In the last year at the City of Portland (1999) I found a niche as the clerical specialist for the soils engineers who reviewed plans for building, checking for soil stability and flood potential. I gave each man a copy of a little paperback I loved: "Dirt, the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth" by William Bryant Logan. The six of them were baffled. They were engineers and this was a poetic, if fact-based, book. I don't know if they even read them.
I'm in a bit of the same position on Twitter. I'd been tracking politics and Western Canadian indigenous people, esp Alberta. Then the algorithm recognized that these are the same thing and suggested these two soil tweeters. I should have looked for them, but I didn't know they were there. They know each other and there are more of them.
BuildSoil "MA Ecological Design, landscape planning, geospatial, ClimateRepair/SoilCarbon obsessed. eMergy literate. RTs may not be my view. he/his. Occupied traditional lands of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Cowlitz bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla & many other tribes."
Stuart Somerville. "Father & Husband. Farmer. Bagpiper. Trying to live in a good way."
The first tweeter is in the Willamette Valley (I know about these tribes because I grew up in Portland, visiting Roseburg, where my mother grew up and was once a Strawberry Princess in Roseburg and handed the chief of the Kalapuyas his bowl of berries and cream.)
The second is a highly literate guy who tweets from atop his tractor, saying he is "in his office." He also has a strong ethnic religious background. He reminds me of my two years in Saskatoon when the "sustainable ag" farmers rented our Unitarian congregational hall for their meetings and let me sit in with them. The energy was so strong it nearly burst our walls.
People my age (79) are likely to be the first urban generation in their family which is probably more significant than the first college grad generation, which I and my sibs were. My grandfather was an admirer of Rodale and the Nearings, a little too early for "Small Is Beautiful." As people begin to understand that we must redesign the way we live, I would recommend these profound and practical people as well as Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry. They don't just address the practical work of restoring land in all its variety and profusion, but also pass along the delight of being out there, so deep that it speaks to "humans" who arose as a phenomenon of "humus."
This morning my tweets included the recommendation of this book, which I want to read though I'm in dryland farming country probably best used for grazing rather than the endless miles of wheat, which it doesn't mention. Another tweet (Somerville) spoke of the drought up north. The related massive Alberta wildfires started early: already the smoke is filtering in my Montana windows strong enough to smell. And Somerville again spoke of the other end of the scale, the stupendous floods through Midwest crop lands that are destroying towns and making fields impossible to plant. It looks as though this will be a seriously short production year. The Ukrainians -- who escaped Stalin's imposed starvation by emigrating to Saskatchewan where Canada was trying to fill up the land with Europeans -- are shuddering at the possibility of consequences they recognize.
Potatoes are one of the six crops for survival in the book above. My Scots grandfather in South Dakota was first a school superintendent but then went to raising potatoes in Swan River, Manitoba, with a plow pulled by horses. Then he joined the industrial revolution by sub-contracting American farm machinery for tractors. Ended in old age with two lots, just outside Portland, where he gardened intensively until death. His youngest brother became an expert on grasses and forbs.
What I'm saying here is that my connection to people of the land is real and even "documented." Which is lucky, since I'm no kind of gardener because I sort of avoid reality. Even my houseplants suffer from lack of attention. But I AM a thinker and walk through the theories with relish. A fav (I should read it again) is "Topsoil and Civilization" by Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale. (I955) It's as useful as Jared Diamond's work.
I have not left thinking about politics, the work of the people. It is plain that the land, particularly food production more than resource development like oil or steel, is the basis of forming a country. The historical push/pull and economic opportunism that formed our States are outdated. We need to move to ecologically defined areas with common interests, small enough to monitor for corruption and invasion by mafias from other countries.
The work is far enough along that there are already alliances and regional authorities that work together for common goals. We still get surprises like the high tension electrical lines that set massive fires in the California mountains. Population still needs to settle. We could easily be ecologically defined and yet globally aware of far impacts like climate change or commercial satellite networks so bright they prevent dark nights.
I think the insight that deactivating the state lines, surveyed defined boundaries, in order to go to mega-city centers that organically serve areas, something like postal or pipe distribution networks, make far more sense. But there's a population density aspect of culture and the nature of the residents that deserve thought. You don't have opera or people who love attending them in the vastness of desert. Manhattan may be outdated. It will be flooded for sure.
In the end we're looking at something near-religious, a shift from the metaphor of a king in the sky to the new understanding of Deep Time written in traces long before life, a hundred hominin models before today's people, an exquisitely calibrated fleshly functioning body, and an unlimited Cosmos. Our deepest religious impulse now should not be eternal life but rather participation in all of existence. WE are the creators, not all-powerful, but each in our little particle of time/space with the capacity to organize ecologies, systems with enormous efficacy. We receive a zillion molecular events and begin a zillion more.
Hey, do you Canadians still think about Stan Rowe? Lovely Albertan who taught in Saskatoon.
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