Jake Healing Grounds Chapter 1

The agricultural systems that are responsible for feeding the billions of people alive today are not sustainable and degrade the land they are used on. It's a product of the industrial revolution super-charging western agricultural techniques, which were already comparatively less attached to nature than many other culture's systems of agriculture. When trying to answer "How do we get the agricultural system to work with nature instead of against it?", many indigenous systems around the world provide clues or answers that we can more readily learn about than trying to rediscover knowledge many groups have known for countless generations. This is most prominent in America where not only do we have the most radical version of the supercharged, upscaled, industrialized agriculture, but the ecosystem itself was colonized to more closely match the European environments the settlers were more used to (Carlisle talks much about the buffalo, but another great example is the beaver. After decades of acknowledging the benefit beavers bring and encouraging them rather than exterminating, North America has an estimated beaver population of 15 million. Pre-European beaver population estimated range from 100 to 200 million. We need more beaver.).

Moving on to the justice part of all of this, what should be done with the marginalized voices that got pushed aside for the current agricultural system and the voices we should turn to now to improve the agricultural system we live in? My opinion on this issue is shaped by Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. It's a great book that looks into why projects in the U.S. regarding housing, infrastructure, climate change, etc don't get results. What I took away from that book is that the powers that be either do not care for these projects and those that do become too engaged in crafting the perfect process that the results never came. After an infrastructure bill passed at the beginning of Biden's term, it took nearly 4 years of work to take 56 applications for funding of rural broadband projects and return 3 applications that could theoretically receive funding from congress to begin the construction which would take however much longer. Nothing has happened as a result of all the effort put in for that rural broadband.

I do not have an exact answer for how we should help out those that have been screwed over by having their way of life taken over and now investigated to find out what they did right that our agriculture does wrong. What I do know is that if we carry on as we have been for a while, we'll likely end up doing little more than wasting time figuring out how we want to make amends without ever getting anything material done. I'd never say to just ignore compensation and acknowledgement, but it would be a damn shame to see another incident of potential growth and healing crushed under the weight of good intentions that had no muscle to support them.