Ben Falk rejects the term “reducing your footprint,” as the need for reduction of our actions implies that our actions, our livelihoods, are inherently bad. Instead of reducing environmental damage, maybe we should focus on promoting healing, healing of earth, mind, and body. We stray from nature’s design and then try to develop technologies to amend such deviations. The solutions are seemingly simple: close the loops, build green roofs, use everything, and let everything find new use. Nature does not waste anything. Nature regenerates life on its own, and permanent agriculture follows these principles.  After watching the documentary on permaculture and reading Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution, I am left to wonder why we strayed from nature’s philosophies. Why did farmers stop writing poetry?

I guess we thought technology was efficiency, but efficiency is not just speed and the amount of production – efficiency is the amount you get out based on the amount you put in. Fukuoka’s “do-nothing” farming is not about doing nothing; it’s about utilizing and working with nature’s built-in efficiency. Let nature do the work. Be the orchestrator. Then the crops and insects will sing, and we too may sing – we may even write poetry.

I wrote a poem while watching the documentary. Idyllic scenes of green rooftops and happy sheep inspired some creativity:

***

Roots reverse factories

Plant the seeds

Incite symbiosis

And from air

Carbon sinks

 

Roots draw nutrients

Hold them deep

Like pollen to the bee

Tell me,

The last time soil left

your hands dirty,

ready to feed

 

Could we release

Our machineries

And firmly grasp

Nature’s opportunities

Find – healing

Spirituality and

Harmony?

 

Could we replace

Warming ceilings

With cooling leaves

Tell me,

The last time your eyes

Met green

Between horizon and skies

***

The One-Straw Revolution may be one of my new favorite books. Thought provoking doesn’t do it justice. I think the most influential parts of the book for me were the aspects of philosophy. Lately, I have been asking myself what my purpose is here, what kind of impact I can really make. Fukuoka believes it’s ok to not understand the meaning of life. “We have been born and are living on the earth to face directly the reality of living” (Fukuoka 112). I interpret this as a call to not waste time worrying about how to live but to simply live in tune with the rest of life around us. Perhaps this is the “reality of living,” which applies to permaculture in various ways. Before you start farming, you observe the land, watch how life naturally lives. When eating local and seasonal food, we are living and in tune with other life forms around us.

I read The One-Straw Revolution laying on a blanket all day outside my dorm. After finishing, I wrote inside the cover:

Now I see. How nature is not part of me, but me part of it. Or maybe there is no “me,” only life that transforms perpetually. I read this book from beginning to end as the sun illuminates and descends. I want to cry on the last page. I have lost sense of time and age.

Fukuoka, Masanobu. One-Straw Revolution. Rodale Press, 1978.