:

“Hey, did you become a mushroom expert recently?”

            “No,” she said. “I wish I had.”

            “Oh,” I said, “I had this dream about you…”

            “Well last night I finished this quilt. Let me text you over a picture.”

            The picture she sent me was a tapestry of mushrooms of all shapes and sizes and colors.

“Oh,” I said, “that’s it!”

            My quantum physicist friend, after I told him this story said:

“Oh, sure. I could see that having something to do with you and Erica’s quanta becoming entangled and then decaying away leaving behind some information of some kind.”

            It was, as he admitted, just a guess. But researchers like Eben Alexander are exploring these hypotheses. Although science may be finally “feigning a hypothesis” it may take generations to finally understand the mechanisms of such experiences. Certainly it will require the rewriting of some of our most fundamental understandings of the universe and ourselves. A scientific community dominated by reductionist materialism will need to be questioned to its very core to make honest work of the problems parapsychology poses.

In the fourth century of the Common Era western paganism was on the wane. The new faith of Christianity had slowly infiltrated the communities of the Near East from its humble beginnings in ancient Palestine and now had spread to the very pinnacle of power, the Roman Imperial class. After Constantine the Great’s official conversion to Christianity in the early three hundreds only one succeeding emperor would briefly profess allegiance to the old gods. Christianity would dominate the west from that point in history to the current day.

During this time of profound religious transition early Christian intellectuals, such as Origen, mixed freely with pagan philosophers. A contemporary of Origen and a troubled observer of the changing nature of religion was a Syrian Neo-Platonist named Iamblichus. Iamblichus lamented to his interlocutors that “the problem with you Christians is you rid the world of gods and you make it a lonely place.” Religion in the ancient world was, up until the rise of Christianity, an eclectic process of personal connection with nature and other people, as well as the state. Christianity captured from religion the democratized pagan experience of personal revelatory power and placed it into the hands of the hierarchy of the clerical class. From this point forward it would be the submission to holy texts and to the learned interpreters of those texts that would define a person’s relationship with the divine. Personal holy places, such as family shrines or natural springs, were demoted, desecrated, and denied while family and communal gods were banished, recast as demons. Pagan priests and priestess became witches as authority became centralized and the early-modern world dominated by Christianity began to take shape. Psychic and revelatory powers, such as divination or spirit mediumship, were outlawed, the powers of the gifted denied as superstition.

But the power remains. If what we are coming to understand of the nature of parapsychology and metaphysics is true, i.e. that we are more than just bodies and brains, than we share a connection with not only each other but with all things. Some of the more trite, banal adages like ‘we are all connected’ or ‘love is everything’ may be vindicated as being literally true. This is not connection as a metaphorical conceit that we share priorities and resources but the literal insistence that we are one, that our minds mix within a universal consciousness that binds our individual experience of the world together. More over this extends to this world and the universe around us, that we can feel the literal mixing of our minds within the sentience of tree, of flower, of cat, of home, of land, of sea. Maybe this would be nothing more than a validation of some of our more banal, ethereal moments of lightness or perhaps it would be the foundation of an entire, new, universal ethic.

At it’s heart it demands a rejection of some of our most materialist and western concepts, not least of all the deeply ingrained persistence of Existentialism: that we are separate, distinct, traveling through this world alone and only briefly, headed for the ultimate cataclysm of personal and final death. Within Existentialism poetry and metaphor or scientific realism are our best attempts to connect with reality but are destined to leave us cold, alone, our spiritual cup never quite full. The wine of metaphor cannot fill our glass. If it is true that within a quantum context we are always blending with the world around us then there is some truth, perhaps more for some people than others (or for people who practice their psychic powers by way of instructive books like Sander’s) that when we feel close to rock, pet, mountain, or person that we are literally within them. Cold metaphors of oneness, togetherness, and interconnection can be set aside and with confidence we could say we are one. Perhaps this is so and what a wonderful revelation it would be.

Those of us who have experienced tastes of this “otherness”, these occult forces that draw us to things and bring things to us outside of our “natural” senses are primed to a lesser or greater extent to be open to such explanations. It is beyond seductive for the nature lover to understand a bond with the forest or the mountain or the prairie as a legitimate cohesion, not merely a romantic fancy. As someone who strives everyday to bring myself into greater alignment with the rhythms of nature by way of my eleven-acre farm I feel a lifting vindication at these prospects. For me to say I put my heart and soul into the cabbage and the carrot I grow for my friends and neighbors, and for me to mean it as literal truth provides a sanctuary of warmth that the cold chill of Existentialism cannot cool. And as these plants and animals that call my farm home live and die, perhaps I carry some of their living story woven into my quanta, into the fabric of my mind. So, that when I die their story will be returned to the land and live on in the flakes of granite and humus of my tended soil, an endless turning of material overlaid with a blanket of universal consciousness like ocean water surrounding the vast depths of the sea.

It may seem like I am going too far, lost in the romance of my own revelatory enthusiasm. Yet it is important to remember how decisively personal revelation has been discredited in our society. The universality of psychic potential is something that, perhaps with practice or proper attention, all can experience yet it is something difficult to prove or even convey. I do not know what it means. I do not know how it operates yet I’ve come to believe in the legitimacy of such phenomena and their profound implications for our understanding of nature, life, death, and the afterlife. For what are we to make of such phenomena, of which science is insisting is real and that millions upon millions of people have testified to experiencing for themselves but the simplistic observation: we are never alone, we are never isolated, we are never irreparable, and perhaps we should never fear death for death’s sake.

May it be so.

Meat wagon come

Born on the rays of the morning sun

Thy kingdom come

Thy will be done

–Amebix, ICBM*

* Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile

Carl Jung used the term synchronicity to describe the seemingly coincidental aligning of events that appear to have no casual reason to be associated with each other.  Describing coincidences, whether spatial or situational that seem to defy probability Jung tried to validate such phenomena as being more than the result of simple chance. The most mundane examples of synchronicity occur when you suddenly think of someone and then within moments they appear or call you on the phone, or after you’ve dreamed of someone you’ve haven’t see in years and then bump into them that day at the gas station. Other more elaborate forms of synchronicity occur as well, for instance when certain themes or subjects insert themselves into your attention. One example might be that at your child’s third birthday party frogs appear in random, unrelated circumstances, and not just frogs, but pairs of frogs. First the grandmother comes with a double candlestick of two frogs as a gift for the family. Secondly a friend places two temporary frog tattoos from a large collection of options on each arm of your child. Thirdly, a gift of a t-shirt with two frogs on the front is opened at the end of the night. In each example the frog pairs are symmetrical images of each other. We all have experiences like this that we typically dismiss as simple coincidence even when statistically speaking the circumstances’ are bewilderingly unlikely.

I had such an experience in 2023 with the repetitive reoccurrence of two seemingly unrelated themes that came together suddenly.  One was the Prometheus myth and the other was the doctrine of the Trinity.  The Prometheus story is one I have always liked and something I actually enjoy meditating on from time to time.  In 2023 however the story kept presenting itself to me from several different directions, not just from the wanderings of my mind.

As a farmer I always found it interesting that Prometheus hid the Olympian fire inside of a fennel bulb.  Fennel seemed like an prudent choice to me for two reasons:  One, the fennel bulb is vase shaped and perhaps reminded ancient Greeks of a vessel.  The other was that fennel is a remarkably cooling vegetable, great to eat on a hot summer day.  Using fennel may have seemed like a wise choice because as a cool vessel it would be ideal for containing hot fire.

Ancient Greeks believed that human beings contained an inner fire and that the emanating fire light manifested human senses. They believed that light from this fire within the body shown through the eyes acting like a laser beam, gathering information and translating it into the phenomena of sight and understanding.   As we understand modern optics today, we know that light enters the eyes and conveys meaning through neural pathways starting with the retina. But to the minds of ancient Greeks this process worked in reverse order making the human eye a conduit to the outside world for the ultimate source of reason and understanding, the inner light.  The movie The Lighthouse, based on the Prometheus myth, includes a scene where Thomas stands like a naked Greek statue while light emanates from his eyes into Ephraim’s face. This allows Thomas to simultaneously see and understand the younger man. Being in the presence of a being containing the inner fire of reason, something the young, mad lighthouse keeper seems to lack, terrifies Ephraim. Under the beams of light he is totally exposed.

For Prometheus to present fire to human beings hidden inside a fennel bulb always made sense to me.  The Olympian fire needed to get inside of human bodies so tucking it inside a accommodatingly cool vegetable like fennel seemed to me very considerate of Prometheus, as well as elegant.  This myth to me, and this is all my own speculation based on what little I know of ancient, Greek-speaking people, does not represent the literal gift of fire as a tool but rather the bestowment of soul that comes with it sight, will, and reason.  Modern psychology uses the Prometheus myth as an allegory in this way as well but it seems to me that ancient Greeks also probably viewed the story in this light. The gods had no reservations with human beings acquiring literal fire.  The Olympian gods all appreciated that human beings had the capacity to build fires and roast bones in sacrificial hecatombs in their honor.  It was the acquiring of divine insights and perspectives that the gods disapproved of.  The inscription at the oracle of Delphi describes the god’s position on this subject:  Know Thy Self.  Know that you are not a god.  Prometheus’ crime was that he had begun the process of human intellectual and technological development that would at some point in the future provide human beings with godlike powers.

As a newcomer to Unitarianism (my family belong to a UU congregation in Providence, Rhode Island) I was curious to understand the origins of this oddly unreligious religious organization.  I had always assumed that the root word of “Unitarianism” referred to a unity of world mystical traditions. This is not the case.  Coincidentally (or perhaps by synchronicity?) the name of this humanist religion that is informed by mystical insights is not referring to any fuzzy fraternity with world religions but is so named for it’s earliest defining heresy: the rejection of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

To those who don’t know the doctrine of the Trinity represents one of the earliest and certainly the most important schism within the dominant (or orthodox) schools in early Christianity.  Reconciling the nature of Jesus to the nature of God and their juxtaposition to the logos, or word of creation, or Holy Spirit, demanded the spilling of a lot of ancient ink. This debate was largely settled in an ecumenical council known as the council of Nicaea (325 CE), which was overseen by the first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine the Great.  The argument came down to whether Christ was not only equal to god the father but was literally the same stuff, the same material (homo-ousios).  Or was Christ made of slightly different stuff and distinct from the father (homoi-ousios). The single “i”, or iota in Greek, is where the phrase “an iota of difference” comes from. Sometimes an iota makes quite a big difference.

Those that argued that Christ, god the father, and the logos were coequal won the day and the doctrine of the Trinity became a cornerstone paradox in the Christian intellectual world. Accepting the clearly contradictory nature of the Trinity in which three distinct things are at once the same thing was a sign of faithfulness and deference to the most important mystical mystery of Christianity.  By the end of the Roman Empire, and the beginning of the medieval period rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity was considered a severe heresy, punishable by death.

Unitarians like to trace their heretical beginnings back to the Christian third-century intellectual Origen.  Origen was greatly influenced by pagan philosophers of his day (this was a period when academic schools were a mix of pagan, Jewish, and Christian thinkers) and he had organized a very Platonic (based on the philosopher Plato) cosmology.  To Origen souls were in a process of falling into and away from Grace, being endlessly reincarnated in a great “chain of being”.  Within this scheme of reaching for and falling from salvation souls could manage to achieve Christ-like divinity while others, even enlightened souls, could fall and be reincarnated as devils.  This of course sounds similar to the Buddhist concept of samsara, that of endless rebirth in the search for final enlightenment.  Although Origen lived in a time of intellectual openness and creativity, the church under the emperor Justinian later condemned him during the Byzantine period.  After this more open period of theological cross-pollination heretical teachings straying from Trinitarian thinking were aggressively condemned. It was not until the 17^th century that unconventional, anti-Trinitarian thinkers become influential again. It’s during this period of the late Renaissance and the early Enlightenment that began the modern Unitarian movement.

For whatever reason Trinitarian thinking has robust and lasting appeal even outside of mainstream Judeo-Christian theology.  Philosophers have enjoyed thinking of reality in terms of threes for centuries.  Plato’s book the Timaeus uses a three-part cosmology.  Some modern Tarot interpreters such as Rachel Pollock point to the first three cards of the Tarot’s major arcana (the fool, the magician, and the high priestess) as emblematic of the whole of human experience.  The Tarot is often related to the Jewish mystical writings of the Kabbalah, which has it’s own tripartite cosmology.  The controversial scientist Rupert Sheldrake conceptualizes the popular modern philosophy of pan-psychicism in a Trinitarian format.  Over and over again we see examples of the nature of things described in this triangular way.

Over the spring and summer of 2023 my mind wandered often to thinking about the subject of the Trinity. I revisited some writings by Bart Ehrman on the subject and read about Unitarian history. I thought about things in terms of threes and meditated on the right-brain idea of things being together yet apart at the same time, distinct yet whole. It was fun, and like all the people throughout history who have thought about the Trinity it was elusive to me. It continues to be a paradox. As the first harvest of fennel arrived in the summer or 2023 I also found myself meditating on the Prometheus myth. I watched The Lighthouse for the first time and discussed it with several of my employees and my wife. The two subjects circled in my mind together, like heat and water in a little, mental hurricane.

In 2023 the blockbuster movie Oppenheimer was released based on the exhaustive biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the nuclear bomb.  My dad gave me a copy of the biography and I was slow to pick it up.  At the time Oppenheimer and Barbie (the other blockbuster of the 2023 summer) were synonymous to me (“Barbenheimer”) and I didn’t want much to do with either of them. Because the film was so prominent in my mind and the subject of the book’s name (rather than the title) was displayed in such big text on the cover I didn’t even notice the title of the book when I finally started reading it.  As I dug in and flipped through the photographs in the center of the book I found a picture of the first nuclear explosion carried out at Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1945.  I was reminded reading the footer below the photo that the name Oppenheimer chose for the first test of this new weapon was Trinity.

Trinity? I got one of those funny feelings, the kind you get from déjà vu or when the phone rings and bad news is on the other line.  I flipped to the front cover and saw the title of the book for the first time.  The biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer is called American Prometheus.

The code name Trinity, as Oppenheimer considered it, refers to the Hindu notion of trinitarianism in which Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver), and Shiva (destroyer) form a tri-part godhead. The famous quote attributed to Oppenheimer (“now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”) is a paraphrase from the Bhagavad Gita in which the Hindu godhead speaks through Krishna in the form of a charioteer. The line from the Gita is “I am Time, the destroyer of worlds, grown immense here to annihilate these men.”

Oppenheimer was warned by his fellow physicist Isador Rabi that his invention of the atomic bomb would be the sad “culmination of three hundred years of physics.”  Regardless both Oppenheimer and Rabi worked together to produce the bombs that would be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.  Despite a brief period of elation for bringing about the end of the most destructive war in world history Robert Oppenheimer quickly became appalled at the use of the bomb(s) in Japan against an enemy he would learn, through his extensive access to the Truman white house, was considered already at the brink of surrender (still a controversial subject).  Oppenheimer’s dogged motivation to develop these weapons was his belief that they were required in order to defeat Nazi Germany, considering that the Nazi’s, under his old aquaintence Heisenberg, were developing their own nuclear weapons program.

Foundationally the Gita is a text driven by karma, a fatalism that it’s main character needs to embrace and resolve. Arjuna, a warrior prince, is pitted against family and friends on the battlefield and is encouraged by the gods to persist, to understand that he has the moral upper hand against his tyrannical opponents.  Instead of throwing away his weapon and bending at the prospect of potentially killing his own family on the battlefield Krishna steadies him to persevere and fulfill his destiny. In the context of the burden placed on American scientists to develop the atomic bomb, a weapon that once built would threaten humanity’s survival perhaps indefinitely, one can imagine why J. Robert Oppenheimer might have turned to the Gita to help steady his hand in this terrible work.

It is interesting to consider Prometheus in the light of the Gita’s message as well.  Prometheus was himself driven by selflessness and perhaps fatalism to bestow onto human beings the gifts of godly insights through the metaphor of fire.  Unlike his twin brother Epimetheus, who represents a kind of hand wringing regret fullness of potential lost or karma shunned, Prometheus is spurred on by his foresight to fulfill his destiny.  Despite the potential consequences for the people now enlightened with his gifts and despite his own eternal punishment metered out by the gods Prometheus carried through and realized his dharma.

The Trinity is a cosmic metaphor, and one that is almost cherished in its lack of decipherability, it’s mystery. In many of its forms Trinitarianism expounds in its contradictory formulations.  In the Hindu form the Trinitarian arraignment attempts to remove time by placing Creator and Destroyer within the same context, the same thing,while simultaneously invoking Time as its manifestation.  In much the same way human beings attempt to conceptualize a world that can somehow be at peace while arsenals of nuclear weapons fill silos across the globe.  Oppenheimer spent his career after Los Alamos in an attempt at international cooperation to stymie the development of more powerful bombs.  The man most pivotal in summoning the genie tried and, of course failed, at putting it back in the bottle.

In a very short time bombs were developed in the United States and in the Soviet Union that made the weapons used in 1945 look like toys.  The development of the hydrogen bomb (the “Super”) replaced the antiquated “city-busting” fission bombs Oppenheimer had invented by the 1950s.  Oppenheimer protested against their development.  One of the arguments he put forward to resist the urge to create such powerful and pitiless machines was that they would in fact have no plausible military use.  They were simply too destructive to use against any military target.  A large hydrogen bomb of the 1950s, if detonated, could destroy up to one-thousand square miles, an area about two-thirds the size of the entire state of Rhode Island.  These weapons were truly world-killers and their deployment would be genocidal by design.  The most powerful bomb ever detonated was tested in 1961, a Soviet bomb named Tsar Bomba with a blast of 50 megatons of TNT with a potential for twice the magnitude depending on the uranium deployed.  It seems the public knows little about the modern destructive capacity of current world arsenals.  However we do know that the USA alone has over 5,500 warheads with over 1,500 deployed around the world while Russia has a similar amount.

Fire and destruction are common themes in religious and mythological metaphors.  Christians anticipate an Apocalypse (a “unveiling” or “revealing”) where destruction is facilitated by fire (“fire this time”) ushering in an ordainment of the resurrected Jesus.  The Bhagavad Gita uses a very similar theme in this verse:  “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once in [the] sky, that would be the splendour of the mighty one.”  In this Hindu verse the tripartite God is revealed though a tremendous conflagration.  Perhaps this is an explanation of the Hindu trinity with the instantaneous, (Time)less glimpse of the Creator during the final act of Destruction.  Since the days of Prometheus people have seemed to anticipate humanities rise and fall through our hubris of fire.

And yet here we are. Decades of anxiety have passed us by while intercontinental nuclear war has failed to materialize.  Popular culture has remained fixated on this un-ignorable drama with 2023’s Oppenheimer the most recent addition. This mostly quiet, historical biopic is something of a relief to the overwhelming pile-up of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic films and novels in our lexicon.  A recent film review I heard on the radio described a movie where Los Angeles was obliterated by a nuclear bomb.  The reviewer yawned and asked: “Really?  Again?”

So, what about this synchronicity I experienced? One reason people are typically so undistracted by synchronized events is that they are often quite mundane. The frog example I mentioned from my son’s third birthday party is one that didn’t keep those of us that noticed it up at night. The old theme of Prometheus resurfacing has given me some pause though, especially seeing it so explicitly tied to the most contemporary popular take on the nuclear age we all live in, American Prometheus. Spending too much time trying to substantiate the mystery of the Trinity is clearly a fool’s errand too. After all, people have been chewing on that recalcitrant cud for centuries. Without requiring him to fully unwind this mystery Oppenheimer’s choice of the name Trinity for his first bomb places him at the center of his cherished Gita. For him I believe the fatalistic philosophy of ancient India helped him cope with his terrible burdens.

Personally I see this Trinitarian aspect in a more holisitc view, one that describes all of us and not just the gods of world religions. If we are all inheritors of Prometheus than inside of each of us we hold the Olympian fire and that allows us a burdensome rationalism that divides us into three minds. As inheritors of the earth we strive as all life does to persist (Creator) yet we are distinct in that we bear the unprecedented power to ravish the world (Destroyer). Within this cruel binary we reach for a timeless moment in between birth and death: a time of peace (Preserver). In the Gita we must remember that this preservation cannot be achieved, perhaps can only be witnessed in the moment of annihilation. The landscape of the Gita is of course a great battlefield.

It is a distasteful metaphor to see the world, especially the natural world, as such but a view easy to slide into when we think of the struggles of our own lives and the world we’ve imposed on nature. I’ve heard it said that when synchronicities arise, like déjà vu, then you are “on the right path”. Perhaps synchronicities like this are no more than random joining of quantum decay, each of us influencing each other’s behavior in tiny, occult ways, ways that lead us to predicting phone calls or picking out movies we dreamed about the week before we watched them. Often it seems to be the case, yet sometimes it is hard to believe that they are not something more than mundane psychic static. Sometimes it’s hard not to see them as warnings.

Maybe the gift of synchronicity is the same as the gift of the Trinity, a compelling exercise in meaning making that can never really be solved. Even more compelling though, to me, is that I’ve come to believe, like Jung, that these are more than just simple coincidences. They are real phenomena, real mysteries, that tie us together in the present, in the past, and perhaps to a some-what predetermined future. A already determined teleological future is something that rightly boggles the rational brain and yet in our midst are agents like Prometheus, versus Epimetheus, that move history forward into the space of natural possibility. A space where possibility lays open like a natural mold, hands grasping to find it’s definitions and it’s limits.

Brief Preface: This essay examines how the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) through its regulatory body the National Organic Program (NOP) is threatening the future of organic farming in the USA.

When reading it is important to remember several points.  Organic certification is the only true national standard for growing healthy food in this country.  Many of the regulations designated and enforced by the NOP date back to the original drafting for organic certification in 2001/2 and are widely accepted as promoting and protecting true organic principles.  In our current marketplace other terms such as “regenerative” or “certified regenerative” or “natural” mean absolutely nothing from a standards point of view.

This is why the Real Organic Project certification (discussed below) is an addendum to the NOP organic certification.  It is attempting to validate organic certification where appropriate during this current period of wide-scale NOP-endorsed fraud.

I had the opportunity these past several months to revisit my commitment to the National Organic Program.  The NOP is the regulatory arm administered by the USDA that oversees permitting for farms that wish to promote themselves as organic.   The NOP essentially contracts out organizations both public and private to oversee the process of certifying farms (and other related businesses).  Until recently, the fall of 2023 to be precise, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management’s Division of Agriculture oversaw this certification process in RI.  Many if not all of the certified organic growers in Rhode Island received their certification through this public office.  If you were buying Big Train Farm products wholesale you would receive a sticker on your box that said  “Certified Organic by RIDEM”.

Rhode Island recently was one of several states to loose its public accreditation to administer organic certification to farmers.  According to the head of RI’s Division of Ag the increasing demands of USDA and the lack of funding and support led DEM to finally surrender the process. This precipitated a scramble for organic growers in the state.  Farms like Big Train had only a matter of months to reapply through a private certifying agency, a process that usually takes at least several days to prepare and had already been done in the spring of the same year.  If we failed to do so we were in danger of losing our USDA organic certification by the New Year.  With the alternative private company the cost of applying for certification was going to skyrocket and the additional paperwork looked potentially daunting.  For me it was a chance to step back and think about where I stood with organic certification personally, financially, and ideologically.

I’m old enough to remember when the NOP was founded in 2001.  I had just finished my first internship on an organic farm in the Finger Lakes region of New York.  In those days the organic sector held only the slightest sliver of a fraction in the grocery retail market.  While today we have one national standard in those days local, unregulated certifiers accommodated farms that wished to be certified organic.  Unlike today where you could potentially be fined up to $10,000 for organic fraud, there were no penalties to speak of for folks who did not follow the standards of their certifying organizations.  Although the organic movement had been defining the word intentionally for many years at this time the term “organic” still was not technically defined and as open to potential fraud as familiar, murky terms such as “natural” or “regenerative”.

With the arrival of the NOP on the scene organic certification became truly standardized and national.  The public and private certifying organizations I mentioned stepped up to oversee the application and renewal process, and long-time luminaries in the organic movement had influence with the NOP.  The standards were not perfect by many accounts but they were strong and included ideas critical to organic farming principles.  Regulatory standards included mandatory crop rotations and natural resource management such as on-farm water and biodiversity concerns.  Core organic values such as pasture-based livestock production, cover cropping, and soil-grown crops (i.e. no hydroponic production in organics) were embedded in the standards.

Most people focus on the issues orbiting around restricted and prohibited substances in organics such as the various pesticides that are not permitted in organic farming systems.  These are of course extremely important issues to consumers and remain the primary purchasing leverage for organic products.  Yet these other standards I mentioned are also of critical importance to developing a healthy farming system that can be recognized as “real organic”.  It is in fact these more holistic practices such as cover cropping, pasturing, and ecologically minded soil-care that make the final products of our farms healthier, more nutritious, and better for the environment.  Our crops are healthier because of the things we do do, such as cover cropping, not because of the things we don’t do, such as spraying poisons on our fields.

Check boxes that speak to these more holistic and less consumer-centric topics are found on every farmer’s organic certification application. They are time-consuming and often costly practices to implement on farms and are one of many reasons that organics can demand higher prices.  The USDA has been allowing conventional growers to circumvent many of these application boxes, whole pages really, and allowing farms who would otherwise be deemed noncompliant to receive organic certification.  This is fake organic farming and it has real consequences for the market and our communities.  Because of two particularly egregious departures from core organic principles a new organic movement in the USA has risen up to bring integrity back to the organic label.  As the NOP has allowed the bypassing of organic standards in several arenas, such as permitting hydroponic growing and confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) to be certified organic, farmers around the country are pushing back.

The Real Organic Project has been offering a addendum to the USDA organic application which certifies that the farm in question is a soil-based farming system (no hydroponics) and/or raises it’s livestock primarily on pasture (no CAFOs).  Because the USDA has bent the knee to Big-Ag by allowing hydroponic farms and CAFOs to be certified organic real organic farms are finding their markets debased and themselves priced out while the consumer is totally unaware.  This has had a deleterious effect on real organic farms across the country, in particular organic dairy farms, chicken farms, blueberry and cane-fruit farms, and vegetable farms, in particular tomato growers.  A salient example for New England has been the pull out of Horizon Organic milk from Vermont and New Hampshire (all contracts were canceled with these real organic farms), the company preferring to buy cheaper milk from fake organic farms out west.   If you are a wholesale farmer who deals in these commodities you are being swindled by the NOP, priced out of your market.  If you are a consumer you are being deceived.  Sadly you simply cannot trust the USDA’s organic label today in regards to these staple agricultural products when shopping in a grocery store.

Big Train Farm has had a relationship with organic certification typical of many small farms.  Being such a small operation (BTF is a ten acre farm that primarily serves roughly eight-hundred people through our CSA program) our marketing style is very retail, very face-to-face.  We decided to adopt organic certification in 2012 for two reasons.  We were doing more wholesale in those years, sending product up to Boston and the north shore through a local distribution center as well as working more closely with local universities and restaurants.  With anonymity in those markets organic certification was extremely important in justifying our pricing and assuring these faraway customers of the integrity of our products.

During the pandemic we increased our CSA membership by about thirty percent.  This required more than word of mouth advertising so organic certification was important in providing interested customers a reliable standard when deciding to join our CSA membership.  Marketing is a fundamentally important benefit to organic certification.

But also important was the fact that I had come up in what was a particular cultural wave of organic farming (I’m not sure what to call this wave, but the period from 2000-present).  All the farms I worked for previous to starting my own business were certified and I saw organic (especially in my early years) as a unique and even fringe movement that spoke to my counter-cultural sympathies.  Yet as I’ve grown up I feel like Organic has grown up too.  Organic is ubiquitous now and has become a successful and respected standard, a household word.  The community has expanded as well with new growers and organic-minded organizations popping up like dandelions all around us.  I came up in organic farming feeling as though I was part of an intelligent, dedicated, and thriving community and once I was farming on my own I wanted to be counted among the ranks of certified organic farmers all around the world.

Yet in the fall of 2023 I was feeling skeptical.  Dealing with the public certification process through RIDEM had always been frustrating.  Slow, clunky, often opaque and sometimes arbitrary I was tired of the tedious noncompliance letters and late to arrive certificates.  The increased cost of switching to a private certifier had me balking too.  My business was established, we knew our customers and at this point most of our business was built on reputation and not on advertising.  I felt like I didn’t really need Organic anymore.  So what brought me around?  It was the Real Organic Project.  Being certified by the Real Organic Project for several years now I could see how important it was to stand with these certified growers, some who are not as fortunate as me to have a nearly fully retail business.  I felt that pull of community again, a Real movement, something stirring, like I felt in my early days of farm work.

This community is still small with only about 1,000 farms certified Real Organic.  I believe it needs growers like myself to stay certified in order to fight and to win.  The issues attached to Real Organic go far beyond a national standard of excellence in food production.  These issues go to the heart of our troubled economy and suffering environment:  anti-trust, indigenous rights, climate change, inequality, algorithm autocracy, rural decimation and so on.  This movement is at the heart of systemic change because food production is at the heart of systemic recalcitrance.  Frankly I’m proud to be part of it.

So I went to Staples and copied all my paper work for the second time last year.  I sent in my application in a heavy envelope with an even heavier check, and gladly participated in half-a-dozen clarifying phone calls with my very charming new certifier.

Organic has done a lot for me.  It has been a friend, a buoy, a partner, and a family.  Perhaps right now it needs me more than I need it.  I am happy to accept that.  When my son asks me where I was when the USDA was trying to roll back Organic I’ll be able to tell him… right on the front line.

An older Irish man who lived alone would walk two hours from his house to catch the bus to the nearest fishing village.  He’d spend the day walking around the familiar streets, have a meal, take the bus back and walk another two hours home again.  When his neighbors finally asked him why he made the same trip over and over again he replied:

“Pity the man that doesn’t travel.”

While pulling trash out of a gully along the side of Snake Hill Road in Chepachet, Mindy and I came across some small patches of horsetails.  I had just taken hold of the corner of an old, thoroughly buried black plastic bag.  I could hear the crunchy, crinkling sound of old trash inside.  Whoever had dumped it had done a poor job tying it off or over the years the knot had finally slipped and belched out some of the garbage.  The hard plastic that lay around it, laundry detergent and milk bottles and such, were now bleached and brittle, crumbling into smaller and smaller pieces.  The tiniest fragments of the desiccating containers would be impossible to fully remove.  It would take the Herculean effort of sifting the wet, root-filled soil to the fraction of a millimeter, which is a disturbance and time commitment that would be hard to justify.

I held the old trash bag by the corner.  It was mostly sealed in the ground, covered in washed out soil that had since become home for roots of tending trees, sedges, grasses, vines, forbs, and horsetails.  I had dislodged a shallow wedge of sod in order to get a grip on the bag and it immediately began to tear as I tugged at it.  Instead of shredding it and making matters worse I improvised a small-scale landfill on the spot.  I tucked the corner of the frayed black trash bag back into the muddy groove I had exposed.  Then I slapped the wet sod back on top of it and dedicated my limited time to easier objectives.  My little landfill sits in a notch below the gentle tilt of a wetland and the steep embankment of the road.  With each wet season a little more soil will be deposited in that low place until the 21^st century relic I could not evict will be firmly ensconced in the geological record of what people once called southern New England.

Mindy and I were out on a beautiful spring Saturday morning in April, slightly damp from evening showers and cool.  Everything glistened in the cloudy light and lots of plants were pushing out of their dormancy.  The red maple had already begun shedding its blossoms and the hard crimson color of the sprouting poison ivy was littered with piles of washed maple flowers, something of a sickly brown, grey, pink.  Wild cherry buds were swelling, and dozens of different perennial herbs already had formed proud rosettes and upright stalks.  In another week this ground-cover community of green, red, and purple plants would thoroughly shade out much of the trash we were unable to remove.  Of all the spring growth we saw the horsetails were the most captivating.  Small and feathery with their tiny upturned whorls of microphylls they resemble nothing else that grows around them.

Horsetails and Scouring Rushes are two common names for plants of the Equisetum genus.  In Rhode Island four different species can be found.  These plants are quite ancient in evolutionary terms.  Most of the plants people are familiar with are seed bearing plants.  Seed bearing plants form flowers and fruits like an oak tree or a dandelion, or they make cones like a pine tree.  Flowers are the most recent major adaptation plants have made in seed production, developing complex cross-pollination relationships facilitated by animals, insects primarily.   In flowering seed bearing plants the developing seed is protected inside the ripened ovary of the flower, which becomes the fruit.  Flowering plants are the most successful and therefore the most abundant and diverse plants globally.  Previous to the evolution of flowers plants developed “naked seeds”, seeds unprotected by fruits but housed safely in woody cones that we see hanging from conifers.   Prior to the evolutionary development of seeds, plants like ferns, lycopods, cycads, horsetails and mosses evolved to reproduce by spreading spores about, similar to fungi.

These spore-shedding seedless vascular plants were some of the earliest plants to colonize the land and Equisetum are the living descendents of ancient horsetail species that once covered much of the planet.  More than three hundred million years ago the order that horsetails belongs to enters the fossil record.  It consisted of many genera and species, some of them massive in size.  The genus Calamites was tree-sized, a horsetail that sprouted off a horizontal rhizome much like modern day quaking aspen trees.  Calamites grew to be over sixty feet tall forming trunks of dense silica that must have been stronger than any tree of modern comparison.  The horsetails Mindy and I noticed in contrast were about two or three inches tall, and might grow to be a foot or two by the summer.  All of the ancient genera in this taxa, like Calamites and others, are extinct.  All of them are gone from planet Earth… except Equisetum. 

Thinking about the giant ancestors of these humble plants on the side of the road in rural Rhode Island reminded me of a trip we took to Sequoia National Park.  The giant sequoias, unlike their sister trees the coastal redwoods, grow in the high Sierras.  Driving up and up through the park you pass through several distinct ecosystems.  Eventually you reach an altitude where you begin to see the huge trees here and there.  By the time you reach the high points of the mountains the giants are all around you, some standing tall and wide while others lean in precarious postures, growing crookedly for presumably hundreds of years.  From the visitors center you have the option of taking a shuttle bus to the grove where the General Sherman tree is found.  Many of the trees there are named for Civil War era personalities such as U.S. Grant, Tecumseh Sherman, and Abraham Lincoln.  Being in the presence of these ancient creatures makes you wonder how many years it will take until the nineteenth century human names will be sloughed off and forgotten like the millennia of old bark that is constantly being shed and replaced by the giant trees.

Instead of the shuttle the other option is to walk the short distance to the big grove.  It was probably a quick one to two-mile hike but despite the parking lot being full of cars Mindy and I had the trails primarily to ourselves.  We passed some people here and there, yet we had many opportunities to be alone with the sequoias we found along the way.  Walking through this stunning, quiet forest felt similar to other places I’ve been in California, Arizona, and Chile.  Like Muir Woods where the coastal redwoods grow above a carpet of purple wood sorrel and the boardwalks are shaded and quiet you feel like you’re inside a cathedral.  California landscapes in particular always seem to push against the boundaries of gorgeousness, almost impossibly grand.

The reverence you might feel for such a profound landscape is very often a humbling experience.  Again, the grandness of it all can be very overwhelming.  Returning to our own simple places in the world might make them seem all the more drab in comparison.  I don’t think so.  Huddled down under the splitting cherry blossoms, among the trash and the horsetails may not exhibit the same awe-inspiring vista but the simple beauty and divine normalcy of this natural setting I think provides equal value.  After all these simple places are the ones we inhabit on a daily basis.  Together they form a quilt of ecosystems, something like gaining altitude in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  Driving from Chepachet where pine warblers and pileated woodpeckers live, and where spring blooms are sometimes two weeks behind, to Aquidneck Island where it’s salt and wind whipped scrub grow in tangles, seem like another world.   In our corner of the state we see the previews of northern forests, with red pine and striped maple scattered around while traveling to Washington county provides a more southern feel with it’s inkberry, bearberry, and pitch pine.

Burdened by our limited ability to conceptualize between private and public concepts of landscapes many of us see nature in a myopic way.  Nature is where the land trust and Audubon parking lots provide access.  Nature is some precious or frustratingly unkempt part of our property, maybe a city park, or a national forest.  It is a difficult and heart-braking sentiment to consider, say, all of route 6 as part of your natural inheritance.  Most of the natural landscape we live in seems to in a state of constant vulnerability.  It seems to inevitably be awaiting some undemocratic, unnatural disaster, veering helplessly towards the rampaging blight of progress.  It is undeniable that our mental health and satisfaction, albeit often subconsciously, are tied to the larger natural settings we reside in: our yards, our streets, our neighborhoods, our towns, our cities, our state.  The conduits we use are precious to us wether we acknowledge it or not.  For instance, a farmer down the road is cutting down his healthy peach trees.  It must be some clause in the purchase contract he signed when he sold his farm, to clear out all the trees.  My wife can’t even drive by that property lately. With the limbs scattered around the cursed orchard this private piece of property is suddenly a wellspring for public sorrow, a loss of character, a loss of sustenance and the stunting of shared natural beauty.

Grand places like Sequoia can be and are taken for granted of course.  At Mindy’s urging I’ve edited more than a few biting quips from this story about how flippantly the groves were regarded by the people being shuttled back and forth from the parking lot.  But of course for me too there was an enormous feeling of disconnection from this place, something similar to how I felt in the Andes, or in Yosemite Valley.  It’s something similar to a no place like home feeling, but I think somehow more closely related to the removal of obstacles of time and space it requires to visit such a place.

We live in a world where traveling from the east coast of the United States to the west coast can be accomplished in six hours.  There is something I think inherently dumbing in this, something that corrupts our sense of place and our concern for places.  An explicit example of this type of perversion might be when we get frustrated about interruptions in our travel plans.  Sitting on the tarmac for an extra hour or two strikes many of us as an inexcusable violence to our person.  Some of the earliest American immigrants to California came there during the gold rush of the 1840s when it required six months to make the same trip.  Maybe there would be one or two literate people in the party that could read to the kids to pass the days and months a trip like this demanded.  Now being without Wi-Fi for half a day on a plane ride is almost unbearable.

Yosemite Valley was “discovered” by white Californians in 1851 when a militia was sent to remove the Awahnechee tribe from the area.  These Native Californians had Yosemite Valley as their traditional homeland.  These people knew this valley in a way that is basically unknowable today, knew it as food basket, church, a sentient provider.  With their removal it became a tourist destination almost immediately, was sanctioned as a protected site by the Lincoln administration, and led the way for the creation of the National Park system some decades later.  It was famously a temporary home and inspiration to John Muir who herded sheep and worked at a lumber mill in the valley.   Today landscapes like Yosemite are primarily if not solely used for recreation.  Those deeper, soul-deep utilities have been developed out of them through conservation, the great “othering” of Nature.  In the words of Bill Bryson Nature is becoming more and more a place “that you drive to.”

The dispossession from Native People of these beautiful and bountiful national parks was nearly universal, is well understood, and is not repaired.  What we have been starting to understand now is the historical mismanagement these ecosystems underwent once bereft of their original stewards.  The disarticulation of people from place creates an ecological corruption that rips the heart out of the human-nature bond.  Nature becomes more of a museum in this picture, a fictitious undisturbed canvas that is really just a hall of mirrors.

This sequestering of Nature “out there” somewhere works in another direction as well.  Society has managed to disarticulate our hearts from the simple places, the public-emotional investment we all share in the land.  Is it because fenced in and profoundly beautiful landscapes are ever at our grasp, within a drive or quick flight?  I can be in Muir Woods in seven hours; about the same amount of time it would take me to drive to Acadia National Park in Maine.  Why should I care then if a simple peach orchard falls to development?  Is that why it’s acceptable for a hayfield to become an industrial park, or a meadow a gas station?  Have we supersized our minds out of an appreciation for the simple places in Nature?

More and more people swell high profile natural places for pleasure and thrill seeking.  On our most recent trip to California the parking at Muir Woods in Marin required a preordered reservation made a month in advance.  Hiking Mount Everest these days can mean you’re standing in line near the top waiting for the privilege of holding the summit for a few seconds.  In 1953 two people are recorded to have summited Mount Everest.  Twenty-two people reached the summit in one day in May 2022.  This kind of anthill tourism centers the question for me: What am I looking for here? 

 Our ideal of beautiful places is a panned-out, wide angled view.  We travel around the world to see these impossibly beautiful landscapes to revel in them.  Awe is why we’ve come.  The privilege of being close to the oldest, the largest, the most unspeakably resolute things on earth is a draw.  The history and natural history of these places is fascinating and by being among them we feel as if we are, even if atomically so, part of that story.

I saw that.  I felt that.  I was there.

Yet even the giant sequoia bares the small, modest cones of its humbler cousin the cedar.  You can pick up these cones on the boardwalks, pry open their scales and find the small seeds inside.  With your eyes focused on these simple beginnings, when you narrow your wide-angle down for a moment, you can be reminded that the nature you have arrived at here is the same nature you left behind at home.  When I do that the question that comes to me is not why did I come but why did I leave?  What have I left?  What have I lost?  What has been taken from me while I wasn’t looking?

My parents impending divorce was greeted by me with a massive sigh of relief.  Not because my parents fought viscously or used me as a pawn in their splitting up.  Things were difficult during those years but nothing egregious was going on that made my daily life miserable, or really even terribly uncomfortable.

At some point shortly before they decided to divorce, my parents had bought some land and contracted an architect to draw up plans for a new home.  The land they were planning on building on was at the other end of the road; a mile or two from where we lived.  A small, undeveloped road bordered the land they purchased.  It was abutted by a preserve where hayfields, woods, and an old dilapidated hydroelectric station resided.  There were no homes yet on this stretch of road.  My parents were going to be the first people to build there.

I can still remember how my body went cold when they rolled out the plans to show me our future home, pointing out where my bedroom was going to be.  I didn’t mind the idea of leaving our current house.  My brother and sisters were a lot older than me and had already left home.  It was a big house for three people.  But I did not want anything to do with the dissolution of that quiet, simple landscape that they had purchased.  I made the trek down to those woods and to that hydroelectric station on a weekly basis to write and draw and think.  It could not have been a more typical, more mundane place.  There were ticks, hundreds of them.  There was stinging nettle and poison ivy.  But there was peace down there, a simple, steady, and unprovoked settling.  It was my first church. If it were to be a backyard, even if it was left in its current state, it would have been, in my eyes, desecrated.   How could a place like that be behind something else?  It was holy because it was, at least in veneer, untouched… at least unmanaged, at least away.  It was not oriented to a human compass.  After all, if a backyard would have sufficed I wouldn’t have walked the four miles round trip to go there.

It’s the simple places like this where people throw their trash at the feet of plants like Equisetum, creatures that have traveled over vast amounts of time to join us here in the now.  These are the little treasures that we often don’t see, don’t value, and so inevitably loose.  These are the places where the animals that children love hide from us.  Some of the most unusual things on earth are common there.  Skunk cabbage for instance is one of three plant species on the planet that can regulate its own body temperature.  The mottled spathes warm the ground in February and melt the snow.  Their massive leaves come later, filling in the wet places that we haven’t managed to develop yet, feed wildlife, and amaze those of us who pay attention to them. As much as I love blue violets I would be proud if skunk cabbage was Rhode Island’s state flower.

Simple places are our true inheritance.  The grand parks that we treasure, if you resided in them, foraged in them, grew your crops in them, would also become mundane to you.  How could a landscape like Yosemite become common?  The same way route 6 has become common, or west main road on Aquidneck Island has fallen to mediocrity.  These gorgeous landscapes became mundane, became commodities, and then became the wastelands they are now.

A farmer I know asked her grandfather why he never traveled.  On his farm, he said, “I already live in the most beautiful place on earth.”  As is clear, I do love to travel and, like the thousands of others who visit them every year, I love the national parks.  I’ve been fortunate enough to visit some beautiful places but I am richer for having the quiet woods of nettle as a child.  I enjoy being in places like Sequoia where ambrosia is on tap but I need to be able to go home and still have my common cup of tea in comfort and beauty with the horsetails.  The great cathedrals of Nature are to be revered and honored but no less than the little churches of peace and grace in our world.

Did you go to the woods to find yourself?

There is no self.

Did you learn there how to treat others?

There are no others.

Land flows like water over the coursing of time.  It is one thing, then another, and it’s shape and function wholly dependent on the circumstance of the climate, geological history and natural history of the plants and animals under which it flows. It is exemplary of gestalt: it is recognized as itself when it is whole and all it’s parts are at play synergistically.  A desert is such, the alpine environment, the beach, the open meadow, the manicured lawn even.  All are assemblages of these waltzing climatic, geological and living forces.

Yet one landscape can become the other.  The first spark is often chance.  Chance manifests as disturbance:  a devastating process that changes the landscape, rewinds the ecological clock.  A mudslide that cleaves a hillside exposing a massive swath of subsoil while burying the land downslope in a sarcophagus of topsoil.  Even more dramatic is the clean slate left behind in the wake of a volcanic eruption, like the landscape surrounding Mt. St. Helens after the volcano erupted and blanketed hundreds of square miles in hot ash in 1980.  The eruption killed thousands of animals, plants, and buried the topsoil so that even the microbial community was more or less erased.

These disturbed environments provide a canvas.  Each fresh canvas is a clean slate for the pallet of weather, rock and life to paint on.   This process is the facilitation of Nature’s great art form.  This art form is called ecological succession.

It’s a predictable process if you know something about the environment.  A farm is a perfect example of disturbed land in transition.  Think of your garden.  When you disturb the topsoil before planting you are able to anticipate the arrival of a very narrow variety of competing plants (weeds) which will grow in that soil.  Though they may be very, very abundant in your garden they are not a diverse representation of the plant kingdom.  They are only a handful of species from a very narrow range of plant families.  We can name the most familiar offenders pretty quickly: pigweed, lamb’s quarter, purslane, chickweed, gallinsoga, shepherd’s purse, foxtail etc.  These annual plants, which go from seed to seed in less than twelve months, are fast growing, thrive in dry, disaggregated soils, and do not exhibit (or require) mycorrhizal relationships.  They are wholly suited to the environment you have provided by your initial disturbance of turning or tilling your garden.

Weeds are predictable across regions and although the species represented may change as we move from one region to another their ecological niches are all the same.  They are pioneer species, early colonizers when a once green environment has been suddenly made black or brown or yellow by exposed soil, devoid of plants.  They are the first plants to grow after a disturbance and they have evolved to thrive under the predictable conditions disturbances leave in their wake.  You would be surprised to find goldenrod or dogwood growing first in a newly tilled garden.  You would also not expect to see birch trees or oaks sprouting in your freshly prepared beds.  Not with tending but through neglect will these higher order species establish themselves.

If you interact with your garden in this same manner every year you will continually reset the ecological succession clock back to zero.  If you were to ignore your garden and allow those annual weeds to thrive you would see, even by the end of the first growing season, the establishment of some higher tier plants:  biennials, perennials and some second succession (less ambitious) annuals, for instance plantain, dandelion, dock, brome, wild carrot etc.  These plants establish themselves on the land a bit more slowly.  Dandelion is more of a nuisance in your blueberry patch (perennial) than in your tomato patch (annual)… unless you adhere to no-till practices.

A farm or garden that is abandoned follows a steady, let’s say upward trajectory (figuratively and literally).  Think of ecological succession as a staircase.  The community of species that come to dominate the environment at the top of the stairs are called pinnacle species (pioneer species being at the bottom step). The change in species representation slows, and the land is said to finally be in a steady state.  The most striking example I have ever seen is in the Sierra Nevadas among the giant sequoias.  These trees are the most amazing species in a community that also includes tall jack and ponderosa pine, and a narrowly diverse mid-canopy and understory environment (even though they are at different heights in the forest these species are all at the “top of the stairs”).  This community has been in a steady state for thousands of years but at some point (and today) disturbances large and small will set this process back to a place where the humble, annual weeds must lay the foundation for the stairs to be built again( i.e the regrowth of these aged giants).

In southern New England steady state forests are dominated by white pine, oak, beech, hickory, and maple.  They are accompanied by muscle wood, hazel, birch in the mid-canopy and shad, inkberry, chokeberry, pepper bush, blueberry (and more) at shrub height, and finally a diverse array of wildflowers at ground level.  Clear these trees, grind the stumps, plow the land and pigweed will grow.  Almost immediately. For this reason pioneer species are sometimes called “nature’s scabs”.  By having such fast growing plants available to root into the loose exposed earth much soil, and in turn nutrition, is conserved.

You can farm that land with the plow and fight with the pigweed for your whole life but when you leave your garden untended your grandchildren will, eventually, receive the forest again.

Interfering with this ecological trajectory, the ecological stair case, is part of the natural order.  There is much opportunity within disturbance and, indeed, our entire agricultural (as well as much of our hunter gatherer) inheritance is dependent on it.

Is agriculture natural?  Nature and natural are  quite tricky words to define and opinions differ whether or not, for example, to include humans within a natural definition at all.  Surely we are solidly understood to be within nature’s pantheon but most of us consider “nature” to be a place you go to, inhabited by things you are not, and not someplace you are or am.  Nature is someplace, some-thing, we are best suited to observe, not disturb.  It is something that modern human’s seem incapable to live in harmony with.  Once human beings get involved in nature it is widely regarded we do little but muck it up, pollute it, desecrate it.  After all don’t we live in a world that’s very geological epoch is defined by human disturbance (i.e. the Anthropocene)?  At best, we believe, we must strive to do the least harm, which of course means we fully expect to do some harm: a perpetual, inescapable biting of the hand that feeds us.

So what is Nature?

It’s a stretch for common parlance to include a concrete city sidewalk in a definition of a natural environment, even though it is not so different from the landscape left behind in the wake of Mt. St. Helens’ eruption.  The city street?  No, not nature (or natural) most would say.  However we wouldn’t hesitate to describe a farm as a natural place or, maybe, at least a place where nature resides.  This is despite the fact that ecological succession, the natural order, the stair case I tried to describe earlier is so often aggressively circumvented on farms as a matter of course.  Land that is being farmed is trying to build that ecological staircase again and the farmer prevents it.  The farmer’s job is, in a sense, to push back.  The farmer’s methods and systems dictate just how hard they have to push yet it is all in service to maintaining a step on the staircase where the plants and animals we want to raise can best thrive.  How effectively we do this either makes us an industrial farmer or a regenerative farmer but this distinction for this discussion is not important.  Either way managing land for agriculture is by degrees a fight against entropy, something Nature always has the final word on.

In the last ten thousand years, across the planet, there is nothing more natural than an environment impacted by human beings.  Another way to say it is there is nothing so unnatural as a landscape not influenced, either big or small, by human beings.

In New England for instances we might consider our forests to be something of a static representation of our regions natural order but this is an illusion.  The vast, virgin forests of the precolonial period that live in our imaginations did not really exist after humans took up residence on the east coast thousands of years in the past.  Precolonial indigenous peoples managed these landscapes heavily, clearing huge tracts of land with fire and creating something of a park-like panoramic.  Early colonists complained of not being able to locate timber some twenty miles from the coast in some areas.  The re-foresting of this environment coincided with the removal of indigenous peoples and the eventual abandonment of farms in the ninetieth century as Europeans moved west.  Stone walls were built in our area only because there was not enough timber left for fencing.  The forests and wild places of New England are not a representation of what has always been here, or even been here for very long.  Even the species have changed dramatically in the past hundred years. Our landscape is an evolving inheritance that has been hugely influenced by management practices of indigenous peoples over thousands of years, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and ninetieth century colonial history, and the unique impact of the modern world with exploding human populations, invasive species introduction, chemical contamination, and climate change.

Nowadays our landscape is essentially a mirror image of the proportion of forested land to open land that would have been seen in the colonial period of the eighteenth and early-mid nineteenth century.  Eighty-percent of New England is wooded, twenty-percent of it is cleared.  One hundred fifty plus years ago it would have been almost exactly the opposite.

Discussing loose terms like nature and natural provid plenty of pitfalls.  Moving into the metaphysical realm requires much more patience and latitude, comfort with the murky place around powerful words.  We’ve established that land can change though we might struggle with whether it is natural or not.  Inevitably this argument is based upon our own prejudices, principles, and our guilt.  Our ideas of how Nature ought to be is indelibly tied to our own aching desire for it to stay the same, unscarred, unsullied. Consistency is something human beings get very sentimental about and it is the antithesis to any natural system.

I mentioned earlier in the example of the farm that nature was trying to rebuild the staircase, to move from the pioneer first step (pigweed and quack grass) to the pinnacle top of the stairs (white oak and beech).  It is typically unforgivable in the academic world to speak about plants trying to do anything.  Wants and desires are a teleological illusion that we place over other living things.  We’re told we should speak about living things in terms of instinct, of mechanisms.  Plants are the extreme example.  Since a plant does not even have a central nervous system insisting that it could have wants, desires, or aspirations sounds ludicrous to any respectable scientist.  Instead we must talk about plants, if we truly want to understand them from this academic point of view, in terms of hormonal responses, environmental cues.  An entire landscape isn’t even a single thing, never mind a thing without it’s own compartmentalized nervous system.  It strikes a materialist as absurd that a landscape could have wants and desires.  The predictable development of the ecological staircase isn’t a want, or an intent, you could say.  It is simply a predictable, mechanical process.

It is difficult for one who works with land everyday to accept that it is merely an impartial bystander.  Seeing what a landscape is capable of, how it organizes itself, nurtures living things, fosters dynamic relationships and bends toward equilibrium is something that one can’t help but feel moved by emotionally and left awed and curious about.  The fact that nature seems to have a range of functionality that can best be described as healthy and unhealthy always leaves one wondering about these more teleological aspects.

We all know nature is cruel.  Yet we can also tell when it is right versus when it is wrong.  When it is unhealthy versus when it is healthy.  The wolf pack that competes with another and fulfills it’s goals of reproduction and “wants” for full bellies versus the white-tail deer family dead on a Rhode Island beach with stomach’s full of sand.  One is right, within the landscape’s care or the landscape’s gestalt.  The other is clearly wrong and wrought of a system disarticulated in some critical way.

If landscapes operate in these ways, in these complex patterns that seem to develop into healthy, right, and good systems can we reach into a messy place of words and say a landscape might, collectively perhaps, desire for such a thing to be so?

Can land feel love?  If a landscape is trying to build it’s staircase to the pinnacle, to the white oak and beech forest, than is it a sacrifice if it should be redirected?  Can land willing make sacrifices, be able to choose among it’s constituents (trees, rocks, elk) which can be harvested, dynamited, killed?  Is there a way of disturbing the land in which the land may approve of?

It’s easy for us to think of loving houses, meadows, beaches, bars, and churches.  It’s more difficult to think this feeling could somehow be reciprocated.   It’s a very complicated proposition to think about because if you say the land loves you than you are actually talking, depending on the acreage, about millions and billions and trillions of things.  As individuals they all have different priorities, different struggles.  The amoeba that engulfs the bacterium, the sand particle that is aggregated to the humic acid in the soil, the worm that drills the pores of the ground, the bird that eats the worm.  Billions of things having billions of interactions.  But if we allow our minds to fuzz the reduction of all these things into individual parts and instead mold them into a single gestalt (a single, functioning thing composed of many) than we have something broad, something amorphous, something we typically consider as unfeeling, certainly not kind, and unconscious.  This fuzzy place is where metaphysical and religious language might bring us closest to appreciating what this natural gestalt’s wants may be.

In Leah Penniman’s book Farming While Black she describes a form of divination (Ifa divination) that the farmer’s use when interacting with the land*.  Asking permission in order to clear a field, cut down a tree, or put in an irrigation pond are requests put to the land and a reply is given back.  Yes or no.  Assuming that it is the land itself or some natural force that inhabits the land there is a higher perspective overseeing the wishes of the farmers guiding them towards, let’s say, healthy choices.  It’s ends may seem anthropocentric at first, transactional even.  If the land grants the clearing of a field, or the pouring of a foundation, it is to the benefit of the humans and their goals.  But if healthy disturbances are made than the overall gestalt will benefit and it will be a gestalt, a natural gestalt, that includes the people within it as contributors of good will, not selfish exploiters.

I would venture to say that most people do not interact with land in this spirit of reciprocity.  It took me several years to even begin to learn what best suits my land, what it wants, and how it’s goals coincide with mine.  In the process the land nearly kicked me off a couple times.  It was as if the land said to me “if you intend on growing vegetables here we need to reach an understanding because how you are doing it is not in line with my goals.”  Bending to the gestalt of the land has made my life much more satisfying and much more predictable.  For example the drought that rocked the country in 2022 was not felt so severally on my land.  That is because the land communicated to me in 2017 that I needed to think more holistically about my soil health.  Now, after five years of undisturbed permanent bedding over five acres of vegetable fields our water holding capacity provided us with all the water we needed (after establishment of the crops… some water was used immediately after transplanting) for the majority of our vegetables.  This was during a summer where we received zero rainfall from late June until mid August.

I wish that I was the recipient of a religious tradition that allowed me to communicate so literally (so “saliently” as Penniman puts it) with my land as the farmers do at Soul Fire Farm (Penniman’s farm in NY).  It probably would have saved me much time and at least some gray hairs.  I think however that without having this conduit there are many ways to intuit the process of a landscape.  Some of the messages will be subtle.  Some will be deafening.

I was told that my land loves me by someone who means this quite literally.  Someone who claimed to feel the love of the landscape, my small little farm, for me and my family.  Does this mean perhaps that I am finally working in concert with the land?  Does the land approve of my actions?  If so I can hardly think of a greater source of pride than the approval of this small, revitalized eleven acres of northern Rhode Island land.

I think it’s healthy to think of ourselves as fox that come onto a place and make a home of it.  A person is no different, just a visitor, a temporary resident, but one with the potential for an enormous ecological impact.  Like the beaver the person becomes an engineer of the landscape and while they have their time there they can help become part of the lands gestalt or they can push and push against it until both they and the land are exhausted.

And maybe it is (also) simple.  My mother in law said to me the other day “I love my living room.”

I pounced:

“Do you think your living room loves you?”

“Of course,” she said without hesitating.  “My room loves me because it is me.”

Whatever comforts or squeamishness the idea of animals, plants, rocks, or macrostructures like forests and deserts being able to feel and understand love might bring us this tender insight left me feeling comforted.  My land loves me because it is me.

*Penniman describes Ifa divination as follows: “Practiced among Yoruba communities and throughout the African diaspora, the Ifa divination system was inscribed in the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in 2008.  She refers to the book Ifa Will Mend Our Broken World by Professor Wande Abimbola.

Wendell Berry, natural philosopher well-known to organic farmers and back-to-the-landers, once quipped about modern agriculture trying to take the farmer out of farming.  Or, at the very least, to so insulate her from the natural world where farming takes place that she would never break a sweat, knick her flesh, or dirty her pants.  He was wringing his calloused, Kentuckian hands over such new inventions as environmental-controlled cabins on tractors and, what has become so ubiquitous now, remotely controlled combines performing automated harvests while monitored by a “farmer” from… somewhere else.   Wendell is one of those particular kinds of people who still enjoys working in the rain, the smell of manure, and dirt that will simply not come out from between your wrinkles.

As you can imagine the concerns of sentimentalists like Wendell Berry, Vandava Shiva, and Eileen Crist have not been heeded. We are now on the verge of an agricultural system ready to collapse, a system which has been estimated to have approximately sixty harvests left to offer before becoming completely exhausted.

Just a minute now… that is quite a jump to go from tractor’s with air conditioning to the end of the world, isn’t it?

Our societie’s relationship to technology has come to a reckoning point.  The human relationship with nature has become more abstract and less grounded over the twentieth century and has reached a tragically dismal disassociation for many in the twenty-first. Ironically during this same period our scientific understanding of natural systems and organisms has exponentially increased.  We have never been better poised to understand in a materialist way the organisms that we are extirpating from the planet.  We know more about the ecology of the rainforests, the oceans, volcanoes, and temperate environments, along with the life they sustain, than ever before.  It’s as though we have the opportunity to watch all of these remarkable systems die in high-definition, knowing the mechanisms of the octopus’s reproductive cycle, down to each quark, as it withers in the last tank of the last aquarium.  There is something wholly fitting of a species that in it’s buried heart loves these creatures with that originalism of a child, but unable to change it’s adult excesses, has to watch it all go amidst the cumulation of all scientific knowledge.

I have had little choice but to believe that agriculture, a system which currently manages 38% of the planet’s land, holds the key to a livable, co-habitable world in the future.  Our current industrial system of raising food is one of drone-tractors, pollution of air and waterways, and the off-gassing of soil carbon through tillage and soil organic matter dissolution.  The tenets of regenerative agriculture would ask the world’s farmers and land managers to be our saviors, storing carbon in their soils (and out of the atmosphere and oceans), providing habitat for flora and fauna, reducing our use of natural resources like oil and water, and re-beautifying the landscape.  If these goals are tenable then there would be no greater honor or call to service than to be a farmer, and no closer relationship to nature.

The approach of regenerative agriculture is not complex.  You do not need a master’s degree to implement it on your farm, in your city, or in your backyard.  It is, in it’s most distilled, a model of managing land that maximizes biodiversity and maintains soil at it’s maximum potential for organic matter.  For example a tallgrass prairie in South Dakota had a pre-farming soil organic matter content around 6-7%.  Your average ranch in the state is somewhere between 1-2%.  Some regenerative farmers in South Dakota have returned their ranches to this pre-farming level and have re-sequestered carbon to the tune of 11,600 pounds of carbon per percent per acre.  So, these farmers are relocating carbon (think carbon dioxide, greenhouse gas) to the tune of almost twelve thousand pounds for every one percent increase they make in soil organic matter in the soil per acre.  That’s a lot.  Many academics doubt it is even possible.

This is done without the latest GMO technology.  This beats county averages for yield without nitrogen fertilizer applications.  This does not require, or even consider, the latest proprietary technology of waxy protective lipid-containing structures to improve the penetration of pesticides into our crops(!), nor does it depend on the latest slow-release micro-nutrient technology.  It also doesn’t require us to treat our soil with contempt, as though it’s inferior to a hydroponic medium in a Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) factory.

No, it requires animals, plants, insects, soil biota, and human beings in a relationship for our mutual benefit.  It calls for more than just a scientific understanding of land, but a reverence for it.

Yet even in Rhode Island some of our academics are looking to technology to save us.  The University of Rhode Island is looking to the future and they see CEAs as the solution;  “greenhouses” the size of shopping malls sprawling on what were once productive soils.  Investments in new infrastructure between 60 and 115 million dollars per facility to grow crops in a manner which many people believe to produce a lower-quality product (hydroponics).

Perhaps you can make the argument that hydroponic factories are a good use of otherwise tainted land (brownfields, as in the case of Gotham Greens in Providence), but on prime farmland?  Constructing, from the road what look like industrial parks, on some of the most beautiful land RI has to offer?

Also, according to the Dean of the College of Environment and Life Sciences, people who operate these facilities will need at least bachelor’s level, if not master’s level, training in order to work in them.  So farming in the 21st century will require a master’s degree and you get to work… inside?

Farmland is a unique thing.  In New England it is most similar to our forests and salt marshes, coastlines and beaches.  There is a collective benefit in your farm being part of the landscape.  It is beautifying, it is fantastic, and it stokes the imagination of children (and adults like me), not to mention provides food.  The phenomenon of chlorophylla (“the love of green”) is so hugely important to us on a conscious and subconscious level.  The benefits of nature to our mental and physical health have been put to bed, well documented and understood.  Beauty, in the case of nature, is not in the eye of the beholder.  In this sense farms need to be maintained and expanded to promote as much beauty as they can.  What’s more our farms, along with our forests, are a critical resource for battling climate change and the planetary health crisis in general.

RI farms can be part of the solution to our estrangement from nature.  Let’s improve our land with regenerative practices and stop pretending like we don’t already have the tools we need to succeed.

Remember the taste of good soil.  Start early.  If you didn’t, start now.

(Image from The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris)

It may seem hopelessly sentimental to lament that in the 21st century American adults, much less children, can no longer distinguish tufts of wheat from rye.  It was lamented perhaps more appropriately in the 19th centuries when millions of men and women left the “plow in the field” to make their livings in the industrializing cities.  Even though the masses being unable to tell one from another these two staple grains must have left naturalists and agriculturalist with a sense of alarm, even dread, I think it would have been unimaginable to them that someday children would not be able to tell the difference between a maple tree and an oak, recognize an acorn, or distinguish a field mouse from a shrew.  Such an imposing presence as an oak, one would imagine, could never go unnoticed or unnamed.  It would be like living among elephants and being content that the thing hanging from their giant face might be called a “trunk” or just as well be called a “tentacle.”  Yet I have worked with adults, college graduates, who didn’t understand that butterflies come from caterpillars.  Most people who visit the farm cannot identify the most simple bird calls, point out poison ivy, or confidently identify common trees.

When Josiah was born my friends gave us a book called Lost Words.  I’ll let it describe itself:

“When the most recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary – widely used in schools around the world – was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that forty common words concerning nature had been dropped.  These words were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary.  The list of these “lost words” included acorn, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow.  Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail.  The news of these substitutions – the outdoor and natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual – became seen by many as a powerful sign of the growing gulf between childhood and the natural world.”

To the outdoor person of the 19th century wringing their hands over the blurring of wheat and rye this degree of displacement (a child not recognizing a dandelion) would be simply unbelievable.  As we look towards the future being designed for us in silicon valley I’m afraid we are set to move this bar even further afield from the sad place it hangs now.  Children that cannot tell, or have no interest in telling, a kingfisher from a mourning dove, may be living in a world where not only natural things cannot be distinguished from one another, but that natural and virtual themselves cannot be teased apart.

I don’t believe we are at this point… yet.  It may seem that young people’s worlds revolve around their smart devises but in the end they seem to function more as coping mechanisms then actual stand-ins for realities.  Even if they don’t understand it I think kids are still yearning for reality.  For instance, if I am looking at a post of someone doing something exciting I am jealous or insecure because I want to be doing that thing or something equivalently cool.  I want to be known as someone interesting in reality.  It’s the difference between going to a concert and watching a recording.  One is an event the other is an interpretation.  The bored places that my generation would spend in their daydreams, hobbies or in books or in the impulsive walk has been occupied by an army of virtual distracters.  Finally the feeding frenzy of virtual impulsiveness is being exposed, for what we all could have, should have seen: a greed-driven social experiment that is washing the color from adult life and crushing our kids.

Kids don’t need smart phones.  Despite what they might believe they can live without them.  Shockingly, according to the current data on anxiety disorders in kids, they may have a better chance of surviving without them.  A kid may need a way to get in touch with a parent.  This does not mean they need a devise that has access to all the information that humanity has ever generated and is dominated by platforms designed to addict them.  I had an eighteen year old man working for me several years back.  He had no cellphone and grew up without a personal computer.  I asked him how he got his work done for school.  He told me he went to the library.

What I am getting at, tying the world of virtual distractions to the point that many people today do not know the most basic things about the natural world around them, is not that we can simply get some apps, even guidebooks, together and solve this problem.  Sending kids to camp doesn’t solve it in many cases either.  In truth it’s not so much the identifying of a maple leaf from an oak leaf that I’m concerned about.  It’s the reverence for damp leaves falling on your neck.  Telling a frog from a toad is less important than having tadpoles between your toes.  Knowing a bluebird from a bluejay is not valuable, perhaps at all, compared to peering into a nest of splotched eggs, feeling the joy of watching barn swallow juveniles in their first flights or the sorrow of a fledgling found dead in the yard.  The compartmentalizing left brain follows the life-embracing right.

Children do not fall in love with nature by way of guide books, placing names to things, distilling nature into latin and taxa.  They, we, fall in love when we fall down and scrap our knees.  I came to love nature by sitting in a sanctuary of forest, a undeveloped, quiet wood lot on a small private road by the Glen.  Watching as it was bulldozed was one of the, if not the, most important developmental moments of my life.  A common place of alchemy made into an exclusive place of entropy.  Let a child fall in love with a woodlot and mourn it’s loss to the new home or commercial development.  You can’t grieve what you never loved.  As children we shouldn’t be shielded from the heartbreak of knowing a brooked wood torn asunder to make way for a gas station.  A child has to understand the difference between a system, a natural system, that’s functional purpose, or dharma if you like, is to promote life and growth, to an artificial system, that’s functional purpose is to promote diabetes, heart-disease, foul air, poisoned water.

If our culture raised children in this way then we would already be celebrating what we all know we need: beauty in our surroundings.  It is seen as a disgrace that any child should grow up without adequate food, water, or access to health care and education.  I think it is equally disgraceful that any child, any child, should grow up without access to at least twenty acres of woods, meadow, open desert within a walk or a short bike ride of where they live.  I’m sorry but parks are not good enough.  Mown grass, pruned shrubs, invasive bird species and hybrid trees do not foster imagination like stinging nettle, fox, and red maple in the marsh.

I’m a dreamer.  That this is a dream is maybe a sad truth (but not a fact).

Truths can change.  Dreams can become realities.  It may be hard to imagine a society arranged around the priority of providing nature as a staple for a humane life.  Clearly it was difficult for our ancestors to accept that people might not someday tell wheat from rye.  It is troubling that our young people’s natural literacy is at such a frightening low but even more frightening is what may be coming if we continue to prioritize the synthetic over the photosynthetic.  Eventually what we once called the natural world could be so bled out, so un-wilded, that it will have no appeal to our imaginations.  This is the world the meta verse of Mr. Zuckerberg first requires.  After all a healthy, inspiring, and fulfilling real world is the primary competitor to any virtual one.  Striping nature down to a caricature, a world where one can’t tell grass from tree, bird from mouse, is fertile soil for a private virtual world to spring forth from.

Human beings are notorious for looking for the greener grass over the hill.  The meta verse, or virtual reality, will supposedly offer that grass: the hike more majestic, the concert more historical, etc, etc, etc, etc.  But think of the octopus or the star nosed mole.  Human beings will search the galaxies for other, strange worlds, but they will never find anything stranger than a crab spider inside an aster or a skunk cabbage melting the snow.  What we have is more than just worth celebrating.  It’s our salvation and our redemption all in one.

Start early.  If you didn’t, then just start now.

I’m going to try and explain how trees break their winter dormancy.

Plants exhibit various adaptations for dealing with tough weather conditions.  Some of the more famous plants dealing with adverse conditions are cacti.  Native to the North American southwest and Central America the Cactus Family is a famously tough group of plants that flourish in dry, hot environments.  The “stem” of a typical cactus is thick and fleshy, storing a large amount of water in these tissues.  Leaves, which are the primary conductors of water in plants (water being drawn from the roots, through the stems, and evaporating out of leaf pores = transpiration), have been repurposed in the cactus into hard, sclerified spines which do not conduct water.  Yes, cactus spines are modified leaves.

Cacti still do conduct water through their bodies but they do differently than most other plants.  Most plants conduct water during the day, opening up their leaf pores (stomates) and allowing water vapor to evaporate. This causes a suction effect that draws water from the soil into the roots and up through the plant body.  At the same time air is allowed to cycle in and out of the leaf.  Carbon dioxide enters and is used for photosynthesis (remember photosynthesis requires sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to work).  So when the leaf pores are open and the sun is shining photosynthesis can occur.

Because the environment where cacti grow is so hot and so dry it is dangerous for transpiration to occur during the daytime (they would dry out too quickly).  Instead the cacti shut their pours during the day and open them at night (the opposite of most plants).  When they open up their pores at night carbon dioxide comes in and the cactus will store the carbon in it’s cells as malic acid (or malate).  At the same time the plant can take up the water it needs from the soil.

When the sun comes out again the cactus will shut it’s pours, stymy the flow of water, and then release the carbon it was storing up all night so it can be used for photosynthesis.  Because cacti are so efficient at storing water in their juicy flesh (think aloe, which is not a cactus) they have plenty on hand to use for photosynthesis even though they are not actively taking up water during the day.  This is an example of how plants adapt to a dry, hot environment.

In our part of the country in southern New England we have plants that deal with the opposite kind of adverse conditions: cold, wet, and dark weather.  During the winter the ground freezes making it impossible for plants such as trees and shrubs to take up water from the soil.  Without free water leaves cannot stay turgid and will wilt.  Perennial plants around the world are adapted to these conditions by going into a type of dormancy where leaves senesce (“die back”) and abscise (“fall off”).  By shedding it’s leaves the tree does not need to try and maintain transpiration and instead cannibalizes the nutrients in it’s leaves, taking them into the body of the trunk, and storing them for the spring.  The dead leaves are shed, no longer of any use.

Over the course of the winter perennial plants maintain the following years growth in their buds.  Fall and winter buds are the product of the growing season and represent next years twigs, leaves, and often flowers, which all unfurl the following spring.  Hard scales cover the buds tightly and frost-resistant chemicals concentrate in the buds to ensure their safe passage through the dark, cold months.  Take a look at the tops of oak trees in the winter and see the massive, stout buds all swaying at the summits of our mightiest trees.  They are completely exposed to the wind and cold weather yet they manage to pull through.

The water table becomes very high during the spring as the ground thaws but the trees and bushes are all still dormant, without leaves, and unable to take up water in any extensive amount.  Vernal pools and muddy ground is the result of the water table being so high.  Once plants break dormancy and “leaf-out” transpiration begins again and the water table drops, allowing the ground to dry out.  Available water (i.e not frozen) is key for plants breaking dormancy.

Plant reactions to cold weather in the fall and warm weather in the spring is mediated by a balancing act of several plant hormones.  Ethylene, abscisic acid and cytokinin interact in determining when leaves begin to fade and drop, and when spring buds begin to open again.  The delicate balance of this is such that the plant will protect it’s incipient new growth until it has received plenty of information confirming that it is, indeed, nice outside and will stay nice outside.  Warm snaps in the winter do not immediately cause plants to break dormancy although extended periods of warmth will cause some species to flower and leaf out too early.  An example of this is the extremely warm weather we had in 2012, hitting several seventy and eighty degree days in March.  This extended warm spells caused the fruit trees in Rhode Island to bloom far too early.  When cold weather returned in April many of these tender blossoms were destroyed by frost, greatly impacting the peach and apple crop that year.

To take an object, a thing, and prescribe purpose to it is to treat it teleologically.  Pre-Enlightenment Europeans were said to consider the universe with a Aristotelean teleological scholasticism, which means there was a dominant school (scholastic) of philosophy based on the purpose-driven ideas of Aristotle.  The classic lived example of this philosophy is Thomas Aquinas asking for a favor from a rich friend to buy him all the caged birds at the marketplace.  His friend gladly does so and Aquinas promptly opens all the cage doors, for what is a bird but to fly?

The teleological cynic in us immediately says ‘ah-ha! What about penguins?’  There is no over-arching purpose in a bird to fly because we know of lots of examples of flightless birds.  Also, the anti-ableist in us says ‘slow down, a bird that has lost it’s ability to fly, from an accident, could still live a long, healthy life on a preserve.’ It’s wrong to prescribe purpose to things, in particular living things, because of the inherently oppressive, short-sightedness of what we perceive to be a thing’s value.  Still there is something compelling about Aquinas setting the birds free, something that resonates as just.  Why is that, if you can’t boil it down to ideas of value and purpose?  It’s a bit more clumsy to say what is a bird but to not live in a cage except under certain circumstances where we use other criteria to determine it is within the birds best interest.

A non-living example I like to think of is a house.  What is a house but a place to live in?  Boiled down a house is a non-living thing that’s purpose is to accommodate living things, in most examples in nature for the purpose of creating more living things (bird’s nests, dens, one-family homes).  It’s fair to say that a house is not bound to abide by these purposes.  A house could also be simply a storage facility or it could be a torture chamber, which would be wholly the opposite of a place to live in.  Our society would condemn both of these ideas for a house in various ways.  A house used only for storage on your block would bring everyone’s home values down.  A house used for nefarious purposes would see the owners arrested and the house condemned.  Some events and uses go so far beyond the intention of a building that the building cannot be redeemed.  After the Sandy Hook massacre the entire school was torn down and rebuilt.

A houses purpose is also not to burn down.  You can think of instances when it might be appropriate to burn down a house (for filming a movie or if you are an arsonist) but for the vast amount of homes that are built they are intended to last many years and are intended to avoid destruction.  Think of this when we explore the purpose of soil.

As you’ve probably gathered discussing things in terms of their purposes is frowned upon by modern science because it is seen as antiquated, incomplete, and at worst a fallacious and oppressive way of looking at the world.  Ironically teleology is rife in modern culture and if you are in school studying science, like I did, you will constantly hear teachers chaff as students refer to plants as “wanting to” grow toward the light, or an animal “wanting to do” this or that.  Students were trained well enough never to impart emotion to a butterfly “loving a flower” for this would have been beyond the pale.  No, the teleological slips in the classroom were only slips, nothing that couldn’t be corrected by mechanistic, technical training.  In science’s eyes, this is the human impulse towards anthropomorphism and poetry and should be left to artists to play with and is not a proper way to really understand nature.

How we speak and define soil is an interesting topic.  Regular people like you and me think of soil in simple, pliable terms.  We think of soil as being something that covers the ground and where plants grow or, for that matter, don’t grow, if the soil happens to be exposed or poisoned.  If I held up some farm potting mix or a handful of beach sand and ask “is this soil?” you would probably shrug and say “sure.”  However the definition of soil is more technical and excludes certain things you might consider to be “soil.”  Potting soils for instance, because they are not the naturally occurring result of millennia of erosion and decay, but are rather a human made mix of naturally occurring mineral and organic material, are not technically soil by most definitions.  Even beach sand, though mostly devoid of organic matter, and therefor almost wholly mineral, is still considered soil, even when no plants can be found growing within it.  The beach sand closer to the dunes, where beach grass and other species grow, would be more easily recognized as soil for the presence of plant roots and the beginning of a very remote organic layer.  To many a soil isn’t really a soil until it has become a host to plants, or at least has the potential to foster plant life.

Soil Health is a difficult concept to define and fraught with teleological pitfalls.  Applying the concept of health to non-humans is something that people have not cleanly worked out.  Our dogs and cats are seen as deserving almost the same level of health care as our children.  Farm animals, well, it depends on your point of view.  Wild animals, plants, extrapolated into larger units called ecosystems, are governed by a natural order, one that is beautiful but harsh.  A malnourished wolf or chipmunk is set upon by natural selection, something humans should not tinker with (a common view), except in that we should follow wildlife biologists recommendations and care for these ecosystems as a whole.  “Individual [animals] don’t matter,” my wildlife professor said.  “It is populations of animals we need to concern ourselves with.”  So the health of an individual, sick white-tailed deer is not societies concern, but the health of the white-tail population is.

Soil is an ecosystem, an ecosystem composed of different kinds of organisms, most small and smaller.  It is by far and away the most diverse ecosystem on the planet (fungi alone are estimated to represent between six hundred thousand to ten million species, most having a role in soil ecosystems).  If we were to stick with the definition of health laid out by my wildlife professor we would consider the health of the ecosystem to be based on how “well” the populations of organisms in the ecosystem are doing.  Terms like fitness, fecundity, diversity, reproductive success would all play into the equation.  Generally speaking most of us can think of what an unhealthy soil environment looks like without trying too hard.  A bare, uneven field or yard, for example, with large tracts eroded away from exposure to rainfall or thaw.  The farmer with a sense of soil health can tell just by looking at a field to what degree it is healthy in terms of it’s color, it’s particle aggregation, or the quality of the plants growing on it.  It seems that from agriculture’s point of view a soil’s purpose is to produce crops and it’s health can be accessed by how well it does this.

Leaving the definition of soil here does not take us to the point of fully appreciating the magnitude of the beauty of soil, or it’s higher potentials.  For this we have to step back, stand beside the entire scope of the phenomenon we call soil.  Purpose can be tied to the concept of duty, as if we were talking about the dharma of the soil.  The more we learn about the degradation of our planet’s soils the more we have to give thought to how we have managed our soil’s dharma.  That is to say, are we supporting or hindering our soils in their ability to do their duty?

In Gabe Brown’s book Dirt to Soil he talks about the extent that his home state’s (North Dakota) prairie soil has been degraded from farming over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from having organic matter contents of around 7% down to current averages between 1-2%.  Although this may sound like a small amount of the soil’s volume it is important to remember that soil organic matter is the primary warehouse of soil carbon, each percent containing between ten and twenty tons of carbon in the just the top six inches of soil, and increasing the water holding capacity of the soil by about twenty-thousand  gallons per acre per percent.  Think of all of that land’s organic matter vanishing from the soil and being returned to the atmosphere by conventional methods of farming.  I hear that we have an issue with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

Since Gabe Brown began farming his land in the early nineties his soil organic matter has returned to those pre-ag numbers, because he is farming with the soils dharma in mind, the soils gestalt, the soils purpose.  Many farmers are trying to regenerate their lands and looking to methods such as Gabe’s for the answers to making soil dharma a priority.

To finish where we began, if we can be forgiven for being a little teleological we might be able to stand a little closer to a better way of conceptualizing our treatment of the natural world, soil in particular.  I once heard an extension agent say, when asked what school children needed to understand about farming, “it’s important for them to understand that farming is not Nature.”  This is exactly the opposite of what we need to be telling young people about agriculture.  It is also exactly the opposite of how agriculturalist should be trained.  Look to nature for your model.  See the tall grass prairie, or the New England wildflower meadow and ask what it’s lessons are.  What do you see: diversity of plants and animals (big and small), balanced ratios of predators and prey, balances of perennial and annual plants, balances of biannual and winter annual plants, carbon cycling through grazing, nutrients cycling through penetrating and diverse styles of root systems, ecosystems buffered against disturbances.

If farmers and extension agents don’t recognize this as a model for farming than the land and it’s soil, with it’s potential, it’s purpose, it’s gestalt, it’s dharma, will continue to be deferred.   Unfortunately we do not have time for the next generation to be so poorly served to believe that mankind’s most intimate relationship with nature, agriculture, is nothing more than an adversarial battle to bend nature to our will.