One-Straw Revolutionary

Long, long ago, hip folks in the Beatles era were jabbering about Masanobu Fukuoka’s book, The One-Straw Revolution.  It explained how he grew healthy food via natural farming, a low budget, low impact approach.  On his farm in Japan, Fukuoka was growing grain, fruit, and vegetables without plowing, cultivating, chemicals, compost, fertilizer, fossil energy, erosion, pruning, or regular weeding.  He farmed like this for more than 25 years, and his yields were comparable to those at conventional farms.

The Japanese edition of his book was published in 1975, at a time when oil shocks had spurred interest in energy efficiency.  When the English version was published in 1978, it was an international smash hit, and Fukuoka became a celebrity.  Larry Korn was the book’s translator.  He’s a California lad who worked on Fukuoka’s farm for more than two years.  Now, in 2015, Korn has published One-Straw Revolutionary, which is the subject of this review.  It describes Fukuoka the man, and his philosophy, with glowing praise.

Korn detests conventional industrial farming, because it has so many drawbacks.  A bit less troublesome is organic farming done on an industrial scale.  At the positive end of the spectrum, he sees Fukuoka’s natural farming as very close to the ideal, both environmentally and philosophically.  A bit less wonderful than natural farming are permaculture and old-fashioned small-scale organic farming.

The ideal is something like the California Indians that were fondly described in M. Kat Anderson’s book, Tending the Wild.  They were wild hunter-gatherers who included wild plant seeds in their diet.  They devoted special care to the wild plant species that were important to their way of life.  Most folks would consider this to be mindful foraging — tending, not farming.

These Indians did not till the soil, and were not warlike.  Nobody owned the land.  There were no masters or servants.  There was no market system or tax collectors.  They had a time-proven method for living, and this knowledge was carefully passed from generation to generation.  The Indians were wild, free, and living sustainably — in the original meaning of the word.  When the Spanish invaders arrived, they saw these Indians as lazy, because they worked so little.

Fukuoka, on the other hand, resided in a densely populated industrial civilization, which was eagerly adapting American style industrial agriculture.  While the Indians foraged in a healthy wild ecosystem, Fukuoka worked on an ecosystem that had been heavily altered by centuries of agriculture.  He raised domesticated plants and animals.  Fukuoka was experimenting with radically unconventional methods, and had no traditions or mentors to guide him.

He practiced natural farming on one acre (0.4 ha) of grain field, and ten acres (4 ha) devoted to a mix of fruit trees and vegetables.  When Korn arrived in 1974, Fukuoka was assisted by five apprentices, who were not at all lazy, and rarely had a day off.  Cash had to be generated to purchase necessities and pay taxes, so surplus food had to be produced.  Food shipped off to cities carried away phosphorus, potassium, and other minerals that never returned to the farm’s soil.  Thus, his natural farming was quite different from California tending.

On the plus side, Fukuoka’s experiment benefitted from rich soil and generous rainfall — especially during the growing season.  Vegetables could be grown year round in the mild climate, and two crops of grain could be harvested each year.  On the down side, few succeeded in duplicating his success, even in Japan.  It took years to get the operation working, requiring extra servings of intuition and good luck.  Korn warned, “In most parts of North America and the world the specific method Mr. Fukuoka uses would be impractical.” 

In the natural farming mindset, the strategy should not be guided by intellect; nature should run the show.  Fukuoka talked to plants, asking them for guidance.  When he planted the orchard, he added a mixture of 100 types of seeds to wet clay, made seed balls, and tossed the balls on the land.  Seeds included grains, vegetables, flowers, clover, shrubs, and trees.  Nature decided what thrived and what didn’t.  Within a few years, a jungle of dense growth sorted itself out.  But sometimes nature gave him a dope slap.  In the early days, Fukuoka allowed nature to manage an existing orchard, and he was horrified to watch 400 trees die from insects and disease.

My work focuses on ecological sustainability, at a time when the original meaning of sustainability has largely been abandoned, and replaced by sparkly marketing hype.  I go on full alert when I see “sustainable agriculture.”  In my book, What is Sustainable, I took a look at what Korn calls “indigenous agriculture,” which is often imagined to be sustainable.

California tending was far different from the intensive corn farming on the other side of the Rockies, which led to soil depletion, erosion, population growth, health problems, warfare, and temporary civilizations like Cahokia.  In his book Indians of North America, Harold E. Driver estimated that less than half of North America was inhabited by farmers, but 90 to 95 percent of Native Americans ate crop foods, indicating that farm country was densely populated.  In corn country, defensive palisades surrounded many villages.

In 2015, humankind is temporarily in extreme overshoot, as the cheap energy bubble glides toward its sunset years, and the climate change storms are moving in.  Obviously, feeding seven billion sustainably is impossible.  At the same time, highly unsustainable industrial farming cannot continue feeding billions indefinitely.  It’s essential that young folks have a good understanding of ecological sustainability, and our education system is doing a terrible job of informing them.

The California Indians provide an important example of a vital truth.  When voluntary self-restraint was used to keep population below carrying capacity, people could live sustainably in a wild ecosystem via nothing more complex than hunting and foraging.  They had no need for farming, with its many headaches, backaches, and heartaches.

Korn’s book got exciting near the end.  Farming was just one facet of Fukuoka’s dream.  As a young man, he attended an agriculture college, and then endured a dreary job as a plant inspector.  His mind overloaded, his health fell apart, and he nearly died.  In 1937, he had a beautiful vision, quit his job, and went back home to the farm. 

In his vision, he suddenly realized that all life was one, and sacred.  Nature was whole, healthy, and perfect — and nothing our ambitious intellects imagined could improve this harmonious unity in any way.  Humans do not exist in a realm outside of nature, no matter what our teachers tell us.  Heaven is where your feet are standing.

The world of 1937 was a filthy, crazy, overpopulated train wreck, and this was largely thanks to science, dogmas, and philosophies.  Intellect alienated us from our “big life” home.  Civilization had created a dysfunctional world that was far too complex.  The lives of most people were no longer intimately connected to the natural world.

In agriculture, the herd of experts insisted that plowing, pruning, cultivating, chemicals, and weeding were mandatory for success.  One after another, Fukuoka abandoned these required tasks, made some needed adjustments, and didn’t crash.  His farm got simpler and healthier.

No other animals harm themselves by pursuing science.  Fukuoka realized that people should be like birds.  “Birds don’t run around carefully preparing fields, planting seeds, and harvesting food.  They don’t create anything… they just receive what is there for them with a humble and grateful heart.”  Bingo!

How can we reorient to nature?  “For most of us, that process begins by unlearning most of the things we were taught when we were young.”  The healing process requires abandoning many, many beliefs and behaviors that our culture encourages.  We need to waste less, spend less, and earn less, take only what we need, and nothing more.  “Wearing simple clothing, eating simple food, and living a humble, ordinary life elevates the human spirit by bringing us closer to the source of life.”

Korn, Larry, One-Straw Revolutionary, Chelsea Green, White River Junction, Vermont, 2015.

The Earth Has a Soul

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was born in Kesswil, Switzerland, a wee lakeside hamlet that had changed little since the Middle Ages.  His rustic upbringing gave him the gift of intimate contact with the natural world, a profound source of meaning for him: “Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous.”  Like his mother, Jung had the ability to access his archaic mind.  He had an old soul that was intimately connected with all living creatures, and to the world of dreams.  This gave him the unusual ability to observe people and events with extreme clarity, as they truly were.

From the sweet pinnacle of a tranquil, wholesome childhood, the rest of his life was a stunning downhill plunge, as the civilized world fell into ever-growing chaos and catastrophe — rapid industrialization, urbanization, population explosion, two world wars, mustard gas, atomic bombs, holocaust, the rise and fall of Hitler and Stalin.  It was an excellent time to become a famous psychiatrist, because this new reality was a steaming cauldron of intense insanity.

Jung provided the world with a new model for understanding the mind.  For almost the entire human journey, we had obeyed the laws of nature, like all other animals did.  But with the emergence of domestication and civilization, we began violating the laws of life, snatching away some of nature’s power — power that did not belong to us.  This cosmic offense created a break that shifted us onto a path of suffering.  The gods are now punishing us for our immature and disrespectful impulses.

Jung left behind a huge body of writings, most of which are of little interest to general readers.  Meredith Sabini heroically combed through the mountain of words, extracted passages about our relationship with nature, and published them as The Earth Has a Soul.  It stitched together snippets from many sources, from different phases of his life, so it’s not as flowing and focused as a discourse written from scratch, but it’s an important collection of provocative ideas.

In recent decades, thinkers have tried to explain why the roots of the Earth Crisis emerged several thousand years ago.  Most have diagnosed the root of today’s problems as rapid, out-of-control cultural evolution — our skills at learning, communication, and tool making evolved far more quickly than our genes did, and this pushed us dangerously out of balance. 

Jung would agree with this theory, but his perception of the problem was far more complex.  For almost our entire journey, humankind was guided by instinct, a form of intelligence that was magnificently refined by millions of years of continuous improvement.  Like other animals, we lacked self-awareness, or consciousness.  Like other animals, we could think and strategize, but we remained unconscious, and perfectly functional.

Jung thought that consciousness became apparent in civilized cultures maybe 4,000 years ago, and it has been increasing ever since.  The expansion of consciousness went into warp drive when the era of modern scientific thinking arrived, and we plunged into an industrial way of life.

In remote, isolated locations, there are still a few “primitive” cultures which remain largely unconscious, guided by their normal instinctive intelligence.  They do not engage in abstract thinking.  They do not destroy their ecosystem.  They continue to obey nature’s laws.  But they are being driven into extinction by you-know-who. 

Our conscious mind was new, infantile, incomplete, unstable, and easily injured.  Jung saw it as a tiny boat floating in a vast ocean of unconscious knowledge.  Like a fish out of water, we were separated from our ancient oceanic home, an unpleasant traumatic shock.  In the good old days, we lived in an enchanted world where everything was sacred.  But science and technology have dragged us away into a miserable manmade world where nothing is holy, and everyone is restless, anxious, and neurotic.

Consciousness was an extremely powerful two-edged sword, equal parts blessing and curse: “Unfortunately, there is in this world no good thing that does not have to be paid for by an evil at least equally great.  People still do not know that the greatest step forward is balanced by an equally great step back.”

On the shore of Lake Zurich, Jung built a summer retreat out of rugged cut stones, a sacred refuge for solitude and contemplation.  He cooked on a wood fire, raised food in his garden, and drew water from a well.  There was no phone or electricity, because the technology of modernity was certain to frighten away the souls of his ancestors.

Primitive people were “hellishly afraid of anything new” because they feared “unknown powers and indefinite dangers.”  This was just as true for modern folks, even if we pretended otherwise.  “Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with even wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots.”  In 1912 he wrote that America “does not understand that it is facing its most tragic moment: a moment in which it must make a choice to master its machines or to be devoured by them.”

Jung had an intense dislike for modernity.  A city dweller was reduced to a tiny, insignificant ant.  Humankind was moving toward insectification.  Overpopulation was destroying everything.  Growing crowds multiplied the stupidity level, whilst sharply decreasing our intelligence and morality.  Crowds were incubators for psychic epidemics, which were far more destructive than natural disasters.  Excited mobs often created explosions of madness that nothing could stop.  “The most dangerous things in the world are immense accumulations of human beings who are manipulated by only a few heads.” 

In his psychiatric work, Jung helped patients heal by encouraging them to seek guidance from their dreams.  Our unconscious has all the answers we need, but we usually avoid looking there, because we are afraid of it.  We overload our lives with distractions to discourage reflection, and to hide from our darkness.  We live at a rapid pace, and never leave a moment for looking inward.

Tragically, Jung never came to know a real live hunter-gatherer.  He never spent a year or three with the Pygmies or Bushmen, people who lived in the traditional human manner, and lived quite well.  If he had, his thinking would certainly have taken quite a different path — and very likely a far more powerful one.

He did take several brief expeditions to New Mexico, Africa, and India, to spend a little time with people who were neither Christian nor European.  Contact with these miserable “primitive” people gave him feelings of superiority, because they seemed to be neurotic, “tormented by superstitions, fears, and compulsions.”  But they also scared him.  He once left Africa because of a powerful dream.  He worried that he was in danger of “going black under the skin.”  Did he come frighteningly close to breaking free from his civilized cage?

For Jung, returning to simple, primitive, sustainable living was not a possible solution.  “The wheel of time cannot be turned back.  Things can, however, be destroyed and renewed.  This is extremely dangerous, but the signs of our time are dangerous too.  If there was ever a truly apocalyptic era, it is ours.”  He believed that salvation could be found by training the conscious mind to receive guidance from the unconscious realm, the world of dreams.

His recommendations for healing included: getting closer to nature, living in small communities (not cities), working less, engaging in reflection in quiet solitude, reconnecting with our past, avoiding distractions (newspapers, television, radio, gramophones), paying serious attention to our dreams, and simplifying our lifestyles.

In 1961, the year he died, Jung wrote: “Civilization is a most expensive process and its acquisitions have been paid for by enormous losses, the extent of which we have largely forgotten or have never appreciated.”  In his final days in 1961, Jung had visions of massive catastrophes striking in 50 years.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Earth Has a Soul, Edited by Meredith Sabini, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 2008.

The Continuum Concept

Jean Liedloff was a New Yorker who went to Europe and pursued modeling and journalism work.  She met some Italians who were leaving for the jungles of Venezuela to hunt for diamonds.  On a whim, she joined their expedition.  Over the course of five expeditions, she spent two and a half years living with Stone Age people.  As she bounced back and forth between the modern world and wild freedom, she became acutely aware of the staggering differences between the two ways of life.

The natives were “the happiest people I have ever seen.”  She found their lack of unhappiness to be spooky.  The adults maintained a high state of social harmony — even when everyone was drunk.  Their children were all well-behaved, never argued, never hit each other, never had tantrums, never suffered boredom, and were never punished by their parents. 

Returning to the modern world was always a ghastly experience, because the people were so strikingly unhappy.  Why?  Liedloff explored this question in her book, The Continuum Concept.  It compares wild people to civilized people through the eyes of an eyewitness reporter, and tries to explain how communities of the same species could be as different as night and day.

Liedloff observed that the misery of civilized people began shortly after birth, when the newborn was immediately carried away from its mother, placed in a crib in the nursery, and left to scream.  Welcome to civilization, Bubba!  The sense of wellbeing enjoyed in the womb came to an abrupt end at birth, and most of these kids would never again recover it.

The Indians, on the other hand, raised their children in accordance with ancient instincts — a specific sequence of normal developmental experiences that Liedloff called the human continuum.  From the moment of their birth, newborns were held and nursed and loved — and this warm, secure, continuous contact lasted for months, until the child indicated that it was ready to begin the creeping and crawling phase.  Raised in the Indian manner, the kids lived with a sense of wellbeing throughout their entire lives.  They were happy.

Our animal instincts are very much in tune with our evolutionary journey.  In the civilized world, “primitive” instincts were disregarded, and society was dominated by intellect.  The Indians were intelligent, and they knew how to reason, but for them intellect was a servant of instinct.  The rise of civilization corresponded with the rise of intellect.  Unbridled intellect is the father of unstable societies, like the one outside your window.

Today, civilized mothers are so removed from natural life that they actually have to read books by childrearing “experts” like Dr. Spock to learn how to raise their young.  But when these non-continuum instructions are followed, civilized mothers “produce children they cannot love, who grow up like themselves, anti-self, antisocial, incapable of giving, destined forever to go hungry.”

Indian children, raised via time-proven instincts, develop normally, in a sequence designed by evolution.  Civilized children do not.  We miss vital developmental steps in childhood, and this frequently leads to adults who have infantile components in their personalities, for their entire lives.  Here is the most striking paragraph in the book: 

“Man can ‘survive’ in appallingly anti-continuum conditions, but his well-being, his joy, his fulfillment as a whole human being, can be lost.  From many points of view he might be better off dead, for the life force, in its ceaseless tending toward repair of damage and completion of developmental phases, among its instruments employs anxiety, pain, and an array of other ways of signaling that things are wrong.  Unhappiness in all its forms is the result.  In civilization, a frequent outcome of the operating of the system is constant misery.”

She wasn’t fond of modern society.  Liedloff eventually became a psychotherapist, and she used what she had learned to help some people reduce their inner pain.  She didn’t discover miracle cures, but she believed that some degree of healing was possible for some people.  Her book has helped many new mothers avoid making some of the classic mistakes. 

She presents us with compelling descriptions of both ways of life, and these fit nicely with studies done by many others.  The symptoms of our illness are numerous and easy to see.  But her diagnosis is primarily focused on the child-rearing process, and I suspect that this might be too narrow. 

There are many other major differences between wild societies and civilization.  Wild people live in wild lands filled with wild animals, and they spend most of their time outdoors.  They rarely experience strangers, crowds, or machines.  They are not controlled by others, they are free.  Their sense of rightness is not suffocated by contact with school systems, corporate systems, religious systems, or greedy, exploitive, dishonest people.  Civilization damages us in numerous ways, throughout our lives.

The good news here is that we can quit blaming our parents for screwing us up, because the entire society is screwed up.  “All one can discover from horizon to horizon are victims of victims.”  The bad news is that we are locked into powerful, unhealthy patterns of living, and damaged parents create damaged children.  There are no simple solutions.  The good news is that Peak Cheap Energy is going to disrupt our patterns of living, and one of the possible outcomes is positive, beneficial change.  Liedloff provides us with some important pointers for the road ahead.

Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept — In Search of Happiness Lost, Addison-Wesley, New York, 1977.