Mr. Levi's Class

Go North, Young Man: An American Chef Goes to Fäviken and Jamtland

2011-12-21T15:22:00.000-08:00

On August 29^th, I landed in Stockholm and caught the midnight train to Järpen. I'd come from the heat of summer in Tuscany and Rome. When I stepped off the train in Järpen, I stepped into another season. It seemed another planet. I layered on my sweaters, waited for my ride, and considered the mystery that lay ahead.

I came to Jamtland as the coda to my year-long fine-dining boot camp. As a 33-year-old man who'd long since gone to university and graduate school, who'd already had a solid career as a high school teacher, I had neither the interest, the time, nor the money to enroll in culinary school with a bunch of kids. I figured I could learn more and faster in the real world.

Off I went to Chianti to learn salumi from the great Tuscan butcher Stefano Falorni and beef butchery from his neighbor, the meat-cleaving superstar Dario Cecchini. I worked for Chef Jean Georges-Vongerichten in his hip, bustling restaurant Perry St. in Manhattan's West Village overlooking the Hudson River, and worked side-by-side with “Molto” Mario Batali at his temple of Italian cuisine, Del Posto, in New York's Meat Packing District. I secured a stage (or apprenticeship) at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant now widely regarded as the world's best. It seemed a logical endpoint. Surely my skills were now at a level where I could be paid for my work. Surely I'd maxed out my career as a “kitchen slave.” Oh, and I was broke. But, then I heard about Fäviken Magasinet. I emailed Chef Magnus Nilsson. One more stage.

But Jamtland?

In the weeks leading up to my stage at Fäviken, I read all I could about the place and the vast, wild region around it. I read about the long history of fiercely independent farmers governing their land in a sort of democratic anarchy. I stared wistfully at glowing laptop images of sod-roofed huts of weathered, unfinished wood, of grand waterfalls, of hikers against a backdrop of unravaged forest and snowy hills. I was in love. And like any lover, I was, at first, in love with the idea of love, with my ideas of Jamtland and Fäviken, and any adult knows how fragile such love can be when it collides with reality. Was I wary? Not at all.

My first day at Fäviken turned sunny and almost warm. The lush green of the rolling meadows pressed against the white clouds on the horizon, above which loomed a sky of intense blue, one of the bluest blues I've seen. I saw the Jamtish flag across from the restaurant and immediately understood it.

I took off my shoes and took my cocker spaniel (who accompanied me throughout my journey, as she does now) and headed for the woods. For those who have never walked barefoot in the wet, northern woods, there are few feelings that compare to cool moss between your toes, cool mud on your skin, even a deep massage from sticks and stones. Once you've walked barefoot in the woods, putting on boots is like wearing ten condoms while making love. Safer, no doubt. But really...

Once I was in Jamtland, I found that what I loved most were the things that reminded me of Maine. My homesickness was becoming acute, but the similarities were undeniable regardless. The woods of pine and birch. The mossy, wet earth under the trees. The bright green meadows. The rural land, dotted with A-frame wooden houses, little villages, and farms. Cows, sheep, and horses. The cars were bigger than in Italy. The people were bigger, too. It wasn't utopia. Better, it felt like home.

What can I say about the food at Fäviken that has not already been said by some of the world's leading food writers? It is very good. As at Noma, they have a vision and they execute that vision flawlessly. The culinary vision at Fäviken happens to be a little closer to my own, which is why I decided to continue staging even after Noma. The Brummer family, which owns the vast Fäviken estate, leads regular hunting parties which provide plenty of wild meat for the restaurant, notably grouse and capercaillie, which we hung to age in the walk-in for three to four weeks. (Magnus pointed out that we were probably the only restaurant on Earth serving capercaillie on that particular night.) Foragers provide wild mushrooms like chanterelles, hedgehog, and matsutake. I picked stone-bramble berries, juniper, wood sorrel, moss for the scallop plate, and fresh garden vegetables in the hours before service. The beef is from retired mountain cows and dry aged for up to six months. Raw milk, aged butter, and alpine cheese comes from Oviken Ost. (Oh, that butter!) Only the seafood is not truly local, though Trøndelag can hardly be considered far, and the quality of the monkfish, mussels, and diver scallops is exceptional. None of this surprised me. It is why I came to Fäviken. It was a joy to work with food of such quality and integrity, and to work with such skilled chefs, Magnus as well as Sebastian Bjernalt and Johnny Fredrikson.

As in any budding romance, at a certain point, the exigencies of life were bound to cut through the mist of infatuation. Kitchen life brings its own kinds of stress and there are, sure enough, downsides to the isolation one experiences as a foreigner living alone on northern Sweden's vastest private estate, well beyond walking distance from even little Järpen, let alone Åre or Östersund. It was in my post-infatuation hangover that I was lucky enough to be introduced to Jamtland's food ambassador, the chef and writer Fia Gulliksson. Fia welcomed me into her home during a week in which Fäviken was closed (the team had gone to Belgium to put on a special dinner at the acclaimed restaurant In de Wulf). Fia quickly became a dear friend, as did her husband, Martin Alfredsson, a wonderful bluegrass musician and owner of the organic tea company Brunkullans. Almost instantly, they introduced me to a number of fascinating people, locals and expats alike, and suddenly I had a circle of friends. My romance with Jamtland entered a new phase, and I began to sense that this was a place to which I would return.

Beyond the blessing of friendship, Fia deepened my appreciation for the food culture of Jamtland. We went together to Ås to buy outstanding produce, all organic and homegrown, for the feast we would cook that evening, otherwise comprised of vegetables and herbs from her own garden and meat and fish hunted by Martin. She told me about the wonderful artisanal cheese production in the region, spurring me to visit Oviken Ost, supplier of all things dairy to Fäviken, and the more remote and idyllic, and equally masterful, Kullens Gårdsmejeri in Klövsjö.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.” I hope not to draw too much attention to Jamtland. Its beauty is entirely contingent on its wildness, on the sparseness of its human population, on its isolation from the industrialized, urbanized world. Its gifts come unsolicited. I will never forget my first glimpse of the Northern Lights, as hawk owls swooped three meters overhead, scanning for lemmings. Nor sitting with friends in their hand-made sauna heated with birch wood before jumping naked through the cold waves of Storsjön and then standing in the clear, northern night before dipping again into the heat. Nor tasting the raw heart of moose, my first cloudberry, spring water right from the ground at my friends' cabin in the woods near Orrviken. Nor the austere beauty of Fäviken and of Magnus' quintessentially Jamtish cuisine. Be quiet, Jamts. Don't let the world know you're there. I'll keep the secret, too. Well, maybe I'll just tell a few friends.

My Kind of Kosher

2011-10-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I was at the engagement party of one of my best friends. He's Jewish. So is his fiancée. They aren't religious. There were delicious pork buns. A few old friends heard about my new work as a chef, and naturally started asking me about food. I'm also a teacher, so I was happy to talk. And since we're all nominally Jewish, it's not surprising that the question arose: are you kosher?

The answer is yes. And no. No, as far as almost any other Jew would be concerned. I love pork. A burger is nothing without cheese. Oysters make me really excited. Lobster, mussels, razor clams, and cuttlefish, done right, will make my day. I eat bunnies. I've tried hare, kangaroo, and bear. Bleed out a game bird? No way. Hang 'er up, guts and blood in, for a good week in a cool room. Kosher chefs, like vegetarian chefs, might make some good food, but the cuisine is like jazz with nothing but woodwinds. Sax and clarinet are great. For a while. But thank god there are still trumpets and bass and drums in the world. And get that freaking oboe off my plate.

Judaism is a funny thing. It's a dogmatic religion whose dogma is often dismissed in whole or in large part by many of the people who claim, quite ardently, to be Jews. It is the most rigidly law-based of the world's major religions but has given rise to one of the world's greatest theological traditions of interpretation, reinterpretation, and cherry-picking. It's based on a scripture that is notably harsh and oppressive, even by scriptural standards, yet Jews are widely known for their humor. At least in New York. Let's leave Israelis out of it. They're not funny at all.

So when I was asked if I keep kosher, I said, “no.” But then, “yes.” “In a way.” I made my case. If I feel any kinship with Judaism as a religion, it's because of two words: tikkun olam. “Heal the world.” I know how I understand it. If you know me, you probably know, too. I take it to be the central tenet of Judaism. Not historical Judaism. Not Judaism in its dominant forms. My Judaism. I appreciate that, as a Jew, I can say such a thing and not sound crazy.

Tikkun olam. Apply it to food. It's pretty simple. That food you're eating, it was alive once, hopefully pretty recently. How did it live? Did it suffer? Or was it free to eat in a way that befit its physiology, to live outside in the living world, to live with a healthy community of its comrades-in-species? I am not just talking about cows and chickens and pigs. I am also talking about broccoli, carrots, and potatoes. But let's say you don't hear the voices of plants, don't feel their roots and pollen spreading through your dreams. Let's be “practical.” Did the life of that cow or broccoli hurt the earth or make it better? Is there more topsoil because of her or less? More intact, biodiverse habitat or less? More atmospheric carbon or less? More groundwater or less? These are questions we can answer pretty easily. Tikkun olam. Is your food healing the world or harming it? If it heals, you're keeping kosher, my kind of kosher. If it harms, you're eating treif. And that's so not cool.

Industrial food is never kosher. I don't care what species it is. I don't care if a rabbi said something in Hebrew. I don't care if it was bled out and salted. If it was subjected to a life of unnatural suffering, if it was raised in a way that made this world a little worse, a little poorer, it ain't kosher. It is an affront to God, to spirit, to conscience... whatever you want to call it. It is an affront to the Earth, and therefore to ourselves and our children. It is a failing to manifest tikkun olam. The old kind of kosher is all about how an animal died. What about how it lived? Maybe the question never came up since no one in the ancient world could have imagined the cruel insanity of industrial food. Every Hebrew and every Roman ate nothing but grass-fed and organic food. Bunch of liberal weenies, I 'spose.

Any being who was allowed to live a decent, healthy life and was given a merciful, honorable death, a death that caused no net harm to its species, whose life was, indeed, the blessing it ought to have been for the Earth, is kosher. End of story. That such beings, whether plants, fungi, or animals, are also, invariably, more delicious, more nutrient dense, more healthy, only reaffirms that we are doing the right thing.

All the stuff about not eating pigs or shellfish, that was pretty easy for a tribe of pastoralists. Note that they didn't have to give up beef or mutton. It was the barbarians to the north who ate pigs. The barbarians by the sea who ate clams and lobster. We might say that these all too easy sacrifices for a people who already did not eat these things helped keep them mindful of their faith. Maybe it was about regimentation and social control. Maybe it was about instilling xenophobia. Who knows. I do know this. I do not live in the Middle East. I am not a pastoralist. I live in a land where pigs thrive, by a shore world famous for its lobster and other shellfish. More importantly, I live in an era of global environmental catastrophe. This catastrophe is being greatly intensified by the industrial food system. It can, in part, be mitigated through permaculture, broadly defined as any food system based on a polyculture of plants and animals, intact topsoil, no mining of water or diversion of rivers, and no input of fossil fuel or poison. I see it as a spiritual duty to be mindful of this reality every time I procure food, whether by purchase, gardening, foraging, or hunting.

And I did eat the pork buns (minus the buns). Even though the pigs were probably industrial. I do not blame my friends if they were. Most people are not yet as sensitized as they should be to these issues and it's not fair to expect a sudden mass change in consciousness from all decent people. But we should be working toward that mass change in consciousness and, crucially, also in behavior. Changing hearts and minds is all well and good, but only as a precursor to action. It's not, “think about healing the world,” or “imagine a healed world,” or “write treatises about what a healed world would theoretically look like.” Heal the damn world. Anyhow, I ate the pork. It was already there. I was hungry. It looked and tasted good. And no additional pigs were being raised or killed because I ate it rather than letting it get tossed at the end of the party.

There is room for flexibility. I draw my lines where I choose. Others will draw them a little differently. And that's OK. Just draw them. Live consciously. Find your principles and manifest them. Keep kosher and live in accordance with the law, however you understand it. It all derives from principle. How about this one? Heal the world.

Cops and Troops, Stand With the 99%

2011-10-17T22:19:00.000-07:00

The revolution has begun. If you haven't noticed, it's time you noticed. Those in power have certainly noticed. They're worried as hell. And they should be. The movement afoot in the United States and around the world is the real deal. Take a deep breath. We may have a future.

There are a million questions we might ask. Here's one. What next? A movement of this magnitude, this resolve, this canniness, this sophistication, this selflessness, this moral fortitude will not just evaporate. But it may go in any of a number of directions, not all of which we can anticipate. But the bastards are going down. The question is how.

Cops are part of the 99%. So are troops. They are working class, hard working people who bravely risk their lives for two reasons. One is that by doing so they can earn a decent living, health care, a pension, a modicum of respect, and a chance to help their kids get a leg up. The other is because they believe they are working for good. Or they believed it. At some point. And they had reason to. But for many, that belief has eroded over time, stripped bare by political cronyism, hollow rhetoric, and the increasingly obvious greed, the insatiable, ruthless greed of the powerful. Most cops want to keep their cities and towns clean and safe, protect victims, and confront and stop criminals. Yet they see a system where they are called upon, time after time, to risk their lives defending the grandest of criminals, those who steal billions and produce nothing, who milk the public coffers to pile it atop their obscene booty, who poison our rivers, our air, our bodies, and our children's bodies to squeeze themselves another billion, who callously destroy whole communities to “cut costs” and then fly on private jets, who send our young men and women to kill or be killed, to be twisted and broken by the carnage of war, to be poisoned with depleted uranium in the name of a democracy we all know to be a farce.

Troops are part of the 99%. Like the cops. They enlisted because their neighborhoods, their towns, their whole cities have been turned into post-industrial wastelands with real unemployment often over 50%, just to fatten the wallets of the rich. They enlisted because if they're black and poor and undereducated, they have a one in two chance of winding up in shackles like so many of their ancestors. They enlisted because their options are so few and so poor. And yet, they enlisted because they love this country, what it was, what it should have been, or what it might yet be. They want to protect the Constitution, defend democracy, protect, at all costs, the American people and our collective dream against the tyranny of fascists. Yet they know damn well that they're sent to fight and kill and suffer and die because it makes a few people rich, the people who call the shots, the people who dare to call their unbridled greed “American interests.” They know that Goldman can count on giant bailouts and Halliburton on extortionist contracts but that they, themselves, will be lucky to get half the treatment they need at a financially crippled VA hospital. They see what the US brings to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to wherever they're sent to fight, kill, suffer, and die, and that it has nothing to do with democracy, the Constitution, or freedom from fascism.

Fascism. It's a word with a meaning. We aren't supposed to know the meaning. We're supposed to think it means “bad guys,” “Nazis,” “the other.” It has a meaning. The man who coined the term and created the first fascist movement, Benito Mussolini, made it clear as day. “Fascism should, more properly, be called corporatism, for it is the complete merging of state and corporate power.” I love America. I love this land and its people. I love Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, and Gillian Welch. I love Tecumseh, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Mother Jones. I love our great poets, our great painters. I love barbeque, Kentucky bourbon, and California wine. I love America. But our political and economic elite have created the most fascist system the world has ever seen. It is ruining our lives, it is ruining everything decent in our society, and it is ruining the very Earth itself. I do not hate America. I love it. Therefore, I hate American fascism and I hate the fascists who have the audacity to call themselves the “real Americans.” So should you. So should the cops and troops who risk their lives trying to make this world a little better.

Cops, troops, stand with your sisters and brothers, stand with the 99% who have seen and felt enough of American fascism to know that it's time for it to go. Lay down your guns, or, better still, use them to protect the people, not the fascists. We owe them nothing. Stand with the brave people of your country and help them build a better society, one where the Constitution can live once more, where democracy can flourish throughout the land as it flourishes now in Liberty Park and in the dozens of other protest communities across this nation and around the globe. Don't block the way into the Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, Goldman and Citibank, lead the charge! This is your country. These are your people.

We stand at a decisive moment in history. This can be a velvet revolution. This can be a bloodless coup to restore the honesty and dignity of the America we all long for, the America we now strive to realize. Or this can be a bloodbath, and could even be in vain. Much depends on the cops and the troops. I do not believe, cannot believe, they want to beat, gas, bomb, or shoot their countrymen to defend the world's grandest criminals. Now is the time to realize, they don't have to. When the chain of command becomes corrupt at the top, the brave and the good people in uniform must determine, difficult though it is, to honor their allegiance to a deeper, more unshakeable authority. To many, this is God. To all, it is conscience.

The revolution has begun. Or maybe it's a counter-revolution, striving not to destroy but to restore. We do not know just where it will lead, what heroes and villains will manifest, what names and dates will be etched onto the memory of a generation's collective consciousness, perhaps onto those of generations yet to come. But this is our history. It lives in our hands, in our minds, in our hearts. Brothers and sisters in uniform, use your power for good as you've always meant to do. Stand with the people, help us bring down the bastards, and help us all make this world not just a little bit better but, in this rare historical moment, so rich in possibility, a lot better. We need it. We can do it. It's up to us. We are the 99%. So are you.

On Mourning Steve Jobs

2011-10-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

It is sad that Steve Jobs died at 56. For me, it's sad mostly because pancreatic cancer was almost non-existent before industrialism. It is now increasingly common, and could strike any of us. It is sad for me because I have lost two loved ones to cancer in the past year, including my 28 year old cousin. I feel for those who loved Steve Jobs (those who actually knew him). But the histrionic displays of grief by those who never knew him seem wrong.

I took note yesterday, in transit from Oslo to Milan to Florence, of great numbers of people from different countries sharing music and videos and laughing together over their iPads and iPhones, while I read and wrote on my Air. It was poignant. I understand why we felt connected to Jobs and share a rare sense of community in his passing. Our hunger for community and shared grieving is immense, and found a rare outlet here. But our real wounds are quite different than the loss of a CEO. Our real grief, still deeply suppressed, is for losses far more personal and profound.

Steve Jobs was CEO of a corporation that produces vast amounts of toxic waste. He cancelled that corporation's philanthropy program in 1997 and refused to assent to Bill Gates' request that he join in pledging a good chunk of his billions to philanthropy. Many of the assembly line workers who assemble Apple's "wonderful" gadgets (which no one truly needs) are paid slave wages and develop cancers caused by the workplace carcinogens to which they are so recklessly exposed. In an era of planetary mass extinction, of unprecedented toxification of the total environment, of burgeoning fascism at home and abroad, in a world where half of humanity lives in desperate poverty while a select few (like Jobs) live securely on their backs, the maudlin outpouring of grief for this CEO is actually more than a little deranged. This is not to speak badly of a dead man. He was imperfect, as are we all. This is to urge us to consider what we really value, where our allegiances truly lie.

So, what about the 200 or so species that went extinct yesterday (200 more the day before, 200 more today, etc.)? What of the entire cultures and languages that continue to be extinguished by the onslaught of industrial capitalism? What of the brave social justice and environmental activists killed, imprisoned, and tortured daily around the globe? Or the many more killed for the crime of their poverty? Jobs didn't exactly cause this mess, but his company, despite its clean, wholesome image, has done far more to intensify it than mitigate it. Just as the Republican party channels our righteous anger (at the injustice of our culture) toward scapegoats, this outpouring of grief over Jobs is, at best, misdirected, a projection of other, deeper wounds that need to be brought to light, grieved over, and healed. At worst, it reveals our dedicated allegiance to consumerism at a historical and planetary moment when that can only be understood as treason against the world's poor and the community of life.

A Tale of Two Butchers

2011-09-14T03:41:00.000-07:00

Tuscany, particularly the Chianti region bordered roughly by Florence to the north and Siena to the south, is a place, like so many others, rich in paradox.

On the one hand, it is the cradle of the Renaissance, the home of fashion houses like Ferragamo, Gucci, and Roberto Cavalli, world renowned among epicures for wine and olive oil, a romantic mystery for historians who puzzle over the still obscure Etruscan culture that flourished in the time of Homer. It is celebrated almost ad nauseum for its beauty: the undulent hills, the slender cypresses, the grand villas, the quaint medieval villages, the Apollonian grace of its olive groves, vineyards, and sunflowers, the air fragrant with rosemary, sage, wormwood, mint, and wild fennel, and, above all, the ethereal golden light of its late afternoons.

On the other hand, it is a provincial place where young men blast techno from their tiny Fiats, driving like they were in the Mille Miglia, or just sick of living. Its ballyhooed cuisine is mostly simple grilled or boiled meat. It is a land of stark class divides between the extremely rich (often foreigners) and an overwhelmingly Communist working class struggling against a collapsed Italian economy, all overrun in warm months by every sort of tourist. Its network of winding, tiny, ancient roads can easily turn into an adventure in the Dionysian: vertical dirt roads barely passable by mule, vast forests of chestnut, oak, wolves, pheasant, and wild boar, the occasional shrine to the Holy Mother, a desperate and futile bulwark against a land teeming with far older, more unruly spirits.

It also happens to be home to the world's two most famous butchers, Dario Cecchini and Stefano Bencistá Falorni. Tuscans love meat with a passion. Cooking “sulla braccia,” over fresh, glowing coals, usually in the hearth of some ancient home, evokes the reverence of ritual. Stefano's village of Greve has six independent butchers, in addition to a butcher counter in the Coop (the supermarket) that would put most artisanal markets in the US to shame. Tiny Panzano has two independent butchers, plus another in their Coop. They all know what they are doing. So what sets Dario and Stefano apart?

In the English speaking world, Dario's fame far exceeds that of Stefano or any other butcher, thanks in large part to his ardent, eloquent, and heartfelt admirers, including Bill Buford, Faith Willinger, and Jaime Oliver. Stefano, while lacking such influential advocates in the English speaking world, is, like Dario, a regular on Italian television, and perhaps better known for his salumi than any other butcher in a nation obsessed with salumi, a nation where, moreover, Tuscany is widely considered, at best, a middling region for salumi.

Dario and Stefano are about the same age, on the long side of "middle age," both basking in the golden light of late afternoon, as one might say after too much Chianti and Tuscan sun. Both run butcher shops of which they are the eighth generation inheritors, both dating to the early 1700's. Both of those shops are living homes of the old Tuscan culture, the one that predates highways and industrialization, that was there before the Renaissance, that feels a closer kinship to the Etruscans than to Rome, that is, seemingly, as old as the hills. At both stores, the men and women who work there banter playfully with local regulars and each other, in varying degrees of the local contadino accent. Both Stefano and Dario are large men with large hands in a place where most of the locals are quite small, giving credence to old wisdom about the virtues of meat. Both live in the villages of their births, Stefano in Greve, Dario in Panzano, neighboring villages on the Chiantigiana. Both are fierce defenders of an artisanal Tuscan food tradition both more widely known and celebrated than ever before and perhaps more genuinely threatened. Both are the overwhelmingly dominant personas in their towns, in which people often say, in typical half-derisive awe, that there will soon be statues of them in the main squares (in Stefano's case, he would either join or replace Giovanni da Verrazzano). The similarities, as though there weren't enough, end there.

Oh yes, there is one more commonality, of interest only to me. I worked as a stagista, or unpaid apprentice, for both of them.

Dario is nearly always laughing, beaming, hugging his dear friends (including those he just met), singing, reciting poetry, expounding on the dignity of the artisan and the crime of industrial food, handing out free homemade wine and lardo, holding court in his little shop like a mad and benevolent king, which is, in effect very much what he is to little Panzano. More than king, even, he is almost a patron saint, famous locally for taking in, looking after, and often employing the cast-offs, the troubled, the addicts, the people most in need of help and acceptance, and those typically least likely to get it. On occasion, he bursts with anger, often rooted in indignation at those who question his choice to source beef from Spain (it is pasture raised on a family farm, unlike nearly all Tuscan chianine, the local heirloom bovines, now living miserably on grain in CAFOs), who ask more than once for a Bistecca Fiorentina (thereby ignoring the rest of the animal, and the fact that the Fiorentine all go to his restaurant Officina della Bistecca, where they can certainly get some), who ask for their porchetta sliced thinly (it dries out), and so forth. He always wears red. People often leave his store believing he is a giant, not only because his massive head, hands, and shoulders tower over them as he stands on a not-so-obviously higher level behind the meat case, making him seem a full two meters (that's 6'9" for my fellow Americans... by the way, he's actually about six feet, or 183cm for my non-American friends). Dario is very big, but not too big for Panzano. Herein, perhaps, is the key to his appeal: grand champion of the small.

Stefano, dressed in white like the many other butchers who work for him (his butcher shop is much larger than Dario's and offers a much wider array of fresh and, especially, cured meats), is often seen as aloof. I have known him for virtually all of my thirty-three years and volunteered the autumn of 2010 to work for him, in exchange for his knowledge, which he shared with some initial hesitation but ultimately with great generosity. I think he likes me, though I can never be sure. If I enter the store for the first time in months or years, he may or may not greet me. The greeting may be a smile and nod. If I stand around long enough, he will, maybe, at some point, come over and speak to me with great intensity for a few minutes. Then he will walk away. When I leave, he almost never says goodbye. Stefano inspires more fear than Dario. He is usually quiet, but when he decides to speak up, his booming voice, grand gesticulations, and enormous presence easily dominate almost any situation. His Tuscan accent is so thick that I still usually struggle to understand him, though I've managed to forge close friendships with people speaking only Italian.

Stefano works with all kinds of meat, but mostly pork. He is most famous for his salumi, or cured meat, including salami, prosciutto, lardo, pancetta, capocollo, guanciale, etc. Dario works with no poultry, no rabbit or lamb, the occasional mammalian game, and a steady influx of pork, but mostly beef. His #1 catchphrase is "To beef or not to beef!" (Other catchphrases include, "Senza furia e senza paura," meaning "No rush and no fear" and "Viva la ciccia!" meaning "Long live [the Tuscan dialect word for] meat!") He makes almost no salumi, only guanciale. Both are, for any doubters, truly past masters. I have now seen a lot of career butchers, most of them raised in the proud tradition of Tuscany. Dario and Stefano both combine precision, grace, and speed to a degree I have seen in no one else, with the possible exception of "Maestro" Orlando, the seventy-two year old master butcher who does most of the day-to-day butchering for Dario (after all, Dario's daily duties also include running a busy shop, running three restaurants, and managing the demands of an international foodie media that can't get enough of him).

Where Stefano is proudly “all business,” Dario routinely denies that his business is a business. Both are preturnaturally hard workers, often up before dawn, often working well into the night, often working seven days a week, often doing physically tough and obviously dangerous work, and rarely taking a vacation, which can only be at the instigation of loved ones. Stefano has built, through hard work, talent, and business savvy, a small empire of pork and wine. That empire is already blurring the lines between the artisanal and the industrial. If there is a spiritual or ethical component to Stefano's work, it is manifest only in the quality of his products. Dario has built his little empire of beef and, well, more beef, through hard work, talent, and an unrelenting commitment to honoring the animals, honoring the artisan's dignity and way of life, and resurrecting the dying or lost traditions of Chianti. His empire has little room to grow. It is reaching the upper limits allowed by its fierce artisanality.

On my last day with Stefano, I'm pretty sure I did not see him. Finally, a few days later, after several attempts, I found him in the store, where he gathered some nice products for me as a thank you. I'm not sure he said much of anything. But it was touching. On my last night with Dario, working dinner service at his restaurant above the shop, Officina della Bistecca (Workshop of the Steak), I stepped outside for a breath of air, when I noticed Dario singing in his booming baritone. Then I noticed he was singing to me. I think it was an Italian version of Auld Lang Syne. It's foggy because he quickly threw his (massive) arms around me, catching me a bit off guard. He held me, in Dario fashion, longer than I might have expected, had I expected to be hugged in the first place. Then he pulled back, holding my arms, beaming from ear to ear, and told me that from now on, this was my home, and that whenever I come back, I should always feel that I am home.

I do not know if they are friends, though I am pleased to have found the photo above. I never asked either what he thinks about the other. I do not want to know. I'm afraid that either might color my view of the other in ways I'd rather avoid. I'm afraid of revealing my divided loyalties, if that is not too absurd a notion to express. I figured that by now I would know, but I don't. So be it.

What else is there to say? Actually, a lot. Too much. About the Apollonian order of white-clad butchers, scores of hanging prosciutti, and queued customers in Antica Macelleria Falorni. About the Dionysian spectacle of roaring disco music, fast flowing wine, endless plates of free porchetta bites with pepper jelly, lardo crostini, and fettunte (bread with Dario's very good estate olive oil), booming voices, laughter, and New York City subway-at-rush-hour type crowds in Antica Macelleria Cecchini. About my friends and colleagues, young and old, who populate these fraternal twin temples of meat, for I certainly spent more time with them, and learned at least as much from them as I did from their employers. But I'll leave it at this.

Grazie, Stefano!
Grazie, Dario!
Grazie, Chianti!
E viva la ciccia!

Little Things I Love About Italy

2010-11-02T14:12:00.000-07:00

I have been in Tuscany for four weeks. This is my first blog post. This is not because I have not been having interesting or noteworthy experiences. On the contrary, I've had too many, and too little time to reflect. Since I still have not been able to process it all, yet want to share something, however little, I've decided to keep my first post from Tuscany intentionally light. Just the little things I love.

The little burner on the stove designed for your moka pot.

The fridges which are a third of the size of American fridges, but easily accommodate a couple bottles of wine with corks hastily stuck in their tops.

The only real questions about your espresso are whether it will be good or great or superb and where it will fall between eight-five cents and a euro.

People spend so much time laughing, talking, and being together.

Is it silly to say the food?

Everyone gives everyone else shit, and it's expected. No one expects to be taken too seriously.

Everyone has the same handwriting (exactly like my dad's). Huh?

The weeds along the side of the road include fennel, mint, wormwood, and chives, and often abut gigantic, woody bushes of lavender, rosemary, and sage.

Everyone knows exactly when everything is ripe, when everything is harvested, when everything is at its best. There are four more days for artichokes.

All the old harvest festivals enshrined in the big religions are mirrored by actual festivals here, genuinely celebrated by everyone. One for the wine, one for the butchers, one for the chestnuts, one for the truffles, surely one for the olive oil, though I still have to find it.

The absurdly incompetent, buffoonish, lascivious, hyper-corrupt prime minister actually causes few problems outside of Italy (compared to American presidents), while at least giving everyone here something about which to commiserate.

Ordinary supermarkets carry all the same stuff as fancy, luxury markets in the US, but at a third of the price (except Coca-Cola, which is three times more expensive... ha).

The sounds. The gestures.

Eating bunnies, tripe, and lungs is totally normal.

Wines are marked up maybe 10-20% in restaurants, rather than 300-400% as in the US.

Steaks... see above. And gosh, they're good. And always, always rare.

Tips are considered offensive when they're more than a couple coins because it implies that the staff (often the family that owns the place) is underpaid.

No one orders a cappuccino after 10am. And if you get a drink before dinner, it's a spritz (Aperol or Campari with prosecco and a slice of orange). And if you have a drink after dinner, it's grappa. Unless you overate, in which case it's Fernet.

Everyone routinely eats wild mushrooms, and enough people forage them that it's considered normal.

Everyone loves America and hates our government.

Because practically every restaurant is great, people just go where they most like the people.

No one really knows how to use half of the tenses.

Every city in Italy (and many towns) has its own name for practically every cut of meat.

Men talk wistfully of their mother's cooking, with trepidation for the time when it will be gone.

People would rather risk absurdity to look good than be boring to look normal.

Tiny cars.

There are about twenty newspapers.

Tuscany is, along with Emilia-Romagna, the most consistently radical left region in Italy.

If it's not at least 500 years old, it's not old.

Dogs can go just about anywhere, and are warmly welcomed in most restaurants.

Cactuses and mushrooms grow side-by-side.

People constantly offer each other tastes and grab food off each other's plates. People always buy each other coffee.

Delicious wine grapes left to be nabbed after the vendemmia (the harvest).

Figs along the walkways. And that sweet, mushy, red and yellow berry, like a spiky cherry. Oh.

Lots of little dogs for Goldstar to intimidate.

Well, I could probably go on. And, if I were so inclined, I could do a similar list of all the things that frustrate me (and many others) about Tuscany and/or Italy (surely, Berlusconi would be featured more prominently), but why bother.

Cheers,

David

To Be More Like Jesus

2010-09-03T14:03:00.000-07:00

If you think Jesus loves you, he probably doesn't even like you. Or wouldn't, if he were alive. Jesus wouldn't like any of us who claim to oppose systems of oppression but are unwilling to accept personal risk and take action.

OK, there's my hook, and I like it, but it's not quite fair. So, in fairness, I am guessing we are all familiar with Jesus' message of universal love. I hope so. It is an important message. A dear friend of mine who is a preacher says that the primary focus of Jesus' teachings was interpersonal relations. She has misgivings about my focus, in this piece, on the Temple episode, perhaps the only story in which a fully mature and manifested Jesus acts in an overtly oppositional manner. I hope this piece is not taken as a refutation of the notion of Jesus as a community builder but rather as an expansion of our understanding of his actions and, moreover, as a case for expanding our repertoire in defending the community of life.

Why was Jesus murdered by the Romans? The sources, problematic as they are, suggest it was at the behest of the collaborationist Hebrew elite, feeling threatened, no doubt, by this populist Hebrew resistance leader. But what was the trigger? Again, the sources we have give a perfectly plausible and sensible explanation, which we have no good reason to doubt. Mystical or esoteric explanations are unnecessary. The pretext for Jesus' gruesome public execution was the act of resistance he performed in the Temple.

I just ran a Google Images search using the words “Jesus” and “Temple.” What I saw were images like the famous El Greco painting above, scenes of a man taking a firm stand, sometimes looking serene, sometimes angry, sometimes giving orders, sometimes wielding a whip, sometimes overturning tables, generally striking fear in the eyes of those around him. None of the images show any suggestion that he assaulted anyone, nor do the written sources upon which these images are based. The written sources, like these images, make it clear that Jesus forced the business community out of the Temple by physical means, including the destruction of their property, but not including assaults on their bodies.

But wasn't Jesus a teacher and practitioner of non-violence? The scriptures say so, and there is no reason to doubt this. But what is violence? If I tear a sheet of paper, is that violence? What if I smash the windshield of a car (with no one in it)? It may be infuriating to the car's owner. It may be unjust (but what if it's Osama bin Ladin's car?). It may be interpreted as a threat of potential violence to the owner. But is the act itself an act of violence? If so, why are some acts destructive of inanimate objects violent while others are not? Is it a question of their monetary value? Regardless of how you choose to understand violence, the following should be clear. If Jesus is to be understood as a practitioner of non-violence, yet lost his life for having destroyed the valuable property of business people engaging in what he considered to be morally reprehensible practices, then targeted attacks on immoral or destructive property are not acts of violence.

Get it? Unless you are ready to call Jesus a terrorist, then destroying destructive property is not violence. If you want to follow the example of Jesus, you should be willing to destroy destructive property when other means of resistance fail. Either you sympathize with Jesus and the Hebrew resistance or you sympathize with the genocidal Roman occupiers and the Hebrew collaborators, including the business community. If you are in the latter camp, be honest about it. Do not say that Jesus loves you. On a profound spiritual level he would, but more immediately, he would oppose you.

What is the #1 threat of domestic terrorism in the US, according to the FBI? No, silly, it's not the FBI. It's the ELF. And I don't mean Legolas. Haven't you heard of the Earth Liberation Front? No wonder if you haven't. It doesn't exist, as such. It is label for individual environmentalists or small groups of them who claim the name because they adhere to a set of principles, which are as follows:

* To inflict maximum economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the environment (biophysical).
* To reveal to, and to educate the public about the atrocities committed against the earth and all species that populate it.
* To take all necessary precautions against harming any animal - human and non-human.

Yes, you read that third and final principle correctly. And yes, it has been adhered to very closely and successfully. And yes, that is the “top domestic terrorism threat” in the United States. They haven't hurt anyone. And they don't intend to. And to do so would be in direct violation of one of their three core principles. Some terrorists.

No doubt, Emperor Tiberius, Governor Pontius Pilate, King Herod, and all their cronies, considered Jesus to be the leading threat of domestic terrorism in Palestine. No doubt, the good Roman subjects accepted this without question, or ignored it entirely. Just as few Americans questioned or even noticed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with destroying Dr. Martin Luther King. Or when the Reagan administration added Nelson Mandela and the ANC to their list of international terrorists.

Are you ready to say that Jesus was a terrorist because he broke the law and destroyed property used for immoral purposes? If not, how do you respond to the charge that those who adhere to the principles of the ELF are terrorists, let alone the most dangerous terrorists in America?

My point here is not to make the case for the ELF in particular, though the individuals who have claimed the name have done some courageous work. Nor is my point really to get us to rethink the historical Jesus. My point is to get us to see that the targeted destruction of destructive or oppressive property is, for one thing, not violence, and for another thing, something we should do.

Quick review. The planet is being killed. 1% of species are going extinct annually. Need I say more? OK, I'll say a little more, but this is, hopefully, just a chore at this point. The planet is warming at an alarming rate. The Greenland ice sheet is melting, and when it collapses, will produce unimaginable tsunamis and will permanently raise sea levels by 25 or so feet. This is to say nothing of the much larger ice sheet in Antarctica, also showing signs of at least partial collapse. Up to one third of the wildlife that existed just in 1970 is now gone, exterminated, murdered. There is ten times as much plastic as plankton in the oceans. Every albatross on Earth carries plastic in her/his body. Every human and nearly all non-humans carry dioxin and other hideous carcinogens in our bodies, and cancer rates are skyrocketing. Who have you lost? Oceanic acidification is so severe that phytoplankton can no longer live in large portions of the seas. Over 90% of large vertebrates that inhabited the oceans before industrialization are gone. Pollinators are dying off worldwide. Seals are so loaded with mercury that they are technically toxic waste, as are the indigenous Inuit who live on them and who now have some of the highest rates of birth deformities in the world, despite living a sustainable lifestyle thousands of miles from any industry. There are eighteen mega-dams on the Columbia River, once home to more salmon than any other river system on Earth. The litany could go on endlessly. If you haven't noticed that we are in the midst of an anthropogenic apocalypse, please wake up. Please.

Now, have you signed a petition against BP, Exxon, or Halliburton? Attended protests? Recycled, composted, bought locally, commuted by bike, boycotted sweat-shops, and planted native trees? Shat in the woods, dumpster dived, practiced permaculture, gone to environmentalist retreats, learned primitive skills, killed your food, or taught honest classes? I've done most of these things and hope to do more. These are good things, well worth doing. And yet, they are not sufficient. None of these practices is making a dent in the ongoing process of ecocide. What will? Carbon credits? Please. I ask again, this time for real, what will? Destroying destructive property. Will it be called terrorism? You bet. Will people be murdered for doing it? Yes, they will. Just like Jesus.

Just like Jesus.

Destroy destructive property. It's a hard moral imperative to face. Won't it harm people, even if indirectly, even when taking “all necessary precautions against harming any animal - human and non-human”? It will, in a sense. In the same sense that destroying the property of the businessmen in the Temple made their lives harder, and those of their wives, children, aging parents, etc. In the same sense that ending the Holocaust put a lot of people out of work. In the same sense that shutting down Raytheon or Monsanto or the US military or the FBI would do the same.

One of the sad realities of abusive systems is that innocent people are dependent upon them. Creating this dependency is a universal and key tactic of abusers. Does that complicate the issue of stopping abusers, or dismantling abusive systems? Only on a tactical level. Does it justify or legitimize abusers or abusive systems? Not one bit. The children whose food, medicine, and school tuition was paid for with money from the trans-Atlantic slave trade must have suffered when that trade was shut down. Was it therefore wrong to shut down the trans-Atlantic slave trade? No. If we want to consider ourselves adults, we have to accept that actions have diverse and sometimes unpredictable consequences. Yet profound injustices must be opposed, and not just symbolically, by anyone who genuinely empathizes with the victims or values the qualities that are targeted and destroyed by abusive systems. Jesus opposed the Roman occupation of his homeland, opposed the Hebrew collaborationists, and, as a devout Jew, opposed sacrilegious trade in the house of God.

We should be more like Jesus. We should be merciful and kind. We should not be quick to judge. We should be selfless, humble, and compassionate. We should love this world, love simplicity, love community. We should do everything we can to avoid wantonly harming anyone. And we should be willing to take a firm stand. We should resist injustice like we really mean it, in action as well as in word. That action can and should include direct attacks on property when less confrontational or dangerous means prove insufficient and when the degree of abuse warrants it.

We should be no more violent than Jesus. And no less firm.

For Palestine

2010-08-18T18:31:00.000-07:00

It's time for every Jew with a conscience to openly and unequivocally condemn and meaningfully oppose the brutal and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Zionism is a perversion of all that is decent in Judaism, it is the very opposite of tikkun olam (“healing the world”), and while the horrors and sufferings it has inflicted have been overwhelmingly on Palestinians and Lebanese, it will invite a cataclysm upon Jews in the years to come, Zionist and non-Zionist alike, for Zionism has thoroughly succeeded in falsely equating Judaism with itself. Non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews have been far too silent, far too passive, utterly betraying the lessons of the Shoah. No more silence on the genocide. Silence is complicity and complicity is participation. Moreover, all non-Jewish Americans must also know that this genocide is a joint US-Israeli operation, largely funded by American citizens, and largely carried out with US-made weapons, many of them donated in the nearly $3 billion annual military aid to Israel. That's $3 billion from ordinary Americans, many of whom have no health care, no clean water, no prospects. $3 billion to pay for yet more death, more misery, more destruction. $3 billion to bulldoze homes, blast apart the bodies of children, terrorize a whole society with the aim of destroying it as such. Many good people live in Israel, as in all countries. Many oppose the occupation. It's time we join them and stand in solidarity with the brutalized, dispossessed, and desperate people of Palestine.

If this sounds wrong to you, know that AIPAC, the Israel lobby, is by far the wealthiest and most influential foreign lobby in Washington. Since WWII, the largest sector of the US economy has consistently been weapons production, and US weapons sales account for more than half of all weapons sales on Earth. Conflict is obviously in the interest of the military industrialists, and it is their legally defined duty to maximize short-term profits, obviously through maximizing hate, fear, and militarism. No wonder they support Zionism so ardently. The corporate news and the larger corporatist system of which it is part reflexively paint a grotesquely warped picture, inverting reality, turning victims into monsters and terrorists into statesmen. Again, this is what ensures maximal profits in the war-fueled corporatist economy. Politicians spout the same venal propaganda for they are paid to do so, both by AIPAC and by the military-industrial corporations. Zionists hold undue influence in academia, both through major donors like the Bronfmans and through academic hitmen like Alan Dershowitz, who used his clout to blacklist Norman Finkelstein, a genuine scholar who has exposed Dershowitz for the intellectual fraud he is. The Orwellian named Anti-Defamation League exists exclusively to defame as anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers anyone who questions Zionism or even questions any particular crimes of Israel. It is all but impossible to see anything but an inverted reality about Palestine from the US until you take it upon yourself to do some serious investigation. If you have any interest in learning the truth, the basic act we must take if we are ever to fulfill our responsibility by stopping the horrors, there are many good sources. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are a good place to start, as is the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem. For analysis, Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi, Norman Finkelstein, Edward Said, and Ilan Pappe are courageous scholars, vilified for telling the truth as dissident intellectuals have always been in imperial societies. If you're not quite ready to run out and buy (or borrow) their books, watch a few lectures on YouTube. If you can, go see the occupation firsthand. Or, if you choose to do nothing or even justify and legitimize this brutality, this purposeful, century long program of ethnic cleansing, you must accept your participation in genocide.

The poet W. H. Auden wrote, “Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.” This sad truth extends to far too large a sector of the Jewish people, but a minority has taken a different lesson from the horrors of the Holocaust: oppose and stop atrocities, no matter what your friends and family think, no matter what the government and media do or do not say, no matter who the perpetrators are nor the victims. As Norman Finkelstein said, “If you had any heart in you, you would cry for the Palestinians.” We should all cry for the Palestinians, and all would if we knew even a fraction of the truth. But we must do more than cry. We must stand up to the governments of the US and Israel. We must see Zionism for what it is and has always been, a colonialist ideology based on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Jews lived in Palestine before Zionism, in harmony with Christians and the Muslim majority. I hope Jews will live in Palestine after Zionism and the Zionist state. But if the Zionists have foreclosed that option through their incredible brutality, that does not in any way absolve us of our responsibility to stop these atrocities that are being done to very real men, women, and children, in our name with our money. We must stop the genocide because it is evil. First, though, we must break the silence.

Occupation 101
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_jvXnPG9Xc

John Pilger's Palestine is Still the Issue (takes 18 seconds to start)

Norman Finkelstein on the 2009 Gaza Massacre

Noam Chomsky on the 2009 Gaza Massacre (Part 1)

Feeling Wild

2010-08-13T04:30:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I took the path less traveled. When walking in the woods, I usually do. It surprised me that I'd never noticed this path before. Clearly not an official park path, maybe it had been at some point, or maybe it's just for ranger use. As I walked up Bradbury Mountain on this mossy trail, I was treated to a magnificent boulder field. Already, the exploration had proven worthwhile. Climbing up past the top boulder, I had a little trouble finding the trail again, but soon did, and walked on a little way. Then I stopped. I smelled something. Black trumpets. Unmistakable. I looked around a few times. At first, nothing. And then...

I spent the better part of two hours exploring and harvesting this patch of black trumpets, which truly went on and on and on. Sadly, it was well past the peak of this flush, and while I came home with a very impressive pile of some very good (and some frankly borderline) black trumpets, for every one I took there must have been ten that were too far gone.

It's always a gift to be reminded of the Earth's immense bounty and generosity. I felt this as I picked the mushrooms, and soon lost myself in musings about fungal consciousness, spurred on by my current read, Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets. It is a magical spot, as are all places where mushrooms grow, which is almost the equivalent of saying all places that are profoundly alive.

What will stick with me about that day, always, is that it was the first time I unequivocally found mushrooms by sense of smell, thereby doubling the number of senses I've used in the act of foraging. This sudden and vast expansion of my sensory connection to the living world which supports me, entrances me, and, despite my lingering cultural hang-ups, is me, left me feeling substantially more wild. Wild animals are noted for the keenness of their senses. Civilized humans are so dull they need to be bludgeoned just to register some signs of life (how many rapes and murders does the average American see on TV each week?).

Moreover, smell is not just another sense. Each sense possesses unique qualities, offers unique possibilities. It is difficult to tell a story in odor. Yet no song, no face, no touch can collapse the expanse of time quite like scent. Yesterday, I noticed an unfamiliar herb in my friend's garden. I plucked the tender tip of a stem with its bunch of tiny, silver leaves, rubbed it in my fingers, and smelled. For a flashing moment, I was a seven year old in Tuscany. Later, I learned it was wormwood, artemisia absinthium, which is indigenous and wild in central Italy. I have no idea precisely when or where I smelled it as a child. Presumably, it was a regular feature of the aromatic landscape. On this occasion, the odor transported me to a period in my life, long ago. Sometimes, odor brings us to a precise moment. Either way, it is our time machine. And we usually ignore it.

What does it mean to “rewild”? Surely, some of you have heard the term, perhaps some have not. It is a by-word in the culture of resistance to the dominant culture. It means to restore, either internally or externally, the qualities and characteristics of wildness. What does it mean to be wild? I think Henry David Thoreau said it well: “Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest.” The dominant culture, the culture of nihilism, indeed a culture improperly so-called for it is the antithesis of culture itself, demonizes wildness, which is useful insofar as it facilitates the wholesale destruction of the community of life, including wild humans, including the beautiful, wild elements in civilized people, largely drummed out in childhood.

Wildness, along with the related word savageness*, has become associated with violence, mindlessness, and callousness. This is wrong. To be wild is to be a free agent, uncoerced, to be engaged, to be profoundly alive, to feel deeply, to see clearly, to connect. In the old Norwegian tale Valemon and the Wild Third Daughter, the great white bear Valemon carries the girl away from her parents' castle and into the deep woods. He begins the initiatory process with two questions. Have you ever sat more comfortably than you do now? Have you ever seen more clearly than you do now? To be wild, or, for those of us raised and living in captivity, to rewild, is to sit comfortably in this world, to sense keenly, to take part in the great dance, riding on the backs of our great animal energies toward our destinies.

* Check out the etymology of "savage." The historical progression is fascinating.

Killing Big Shot

2010-07-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I killed someone. Today, I ate her liver. No Chianti. I have a doctor appointment in an hour.

My victim was not a victim, at least not mine. She was a two year old laying hen who was mysteriously assaulted in the middle of the day, possibly by a neighborhood dog, possibly by a fox or fishercat or raccoon. My friend found her on the ground with a punctured windpipe. We decided to help her die as quickly as possible. I brought her to the killing cone, pet her, talked to her softly, and slit her jugular. There wasn't a lot of life left in her, but I think it was right to get her beyond that awful suffering, which may have lasted another hour or more.

Three weeks ago, I became a killer. In a sense. I killed a rooster named Big Shot. Now I'd killed before. Many times. Innumerable plants. Far more bacteria and other microorganisms. A few arthropods and crustaceans, at least a couple fish. Thousands and thousands of insects, many on purpose. I'd stepped on frogs without knowing it, and run over more. I hit a deer when I was sixteen, and had neither the mindset nor the tools to help her die. I ran over a squirrel last week. More significantly, I eat. It felt profoundly different than any of my previous killings to intentionally kill a beautiful and familiar land animal by slitting his throat. I have a throat.

I'm actually responsible for a lot of death, but usually someone else has the job of killing. What would it be like to kill a fair portion of my food? How would that change my relationship to my food, to the plants and animals, to the land of which they and I am part? I also take part in the industrial economy, which not only wantonly kills tens of thousands of people every day, but whole ecosystems, indeed the whole planet. If I am to meaningfully oppose the industrial economy, I better know what I actually stand for, or, better yet, with whom I stand in solidarity. Becoming aware of and taking responsibility for the lives I directly or indirectly take is a crucial step in this process. Learning to kill is a difficult but important step toward gaining what Lierre Keith calls “mature knowledge.”

Big Shot had it coming. He was a rapist. Really, all farmyard roosters are rapists, and in the community of chickens, which is not to be confused with the community of humans, the hens don't generally seem too perturbed by aggressive males running over and forcibly mounting them. It's only a problem when there are too many males. The males become hyper-aggressive, fighting each other viciously and often clawing out the back feathers of the hens who get mounted too often and too furiously. In the wilds of Southeast Asia, the chicken's native habitat, males kill each other off and die protecting the hens from predators. In a stable chicken community, there should be no more than one rooster for every ten hens. We were well above that. And Big Shot was the bad rooster in the bunch. He had to go.

Big Shot was a gorgeous bird, probably the handsomest on the farm. A big, proud, golden rooster, well proportioned and strong. I hope he passed along some of those genes. We may have an inkling in the next few days, as it looks like we're nearing the first hatching of the year. And Big Shot had other virtues, for which my friend thanked him as she stroked and held him before the killing. He brought fertility to the soil. He often protected the hens. Soon, we would eat him.

When the moment came, my will faltered. My first slice didn't even get through his skin. Without a pause, knowing that I had to act instantly to prevent unnecessary suffering, I made a second, decisive cut. The bird was inverted and when the knife passed through his jugular, his blood exploded onto my left hand. There was a lot of blood. Big Shot looked sleepy. We were with him as much as we could possibly be, honoring him and ushering his spirit to the other side. But then I felt faint. Nausea swelled up, and I had to kneel against the tree to keep from passing out or puking. I felt ashamed. I kept reassuring my friend that it would pass in a moment, but it didn't. She told me to get the hose and pour some cold water on my head, and drink some. I did, and felt better at once. By then, Big Shot had gone through his thrashing. Who knows if that's when the soul leaves the body. I think it is.

The rest was comparatively mundane. Scalding, defeathering, and eviscerating were fascinating but purely technical. I was now dealing with food. Very good food.

That night we feasted on coq au vin. If you've had coq au vin, it was probably an eight week old broiler. Maybe a ten or twelve week old, if you got a heritage breed from a small farm. But coq au vin, that brilliant Provencal chanson of rooster, red wine, pork belly, onions, tomatoes (older recipes may call for mirepoix instead), mushrooms, stock, and herbs, was invented for a different beast. A young broiler is tender and bland, an excellent base for applying herbs, oils, spices, what have you. It can easily be roasted or fried. It is forgiving. It is easy. That's why we eat so much of it. That, and it's cheap, because it lives only two months, three at the very most, so it doesn't eat too much or occupy real estate for too long. Genuine coq au vin calls for a farmyard rooster at least nine months old. Big Shot was just about a year old. His legs and thighs were big and meaty. Not much breast. His bones were long, slender, and hard. The colors of his flesh were altogether darker and richer. He could not be roasted or fried. Old meat has to be braised or stewed, but treated properly, possesses incredible flavor. I believe we honored Big Shot. We certainly enjoyed him. He is, of course, now part of us.

And that is the point. We are what we eat. We are also what we eat eats. And so on. In other words, we are our landbase. And we must care for the health of our landbase at least as much as we care for our own narrowly defined bodies, for the two are inextricable. Are factory farms part of your landbase? Denuded prairies and wetlands and aquifers toxified by the natural gas industry? How can you take responsibility for your landbase? How can you redefine your landbase on a more personal, local level, where you realistically can take responsibility? How can you build community so you can act with others to address the problems too big for you alone? Can you kill? Because if you can't, or won't, you will starve. If you live in a bioregion where coconuts, olives, and avocados are impossible to grow, as I do, you will have to learn to kill animals as well as plants, or your health will soon collapse through malnutrition.

Killing is profound, but it need not be evil. Prey need their predators just as predators need their prey. Without their predators, including indigenous humans, the bison would have spread out across the prairie rather than moved in tight herds, and they would have thereby denied the native grasses the conditions in which they outcompeted invaders, and the prairie would have collapsed, and the bison would have largely died off, along with their predators. We evolved to live in balance.

I enjoy the presence and lives of chickens, cattle, pigs, guineas, sheep, goats, and so on. I would be sorry to see them disappear, but their presence depends upon our continued predation. Our continued presence does, too. If we can learn to take responsibility, kill with honor, take no more than we need, and always put the health of the ecosystem first, we will find that death is no end but rather a profound transition.

Who am I? I am Big Shot. I am Bro, the highland bull. I am thousands of other plants and animals, many from within a few miles of here, some from across the world. I am Bradbury Mountain, for I eat her mushrooms and drink her water. I am the clouds above Maine. I am the oxygen exhaled by these woods and the carbon they produce, using the power of the sun, from what I exhale. I am the sun. Who are you? Are we taking care of ourselves? How can we do better? This is no rhetorical question. The fate of the world depends upon our answers.

Beyond Newspeak. What is “Civilization”? What is “Agriculture”?

2010-07-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

"Wetiko" by: Liana Buszka

George Orwell noticed the particular adeptness of Western institutions of power at eviscerating language. He coined the term “Newspeak” in his classic dystopian novel 1984 as the name of a modified, narrowed, ideologically-twisted form of English. The purpose was simple: eliminate language as a tool for critical thought. In his parable, a tyrannical government intentionally molded the language by inverting meanings, simplifying spellings to erase etymology, and so forth. It was part of a broader campaign of mass brainwashing, which also included brazenly ahistorical reporting in the rigidly controlled news media so that the people would always support the latest war with little to no memory of the constantly shifting targets and alliances. In reality, the formation of Newspeak required no conspiracy (nor did the formation of an anti-historical news media), only the combined efforts of thousands of true believers progressively warping, winnowing, and spinning our words to the point where most people literally cannot think.

Anarchy means the absence of a ruler (from the Greek “an,” meaning “without” and “arkhos,” meaning ruler), which is another way of saying the absence of coercive hierarchy. As Orwell or any other anarchist could tell you, it means lateral democracy, egalitarianism, and organized, community-wide cooperation. It means living as humans lived for the first 99% of our existence. It does not mean disorder. It does not mean violence. It does not mean reversion to the Hobbesian nightmare of “man in his natural state.” It is not, most pointedly, a synonym for chaos, itself a poorly used term in mainstream discourse. Yet anarchy has been used by as lofty a mind as William Butler Yeats, and by millions of more humdrum social pundits, as a synonym for disorder, violence, lunacy, perhaps some half-deluded fear of a frenzied Bacchanal. This was a product of corporate spin-doctoring. From the emergence of modern corporatism in the mid 1880's through WWI (later, of course, in Spain), the corporate class rightly saw the anarchist movement as its chief enemy. The corporate media consistently portrayed anarchists as bloodthirsty demons seeking to harm ordinary people. The audacity of this smear-campaign was evident to many at the time, for the country still had intact unions and granges, a vibrant independent press in twenty languages, and traditional forms of education which were quite good at teaching critical thought. It took a full generation to destroy the radical unions, to largely supplant the independent media with corporate mass media, and to implement a rigidly doctrinaire, soul-crushing public education system. It took at least another generation to radically undermine community itself with the inception of television and the suburb. In our now radically atomized, intellectually comatose, docile, infantile, consumerist society, the agents of the corporate media can be as audacious as they please, and only a few radical voices on the margins will even notice, and few will notice them.

Democracy means rule by the people. Not some people, all people. One need not even engage in analysis to know that the United States is not a democracy. We are not even really meant to believe that it is. We are meant to believe that we live in a republic, which is a different form of government, namely a representative oligarchy. I will not enumerate the many ways in which the myth of the American republic is but a thin veneer for fascism. Maybe that will be another post. Athens was not a democracy, not even in Attica itself, let alone in the fairly extensive empire beyond the homeland of Attica. Just in Attica, a third of the people were slaves. Of the remaining two thirds, half were women. Of the remaining third, fewer than 20% were land-owning adults who were thereby eligible to participate in the political process. That means that, at best, 6% of the homeland, or maybe 1% of the empire, was the citizenry. That's not democracy. That's patriarchal plutocracy, rule by rich men. It was not progress, it was propaganda. Meanwhile, most of the world at the time was still indigenous, and every one of those cultures was far more democratic than imperial, war-mongering, ecocidal Athens, many of them being true democracies.

Fascism, in the grand sweep of our language, is a neologism. It dates to 1920. It is one of those rare words whose etymology is so crystal clear, so precisely and unambiguously documented, that there is no question whatsoever about its meaning. We even know who coined the term. Benito Mussolini. We know what he coined it to mean. He said, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, for it is the merging of state and corporate power.” It does not strictly mean Hitler, it does not just mean the official bad guys, and it certainly cannot possibly be twisted to mean Muslim extremists, though the absurd term Islamo-fascist has caught on in some circles. The only problem with Mussolini's useful and clear statement is a slight ambiguity: why call it corporatism rather than statism if it is merely the merging of state and corporate power? His choice of corporatism rather than statism reflects the deeper reality, that in contrast to the older model in which charter corporations served the state, the state would now serve the modern corporations. Need I even finish this paragraph?

Radical is a relative term, as are all political labels, though it is reflexively used in the mainstream discourse as if it were an objective reality. One can only be radical in relation to a given norm. Civilization is radically out of step with, opposed to, and destructive of the community of life. I am radically opposed to civilization. I am therefore a radical in relation to civilization. I am not a radical. I am very mainstream, middle of the road, even quite conservative in relation to the community of life. To obfuscate the reality that political positions are not absolutes but relative to existing systems of power is to make those systems of power appear as given: natural, normal, and inevitable. This is obviously very useful to those in power, and also obviously a big fat lie.

OK, enough warmup, onto the meat and potatoes. Or rather, the genocide and ecocide (the former of which is usually confused with democide and the latter of which is still, sadly, unknown as a word or concept to most civilized people). Nearly every English speaker believes s/he understands the words civilization and agriculture, just as s/he thinks s/he understands anarchy, democracy, fascism, radical and many other critically important words including history, time, nature, science, progress, religion, species, sustainability, etc. (By the way, we really could use a gender neutral third person singular pronoun, couldn't we? But I refuse to use “they” in that manner.) Without a functioning language, we cannot engage in critical thought. So we must seek to reconstruct language even as we engage in the discourse that promises to decolonize our minds, the necessary precursor of meaningful, and desperately needed, action.

Agriculture really did begin about 10,000 years ago, and its adoption is rightly called the Agricultural Revolution. It was the truest revolution in history, and the most destructive. Even the Industrial Revolution was less genuinely revolutionary. Really, it intensified and vastly accelerated the processes that had been in play since the dawning of agriculture. More on this another time. So, let's start by being clear about what agriculture is not. It is not sticking seeds in the ground. Any civilized person who explicitly or implicitly assumes that indigenous people did not know that plants grow from seeds and that there are advantages to having certain plants grow in certain places is, probably unwittingly, engaging in racist thinking. Indigenous people knew and know infinitely more about the processes of life and the interaction of different human and non-human communities that comprise ecosystems than the civilized. Yes, they knew and know where babies come from, and where plants come from. Yes, they planted seeds, and still do. Other animals do this, too. Squirrels plant acorns that will grow into oaks that will feed and house their descendants, many generations down the line. Whether or not this is done with intention is another question, and probably an unanswerable one unless we can get squirrels to join the conversation (I believe we can, though obviously not in English). When a person listens to the land and hears that it is good and appropriate for certain plants to grow here or there, improving the density and diversity of life, that may be called permaculture, horticulture, agro-forestry (though the prefix is misleading), etc, but it is not agriculture. Agriculture is the large-scale monocropping of annuals. Moreover, it is the seizing of land from all its prior human and non-human inhabitants and collective owners, claiming exclusive ownership, killing or exiling every visible organism leaving nothing but bare topsoil (a condition abhorrent to the “natural order”), and planting row upon row of virtually identical annual plants. Any wild being who attempts to reenter this land is defined as a pest or weed and in the value system of agriculture, it is not only acceptable but necessary and virtuous to kill these beings, for they are trying to “steal” what is “yours.”

It should be clear, already, that agriculture is an abomination to any animist, and all indigenous people were/are animists. If you need a quick primer on animism, it is not a religion but a spiritual worldview in which the universe is imbued with spirit in its totality and in all its component parts. Spirit is immanent, not removed as in theism. Therefore, all things are actually beings, each with intrinsic value and rights, each with its/her/his own will, personality, preferences, intellect, etc. If they are to be engaged, it must be on the basis of relationship rather than exploitation. Animism promotes humility and reciprocity and is antithetical to acquisitiveness and coercion. So we need not wonder why indigenous people did not think of agriculture. We need wonder how in the world such a pathological food culture ever came into existence. I dealt with that in my first blog post here.

Agriculture, aside from being immoral and murderous, is unsustainable. Topsoil is the basis for all terrestrial life. It accumulates very slowly. It is not just “dirt.” It is a dizzyingly complex network of decayed organic matter, bacteria, fungi, insects, and burrowing animals (I am borrowing, here, from Lierre Keith). It is, as Theodore Koetke noted, the flesh of the Earth. It accumulates very slowly, by human standards, perhaps two inches per millennium in an intact forest. The accumulation is somewhat faster on a healthy prairie as more of the carbon is stored underground and less in trees and other plants. Its much slower, of course, in arid climates. Soil is protected by plants and fungi. The networks of roots and mycelia hold the soil together, so even in heavy winds and rain, the soil does not budge. Obviously, in rare, catastrophic situations, like a massive flood, giant earthquake, or glacier, the topsoil can be heavily disturbed or even stripped entirely. Thankfully, these occurrences are rare. Tilling, however, is the equivalent of one of these catastrophes repeated once (or even several times) per year. The consequences are grim. Every moderate rain shower and even fairly light winds carry away precious soil. Torrential downpours and windstorms can carry away centuries of soil in a day. This is not sustainable anywhere, though it will desertify some lands much faster than others, depending, of course, on how much soil there was to begin with, how heavy it was, and how heavy the winds and rain were. Different agricultural practices can also accelerate or decelerate the damage, including crop rotation, construction of wind-breaks, etc, but the end result is the same: wasteland. As the water table drops (an inevitable consequence of deforestation, for trees draw the water up and also release water into the atmosphere, creating more rain), irrigation can be implemented to continue the process of destroying the land utterly (oh, I mean nobly feeding scores of hungry humans... more on that later). Trace mineral salts in the river water accumulate in the soil as plants reject them, and without sufficient rain (if there were sufficient rain, after all, irrigation would be unnecessary), the salts are not washed away. The result is salinized soil. Remember why the Romans dumped salt all over Carthage after the Punic Wars? So nothing would ever grow there again. This is the coup de grace in agriculture's war on life. It not only creates a desert but a salinized desert which will not likely recover for millions of years.

OK, so agriculture is unsustainable. It is a war on life. It was almost certainly a long, slow, tragic mistake (see my earlier blog post “Why Civilization?”). It is also a really bad idea just in terms of nutrition. The staple foods of agricultural peoples are grains and tubers, nutrient poor but energy dense foods comprised mostly of starch. In the case of grains, especially, there are also loads of anti-nutrients to contend with, natural chemical defense mechanisms for the seeds that undermine our bodies' ability to absorb and utilize crucial vitamins and minerals, leading to stunted growth and deformity in people who rely too heavily on such foods. With the onset of the Agricultural Revolution, the farming people grew, on average, to adult heights five or six inches shorter than their indigenous ancestors. Where their indigenous ancestors had, on average, less than one cavity per person per lifetime, the farmers had seven to eight (and this was long before refined sugar). Maternal and infant mortality sky-rocketed. Cancer, previously almost non-existent, became a major killer. Likewise diabetes, heart disease, stroke, asthma, and a host of other “diseases of civilization” (and, no, they're not just called that by radicals). Simply put, humans did not evolve to eat the farmer's diet. Our evolutionary ancestors ate very few grains and legumes, and relatively few tubers, at least as a proportion of total calories. They ate a vastly more diverse diet, relying heavily on dozens to hundreds of different species, while agriculturalists typically get most of their calories from a single species, and the overwhelming majority from maybe five or six. Our indigenous ancestors (this also applies to the few remaining indigenous cultures) always ate a great deal of wild meat, including organ meat. This meat was sometimes fermented. They usually ate ripe fruits in season, a wide range of nuts and plants (often soaked or fermented), and mushrooms. Only coconut-eating indigenous cultures got the majority of their calories from plants, and this was mostly in the form of coconut oil, the most saturated oil in nature. In those cultures, fish was a close second. All other indigenous cultures got most of their calories from animals, invariably preferring foods rich in saturated fat. Relatively little of the fat in the various indigenous diets was polyunsaturated and relatively few of the total calories were from carbohydrates. The nutrient density of such a diet is extremely high. The agricultural diet is poor in fat, most of the fat is polyunsaturated, the bulk of the calories are carbohydrates, and the nutrient density is poor. Hence, agricultural people were and are often well-fed but malnourished, short and portly, prone to deformity, disease, and rotten teeth. At worst, they are much more susceptible to famine, due to the fundamental unsustainability of their food culture, their gross overpopulation, and their overwhelming reliance on one or, at best, a few species.

So agriculture is bad for us, in addition to being unsustainable, immoral, and, historically, a big mistake. Hopefully, you're starting to find yourself more interested in ending agriculture than attempting to reform it, though you may still have a few hesitations, some of which will have to wait for another post (like, “OK, but how in the world can we feed seven billion people without grain?”). Now we begin to segue toward the question of civilization. Agriculture is the necessary precursor of civilization. Agriculture, being abhorrent to indigenous people, developed with a concomitant value system which remains with us (the civilized) to this day. No longer was the world comprised of subjects with whom to commune but now objects to exploit (I am consciously paraphrasing the brilliant Thomas Berry). No longer did spirit inhabit and animate the myriad beings in this universe. They were now just things, which humans, unique in the physical world in our possession of souls, could not only exploit at will but were divinely commanded to do so. Agriculture also gave us gods and, especially, God. Where indigenous people saw and see the Earth as a benevolent and generous (and often stern) mother, the agriculturalists, at war with the Earth mother, turned to supernatural powers beyond the physical realm to aid them in their battle. These gods were originally nature spirits who became increasingly abstracted from their physical origins. Early agriculturalists, still closer to their indigenous-animist roots, often worshipped goddesses over gods, but with the prevailing trend toward patriarchy, the gods always won out. The Germanic tribes, still foraging and hunting for much of their food, growing and raising some more, steadfastly avoiding the formation of population centers larger than small villages, continued to worship in the forest and continued to regard trees as divine. The Egyptians, relatively early and ardent agriculturalists and famed champions of civilization, sent their spirits off to the sky, or deep underground. The Greeks mirrored this, but with an astonishing innovation: suddenly, all the gods were in strictly human form, revealing the Greeks' extreme anthropocentrism. Their gods lived in various far off places, but mostly on top of a very large mountain. The Romans would send their gods to the other planets of the solar system, and the inheritors of the Abrahamic tradition sent their God and his angels (I promise another post on this, the insanity of the term monotheism) further still, into the Heaven beyond the firmament. As the alienation between classes, individuals, and especially between humans and the (“natural”) world became greater, and as hierarchies became more stratified and abusive on Earth, so too did the alienation of spirit increase along with the degree of divine autocracy.

In addition to its extreme anthropocentrism, objectification, and increasingly totalitarian theism, agriculture proved to give rise to some other interesting values and concomitant institutions. Because agriculture on fresh soil produces a glut of food in the short-term, and because that food is storable over years, certain individuals, notable only for their ruthlessness, seized control of the surplus. In indigenous villages, all the homes are about the same size. In the earliest agricultural societies, there is always one very big house, adjoining the grain silo (this is straight from Richard Manning). Grain becomes the prototypical commodity, indeed the prototypical currency, as it is taxed, it is fungible, and it is used by the authorities how and when they see fit, always as a tool of social control. Agriculture gives rise to monetarism and commodification.

Since yields on given parcels of agricultural land tend to decrease, due to nutrient exhaustion, erosion, decreasing precipitation, falling water tables, and progressive salinization, previously unfarmed land would continually have to be appropriated even to sustain a stable population. But agriculture demands a growing population. This is a product of the food surplus, the need for more laborers in individual family units to maximize their yields and thereby advance in the emergent socio-economic hierarchy, and the need for soldiers and slaves to do the really dirty work of empire. So the ruling class spawns a subset of itself dedicated to indoctrination, namely a priestly class (my own surname, Levi, indicates my lineage from the Hebrew priestly class, of which there was a further subset of high priests, the Kohenim). These priests preach that the gods, or God, want/s to see people breed as quickly as possible. This is doable, in the short-term, given the expanding food supply, and it is desirable, in a limited sense, for the ruling class as they will have more slaves and soldiers and a larger tax-base. So agriculture values growth, in terms of population and in terms of economic production.

Indigenous economies are gift economies. People individually possess little or nothing. Land ownership is completely abhorrent. People routinely and ritually exchange gifts, but the rule is that the gifts must either be consumed (so an animal must be eaten, usually in a communal feast) or passed along endlessly (as in a tobacco pipe). This is to prevent hoarding, which is, rightly, seen as a root of acquisitiveness and coercion. Hence, “Indian-givers” who demanded back the gifts they'd given to the whites when they found the whites hoarding them. In agricultural societies, the Earth has no value in its “natural” state. There is no intrinsic value to great herds of bison, towering old growth forests, or shoals so thick with cod they could capsize a small boat. In agricultural societies, economic production is equated with exploiting, using up, and usually destroying other beings (who are, of course, rarely regarded as beings, even when they turn out to be humans). It is, as Derrick Jensen so succinctly put it, “the conversion of the living to the dead.” Actually, it's even worse than that, for death feeds new life. It's the termination of the life-cycle and the sterilization of the planet. But Jensen's phrase is catchier, and conveys the most salient information.

Now is as good a time as any to make it clear that civilization is a synonym for “agricultural society,” at least once it has reached the very early stage of city-building. In Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization, Derrick Jensen defines civilization just about perfectly, so I will quote him:

If I’m going to contemplate the collapse of civilization, I need to define what it is. I looked in some dictionaries. Webster’s calls civilization “a high stage of social and cultural development.” The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as “a developed or advanced state of human society.” All the other dictionaries I checked were similarly laudatory. These definitions, no matter how broadly shared, helped me not in the slightest. They seemed to me hopelessly sloppy. After reading them, I still had no idea what the hell a civilization is: define high, developed, or advanced, please. The definitions, it struck me, are also extremely self-serving: can you imagine writers of dictionaries willingly classifying themselves as members of “a low, undeveloped, or backward state of human society”?

I suddenly remembered that all writers, including writers of dictionaries, are propagandists, and I realized that these definitions are, in fact, bite-sized chunks of propaganda, concise articulations of the arrogance that has led those who believe they are living in the most advanced—and best—culture to attempt to impose by force this way of being on all others.

I would define a civilization much more precisely, and I believe more usefully, as a culture—that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts— that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from Latin civitatis, meaning city-state), with cities being defined—so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on—as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life. Thus a Tolowa village five hundred years ago where I live in Tu’nes (meadow long in the Tolowa tongue), now called Crescent City, California, would not have been a city, since the Tolowa ate native salmon, clams, deer, huckleberries, and so on, and had no need to bring in food from outside. Thus, under my definition, the Tolowa, because their way of living was not characterized by the growth of city-states, would not have been civilized. On the other hand, the Aztecs were. Their social structure led inevitably to great city-states like Iztapalapa and Tenochtitlán, the latter of which was, when Europeans first encountered it, far larger than any city in Europe, with a population five times that of London or Seville. Shortly before razing Tenochtitlán and slaughtering or enslaving its inhabitants, the explorer and conquistador Hernando Cortés remarked that it was easily the most beautiful city on earth. Beautiful or not, Tenochtitlán required, as do all cities, the (often forced) importation of food and other resources. The story of any civilization is the story of the rise of city-states, which means it is the story of the funneling of resources toward these centers (in order to sustain them and cause them to grow), which means it is the story of an increasing region of unsustainability surrounded by an increasingly exploited countryside.

Since the population of a civilized society must grow endlessly in order to meet its divine obligations, to conquer and pacify (ethnically cleanse) an ever greater territory, to supply ever more cities, and to meet the material demands of an ever more rapacious and powerful elite, it progresses across the land like a cancer. Indigenous people are, as I noted, generally taller, stronger, healthier (and, I dare say, more clever and intelligent, not by virtue of genetics but rather culture and nutrition), yet they always fall victim to the civilized. The reasons are simple. The civilized have enormous numerical superiority. They have the advantage of being the aggressors, often attacking peaceful settlements. They have a value system that glorifies violence against “heathens.” They have metal weapons and armor, a product not so much of their ingeniousness as of their immense desire for tools of violence and oppression and total disregard for the ecological and moral consequences of mining the earth for ore and deforesting it for fuel. Increasingly, they also have epidemic diseases like smallpox, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, typhus, measles, leprosy, influenza, and a host of other plagues, all originating in settled animal husbandry. This biological warfare was not always used consciously, though it often was. Either way, it was devastating. This endless expansion, genocide, and ecocide is, aside from being the epitome of evil, obviously unsustainable on a finite planet.

Premise #1 of Derrick Jensen's Endgame (the book begins with Twenty Premises) is “Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.” It is only “especially true” for industrial civilization in that the rate of devastation is far greater. It is fully true for all civilizations. The only question is the stage at which they collapse and the legacy of destruction and suffering they leave.

Let's grow up. Let's use our words as tools for liberation rather than wear them as shackles. Let's not be content to use, or countenance the use, of “agriculture” as the noble practice of feeding people, or of “civilization” as a synonym for culture or “a really good culture.” Think twice before saying, “oh, well this is so civilized,” unless you are witnessing the BP oil spill that's murdering the Gulf of Mexico, the building of the Three Gorges Dam and consequent extinction of the Yangzi river dolphin along with much of the rest of life in that river, or the Holocaust. Those are the real manifestations of this culture. The great sociologist and Holocaust survivor Zygmunt Bauman called the Holocaust and the Stalinist purges “the most uninhibited expressions” of modern civilization. If we won't even liberate our language, how in the world can we begin to attack the megamachine that is consuming what's left of the community of life? When I say, “let's grow up,” it is not an indictment. Growing up is painful, even under the best of circumstances. In the context of late-stage industrial civilization, it entails enormous personal risk and near certain abdication of innumerable comforts and social rewards. So I say it as a rallying cry, as much to myself as anyone else. Let's grow up. The Earth can't wait another moment.

Yeast, Bacteria, and Fungus

2010-07-18T08:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was another good day in black trumpet land. A smaller find than in some of the previous days, but it's always exciting to find black trumpets. I'm afraid, though, that my infatuation with the trumpet is undermining my long affair with chanterelles. I trust it'll all work out. Here are some of those trumpets (and my toes) drying in the sun:

I also got around to making a new batch of sauerkraut. Such an amazing food, and so much better than even the best stuff you can buy in stores (though I can't imagine why). By the way, if you've never made it, it couldn't be simpler. Chop up some cabbage, mash it up with salt until it releases moisture, stuff it into a glass or ceramic container, and weight it down to make sure it stays submerged in brine (add water as needed). Then let it sit out until it looks, smells, and tastes really good. Here's mine:

Brewing sauerkraut in the heat was not traditionally done, but works fine. It just brews faster, which means you also have a smaller window of opportunity for stopping the fermentation and getting it into the fridge while its flavor is optimal. Anyhow, I'm thrilled to have good local organic cabbage to work with, once again. Summer is good.

Cheers,

David

Update 7/19. Today was a really good day for shrooms:

Why Civilization?

2010-07-16T12:50:00.000-07:00

Agriculture and civilization first emerged in or around modern day Iraq and Turkey between ten and twelve thousand years ago. There were at least four other independent cradles of agriculture, possibly more. I'm counting China with rice, the Andes with potatoes and quinoa, Mesoamerica with corn and amaranth, and West Africa with sorghum and yams. The Indus River Valley is another possible birthplace of agriculture, though elements could have been introduced from both the Middle East and China. Ethiopia gave rise to an agriculture based on teff, arguably an independent cradle, and there may have been two separate origins of agriculture in China, in the valleys of the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers. The intensive horticultures of the New Guinean highlands are considered agriculture by some, wrongly, I think. Regardless, agriculture emerged in several cultures, all within the past twelve thousand years.

Why agriculture emerged in multiple places within a few thousand years without having ever arisen anywhere in the previous quarter million years or so that homo sapiens existed, is puzzling, and it's all too easy to conclude that it is something called “progress.” Here is another theory. The meltdown of the last Ice Age, between 17,000 and 8,000 years ago, raised global sea levels more than 300 ft, submerging vast areas of previously dry land. It was a major if not quite cataclysmic process of global climate change. Some species are highly resilient, and survive for many millions of years. Large mammal species are not among them, and tend to exist for relatively short periods. They (actually, we) are highly sensitive to climate change, and indeed there was a major die-off of large mammals during the meltdown of the Ice Age. Many of these were important prey animals for humans. Derrick Jensen has gone far toward debunking the Pleistocene Overkill Hypothesis in his book Endgame, though it is undeniable that humans were hunting many of these doomed species, and perhaps the cullings that were previously sustainable rapidly became unsustainable as environmental factors undermined the species. Whether hunting significantly exacerbated this or not is open to debate.

Many humans from low-lying lands were driven off their ancestral lands as they were flooded, and inevitably encroached on other, relatively highland tribes, which were already experiencing a precipitous decline in prey populations. Add to this that the seas were not rising gradually, but in catastrophic floods, including the breaching around 10,800 B.C.E. of Lake Agassiz in North America, which was far larger than the five remaining Great Lakes combined. Each time such a massive glacial lake breached, seas could rise substantially in a matter of days or weeks. Such inundations would also cause vast tsunamis, the worst of which (perhaps from Agassiz) could easily be the basis for the universal myth of a Great Flood. Anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday finds that cultures that have been displaced from their traditional homelands become abusive, "high rape" cultures for, typically, at least 500 years. The pieces start coming together. A traumatized people invades another people's land where people were already wanting for food due to a prey die-off, the hungry peoples come into conflict, and sometimes, the invaders win. Perhaps they find a way to justify their conquest, even genocide, of the former inhabitants: enter the civilized myths that valorize violence and domination. Now that the former refugees are established as the new dominant tribe in a region, they are still, likely, a high-rape, abusive, militaristic culture, perhaps more so than before. They are also still wanting for food, and do not yet know how to live sustainably in their new land. Meanwhile, there are other displaced, traumatized tribes trying to survive this dire epoch, often encroaching on the same land, so a gradual reversion to a saner society is impeded by continual external threats.

Meanwhile, the climate continues to change such that in some parts of the world, practices that may have seemed sane and sustainable for a while (years, generations, etc.) proved to be unsustainable over longer stretches of time. Now, if we examine a map of the world at peak glaciation (approx. 16,000 B.C.E.), what we see is startling.

Now take a closer look at the Middle East.

No Persian Gulf (or, for that matter, Caspian Sea). If, indeed, the Persian Gulf was dry land, it must have been unimaginably horrible and catastrophic when the Indian Ocean breached the Strait of Hormuz (the Caspian Sea, being a lake, may have filled more gradually). Perhaps this explains the severity of the Mesopotamian flood myth, and the extreme traumatization of the refugees. The survivors established themselves in the river valleys of modern day Iraq. Very likely, they already knew and collected the edible seeds of such wild grasses as wheat, barley, oats, rye, and millet, and if not, they caught on from the locals. People had been collecting and eating these seeds for thousands of years. The refugees, valuing the energy density and storability of these seeds in a now frightening and unpredictable world, sought out as much of it as they could, even clearing out competing plants to give the giant grasses maximal room in which to flourish.

The land must have been well watered by the glaciers melting down in the Zagros, Caucasus, and Taurus Mountains, but must have become far drier when those glaciers melted away entirely. By that point, the Mesopotamians were long since committed to a highly militaristic society, and to grain. They surely expended more effort each year trying to keep up food production in a drying land, eventually engaging in widespread deforestation and irrigation, both of which obviously intensified the problem (through dropping water tables, erosion, and salinization). Meanwhile, the hierarchical, militaristic, patriarchal society demanded population growth (for troops, for slaves). Such people might feel by this point that they had good reason to hate and fear the physical earth ("nature," or "Mother Nature"), and turned to a supreme, authoritarian Sky Father to protect them. By this point, I think we can safely say that civilization was born.

Extractive agriculture promotes patriarchy because men do most of the work of providing food. In hunting-gathering societies, men usually do most of the hunting while women usually do most of the foraging for edible and medicinal plants and mushrooms. In such cultures, women are also the primary care-givers of the young, for obvious reasons, and they were able to provide this care while making great contributions to the food supply. It should be apparent that women were obliged to carry and utilize a broader set of skills and knowledge than men, so it should not surprise us that many hunting-gathering societies were/are matriarchal. This matriarchy has never manifested in the coercive, rigid form of hierarchy that is so characteristic of patriarchy in civilization. In agricultural societies, men take overwhelming control of the system of food procurement, so perhaps it is not entirely surprising that women in these societies, now materially dependent on men, become systematically oppressed. Moreover, the militarism and material unsustainability of agricultural societies necessitate their expansionism. Expansionism requires maximal population growth, requiring, again, that women become enslaved. Patriarchy is, undeniably, a hallmark of civilization. “His Story,” indeed.

If we look at the non-Middle Eastern centers of agriculture, we might consider the relative proximity of large areas of now submerged land, and mountains overlooking the fertile plains and valleys where the refugees must have settled, mountains that were, for a while, delivering copious amounts of fresh water in glacial runoff, but then abruptly ceased doing so. West Africa is a likely exception, but the mass influx of refugees may have been from the rapidly desertifying Sahara, though it seems that this cradle of agriculture did not produce cultures as extreme in their pathology as the Mesopotamian cradle. Indeed, none did. If Sanday is right that displaced cultures universally trend toward abusiveness, there is no reason to doubt that the pattern would have been similar in all such areas. Mesopotamia happened to be home to a greater variety of edible wild seeds than any other part of the world. On the other end of things, teosinte, the wild ancestor of corn, is hardly usable as a food source, so it took far longer for any Mesoamericans to stumble on a genetic mutation that opened the path to agriculture, a path that only a displaced, abusive, traumatized culture would be likely to take.

I'm far from convinced that any center of agriculture and civilization other than the Western, Mesopotamian center would have necessarily led to apocalypse (I'm not even sure that the Western center was fated to reach this stage, though it did). We have no way of knowing precisely why Cahokia and the other Mississippian cultures collapsed rather than spreading and exploiting different "resources," as did other civilizations, but resistance was likely a factor. The Mayans abandoned civilization and rewilded, which may reflect their values as well as material limits. We can look at classical Chinese culture and note that the Chinese had a far larger economy and far more powerful coercive technology than Western Europe until well after industrialization was underway in the West. The Chinese could very plausibly have embarked on an Industrial Revolution in the 1300's, when vast Chinese fleets traversed the Indian and Pacific Oceans, building contacts with hundreds of cultures (notably not conquering, enslaving, or exterminating them). Yet we should note that classical Chinese culture, while guilty of manifesting many civilized pathologies (patriarchy, slavery, famine, etc.), is non-theistic and deeply informed by Daoism, which is essentially a form of animism. Unlike in the West (especially the industrial era West), the greatest poets, designers, and philosophers in classical China were often high ranking government officials, which belies a fundamentally different attitude of those in power toward beauty, wisdom, intuition, and spirit (yin energy). To me, it seems likely that China “failed” to subjugate and colonize the globe and embark on fossil-fuel based industrialization not because they couldn't but because they knew it would be wrong to move in that direction.

Does this mean that classical Chinese culture was entirely sane or sustainable? No. Does it leave open the possibility that it would have collapsed far less catastrophically than Western civilization? Yes, it does. The rice-based agriculture in pre-Westernized China was far closer to a sustainable model than anything in the West. Composted human shit and piss (humanure) was widely used as fertilizer, which closes a crucial loop. Ducks and fish were encouraged in the rice paddies, which diversified and improved the human diet and improved the health of the land. Soy was grown as a nitrogen fixing "green manure" (and was not often eaten, except in periods of famine, due to its high levels of phytates, trypsin inhibitors, phytoestrogens, and other baddies). It seems that this model of food production could probably have been practiced more or less indefinitely, at least on a certain scale. If some improvements were needed to create a true permaculture, such improvements might well have been achieved.

The Daoist tradition was always the definitive Chinese model on the place of humans in the universe and the ways in which humans should interact with the rest of the universe, and it is a non-anthropocentric model. In classical Chinese philosophy, one often reads of "wan wu," which translates roughly as "the myriad living things," reflecting a recognition of life, in the literal and spiritual sense, permeating the universe, not restricted to humans, or animals, or even organic life forms. The Daoist and Chan Buddhist traditions both reflect a sense of universal consciousness and of humans being small players in a greater whole of a conscious, living universe. These are mainstream traditions in classical China, quite unlike their Western counterparts, which have always been marginal, heretical, and definitely counter-cultural. Chinese civilization’s values are quite different than, and decidedly more sane than, those of Western civilization. It should be obvious that classical Chinese civilization no longer exists. China has been Westernized, with the full complement of Western industrial technologies and industrial era Western economic and political values and institutions. Today, the distinct elements of Chinese culture are now largely cosmetic. It is part of the West.

Western Civilization is killing the planet, that much is certain. Certain, too, is that it must be stopped. The discussion must move beyond abstraction. Only tangible resistance will stop the destruction, but resistance is unlikely from those who remain colonized. Perhaps these thoughts might help us decolonize ourselves. Civilization was not inevitable. It was not a sign of the “progress” of our species. It is not a manifestation of our “fallen state” or any other notion of inherent human wickedness (indeed, every other culture views humans, and the community of existence, profoundly favorably). It was an understandable accident in the midst of a bizarre geologic epoch that, in the case of one human culture out of thousands, spiraled out of control. Understanding it as such might help us begin to consider concrete action for taking down this pathological culture.