Monthly Miscellany: January-March 2024

Better Late than Never!

In this (belated and abbreviated) issue: updates from around the farm and town; musings on Lent, asceticism, and spring; reflections on Tending the Wild; some music.

i. happenings

Well folks, as you may surmise from the extreme lateness of this missive, it’s been a busy few months, preparing for spring, working on various scholarly and pedagogical projects, and laying additional groundwork (both literally and metaphorically) for our community food forest organization’s hopeful growth and firmer establishment in the coming months to year or so. These days it seems I mostly dream of Arabic script manuscripts, woodchips, and seed planting (the other night I meticulously planted a huge field with I think tomato seeds, for some reason putting four to each mound of earth—an early modern dream interpreter would no doubt find much symbolic wealth in such a sequence!). It’s good to have meaningful work with which to occupy one’s self, but I will confess that I have struggled more than usual to find time for sustained writing. On top of all that, our family has also been hit by bouts of sickness, most recently a persistent sinus bug that has left me in something of a fog the last week or so.

Our winter this year, also not coincidentally, was short if sharp, mostly confined to a few weeks in January, as the globally pronounced warming (relative to overall trends) of last year continues into this one. We had about a week of snow and ice on the ground, at the end of which I managed to make it up onto the Plateau and see some partially frozen waterfalls, hike in the snow, activities that in my childhood we would have multiple occasions all through the winter to do. This year, as I was crunching back up hill to the trailhead in the South Cumberlands, the sun beginning to set, it occurred to me that I probaly would not see snow again all season, this was it. I was right—while we’ve had some brief cold snaps since, no further snow has fallen, and the spring bloom out began, as is now usual, at the start of February (the flowers below are from a bit later). As of this week, while we’ve had a brief return of cold nights and cool days, that is set to lift over the weekend, and summer will be here before you know it. Our garden at the moment is dominated by cool weather greens, but I’ve a host of summer things started from seed that are ready to go, in a week or two most likely.

A few days ago we found a big salamander under a stump next to our main vegetable garden, which was exciting not just because any encounter with salamanders, no matter how frequent in intervals, is exciting, but because it indicates steadily improving ecological health on our property, a sense further reinforced by the sheer abundance of tree frogs chorusing night and day earlier in the year. Last year saw (or perhaps more appropriately, heard) quite a few to be sure, but this year was a significant increase, thanks to some strategic landscape interventions. Over the winter I built out a couple little ponds and a stream course, the original stream that once coursed our land having been diverted into a ditch years ago. So I dug a new one. linking a small springhead with the little natural (at least I think it is, its history is a bit murky) pond at the north end of our property. Frogs are the most audibly obvious benefactors of these modifications, but other fauna have appeared, seemingly by magic, overnight—the little creek and pondlets have numerous freshwater snails, members of the genus Pleurocera, which weren’t there last year but have made their way upstream from somewhere presumably. As the weather warms and the days lengthen new plant species are also appearing, along with lots of self-seeded descendants of last year’s flowers and vegetables.

Our community food forest (which has grown to encompass the building and nurturing of an even wider range of community gardening and growing spaces) project is moving along apace, with additional developments since the essay I published here last month. Things are still in the negotiating and development phase, so I can’t yet go into details, but suffice to say there are some wonderful opportunities down the line, about which I’ll have more to say in detail in the coming months. The generosity and enthusiasm of neighbors has been one of the most wonderful developments in this process—the trees and shrubs and landscapes that we’ve been building and planting these last few months are the physical manifestations of networks of gift-giving and care, of a different sort of economy, small and still mostly at the margins but full of promise.

I’ll be writing and probably talking more about this as well in coming months, but something that I’ve really been hearkening back to again and again lately is the degree to which we as humans can, if we take conscious and deliberate steps (and the hard work required) to tend and nurture the world around us, induce more life and flourishing, not less. We are in both ecological and theological terms the capstone species of this planet, able, compelled even, to shape it one way or another. To use the language of Genesis, we are invested with dominion: but whether that dominion will reflect the death-dealing dominion of the city-state rulers of the antediluvian chapters of Genesis, born of homicide and raised on domination and cruelty, or whether that dominion will be the Cruciform dominion of the servant-Lord, well, that is our choice. If our model is one of care and nurture and humility, of accepting the world as gift and offering it back as gift, we and our non-human neighbors alike will flourish, the earth will quite literally blossom.

ii. on Lent and asceticism

We in the Orthodox world are now in the season of Lent (for arcane reasons that frankly we should all have resolved a long time ago Eastern Western calendars remain periodically widely divergent in our reckonings of Pascha), the spiritual spring of planting and tending and waiting for the harvest to come, for a reconfigured landscape made alive after seasons of death and of slumber. A different world is possible, the New World of which St. Isaac the Syrian speaks so beautifully, one which extends to human and non-human, a fulfillment of the goodness of humanity and the expiation of our equally manifest evils. The transformation enacted within and promised by our season of fasting takes place on both the personal and the universal scale and at every level in between; it is a fundamental mistake to reduce things to one or the other, or to imagine that only one can be pursued or matters in a given case. Everything is connected—a concept long rendered cliché but nonetheless true.

The usual (less so this year) coincidence, at least in parts of the world, of Lent with the pivot from winter to spring might also remind us of the practice of pruning: fasting and other forms of ascetic practice are very much akin to the pruning necessary to maximize the productive potential of a fruit tree (or any tree), and in fact are carried out by trees naturally without human intervention—branches and leaves can be excised by the tree itself when they become unproductive or otherwise act as a hindrance upon the tree’s biological functioning. Our attempts (and they are usually that, not unlike my rather sporadic and not entirely skillful last-minute pruning this year of my home orchard) at asceticism function in much the same way: a cutting away of things in our lives in order to direct our energies more forcefully, to turn our attention to the production of the fruit that matters.

iii. Tending the Wild

I won’t attempt to summarize it here—once I start my much delayed podcast I’ll do so in proper depth—but I finally got around to reading Kat Anderson’s Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources, a book which in short tackles the question of how native peoples of California interacted with and depended upon their natural environments in the absence of (obvious, at least) agriculture. What she concludes, and documents in great detail (it is not a short book!), is that one of the things in common across the many cultures and linguistic groupings of pre-European contact California was a systematic management of ‘wild’ ecosystems and de facto ‘crop’ complexes, using tools that might only be applied once or twice a year. Periodic burning, pruning, coppicing, root gathering, scattershot seeding, and so forth were all measures that could be applied at often quite expansive scales, sometimes leading to a type of domestication of plant species, but in all cases maximizing habitat and growth performance for particular useful species, either for direct human edibility or for wild game. Agriculture in its conventional sense never developed for the simple reason, Anderson suggests, that it just was not needed. California had a climatic and ecological profile that lent itself to a horticultural approach, turning the entire region into a human-cultivated garden of sorts, albeit one that was on many levels ‘self-managed’ for much of the year. While such systems are not unique to pre-European contact California—they have probably existed almost everywhere at some point in time—when Europeans began to explore then settle the region from early modernity into modernity they no longer had frames of reference with which to make sense of what they were seeing. Much as the Spanish failed to understand the complexity of Maya home garden, milpa, and ‘forest garden’ expanses, Spanish and then American settlers and especially agents of the state saw only wilderness and ‘wild Indians,’ both of which ultimately suffered immensely in the centuries after initial conquest and settlement.

There are many potential take-aways and, I would argue, quite practical applications to understanding such histories of human interaction with and modification of our ‘environments.’ One of them is the fact, which is continually being further established and elaborated upon, that all terrestrial ecosystems on this planet are, with a very few exceptions—the most remote alpine tundra, some desert environments probably—at least in part anthropogenic, often in profound ways, even if they appear ‘wild’ and ‘natural’ at first glance. We are ecosystem engineers, on a level unmatched by any other organism that has ever lived; we are the ultimate keystone species—whether or not you understand that status in theological or metaphysical terms as well, it is simply the case, and has been a global reality for at least the last 20,000 years if not longer (depending on just how long humans have been in the Americas). Regardless of whether you understand human dominion of this planet as a divinely granted prerogative or the outcome of evolutionary chance (or both!), it is a reality with which we have to deal. What studies like Anderson’s demonstrate is that the form our ‘keystone’ status takes is not fixed, and can have broadly positive effects in terms of biodiversity, productivity, organism health, and so forth, and not just for humans but for a host of other organisms.

Another, mutually connected, takeaway is that a sharp division between ‘wild’ and ‘cultivated,’ while a feature of many cultural systems, is not necessarily a strict one, and that we ought to think more in terms of gradients of intensity of human intervention and use. This is one of the intuitive ideas behind the food forest or forest garden concept, but it can be applied at larger scales (and often, I think, intuitively has even if not explicitly so expressed). Indeed this sort of continuum reaches deep into human history: as much recent research on the Paleolithic to Neolithic transition has revealed, the movement to sedentary agriculture was an iterative and gradual one, with wild plants and animals becoming cultivated and integrated into human lifeways in barely perceivable stages, with the fully ‘wild’ often remaining important for a very long time (in some cases as in Anderson’s study area right up to the modern age).

Ah goodness, I was about to launch into a discussion of another wonderful book I recently completed, Gayle Fritz’s Feeding Cahokia Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland, but it really deserves its own treatment, and ties into some growing projects I’ll be working on (both actively and passively—planting cultivars and tending self-sown ‘weeds’) this summer, so I’ll hold off for now!

iv. music

This has been a wonderful spring for new music so far, with Waxahatchee’s Tiger Blood and Adrianne Lenker’s Bright Future particular standouts, both profiled amply elsewhere. The following album has not received nearly as much buzz, but it is one I’ve been returning to again and again since its release—a gorgeous fusion of haunting banjo tunes, both original compositions and traditional standards, with an ambient background. Do give it a listen or two: