Summer Moon of First Harvests
Cherry picking. This morning. Blueberry picking, too. Also pears from two trees, their entire crop. First, the low hanging fruit, then up the ladder. A lot of cliches come from the world of the orchard and the garden. Let’s wait til it bears fruit. He planted the seed on fertile ground. In the not so very long ago, maybe one or two generations, perhaps three depending on your age these sayings were not culture; rather, they were everyday experience, or, every appropriate season occurrence. Now, with increasing urbanization, the rapid decline of the family farm and a rush to do all things with technology the hand in the tree which picked the cherries is on the keyboard checking Facebook or more likely on the iPhone checking Snapchat.
Delivering vast numbers from the mind numbing toil of subsistence agriculture is a good thing. No doubting that. Even having agriculture and horticulture done by the few is not necessarily a bad thing. We need food and flowers. If they come to our table full of nutrients and vibrant, well then. If however, we create a system where the food we eat has been modified not for its nutritional value but for the positive economics of its growing, harvesting and processing, well then.
Somewhere a tectonic plate of public opinion has begun to shift. I can feel it in the newspapers, the magazines, the websites I read and visit. That shift is toward action against global warming. My hope is that this shift, which will ride over the continent of fossil fuel and through subduction bury it in the mantle below the crust where it belongs, will include within it a return to the tree, the wolf, the tomato and the onion. May it be so.