Blog Entry, September 23, In Flight:
A perfect scenario for this entry, contrasting the specter of civilization viewed from 20,000 feet with thoughts on wisdom cultures and their traces on the land. We’re on a flight to California for the Longevity Now Conference. It’s also a perfect time and place for reflection—having just turned 60, I have much on which to reflect. For starters, I remain fascinated by Wisdom (known erringly as Primitive or Traditional) cultures and the upright principles they brought to everyday living. In some ways, the spiritual path we have followed for over 30 years, Eckankar, teaches many of the principles of native living, harmonious living based in an understanding of spiritual reality. Wisdom cultures, for the most part and at their peak expression, were defined by a caring spirit of service, with personal ego set in its proper place as a piece of the identity puzzle and not the leader of the pack. Materialism—the acquisition of power, wealth, stuff—this is the province of Ego (erringly known as Civilized) cultures. Yet, these worlds that seem so mutually exclusive are simply sets (think Boolean algebra) that have very little overlap. Each provides scenarios that allow for circumstances that challenge the spiritual “response ability” of individual Souls, giving opportunities to step outside of comfortable limits to stretch into larger rooms of consciousness. Though I certainly have my opinions as to which cultures demonstrate greater expressions of divine love, I recognize that said Divine Love knows no boundaries and will not be pigeon-holed by cultural limits. Within every human experience lies the seeds of love, and cultural identities are no exception. Ok, down from the dais….
Aimee and I just finished reading Joel Salatin’s Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal. Salatin is the self-effacing eco-farming guru whose Polyface Farms, which lies easily in Virginia’s Shenandoah, is the definition of new/old, wise-wrought local food production. A fellow upstream swimmer, Mr. Salatin, with a wry, almost seething wit, laughs and cries at the absurdity of contemporary farming life and its accompanying swarm of regulations and regulators. As most everyone else outside of the (thankfully!) growing local, grass-fed, pastured, raw dairy food movement lurches toward a kind of Orwellian absurdity surrounding all things food, Salatin and disciples attempt to turn the planet right side up by actually salting the wisdom of our ancestors with some carefully placed innovation to demonstrate how it can and should be done. To top it off, he brings to his book a wealth (there’s that word again) of encounters with governmental do-gooders, automaton bureaucrats, and me-first conservative free marketeers that have been stumbling blocks to every “righteous” (his word) activity he’s every attempted. Although Aimee and I often laughed and cried right along with him, Salatin’s railing against all things governmental often veered into a whiner’s tone. I wouldn’t want to change anything about the book or the man, but some observations come to mind. But before I get to them, I’d like to add that Salatin left no political target safe. His verbal volleys shot down liberals, conservatives, religious fanatics (though he is well-steeped in conservative Christianity), lobbyists, industrial/corporate foodists—anyone with an agenda. His most passionate pleas were simply cries for sanity and common sense. Hard not to argue with that! Yet I found myself constantly trying to widen the picture, which he refreshingly did on many occasions.
Back to those observations:
° Laws and regulations are usually the result of abuses of some sort. The problem comes when well-meaning regulators carry them to extremes. Take, for instance, child labor laws, which he addresses at some length. Turn of the century, dawning-of-the-industrial age factories often employed very young children, in harsh and dangerous conditions, to cheaply turn out goods that then crowned unscrupulous capitalists with coronations of riches. To turn the tide, newly-industrialized countries enacted strict child labor laws that drew extreme limits around youthful, for-profit activities. A paranoiac fear of child labor abuse has kept many of these laws on the books today. But small family farms like Polyface have always benefited and even depended upon young, strong, smart adolescents to perform the farm chores. Most of these youngsters come from the farmers’ families or neighbors. Yet this source of inexpensive labor—which Salatin rightfully advocates as a beneficial training ground for restless young people who all too often veer into toxic activities when left to drift amid a sea of other adolescents—has been largely eliminated by unrealistic, disconnected labor laws that show little respect for tradition or sanity.
° The same reasoning holds true for strict laws that regulate food production stemming from the fear of food-borne pathogens. These laws have historically grown out of disease outbreaks attributed to careless food production and handling, rightly or wrongly. As noted above, well-intentioned bureaucrats and consumer advocates pressure lawmakers to tighten these restrictions until small family farms and locally-based food systems are squeezed into oblivion. These are darts Salatin throws at the left-wing, “we-know-what’s-best-for-you” extremists. Despite his seemingly predictable lean to the right, Salatin leaves the conservatives exposed to his withering fire, as well. Turns out, the do-gooders play right into the hands of the industrialists, because corporate “farming” has the resources and the clout to circumvent the very laws and regulations that were given birth by their practices. This leaves the traditional, grass-based farmer at the mercy of the squeeze play, and many a farm has succumbed to the pressure. Again, Salatin shines a bright light on a system that has thrived on darkness, and the picture is not very pretty.
° How about environmentalism/ecology? That’s a cause most any good liberal can climb on board with. Again, no one with an agenda is spared. The eco-warriors push for water management, organic certification, more regulations. And who’s there to collect the largesse that “rains” down from this stance? You guessed it! The right-wing, free-market, lawyer- protected, government-sanctioned, CAFO-based, efficiency-driven suits that round up the critters into gargantuan pens, henhouses, and pig sty lagoons that conform to the latest “thinking” in environmental management. Organic certification? A tailor-made for corporate farming boon! (How about a new definition for CAFO- Corporate A–holes Farming Organically!) In Salatin’s world view, the more layered the regulatory cake, the greater the industrial dessert. How can a farmer farm?
° I found myself agreeing with Professor Salatin almost universally (I’m awarding him an honorary degree from the University of Common Sense). But I still had this gnawing feeling that just below the surface of his story was a precious fruit ripe for the plucking. Whether it’s the forces of Nature, or the darker side of human Nature, we are nearly always shaped, chiseled, and honed by some sort of adversity. While most of the liberal faction is fashioning ways to shelter us, and the conservative faction looks for the latest tax-shelter, Salatin and the rest of the “swimming upstream” crowd remain outside where the wind blows fiercely from all directions. But this “wind” provides the strengthening resistance that moves characters like Joel Salatin from comfortable mediocrity into uncomfortable greatness. The irony is this: the very forces that Salatin rails against have provided the grist that polished him into an innovative, eco-friendly, eloquently-voiced Master Farmer who is a model for anyone who aspires to pull from the earth the many gifts it has to offer. I am grateful for his offering through both his writing and his living. Salute, Mr. Salatin!
° Just a bit more reflection coming your way since I’m stuck on this plane with nothing else to do. Something I wanted to whisper in Joel’s ear. (Hope he doesn’t mind being on a first-name basis with me 
.) In the Wisdom cultures, for the most part, commerce as we know it was unheard of, mainly because the word “possession” was nearly absent from their vocabulary. Items of real value were intangible qualities that could only be measured through demonstration (re: The Gospel of the Redman, by Ernest Seaton Thompson.) In particular, food was hunted and gathered as needed, in season, through wise principles and methods accumulated through generations of experience. Though most primitive—whoops!—Wisdom cultures were decidedly socialistic in nature, the individual members were held to the highest standards of ethics and compassion. Socialism here was not a dread concept, but rather a wise survival technique that allowed races of peoples to live and thrive in harsh environments without concrete shelter and enabling technology. Food and its realization was not a commodity but a sacred activity, one that nourished body, mind, soul. By subjecting the production of food—the eating of which is the most basic of human activities not regulated by the autonomic nervous system—to the realm of commerce, it becomes an efficiency driven activity that seeks to simply provide the most caloric bang for the buck. This disconnect from natural forces gives a human the opportunity to simply buy their way out of the millennia-old conundrum of having to feed ourselves from Nature’s wild-harvested gifts. Since the supermarket has replaced the forests and the fields as the source of our dinner table plans, the disconnect is complete. Farmers like Joel Salatin are now subjects of a hungry populace who measure food by its bottom line parameters. How much does it cost and how conveniently can I get my hands on it? Salatin is a strong advocate of free marketeering, that given free range (pun intended), quality will win out in the marketplace. Has this historically been the case? Seems the jury is still out since there really hasn’t been a true free market in our history, with the decks usually stacked in favor of one or another player. But, in my humble observation, the making of food as a commodity, so that the onus of feeding ourselves becomes a function of our salaries rather than our wit and wisdom, has necessarily lumped farming in with all the other material based activities and outside its traditional place as a kind of spiritual exercise.
° Oh, and one more irony. We’re on an airplane, flying over the earth to a conference to which most of the other participants traveled in planes, trains, and automobiles, collapsing time and distance in ways unimaginable to Wisdom cultures. And at this conference, experts on “Longevity” will pontificate at one another about the latest and greatest superfood, super-technology, or super-whatever that will extend our stay on planet Earth. This is old news, for many of the world’s longest-living (and I mean really “living” beings) never strayed very far from their own native foodshed, and certainly didn’t “fly” around telling strangers about their secrets. They simply handed the wisdom off to their own tribe who did the same thing until the encroaching Ego cultures squeezed them out of existence. Hmmm….Thanks for stopping by.
