The bees have found the buckwheat

It has been the most fecund Spring imaginable. It seems that all of Nature has answered a call to fruition, with blossoms abundant; chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons, starlings, grosbeaks, gold and purple finches, bluejays all scurrying, feeding, reproducing; wild apples, grapes have budded ample fruits; and now the wild bees, gorgeous butterflies and a host of other insects have descended en masse onto the flowering buckwheat.

This Spring, first came the intense heat, then the big rainless dry, then at last sporadic rainfall. Now plants and crops are off to the races, with salad greens happy, and flora and fauna, new-born babies all in a growth spurt. We have been working through the rampant weeds; native grasses surprised us early with their spread.

As the Summer Solstice is upon us, all is well with the natural world immediately around us. Meantime in the Gulf of Mexico crude oil continues to gush into the ocean at a catastrophic rate and it is with dread that the ultimate toll of devastation is anticipated. Marine life will never be the same again and the environmental and economic fallout are bound to be colossal and cruel. Once more corporate greed trumps common sense.

Growing naturally

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Never truer than today, as the major political powers continue to divvy up the states and borders of the world like they own it, and as goodly individuals hunker down and do their own thing in their neighbourhoods.

Honest farmers hearken back to the good old days BC (before chemicals) when the air and soil were pure and naturally chock full of nutrients. Some of us hearken back to the days BO (before organic) and wonder if by natural farming we can dispense with all the terminology, from organic to sustainable to environmentally-friendly to ecological. Our method of growing is just plain natural. It would be nice not to be boxed in any more; to be liberated to roam, grow, and explore, spiritually and physically. It would feel good to re-establish our deep ancient connection to the soil, to the plants we nurture in it, and all the microcosmic world we share life with.

In parts of the Japanese countryside, this practice has gone on continuously, uninterrupted all through industrial, agricultural, technological and digital information revolutions, and through world wars too. Farmers there have always understood that Nature in all its complexity and wealth simply provides. It provides a healthy environment for plants, animals, birds, insects, and human beings in community too. It provides food, medicine, shelter, all the basic needs for optimal health.

Underlying Natural Agriculture is a profound reverence for nature, and the farming involved is guided entirely by nature’s intrinsic wisdom. Rather than seeking to control nature, farmers listen and respond to it. Mokichi Okada, who developed Natural Agriculture in the 1930s, envisioned it not only as a means of cultivating pure and wholesome food, but in addition as an art and also a spiritual pursuit.

Natural Agriculture is not merely a horticultural technique; it entails a change in the way we think about nature, and the advancement of a more sustainable style of living. As an agricultural method, it relies on an understanding of the subtle physical relationships and spiritual bonds that exist among all elements of the cultivation and consumption of food: the earth, sun, rain, wind, the farmer, the people who eat the food, and the society in which these people live. All these benefit from its practice; it is Natural Agriculture's purpose to make all these elements spiritually and physically healthy.

The unique contribution of Natural Agriculture is its fundamental respect for all the elements involved in the natural growing processes – light, soil, water and air. Natural Agriculture fosters a deep awareness of the contributions of each element and the benefits derived from working in harmony with them. In today’s consumer society, some people have lost the understanding of the underlying interconnection of all life; one reflection of this has been a severing from the natural world. Some no longer see their relationship to the natural elements, as they have for millennia. The manipulation of nature has taken an enormous toll on human heath and the well-being of the planet. Natural Agriculture seeks to restore the vital and sacred relationship between humankind and the environment.

A seed is planted in the earth. Rain comes and the seed sprouts and takes root. The germ of consciousness begins to grow. The root derives its nutrition and water from the soil. The leaves absorb the light of the sun and through photosynthesis change inorganic matter into organic matter. This spurs growth. Tens of millions of microorganisms in the soil help to transform organic matter. In its natural state, soil is pure and contains all the elements needed for healthy plant growth. Eventually plants blossom and, with the help of insect pollination, bear the fruit that contains the next generation of seeds. Too much human intervention in this process can hamper and harm the forces of nature, causing all sorts of deviations. But by forming a spiritual collaboration, we can guide, aid and enhance natural food production.

A plant grows amid a myriad of relationships: relationships with neighbouring plants, with the weeds near it, with the insects, birds, squirrels, earthworms and moles. All of these elements make up the natural environment of the plant, and the plant is affected by its interaction with each one. Additionally, the ponds, rivers, trees, surrounding woods and mountains also contribute to the plant’s natural environment and growth. The effect of sun, rain, wind, changing seasons, annual weather conditions, and the region’s climate all have to be considered as part of this plant’s place in Nature. The energy and heat received from deep within the earth and from the sun and other planetary bodies also impact its growth and composition. Equally important is its relationship with the farmer. According to the philosophy of Natural Agriculture, plants respond to the thoughts, emotions and deeds of the people who care for them. The more conscious the farmer is of the interrelationships within nature, the more he or she is able to play a part in fostering the balance and harmony needed for healthy plant life.

The basis of Natural Agriculture is to work in harmony with the natural environment for the benefit of the plant, for the well-being of those who eat the food, and ultimately for the whole environment. One of the goals and commitments of Natural Agriculture farmers is to bring physical, mental and spiritual benefit to people, helping those who have health problems as well as mental and emotional challenges. The ingestion of food grown by Natural Agriculture brings a balance to the bodily systems that ultimately affects one’s whole well being.

Thus Natural Agriculture involves more than agricultural technique; it means changing the way one thinks about Nature. It means relating to the natural world through one’s heart, not only one’s head. And it means listening, respecting and responding to, rather than dictating, the needs of Nature. It leads to the development of a lifestyle that creates a harmony with oneself, one’s community and environment.

Through the practice of Natural Agriculture the producers and consumers of food develop a unique relationship, based on a support system of deep appreciation and gratitude. The exchange of gratitude within this community becomes a key element to its success. Indeed, consumers suddenly realize their relationship, through the farmer, to the soil, seed and subsequent agricultural product. Similarly, as the farmer works the soil, he or she is mindful of the consumers who will eventually eat the produce. This process of exchange forms a bond that benefits each person in the chain.

The farmer/consumer relationship is a vital link, which when activated can lead to a much healthier, more wholesome and aware mode of living, as well as a greater understanding of community.

Snow falling silently on cedars

The end of February, Saturday morning. The softest snow is slowly descending from an empty sky. It appears to come from nowhere, out of the grey. The fields are blanket white. The bare trees’ dark limbs, the cedars’ bulky body are clearly defined by the contrasting lightness that garnishes them. Cotton-wool balls perch on the pines, then disintegrate as gravity tugs them downward.

Animal tracks snake across the landscape, sinking deep into the yielding surface. The birds are quiet, on low energy, observing. The silence is all-consuming. It is a winter scene of delicate grace, transitory in nature. Temperature changing, sunlight bursting through, wind whipping up will transform it. The moment is nature’s gift which stirs this human soul. If only more souls could see it and share in the wonder…

On the other side of the world, buildings are lives are turned upside down by convulsions from deep in the earth. The young Nazca tectonic plate moves violently under the South American Plate. The ground shakes violently and a tsunami ravages the coastline in a display of mammoth upheaval, voices scream in terror, cracks appear, houses and highrises collapse, waves demolish villages. Instantaneously, the devastation is colossal. Communication with the outside world is dead, concentrating the mind on the surreal scene. On the other side of the world, snow is falling silently on cedars…

Hubris

In the mainstream media we are inundated with statistics, surveys, studies, claims that purport to tell us the truth about developments in science, medicine, crops, foods, economics, climate, resource use. As consumers of foods, medicines, materials, and money, we need to read very carefully between the lines. Sometimes, we need to reject untruths, distortions, biases out of hand, and we need to be increasingly vigilant and smart at this, as ploys to make us consume more of the same swill are becoming increasingly brazen and devious.

The mainstream media has become an ethical minefield where we must tread very prudently to avoid explosive lies and deceit. This is the propaganda forum dominated by large corporate concerns with considerable clout. He who shouts loudest gets the point across to the widest audience. It is up to us as individuals to sift through the fallout of bad ideas and poor practice based on greed and fear-mongering.

We resist as individuals and groups, but above us, committees, councils, governments, blocs cave to the pernicious proddings of vested interests. We could give up, yielding to our collective powerlessness. Yet the world is filled with individuals who have started, and continue to start, unimaginably bold initiatives at the grassroots community level. The Grameen Bank, Gaia Hypothesis, the Hippocratic Oath, Slow Food, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, bio-dynamics, organics, non-violence, small is beautiful, truth and reconciliation were seeds started in the creative minds of individuals like Hippocrates, Vandana Shiva, Carlo Petrini, James Lovelock, E. F. Schumacher, Rudolf Steiner, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela …….. Each ethical code set roots and caught the imagination of a broad group of followers. Now, many codes have been co-opted, diluted, by those out to corrupt their followers and convert them to something totally at odds with the original pure precept.

In farming, bio-dynamics, permaculture and organics staked out the moral high ground. To my mind, organic certification should confer credibility to the way a farm operates in the eyes of the consumer. It should establish a level of trust that means that the customer does not need to dig deeper – she knows that the salad greens she is buying are natural, full of nutrients and devoid of chemical additives. She should not need to wonder if they have been bathed in chlorine or gassed with ethylene to last the long trip. To accommodate the big boys of rampant capitalism, regulators have diluted standards to such an extent that consumers don’t know what is organic any more, what natural means. How can they, with all the competing and misleading claims? When new pharmaceutical products lay out the results of their latest study (carried out by their own experts and specialists, and certainly not independently verified), and small-scale producers of natural remedies are prohibited by law from making any health claims, what does this say about the ethics of our society as a whole?

Protecting the honeybees

It’s happened before of course. Our greed has wiped out vast herds of bison, swarms of passenger pigeons, teeming fish in the oceans, and mussels in our rivers. Now we have turned on the billions of honeybees that provide us with so much of our food through the simple act of pollinating fruits, berries, nuts, and vegetables. As humans, we have a symbiotic relationship with bees (through foods from plants), so it is critical that we protect them.

In the pursuit of higher yields, industrial agriculture is now so dependent on the pollinating powers of honeybees that continued precipitous decline in bee populations threatens our very food system. It is hard to imagine a world with way pricier and scarcer coffee and tea, orange juice with our morning breakfast. Nor can we begin to envisage the impact of much-reduced production of apples, oranges, lemons, grapes, peaches, cherries, melons, nuts, squash, beans, carrots, sunflowers and yes, honey. Just one pollinator, the Western honeybee, tends over 130 food crops.

Bees are now bred to perform on an industrial scale, to help produce astounding harvests of all these crops. In the U.S, fruit farmers pay commercial beekeepers to truck bees thousands of miles to pollinate their crops. In the face of disastrous declines in bee populations they have been replenishing with stocks from Australia. In China, in the province of Sichuan, pear trees have been pollinated by hand after the overuse of pesticides in the 1980's wiped out the honeybee population. Is this the road we are heading down?

Around five years ago, honeybee populations started going into a tailspin, a trend that continues now. Why so precipitous? Although the bees had been in a slow decline for years, something happened between 2005 and 2006 that changed everything: a sharp and catastrophic collapse of bee colonies in dozens of countries simultaneously. This was unlike anything seen before, even by the oldest beekeepers in the U.S, Canada and Europe. In the USA, approximately one third of all hives have collapsed over the last two years. These losses are account for the loss of around 800,000 colonies in 2007 and a staggering 1 million colonies in 2008.

The European Parliament voted late in 2009 for tougher controls on bee-toxic chemicals. Hoping to avert a growing catastrophe, it has approved the creation of bee "recovery zones" across Europe. Intended to boost plummeting bee numbers – as well as stave off further agricultural losses – the measure garnered the support of an overwhelming majority of members when they voted on the measure. The recovery zones will provide bees places to buzz that teem with a diversity of plants rich in nectar and pollen, as well as free of pesticides.

In another significant stand, the Co-operative Group, which owns 25,000 hectares of farmland in Britain, recently banned the use of neonicotinoid pesticides on all its farms to protect honeybees. Simon Press, senior technical manager at the Co-op group said: "We believe that the recent losses in bee populations need definitive action, and as a result are temporarily prohibiting the eight neonicotinoid pesticides until we have evidence that refutes their involvement in the decline."

Movement to stem drastic honeybee population declines in North America has been much slower. Now, in light of the mounting evidence that new seed chemical coatings are deadly to bees, Sierra Club has been urging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to ban the use of specific chemical treatments to protect our bees and crops until it obtains scientific evidence that sublethal effects do not cause harm to America's critically important honey bees.

At issue are neonicotinoids being used in a new way - as seed coatings. For years, farmers have been spraying neonicotinoids onto their crops to stop insect infestation. Now huge agribusiness corporations have acquired patents to coat their proprietary corn seeds with these neonicotinoids. These “neonics” are extremely persistent. They enter the plant and are present in pollen and on droplets of water on leaves. As plantings have grown larger, the need for concentrated pollinators at bloom time has grown. Any changes in their health, abundance and diversity will influence the health, abundance and diversity of the prevailing plant species. This is a mutual dependency as bees rely on a steady nectar source and pollen source throughout the year to build up their hive.

The State of California has required that almost all 282 nicotinyl pesticide products be immediately re-evaluated because of toxic concentrations in pollen and nectar, and high residual concentrations in soil. Unfortunately, the EPA is moving too slowly to take action to suspend nicotinyl pesticides.

Kevin Hansen and Krista Keenan have just released a new documentary film called Nicotine Bees, on these catastrophic die-offs of the honeybee. They filmed across the US, in Germany, in Canada, and in India. To Kevin Hansen, neonicotinoids are implicated as the most important factor in the bee die-offs. He thinks the situation is grave, worsening, and has very direct explanations - contrary to earlier reports.

The Sierra Club is urging the American public to view Nicotine Bees. They suggest showing the 45-minute film at organizational meetings, home parties, classrooms and community events. To purchase the video or request a screening, see http://nicotinebees.com/.

After viewing this documentary, you are invited to add your voice to demands to protect our pollinators. Contact EPA's Steve Owens at <owens.steve@epa.gov> or call him at 1-202-564-2902 to request a suspension of the neonicotinoid seed coatings until independent scientists verify safety.

Another documentary film, The Vanishing of the Bees, warns that if our favourite foods and flowers such as broccoli, cherries, onions, melons, cucumbers and sunflowers do not get pollinated, our diets will consist of lots of rice, wheat and corn, which happen to be the main crops that the chemical giants have huge financial stakes in. It can be no coincidence that the commercial beekeepers who isolated their hives from the crops being sprayed with chemicals have reported no bee losses. Similarly, the organic and biodynamic beekeepers who work on diversified systems of food production and improving the immune systems of their bees have not suffered significant losses in their hives.

Beekeepers have been meeting with representatives of pesticide companies in an effort to re-focus how new pesticides are tested for harm to honeybees. Registration requirements for most new chemicals don’t require those tests to determine the long term effects of pesticides that adults eat or store to feed to their young later. It’s already known that some of the newer nicotine pesticides are deadly to adult bees if sprayed directly, and now it is suspected that, when taken back to the hive and stored in nectar and pollen, they are causing problems later.

Beekeeper Kim Flottum notes “… honey bees that pollinated, flew by, or even thought about crops sprayed with the new systemic nicotine pesticides did worse than honey bees that did not come in contact, fly by or even think about them. At first it seemed to be mostly eastern bees that were having this trouble, but when beekeepers actually looked, it is obvious that bees and nicotine don’t mix anywhere on the map. Nicotine Bees is pretty damning in its presentation and accusations, but it’s probably not the whole story yet. Still, it is becoming increasingly clear that these chemicals, either by themselves or as a contributing factor, are causing all sorts of hell for honey bees everywhere they are. And you can be pretty well assured that if honey bees are at risk, so are all the rest of the pollinators out there. All of them.”

David Hackenberg, former president of the American Beekeeping Federation, has been urging the U.S. regulatory agencies to suspend these seed treatments. "Look at what's time based. The massive bee decimation started when regulatory agencies rubber stamped the use of neonicotinoid spraying and coating," he said.

Honeybees have lived successfully on the planet for 20 million years before the arrival of humans up until this point in time. Bees are the ultimate selfless workers that have provided humanity with the miracle of honey; the full implications of its contribution to medicine are still emerging.

As individuals, we can help the honeybee. Apart from working to ban indiscriminate spraying of pesticides and promoting organic agriculture, we can plant native flowers, trees and shrubs that are bee-friendly in our gardens. We can learn about beekeeping and start hives going in our own backyards. We can grow, buy and eat food that supports local, organic and small-scale agricultural practices and producers. When we take care of the honeybee, we take care of ourselves.

Wild Places

Every year as summer ebbs into the memory and fall is in full flow, it feels good to get a break from our civilized world. It is my time to recover flagging energies and truly connect with nature and the wild. In Temagami, after a long day’s paddle across large lakes and along narrow rivers, the reward is to discover an ideal island at which to set up camp. A waterfall roars off in the mid-distance, beyond the bend. The sun is going down as we gather wood for the evening’s campfire. Dusk is magic hour as our canoe draws us past ancient rockfaces. We bear mute witness to the spirits of the ages, their reflections dancing wistfully on the waters as night descends. These custodians of the canyon wrap us in fog as we glide along the waterline, transients, water-boatmen on the silky surface, a liquid bond straddling the twilit heavens and the dark untapped depths beneath our paddles.
We have been guided in to this old-growth sanctuary by ravens, and now loons announce their welcome. At this season of change marked by the onset of cold nights, the odd shower or flurry, gusty winds and the continued shedding of foliage, there are likely no other humans in our midst, but deer and bear, beavers, fish, frogs, ducks and birds are around. To share time and space with them is to feel a definite spritual connection to the wild and to those who have trodden these paths, paddled these waters before us. At dawn a cluster of pines stands sentinel over the misted lake. A stroll reveals the island to us. Pink rocks are partly cloaked in moss and lichens, partly bare but drenched in early morning moisture. The sun suddenly pierces through the trees across the lake. The ground between the towering white pines and clumps of birch is soft with decomposing matter.
I try to make nature part of my every day but there is no substitute for raw exposure to the wilds and the elements. Temagami transports us into a magical realm where the cycle of life and the vision of death are seen stark and true. Seeds germinate, struggle for survival; plants live long, age gracefully, and finally return to the earth, embraced by the living forest floor which nurtures the cradling soil for a successor seed blowing in on the wind. Plants, wildlife and weather perform an absorbing, never-ending play, in which we are incidental participants rather than masters. We soak up the charged energy; nature challenges us and rewards us with fleeting epiphanies and visions of great beauty.
Native peoples endured the extended cold of long winters out here in the woods because they embraced nature, respected it, and gave thanks to it. They were part of it, and it became them. The blowing snows, the numbing cold, the evolving climate are a reminder how intimately connected we all are to the Earth, and how we meddle with it at our peril. As a ‘civilization’, we are accelerating the extinction of species; toxins in the air, water and soils; an altered climate; irresponsible resource exploitation; unfettered corporate greed.
We should be preserving every wild place, setting them aside for future generations. Our wide-eyed wonder is the key to our souls, and our intimacy with nature in the wild enables us to affirm all life. After all, “Once wonder has been chased from our thinking about the land, then we are lost ” (Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places).

Spicy Mesclun

The vibrant mix of organic greens that makes up spicy mesclun seems to encapsulate what I love to plant, grow, eat, and sell; an explosion of flavours that sets the heart and mind roaming - across sensual memories, mineral-rich soils and natural landscapes.