Planting the seeds of subversion

Walking composition

“Being independent of Nature was considered one of the defining characteristics of freedom itself. Only those people who had thrown off the shackles of their environment were thought to be endowed with historical agency; they alone were believed to merit the attention of historians.” —The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh

It’s barely February, and my fingers are already itching to rummage through the box of seed packets I have stored away. I’ve been thinking of soil, and digging, and planting. Of the new bed of strawberries my stepmom and I planted last year, and the golden raspberry starts my mother gave my daughter that we planted by the fence. Of ordering compost for delivery in April, and of some new plant starts a neighbor’s promised to give me and teach me to care for and harvest that I’m very excited about.

It’s been snowing a lot this last week and the temperatures have stayed cold after easing up from another sub-zero dip, so it’s not a change in weather that’s got my mind turning to the garden. More light, maybe? Slightly longer days? I hadn’t thought of this possibility until reading Bryan Pfeiffer’s recent Chasing Nature post on longer days, birdsong, and squirrel sex. I’d always, without thinking much about it, assumed that life, humans included, responded to the warmer temperatures of spring, but now I’m thinking it’s the slow drips of added light that have me wanting to get my hands in the dirt.

I heavily over-ordered seeds the last couple of years, so don’t have the satisfaction of browsing through the seed catalogues to find new things. Except for potato and onion starts, which I get locally, there’s more than enough in my box to be going on with.

There is nothing like food and seeds to make me both hopeful and hopeless about how we relate to land, the planet, commons, and one another. The social and environmental challenges where I live feel enormous. Most days it’s hard to force myself to keep my energy and time directed at work, family, friends, and the few areas where I can make a difference.

But then seeds arrive while snow is still deep on the ground, and I look inside the little packets and think about the tiny specks that somehow turn into food enough to feed multitudes, how my own little garden more than fed three families last year. And am reminded that if we can somehow turn this damn thing around, dismantle this system, and start caring for one another and disable any incentives to hoard and take, that somehow, miraculously, most of what we need is right in front of us.

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Yesterday I got a brief email update from a sawmill I once worked at in upstate New York, New York Heartwoods. Although I now haven’t lived there in nearly a decade, I stay subscribed because I can honestly say working there helped save my life once, not necessarily physically, but emotionally and mentally. I had two very small children at the time, and had never intended nor desired to be a stay-at-home mom, not to mention being one and working at the same time (most of which happened in the middle of the night, a capacity I no longer have). But there I was, rapidly dying inside, when I had the chance to take a rustic woodworking class at the nature museum* where one of my kids went to preschool twice a week, and from there to New York Heartwoods, which the rustic woodworking artist introduced me to. I learned to run a small Wood-Mizer mill and they sent me on a chainsaw safety course in midwinter. Which taught me that I never want to use a chainsaw again if I can help it. I can, but I don’t want to.

*(This one-minute video features that nature museum’s playground. The rustic woodworker I learned from designed it and built the amazing gate you can see at the beginning, and the preschool kids got to build the little bench stools with wooden mallets he’d made for each of them. It was an incredibly cool project, and it still makes me laugh to remember that with all of the fun rustic features that were built, the kids’ ever-favorite thing to do was to pound the sand pile with wooden mallets.)

Working at the sawmill a couple days a week—interning, really—helped keep me from going completely numb and got me into embodiment research, but I was also intrigued by their mission: they only worked with downed or scavenged trees. The point of the mill was to introduce circularity within a wood milling system, which fit right in with efforts I’d been making toward local food systems and a long-term despair over single-use plastics.

We worked with a lot of city ash trees felled by emerald ash borer, for example, and cedar that had to be cleared from farm fields. I spent one entire day planing cedar planks for someone who’d rescued them, already milled, from her family’s farm and was making an art installation out of them; and another day dragging enormous old barn beams out from a fallen building and taking them back to the mill to be sawn into boards that would be lightly sanded and used for shelves. The mill’s shady, forested yard was full of beauties, every one of them cared for, whether milled and kiln-dried or not. I don’t ever plan on moving away from Montana, but do sometimes miss working with hardwood.

The brief email update about New York Heartwoods reminded me of how much work needs to be done in bringing consumption, and responsibility for it, closer to home. And to make it accessible—though I admire the company’s mission and was happy to be learning from it for a while, the clientele tended to be art galleries and high-end clothing stores, not, say, the local public school district.

It maybe came through more forcefully to me because I’ve been reading Harsha Walia’s Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (one of you suggested this book to me, and I’m sorry I’ve forgotten who!), and had just the night before read the chapter on garment workers in Bangladesh. If I needed a reminder of the interconnections between commodification, profit-making, poverty, climate-forced migration, and hardened militarization of borders, well, this book says it all, and very clearly. It’s not just “Who’s Your Farmer?” it’s who’s making everything. Whose labor is being exploited, whose water is being poisoned, whose home and land is being taken, whose forests are being razed, whose children are starving . . .

Who benefits from all of it. And how it might be possible to begin changing these dynamics and dependencies while serving the people who suffer from them rather than those who profit.

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Only four corporations control more than half of the world’s seed supply, by which I mean they own patents on the seeds and prosecute anyone who even seems to violate those patents. It can be difficult to find seeds that are unrelated to those corporations or their control, even seeds that aren’t genetically modified—before I started watching for it, I’d sometimes come home with plant starts that I then noticed were labeled with “illegal to propagate.” How, I wondered, is it possible to make planting seeds illegal? But as the history of property ownership shows us, you can make almost anything legal or illegal, no matter how immoral or nonsensical.

The first year I moved back to Montana, I took my kids to an annual spring Free the Seeds event at the community college, which featured workshops on things like composting and growing microgreens but was mostly about encouraging people to bring and freely exchange seeds. Over a thousand people were there, and it was one of the most encouraging sights I’d seen in a long time.

There is a lot of research that traces privatization, commodification, and ownership back to two probable original subjects of purchase and control thousands of years ago: seeds, and women. The keys, in other words, to life.

Maybe that’s why the fingers itch to get in the soil, why planting seeds feels so satisfying and foraging berries and roots never feels as tiring as sitting at a desk. In doing these things, we can serve something bigger than a system designed to crush the life out of everything. At the very least, we can feed one another. But with a little extra effort, the seeds we share can be a subversion of the forces that desire to own and profit from all that makes life possible.

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It’s been so persistently overcast lately that seeing fringes of sunset last night after days of heavy snowfall was just . . . words don’t do justice to how it made me feel, and neither does the photo I took.

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch (this is a podcast-heavy one, so it’s mostly listen):

• Stories for Action podcast with ethnobotanist Rose Bear Don’t Walk on Indigenous food sovereignty, native plants, and her “Recovering Our Roots” program: “Traditional plant knowledge has kind of been diminished in how we exercise our own food rights here. And it’s really interesting that that’s a piece of knowledge that’s decreased, because when we talk about our creation stories, for the Salish in particular, the animals and the plants were here long before the human, and they coexisted on the land to really understand how to live and how to have symbiotic relationships. When the humans arrived, the animals and the plants taught us everything that we know about being Salish.”

• Also from Stories for Action, a conversation with Patrick Yawakie, founder of the People’s Food Sovereignty Program, about food sovereignty and his work with Billings, Montana-based, Indigenous Vote.

• Looking back at 20 years of the Scottish Outdoor Access Code and the future of the Right to Roam in Scotland and England on the Scotland Outdoors podcast.

• From The Conversation, a review of 7,000 studies on loneliness that looked at how infrastructure and design contribute to feelings of loneliness and isolation. (I particularly liked the tidbit about Dutch supermarkets that have introduced “slow checkouts” for people, especially older people, who like to chat and have a little connection while getting groceries.)

• Two episodes about using AI to watch, forecast, and locate wildfires from MIT Technology Review’s podcast In Machines We Trust: “You know, if you get a big fire up here, you get all these people that are up here in VRBOs and who, you know, maybe got a taxi or an Uber, or they have these mountain shuttles that bring people up here. But that adds a whole new complexity to it cuz now they don’t have an avenue to get out. They don’t have a vehicle to get out and they, half of ’em don’t know how to get out or where to go.”

• Rethinking clothing through considering “fibresheds”: the life cycle of fibers from soil health to raising sheep to spinning mills to dyes to designers to workers, to the end product itself, a three-part series from Farmerama: “Natural dying is something we’ve been doing for thousands of years. . . . There were some scraps of blue cotton died with indigo that was discovered by some archaeologists in Perus in 2016, and they’re estimated to be 6,500 years old. . . . right up until the mid-19th century, when synthetic dyes were developed. Just 170 years later, 99% of our clothes are colored with synthetic dyes, whether the clothes are made from natural fibers or from synthetic fibers. Synthetic dyes are made from crude oil.”

• I finally got around to listening to most of Burn Wild, the newest podcast from Leah Sottile and the BBC: what goes into defining “ecoterrorism” and who’s accused of it? I really think Sottile is one of the most important journalists working today, especially the way she approaches extremism, as I wrote about at more length in the wake of the U.S.’s attempted coup—oh, look, exactly 2 years ago today. Weird.

• From Grist, a report on a study about how to drastically reduce lithium mining and its extremely toxic impacts. (This is kind of a no-brainer—massively build out public transportation options and convert cities to being walkable/bikeable, plus a reduction in vehicle battery size, which means a big reduction in average vehicle size—but so are most of the answers to this planet’s physical problems. At least, all the answers that will have any real effect are. We need to have infrastructure that makes using less even possible for most people.)

• A barely-over-three-minute video about waste and what this craving is for new things and who cleans up the discards through a reimagining of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, via Dark ‘n’ Light magazine.