Text of Radio Piece
Aired on Touchstone Radio, KEOS 89.1
First aired July 7, 2004
Listen online at: http://www.rtis.com/touchstone/tsradio/static/cd40-05.html
I few weeks ago I spied some cattle egrets for the first time this year. The birds are as sure a sign of spring as the native wildflowers, but – like cattle themselves – they're not native to this continent. Flocks of egrets must have been blown across the Atlantic from Africa now and then since time immemorial. But it wasn't until another newcomer to North America – people – brought cattle, and the associated insects on which the egrets feed, that the birds found a way to make a living here.
Not long after that egret sighting, I was blown off course myself, to a conference in California. There, I met a young woman from South Texas. Every year in April, about the time I start looking for egrets, she was pulled from school to make the long trek to Michigan, where she and her family lived in a camp and picked crops at 60 cents a bushel until the last harvest gave out in November. That lasted until she was 14 - but rather than fleeing from farming forever, she's now training Rio Grande Valley teachers how to use gardens as educational tools – and sources of food for the Valley's hungry – in their own schools.
At the conference I heard yet another story of agricultural migrants. This one was about the Zapotec people of Oaxaca state in southern Mexico, whose concept of sustainable agriculture encompasses the ability to grow corn on the same steep mountain slopes for 3,500 years and counting. The Zapotecs don't sell their crops – they just grow enough to carry them through until the next harvest. Over the milennia they've developed a remarkable sense of weather and climate that lets them produce that necessary amount whether the year brings flood or drought.
The Zapotecs got by under Mayan kings, Spanish conquistadores, and Mexican revolutionaries. Their greatest upset to date may have come in World War II, when labor shortages and high wages enticed a few of them to California's central Valley. Few came to stay, but many have had no choice, and more arrive all the time – the industrial economy of agriculture being as detrimental to farmers and farm workers as it is to the consumers it fattens and poisons and the land it degrades.
Even groups working to help immigrant farmers in the U.S. teach them the same rules that got them into this fix in the first place: Farming is a business. Watch your bottom line. Get big or get out. It makes you wonder how things might look if we listened to people like the Zapotecs instead – or gave them a little land to do with as they would, just to see what we could learn. We might see principles, central to their culture, like: Give all that you can. Take only what you need.
Farming has been moving people and species into novel environments for the length of its 8,000-year tenure on the planet. Its 50-year old industrial version is the new kid on the block, a rowdy adolescent that hasn't had time to learn its place – or whether it has one. We can only hope that it catches some of the wisdom of its predecessors before there are none left to teach.