GMO ’ s , chemical fertilizers , herbicides , pesticides and long-distance shipping and trucking , all of which contribute to global warming . In addition , most of our modern-day food systems generally disregard the nutritional quality of the food that they produce as long as it looks good . Driven by profits , food producing corporations also seem to give little thought to the health and wellbeing of people and of our increasingly ailing planetary home .
In our current world steeped in its all-pervasive use of machinery , digital technology , artificial urban environments , and the processing of information as our principal industry , many people , but especially the young , are deeply disconnected from the larger natural environment and the processes that ensure
Eco-farm corps harvesting crops , Santa Cruz , New Mexico . our survival . revolution of nearly ten thousand years ago . On the upside of this equation , however , is the fact that agriculture ’ s surpluses have always insured survival during lean times while hunting and foraging did not .
The more hands that applied themselves to a given task , such as sowing or reaping , the lighter the work became and the quicker it was completed . At the dawn of the agricultural revolution , small groups of people aggregated into extended families , tribes , villages and towns . In such units , a hundred or a thousand pair of hands functioned as a single , large pair of hands responsible for the production of food stuffs . This arrangement enabled human communities to survive and even thrive in places such as the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East , China , Mesoamerica and Peru from where agriculture spread to the rest of the world .
Today , in our country we have relatively few interruptions in our food supply chain although they are beginning to show up and could become more frequent , particularly as pandemics and erratic climate change events begin to take their toll on our infrastructure and society in general . Sadly , what we now have is a food production system heavily reliant on fossil fuels ,
They are also alienated from one another and look despairingly at their options for finding meaningful work in the years to come .
It speaks volumes about our society that we insist that by age five or six , children must be thoroughly versed in the workings of computers that overwhelm the senses with endless messaging and imagery without their ever having experienced much of the natural or even social world to balance out this deluge of information . Such a development is bound to distort young people ’ s sense of nature ’ s workings at a time when humans need to grow more sensitive and
20 plenty I Summer growing 2021