Howdy y’all,
Whew, what a week! I hope you have been energized by our wonderful sunny day and are ready to embark on another transformative week, or surf into the next week on a steady cruise, or however else you might approach your measured intervals of school. It was so emboldening and inspiring to be with Nikki and get a chance to hear her thoughts this past week. In her wake several questions have bubbled to the surface of my mind. Among these is the question of how global cycles of violence are connected to choices about land-use and policy. I got this term, ‘global cycles of violence’ from Lyla June, who uses it to talk about the trauma both within Europe and spread from Europe that was caused by dispossession, forced migration, slavery, and racialization. Both Nikki Silvestri and Lyla June focus on healing that trauma to help promote relational ways of thinking and a widening sense of solidarity. They both do so by talking about land, and food, which I think is helpful. Food is the bridge between the environmental world and the social world; it is a mediator that translates a deficiency in one world into an ill for the other. In other words, if something isn’t so good environmentally the lack becomes understood socially through unhealthy foods and unhealthy people and if something isn’t good socially it can usually be felt environmentally through hastier extractions and non-sustainable land development. Social health can be understood environmentally on a much more basic level as well: the way we organize ourselves has a serious impact on the health of our environment. Thinking about the rise of the nation-state and the globalization of European society through settler colonialism I connect the centralization of power in Europe to the exploitation of the land and the impulse to control as much of it as possible. In 1648 there were 1500 different territorial units in Europe, while in 1850 there were only 30 (Merriman, John. “European Civilization, 1648-1945.” Open Yale Courses. oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-202). In 1648 Europe was just coming out of the Thirty Years’ War, all many people knew was war, and, due to shortages and oppression, the peasants were regularly rising up against their lords to disrupt the status quo. This civil unrest led many lords to swear fealty to larger rulers so that they could gain protection from their own people with a standing army. During this time of political consolidation of power in Europe, Europeans were committing genocide of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples around the world. People were disrupted from their traditional patterns of life and motivated by fear to abandon their old ways of understanding the world in favor of modes of understanding that valued control and mobility rather than relationship and locality. Those who were fully disconnected from the land became the agents of colonial expansion. We can see with the forms of agriculture which were developed during this period, namely mono-crops and plantations, that they are built on exploitation, both of people and the environment. Mono-crops rely on a lot of land being owned by a few people so that those few people can make capital gains by producing commodity crops and plantations were designed to use slave labor. The connections between relationship to the land, internal trauma, and oppression reinvigorate my focus on food because of the need for healing that I witness. I see slow farming as a way of reclaiming particular knowledge of and relationship with a place and other living beings. This is an act of resistance in a world that values efficient exploitation, social mobility, and homogeneity. These values have caused many farmers to abandon their farms, and have caused the farms that remain to be increasingly mechanized. How do you reflect on your ancestor’s migration? If they moved on their own volition what reasons do you think they might have had for moving? How does their movement affect your own self-understanding? How has their movement shaped your relationship with land/places? In light of this ancestral reflection, how do you reflect on slow farming?
In preparation for our discussion I suggest that you listen to Lyla June’s interview, read Nikki Silvestri’s definition of soil and shadow, read chapter 8 from Seeing Like a State, “Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity”, and listen to Lyla June's song, "All Nations Rise".
http://ericgarza.info/episode-53/
https://www.soilandshadow.com/what-we-do
https://libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr2VLI8jKww
