• he/him

guy who was too into deus ex


gardening-in-the-dark
@gardening-in-the-dark

There is a school of thought with landrace garden seed selection that goes something like "don't bother weeding, protecting your crops from pests, replenishing your soil, or irrigating: anything that survives that STUN method (Severe, Total, Utter Neglect) will be pretty resilient in terms of genetics and while your initial yields will be very poor, it will pay off in future years".

I think there is a lot of coherence to this position, but I don't quite agree with it. I mean, sure, it's absolutely a mug's game to purchase seeds that have been selected to produce good-looking (maybe not tasty!) yields in perfect growing conditions, grow them in imperfect conditions, blame yourself for not doing it right when your imperfect conditions cause crop failure, and then repeat the process the next year, resolving to keep on top of the weeding/watering/feeding/pruning/whatever. Selecting for some traits you actually want (taste, ease of harvest, good storage capabilities, reasonable hardiness to whatever your local unstable climate might throw at your garden) is a good idea.

But most of the annual vegetables and grasses we humans like to eat are opportunistic plants that do best in slightly disturbed soil conditions, and most soils, left to themselves, go through a process of ecological succession. The growing environment, left to itself, is constantly changing. There will be some localised disturbance (like a flood depositing silt, or a fire, or a huge flock of birds gathering to migrate and leaving their mineral-rich droppings behind, or a herd of bison trampling the grass, or a volcanic eruption, or....) and first you get the "weeds" and wildflowers, then shrubs and vines and then smaller shorter-lived trees (e.g. birch) and then forest.... or some similar process if the area is a desert or tundra or something. Humans have figured out that some of the tastiest food grows in those disturbed areas and we've figured out that the plants will grow better if we temporarily increase nutrient bioavailability by creating some kind of disturbance, whether that's tillage, swiddening, or creating metric fucktonnes of compost and dumping them where we wanna grow stuff. We dance around the edges of these areas of disturbance, eating the annuals and then some of the perennials too, creating new areas of disturbance or just maintaining the ones with the best sunlight. If you plant a tomato or a stand of wheat deep in bramble thickets they are not gonna make it. If you plant a blackberry deep in a forest with no clearing it is not gonna make it.


corhocysen
@corhocysen

i think sometimes people forget that even the hunter-gatherers didn't just let nature run its course. messing with nature is basically a defining trait of the human species, and no one's actually willing to give it up entirely. for one, it would mean the death of millions of people, because such climax ecosystems can't actually support the number of people we have.

so we should be honest to ourselves about this. the goal shouldn't be no intervention, it should be picking our interventions to work with nature instead of against it, where possible. but sometimes against it, too! because nature, for all its beauty, is still an amoral system that doesn't give a shit about human flourishing, or even sustainability.


calliope
@calliope

There's a fascinating and revolting history of the rhetoric of "untouched nature" in colonialism, which exacerbates this issue for us today. You can see, in the journals of Europeans in both the Americas and the Pacific Islands, discussing how remarkable the "Edenic" paradise was, in which food seemed to grow itself. Nature was providing with no work.

Except, and I'm sure you see where this is going, the indigenous people worked the land. They just didn't work it like Europeans.

Even more "fun" fact: this is overtly one of the ways Europeans excused stealing indigenous land in the Americas. It was a topic, people debated it (naturally they didn't include the people whose land they were stealing, you know). But a significant amount of European traditional law about ownership hinged on working the land.

This is how squatting rights work, in fact. It's not enough for someone to squat on a piece of land for, say, a decade. They must also A: work to improve it while B: demonstrating the original legal owner did not work it in the same time.

This is embedded even further than we might realize. Rousseau was deeply affected by these visions of marvelous "savage" lands and the "primitive" peoples. He went on to imagine that we were all that way once. What he was doing was arguing with Hobbes, but in so doing, he created what, to this day, most of us who are brought up in the European diaspora (for lack of a better term, forgive me, I've been drinking lol) think of as "natural" life.

And, I mean. Native Australian and New Zealand people regularly burned the flora, because it helps things grow better without growing so much it chokes itself out. They just didn't destroy the soil tilling it and planting the same damn thing over and over.

What we can sort of conclude is that in many significant ways these cultures were more advanced than European culture. They knew what would and wouldn't work in their terrain in ways Europeans still don't. We had to learn about rotating crops in grade school, where I'm from, and some people in the area still don't do it. Never mind the, you know, deleterious effects of shit like coal mining on food and so on, so forth.

And because I'm a particular kind of sicko, here's a way this is reflected in science fiction: there are two basic ways to describe how a person or a people live within their surroundings. I can't remember the terms (hopefully one of you will, because it's driving me crazy). But think of Robinson's Mars trilogy, right? Where it begins with terraforming Mars and then some of the more ecologically-minded scientists begin to think that was a mistake, and they should instead change themselves to fit into the Martian systems.

So 20th century science fiction became yet another field of discourse for this thorny problem to work itself out. See also the work of Ursula K. Le Guin.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @corhocysen's post:

Yeah -- we are as much part of nature as beavers and frogs and starlings and spiders and rivers and cholera are part of nature. Protecting our long-term interests does mean protecting or increasing biodiversity, at the very least, and we can't do that without interventions, but beavers also make interventions. Thinking we can survive at all without having any impact on the complex system that supports all life (including us) is some dualist nonsense.

Small farms with lots of hand labour (or draught animals if you can feed them) can probably support the number of people we have. But those small farms are going to need woodlots and pastures and composting toilets and all sorts; they would increase biodiversity, at least compared to over-financialised fossil-fueled industrial-scale monoculture farming which uses something like 10kcal of fossil energy for every 1kcal of food energy it produces. (I don't have a citation to hand, and I don't know whether that figure includes the fertilisers that come from fossil fuels and the transport and processing of the end results, or just running the tractor for the actual production of the ten or so crops a huge amount of our civilization depends on).

in reply to @calliope's post:

Better agricultural practices certainly existed in Europe, too; examples I can think of include swidden agriculture (burning a small area of forest, growing food on it for a few years, then burning a new patch and letting ecological succession take over), water meadows (semi-controlled flooding of a naturally-occuring floodplain in spring so that silt deposits enrich the fertility of the meadow, usually used as pasture), hedge-laying, and coppice management. But most of these methods aren't as conducive to rent-seeking by an owner class, which will prioritise commodity crops like grain and lumber and wool over root vegetables and firewood.

None of that excuses the genocide white people visited on.... well, everywhere really. But Europeans also had traditional agricultural practices that at least limited the damage done by agriculture and could be sustainable -- they just couldn't compete with demand for commodities.

I'm pretty sure low-temperature managed fire was part of indigenous land management on Turtle Island, too, FWIW. I've seen it proposed that the Little Ice Age in Europe was partly due to a reduction in the greenhouse effect because so many people died of smallpox and measles that the forest grew quite a bit more (and sequestered quite a bit more carbon) for several years running. I haven't followed this up but it certainly seems plausible; I would think that the bubonic plague years in Europe would also have contributed to the effect.

I don't know the right words for the impose-our-will-on-the-environment Vs adapt-ourselves-to-our-environment thing. I tend to think a lot about tending systems rather than plants, and about experiments and complex conversations rather than inputs and outputs and plans, though a lot of the time my part of the conversation looks very much like a plan.