Water Hardly Worth Wading In

“Wade in the Water” was one of the songs they sang at the program yesterday afternoon. Humming it, subconsciously I suppose, as I walked around the lake this morning – enjoying the calm reflection of the bridge and surrounding trees in glassy waters disturbed only by a lazy duck or two, the occasional flip of a fish, and the “ploink” of a fisherwoman’s baited cast – a very different body of water came to mind. Spewing oil from a deep water well; black feathers shellacked to the birds they cover; dead fish floating in the tides of a poisoned Gulf Coast; company execs sputtering fecklessly in the face of the Pandora's Box they have so matter-of-factly opened. But picturing the “black gold” still spilling and staining the waters and beaches and habitats and beyond I recalled how the oil in the Gulf is only the newest poison poured into the toxic cocktail that has become those waters; this new toxin stirred or shaken along with the farm chemicals already washed down the river from Iowa fields where they were sprayed as a means to feed the world.

I mused aloud, recently, with my new friend Fred about the ethical dilemma that we Iowans now face – utterly dependent as we are on an economy inseparable from farming practices that have become standard since the Second World War. Mono-cultures (largely corn and soy beans) grown on a larger and larger scale, evoked from the soil by increasing amounts of herbicides and fertilizers, using seeds hybridized to maximize the nutritional elements most commercially desirable. Fred, a world leader in the field of sustainable agriculture, readily agreed that there is a problem; but he was protective of the farmers. Farmers, he noted, are hard-working, capable people who were challenged by a hungry world to produce more and more food that was less and less expensive. And using the best that science could offer them and the smartest practices available to them they succeeded, marvelously. Beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. The fact that we now know that those scientific enhancements and agricultural practices came with collateral damage doesn’t diminish their accomplishments – or their integrity. They did what the world asked them to do.

But as often is the case, yesterday’s solutions become today’s problems. Virtually everything we now eat is made out of the corn that we have engineered to produce maximum sugar that we consume in the form of high fructose corn syrup that “mainlines” sugar into our bodies, or cattle fattened on feed lots that serve up a diet that cattle were never designed to eat. And now we know that all those chemicals used to extract those ever-increasing yields aren’t doing the soil any long-term favors, and that the Mississippi River has come to serve as a kind of agricultural mega-toilet down which we annually flush the residue of all that science. And the result is a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico spanning an area more than 8500 square miles. “Dead” perhaps needing no further explanation.

So, in the name of “feeding the world” we are now in the process of killing it. I suppose irony is one form of humor. But I'm guessing that our children and grandchildren won't be laughing. Another old song reassures us that “God's got the whole world in his hands,” but I think God would have us remember that in a real and immediate sense it's in our hands as well. We are among the many hands of God. If, then, we want to continue to have water in which we and our children are willing to wade, we'd better start living our lives differently.

That, of course, is the ethical problem to which I referred earlier. It was one thing to do what we were doing when we didn’t know any better. But as the poet Drew Dellinger asks from the point of view of great great grandchildren,

“what did you do
once
you
knew?”

The Prayer of Close Attention

Walking around Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture last week, it was the circle that impressed itself on me once again.  One thing leads to another, which dissolves into another, and then another...  The grass is cultivated to feed the sheep, whose enclosures are moved each day to a new stand of grass.  The sheep are followed by the chickens who feed on the bugs attracted by the sheep manure.  I've forgotten now all the sequences, but eventually the pigs move in, and then more grass, and then the sheep, etc.  In the finishing barn, paper from the administrative offices is shredded and mixed with hay for bedding for the pigs.  The urine from the pigs jump-starts the breakdown of the paper, which is eventually transferred to the composting area, the heat from which is captured by water circulating through plastic tubes to heat the greenhouse in the winter.  Once the pigs are butchered, the bones are converted to biochar that is used in the restaurant for grilling the vegetables grown in the garden and fertilized by the compost. 

But maybe "circle" is not an adequate description.  Circles, after all, advance in one of only two directions, and what we observed was almost omni-directional.  Perhaps "web" is a better suited description.  All I know is that in this view of life miniaturized to a comprehensible view, everything fit together in a constant flow of inter-dependence that enabled each expression to simultaneously benefit from and contribute to another element of creation in a way that evoked the wonder and intrinsic value of each.  Operationalized was a kind of systemic graciousness that found ways for each element not only to flourish, but to shine.  Humility and glory no longer made opposites, but co-existent; each part honoring the "other" and the "next" without diminishing the "is." 

This, I left thinking, is the essence of abundance.  Why is it -- and when did it come to be -- that we became so afraid of scarcity that we grew jealous of any and every other; defensive and protective and stingy?  Why did it seem wise to atomize the fabric into discreet threads instead of celebrating their interwoven patterns?  And has the biochar of the divine spirit become so blackened and cold that nature's intrinsic and generous grace can no longer be heated into contributing use?

I  am too much of an optimist to believe that, but I pray that we begin to pay less mind to the faux-improvements we can impose on the world around us and more to the insights that world can teach us about all we have to share with one another. 


W.H. Auden once suggested that the essence of prayer is paying close attention.  Amen.