Food & Nature

"One problem is that in Western nutritional science there is no effort to adjust the diet to the natural cycle.  The diet that results serves to isolate human beings from nature.  A fear of nature and a general sense of insecurity are often the unfortunate results.
Another problem is that spiritual and emotional values are entirely forgotten, even though foods are directly connected with human spirit and emotions.  If the human being is viewed merely as a physiological object, it is impossible to produce a coherent understanding of diet.  When bits and pieces of information are collected and brought together in confusion, the result is an imperfect diet which draws away from nature."

Masanobu Fukuoka

It rained

Last Night.  There is no more happy sound on this earth than that of a serious-minded rain on a metal roof.  I hope for a wet, muddy, "miserable" Christmas, for green shoots, puddles, streams, mushrooms in the cowpies, clouds, mist, fog, dew.  In the midst of the second year of drought, rain-water and all the phenomena associated with it, the very words themselves, have a sensual, almost erotic, fascination.  In classical Chinese "clouds & rain" is a euphemism for sexuality.  I no longer consider it an odd metaphor.   When it rains I feel as if a darkness is washing away: dark worry, depression, fear.  In its place is a new, small joy.

New Mexico

This land has its beliefs and its thoughts. One can hear the land thinking and dreaming in leaf and mud, hills and waters. The strong, fierce, gentle soul of the land is in the grace of draping pine branch, in the tangle of the willow saplings at the edge of the ravine, in a spray of flowers blooming amid the grey-green wormwood.
It is easy enough to miss this, not to hear the thoughts of the land, to pass by hearing only one’s own thoughts, the speech of men echoing and clanging within one’s mind.
The black one in the sky speaks. All day the bee speaks in the brush-land, in the great nothingness on the other side of the gardens, the leaf unwinds its dreams in the shifting light of the woodlands.
Is it knowledge if we cannot name it: another human speak, whisper, write it down?

How awesome is the Quivira Coalition?

http://quiviracoalition.org/images/pdfs/1954-Journal_34.pdf

Choices

I had a conversation today with my friend, the remarkable chef Mark Noguchi, about ambition, talent, and choosing the place where you are. Our conversation was part text, part cell phone - frenetic and staccato, like most conversations in these days.
Mark is a passionate soul in the very best sense, he is all about sustainable food, local communities, native culture, restoring the 'aina and the people.
It started with Mark calling me to see if he could get a hold of 6 pounds of beef fat to render for next month's Kanu Hawaiii Eat Local Challenge. That's a real good, grounded place to start a conversation: availability of beef fat.
Then I opened my email and saw the Food Network had a casting call for chef talent. I thought of Mark with his big personality and unquestionable charisma. He would just kill it: imagine the Mark Noguchi TV show, cookbooks, signature restaurants, merchandise empire. I texted him asking if he was going to try out. He said that he was too busy and happy doing his thing in the 808.
Which I get, totally, completely. There's all that stuff and then there is what you love to do, madly, completely, all in. And sometimes ambition is just a temptation to sell your soul right down the river.
Choosing the place or places that you give your life to defines who you are. To choose a place or be chosen by a place and to give yourself entirely to that choice is a powerful act of love and creativity. You become bigger than yourself in that moment. You become part of a living place. There is no end and no beginning, as Su Dongpo said.

I went out just before twilight, and turned to see two hawks circling above the hill behind my house. I thought of what my friend Palo said, watching an ‘io circling above the ‘ohia forest on the slopes of Mauna Kea: “And we think we are the most advanced species…”

It's true that we can hardly fathom that there might be intelligence anywhere outside of ourselves. We still look down on people who see intelligence in nature: the animist, the shaman, the primitives. Our culture - the Christian and scientific rational culture - says that we are the only ones that matter. The world is for us. It is a powerful idea. Also, it becomes clear, a dangerous idea.

Because we are the only ones that matter we isolate ourselves from life in concrete apartment blocks and office buildings where we go spiritually insane and that is somehow normal and desirable. Our intellectual concepts, our concept of intellegience, have become our straitjackets, instead of our tools. We have developed our capability to lay asphalt and to process information but forgotten how to be a part of a living world.

We are advanced alright, but it seems that there is a point where advanced turns into its opposite.

My “Imagine”

Imagine this: that we loved energy more than we loved things.

That we could see the luminescent and invisible dance of energy through our lives,

And this was our great delight and reward.

Imagine that we treasured life above gold and silver, above possessions and security;

And that we treasured death as the transformation of life into energy.

Imagine that we renounced power, renounced control, renounced wealth,

And sought to make free and joyful lives for ourselves and all other beings.

Imagine that we left behind the manipulation of money as a pointless, circular game;

That we understood mindless success as a destroyer of life;

Imagine that, above all else, we sought to understand and to nurture the jeweled network of life:

The dance of people, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, all the invisible ones;

That we valued machines as tools to a radiant planet, not as ends in themselves;

Saw ourselves as citizens of nature and stewards of life on earth, not as consumers.

Imagine that our greatest achievements as people would be a richer, more finely balanced planet;

That our greatest glory was to bring back life into our dead places;

That always before us was the vision of a beloved place, a beloved country, a beloved world.

Without Names

I learned today that my grandfather, Eustaquio Ganda Galimba, may not have been born with that name, exactly. That name may have been borrowed from a cousin who was a year older, and who had signed on to immigrate to Hawaii, but when the time came to board the ship was too ill to travel, so my grandfather, then only thirteen and therefore too young to contract as a plantation worker in his own name, took his place and his name. Did his real name stay behind in the Phillipines I wonder? What was that name?

I know who my grandfather was. It doesn't matter so much whether he was born with the name or not, or what the story was. I knew who he was. I knew his flaring anger, and his great kindness, his restlessness, and his relentlessness. He had a violent temper, was arrested and jailed for abuse of my grandmother more than once, and was admired by the young men of the district for his spirited pursuit of the opposite sex well into his eighties. He was a chicken fighter and a marijuana grower. He gambled and he drank whiskey. He also raised five children, building his family up from the poverty of his childhood to the affluence of the American middle-class. He gave his children every opportunity. He was a scrambler and a person that enjoyed life. He constructed magnificent gardens in which my daughter, his great-granddaughter would wander, picking and eating delightedly. This was when he was in his nineties.

I don't know what his mother's name is. My grandfather died some years ago and now nobody remembers what her name is. I reproached my father, he said that they hardly spoke of her. It makes me think of a beautiful, powerful book of poems that I once had by a Filipino-American living on the California coast. The book was called "Without Names," I believe.

And that, as I like to say, is so Filipino. So Filipino, like eating every part of the animal, like living together as a multi-generational family, like having big dramatic domestic disagreements, like participating in illegal but fairly harmless activities, like living culture with a small c, like having a very fluid sense of identity.

It is entirely consistent with the Filipino esthetic, if there is such a thing, to take on the name of one's cousin for life, to resist or ignore the attempt to fix thing and people with names, to control, define, and perpetuate. After all, a name is the most gossamer of veils – a pattern of sound or dark marks, a point of light that might mean something, or something else. The ancient Chinese understood the double-edged power of names – the Confucian tradition was obsessed with fixing names, the Taoists with subverting them.

Filipino Women

I woke up this morning thinking about Filipino women. Filipino women are strong. They are presidents. They run businesses. There are a lot of cultures where women are like that. The men don't mind, are not shamed by being bossed around by women. They would rather go hunt, fight chickens, or whatever anyway. And make garden. That is what we say: make garden. "What are you doing these days, now that you are retired?" "Oh, you know, I am making garden." Filipino men are hardwired with the green thumb.

On the other hand Filipino women are known worldwide as sex workers and cleaning women. Is there a conflict in that? Perhaps not. Perhaps it is only a certain perspective that sees sex and cleaning up as degrading. Both arts are, can be, an honest living. Both arts are very much a part of honest living.

Then I realized I'd read this a few days ago from UKL i.e. Ursala K. Le Guin (who I've been mad in love with since grade school) :

…like that woman we all know who's been pushed so far over by cultural bias that she can't stand up and crawls around the house scrubbing and waxing and spraying germ killer on the kids. But even on her kneebones, where you and I will never join her, even she has been practicing as best she knows how a great, ancient, complex, and necessary art. That our society devalues it is evidence of the barbarity, the aesthetic and ethical bankruptcy, of our society.

As housekeeping is an art, so is cooking and all it involves – it involves, after all, agriculture, hunting, herding…So is the making of clothing and all it involves….And so on: you see how I want to revalue the word "art" so that when I come back as I do now to talking about words it is in the context of the great arts of living, of the woman carrying the basket of bread, bearing gifts, goods. Art not as some ejaculative act of ego but as a way, a skilful and powerful way of being in the world.

From: Bryn Mawr Commencement Address, Dancing at the Edge of the World, 155.

There is another kind of culture and another way of being in the world, waiting there in the wings, already there but not easily visible. Already being practiced but without fanfare, without being on the cover of magazines. It is the same kind of thing that gives (Filipino) women their strength.

Art/daily life

Why is it that the only Culture that seems to matter is the one that has broken free from biological responsibility, and exists in a shining, fragile, parasitic bubble. Why does Art have to be so dysfunctional?

So much of Art & Culture seems like the rage of caged animals at their confinement. Like gilding the bars of the cage. Or covering them with grafitti. The same cage that is closing in like a garbage crusher.

Beauty is free. That is one thing I know.

Things I like: the small acts of making by gentle but independent people, the cadences and melodies of daily life.

Everyday life, unfathomed yet. We don't even know how to eat in a way that is beautiful and respectful of the great world.

The Silence

The long silences of herder are not empty, but represent their blending into the cyclical processes of this land, a oneness for which words seem superfluous even in the Eveny language which was fine-tuned for use here. From Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia. This seems to capture a kind of silence that is not really silence but a listening to the music of the world, listening as it passes through you and is all around, and maybe with the one(s) that you are being silent with. It is not silence but no one is speaking.

Life & success (that’s all)

First there is life. That is all, life. Life in the very broadest sense. Life and being, much the same. Rocks have life, as does plastic.

Then there is animate life. With all the attendant drama of moving, stopping, living, dying, reproduction, transformation.

We, with our fine minds, our powers of invention, like to make up stories about how things are supposed to be, but after all there is only life. It is the most important thing to remember. If we could keep that in our mind we would not chase dreams so much. Those dreams that have led us to spin stuff out of oil and metal like crazy fools.

What is it that we wanted with all of this stuff that we have made? A warm place, enough to eat, to be clean and healthy and happy in our families, however constituted. Everything else is just the means to those ends, or a detour. Everything.

Isn't it absurd that we cannot understand even our own needs? Do we define success by fulfilling our needs? No, success for us is about being better than everyone else, or trying to be. Much good that does. In fact, it does much evil. We hardly recognize the world we have made anymore, it is so over-built.

Our heroes of late have been engineers and physicists. We have all manner of machines. Now we live in order to keep the machines running. We work in order to pay for rent, food, water, for electricity, for the car and gas that goes into it, for the cell phone, cable-TV, internet connection, for the airplane, the airport, the shipping vessels, the delivery trucks, the factories, the tractors, the hospitals, the oil-rigs, the shopping centers, the cities! We have to keep all those machines running, each of us, otherwise we will be going backwards!

We can't imagine that, going backwards. We are terribly afraid of going backwards. Because going backwards means having less power, means being vulnerable, means, perhaps, failure. Failure to be better than everyone else. To do away with what is not really necessary, with what no longer works, is not failure.

Perhaps if we understood that seeing ourselves and our needs very clearly is a way forward. If we can see what we truly want and need, we will not expend energy, increasingly precious energy, on anything that does not get us there directly. What gets as much of the world as possible there, to what we truly need.

So one must challenge the idea of that false, invidious success, in the name of life, a good life, a good world. It is not so difficult, to get to the world we need.

 

Death in the Afternoon

Chicken-fighting is one of the past-times of winter and early spring while the roosters have their tail-feathers. Some people think that cock-fighting is cruel and perhaps they are right, but if you have ever seen what roosters will do to hens, it makes you a lot less sympathetic. Chickens are some of the most vicious creatures on this earth. We can all just thank the Creator God that chickens are not 10-feet high, because us humans would have been extinct a long, long time ago. So there is quite a bit of practicality to fighting roosters. You only need so many.

I've only been to one cock-fight in my life and that was with my Filipino grandparents. My grandfather had an island-wide reputation as a breeder of fighting chickens and when he was in his prime his yard was filled with huts and cages for his chickens, with roosters tied out by a string around one leg, gazing down their beaks with imperious fierceness. The chicken-fight that I went to took place in the old Filipino camp in Pahala, under the shade of the giant, ancient mango trees. This was in the 80's when the sugar plantation and mill were still in full operation, but the Filipino camp was quite broken-down already. I don't remember much about the chicken-fight. There were crowds of people and my grandmother took me around to show me off to her friends. For some reason I ended up getting a hair cut there in someone's living room.

I watched one chicken-fight: first the round of betting with much yelling and money held high in the air, then the chickens were let go. Being a "let-go man" is a special skill -and dangerous, as the roosters have knives tied onto the spurs of their legs, and they waste no time going after each other. There is also a "knife-man" who specializes in tying on the knives. Then there is the owner, anxious. He has bred or bought the rooster, fed it a special diet, groomed and massaged it to build up its muscles, trained it with sparring matches. The two roosters circle each other with ruffs open like angry lizards, then fly at each other clashing in mid-air. They peck and bite at each other, and slash with their bladed legs. It's over in minutes. One combatant is dead or nearly, the other is triumphant and deadly. Each chicken is collected by its owner. Money is redistributed. Another pair of roosters are matched.

More often than not a fight erupts between the humans as well, or some kind of drama. Everyone is jacked up on money and surrogate battle. Someone is caught stealing or cheating or not behaving the way they are supposed to be. There are threats, yelling, posturing. Perhaps it comes to blows. Usually not. Just blowing off adrenaline. It is a Sunday afternoon. A past-time that takes place in clearings in the forest or fields - it is illegal - but that doesn't stop anybody: some things are older than laws.

Community Concerns About the Biofuel Project

People I know stop me to talk about the biofuel project quite a lot these days. Some of the comments that they have voiced to me:

The honeybees in Ka'u are just starting to recover. Will the feedstock be grown using pesticides? If so this could have an effect on my honeybees and my livelihood producing honey. What assurances do we have that this will be taken seriously?

Do the project planners understand that they cannot just strip the fertility out of the soil again? It has taken this long to build anything back up after sugarcane. What are their plans for maintaining fertility in the soil?

If, as stated at the County Council meeting, this project will provide 200 permanent jobs and it takes 20 people to run the plant, what exactly are the other 180 jobs going to consist of?

I want to support biofuels but I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this project.

Balanced Cycle

I'm a member of the current Agricultural Leadership Program of Hawaii (ALPH) class - which is an experience I highly recommend. We visited Kauai in January for four days of farm tours and intense discussion (always) between the class-members and the farmers we visit. One of the most intense was a talk by my fellow Board of Agriculture member Jerry Ornellas. Jerry talked about virtuous and vicious cycles and challenged us with the question: "what does a balanced cycle look like?" No one had an answer then, but I've been thinking about it ever since.

What seems pretty clear is that we need to balance extraction with regeneration. Unfortunately our present system provides very little incentive for regeneration of any kind. At least formally. We all know we have to regenerate our own private support systems, and that our" professional life" often conflicts with that need to regenerate our personal resources of energy, health, family.

Furthermore, the economics of almost any pursuit encourages, even demands, full-tilt resource stripping. If an enterprise understands the necessity of regeneration, it does so as an adjunct to the main task of transforming resources into wealth/power/survival as efficiently as possible. There is no margin for regeneration.

How do we balance efficiency and regeneration? How do we value an enterprises' return to its own ground, its regenerative power? How do we discourage irresponsible extraction? How do we articulate regenerative power as a source of pride and social prestige? How do we, at the very least, make some room for the regenerative cycles that Nature has developed over its billions of years of existence?

A lot of it comes down to social ethos - the way we think about ourselves, our way of making a living and consuming, thinking about the complexity of natural systems and our place in them, understanding the basics which we were all educated to forget. A lot of this will become much more clear as the Great Unwinding unwinds.

http://www.postcarbon.org/blog-post/254427-an-interview-with-michael-shuman-if

Avatar

Kane talking about lying down in front of bulldozers.

Cliff-hanging off pali to find endangered plants.

Hippies living in remote valley of Kalalau

Green flanks, black teeth

Trail beside cliff that falls into ocean - Old Hawaiian man on horseback – seeing the hair in the water under the empty backpack

Story of Ko`olau & Pi`ilani – refuge- hanging valley – waterfall

Red dirt mud

Cycle of methane fuel production – anaerobic digester – methane –generator adapted to burn methane – electricity – heat byproduct –absorption chiller

Mud ditch and red dirt ribbon around the island

Ornellas – vicious/virtuous cycles – what is a balanced cycle?

Definition of agriculture enlarged to include all human activity? (Renewed) understanding of agriculture will only come through explaining connections, engagement, participation, holding stake. There is agriculture in astrophysics, agriculture in everything, can we remember in time? It's possible to be human without agriculture, but it's not possible to have a civilization without it, even just a village.

Mikinalo (carnivorous plant) and ohia makanoe

Smilax (hoe kuahiwi)

Can we remember in time?

 

Biofuels in Ka’u

Yesterday I went to a public presentation of a biofuels project in Pahala. A company called Aina Koa Pono wants to come into Ka'u and harvest biomass from 13,000 acres for a biofuel processing plant that will involve microwaves. The presentation was held at the Pahala Clubhouse, a graceful meeting space built during the plantation era. There were approximately 100 people there and two video cameras. It was a warm afternoon, and there were plenty of mosquitoes taking advantage of the crowd. The chief engineer Sandy (Alexander) Causey stood in front of the group and gave a fairly detailed explanation of the process by which the organic matter would be vaporized, filtered, re-vaporized and distilled into synthetic crude (aka biodiesel)l, kerosene (aka jet fuel) and gasoline. The byproduct of this process – char- would be put into a boiler to create electricity to run the plant. Everyone was very polite, but the questioning that ensued was decidedly skeptical in tone. Sandy Causey is not PR guy, which is a good thing for the people of Ka'u because they get to see what the real deal is on this project. To be blunt, there are big gaping holes in their business model as far as their agricultural/harvesting expertise. They really don't know what they are doing, especially in respect to the actual physical costs of growing and re-growing biomass. It's not something I hold against them very much. Ignorance of biological reality is rampant. On the other hand, ignorance does not inspire confidence. Is it okay for them to blunder into our neighborhood armed with a HECO contract, federal funding, and an amorphous plan? I really don't know. On the one hand, no one knows what they are doing when it comes to facing the transition from away fossil fuels on the ground level. We absolutely need to have alternative energy processes being developed, even if it not particularly efficient or knowledgeable production, just so that we can learn to be efficient. On the other hand, there is a good chance that the project will fail because of the project designers ignorance of some very basic realities of Ka'u, the kind of experience that regular people have, the ranchers, the farmers, the loggers, the bulldozer operators. Unfortunately that kind of experience does not seem to be getting into the spreadsheets for this project.

Reading: A World Made by Hand

Kunstler's novel is dystopian sci-fi of a different sort. Our more probable future, as is now apparent, will be one of devolution, rather than hyper-technology. If we come up with something along the lines of nuclear fusion, then we're on for R2D2 and the Death Star, but if not we're looking at a transition to the kind of neo-rural scenarios that Kunstler imagines. It's unclear whether he longs for or dreads it more. Me too.

Kunstler's novel is the story of the events of a few weeks in the town of Union Grove, in the vicinity of Albany, after the oil has run out, influenza epidemics have decimated the population, and bombs have destroyed Washington D.C and L.A. The electrical grid has gone down and central government has faded away. The town is on its own – for its food, fuel, shelter. Life reverts to the patterns of a 100 years ago, with the difference that people of the town are demoralized by the memory of how easy things were before.

At this point the odds are looking better for decentralization than world cities. We may lose some ground in the efficiency of production with decentralization but it is the lesser of two evils.

Eco-villages

I'm feeling very optimistic about the new year and the new decade which I've decided starts now, rather than a year ago. 2010 was the end of what we will call the George W. Bush decade (pace Obama) and look upon with wonder and a twinge of embarassment for decades to come. We have a saying in the horse-training world (where there is a high and immediate cost in physical pain for bad decision-making): "Good judgement comes with experience. Where does experience come from??? Bad judgement." So let's get on with it now that we tried all that and saw how it worked out for us. :)

I began the new year with a websearch (aren't we humans great, we have websearches!) which led me eventually to the concept of the Eco-village and it occurred to me that I don't live in an economically depressed rural backwater - I live in an eco-village. Well, really, an eco-district. Sure we all drive around in trucks that gobble diesel, use LPG, and have high rates of unemployment and drug use. I didn't say we were angels. But we have a thriving community spirit, close-knit 'ohana, mad gathering, hunting, and fishing skills, and an intense connection to our beautiful, tough, magnificent Aina. Ka'u has soul.