Love your land. Know your land. Two pieces of the same whole. It’s hard, no, impossible to truly love something, to love anything you don’t know on some level, and the more you know something the deeper your intimacy, the deeper and more complex the love. It’s true for any relationship, especially true for one’s relationship with the land, and while there are any number of ways of knowing a landscape the act of working the land engenders a sense and sensibility unique to itself. Working a landscape precludes the structural “othering” of it, an almost guaranteed outcome by other means, no matter how well intentioned; through the disruptive, transformative act of work you by necessity merge with the ecology you’re entangled with, forced to see this world as an equal, sometimes an adversary, always an interlocutor as you and the non-human world chart your separate but intertwined and dependent courses. No other approach to nature leads to this end, or teaches this perspective.
What is “working” the land? Well, what is “work”? Work in something you do not because you want to, but because you have to in order to survive; it is involuntary, or necessary regardless of your feelings about it at any given time. Work is not necessarily enjoyable, and often isn’t. It is not casual, or optional, or an act of veneration; like any deeply intimate, committed, non-optional relationship work allows no illusions; you see the thing you work with as it really is, the good, the bad, and the ugly, sometimes through the fog of fury or even hatred; you see it, all of it, because you can’t afford not to. Illusions, here, are a mortal error. Working the land, changing it, struggling with and bending it engenders a respect you will not arrive at through other means, a respect for the existential conflict inherent in the interface of two powerful and intertwined systems, the human and the non-human. The rub, of course, is that the system that can and is destroying the other is the human, and that without the non-human, the system being destroyed, the human will cease to exist. Nice little twist, no?
So this changes the dynamics, the meaning of “work” when talking about these two systems. The work facing us now, what’s necessary, obligatory, not a choice, is to do everything in our power, my power, your power to not destroy the non-human world; in fact, the work now is to reverse thousands of years of humans systematically exacting an impossible toll on…. everything else. What we have to do - again, no choice here - is go back to our origins, go back to working the land, to re-learn and do what needs to be done and do it regardless of how we feel about it on any given day or at any given time. This is not an option. Either humans learn this, and learn how to do this, and do it at critical mass, or things are not going to go well for us dependent humans. This is not some thing someone else can do for us. It is something we have to do ourselves, each and every one of us, which means figuring out what working the land means for you in these terms and doing it, hot or cold, rain or shine, like the old school Vermont dairymen and First Peoples before them. It’s not a choice. It’s work. It’s survival.
Comments