Homo Humilis (man the humble)

God set us up. He made us in His image and ordered us to rule “over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” (Genesis 1:26) Add to this command our apparent ability to control and manipulate nature and it comes as no surprise that man and woman often act as though they are masters of the universe. The plants, the animals, the soil, the land itself – they are indentured servants whose sole purpose is to satisfy man’s needs and desires.

Think of nature as a machine and man as the master mechanic. The machine possesses no value other than to produce a commodity to be bought and sold. The mechanic has a right to modify, fix, re-calibrate, and even break the machine. He owns it and as such can do with it as he pleases. How is our relationship with the land any different?

This model – nature as machine – has infected even one of our most fundamental activities, growing food. Take the factory. Resources are shipped to the factory, a commodity is manufactured, and it’s sold to a customer and eventually dumped in a land fill. Now, take food production. The farmer drives a tractor to plow, disc, and seed the fields. He props up the soil’s fertility by pumping in fertilizer. To kill insects he sprays pesticides on the fields, for weeds he applies herbicides. The harvested crop is sold to the food industry. It’s altered and packaged. We eat the food, most of it anyways, and the leftovers – cups, straws, cellophane, lids, boxes, styrofoam – are thrown away. It’s the same assembly line process: resources as inputs, products as outputs, and refuse as finality.

Both the current food system and factories rest on an identical view of reality. The physical stuff of life is seen as a collection of isolated, discrete objects, floating in space, colliding with one and another. To manipulate the system – to make it give you what you want – the pieces are isolated, quantified, linked, and set in motion. In other words, life is a game of billiards: you hit one ball to get to the other ball. This is classic Newtonian physics, and it works.

Consider this astonishing fact. There are 6.7 billion people on the planet. The current food system produces enough food for every man, woman, and child. Every single person.

The capacity to grow such a prodigious amount of food has taken thousands of years of trail and error, advances in plant breeding, and critical inventions like the internal combustible engine. But, none of this would have been possible without humanity embracing a single, overriding belief: man stands apart from nature instead of being a part of nature.

If we thought of ourselves as part of nature instead of outside it, our food system would be radically different, because life itself would be seen differently. The land and all that inhabit it, including ourselves, would be seen as a gigantic maze of relationships, a jumbled spaghetti of connections with relationships nestled within relationships and patterns within larger patterns.

A relationship centric view of life is not some mystic’s pipedream of peace and harmony, but based on science. Experiments have repeatedly demonstrated a level of connectedness among apparently distinct particles, even when separated by huge distances. In the tests two electrons are paired. Their spin is tested to see if they act as a unified electron. If one electron is observed to spin up, the other will spin down, or if one is observed to spin right, the other will spin left. The electrons are next separated. The vertical spin of the electron is measured, and at that very instance the other electron displays a horizontal spin, no matter the distance separating them. It is as though a billiard ball in Los Angeles suddenly spins because a billiard ball in New York City moves across a table. Amazing. How is it possible that the one electron “knows” how the other electron is being measured? A likely explanation for non-local causation is that the two electrons are linked or possess a hidden relationship and are part of an invisible whole that can’t be broken by distance. Or, as Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in the second century CE, “Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy.”

A food system based on connection thinking requires a new model. Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese farmer, developed one such model called natural or do-nothing farming. He advocates no cultivation, no fertilizer, no weeding, and no pesticides. His fields are never left bare: weeds are cut and left on the surface to return nutrition to the soil; white clover grows under barley and rye to fix nitrogen; straw from the previous harvest is used as mulch. Seed balls, made with clay, compost, and sometimes manure, are sown by broadcasting before harvesting the standing crop. Turning the soil is left to plant roots, earthworms, and other critters. Carp devour slugs and pests in rice fields, and the ducks prey on weeds and insects. Everything is connected, all or most matter recycled, diversity embraced rather than scorned, and the land itself respected as a living being. Would a safe, affordable, nutritious, and environmentally sustainable food system like Fukuoka’s be capable of feeding 6.7 billion people? We don’t know, because we’ve never tried.

Operating a machine is simple. It comes with an owner’s manual, the parts are know, the interactions predictable, and the fixes possible. Contrast that with working with the land. No matter how clever or smart we are, man will never see or know all the multitudes of connections. We have been set up in a labyrinth of dead ends and hidden passages along with a few trap doors. Success will require more than expanded scientific knowledge or better technology. Something more difficult is necessary. It’s called humility. Are we up to it?