Turn Turn Turn

This appeared in the September 24, 2020 edition of The Fish Wrap.

When a forest is turned to bare earth, through fire, flood, disease, etc., a cycle begins again. First the annuals (weeds) pop up, followed by grasses, then a thick brush and finally trees. If there are adequate nutrients and water, a forest will develop. Land is always trying to become woods, but there is a special beauty of each stage in the natural cycle.

You can sense the land’s yearning to become woods when you see a weed growing through a crack in the sidewalk or see a dandelion pop its head up above your carefully mowed lawn. For most of human history, we have been battling with the land to hold it at a stage that gives us resources. It takes great effort to arrest the land at a single stage of the cycle. 

Managing land or farming is about holding that piece of land in suspension for as long as possible. Almost every bit of land on earth has been managed at some time by humans. The earth generously worked with us to produce food for all our ancestors. Humans repaid this generosity by treating the earth as a rival, pulling all the resources from her, leaving her unable to support life. 

What if instead we treated the earth with gratitude and respect for cooperating with us and holding herself in a single state for as long as we need her to. The earth loves us and wants to support us. We can approach a field with a commitment to steward the land well and to leave the soil richer in resources than when we started. The earth will support us patiently until our time has passed, when she will return to her cycles of growth from charred earth, to pasture to thicket and finally to woods.