On Recovering Something Like Eden
This is the first part in a series on perennial agriculture.
It's hard to think about leaving when everything comes alive. This time of year the last daffodils show their faces and the wild peonies hint at revealing theirs, the grapes and figs unfurl and freeze back on a cold night and the wet chervil crushed underfoot makes the whole world smell like parsley. The snow turns to water in the mountains and fills the pond and ducks fire off the surface like fat flapping missiles.
The lilacs recently burst their pastel knuckles. People come to Julian in Spring to see them. Roadside stands pack clusters in buckets and make a nice bit of side cash selling them to tourists. But the opening lines of TS Eliot's The Waste Land flicker in my head as a reminder that the desert has not stopped its march to the sea and before long the grass will bleach and shrivel like Gardens of Adonis.1
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
We should be getting ready to plant potatoes, and potting on the peppers and tomatoes to larger soil blocks. Instead we're painting, fixing, organizing and working to finish the bathroom build we started a year ago to get the place ready to sell.
Hopefully in a month or two we'll be back in Oregon's Willamette Valley in search of fifteen acres to plant chestnuts and hazelnuts. I've tried to nail down my fascination with these particular trees and piece together a story that fits together neatly, but as with the rest of the living world, the reasons bleed into each other and keep going further back until all that's left is a tangled web of thought that forms an arrow. Which I suppose is how human motivation works.
Making the connection between the Fall from Eden and the origins of agriculture is a well trodden and somewhat boring path — the idea that we once lived in easy affluence before exile from the garden, cursed by some wrong turn or lust for power to scratch out a living from the dirt. Too fated and teleological, it overlooks the fact that no single decision led humanity off the cliff.
Many societies throughout history veered back and forth in cycles, oscillating between social structures and methods of subsistence as the seasons changed.2 The Nambikwara of Brazil studied by Claude Lévi-Strauss spent the rainy season farming in large egalitarian hilltop villages and the rest of the year in small forager bands under the leadership of dictator chiefs. The Great Plains Cheyenne and Lakota ditched agriculture after domesticating Spanish horses gone feral, living primarily in loose semi-nomadic groups but rendezvousing for the bison hunt each year, organized by a rotating police force. The Kwakiutl in the Pacific Northwest went so far as to use different names in the summer and winter, while the Inuit one-upped them by switching partners and religions.3
Wheat itself, the poster-child for domestication, did not fully lose its wildness for 3000 years at the dawn of the Neolithic. The key genetic mutations that tame wheat can occur in twenty to thirty years using simple and intuitive techniques, meaning people probably didn’t try that hard to do it. Agriculture originated as a relaxed affair, with communities exploiting the rich soils on the edges of rivers and lakes that swelled in spring, scattering seed where it seemed opportune.4
Until the current global monoculture oozed into every corner of the world, the line between hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist remained fuzzy. Indigenous methods of producing food went completely over the heads of Europeans exploring the Americas, who were confused by the lack of plowed fields and straight rows. In many parts of the new world people managed landscapes in dimensions long forgotten by the colonists, across vertical layers and time. Amazonians would clear fields on the bluffs at the edge of high water and plant manioc and other annual crops, as well as their preferred types of staple fruit and nut trees — coco-palm and sapodilla, tucumá and acai. As they repeated this pattern again and again and the trees grew tall and shaded the manioc fields they gradually recast the Amazon as a vast forest garden composed primarily of species useful to humans, but varied and ecologically rich at the same time.5
California natives set cold fires that moved slow through the grasslands every handful of years.6 Two years for hazel shoots that grew straight and good for baskets. Four or five to keep brush down in the redwoods or burn the piling oak leaf duff, kill overwintering beetles and avoid wormy acorns. The regularity prevented fuel buildup and the danger of the climbing megafires prevalent today and kept things open and park-like, ideal for game. Diversity reigned among plant and animal communities as well as cultures and languages. No untouched wilderness this, amidst the burning, coppicing, pruning, the transplanting of edible bulbs. Wilderness was a pejorative, meaning a landscape humans had neglected to care for and steward.7
So it wasn’t a fall, then. More like a lazy meander away from the garden. I picture Adam and Eve returning one evening surprised to find the gate locked, cherub with flaming sword standing in front cleaning his fingernails. They beg and plead but the bored cherub (angels not being moved by the whining of man) shrugs his shoulders and tells them they aren’t on the list.
That California had been architected by humans for their own purposes escaped John Muir as well, who, not seeing fields of grain in Yosemite, puzzled at feeling food poor in so rich a wilderness. If he had tossed his bread aside and learned to eat acorns and pine nuts, and geophytes8 like camas and cluster-lily and wild onions, he might have felt food rich, and not surrounded by so much wilderness. He would have joined the company of his Druid ancestors, who once shook off their own reliance on grain and returned to a culture that consumed hazelnuts as their staple.9
In Muir’s day the San Joaquin Valley, now a scabrous archetype of industrial agriculture, was still marshland, home to millions of antelope and tule elk and legions of migrating waterfowl and grizzlies. Drive up the grapevine through central California today and you’ll see drab fields and signs declaring Congress created dust bowl. The western section of the Tulare Lake basin looks like tundra from the salt crusted on the surface — nothing grows there anymore.10 The contrast seems to encapsulate the core of the problem in the way we sustain ourselves. It takes what was beautiful and alive and degrades and poisons it. It erases complexity and self-organization. It kills what wants to live and coddles what wants to die. And it won’t last anyway.
Modern agriculture relies on synthetic fertilizers derived from a waning fossil fuel supply while steadily eroding the topsoil. Hostile to the animals it raises in confinement and filth as well as the wildlife whose habitat it destroys, it breeds juggernaut diseases resistant to the antibiotics pumped into livestock and the chemicals and pesticides in which crops bathe. In the west, more than a million acres of some of the most productive farmland in the world could eventually go out of production due to excess salinity caused by irrigation.11 Which depends, of course, on whether or not there is still water left to irrigate with by then.
My aim here is not to idealize indigenous cultures. They were people, and had their faults. What I mean to say is that the current system isn’t working all that well, so it seems logical to look elsewhere for models — a self-satisfied scarfing down of Impossible Burgers for dinner in the name of climate change is not going to fix things. Observing that humanity can be a beneficial species rather than a leech might be a good first step.
The French philosopher Bruno Latour has framed our current predicament as a conflict between systems of production and systems of engendering. Systems of production view humanity as the central locus and shoulder responsibility for mechanics — we build mammoth dams and in fifty years they silt up and stop working, and by then the salmon have disappeared.12 Systems of engendering extend the self to encompass the ecosystem and take responsibility for genesis and process — in northeastern India the Khasi and Jaintia weave bridges from the aerial roots of rubber fig trees. It takes thirty years of training the roots, but you can still walk across some over half a millennium old.13
Latour suggests that we give up our project of control and coercion while accepting the obligation of caring for a particular territory. Doing so means working out a distributed science that cares more about the vitality and heat on the ground than the coldness of Mars, the life in the soil more than an infinite regress of subatomic particles, and views things from the inside instead of detached and far away. It means shuffling our values a bit.14
I thought about control a lot last year, in the process of growing my largest garden to date. After rototilling and turning over the soil a foot deep, I cut some of the dead black locusts that languished near the pond, bucked them into eleven foot sections, pounded them into the ground three feet deep to form an eight foot tall fortress that would defend against all but the most determined deer. I stretched chicken wire across the bottom half to keep out rabbits and ground squirrels, and fit manzanita trimmings into the upper part. I formed neat rows and spread freshly chipped mulch between them. The potatoes and corn and tomatoes and peppers grew beautifully, but the squash, peas, tepary beans, and cabbage endured a siege from the beginning. Squirrels can dig pretty damn deep, you see, and they climb chicken wire without batting an eye. So I trapped and shot them and left them for the turkey vultures. Still they came in waves and tormented the crops. I killed over a hundred from May through October, and I’m not sure how much it helped.
It’s not hard to justify killing squirrels when framed as I eat or they eat. Death is part of life, some creatures must die for others to live, and so on. But something rankled me still. I’m not convinced that three thousand square feet is better now than before it became a citadel of potatoes, when it was a meadow of sedge and checkerbloom. Maybe it’s just an inkling that we can do better than one dimensional walled veggie patches, even when those plots are well tended. Or that I know the small violence of my own garden, where I care about the ecology, is writ large and thoughtless at the industrial scale. Could be that I’m weary of the misplaced human impulse to impose our own desires on the earth instead of shaping them around what it provides already, and frustration that I haven’t worked harder to do it myself.
Every year the coast live oaks and California black oaks drop heaps of acorns without human intervention that amount to nothing, when we could be eating them. We’ve certainly done it before. The ancient word for oak in Tunisia is the meal bearing tree.15 Though anyone who has spent time processing acorns knows that it takes forever (pounding, picking, husking, grinding, leaching, roasting) and we’re all very busy doing important things, some nut trees don’t require as much labor, and streamlining the process seems like fairly low hanging fruit for modern technology.16
So forging a subsistence ecosystem based on perennial plants seems worth trying.17 When trees grow on land enriched by the manure of the grazing animals that pass beneath they don’t need synthetic fertilizer. They build soil over time and preserve its structure by shielding it from the pounding rain. When selected appropriately for the climate, they don’t need irrigation. They provide shade and habitat for wildlife. Wheat and other annuals must undertake the Sisyphean task of rebuilding themselves from scratch every year, while perennials draw on their past work and get months of additional photosynthesis as a result.18 Given the choice between the most well cared for annual farm and a forest garden, with its myriad niches and oddities, unique places to explore, trees to climb, and if you want to get even more practically idyllic itinerant beavers at work constructing wetlands from scratch while busting the ornery neighbor’s culverts, I’d bet a curious eight year old chooses the forest garden every time. Frankly, the curious eight year old test seems like as good a metric for culture in general as anything.
Models of this type of working landscape still exist — the Spanish dehesa has persisted in different guises for six thousand years, where Iberian black-footed pigs hoover acorns under the shade of oak trees, grow fat in autumn and become the most expensive pork in the world.19 Merino sheep and fighting bulls graze the grasses in between, which doubles as hunting grounds for deer and wild boar. Pruned branches provide firewood and charcoal. Every nine years the cork oaks have their bark stripped to make bottle stoppers, flooring, shoes, and a range of other products. Wheat, beans, chickpeas, and sunflowers grow in the open spaces. Pound for pound, dehesas yield more than modern agricultural systems, but instead of one big silo of corn, they produce smaller amounts of honey, mushrooms, pork, truffles, cork, charcoal, wool, etc. Again, diversity reigns. Although we know little of the dehesas of antiquity, pollen analysis suggests that the Iberians of old included olives, chestnuts, and wine grapes as essential parts of the system as well.20
Like most traditional structures, the dehesa endures in a diminished state today. Historically part of the commons and managed collectively, with the various forms of access dictated by obligation and tradition, the 19th century saw the majority of land privatized.21 And as happened across the globe, the advent of tractors, extensive use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and the changing economics of the 20th century caused a decline in the amount of land they covered. Oaks now struggle to survive la seca, a fungal disease that creeps slow but persistent, and they don’t spring back to life as in former times.22 Nevertheless, the dehesa serves as a beacon for how things could be different.
In 1945, Tolkien wrote to his son:
“Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile’... We shall never recover it, for that is not the way of repentance, which works spirally and not in a closed circle; we may recover something like it...”23
While I’m sure of very little, I am certain that recovering something like Eden won’t happen by doing the same damn ruinous things over and over. A livelihood based on tree crops and shouldering responsibility for genesis seems like a fitting place to start, given the subject — along with farming that accounts for the nuances of specific territory and the consequences of its decisions unfolding generations into the future. It’s not anything new, and neither is renouncing annual agriculture. At the very least it might help us dodge that old vicious cycle of forest to field to plow to desert.
At midsummer in Greece, women would plant into broken pots and place them on the roof of their house. They would sprout and start to grow, but wither quickly in the heat, and the women would carry the pots to the sea and throw them in while mourning the death of Adonis.
Called “Double Morphology” by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss.
These examples are taken from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s brilliant book The Dawn of Everything.
Known as flood retreat farming.
See 1491, by Charles Mann.
Cold fires were slow moving, low intensity fires that only burned the lowest layer of the forest. More often used to refer to those set by aboriginal Australians.
See Tending the Wild, by M. Kat Anderson.
Edible bulbs, corms, and tubers.
Muir was born in Scotland.
From Cadillac Desert, pp. 475-476:
In the Colorado Basin, the effects of wastefully irrigating saline lands are not, for the most part, being felt by those doing the irrigating. Thanks mainly to the taxpayers, the farmers who are contributing the lion’s share of the salts to the river have had drainage facilities built which flush the problem down to someone else. In the San Joaquin Valley, it is a different story. The San Joaquin’s problem is unique—an ingenious revenge by nature, in the minds of some, on a valley whose transformation into the richest agricultural region in the world was wrought at awesome cost to rivers, fish, and wildlife. Several times in the relatively recent geologic past—within the last couple of million years—the valley was a great inland sea, thick with diatomaceous life and tiny suspended sediments which settled near the middle of the gently sloping valley floor. Compressed and compacted, the stuff formed an almost impervious layer of clay that now underlies close to two million acres of fabulously productive irrigated land. In the middle of the valley, the clay membrane is quite shallow, sometimes just a few feet beneath the surface soil. When irrigation water percolates down, it collects on the clay like bathwater in a tub. In hydrologists’ argot, it has become “perched” water. Since the perched water does not have a chance to mingle with the relatively pure aquifer beneath the clay, it may become highly saline, as in Iraq. The more the farmers irrigate, the higher it rises. In places, it has reached the surface, killing everything around… An identical fate will ultimately befall more than a million acres in the valley unless something is done.
For more on the future of agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley, see the following:
Sustainability of irrigated agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley, California
Remote sensing is a viable tool for mapping soil salinity in agricultural lands
Groundwater depletion and salt-impaired lands in the San Joaquin Valley
Raphael Kazmann, a former professor of hydrology at LSU who spent his career studying the Mississippi River delta, believes that the silting up of dams in America will cumulatively be the biggest peacetime disaster in American history. He has written (quoted in Cadillac Desert pp. 485-486):
[T]he reservoir construction program, objectively considered, is really a program for the continued and endless expenditure of ever-increasing sums of public money to combat the effects of geologic forces, as these forces strive to reach positions of relative equilibrium in the regime of rivers and the flow of water. It may be that future research in the field of modern hydrology will be primarily to find a method of extricating ourselves from this unequal struggle with minimum loss to the nation. . . . The forces involved . . . are comparable to those met by a boy who builds a castle on the sandy ocean beach, next to the water, at low tide. . . . [I]t is not pessimism, merely an objective evaluation, to predict the destruction of the castle. . . .
For more on this, here’s a decent article: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211117-how-indias-living-bridges-could-transform-architecture
See Down to Earth, Bruno Latour.
There’s actually a large market for acorn products in Korea, where they’re made into noodles and jelly (dotorimuk).
Sam Thayer is already working on making acorns a commercial crop, and he sells acorn oil on his website. I bought some and it’s really fantastic stuff. He uses a machine similar to those used in making olive oil. See this article for more info: https://foragerchef.com/acorn-oil.
Note that this does not mean any perennial agricultural project is a good thing. There are tons of almond, walnut, and avocado monocrops that are just as emblematic of everything wrong with industrial agriculture as fields of GMO corn.
See Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepard. Shepard is someone who puts his money where his mouth is, and is practicing all the stuff I’m talking about on a large scale in Wisconsin. His farm (New Forest Farm) is a huge inspiration and model for how I’d like to do things.
See the following:
Oak, William Bryant Logan
Today 85% of dehesa lands are private.
The disease is caused by Phytophthora cinnamomi, now one of the world’s most invasive species. It is the leading cause of damage to avocado trees and affects a wide range of plants. It also caused widespread damage to the American Chestnut before the chestnut blight wiped them out more thoroughly.
Letter 96, to his son Christopher, from The Letters of JRR Tolkien. He wrote it in 1945, near the end of WWII. It’s interesting that he ends the letter with this:
Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter – leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What’s their next move?