what I believe

Along the way we forgot something essential to our health, to our happiness, to our success.  We forgot that we are animals before we are humans.  That fault in our logic, in our self-understanding, has distorted just about everything that we do.  We do not take the simple fact of our bodies, our biology, our identity as animals among other animals into account.  Our philosophies, our cultures, our very psyches display the neuroses that we inflict on ourselves in this strange misunderstanding.  We constructed our human-ness, at least in the West, by dividing ourselves from the animals, by defining our human-ness as “not animal.”  To call a human an “animal” is an insult, we say “dumb animals,” we call our violent tendencies “animal” when no animal is as violent as we are, we construct cities and technologies as devoid of and hostile to non-human life as possible.

(Despite our obsessive attempts to do so, we have yet to come up with a convincing definition of what makes human animals distinct from the other animals, so untenable is the attempt and faulty the reasoning.)

We are a kind of animal - a complicated kind of animal, no doubt - but animal nevertheless.  We have needs and desires that have been left by the wayside in the development of our identity as “not-animal.”  Simple needs like the smell of green grass in the wind and the sight of stars at night.  We have build up around us systems, machines, environments which are hostile to our mental and physical health as we pursue the idea of ourselves as “not animal”: as builders of machines and of political and economic powers; as inheritors of Godʻs dominion over everything we see, as thinkers and spirits somehow divorced from our animal bodies.

And yet the soul in us - the anima - grows more and more distressed.  We have become animals under stress.  Yes, we are richer than we have ever been, and our lives are, generally, easier and more secure.  Yet our lives are also subtly painful and frustrating, as well as more and more frantic.

What do our souls need? How do we understand ourselves as the animals that we are? What is it that we really want and need, as humans? I believe these questions are inter-related.  I believe that we began to lose our way when we lost track of ourselves as animals, lost track of the anima within ourselves that is also within all living things.   I believe that the moment we began to denigrate and deny ourselves as animals was also the moment when we began the great project of control and domination of all other beings and the extraction of all resources exclusively for ourselves.  It was a powerful moment.  It was also a moment of terrible violence to ourselves and to all other life.  


And we have to ask: is that what we wanted?  Is that what we still want? 

why it is good to have evening chores

You catch all the weird stuff going on: last month it was lightning hitting ten feet away (sorry no pic), today it was a water spout. whoa!

The Rice is Cooking

There is an old Chinese tale about a young man who is travelling to the Capitol to take the annual Imperial examinations, and although he is a smart, ambitious, up-and-coming young scholar, as he would have to be just to qualify to take the Imperial examinations, he is walking, because that was how people traveled in those days before fossil fuel and in that country without much pastureland for horses.   One day, he falls into the company of a somewhat travel-worn but genial old man and they walk along together.  When the sun sets and dusk falls there is no town or inn, so they camp by the road.  They make a fire and set a pot of rice to cook for their dinner. As they are sitting around the campfire, they hear the clatter and rumble of a carriage coming along the road.  It so happens that the carriage breaks down just as it is passing the two travelers and the young man goes to see if he can help.  Because he is bright, capable young man his help is indispensable to fixing the carriage, which belongs to a high official of the Capitol.  The official, impressed by the young man's abilities, offers to take the young man with him to the city in his carriage.  The young scholar accepts and says his good-byes to the old man.  He goes to the Capitol and is wildly successful in the Imperial examinations. Furthermore he is helped in his career by the high official and quickly rises through the ranks of the Imperial government to become a high official himself.  He becomes immensely wealthy and a favorite of the Emperor; he marries a beautiful princess and has many talented, good-looking children.  He has it all - an Elon Musk, a Bill Gates, a Richard Branson. Then it all goes to hell.  He is accused of treason and mis-management by the other officials.  He is thrown in jail and his family is exiled. After suffering many years of imprisonment he is finally released.  All his wealth is gone and his family scattered. Beaten and broken, pre-maturely aged, he finds a small room to live in and manages to make enough to live on as a scribe in the marketplace of the Capitol. One day, as he is sitting in the marketplace he sees an old man, somewhat travel-worn, somehow familiar; the old man smiles at him and says: Wake up!  And the young scholar wakes up: there is the clatter and rumble of a carriage passing, the old man is dreaming by the fire, and the pot of rice has not yet done cooking.

The practical applications of a non-dualistic epistemology

Yes, we're going to do this thing, and it might not even hurt!

So, going back to Bateson and his definition of mind as a complex series of interactions between living creatures and their environment in which there is self-regulation (feedback-loops)  - how does this make a difference in everyday life?  

Well, for most of us farmer/rancher types living the non-dualistic lifestyle is as natural as breathing and losing money. As natural as trying to figure out the interactions of rainfall, topography, plant succession patterns under grazing pressure, the social patterns of cattle, wind direction, cash-flow and how all of that will affect the fence you are thinking of building. Except maybe you're not so much figuring it out as much as making some proposals for consideration in the form of the wisest fence you can imagine. 

Or, when looking at a piece of art, it's not that you are looking at a thing, so much as an interaction between material, human hand, human mind, and the particular entire ecosystem that cradles all of those.  And then you, looking at the "art" are now inside of that interaction, and how does it change you?

Or, standing next to someone in line at the supermarket...well, you can fill in the whole social part of that however you like... but the supermarket itself, convenient and necessary as it is, might be a problematic kind of mind for us to be taking part in as it so completely alienates consumers and producers, making one unconscious and the other over-burdened. 

Now, you

My gentle readers, all 4 or 5 of you (hey, thanks for hanging out with me) might be saying what is the point of all this hyper-intellectation? Why should you care about definitions of mind and theories of aesthetics and mapping and materialism? I really have no idea why you might care.  Why do I care? Sometimes I'm not sure myself. To replace one folly, one set of words, with another seems hardly worth the trouble.  The world is, and that's enough.  But here is why I care about all this, really, and it's the most dorkiest reason in the world: love.  Yep, the most cliched word ever.  But you see: 1. love is a verb, not a noun, and 2. there's all kinds of love, and as long as you live, you can keep on learning to love, in different and maybe better, braver, bigger ways.

This morning in the pre-dawn dark as I was driving my daughter to the bus and thinking about Bateson's use of Jung's distinction between Pleroma (dead matter, like stones) and Creatura (living things) to counteract the medieval Christian/Cartesian mind/matter dualism that has really f*cked us up as a civilization, I looked out into the distance across the Ka'u desert and saw the fiery orange glow of  our local live volcano Kilauea, and knew that Jung's distinction is not very, very distinct.

Also that I love that volcano.

Bateson contra Fowles

"No, you see it's not possible to map beauty and ugliness onto a flat piece of paper.  Oh yes, a drawing may be beautiful and on flat paper but that's not what I'm talking about.  The question is onto what surface shall a theory of aesthetics be mapped?"

Ok, so I'm setting up two dead English dudes to talk about something very important to me, in a very, very, very abstract and probably incomprehensible way, but wtf, it's my party.

Bateson has an intricate and yet earthy mind.  He never seems to take the bait that leads so many of the intellectually ambitious into the maze of irrelevant abstractions that is academic philosophy.

This idea of surfaces and "mapping onto" is important.  It's something that we all learn to do as we  learn to become more or less conscious, and because it is how we built up consciousness, the mapping and the surfaces onto which we map onto are not something that we remember to be conscious of.

"...it is the primary definition of mind that has to accommodate the theories of aesthetics and consciousness.  It's onto that primary definition that the next step must be mapped."

Now Bateson spends most of the book on the functional definition of mind, and it's some heavy-duty stuff, but the title of the book is "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity" so that will give you a hint that his idea of "mind" is not limited to the patch of gray matter at the apex of the spine of human beings.

So to knock all of this gobbledygook down to a super-simple and concrete example: it matters A LOT whether we map our most basic level of consciousness onto the warmth and intelligence of a human body and maybe a human breast or onto the cold geometries of a crib and a plastic nipple. The one in the crib is going to spend their whole lives frantically piling up non-living things to remake the security of the crib. AKA consumerism.  That's definitely a dumbing down and maybe a complete bastardization of what Bateson's getting at, but maybe not...

Reading Gregory Bateson

On the whole, it was not the crudest, the simplest, the most animalistic and primitive aspects of the human species that were reflected in the natural phenomena.  It was, rather, the most complex, the aesthetic, the intricate, and the elegant aspects of people that reflected nature.  It was not my greed, my purposiveness, my so-called "animal," so-called "instincts," and so forth that I was recognizing on the other side of that mirror, over there in "nature."  Rather, I was seeing there the roots of human symmetry, beauty, and ugliness, aesthetics, the human being's very aliveness and a little bit of wisdom.  His wisdom, his bodily grace, and even his habit of making beautiful objects are just as "animal" as his cruelty. 

from Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

Again, Another Way

Here is one of the challenges for civilized humankind: to learn (again!) from the animals and the plants, rather than use them like dead matter or animate machines for our needs and ends.  They can be sources of inspiration for adaptive techniques and technologies; they are keepers of a kind of quiet wisdom we are only beginning to appreciate. 

The cow knows how to live on cellulose, the deer and the horse, too.  They know how to live outside, in all weathers, needing only the barest essentials.  They will still be here long after our fossil-fuel-driven civilization grinds slowly to a halt. 

This is not to say that we need to “live like animals.”  This is not to say that we must forswear civilization.  It is simply to say that we could learn a great deal if we had a little humility; if we could allow ourselves to learn something from their radical simplicity. (Which is not so very simple, as animals are just as much the fine-honed products of evolution as we are.)

This runs counter to everything we in the modern West are taught about what it means to be human; it runs counter to the tradition of humanism and an idea of science in which humans are the only subjects; it runs counter to the great project of industrialism, in which everything non-human is raw material for processing.

But more and more of us are questioning the great project of industrialism – the efficient exploitation of natural resources for human prosperity, and asking if our present trajectory is truly one that leads to human happiness or health.

The next great project – which countless non-profits, young people, homesteaders, artists,  cooperatives, farmers, legislators, businesspeople,  musicians, local food enthusiasts and critics of modernity are already pointing towards and working to construct -  is underway.  It is the object of much inchoate yearning and determined dreaming.  Although there is a timidity and confusion in the face of the great machines we have constructed and which now run on their own momentum; in the face of the ancient hatreds and the new addictions; and not least in the withering scorn of those who have no hope anymore, still the current trajectory is clearly untenable.  This is not about utopia, or world peace, or end times.  There is no grand plan – just us, all of us, here, now, making choices, asking ourselves: what is it that we really want?

Do we still have to defend ourselves from each other, physically and economically? Will we still have an expensive military and health-care technology to maintain, power differentials and economic disparities to contend with?  Will the destruction of the forests and fisheries of the world continue? Will I wake up tomorrow and get into a SUV? Yes, definitely.  The trajectory that we are on was not developed in a year or a hundred years or a thousand years.  It is project of long millennia of choices and intentions.  It is old, it is ingrained in our human support systems: our agriculture, our architecture, our technology, our cultures and social systems, our sense of who we are as a species, our very cells, it sometimes seems.  To unwind the belief systems in which we have wrapped ourselves, in which we have inculcated loyalty to the trajectory, can be psychically dangerous.  We must proceed slowly, gently, with ourselves and with others.  To get onto a new trajectory is a dangerous transition; it will not be a bad thing if it is so gradual that we barely realize it ourselves.  No great revolutions, no us vs. them, just the slow turning of the tide.

To allow ourselves to recognize what animals and plants can say to us is one way to loosen the hold of the belief system that ties us to the industrial way of life, one way to open ourselves to other possibilities. 

Bliss/Mutluluk

Possibly the best movie I've ever seen:



Based on a novel by O.Z. Livaneli. I wish I could read Turkish, since Bliss seems to be the only work of his translated into English.   Warning: I personally cried cathartic tears of terror and wonder through most of this movie, so not one to watch when wearing mascara. 

Touch

When I touch a horse, or am within a few feet of it, I experience the world differently.  It is not something that I know how to measure.   It is there however.  What to call it?  A magnetic field, a gravitational field, the presence of another living being, shared breath? It is perhaps all of these things.   When I walk into a herd of cows the manner in which I approach, the thoughts that I am thinking, my gestures, where I look, and what I intend all matter to the cows.  It’s not that they can read my mind, it’s that they can read bodies.

Warm skin of a dog, a horse, a cow – the brain buzzes with the contact, hand to fur. 

At an agricultural fair, which is the only place that most city-folk get to touch a large animal, you see this all the time, how touching an animal strips away all of the masks for a moment.  For a moment, the moment of contact, there is wonder, stillness, the experience of warmth: you see it on the faces of old people and young, tattoo-ed city toughs, women in heels and elaborate make-up, mothers, fathers.

That is a language, just that moment of stillness, the contact, the way an animal makes you feel for a moment, that relief, that sense of flowing out beyond the ego-mind, that enlarged sense of being that is there for a moment.

What is the value of that moment when two bodies communicate?  What is value of basic sanity, and the small things that allow it to be?

Language of Paper

"Neither the scientifically nor the artistically expressed reality is the most real reality.  The 'real' reality is a meaningless particularity, a total incoherence, a ubiquitous isolation, a universal disconnection.  It is a sheet of blank paper; we do not call the drawing or equations we make on the paper the paper.  Our interpretations of reality are not 'the' reality, any more than the blankness of the paper is the drawing.  Our drawings, our equations, are ultimately pseudo-realities, but those are the only realities that concern us because they are the only realities that can concern us."  John Fowles, The Aristos, 154.

This perfectly expresses the blindness of our civilization to "paper" i.e. the material substrate of all consciousness.  Paper is a good metaphor for this material substrate:  dead trees ground into 'meaningless particularities' out of sight somewhere, where these kinds of things are done.  When we look at only the human art and science and not the "paper" we are refusing to see all of the biological and industrial processes that go into making that blank page: the supposed unconsciousness of trees; the dumb labor of lumberjacks and factory workers, neither scientific nor artistic; the invisible support of wives and mothers; the nameless waters in which paper pulp is suspended before it can become paper. All of this comes before science, art, or any such anthropocentric endeavor.

There is another reality that must concern us, a third discipline that does not take the blank page to be meaningless, but glimpses that the paper is a body that has something to say, some remnant of the language of trees perhaps, if we would learn to hear it and heed it.  A discipline that does not presume that paper is dead matter, voiceless.  If we were to understand, truly understand, that without the paper there is no consciousness and therefore no science and no art, then there would be no science and art that did not understand itself as the voice of trees.   If we could understand this we might not continue on our blind, deaf path to the place where there is no more paper, and therefore no more art and no more science.  Or business. Or trees, possibly, for that matter.

Our culture gives us the options of science, art, or business.  None of these are coherent in the face of our  first responsibilities as living bodies within a field of other living bodies.  Only secondarily  can we be transcendent scientific or artistic minds or units of consumption, or systems designers. Without a theory of reason which is conscious of its biophysical origin and dependence, all of our efforts will lead us to disaster and insanity.

(Actually, we think we have gone beyond paper, and only need screens anymore, which is compounding our foolishness.)

The language of paper, by which I mean the language of living as a body within a field of bodies, is still waiting to be discovered. As yet we only perceive sound shadows echoing off the back of the cave, only incoherent fragments of the living language of the field into which we are born.
 

The wilderness is just next door, still.  When I was a child of two or three our family lived in a place called Kapua where my father worked as a foreman tending a macadamia orchard of several thousand acres that had been carved out of the native forest.  We lived in a house on the edge of orchard, just two houses together, ours and the manager’s.  Across the lane that led to the two houses there was a little stand of ohi`a, the predominant native tree of that forest.  My father would tie the Shetland pony that he’d bought for me to graze under those trees.  Ohi`a are majestic and mysterious trees, whose small, stiff grey-green leaves are homes to many insects and whose orange, red, or yellow flowers are the source of nectar for many species of native birds.  Those trees, as I remember them, were decked in jewels and would sing to me sometimes when I went out to see my pony, who was a bad-tempered beast that bucked me off more than once and generally seemed to hate his lot in life, but that I loved anyway.  Because he lived under the trees in the wilderness across the road, my Hundred-acre Wood of less than an acre, and because it is in my blood, on both sides, to have an unreasonable affection for horses. 

We may think, having grown-up, that we forever exiled from such places but it is not so.  It is only fear and shame and forgetfulness that keeps us away.  The training that begins at four or five, that makes us managers and mechanics, scholars and salespeople tears us away from such places of wilderness.  But there is a childish wisdom in being able to find glory in a few trees and a bit of grass.  There is no fabulous wealth or power on earth that can buy or compel the song of the trees, or the experience of their unveiled beauty.  They are not so far away, those places.

3 a.m.

If you are so lucky
you have a world and a life
made up of bodies -
by which I mean flesh:
pulsating, ravenous, timid, beloved -
which you are constantly
tempted
to betray
in the name of
the big time,
the big game, the big boys,
the big dream,
the ticket out.
But then
haven't we all
already
disappeared into
screen or plane?
This is us,
We are not here.

Morris Berman and "Paradox"

As I mentioned earlier,  I just finished Morris Berman's Wandering God, where he argues for a distinct difference in the kind of consciousness that is encouraged by hunter/gatherer cultures and by civilization.  That of the former, which he terms "paradox" is a state of high alertness as to the present environment; the latter, which we are all very familiar with, is the conceptually complex, achievement-oriented, planning-obsessed, hierarchy-worshipping consciousness that keeps us all on the same civilizational page, working away diligently and  paying scant heed to non-human epiphenomena. 
Paradox is by its very nature non-conceptual and yet it helps to have a word/concept to point the way towards the non-verbal/non-conceptual.  It becomes a thing one can seem to talk about, although in actuality one can't or wouldn't really want to. 
Paradox pops up in "the literature" every now and then.  For instance, in a work of anthropology on the Siberian reindeer-herders.  In poetry, in Zhuangzi.  And in life, when you just get thwacked over the head by the mad, epic beauty of wherever you happen to be, and you just soak it all in until there is no little you-ego left, for a minute.  And for that minute, the world sings and shimmers. 
It's a kind of consciousness that is deeply repressed in our civilization, as in all others most probably, because it doesn't help to build anything impressive.  And it's not really something you can teach someone else to do; you can't provide step-by-step instructions.  So it's pretty useless, from the point of view of civilization, and what is more not conducive to profitability.
Nevertheless, Berman makes the point that we might want to re-balance our conventional goal-driven consciousness with an infusion of "paradoxical" awareness.  That'll be a long time coming, I fear, but in the meantime being able to talk about it a little bit is a big help.

Flu - More Reading

Nothing like airplanes and schools for disease vectors, so Ua and I got a strain of something back to back weekends and it was nasty enough to make me re-think my earlier incredulity about the millions that died in the 1918 influenza pandemic.  The world was a much scarier place before anti-biotics.  Every time I dragged my aching corpse out to do chores I broke into a cold sweat and retreated back under the covers asap, where I devoured some (more) books to keep my mind off the miserableness of it all.  They were some fine books that arrived just in time to save me from what would have been a sure case of Netflix poisoning:

 Wandering God - A study in nomadic spirituality/Morris Berman
I've been wanted to read this ever since I read Berman's Coming to our Senses, which was an electrifying book for me  Wandering God is as excellent, original, and fascinating as the earlier book.  Here Berman builds his case for the change in consciousness from a horizontal alertness associated with hunter-gatherer economies and cultures to a vertically oriented consciousness associated with agricultural economies and civilizations -what he calls the sacred authority complex. Berman is an immensely provocative thinker that will make you look at the world differently after reading him, which is a great gift that he gives the world.  Sometimes you have to give him the benefit of the doubt with some of his conceptual leaps, but I like him the better for not being a dry-as-dust, defend-yourself-from-all-directions academic.

The Scarlet Sisters/Myra McPherson -  The sisters being Victoria Woodhull and Tennesse Claflyn; these were some awe-inspiring Victorian-age gender-rebels, and all-time fearless women.  Victoria was the first woman to run for POTUS, with Frederick Douglas as her running mate, as well as the first woman to address a congressional committee.  Before that, the sisters opened a brokerage on Wall St. in 1872, and started a weekly newspaper where the The Communist Manifesto was published for the first time in the US.  They got called sluts and prostitutes a LOT, of course.  And maybe they were, but who isn't? 

Brown Dog/Jim Harrison - I would have laughed out loud a lot more reading this book if it didn't hurt so much to do so.  There was a lot of subsonic giggling going on.  Who knew there was a (much colder) cultural cousin of Ka'u up in the U.P. (upper peninsula) of Michigan?  A subsistence sort of place let's you see the idiocy of our overly-complex civilization much more clearly, and with a sense of humor because you're not right up entangled in it.  I usually circle most works of fiction sniffing warily, ready to pullback, because there is an awful lot of trashy fiction in the world, but after a few pages with Jim Harrison, I was just thanking and praising whatever for such a writer and beautiful human being.

Reading List

I guess I've devolved to book reports, not that there's anything wrong with book reports:
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth -- Buckminster Fuller
His Great Pirate theory is juvenile, but a fascinating book, not least for the temporal effects of reading the work of a futurist of long ago.  Points out how ignoring the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy) as a civilization is just not wise.
Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, and City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design -- Nancy and Jack Todd
Cool but somehow superficial, they have a lot of great ideas which never really engage with the nitty-gritty of making a living.  There is actually astonishingly little written from a practical perspective on the subject of ecology and design
Ecology and Design: Frameworks for Learning
An anthology of academic essays on education for ecology in the design world.  It's academic, so, you know, not very practical.
Dune Messiah -- Frank Herbert
Not as good as Dune, I think, but pretty good.  Nobody does multi-layered conversations like Frank Herbert.  He was obsessed with ecology; I read a very dark, weird, early novel about our human war on insects called The Green Brain. The cultural bricolage in his science fiction is stupendous. 

Half A Year Gone By in Minutes, It Seems

I've been so engrossed in my little world. 
The east is beginning to lighten and the orphan calves to cry out for their breakfast.  I have six this year, all with their tales of woe or mischance.  Bruce, Godiva, Cherry, Lilly, Billy, and Dilly. My religion this year is orphan calves, with prayers twice a day. 
You have to believe, even if it makes no sense "economically" to be up at dawn every day for months tending to their infant needs.  Believe in the unarticulated bond between your life of your kind and theirs.  You have to believe that you are serving life, making a small place of beauty.
I think about this idea of "leadership" that has become so popular lately.  What does it mean?  I thought for a long time that it was about having a vision and being able to articulate it to others effectively.  You know, politics.  Now I think it is much simpler than that.  It is in the making.  Making just about anything.  That's all. 

Just Keep Soldiering On

The other day I went to a meeting about the lawsuit that will seek to invalidate Bill 113, the Big Island's anti-GMO bill, based on federal pre-emption.   It's just sad that we all have to go through this pain, conflict, and expense with everyone having the best intentions, just different best intentions. 

How will the future turn out?  Will we gradually convert to more organic/sustainable kinds of agricultural production systems?  I think and hope so.  Will GM crops be part of the challenge of feeding 9 billion people by 2050?  Probably.  It will be a little bit of both. 

It is good that we think long and hard about the risks of GM technology.  The critics of GM are right in that there are great risks in altering biology at a genetic level, in my opinion.  But they are also a bit hysterical about that risk.  Automobiles pose a much greater threat to individual bodily health and to the health of the planet.   By orders of magnitude.  But we keep driving on and on.

It isn't what's written or spoken that matters at the end of the day.  It's what gets done, it's what we do with our bodies.  So we must live the life that seems best to us, that perhaps makes things a little better for everyone, both human and non-human, and keep soldiering on.

Some Mistakes Farmers and Ranchers Are Making Out of Pure Annoyance

Being a farmer or rancher in today's world takes wit, courage, determination.  It is to take on an almost impossible challenge with one's fragile physical body, . And because there are so few of us, less than 2% of the American population, it often seems as if no one else gets it.
  
It takes something akin to wizardry to keep the powers of nature aligned so as to produce the material that keeps the wheels and wires of civilization humming along, to fill the shipping containers week after week.  It takes an agile wit to keep one's agricultural production system  fine-tune to constantly evolving environmental, cultural, and commercial conditions.  It takes intellect, labor, and technology to feeds one's fellow citizens. Yes, technology is indispensable, even to the most ardent of organic producers, as any thoughtful one will tell you. Whether it's a solar charger for an electric fence or plastic film for floating row covers, or soil tests to determine fertility, science and technology are essential to commercial agricultural production, given the fact that 2% are feeding 98%.

We're some of the busiest people in a busy society, but it's not social-media busy, it's not political busy, it's not financial manipulation busy, it's not in a meeting busy.  It's producing food busy. So we get a little grouchy when we feel like we are being attacked for what we do.  Because we do exactly what the other 98% tell us to do.

Farmers and ranchers don't get to choose what we produce or even how we produce it. We can propose a crop or a method of production, but it is the market that always decides and determines what we do.  If there is a market then we can and will do it.  If there is no market, no possibility of the tiny margins of profitability that we will accept as success, then no matter how strongly we may feel about a crop or production method, it goes by the wayside.

So we get annoyed when people accuse us of only wanting to make money, of not caring about the health of the planet, about being cruel to the animals in our care, about growing crops or using chemicals that supposedly cause cancer.  We get annoyed because we don't get to choose what we produce.  The other 98% chooses and we deliver, if we can.

So we get annoyed, and we make mistakes out of anger:
1. Getting Annoyed at Ignorance
We all need to write out a little message to ourselves and tape it to our bathroom mirrors: AT LEAST THEY ARE INTERESTED NOW.  Because not so long ago if I registered a software product I couldn't even find "Agriculture" in the list of professions.  We were a big joke ten years ago.  Farmer, ha, ha.  How quaint.  Right. We'll see how quaint it is when you have to grow your own food.  Did I mention we get annoyed?  But we can't let our annoyance keep us from thinking clearly, which is what is happening.
2. Talking Down to Our Customers
A lot of the time we're like Jack Nicholson's character in a A Few Good Men: "You can't handle the truth!"  So we've been guilty of blandishment and double-speak.  Of referring to "sound science" and "abattoirs."  But people want to know the truth.  They'll even go undercover with secret recording equipment to get at it.  So let's just give it to them straight and let the cards fall where they will.  It'll be healthier for everyone.
3. Opposing GMO-labelling
Following on above, let's just get it over with already.  Most Americans have been eating the products of genetically modified crops for years with small evidence of ill effects.  Which is not to say the same as saying that GMO technology is a good or necessary way to go about facing the challenges of our burgeoning human population. It's just the truth.  And people want to know the truth, so let's give it to them.
4. Not Taking Advantage of the Interest
People want to know where their food comes from.  This is great.  They want it to be raised humanely and grown with respect for the soil and the environment.  Guess what?  This is what we want too. We're closer to the soil and the animals than anyone.  But for the longest time our marching orders have been:   Lots of Food, Mostly Animal, As Cheap as Possible, We Don't Want to Know How.  That's what the market/consumers was telling us to serve up, and so that's what we did.  Now, thankfully, things are changing.  So let's run with it, let's get out in front of it, let's give the people what they want and ask them in return to pay the un-subsidized cost.  Let's charge people what it costs to do what they are asking us to do and let's tell them exactly how we do it.  Let's educate our customers, not fight with them.  Let's train our workers on responsible pesticide use and humane handling and pay them as skilled workers. Give farm tours and charge for our time to do it.  Let's give them high-quality, environmentally responsible, humanely raised products and charge the true cost. That's what they want, it seems, and giving people the food they want is what we do.

What gods do you serve?

That seems to me to be the essential question for humans.  If we have any distinguishing characteristic as a species it seems to be the blessing and curse of symbolic thought and that capability culminates in theology.   We believe in something, or some idea, that is the guidestar of our everyday life.  How we shape our days and ourselves. We all have our personal pantheons.

The God of Love, perhaps, or the God of Money or the God of Power (perennial favorites.) The God of Organic Agriculture, or the God of Efficiency. The God of Global Dominance or of Manifest Destiny, of Time is Money, or of the Perfect Beach.  The God of Please Don't Let Me Die Alone or the God of A Possible Future or the God of National Security or any kind of Security.  The God of Poetry or the God of Horses (two of my faves) or the God of Climate Change or the God of Perfect Nihilism. 

Maybe it's good not to serve gods that you don't believe in just because everyone else does.  If you do Zen, maybe you can be free of gods for a few minutes, but then you're right back in the middle of it the moment you uncross your legs.  So, to know who the gods you serve actually  are, at the very least, that seems to be a good idea.  But who can say?