My Favorite Quote from Vandana Shiva (So Far)

“The beauty of the seed is out of one you can get millions. The beauty of the pollinator is it turns that one into the million and that’s an economics of sharing. That’s to me the real economics of growth because life is growing.”

– Dr. Vandana Shiva, from “Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?”

The Wisdom of Wendell Berry

After reading two books (each by a different author) that were full of quotes from Wendell Berry's writings, I figured it was high time I investigated some of his work. It took some searching of San Jose Public Library's catalog to find the books containing the essays most frequently referenced in Shannon Hayes's Radical Homemakers, but I was able to find and check out Berry's The Gift of Good Land and Home Economics. I've already begun plowing through several essays in the former, but it was the foreword that I found especially thoughtful. In particular, the following paragraph for me summarized and underscored the primary reason our species seems to be increasingly indifferent to the plight of the natural systems that support life on our planet, despite the abundance of evidence that our current behavior is very likely to lead to the demise of more than just a few "inconsequential" species:

Soil conservation, Henry Besuden wrote nearly forty years ago, "involves the heart of the man managing the land. If he loves his soil he will save it." There are fewer hearts involved now than there were then, and more soil is being lost. Wes Jackson, writing in 1981, is forced by consideration of the increased loss to the same perception; the cause of waste is "alienation from the land": "Where there is alienation, stewardship has no chance."

Pollan Pegs It

While reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, I was particularly struck by one of his keen observations on the connections between soil and food:

In many ways the mysteries of nutrition at the eating end of the food chain closely mirror the mysteries of fertility at the growing end: The two realms are like wildernesses that we keep convincing ourselves our chemistry has mapped, at least until the next level of complexity comes into view. Curiously, Justus von Liebig, the nineteenth-century German chemist with the spectacularly ironic surname, bears responsibility for science's overly reductive understanding of both ends of the food chain. It was Liebig, you'll recall who thought he had found the chemical key to human nutrition when he identified the macronutrients in food. Liebig wasn't wrong on either count, yet in both instances he made the fatal mistake we'll probably keep repeating until we develop a deeper respect for the complexity of food and soil and, perhaps, the links between the two.