Trauma Farm (24 page)
Without labels alerting us, we end up buying gm produce unknowingly. The industry can now claim that almost everyone is eating GM foods, so these Frankenfoods must be healthy and we should create more. That’s why it’s assumed the corporations contaminated corn and soy and canola with GM genes first—these grains are in almost every processed food in existence.
Inserting frog and fish genes in tomatoes is a creepy business, but it gets really scary when companies like Monsanto start creating herbicide-resistant plants. Not only have these genes already crossed over into organic produce, but they’ve also passed into wild plants, creating superweeds that are herbicide resistant. It’s also feared they will make pests Bt (the best organic pest killer) resistant and kill too many beneficial insects. Between crashing pollinator populations and superweeds, the monster might already be unleashed.
The worst danger is the partnership between the trans-nationals and government regulatory bodies. Patent laws now make you liable if your fields are polluted with gm seeds in Canada. If I am growing organic canola and gm pollen drifts onto my field, I could lose my organic status. Worse, I’d be legally obligated to pay the seed company for the “theft” of its product and be forced to allow it to bomb my organic fields with poisons to destroy the “pirated” crop. According to the laws of Canada, gm businesses also have the legal right to herbicide-bomb grain fields they only suspect of stealing their genes. If not all of the crop dies, that means there are GM -patented genes contaminating the field, and the innocent farmer is liable for damages. This automatically destroys an organic farmer’s legal status because the farm has been sprayed, even if the farmer is innocent.
The GM manufacturers are attempting the same strategy in the United States and Europe. Since it appears that GM genes are moving quickly into the natural environment, some environmentalists have claimed it’s no longer possible to grow organic canola, soybean, and corn in North America. Contaminated corn has been discovered in the isolated mountains of Chiapas in Mexico, where traditional seed collecting has continued for centuries. The drift is big.
UNTIL ABOUT THREE DECADES
ago the fate of North American seeds was in the hands of hundreds of tiny seed companies, a few large ones, a cluster of surviving sixties communes, a few old ladies from the Ukraine or fussy Italian tomato growers, and so on. When the transnationals began creating gm seeds and taking over seed companies and eliminating their stock or shutting them down, a growing storm of back-to-the-landers, old-time farmers, and ecologists recognized the danger, and the battle was on. Dozens of organizations like Seeds of Diversity, Seeds of Change, and Seed Savers have sprouted, along with rebel seed companies like Dan Jason’s Salt Spring Seeds. It’s a strange, sometimes hilarious guerrilla battle between transnationals armed with fat lobby funds and agricultural ministries tucked in their pockets, and a fluid underground of gardeners and farmers and ecologists attempting to preserve the seeds of history.
I volunteered at a recent Seedy Saturday on Salt Spring— these charity events for seed savers are a redoubt of local food—promoted by educated rebel growers and a host of vegans. I packaged the seeds while mothers and ancient hippies and retired professionals with gardening habits thumped their donated bags of seeds onto the counter. Local growers, cooks, alternative-energy promoters, bamboo lovers, relief organizations (Seeds for Malawi), and orchardists displayed their retail goods. The hall was packed. It was practically panic collecting as seeds were donated, then sold for a song, or just handed over, because a half-dozen of us couldn’t package them as fast as they were donated. We raised thousands of dollars for all the good causes, and by late afternoon the place was cleaned out. There were mislabelled seeds, wet seeds, and dead seeds, but there were far more good than bad germs given back to the community. So despite all the obstacles thrown at the seeds of the world, wild and domesticated, I still can’t help but smile when those gauzy summer winds of thistledown float like clouds across the field—declaring that the planet still intends to seed itself—for now.
T
HE SKY WAS
a propane-fire blue. The old ghetto blaster was cranked up to abusive volume. Our pack of rap-playing nineteen-year-olds were splitting and stacking thirteen-foot cedar rails and digging ditches according to my erratic instructions. It was a moment when you stop, aware of something, although you have no idea what’s different. We turned as one and saw the two giant birds swoop overhead and circle the ponds before they landed on the tall maple.
“What are they?” Joaquin asked—bare chested, head shaved, wearing big wraparound sunglasses, blocking the sun with a dirty hand while attempting to make out the birds against the shimmering light. And he thought the birds looked weird?
“They ain’t eagles,” I said, “and they sure aren’t vultures— they’re ospreys!” I’d never seen them on these islands. One dived off the big-budded maple and circled the ponds, gliding lower and lower. The ducks remained undisturbed, although an eagle would send them into hysterical formations. They knew a fish eater when they saw one.
The osprey plunged into the pond, enormous wings folded back, talons extended, head down, at what seemed around forty-five miles per hour; then it sank out of sight— a stunning assault. We could see its huge dark shadow swimming. It was flying underwater! It came up, beating its wings against the surface, thrusting itself into the air. Gaining altitude it approached the limb where its mate had supervised the performance. It landed, shook the water off, and leaped into cruising mode again, before diving and failing to find prey once more.
That was it for work. Seb brought out the beer, and we all took seats on the deck, cheering this useless hunter while his mate (judging from the sour look she gave him after his first failure, our male crowd automatically assumed she was the female), who refused to hunt, became more peeved. Within an hour she was shrieking and he was foxtrotting mechanically, one talon up, one talon down, a psycho on his branch, while she denounced his incompetence. By then several empty beer bottles were rolling around the deck and we were guffawing mercilessly at every failed dive. “That bird is too useless to catch my goldfish!” We wondered if he was fresh off the nest and if they’d just become an item.
Finally, the female left in a huff, while the male danced himself into a frenzy on his branch. Then he launched again and hit the pond with a crack you could hear a half mile away. By now, I figured the goldfish were hiding two feet under the mud at the pond bottom, but suddenly the osprey surfaced like a god out of black water, a golden fish between his talons. As he gained altitude he effortlessly flipped my ten-inch goldfish face forward so that the fish resembled an orange torpedo hanging from a bomber’s fuselage, in an undignified yet streamlined formation. The triumphant osprey performed a victory flight ten feet over our heads, displaying his trophy, and we couldn’t help cheering, though I had some regrets about my goldfish. Then he landed in a tree across the field.
I took out my binoculars and watched him lunch. He held the goldfish the way a kid would hold an ice cream cone, only it was still twitching and slapping about. He calmly began chewing its face, holding it up and looking back at us, while the fish spasmed between his talons. It was the cruellest lunch I’ve ever seen, as he decapitated that living fish, working his way down to the meat, taking his time. Predators don’t have our sentimental morality. The boys took turns with the glasses, and the excitement faded. Watching this gory lunch wasn’t anybody’s idea of fun. They gradually straggled to work, and I followed, thinking about more than diving ospreys.
We all live in the world, but what world do we live in? This was perhaps the only opportunity in their lives for these young, healthy men to witness an osprey hunt and its aftermath. They are modern kids. They didn’t enjoy watching a victim being eaten alive. They returned to lifting rails onto the fence and hollowing out their drainage trenches. And I recognized that’s why these young, rambunctious idealists had come to Trauma Farm—because it was an opportunity to witness what was disappearing: the natural world of simultaneous beauty and laughter and terror.
NOT TOO LONG AGO
I encountered a knowledge test. Do you know ten local birds, ten local trees, ten local flowers? Shut your eyes. Now, point to the north, point to the west. What phase is the moon tonight? Where will it rise, and when was the last time you watched it rise? What kind of ground is beneath you, and when was it created? Who were the first people who lived where you lived? Do you know how an internal combustion engine works? What is the second law of thermodynamics? Can you find the North Star at night? Can you recite more than three lines of a great poem aloud? Of course it’s not a real knowledge test, but it asks wonderful questions about our quality of life. The poet Patrick Lane used a similar test for his students and was shocked to learn how many would-be poets couldn’t name more than three local birds or trees. Then he asked them how they expected to be writers if they didn’t know what was going on in the environment. That got a sea of blank faces. They thought writing meant expressing themselves— not recognizing the world celebrating its diverse expressions all around them.
It’s said we live in the age of information. Modernists make stunning pronouncements like: “The average person today knows fifty thousand more facts than the average peasant from the sixteenth century.” I smile when I hear this. We live in the age of trivia, not information. Real information has become subverted by sound bites and statistics flung about in defence of far-fetched arguments. That’s why I keep in mind Mark Twain’s sassy quip: “There are three kinds of lies—lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Despite my distrust of numbers I still find I also have to use them.
But we are paying too much attention to the wrong information. Certainly, there’s little harm in zoning out with a well-designed piece of gaming technology. Urban living has many glories. But if we consider how we surround ourselves with repetitive trivial information and celebrity gossip it’s apparent we have become sleepwalkers who’ve forgotten the grandeur of the planet—the osprey and its hunt.
When I consider the sixteenth-century peasant who supposedly knew so little, I think of someone who could smell hay and recognize its food value, identify hundreds of medicinal flowers, berries, and vegetables, and tell you when to plant or harvest and how to preserve; someone who could milk a cow and create or fix almost any tool in the house; someone who lived for the most part in grace with a natural environment (when not being a victim of the feudal politics of the era). Comparing “old knowledge” with the knowledge of how to operate a remote control or play a new video game, it’s clear that an important range of experience has been lost. What can we say to a world where a child on a bus in Vancouver looks out the window and asks his mother, “Is that a crow?”
ALMOST EVERY FARMER I
know, female or male, has the ability to stand still, gazing—at things or events most urban dwellers wouldn’t even notice—often with the wry, laconic expression of the experienced: “Well, would you look at that?” Yet we’re a diminishing crowd of gawkers standing in our pastures or walking through the frozen wheat fields of the winter prairie, the Brazil nut forests of South America, the Southwestern mesa valleys with their peach trees, or the bamboo jungles of Thailand. “Being there” has become a tourist experience, not a way of life. Now that the human community is urban and cocooned we find ourselves without natural miracles, addicted to the fast-edited images of media that can give people vertigo when the images are flashed at epileptic-fit-inducing frequencies. The world has become a jumpy, twitchy place. Though riding a roller coaster can be fun, we also need the capacity to walk slowly. Like farmers, people from aboriginal cultures also have a tendency to move and talk slowly, until the moment calls for an explosion of action. This leads to a dry humour. If you’ve lived long with the landscape you learn to smile because you never know how the world will come at you.