Religion and

Sustainable
Agriculture
RELIGION AND SUSTAINABLE
AGRICULTURE

WORLD SPIRITUAL TRADITIONS AND

FOOD ETHICS

Edited by
Todd LeVasseur, Pramod Parajuli,
and Norman Wirzba

Foreword by Vandana Shiva

Copyright © 2016 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky,
Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown
College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead
State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University,
Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,
and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.
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663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008
www.kentuckypress.com
Maps and figures by Richard A. Gilbreath, University of Kentucky
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: LeVasseur, Todd, editor. | Parajuli, Pramod, editor. | Wirzba,

Norman, editor. | Shiva, Vandana, writer of foreword.
Title: Religion and sustainable agriculture: world spiritual traditions and
food ethics / edited by Todd LeVasseur, Pramod Parajuli, and Norman
Wirzba; foreword by Vandana Shiva.
Other titles: Culture of the land.
Description: Lexington, Kentucky : University Press of Kentucky, [2016] |
Series: Culture of the land | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016026839 | ISBN 9780813167978 (hardcover : alk.
paper)| ISBN 9780813167985 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813167992 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Sustainable agriculture—Religious aspects. | Food—
Religious aspects.
Classification: LCC S494.5.S86 R45 2016 | DDC 338.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026839
This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the
American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library
Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of
American University Presses
 Contents

Foreword
Vandana Shiva
Introduction: Religion, Agriculture, and Sustainability
Todd LeVasseur
1. Our Flesh Was Made from Corn
Leonor Hurtado Paz y Paz and Cristóbal Cojtí García
2. Soils, Spirits, and the Cosmocentric Economy: Re-creating Amazonian
Dark Earth in Peru
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
3. Renewal of Non-Western Methods for Sustainable Living
Eston Dickson Pembamoyo
4. Nature Spirituality, Sustainable Agriculture, and the Nature/Culture
Paradox: The Permaculture Scene in Lower Puna, Big Island of Hawaii
Michael Lemons
5. Hindu Traditions and Peasant Farming in the Himalayan Foothills of
Nepal
Jagannath Adhikari
6. Dharma for the Earth, Water, and Agriculture: Perspectives from the
Swadhyaya
Pankaj Jain
7. Gandhi’s Agrarian Legacy: Practicing Food, Justice, and Sustainability
in India
A. Whitney Sanford
 8. Thailand’s Moral Rice Revolution: Cultivating a Collective Ecological
Consciousness
Alexander Harrow Kaufman
9. The Seven Species and Their Relevance to Sustainable Agriculture in
Israel Today
Elaine Solowey
10. Tending the Garden of Eden: Sacred Jewish Agricultural Traditions
Yigal Deutscher
11. Religion, Local Community, and Sustainable Agriculture
Anna Peterson
12. Heideggerian Reflections on Three Mennonite Cookbooks and a
Mennonite Farm in Northwest Ohio
Raymond F. Person Jr. and Mark H. Dixon
13. Steward or Priest? The Possibilities of a Christian Chicken Farmer
Ragan Sutterfield
14. Religion and Agriculture: How Islam Forms the Moral Core of
SEKEM’s Holistic Development Approach in Egypt
Maximilian Abouleish-Boes
15. Tohono O’odham Himdag and Agri/Culture
Tristan Reader and Terrol Dew Johnson
Conclusion: Searching for Annapurna; or, Cultivating Earthbound
Regenerative Abundance in the Anthropocene
Pramod Parajuli

Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Index
 Foreword

The Dharma of Food

The seed, the soil, the water, and our food are sacred gifts of the earth.
Cultures and civilizations that have revered these gifts, and grown food
in partnership with the earth, have nourished and sustained themselves, and
lasted. Cultures that exploited and destroyed the biodiversity, the soil, and
the water have perished. As the ancient Vedas tell us, “Upon this handful of
soil our survival depends. Husband it, and it will grow our food, our fuel,
and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it, and the soil will
collapse and die, taking humanity with it.”
Over the last three decades I have learned that agriculture is primarily
about caring for the earth. The growing and sharing of food is therefore a
spiritual act, as the contributors to Religion and Sustainable Agriculture
remind us. This book is therefore an important contribution to
sustainability. But it is also a contributor to peace in these times of religious
and cultural polarization, and hate and fear of the “other.” All faiths are in
unity when it comes to sacred seed, sacred soil, and sacred, sacred food. No
faith says to destroy the earth and starve your neighbors.
When we realize that the sacred duty to care for the soil, to save and
share seeds, to share food and let no one in your sphere of influence go
hungry, to conserve water, to give back to the earth in gratitude—through
what Albert Howard called “The Law of Return”—is part of every religion,
as this book records in such detail, then we will be able to start seeing how
we are similar, instead of how we differ. We will start becoming aware that
loving and caring for the earth as an intrinsic part of sustainable agriculture
includes loving and caring for one another because we are part of Earth’s
family.
I started to work on ecological issues of agriculture in 1984 because of
two deep tragedies in India—the violence in Punjab, and the Union Carbide
gas tragedy in Bhopal. My study on Punjab, published as The Violence of
the Green Revolution, revealed to me that what are called agricultural
technologies in the industrial system are primarily tools of war. And as they
destroy the earth, conflicts increase. Tragically, conflicts rooted in
nonsustainability are often given a religious hue. The assumption is
growing that religions are at the root of the escalating social conflicts and
violence we are currently witnessing around the world. Yet when we look
deeper, we find societal conflict growing from a destructive relationship to
the earth. The Seed Freedom organization reports, for example, that such
conflicts are occurring in both Syria and Nigeria. (See
http://seedfreedom.info/campaign/terra-viva-our-soil-our-commons-our-
future/.)
My own approach to the sacredness of food and farming has been
informed by my culture. Dharma is the unique gift of Indian civilization to
humanity. It has provided the compass for right action and right livelihood.
There is no equivalent word in English. Dharma is not reducible to religion,
as has often been erroneously done. It is the “right way of living” and “path
of righteousness.” All religions that grew from Indian soil—Hinduism,
Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism—refer to dharma.
In Hinduism, dharma signifies the “right way of living” aligned with
rta, the right order that makes life and the universe possible. In Buddhism,
dharma/dhamma means “cosmic law and order.” In Jainism, dharma refers
to the teachings of the Jinas (deities) for the moral transformation of human
beings. For Sikhs, the word dharm means the “path of righteousness.” In
hymn 1353 Guru Granth Sahib refers to dharma as duty.
The etymological root of the word dharma is dhr—to hold, bear,
support, maintain, keep, carry—and its meaning is “that which holds,” “that
which sustains.” Dharma encompasses the universe and the whole creation,
the earth and the entire earth family (Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam)—from the
microcosm to the macrocosm, from the tiniest microbe to the largest
mammal—all of humanity from individual people to their relations with
other human beings and nature. Because dharma holds and sustains the
earth community and all of humanity it embodies the principle of unity—of
humans with the rest of nature, and of humans across our diversities.
Dharma arises from the interconnectedness of all life and from our duty to
care for all humans and all species. The opposite of dharma is adharma, the
violation of rta, of the ecological laws of the planet, and of the care for
fellow humans. Whatever separates us from nature and from one another,
whichever actions lead to the disintegration of ecosystems and societies, is
adharma.
Dharma guides us in choosing between right and wrong actions. Into it
are built ethical assessment, environmental assessment, technology
assessment, socioeconomic assessment—all measuring our impact on
nature and society by our choices of tools and instruments. If our choices
contribute to “holding together,” to integration, then they are dharmic. If
they lead to ecological destruction and social displacement, then they are
adharmic.
The great Mahabharata, sacred Hindu texts, have at their core the land
and earth that sustain us, the food that nourishes us, and the systems of
production that provide our livelihoods and basic needs. Whether we tread
lightly on the earth or not, how we grow and produce our food, and how we
define the economy (Aristotle called it oikonomia—the art of living) are all
intimately intertwined with right living and right livelihood.
The growing and giving of food in abundance is the highest dharma.
The dharma and discipline of food in India is in the langars (Sikh kitchens)
at the gurdwaras (Sikh temples), and in the feeding of the poor found in
every culture and tradition. My colleague Jatindar Bajaj, with whom I
studied particle physics at Punjab University, along with M. D. Srinivas,
another particle physicist, has written the most comprehensive book we
have today on the dharma of food—Annam Bahu Kurvita: Recollecting the
Indian Discipline of Growing and Sharing Food in Plenty. Their citations
from ancient texts resonate with the latest in the science of agroecology,
that everything is related and that the web of life is the food web. Food is
life; therefore it is sacred. It is not just a commodity: “Food is indeed the
preserver of life, and food is the source of creation. . . . All beings are
formed of anna [food]; anna arises from the rains, the rains arise from yajna
[ritual offering], and yajana arises from karma action. . . . Out of the
contented Earth grow the food crops, which sustain all life. Flesh, fat, bone
and marrow are formed of these alone” (5–6). Moreover “it is of anna that
indeed all beings are born, it is from anna that they obtain the necessary
sustenance for living, and having lived, it is into anna that they merge at the
end” (161).
 From the Upanishads we learn that good food is the best medicine. As
Bajaj and Srinivas relate: “All that is born is born of anna indeed. Whatever
exists on earth is born of anna, and in the end merges into anna. Anna
indeed is the first born amongst all beings; that is why anna is called
sarvausadha, the medicine that relieves the bodily discomforts of all”
(152). They also tell us that the growing and giving of good food is the
highest dharma: “Do not look down upon anna, food. That is the inviolable
discipline for the one who knows. Prana, the winds of life, are indeed anna,
and sarira, the body, is the partaker of anna. Sarira is secured in prana, and
prana is enshrined in sharira. Being dependent on each other, the two are
anna for each other, and thus indeed anna itself is secured and enshrined in
anna. . . . Do not neglect food. That is the inviolable discipline for the one
who knows. Because, water is indeed anna, and jyoti, fire, is partaker of
anna. Fire is enshrined in water and water in fire. Thus it is that anna itself
is enshrined in anna” (165–66).
The growing and serving of good food means the knowledge,
intelligence, and capacity to know the difference between good food and
bad—between systems of growing food that hold the web of life together
and sustain the earth, and those that push species to extinction and cause
ecosystems to collapse by transgressing planetary boundaries due to
ignorant, limitless greed. It means knowing which farming system will
improve the well-being of farmers, and which system will disintegrate
agrarian societies, pushing our farmers into debt, distress, and suicide. It
means knowing and assessing which culture of eating will improve our
health and well-being, and which culture will spread hunger, malnutrition,
and disease epidemics.
The dharma of food guides all these plural, diverse assessments of food,
agriculture, seeds, and biodiversity, as well as our relationship with the soil
and the land. The contributors to this book have articulated the dharma of
food across various religious traditions to help readers understand both food
and religion at a deeper level—and through a deeper understanding, sow the
seeds of sustainability, justice, and peace.
Vandana Shiva
 Introduction

Religion, Agriculture, and

Sustainability
Todd LeVasseur

Distinct practices of eating are at the heart of many of the world’s faith
traditions. In Western traditions, Jews observe kashrut, Christians gather
around a Eucharistic table, and Muslims observe a monthlong season of
Ramadan. In Eastern traditions, Hinduism and Buddhism offer rich symbols
and practices for relating to the earth, each other, and the cosmos through
practices of puja (offerings to deities, often in the form of food), vegetarian,
and ascetic eating. How we eat matters because eating is an intimate act for
human beings, establishing our connections to natural, social, and ultimate
reality. What we eat, how we eat, whom we eat with express—often more
clearly than our verbal piety—what we value most and think of supreme
significance.
Religion and Sustainable Agriculture: World Spiritual Traditions and
Food Ethics pulls back the curtain on food’s consumption and examines
more closely food’s production. Religious traditions have much to say
about what and how we eat. Do they also have anything to say about what
we grow and raise and how we go about doing that? This line of inquiry has
not been very well developed in research and writing. This book shows that
practitioners of religious traditions care about food’s production because
they care about the world that is the source of our daily sustenance. In other
words, agriculture is never simply a technical exercise for food’s
procurement. It is also a daily and necessary exercise in which we learn to
nurture, receive, and share the gifts of life and world. Agriculture is, in the
many senses of the term, an act of faith and an embodied and economic
expression of what people care most about.
 This volume presents the work of scholars, theologians, food activists,
and lay farmers, all of whom explore how religious beliefs, values,
teachings, and practices influence and are influenced by the goals, practices,
and values of sustainable agriculture. This collection of essays, global in
scope, shows the diverse potential and challenges emerging within what can
be called a green/sustainable religious farming milieu. It takes up the issues
of postcolonialism, indigenous rights to land and seed, the transmigration of
environmentally sustainable religious values and beliefs, the polysemous
meaning of “sustainable agriculture,” the appropriation of green
philosophies, and the complex demands of mindful and compassionate
eating.
The impetus for this book came in 2009 while I was undertaking
research for my dissertation on what I term religious agrarianism.1 I
noticed huge gaps in the extant literature; there was minimal mention of
contemporary religion/agriculture issues, including sustainable agriculture
issues, in leading journals and books.2 It seems that the majority of scholars
producing monographs or studies in the humanities are extremely
competent in talking about religion, but not necessarily about agriculture
(although, thankfully, this is quickly changing, as seen in the creation of the
“Religion and Food” group at the American Academy of Religion). Or, as
members of the growing subfield of “religion and nature/ecology,” scholars
offer sophisticated studies of religion/environment issues, but within this
subfield there is still little work on religion and sustainable agriculture. The
same is true of social science literature; here, many studies exist about
agriculture, and sustainable agriculture, but only a minority attempt to
tackle the tougher “values” element by researching why farmers,
consumers, or legislators advocate for sustainable farming. When the values
element is incorporated into social science studies, it tends to focus on
ethics or political values—very rarely on religious values and identities.
The time in which most people could hunt and gather their food is long
gone. To eat, we must now grow the bulk of our food. Given a growing
global population, that means questions of agriculture will continue to be
central to the economies and cultures of people around the world. Given the
widespread degradation of lands and waters, that means questions of
sustainable agriculture will have to assume central importance for all
people. This book deepens our understanding of the diverse ways in which
food’s production and consumption can be sacred acts and practices that
contribute to the healing of the world. In so doing, the volume helps fill in
some of the gaps in current academic literature about religion and
sustainable agriculture.
The following questions are central guides to each individual
contribution to the book:

• How are the religions of the world contributing to a maturing

sustainable agriculture movement?
• How are sustainable agriculture projects unique to both their bioregion
and to the nations within which they are located? And, conversely,
how are these projects similar on a global level?
• How and why are farmers and citizens motivated by religious belief,
faith, ritual, and/or teaching to either undertake or participate in
sustainable agricultural practices?
• What criticisms of global trade agreements, agricultural subsidies, and
corporate farming practices are inherent within faith-based sustainable
agriculture initiatives?
• How do such farmers compete with conventional farmers for market
shares and profitability?

Because people must eat to live, there is no such thing as a postagrarian

society. That raises two questions: what are the indispensable ecological
and agricultural conditions necessary for good food to be produced over the
long term, and how might religion play a role in creating, nurturing, and
sustaining such conditions?
Though there are remnant pockets of gatherer-hunters, and an even
larger aggregate of nomadic pastoralists, a perhaps surprisingly great
number of humans are peasant farmers: Jan Douwe van der Ploeg estimates
that there are roughly 1.2 billion peasants farming small plots of land.3 But
a majority of the world’s population is dependent upon industrial
agriculture products, either in full or in part, for its daily caloric needs. This
majority includes the powerful elite of our globalized world and almost all
the citizens of the Global North who, given their rates of consumption, bear
a disproportionate duty to ameliorate the emerging crises caused by
industrial agriculture: the harmful environmental impacts; the abuse of
animals, soil, and farm workers; the major contributions to human-induced
climate destabilization. Indeed, the impact of industrial agriculture on the
biosocial planetary commons precipitates one of the goals of this book: to
situate these effects within the emerging ecocrisis of the Anthropocene.
Another premise immediately follows: that by better understanding
alternative agricultural models and the religious worldviews that underpin
these models, policy makers, religious communities, and farmers can move
toward adopting sustainable farming techniques, as these are inherently
better for the planet and society, based on a variety of metrics (see below).
We need not belabor the astounding amount of evidence that has
accumulated in the past few decades in regard to the human impact upon
the earth’s various biomes and biogeochemical processes. In fact, it is
studying the social and environmental impacts of humans, coupled with the
normative goal of sustainability (and especially agricultural sustainability),
that unites our scholarship and that in large part stimulates the publication
of this book. Nonetheless, a quick list will suffice to once again remind
readers of our perilous situation: the sixth-largest extinction process in the
history of our planet; massive deforestation; loss of freshwater sources;
changing weather patterns (including rain and snow, a huge issue for
agriculture); overpopulation; overconsumption; loss of genetic diversity of
wild plant and animal species; the emergence of failed states; terrorism; and
the seeming inability to regulate international finance/globalization. All of
these issues are anthropogenic in origin, and they add up to create the even
larger issue of climate destabilization. Most climate specialists, and those
involved in climate policy and those who work in the insurance industry,
readily accept that the planet is on track to become two degrees Celsius
warmer within this century, regardless of what we do to mitigate climate
change from here on out. Worst-case scenarios predict a rise of five degrees.
The impacts of these nested and interlinked processes are being felt by
all life forms the world over. In terms of Homo sapiens’ need to imbibe
calories, the implications are startling. The oceans are overharvested and
becoming more acidic. The latter will most likely cause the collapse of the
remaining aquatic food chain, at least in terms of viable scales for providing
humans with calories. As for terrestrial food chains, and here we are most
concerned with agriculture, since most arable land is used now either for
urban living or growing the food and producing the materials that allow
urban living, we know that for each rise in degree of temperature Celsius,
there is a correlated decrease in agricultural production of approximately 10
percent. This presents a sobering conundrum: how to provide for the
projected 9 billion humans who will be alive in 2050, on a planet that will
be one to two degrees warmer and produce 10 to 20 percent less terrestrial-
based food?4 As authors and editors, and speaking for both our contributors
and the University Press of Kentucky, we are alarmed by these figures, and
believe that agricultural production is the key to understanding (and
solving, as much as possible) these interconnected environmental and social
issues. We aim in this volume to better understand the dominant industrial
paradigm and, more important, to study and build a foundation for better
understanding religiously inspired sustainable agriculture.

Industrial Agriculture and the Green Revolution

In this book, we will operationally define agriculture as a deliberate
intervention into either naturally occurring or human-managed ecosystems,
with the goal of breeding and producing a secure supply of calories for,
ultimately, human consumption. Humans have practiced some form of
agriculture for thousands of years, creating various technologies and
management regimes geared toward producing plant- and animal-based
calories.
In recent years, archaeologists have discovered more nuanced
understandings of early gatherer-hunters and their food needs, including
means of food storage, trade, and cultivation, so that our knowledge of early
human diets is becoming more robust.5 Furthermore, archaeological and
anthropological evidence suggests that a key shift occurred in agriculture
approximately ten thousand years ago. Beginning at this point in time, and
occurring in various places around the planet over the next few thousand
years, the onset of agricultural civilizations began, with their formation
based upon the domestication of a few key plants and animals. Cristiano
Grottanelli writes that these included a wheat zone, stretching from Europe
to China, where barley, spelt, and oats were domesticated and grown with
the aid of the plow; a rice zone, stretching from India to Indonesia to
southern China, aided by the plow and hoe; a sub-Saharan Africa zone,
where domesticated millet and sorghum were cultivated by using a hoe; a
yam and taro zone in Oceania, where coconut palm and sago palm were
also domesticated via the digging stick and hoe; and a maize/corn zone in
the Western Hemisphere, along with beans and pumpkins in the North and
potato and quinoa in the South, with their domestication aided by the use of
digging sticks and spades; and finally, a manioc/cassava zone in the
Amazon and tropical Americas, with secondary domesticated calories
derived from peanuts and sweet potatoes, spread and cultivated by digging
sticks and spades.6 After the cultivation of these various grains, tubers, and
pulses came the domestication of animals, including sheep, goats, cows,
chickens, llamas, rabbits, and pigs, so that taken together, these
domesticated forms of calories created the context in which human numbers
began to grow and societies became stratified, warlike, and hierarchical. All
of the major world religions encountered today are also post-agricultural
revolution constructs, which have spread around the world often hand in
hand with agricultural seeds and technologies. These same domesticated
plants and animals also form the backbone of today’s industrial agriculture,
with corn, soy, rice, potatoes, sugar, and wheat proving to be the key crops;
cows and chickens the key animals; and also coffee and cotton being the
key commodities produced and traded the world over.
Today’s modern agricultural system, commonly known as “industrial
agriculture,” is the system of agriculture against which the contributors to
this book are researching and writing. Industrial agriculture is based upon
this ten-thousand-year-old history of both genetic stock and farming
knowledge, but its advent has radically changed the trajectory of
agricultural practice: today it is also a form of agriculture based upon the
fossil fuel economy. The addition of fossil fuels and industrial technologies,
like tractors and combines and refrigerated forms of transport, has turned
agriculture into an industrial process carried out at a massive scale on farms
that are often thousands of acres in size—but that grow only one or two
commodity crops in the form of a “monoculture.” Moreover, it is a process
that is entirely dependent upon inputs of oil and gas in the forms of
herbicides, biocides, insecticides, fertilizers, and fungicides, as well as fuel
for transportation of industrial agriculture products. All of these inputs are
added to farmlands so that the few key crops mentioned above can be
grown and traded in global markets. Some scholars claim that agriculture,
and especially domesticated agriculture based on a few key crops, can by
definition never be sustainable.7
 Some critics of industrial agriculture lament its perceived impacts on
social health, focusing especially on the influence of both free trade
agreements and proprietary agricultural patents and knowledge owned by
international seed and agribusiness corporations. Such critics charge that
international free trade agreements erode both democracy and the ability of
small-scale peasant farmers to maintain their lifeways with dignity.8 These
critiques rest on a foundation of recognizing unequal global power relations
that have existed since the beginning of the Columbian Exchange, which
became the basis of modern industrial agriculture. This exchange was
created when Columbus “reknit the seams of Pangaea” and brought both the
potato and guano, “the world’s first intensive fertilizer,” to Europe.9 This
same process also began the transatlantic trade in human flesh—slaves from
Africa and indentured servants from Europe—and led to the Dust Bowl in
the United States in the 1930s, created over many decades when indigenous
farming and grazing were systematically and violently replaced by
monocultures of wheat, aided by the plow and mechanization of agriculture.
The history of agriculturalists replacing small-scale herders and nomads and
pastoralists and polycultural (in terms of a variety of plant and animal
species being cultivated) farmers is a long one, and one that critics claim
continues to this day. Readers will encounter many of the above-mentioned
criticisms, and much of the history of unequal power relations, in the
chapters that follow.
However, today industrial agriculture is buttressed by the World Trade
Organization and other national and international political bodies that often
rule in favor of streamlining world agricultural markets, and the North
American Free Trade Agreement and other neoliberal trade agreements that
contain farm subsidies and give knowledge and patent rights to agribusiness
corporations, which so far has resulted in these agribusinesses gaining more
and more shares of the global food market.10 The impact of industrial
agriculture on social and political structures the world over is another
emergent theme in this book’s chapters.
On one level, agriculture is built into the fabric of modern nation-state
politics, first as a result of the Columbian Exchange; its inclusion was
further solidified during the aftermath of World War II, when war
technologies based on oil and natural gas (the latter is the basis of industrial
fertilizers used to make modern farm crops grow, based on the Haber-Bosch
process of producing ammonia-based nitrogen) were applied to agricultural
fields. This use of technology precipitated a mass migration in developed
countries off farmlands and into cities, where the development of an urban
and suburban leisure class ensued. The calories to support this lifestyle
were made possible by the “Green Revolution” technologies that form the
basis of industrial agriculture and were coupled with post-World War II
trade agreements that were made on the basis of American economic,
political, and technological power and exceptionalism.
Furthermore, a unique American trajectory of farming and farm laws
has created the context for this book, including the passage of the Morrill
Land-Grant Act in 1862 and the Agricultural College Act in 1890, and then
technological efforts to address growing global concern about widespread
famines that dramatically impacted countries such as Pakistan, India, and
the Philippines in the 1950s and 1960s. The result was that agricultural
technologies developed before and after World War II in America were
disseminated via American philanthropic and government entities to
farmers in developing countries. This transfer of farming knowledge and
technologies, based on developments of high-yield varieties of wheat, corn,
and cotton, all of which require large amounts of chemicals and water to
grow, meant that “the Green Revolution was not only an agricultural
revolution but also a full-scale social revolution.”11 The impact of Green
Revolution industrial farming technologies, and the politics and economics
that underlay them, presents another instance in which “Western powers
come to the economic, humanitarian, and occasionally military ‘rescue’ of
‘developing’ nations as predominantly ‘white’ civilization rides to the
rescue of those needy ‘others,’” a trajectory mirrored in the spread of first
Christianity and then market capitalism out of Europe; and the results of
which are “postcolonial ecologies,” an emergent theme and critique that ties
together many of the chapters in this book.12
The final interlinked issues of this revolution are its impacts on
ecological, political, and social health. For some farmers and activists the
world over, these issues have religious underpinnings, forming both the key
drivers of the growing movement toward sustainable agriculture and the
foundation of this book. Agriculture based on only a few key plants or
animals is inherently detrimental to ecosystem health, especially over a long
period of time. The historical record of this is what drives the critiques of
agriculture broadly mentioned above. Contemporary environmental
critiques of Green Revolution technologies and high-yielding varieties of
seeds that form the basis of industrial agriculture are robust, with mounting
evidence over recent years providing strong evidence that the critiques are
well founded. One concern is the contribution of industrial farming,
especially its dependence on animal agriculture, most notably cows, to
overall human-induced climate change; some suggest that “the global
system producing and distributing food—from seed to plate to landfill—
likely accounts for 31 percent or more of the human-caused global warming
effect.”13 Another critique is the impact of industrial agriculture food
products on human health, as mounting evidence suggests that high-
yielding varieties of crop foods are leading to higher rates of obesity,
diabetes, and malnourishment.14 Agriculture broadly, including especially
industrial agriculture but also the expansion of peasant farms (the latter
often as a result of global agribusiness economics), has an impact on global
biodiversity, soil erosion, carbon storage, water tables, and habitat
destruction, so that “conventional approaches to intensive agriculture,
especially the unbridled use of irrigation and fertilizers, have been major
causes of environmental degradation.”15 The problematic environmental
impact of industrial agriculture is summarized by David Pimentel:
“Fertilizers and animal manure-nutrient losses have been associated with
deterioration of some large fisheries in North America,” while “runoff of
soil and nitrogen fertilizer from corn-belt corn production has contributed to
the anaerobic ‘dead-zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico,” which some studies
suggest is now the size of Connecticut.16
Perhaps one of the most comprehensive and damning critiques of
industrial agriculture, in both its ecological and social forms, is levied by
the environmental lawyer Andrew Kimbrell, who writes that industrial food
production yields a “fatal harvest.” Fatal to consumers, as the massive
amounts of chemicals used in growing crops dramatically increase the
incidence of cancer and other diseases. Fatal to our rivers, lakes, and oceans
that are polluted by pesticides and chemicals. Fatal to the genetic diversity
of plants, as countless species are destroyed and replaced with universal
high-yield crops and genetically engineered varieties. Fatal to our farm
communities, which are wiped out by huge corporate farms. Fatal,
potentially, to the entire biosphere as modern agriculture contributes to
global environmental threats such as ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect,
and mass species extinction.17
It is this concern with the fatality of industrial agriculture—fatal to the
health of democracy, soils and landscapes, biodiversity, the physical health
of both humans and domesticated farm animals, the well-being of all forms
of future life on this planet, and most important, to the health of human-
nature relations mediated by the context of religion—that motivates the
research and writing found within this book. Given that humans must eat,
then where might we find an antidote to the interlinked fatalities of
industrial agriculture? This book argues the solution is in the technological
practice of agricultural sustainability and, as important, in the uncovering of
the interlinked values—emotional, affective, psychological, economic, and
religio-spiritual—that underlie this method of cultivating calories.

Agricultural Sustainability
The agronomist Gary Fick reminds us to use the term sustainable
agriculture cautiously because at the end of the day it can be interpreted to
mean any form of agriculture. We give this point credence: Monsanto’s use
of the phrase, for example, is an empty gesture, devoid of meaning
considering the company’s farming and business practices. Rather, Fick
discusses the need to cultivate agricultural sustainability, a form of farming
that strives to find a balance of three interlinked aspects: (1) to “conserve or
enhance” ecological relationships; (2) to nurture social relationships that
generate fair wages and holistic knowledge for all involved with food
production; and, key to this book, (3) “spiritual and ethical relationships
that . . . engender stewardship or care of the natural and social foundations
of the food system [and] address injustice, economic abuse, and other social
or cultural failures that endanger the continued health of any part of the
food system.”18 The farming practices outlined in this book present exactly
this form of agricultural sustainability, and this book is the first to
specifically bring together case studies that focus on the very key third
element of agricultural sustainability.
Thus, agricultural sustainability is a method of producing calories from
domesticated plants and animals in which the underlying view of human-
nature relations is holistic and restorative, not mechanistic and reductionist.
Farmers who attempt to grow food in a sustainable manner recognize that
they intervene in natural systems, yet rather than basing this intervention on
concepts of human superiority that typically lead to dominating these
systems, as is the modus operandi of industrial agriculture based on its
metric of increased yields, such farmers work with and mimic the systems
found in nature.19 Farms engaged in agricultural sustainability exhibit
several common characteristics: they tend to be polycultural, smaller in
scale, and less mechanized; they typically eschew the fossil fuel-based
inputs upon which industrial agriculture depends; they preserve and save
heirloom varieties of seeds and animals, and use cover cropping and crop
rotation and rotational grazing; they treat their workers fairly; and, most
important, they compost their “wastes” so that a closed-loop system is
created on-site. The overall goal of these farming methods is to create,
maintain, and enhance soil fertility, as soil health is the basis upon which
agricultural sustainability rests. This insight was recognized by Sir Albert
Howard, who wrote on the first page of his classic An Agricultural
Testament, “The maintenance of the fertility of the soil is the first condition
of any permanent system of agriculture. In the ordinary processes of crop
production fertility is steadily lost: its continuous restoration by means of
manuring and soil management is therefore imperative.”20
Yet, there is one more link of even greater significance—the health of
the soil is codependent upon the health of society, so that a sustainable
society will by definition practice agricultural sustainability. This book
enters into this dialectic by focusing on the variable of religion, highlighting
how practitioners all over the globe are interpreting and putting into
practice their religions in order to help generate resilient biosocial farming
systems.21 Each chapter takes a unique look at the interaction between
religion and sustainable agriculture in a particular geographic region and as
practiced by farmers influenced by varying religions, helping us to better
understand the human, and especially religious, motivations behind
practicing sustainable rather than industrial agriculture.

Brief Introduction to Chapter Discussions

In chapter 1, Leonor Hurtado Paz y Paz and Cristóbal Cojtí García take us
to the heart of Maya political ecology in Guatemala and interrogate it vis-à-
vis the sanctity of the milpa system and corresponding agroecological
cosmovision. The chapter presents a dialogue between what is possible
within the milpa system and the long history of discrimination against the
Maya: from their dispossession from their ancestral lands to the excesses of
the Green Revolution to recent massive investments by USAID aiming to
incorporate peasant agriculture into the global market. The authors equate
such externally induced erosion of peasant agriculture with an attack on
Mayan spirituality. The recent revival of Mayan spirituality is discussed in
the context of the science of agroecology and initiatives to create
community-based food sovereignty.
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin (chapter 2) brings a promising story from the
Peruvian high Amazon, where she is active in what she calls making and
bioculturally regenerating yana allpa, a Kichwa-Lamista term for
Amazonian Dark Earth (ADE), also known as terra preta do Indio in
Portuguese. Through the Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration,
which she founded some five years ago, the Chacra-Huerto project is
already working with four native communities and six local schools. The
chapter weaves the conversations the author has had with Kichwa-Lamista
indigenous communities and their elders with serious exploration of the
properties of ADE, including the biochar and the broken pieces of ceramics
(called shaño in Kichwa) found in those ancient soils. The core of this
chapter is a captivating narrative of this anthropogenic soil, whose existence
in the Amazon could have been as early as five thousand years ago, or even
earlier. The author describes the significance of the Kichwa-Lamista culture
of reciprocity/respect and how and why they present offerings to four
deities associated with the chacra (the agricultural field): Mama Allpa, the
earth; Yakumama, the rain/water; Mama Qilla, the moon; and Tayta Inti, the
sun. For the author, “These reciprocal exchanges of gifts enact a
regenerative cycle, which constitutes the opposite of the extractive actions
characteristic of a capitalistic economy.” She then articulates this act as an
essential feature of the cosmocentric cosmologies of indigenous
communities. In this cosmocentric universe, “the soil becomes Mama
Allpa, a being to whom prayers and offerings are made, who is endowed
with understanding, agency, and sentience, and who responds to the actions
of humans.” Mama Allpa is both a spirit and the soil/earth; Mama Qilla is
both the moon and a spirit. The offering is not simply a gift exchange
among humans; it is an exchange between humans and the nonhuman
entities who also reside in the chacra. Additionally, the chapter discusses
the significance of yana allpa in addressing deforestation in the Amazon,
sequestering greenhouse gases, and contributing to community food
sovereignty.
Chapter 3 on the Malawian permaculture initiative, written by the
Reverend Eston Dickson Pembamoyo, offers a vivid example of how the
values and skills embedded in permaculture are introduced and practiced in
Malawi to regenerate malimidwe a makolo—ancestral farming methods.
The ritualistic nature of such traditional techniques in Malawi are
contrasted with the mechanistic methods of the Green Revolution. The
author approaches permaculture as a corrective, a religiously infused path to
bring authentic abundance back to Malawi, where the Green Revolution has
severely impacted soil, seeds, and productivity. How can coordinated
human initiatives and actions help to arrest food insecurity and create a
sustainable supply without destroying the land? What can be done generally
to develop designs people could use in order to combat hunger and poverty?
The chapter also blends permaculture principles with theological traditions.
The progress of this initiative since 1994, and lessons it yields from one of
the younger African nations and one of the remaining agrarian economies
of the world, is worth watching and celebrating.
In his chapter 4, “Nature Spirituality, Sustainable Agriculture, and the
Nature/Culture Paradox,” Michael Lemons pulls on years of participant-
observation and permaculture expertise to weave a “dramaturgic” analysis
of the permaculture subculture located in Puna, on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Lemons’s chapter weaves together summaries of lifestyles and the
motivations behind them of various participants in Puna’s unique
permaculture subculture, exploring how these are indicative of a
nature/culture duality that underlies the attempts of those on the Big Island
to generate a localized understanding of permaculture and thus sustainable
farming regimes. The author also adds a unique methodological lens to the
book, in that his analysis is driven not only by qualitative research methods
but by statistical, quantitative methods that allow us to gain a better
understanding of the various motivations that inspire permaculture
practitioners to engage in sustainable agriculture practices in Puna. Lemons
expertly situates his findings in a variety of academic domains and
literature, from anthropology to religious studies to postmaterialism and
literature on human religio-spiritual views of nature. Lemons concludes that
the urge to engage in a back-to-the land type of sustainable agriculture in
Puna is very much motivated by connections to nature whereby nature is
seen and felt to be sacred and holy, and these religious motivations and
sensibilities thus inspire the practice of permaculture. Lemons’s essay adds
a nuanced perspective to the book as a whole, highlighting differences
between the practice of permaculture in the Global North and the Global
South, where different material, political, and religious backgrounds create
localized understandings and practices of religiously inspired sustainable
agriculture.
Jagannath Adhikari (chapter 5), a longtime researcher on the
agroecology of Nepal and a frequent commentator on food and agricultural
policies/trends in Nepal, assesses Hindu/Buddhist traditions and peasant
farming in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal. The beauty of this chapter is
the live dialogue Dr. Adhikari creates between the Vedic and Hindu textual
wisdoms and the everyday practices of smallholding peasants and farmers.
After outlining a Vedic system of an agricultural household and some
remnants of everyday beliefs such as dharma (merit), paap (sin), and karma
(deed), and live but declining practices such as satjbeej charne, the chapter
concludes on a sobering note. The religious values of the indigenous
farmers might not suffice to counteract the prevailing trends toward
chemical and industrial agriculture propelled by Nepal’s rapid pace of
modernization and urbanization. The author’s closer examination of the
Pokhara Valley in Nepal testifies that the use of land for farming has
become a losing proposition due to the region’s recent real estate boom and
allocation of land for other economic activities. While Adhikari
acknowledges that peasant farming has been substantially displaced and
eroded, regeneration of what he calls the kisan dharma holds deep promise
in the future agrarian and food economy of Nepal.
In chapter 6, Pankaj Jain explores dharmic ecology and brings unique
voices from the Gujrat and Maharashtra states in western India:
practitioners of the new religious movement Swadhyaya, which literally
means “self-study.” This movement challenges both the utilitarian and
protectionist motives behind environmental efforts. Instead, Swadhyayis
attribute environmental concern to their devotional motive and a search for
the “Indwelling God.” Building on the statement of Pandurang Shastri
Athavale, founder of the Swadhyaya movement, that dharma is “that which
sustains both the personal order and the cosmic order,” Jain argues, in the
case of Swadhyaya, that the concept of dharma can be “successfully applied
as an overarching term for the sustainability of ecology and agriculture.”
Jain argues that Swadhyayis strive to develop their dharmic teachings into
practice by developing reverential relationships with the trees, water, cows,
and other ecological resources of their community. Some examples of this
are how Swadhyayis have collected rainwater on their roofs as well as
recharged their water wells and rivers. What they call Yogeśvara Krsi
(agriculture) includes four components: trust of neighbor, love for animals,
faith in God, and respect for nature.
A. Whitney Sanford’s chapter 7, “Gandhi’s Agrarian Legacy,” interprets
official texts and the lived lives of members of Brahma Vidya Mandir
(BVM) and associated farms such as Samvad and Nilayam Nivedita. The
author describes everyday life on these farms, placing them within the
context of the values of the Bhagavad Gita—a central Hindu text—and the
legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. Established in 1959 by Vinoba Bhave
(Gandhi’s spiritual successor), BVM is a women’s intentional community
whose members consider the ashram their spiritual and social laboratory.
As they attempt to address the failures of modern agriculture, their core
principles are geared toward inculcating the values of self-reliance, self-
sufficiency, nonviolence, bread labor, and self-discipline in a community
setting. The story of BVM highlights an irony of modern India: while many
Indians revere Gandhi as a national hero, they also proudly proclaim the
country’s large and growing middle class, who have rejected Gandhian
austerity in favor of US-style consumerism.
Alexander Harrow Kaufman (chapter 8) digs deeper into what farmers
and peasants in Thailand call the “Moral Rice” culture and network they
have created over time. Within these networks there is a fertile debate
between whether to accept the global organic rice certification or to replace
it with a standard based on the teachings of the Buddhist Five Precepts.
Since the goal of Moral Rice is to cultivate Buddhist values among organic
farmers, one can become a member of the Moral Rice Network by joining
the Dharma Garden Temple, learning to sacrifice oneself, and giving to
others by joining the savings cooperative. Akin to what Frédérique Apffel-
Marglin describes in the Peruvian high Amazon, Kaufman portrays how
Thai farmer households pay reverence to Khwan Khao (Rice Soul), Mae
Phosop (Rice Mother), Mae Thoranee (Earth Mother), and Mae Khongka
(River Mother) through rituals and offerings. Rituals are performed on
behalf of specific deities at each stage of the process: plowing, sowing,
transplanting, harvesting, and threshing. The Asiatic water buffalo, which is
used in farming, is also ritually thanked for its contribution to the rice
culture. Overall, this chapter offers an excellent case study of the biosocial
evolution of sustainable rice farming in Thailand.
Elaine Solowey’s chapter 9, “The Seven Species and Their Relevance to
Sustainable Agriculture in Israel Today,” shares the insights of one of
Israel’s leading plant scientists, who is working on ways to cultivate
sustainable forms of perennial agriculture in the region’s arid climate. In
this chapter, Dr. Solowey combines biblical exegesis, focusing on the sacred
Seven Species of the Hebrew Bible, with her own experience as a Jewish
farmer/plant researcher in Israel, crafting a compelling narrative about how
the traditional ecological knowledge of the early farmers of the region has
much to teach modern-day farmers in the quest for sustainability. She
examines ecological, religious, cultural, and historical facets of traditional
indigenous farming, applying the lessons of ancient documents and
practices to the creation and maintenance of sustainable ways of growing
food in Israeli agriculture today. Overall, this chapter provides a
comprehensive history of how agriculture and religion have intermingled in
Israel, and what this history might suggest for how to farm sustainably in an
area of the planet that will have to navigate changing weather patterns
brought about by anthropogenic climate change.
Yigal Deutscher, in chapter 10, “Tending the Garden of Eden: Sacred
Jewish Agricultural Traditions,” grapples with the implication of the
biblical narrative in the Hebrew Bible in which the early Israelites were
commanded to farm and steward the Promised Land. Inspired by his own
experience practicing permaculture and other forms of sustainable
agriculture in both Israel and North America, Deutscher articulates a
modern Jewish agrarian hermeneutic that attempts to recapture the relevant
teachings and insights about sustainable farming practices contained within
the Torah. Deutscher argues that a clear blueprint is offered to the ancient
Israelites, and this blueprint is one that modern-day farmers, especially
Jewish farmers, can follow if they wish to restore soils and health to both
farmland and cultural institutions. Unfortunately, through history, and
especially with the onset of industrial agriculture, this blueprint has been
neglected. Deutscher’s hope is that the biblical teachings of rest and release;
the concept of sacred land; the use of perennials; and other biblical insights
can move Jews, and society at large, toward a more sustainable form of
agriculture.
Anna Peterson’s chapter 11, “Religion, Local Community, and
Sustainable Agriculture,” investigates sustainable agriculture at the scale of
community, and specifically collectives of humans united under shared
religious identities. One such community is the Old Order Amish, another
displaced Roman Catholic peasants in postwar El Salvador. The Amish
have a long tradition of low-tech farming in North America, but they face
issues of rising property values and the need to navigate the modern
economy while maintaining fidelity to religious views of work and
technology. Peterson shares how close-knit Amish communities, held
together by shared beliefs that inform their farming practices, are able to
create an estimable track record of eco-friendly farming (when compared to
metrics of industrial agriculture) that is more profitable and requires lower
inputs of nonrenewable forms of energy—key attributes for any type of
agriculture to be sustainable in a world of climate change and peak oil.
Amish farmers are not “organic purists,” as they do use small amounts of
chemicals, but this use is part of a larger management regime that relies on
more traditional practices, such as crop rotation and the planting of
polycultures, as is evidenced in their healthy levels of topsoil. The key
insight shared by Peterson is that “religious priorities and values shape both
social and agricultural choices” for the Amish, demonstrating the clear role
of religion in forming how some humans choose to produce food. Similarly,
Peterson finds that small communities of Roman Catholic “repopulators” in
El Salvador are also inspired to utilize practices associated with sustainable
agriculture regimes, but their choices are shaped by postcolonialism,
national policies (including the fallout from a civil war), and local religious
identities, including liberation theology. Thus, for repopulators, sustainable
agriculture goes hand in hand with democracy, social justice, and economic
security. Their success in generating resilient farming practices is hampered
by the lack of needed structural and democratic changes in El Salvador.
Despite their geographical and historical differences, both case study groups
can be classified as peasants, as they are low on the “energy food chain,”
and so are marginal groups within a larger capitalist society. Yet members
in both groups use religious teachings and beliefs to organize their identity,
and these also shape their farming practices; both groups also are critical of
larger trends in society: the selfishness and wastefulness of American
society, and the subjugation of peasant voices in El Salvador. Peterson
expertly teases out implications of scale, levels of technology, economics,
and politics to extrapolate possible sustainable agriculture solutions that are
grounded in small religious communities, thereby adding a unique
perspective to the book.
Chapter 12, “Heideggerian Reflections on Three Mennonite Cookbooks
and a Mennonite Farm in Northwest Ohio” by Raymond F. Person Jr. and
Mark H. Dixon, explores possible answers to the question “How do we, as
human beings, interpret our connection to the earth as embodied and
emplaced beings, and live our lives accordingly?” Person and Dixon writes
as both scholars and insiders to the Anabaptist tradition; whereas Anna
Peterson focuses on Old Order Amish from within this tradition, Person and
Dixon explore theological insights about sustainable agriculture from the
perspective of Midwestern (USA) Mennonites. They find answers in an
“embodied theology” of simple living that underlies many Mennonite
teachings and practices. Combining spiritual inspiration taken from within
the Mennonite tradition with insights from the philosopher Martin
Heidegger and his work on being, dwelling, and building, Person and Dixon
tease out ethical values regarding how we should dwell and build as
farmers, basing our activities on tenets of sustainable agriculture. The
authors find evidence for sustainable dwelling and building in Mennonite
cookbooks and the work of a small group of farmers tending a Mennonite
homestead in Ohio. Person and Dixon’s application of Heidegger’s thought
provides a needed engagement with the Western philosophical tradition,
especially with phenomenology, and the implications of this for a religious
sustainable agriculture; yet their deft treatment of Heidegger is grounded
within their own work as farmers as well as within larger Mennonite views
of creation and the human enterprise of food production and consumption.
Ragan Sutterfield’s chapter 13, “Steward or Priest?” presents the
“insider” work of a theologian who grapples with the fundamental question
of what the human role in creation should be: that of “steward” or “priest.”
Taking the practice of saying grace before mealtime as his starting-off
point, Sutterfield asks, “In a time when our food systems are not always
good, when our meals represent sins against the creation, how can
Christians bless a meal that represents a desecration as much as the
blessings of God?” Sutterfield rightly points out that grace is really a
second-level concern; the real issue is how the food that is being blessed
was produced. Comparing the industrial stewardship paradigm of
production (typified by megacorporation Tyson Foods) with the grace-
giving priesthood model (exemplified by Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm), the
chapter explores how cultivating a Christian sense of being priests presiding
over creation can inspire an emergent Christian sustainable agriculture.
Sutterfield expertly teases out the implications of these two models, on both
religion and the planet, by focusing on the practice of raising chickens,
rightly concluding, “What is at stake [in how we farm and the religious
values behind this] isn’t simply our moral status, but our very life. That is
what ‘sustainable agriculture’ means—a way of farming that continues and
draws forth the being of creation.”
Chapter 14, by Maximilian Abouleish-Boes, explores the Muslim
farming and business group SEKEM, based in Egypt. It briefly provides the
context in which SEKEM originated, including a short history of the life of
its founder, Dr. Ibrahim Abouleish. SEKEM’s remarkable achievements in
fostering sustainable agriculture and biodynamic farming in Egypt and
abroad are detailed. For example, SEKEM has succeeded not only in
reducing synthetic pesticides in its own operations but, in cooperation with
the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture, in cutting chemical use by more than
90 percent on Egyptian cotton farms. SEKEM’s basic values are informed
by a blend of European culture and philosophy with principles of Islam.
The organization draws from the core Islamic values of tawhid (unity), fitra
(natural state), ilm (knowledge), ihsan (beauty and excellence), khalifa
(stewardship of the earth), and justice (adl) to embrace an agricultural ethic
that is “future oriented and sustainably competitive.”
Tristan Reader and Terrol Dew Johnson offer another perspective on
indigenous farming in their chapter 15, “Tohono O’odham Himdag and
Agri/Culture.” They paint a vibrant ethnographic picture of the traditional
farming methods and lifeways of the Tohono O’odham (the People of the
Desert) of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. They discuss the traditional ecological
knowledge of the Tohono O’odham, and how this knowledge is
encapsulated within a functional cosmovision in regard to the harvesting of
the fruit of the saguaro cacti as well as other important agricultural
activities. As they explain, for the Tohono O’odham, “Food is health. Food
is culture. Food is community. Food is the basis of a sacred economy of
what you grow, what you harvest, and how you share.” As is seen in other
chapters of this book, the separation of agriculture, religion, culture, and
nature is a false distinction—there is an explicit recognition that the health
of all are entwined. This is evident for the Tohono O’odham in the
traditional songs they sing, the rituals they undertake, the organization of
their farming calendar, and the structure of their community, all of which
are embedded within their food culture. As is the case with other indigenous
farming agricultures covered in this book, the Tohono O’odham, too, are
having to navigate postcolonial and post-Green Revolution lifeways.
The conclusion to this edited volume is written by coeditor Pramod
Parajuli. He provokes readers to imagine an agricultural food system in
which what he calls the “‘soil to supper/sustenance and back to soil’
continuum” is not only sustainable but also abundant and resilient—and he
argues that its creation is still within our reach. Within the rubric of
“searching for Annapurna,” he develops a theoretical framework that looks
at the intersection of biosphere, ethnosphere, and learningsphere in the
context of humanity having entered an Anthropocene epoch in which we
have exceeded planetary boundaries. He proposes that various religious
traditions, including those covered in this volume, have a role to play in an
emergent regenerative food system. However, the severity of our current
situation demands that we reimagine and reconfigure what religion is and
give room to the diversity of “earthbound” religiosities, worldviews,
cosmovisions, and practices that millions of farmers, peasants, food
growers, and gardeners on our planet are already engaged in. This emergent
religiosity might nurture a mix of sacred and secular tenets and might even
transcend the customary boundaries of religious traditions. Parajuli builds
on conversations with his late mother in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal to
illustrate the thread between the human household and the earth household.
He focuses on the act of building soil and carbon, including Amazonian
dark earth (ADE), as the foundation of such earthbound worldviews and
cosmocentric visions. Parajuli urges us not to burn and send valuable
carbon into the sky but to sequester it in the soil where it belongs, thus
making, as William McDonough and Michael Braungart describe it, a
“high-carbon diet for the planet.” In an emergent abundant and resilient
food economy, carbon should not be considered a waste to be minimized
but an asset to be enhanced and multiplied. Finally, Parajuli ends the
chapter with suggestions to the reader, and the larger scholarly community,
about fruitful avenues of exploration that can be built upon the themes and
methods of this book.

A final note to the reader before you proceed on your journey through
religion and sustainable agriculture: we recognize that this book has its
limitations. First, not every guiding research question listed at the beginning
of this introduction was systematically addressed by each and every author,
although each did her or his best to work through them using the data
available. Nonetheless, we feel that the data and themes that emerge are
compelling, and that their implications demand scholarly attention. Second,
we recognize that although this book is global in scope, it is only a snapshot
in time, and it lacks case studies and input from scholars or activists in key
parts of the world. For example, we have no chapter on agriculture and
religion in China, despite repeated attempts by the editors to track down
submissions from scholars, journalists, or activists in East Asia. Another
gap in this book is an exploration of what religious institutions and their
teachings have to say about sustainable agriculture from a top-down,
hierarchical perspective. We hope readers will search out information on
religion-agriculture issues in their own communities and geographic areas
as well as research that is being generated at institutional levels in religious
traditions and published in academic journals or books to augment the rich
material covered in ours.
We invite you now to read on to learn about the active, compelling
interface between religion and sustainable agriculture around the globe. We
hope that in your reading and study of these chapters, you too may find
yourself engaged in the noble, needed practice of supporting sustainable
agriculture, campaigning for food security and food justice issues in your
local community, wherever you may reside.

Notes
1. “Religious Agrarianism,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia on Food and Beverages in America, ed.
Andrew Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
2. For good introductory surveys that look at religion-nature interactions, including some mention
of agricultural issues, see Martin Tyler and Victoria Finlay, Faith in Conservation (Washington, D.C.:
World Bank, 2003); Mary Evelyn Tucker, Worldly Wonder: Religions Enter Their Ecological Phase
(Chicago: Open Court, 2003); Darrell Posey, ed., Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity
(London: Intermediate Technology, 1999).
3. Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, The New Peasantries: Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in
an Era of Empire and Globalization (London: Earthscan, 2008).
4. S. Chakraborty and A. C. Newton, “Climate Change, Plant Diseases and Food Security: An
Overview,” Plant Pathology 60 (2011).
5. Alan Outram, “Hunter-Gatherers and the First Farmers: The Evolution of Taste in Prehistory,”
in Food: The History of Taste, ed. Paul Freedman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
6. Cristiano Grottanelli, “Agriculture,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay
Jones (Detroit: Macmillan, 2005), 185.
7. Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (New York: Turner/Bantam, 1992); Richard Manning, Against the
Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization (New York: North Point, 2004); Wes Jackson,
New Roots for Agriculture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).
8. Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (Cambridge, Mass.:
South End, 2000).
9. Charles Mann, “How the Potato Changed the World,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2011;
William Doolittle, “Agriculture in North America on the Eve of Contact: A Reassessment,” Annals of
the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992).
10. Piero Bevilacqua et al., “Manifesto on the Future of Knowledge Systems: Knowledge
Sovereignty for a Healthy Planet,” International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture,
http://www.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/6/7/1367341/manifesto_on_future_knowledge_1.pdf (accessed
April 3, 2013); Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (New
York: Melville House, 2012).
11. Murray Leaf, “Green Revolution,” in Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability, vol. 4,
Natural Resources and Sustainability, ed. Daniel Vasey et al. (Great Barrington, Mass.: Berkshire,
2012), 199.
12. Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt, “Introduction: Narratives of Survival, Sustainability, and
Justice,” in Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives, ed. Bonnie Roos and
Alex Hunt (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 2; Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George
Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011).
13. Anna Lappé, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You
Can Do about It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), xvii.
14. Patel, Stuffed and Starved. Meanwhile, in a recent editorial, José Domingo called for much
more robust assessments of the potential risks to both biophysical and ecological systems posed by
genetically modified food organisms (GMOs; this is the insertion of a gene from one species into
another species, and is not to be confused with selective breeding of a single species). “Human
Health Effects of Genetically Modified (GM) Plants: Risk and Perception,” Human and Ecological
Risk Assessment 17, no. 3 (2011).
15. Jonathan Foley et al., “Solutions for a Cultivated Planet,” Nature, October 20, 2011, 3.
16. David Pimentel et al., “Organic and Conventional Farming Systems: Environmental and
Economic Issues,” Environmental Biology, July 2005, 1,
http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/2101/1/pimentel_report_05–1.pdf (accessed
November 28, 2013).
17. Andrew Kimbrell, foreword to Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, ed.
Andrew Kimbrell (Sausalito: Foundation for Deep Ecology, 2002).
18. Gary Fick, Food, Farming, and Faith (Albany: State University of New York Press), 169.
 19. Whitney Sanford, Growing Stories from India: Religion and the Fate of Agriculture
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011).
20. Sir Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 1.
21. This approach differs from those of other recent works aiming to help us better understand the
emerging sustainable food movement, from investigations of the ethical dimension of eating local
foods to nuanced ecofeminist critiques of place-based foods. See Gregory Peterson, “Is Eating
Locally a Moral Obligation?” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 26, no. 2 (2013):
421–37; Chaone Mallory, “Locating Ecofeminism in Encounters with Food and Place,” Journal of
Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 26, no. 1 (2013): 171–89.
 1

Our Flesh Was Made from Corn

Leonor Hurtado Paz y Paz and Cristóbal Cojtí García

Ixmukane, our grandmother of creation, ground the white and yellow corn kernels, and formed
from the dough the four bodies of our grandfathers: Balam Kitzen, Balam Aq’ab’, Majukutaj,
and Iq B’alam and then she made nine drinks that became the blood of our first grandparents
and parents.
—Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiche Maya People

The Mayan civilization unites spirituality, science, and agriculture, thus

creating an agriculture that is in harmony with nature, the individual, and
society, weaving all the elements together as part of the cosmic fabric.
Harmony is created by respecting principles that consider the human being
as one integral element of the whole system rather than the main or
dominant element of that system. In this context, the person respects the life
of all other elements, understanding that all elements are alive and have
their own mission. Another principle is “You are my other self”—this
principle considers that one’s life influences another’s life and vice versa;
thus, one must love the other as much as one loves oneself. And that “you”
is not only other people; “you” is nature, water, soil, plants, animals—
everything, because every thing is alive. That is why nature and agriculture
go together: they look to reinforce each other.
This way of life and agriculture honors existing resources, biodiversity,
and the preservation of future generations, and is integrally oriented by both
the Mayan sacred calendar, Chol q’ij, and the 260-day lunar calendar,
marked by nine lunar phases (the gestation time for human life), together
with the solar calendar Ab’, the 365-day agricultural calendar. The
understanding of time is incredibly important because apart from governing
agricultural work, each day offers advice for life, because each day has its
own energy and numerical figure; each day has its own charm and secrets,
its own name, its Nagual, a living being that encourages us; each day is
inspired by its cardinal direction, containing the force of one of the essential
elements: fire, air, water, or earth. This means that each day has its own life
force, one that repeats with the same vitality in a cycle of fifty-two years,
when Chol q’ij and Ab’ coincide once more. This wealth of ideas, spiritual
facts, and materials allows people and their community to be in unity with
agriculture and to adjust their actions accordingly.
Guatemala’s population is currently 14,713,763, and 60 percent of the
inhabitants are indigenous: Mayan, Xinca, or Garifuna, who between them
speak twenty-three languages.1 These groups preserve their ethnic tradition,
rituals, and social organization in various and different ways. Guatemala’s
ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity and the rights of indigenous people
to live by their own cultural norms were legally recognized in 1995 with the
signing of the indigenous rights accords. Since then, indigenous peoples in
Guatemala have been reinforcing their cultural and ethnic organization,
including in the realm of agriculture.
Historical Mayan agriculture required keeping track of time, which
began to have a spiritual, social, and scientific function in which everything
belonged to a whole, and agriculture itself wasn’t differentiated from the
human being, from society, or from the cosmos. In this integration, the
union of the cosmos, nature, people, and all living things is valued and
respected, as both the interdependency and the complementarity of
everything is recognized. For in the end, people, like all beings, are part of
the cosmic fabric. The planet is known as Mother Earth, who offers
everything that makes life possible: she produces the trees and all of the
plants, she provides water and calls down the rain, she houses and feeds the
animals who then create music and dance—all of which allows us to feed
our communities. Thus, people belong to Mother Earth, not the other way
around, for she is not our property; she cannot be sold or bought.2
The products of agriculture are granted to us with love from Mother
Earth, Father Sky, Sister Water, and Brother Sun to nurture the social ideal
of living well, meaning that the whole community has enough to share in
harmony. The “good life” doesn’t allow for some people to have more than
they need while others suffer without, because it encompasses the
fundamental value that “you are my other self.” The Sky’s Heart and the
Earth’s Heart make up all people, giving them their heart, mind, and body
as well as a full capacity to live with dignity while loving and respecting all
that allows them to exist.3
The Maya are an agroecological civilization. Over the course of
thousands of years, they developed a deep, profound knowledge and
agrarian practice that afforded well-being and allowed them to achieve
complete economic, political, social, and cultural development. Mayan life
and agriculture are driven by a holistic vision of physical and spiritual
interdependence, and by a worldview rooted in spirituality. These
characteristics are vital and persist as an inspiration and guide to creating
integrated development that is complementary to and in harmony and
equilibrium with nature, family, and community.4 The Mayan culture
believes all beings have their light and dark side, hot and cold, masculine
and feminine; moreover, the Maya view these supposed opposites as not
contradictory or competing with one another, but rather as complementary,
diverse, and necessary for existence in a cycle of constant development.
Diversity, then, is recognized as an essential ingredient of life; to be
different is not to be opposite but complementary. This principle also
applies to agriculture and has enhanced agricultural diversity.5

The Spanish invasion in 1524 and the subsequent conquest destroyed the
economic, political, and social structures of the Maya, and deeply attacked
their spirituality. During the colonial period and even up to today, the
Mayan people have been evicted from their lands, discriminated against,
segregated, exploited, and murdered. Their spirituality and its
manifestations are condemned and attacked.6 Spanish conquerors imposed
the Catholic religion on the indigenous populations as an ideological
instrument of domination. True to the ideology of the Maya, attacks against
their agrarian economy and attacks against their spirituality are one and the
same. Dispossession, discrimination, and exploitation have historically been
the principal aggressors against Mayan spirituality, because without land or
dignity there cannot be the kind of communion that feeds spirituality.7
Originally, the Maya occupied extremely productive lands and
developed a technology that is known today as agroecology, based on the
application of concepts and principles of ecological design, development,
and sustainable agrarian system management.8 Pre-Columbian people lived
in valleys with abundant water resources and a six-month rainy season; in
this environment agriculture imitated the natural life of plants and animals
in a harmonious interdependence. Intercropping was used during planting:
seeding corn, beans, and different types of squash all in the same space.
Corn was the main source of sustenance, beans both complemented the diet
and fertilized the soil, and squash added to the diet, retained soil moisture,
and suppressed weeds. Thus, the population had a rich and balanced diet,
while sustainable agricultural practices preserved the fertility of the soil.
There was abundant production that allowed people to live well and
maintain surpluses without exploiting the land. The main driver of
agricultural production was community life, not the generation of
commodities. Producing in order to sustain life was and remains linked to
spirituality, and so one must ask permission and forgiveness to use the
earth; bless the seeds, water, sun, air, and labor; and finally, give thanks and
share the fruits of Mother Earth.9
During colonization, the Maya were suppressed and condemned to live
in the mountains on rugged, fragile soil, so that they were forced to cut
down trees and jungle to create the agricultural land necessary to stay alive.
In contrast, the colonists appropriated the highly productive lowlands, and
in 1525 this act of expropriation was legitimized by the pope, creating the
Latifundio-minifundio system, now the backbone of Guatemala’s
agricultural production system.10 Practices of expropriation,
marginalization, exploitation, discrimination, and murder of the indigenous
population have continued into the twenty-first century. As late as 2011,
fourteen communities in the Polochic Valley (Baja Veraz, Guatemala)
experienced cases of eviction, destruction of homes and crops, violence
toward peasants, and assassinations.11
Through colonization, the Europeans classified the indigenous
populations as an inferior race, treating them as subhuman. The concept of
race is a political system defined through inheritance and social
categorization, symbolically constructed from skin color. Race
categorization was invented by the Europeans to justify attacking and
usurping the land and labor of indigenous peoples and African slaves. In
this way, the colonizers acquitted themselves of being characterized as
criminal, illegal, and terrorist for their violent acts of conquest. “Race”
criminalizes nonwhites and decriminalizes whites, and so history has been
built on a basis of racism.12 Such structural racism created by the imposed
system has destroyed much of sustainable agriculture and the spirituality of
indigenous people all throughout the Americas.
In 1871, liberal reform in Guatemala established a new system of
exploitation of land and the labor force, as dominant Creoles protected by
the law expropriated communal lands and imposed forced labor on the
indigenous community for export production. The objectives of the reform
were to subjugate the indigenous and poor mestizo populations, forcing
them to sell their labor cheaply and survive from what they produced in
their minifundios, or smallholdings. Historically, this phenomenon
reinforced the impoverishment of Guatemala’s indigenous peoples.13 With
the revolution of 1944 there were significant changes, but coerced labor,
though forbidden, continues and persists to this day under disguised
forms.14
Under these conditions of exploitation and domination, the Maya
engaged in religious syncretism, combining the imposed Catholicism and
their own spirituality, a practice that still exists today. Some writers explain
this by attributing it to the “devil,” but this characterization fails to take into
account the indigenous consciousness and spirit of rebellion. Hidden within
the mystical shadows of Catholicism, the Maya maintain their own
expression and spirituality, a reflection of their own firm, powerful
mentality.15

After World War II, in order to make use of the surplus nitrates (for
explosives) and poisons (for gas), the United States turned these chemicals
into fertilizers and pesticides. To create international markets for these
products, it was necessary to replace traditional farming with the industrial
model of production. In an effort to spread industrial farming and at the
same time provide a technological alternative to the agrarian reform being
demanded by Guatemala’s peasant movements, the United States, through
its Agency for International Development (USAID) and international
institutions such as the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) and the
CGIAR (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research),
promoted the Green Revolution. This consisted of increasing the production
of basic grains with high-yielding varieties and improved hybrid seeds.
With these came the demand for and use of external chemical inputs
produced with petroleum that combined fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides,
irrigation, and mechanized agriculture. Proponents of the Green Revolution,
such as William Gaud, publicly prided themselves on their achievements,
noting that the external assistance they financed increased agricultural
production.16 What they did not mention was that this “assistance” was
made possible by loans, and that the new system required agricultural
expansion, destroying forest and jungle for the sake of production.

Map of Guatemala. (Based on Problèmes d’Amérique latine 43 [1976].)

In Latin America, the Green Revolution was promoted between 1960

and 1980 and even persisted into the 1990s.17 Initially, Latin American
states had to invest more in agriculture during the Green Revolution,
providing subsidies, price incentives, infrastructure, and research. These
programs were established as conditions for loans for agricultural
development. In Guatemala, such loans were quickly plagued by
corruption, racism, and structural inequalities. The Green Revolution
changed the mode of production and the agricultural markets, decreasing
the access of the poor population—mostly indigenous Mayans—to land and
staple foods. On top of the harmful conditions created by the Green
Revolution, in Guatemala discrimination and oppression against indigenous
peoples further deteriorated their way of life.18 During this period,
missionary action linked to the Green Revolution continued as a useful tool
for colonization. As the United States became a stronger presence in
Guatemala, missionaries arrived en masse, with pastors and investments
from Christian sects promoting their own concept of development and
organization, further dividing communities.19
After Jorge Ubico’s overthrow in 1944 by the “October
Revolutionaries,” a group of left-leaning students and professionals, along
with liberal-democratic coalitions led by Juan José Arévalo (1945–1951)
and Jacobo Arbenz Guzman (1951–1954), instituted social and political
reforms that strengthened the peasantry and urban workers at the expense of
the military and big landowners, like the US-owned United Fruit Company.
With covert US backing, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas led a coup in 1954,
and Arbenz took refuge in Mexico. A series of repressive regimes followed,
and by 1960 Guatemala was plunged into a civil war between military
governments, right-wing vigilante groups, and leftist rebels that would last
thirty-six years—the longest civil war in Latin American history. During the
conflict, control, discrimination, segregation, and assassination of the Maya
increased. During the 1980s and 1990s, model villages, development
centers, and civil defense patrols were forms of segregation controlled by
the army. The permanent presence of the army re-created colonial
conditions and maintained a regime of terror. Mayan spiritual leaders were
directly repressed and killed, and their sacred sites were destroyed or used
by the army in carrying out massacres.20 The kidnappings, torture, and
murders were carried out not only to obtain information but also to terrorize
the people. The counterinsurgency developed in phases: (1) violent
eradication of the guerrilla outbreak, (2) civic action, (3) devastation of
land, (4) hunting down those who fled, and (5) civil patrols.
 During this time, the Maya resisted. The love of relatives and neighbors
was the spark of life that reunited the scattered and lost, giving rise to new
forms of social organization. What emerged was a versatile human
collectivism that retained the feel of the family home while respecting
personal and cultural needs. This served as a testimony of hope, affirming
that the weak and poor can defeat strategic violence and resist techniques
used to divide the innermost depths of a person, that which defines identity
and loyalty.21 This resistance was aided by Catholic liberation theology:
progressive Catholic forces mobilized in favor of the people’s struggle,
though they were unable to transform the reactionary and conservative
church hierarchy.
The role of the Green Revolution as a counterinsurgency measure
impoverished and radicalized the peasantry. The Green Revolution finished
the four-hundred-year process of destroying peasant agriculture and
degrading Mayan spirituality. Agriculture itself was destroyed because of
the Green Revolution due to these realities: (1) it increased yields only for
the first few crops and harvests, (2) it imposed monocultures, (3) it
destroyed the soil’s organic matter, (4) it brought indebtedness and
destroyed peasant livelihoods, and (5) many peasants went bankrupt and
were forced to migrate to the agricultural frontier, to cities, or to the United
States.22 The Green Revolution divorced peasant farmers from the spiritual
practices they had performed for centuries, from preparing the field to be
sown to blessing the seed and thanking it to sharing and celebrating the
harvest.
Although the alleged triumphs and production miracles of the Green
Revolution were heralded internationally, from its inception the new system
was criticized by both scientists and activists for several reasons: the
excessive cost of seeds and their required technology, the subsequent
dependency on that same technology, the danger of eliminating traditional
crops that were better suited to their environment, and the emergence of
new pests. All of this was evidence that the Green Revolution was not
ecologically sound. Although it increased crop yields for a few years, the
crop products did not nourish people.23 In Latin America, the Green
Revolution mainly favored the large- and medium-sized producers
developing industrial agriculture totally dependent on inputs from the
United States. Small producers were persuaded and/or pressured to use the
“improved seeds” and chemical inputs, which they obtained on credit. Since
all peasants were producing the same products, at harvest time there was an
excess—and prices dropped off. Peasants, unable to pay their debt, lost their
land.24
The attack continued and still continues on other fronts. In 1980 the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank implemented
structural adjustment programs (SAPs) to reduce the fiscal imbalance
between lending and borrowing countries and supposedly reduce poverty.
The SAPs promoted the privatization of basic services and resources
(education, health, electricity, water, and the like) as well as currency
devaluation, deregulation, and the reduction of trade barriers. Other
conditions of various SAPs included the reduction of social programs,
opening domestic stock markets to direct foreign investment, and special
rights for foreign investors.25 Severe international fiscal discipline is
applied to countries that don’t adopt these programs, effectively
marginalizing them. Ultimately, such measures have undermined both the
economy and sovereignty of poor countries, converting basic needs into
commodities to which the majority of the population has no access.26 The
imposed neoliberal model excludes rural producers of staple foods for the
domestic market, favoring financial investment in agricultural exports for
the liberalized global market. For this reason, low-priced and unstable
production doesn’t receive subsidies, usually leading small producers to
bankruptcy and contributing to the concentration of landownership by
larger corporate farms, most of which export their products.
Another neoliberal measure is the establishment of free trade
agreements (FTAs), such as the Dominican Republic-Central America Free
Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), which expand and diversify the region’s
trade, remove trade barriers, and facilitate cross-border circulation of goods
and services to increase investment opportunities and enforce intellectual
property rights. Before the Guatemalan Congress voted to allow FTAs in
2006, there was massive opposition from farmer organizations, workers,
trade unionists, and students. Letters of protest were written to Congress
from the Republic (the legislative chamber), the Higher University Council
of Universidad San Carlos, and the Episcopal Conference, all expressing
revulsion for the agreement and demanding a popular consultation prior to
its adoption. Ignoring popular sentiment, Congress approved the Central
American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).27 Since its implementation,
CAFTA has caused small farmers to go bankrupt and migrate to cities or
abroad because the domestic market is saturated with subsidized imported
products, driving domestic producers out of the market. Likewise, it allows
foreign companies to violate labor treaties created through popular
struggles. CAFTA “cements” the SAP programs into international treaties
such that national congresses and international parliaments have little to no
authority. CAFTA represents the loss of national sovereignty.28
The Green Revolution and the subsequent FTAs only added to
Guatemala’s history of the denial of its indigenous people, which has led in
certain periods to policies of extermination and to massacres. Massive
elimination of Indians took place in the sixteenth, eighteenth, nineteenth,
and twentieth centuries via tierra arrasada, or scorched-earth, policies and
the immense displacement of more than a million indigenous peoples. The
acts were committed with an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, numerous
indigenous groups: they were not isolated actions, nor were they the
inadvertent result of out-of-control troops or the handiwork of rogue
military commanders.29 The idea that indigenous peoples might become the
subject of their own history and join large-scale political life through
revolutionary organizations unleashed a wave of purposeful extermination
that brought about the death of thousands. The fear of an Indian rebellion
and the desire to exterminate them overlapped in a historic political juncture
that resulted in true ethnocide. According to a report prepared by the
Commission for Historical Clarification, CEH, called “Memory of Silence,”
of the 42,275 investigated and verified cases of murder during the years
1960–1996, 83 percent of the victims were full Mayan.
Recently, linked to the Efrain Rios Montt genocide trail, US journalist
Allan Nairn, who was in Guatemala in 1982, reported: “Rios Montt was the
dictator of Guatemala during 1982, ’83. He seized power in a military coup.
He was trained in the U.S. He had served in Washington as head of the
Inter-American Defense College. And while he was president, he was
embraced by Ronald Reagan as a man of great integrity; and someone
totally devoted to democracy. And he killed many tens of thousands of
civilians, particularly in the Mayan northwest highlands. In this particular
trial, he is being charged with 1,771 specific murders in the area of the Ixil
Mayans.” The testimony of a general named “Tito”—actually Otto Pérez
Molina, Guatemalan president—Nairn stated, suggests that “the use of U.S.
and Israeli aircraft and U.S. munitions against the civilians in the Ixil
highlands was actually much more extensive than we understood at the
time.” Moreover, “beyond that, beyond the material U.S. support, there’s
the question of doctrine. . . . It is often difficult for soldiers to accept the
fact that they may be required to execute repressive actions against civilian
women, children and sick people.” When asked about this, Rios Montt
responded, “Well, that training document which we use is an almost literal
translation of a U.S. training document.” Nairn affirms that the army “didn’t
view [Mayans] as individuals, but they saw them collectively as a group as
sold out to subversion. And this was a doctrine that the U.S. supported.”30
Currently, the US government’s plan in Guatemala with the Rural Value
Chains project, Cadenas de Valor Rural, as part of USAID’s Feed the Future
initiative, has the following goals: (1) to develop a competitive market-
driven agriculture, (2) to prevent and treat malnutrition, and (3) to improve
humanitarian aid. Today, most investment areas are in horticulture and
coffee, with products grown for export. This investment and export will be
implemented in five areas: Huehuetenango, Quiché, San Marcos,
Quetzaltenango, and Totonicapán. These areas have the highest degree and
concentration of both national poverty and indigenous peoples. The
horticultural investment regimes will also work with private authorities
using transgenic and improved seeds, chemical inputs, and irrigation. All
required products and services must be purchased from US companies.
Projects will be funded for five years with US$40 million.31 This
investment is intended to stimulate agriculture by inserting peasants into the
global market—without consideration of the fact that it was the global
market that provoked the current crisis in the first place. It also seeks to
improve humanitarian assistance, contradicting sovereign rights and the
country’s capacity for self-sufficiency. This kind of foreign investment
disguises market expansion as humanitarian and development aid. As Eric
Holt-Giménez of Food First has commented, these million-dollar
investments annihilate peasant farmers and their spirituality, sustainable
agriculture, and the country’s possibilities to build food sovereignty.
Initiatives such as those sponsored by USAID aim to destroy peasant
farming despite its advantages: peasant farming is more efficient and
productive, it produces at least half of the global food supply and most of
the employment in rural areas, and it can cool the planet. The pattern of the
Green Revolution is repeated here, only this time using genetically
modified seeds. However, this is not a counterinsurgency measure because
there is no insurgency. Instead, this is purely an investment to advance
capitalist agriculture by removing the peasantry—which in Guatemala
happens to be primarily indigenous. This kind of capitalist “development”
emanating from the Global North is unjust and unattainable. Unjust,
because the Global South is treated like a servant territory. Unattainable,
because for all its devastating nature, the development does not offer
solutions to poverty or to hunger.32
The Mayan people survived colonial and later government repression by
valuing their identity, culture, and spirituality. However, it was not until
1992, during the commemoration of the five-hundred-year anniversary of
Spanish arrival in the Americas, that talk turned to indigenous rights, and
Mayan spiritual practices were demonstrated in public celebrations.
Guatemala has ratified international conventions and declarations
recognizing the collective rights of indigenous peoples, and the country
condemns all forms of racism, discrimination, and violence against
indigenous and tribal peoples. The International Labor Organization (ILO)
agreement no. 169 was ratified by Guatemala in 1996. The Declaration of
the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, crafted by the United Nations, was
adopted in 2007, although in Guatemala these collective rights have been
recognized only in a very limited way, due in part to truncated
constitutional reform in 2001. At the national level, the peace accords
signed in 1996 after thirty-six years of internal war included the Agreement
on the Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples, opening a space for the
recuperation and revitalization of Mayan spirituality. The Ajq’ijab’, the
counters of days and Mayan priests, appear publicly in Mayan communities
and nationally, expressing their right to be different under equal
conditions.33
In this space, spirituality linked to the practice of some agricultural
Mayan Kaqchikel communities and other ethnic groups has begun to
strengthen. In present studies, work is being done with Kaqchikel
communities which, through practicing agroecology, are returning to
sustainable agriculture, knowing that it is their only way to survive. As
these communities revive their spiritual traditions, they privilege the
sanctity of agriculture and the primacy of the milpa, or “the three sisters” of
polyculture—corn, beans, and squash. Kaqchikel women in multiple
communities plant and breed seeds to preserve agrobiodiversity, to share
their knowledge, and to be the guardians of fertility, as they were taught by
their grandmothers. Spirituality and sustainable agriculture are seen as
harbingers of hope, a positive testimony to the possibility of recovering a
full life.34

Let us present a case study of an indigenous initiative to address some of

these issues. Cooperation for Rural Development in the Western Region of
Guatemala (CDRO, Cooperación para el Desarrollo Rural de Occidente)
was created in 1983 in Nimasac, Totonicapán, Guatemala. The founders’
main idea is to promote social, economic, and political development in the
rural area according to indigenous spirituality. CDRO considers that
development is an integral process of organization and production that
allows a better life for all the people in the community. This process must
be controlled by the community and must respond to the people’s own
vision, interests, and needs. CDRO integrates several activities: agriculture,
education, health, use and trade, and development of infrastructure. The
organization and work of each activity is a process that begins with
consulting the elder people to understand how the undertaking was done
traditionally, why, and who are the best persons to guide the endeavor.
(Elder people are older than fifty-two, those who have lived all the energies
of the days, since the solar calendar and the sacred calendar match every
fifty-two years.) On issues related to health, nutrition, hygiene, children,
and education, women’s advice is more powerful; on those related to
agriculture, water, transportation, and infrastructure, men’s advice is
preferred. This knowledge is shared with all the people in the community
and together they decide how they are going to organize and work on a
project. CDRO confirms that indigenous communities always relate their
daily activities to spiritual beliefs and rituals.
CDRO reinforces agroecology as a way of living and producing,
because it is the way people want to plant, work their fields, and produce
their food. CDRO encourages the elders, the sacred people, Ajq’ij, to teach
their community the original ideas, values, and practices. There are many
commonalities, but each community has distinctive practices, rituals, and
prayers. As expressed by Carmelo Chan, CDRO facilitador (field worker),
“In Xecul, Totonicapán, for example, seeds are submerged in water the day
before planting them. This entails several rituals: asking permission to
gather the water from a certain water place; expressing gratitude to the
water, soil, sun, air, and seeds; expressing their commitment to be loyal to
their field and to respond to its needs; and finally asking for the needed
strength to work. The night before sowing women and men don’t sleep
together, because they need to save all their energy and inspiration. We
respect these practices, but we don’t ask any other community to follow
it.”35
At the same time that CDRO reinforces agroecology, the community
reinforces spiritual activities linked to the practice. This has begun a
process of rebuilding the confidence and organization in communities that
were deeply affected by the civil war. CDRO is promoting development
reinforcing the community’s own identity.
Additionally, in 2004 twenty organizations working on agriculture,
food, nutrition, and fair food markets created the Network for Security and
Sovereignty for Food in Guatemala (REDSSG). The association is
promoting practical activities for participatory community food assessment,
food production, school participation, coordination between organizations
working with the community, the creation of community food markets,
festivals for sharing their experiences, and many other activities.
Elder people began to organize spiritual activities, inviting people to
recognize the strength and love of Mother Earth, because she was
encouraging them to join, share, and build a better life. Thus a spiritual
group was organized inside REDSSG, one willing to walk with
communities that want to rescue their spiritual tradition linked to
agriculture and food. And participants were not only people interested in
spiritual practices linked to agriculture; they included as well technical
people teaching agroecology—and both groups know that their work is
better done working together.
People realize that working together and learning better agricultural
practices are very important, but at the same time they recognize that
spirituality is the inspiration that makes it possible. “Spirituality brings our
hearts and minds together, and that is why we’re able to work together and
share.”36

It is essential that any framework used to analyze the state of agriculture

and Mayan spirituality be political and structural, because it is only in this
way that one can assess the severity and complexity of the problem as well
as the urgent need for change in the conditions of agricultural production
and life in Guatemala.
Mayan peasant agriculture has suffered several profound systematic
blows: (1) the dispossession and land-use change by colonists and the
institutionalized discrimination against indigenous people, (2) the
expropriation of communal lands and forced labor legislated by the liberal
reforms of 1871–1944, (3) the imposition of the Green Revolution, which
catered to outside capitalist interests, (4) the imposition of free trade
agreements, and (5) the massive US investments used to incorporate
peasant agriculture into the global market and to maintain dependency. All
of these attacks on peasant agriculture are also attacks on Mayan
spirituality.
In spite of this, peasant agriculture still persists in Guatemala. There is
now a new political space created by the peace accords. Many Mayan
peasant farmers are returning to sustainable agriculture as a strategy for
survival. At the same time, they are reviving their spiritual traditions, like
the sanctity of the milpa. Mayan spirituality renews a way of life that
respects the cosmos, nature, and all living beings. This way not only allows
one to be maintained as a person but also serves as a vital link to one’s
community and to all indigenous peoples. The process of revitalizing
Mayan spirituality allows for the reconstruction of those damaged by
racism, violence, and exploitation; it favors each person’s capacity for
expression and decision, maintaining identity and sense of self; and it
enables the reconstruction of destroyed social fabrics and the establishment
of a respectful relationship with nature. This relationship creates better
production, adapting and evolving and learning from nature’s cycles and the
interdependence of the elements.
Agroecology is an agrarian-environmentalist facet of food sovereignty,
which is the right of people to take democratic control of their food system;
the right to access healthy, culturally appropriate food produced in an
ecologically sound manner and with sustainable methods; and the right to
define their food and agricultural systems for themselves. These concepts
reflect Mayan spirituality by treating life as an interdependent whole,
whereby the goal is to produce enough while also respecting the
environment and equitably distributing resources so that all people live in
dignity. Land, water, air, seeds, the workforce, and the animals are sacred
elements, and all should benefit in their relationship with production.
Mayan spirituality is being revived and is strengthening as an expression of
resistance and healing. This strength is supported by the adoption of a
political position that defends indigenous rights and food sovereignty. Food
sovereignty is considered just as important as Mayan language and identity,
and is as irreducible as their spirit. Therefore, spiritual affirmation is also
political. It recognizes that the struggle to defend food sovereignty is also a
way to defend Mother Earth, demonstrating the integration of the material
and spiritual life. This position challenges all of Guatemalan society,
asserting that there can be no talk of national sovereignty if there is no food
sovereignty.
Spirituality is a vital component of resistance and healing, and it is a
catalyst and a resource that allows people to strengthen their sense of self
and further their well-being. It allows survival as a person, family, and
community, but not as a whole people. The Mayan people need another
structure: they need land, access to resources and services, and a decent and
fair system that allows them to exist with self-determination. The Mayan
narrative as we presented it above attests that spirituality is threatened and
damaged not only by exploitation, discrimination, and repression, but also
by the lack of land and by structural marginalization. If the Mayan people
have no land on which to produce and subsist, then they lack what is
necessary to inspire and give life to their society and their own spirituality.
What is required is a structural change to develop agroecology while at
the same time recuperating Mayan spirituality. Structural change implies a
fair distribution of land and resources, and the implementation of national
programs that foster agroecology both economically and technologically so
that the country can achieve food sovereignty. The transformation must be
freely celebrated and accompanied by Mayan spiritual practices. Despite
the new political space created by the peace accords and the reaffirmation
and empowerment of Mayan identity, agricultural change and spiritual
renewal are not possible without systematic change within the country to
completely overcome the discrimination that exists against indigenous
people. We are left with some vital questions: Can Mayan spirituality be
integrated back into modern Mayan culture? Could this be a path toward
food sovereignty? Toward autonomy?
 Study Questions
1. What were your assumptions about the relation between indigenous
Mayan spirituality and agricultures before reading this chapter?
Have those views and assumptions changed, and if so, how?
2. The Green Revolution has destroyed traditional agriculture in Latin
America and Asia, but now the Gates Foundation finances it in
Africa. Why is the foundation pushing a failed process?
3. Why is USAID promoting the program Feed the Future, knowing
that it benefits only US investors, not the poor people?
4. The US government has played a determinant role in destroying the
agriculture and the economic and political life of many countries
around the world. What might be the role of the new US
generation? What should be your own role?

Notes
1. http://www.ine.gob.gt/np/generoypueblos/documentos/Perfil%20Estadiscio%20final.pdf
(accessed May 20, 2013).
2. The traditional concept that land cannot be privately owned was overturned with the invasion
of the Spaniards. Currently, 80 percent of the arable land is owned by 8 percent of the population.
Economic, political, and military powers determine the ownership of land, so that indigenous and
community lands are currently violated even though Guatemala’s Constitution, article 67, established
legal recognition of Native community land.
3. Cristobal Cojtí García, El valor sagrado del maíz (Guatemala City: Cholsamaj, 2012); Leonor
Hurtado, La vida complementaria entre las personas requiere la soberanía alimentaria (Guatemala
City: Cholsamaj, 2010).
4. Saqb’ichil-COPMAGUA, Más allá de la costumbre: Cosmos, orden y equilibrio, 2nd ed.
(Guatemala City: Cholsamaj, 2000).
5. Hurtado, La vida complementaria.
6. Severo Martínez Pelaez, La patria del criollo (Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria USAC,
1998). Despite the accords signed in 1995, respect for indigenous spirituality has improved very
little. Indigenous organizations and communities have included spiritual ceremonies as a regular
practice in public activities, but it is mainly a show. There are still extended preaching activities
taking place in indigenous communities, mainly done by US evangelical churches.
7. José Luis Chaicoj Sian, personal communication, 2012.
8. Miguel Altieri, Agroecología: Bases científicas para una agricultura sustentable (Norda
Comunidad, 1997).
9. Saqb’ichil-COPMAGUA, Más allá de la costumbre.
 10. Carlos Guzmán Böckler and Jean-Loup Herbert, Guatemala: Una interpretación histórico-
social (Mexico City: Siglo XXI SA, 1970).
11. Convergencia por los Derechos Humanos Guatemala, Comunicado sobre los despojos en
polochic (Guatemala City: FLACSO, 2011).
12. Steve Martinot, The Machinery of Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).
13. Martinez Pelaez, La patria del criollo.
14. Flavio Rojas Lima, Los indios de Guatemala (Hegoa, 1992).
15. Martínez Pelaez, La patria del criollo.
16. William Gaud, “The Green Revolution: Accomplishments and Apprehensions” (speech given
at the Universidad Cuernavaca, 1968).
17. Karlos Pérez, La revolución verde (Hegoa, 2000).
18. Felipe Gómez et al., Racismo y genocidio en Guatemala (Guatemala City: Cholsamaj, 2004).
19. Guzmán Böckler and Herbert, Guatemala.
20. Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, Guatemala memoria del silencio (Guatemala
City: Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, 1999).
21. Ricardo Falla, Masacres de la Selva, Ixcán-Guatemala, 1975–1982 (Guatemala City: Editorial
Universitaria USAC, 1992).
22. A critique of the Green Revolution and documentation of its side effects (intended and
unintended) has been done by the Oakland, California-based Food First; see www.foodfirst.org. For
Latin American case studies, see Eric Holt-Giménez, Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin
America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture (Oakland, Calif.: Food First,
2006).
23. Pérez, La revolución verde.
24. Armando Bartra, Fin de fiesta: El fantasma del hambre recorre el mundo (Mexico City:
Endira, 2008).
25. James Greenberg, A Political Ecology of Structural-Adjustment Policies: The Case of the
Dominican Republic (Culture and Agriculture, 1997).
26. Eliana Cardoso and Ann Helwege, Latin America’s Economy: Diversity, Trends and Conflicts
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
27. Violetta Yagenova, Cronología de la lucha contra el TLC en Guatemala durante marzo 2005
(Guatemala City: FLACSO, 2005).
28. Holt-Giménez, Campesino a Campesino; Andrés Cabanas, TLC en Guatemala: Represión
contra diálogo (Guatemala City: Cholsamaj, 2005).
29. Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, Guatemala memoria del silencio.
30. “Exclusive: Allan Nairn Exposes Role of U.S. and New Guatemalan President in Indigenous
Massacres,” Democracy Now! April 19, 2012,
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/19/exclusive_allan_nairn_exposes_role_of (accessed April
25, 2016).
31. USAID, Request for Applications (RFA) Number: RFA-520-11-000003, in Rural Value Chains
Project (Guatemala City: USAID, 2011).
32. Isabel Rauber, Dos pasos adelante, uno atrás: Lógicas de ruptura y superación del dominio
del capital (Vadell, 2010).
33. Saqb’ichil-COPMAGUA, Más allá de la costumbre.
34. Cojtí García, El valor sagrado del maíz.
35. Personal communication.
 36. Colectivo Social por el Derecho a la Alimentación, Informe alternativo por el derecho a la
alimentación (Guatemala City, 2008).
 2

Soils, Spirits, and the Cosmocentric

Economy

Re-creating Amazonian Dark Earth in

Peru
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin

Agriculture . . . can provide “balance for well-being” through relationships not only among
people, but also nature and deities. In this concept, the blessing of a new field represents not mere
spectacle, but an inseparable part of life where the highest value is harmony with the earth.
—Darrell Addison Posey

Girvan Tuanama, our indigenous farmer at Sachamama Center for

Biocultural Regeneration in the Peruvian high Amazon, said to me: “My
grandmother and the elders used to offer pieces of ceramics in their chacras
to Mama Allpa.1 Now most people no longer do that.” So when we went to
his Native community at the time of the mikuna—communal meal—we went
to his grandmother’s house to eat. The little old lady sat on the threshold
welcoming everyone in. After everyone had eaten and left, Girvan, his
grandmother, and I stayed in the nowquiet room. Carmen Tapullima Salas
looked to me to be in her nineties, frail but lucid. Girvan had told me that she
did not have a birth certificate since in those days such niceties were not
always observed. After some chatter to make us comfortable with each other,
I asked Carmen about the offerings in the chacra. “Yes, I used to always
bring with me my shaño and give it to Mama Allpa.2 That is what we used
to do then.” Girvan explained: “It is the ingenieros who made us ashamed of
this practice by telling us it was a silly superstition. So now only a few of the
old ones still do it, but in many communities this pago [offering] is no
longer done.3 But you yourself heard the comuneros [members of a Native
community] of Shukshuyaku yesterday tell you that they keep finding pieces
of ceramics in the old chacras. That tells them that their ancestors used to
offer them to Mama Allpa.”

Ceremony and broken ceramics. (Photo by Frédérique Apffel-Marglin.)

Indeed, the day before we had gone to Shukshuyaku, a Native

community with which we have created a permanent communal chacra, for
the first planting of the June agricultural campaign.4 Since archaeologists
have discovered in the last few decades that the yana allpa (black earth) we
are re-creating in our center is full of ceramic shards, the comuneros were
enthusiastic about remembering their ancestors’ practice and offered broken
ceramics to the soil before planting.
 Combing the literature on Amazonian dark earth (ADE), popularly
known in Brazil as terra preta do Indio (black earth of the Indians), reveals
that most authors consider that the many pieces of broken ceramics found in
ADE come from middens. A few are found in conjunction with burials, and
one anthropologist studying the ceramics of the contemporary Asurini do
Xingu peoples in Brazil reports that at the death of a woman, her ceramics
are broken.5 (Among these peoples, as among the Kichwa-Lamistas, women
are the ceramicists.)
The only scholar to report that the broken ceramics found in terra preta
come from offerings to the deities/spirits is Alfredo Narvaez Vargas, a
Peruvian archaeologist and anthropologist who has excavated one of the
major archaeological sites of Chachapoyas, Kuelap. Dr. Narváez Vargas told
me that when he excavated in a few archaeological agricultural terraces near
the site of Kuelap, he typically found a dense layer of black organic soil that
was easily differentiated from the yellow color of the geological layers. In
the black layer he found fragments of ceramics he considered to be remnants
of offerings.6 His findings correspond closely to archaeological descriptions
of terra preta sites in the low Amazon. This information is particularly
relevant here since Sachamama Center in Lamas, department of San Martin,
is situated at the edge of the Chachapoyas pre-Columbian culture area.
However, to my knowledge, no one has reported on a practice of the
Kichwa-Lamistas of offering pieces of broken ceramics to the various spirits
of the chacra. The four most important spirits of the chacra are Mama Allpa,
the earth; Yakumama, the rain/water; Mama Qilla, the moon; and Tayta Inti,
the sun. Many of the Kichwa women elders keep some pieces of ceramics
for offerings. They also make the traditional pre-Columbian offerings of
corn beer (chicha).
Offerings of pieces of ceramics are made before planting and at harvest
in each of the two major agricultural campaigns; they are also made at
solstices. This means there are quite a few occasions during the year when
offerings are made by people involved in agriculture, and since agriculture is
the principal economic activity of the Kichwa-Lamistas, almost everyone
used to do this. However, the seductions of modernity, combined with the
scornful attitude of the dominant mestizos toward such practices, have
deeply eroded it. Although poor mestizo farmers practice the same
agricultural techniques as the Kichwa-Lamistas—swidden agriculture,
planting according to the phases of the moon, polyculture, and so on—they
are much less likely to make offerings to the spirits of the chacra. The
Kichwa-Lamistas keep their ritual practices to themselves, careful to protect
them from the contemptuous gaze of others. The colonial laws of
“extirpation of idolatry” may no longer be enforced (although they have
never been removed from the books), but their spirit is very much alive.7
The memory of the death-dealing ferocity with which they were enforced
has not completely vanished among the indigenous people. It must also be
pointed out that Kichwas belonging to evangelical movements, which have
made deep inroads in the Peruvian high Amazon, have ceased making such
offerings because their faith considers them to be the work of the devil.
Map of Chachapoyas cultural area. (Based on Morgan Davis, “Chachapoyas, the Cloud People: An
Anthropological Survey,” 1985, Tozzer Library, Harvard College, Cambridge, Mass.)

I believe that the ancient practice of offering ceramics could well account for
the amount of broken ceramics found in the ADE all over the Amazon basin.
It is well known that at least in the highland Wari pre-Columbian culture,
elaborate ritual ceramics were dashed to pieces after an offering. I have
admired such reconstituted vessels in the archaeological museum in
Ayacucho as well as the one in Pueblo Libre in Lima. According to Harvard
professor Thomas Cummins, renowned specialist in Peruvian pre-Columbian
ceramics (among other topics), the practice of dashing the ceramics used in
offerings could very well have been a widespread one, extending as far as
the low Amazon.8 The same was communicated to me by Dr. Alfredo
Narváez Vargas from his findings in another archaeological site, one on the
northwest coast of Peru in the town of Tucume. There Dr. Narvaez Vargas
has found broken ceramics in altarlike sites associated with sacred objects
that were clearly put there as offerings.9 Since ceramics in the low Amazon
antedate ceramics in the rest of the Americas (see below), it might even be
possible that the practice originated there. Vargas’s discovery of ceramics in
the Amazonian dark earth in the Chachapoyas culture area (ceramics he
claims are the remnants of offerings to the deities/spirits) is the strongest
evidence so far for a continual practice among the indigenous population of
making such offerings in their food fields. The Chachapoyas center of
Kuelap is at an altitude of some three thousand meters and is full of evidence
of stone terracing as well as of terracing made with perishable material since
only the abrupt change of height is left, indicating such terracing was
constructed with the use of perishable materials.
Traditional pre-Columbian terraced fields in Chachapoyas territory at high elevation. (Photo by
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin.)

Offerings to the Spirits and the Cosmocentric

Economy
Although most of the literature on ADE is overwhelmingly quantitative and
scientific, silent on its religious aspect, Gerry Gillespie comes close to
referencing spirituality. Pointing out that successful communities the world
over have always returned organic matter to the soil, as this is the very basis
of those communities’ sustainability, he maintains that such acts were “an
intentional and conscious attempt to maintain a link between the individual
and their food producer. As much as any other action, it was an act of
respect.”10 In fact, such respect for the soil, as well as respect for all the
other beings/spirits involved in growing food, is typical in peasant and
indigenous societies worldwide. It was also typical in premodern European
agriculture. As I have argued elsewhere, it was not until the advent of the
enclosure movement, the Reformation, and the scientific revolution that gift
exchanges between humans and nonhuman entities involved in growing food
(the soil, the water, the sun, and the moon, among others) began to be seen
as magical acts devoid of efficacy.11

Offerings made to the soil, locally embodied in its spirit Mama Allpa (Earth
Mother), emphatically enact a conscious and intentional bond of respect
between humans and the soil, simultaneously recognizing the agency of the
earth. There is a concomitant awareness that without a return gift to the
soil/earth, the success of agriculture is in danger. The earth/soil gives of its
produce, enabling humans to live, and humans enact their awareness of their
dependence on those gifts by offering something to the soil. These reciprocal
exchanges of gifts enact a regenerative cycle, which constitutes the opposite
of the extractive actions characteristic of a capitalistic economy. In the latter,
the soil is considered a “natural resource” rather than a sacred mother. I have
borrowed the term cosmocentric from Stefano Varese, who contrasts Euro-
American anthropocentrism with the cosmocentric cosmologies of
indigenous peoples.12
Agriculture is a series of concerted actions carried out by various actors:
humans, who prepare the fields, choose the seeds, prepare the soil, and so
on, and nonhuman actors. Without the actions of the soil, the water, the sun,
and the moon, whose phases affect the rising and falling of all liquids, from
the sea with its tides to the sap in plants, agriculture would not be possible.13
As I have documented at some length in my book Subversive Spiritualities,
the agency of the nonhuman world is a feature that has become accepted,
particularly in the field of critical science studies and among certain
quantum physicists. The French anthropologist/philosopher Bruno Latour,
whose work has contributed so much to this recognition, has titled one of his
books We Have Never Been Modern. The classical
Cartesian/Boylian/Newtonian paradigm of a mechanical, agency-less,
insentient world has been effectively displaced, although this paradigm shift
has barely begun to percolate in modern culture at large.
As the discoveries concerning ADE and other anthropogenic phenomena in
Amazonia have revealed, the Amazonian rain forest is anything but a virgin
forest. It is the result of millennia of concerted actions carried out by pre-
Columbian humans and all the nonhumans in that locality. I have suggested
that concerted actions between humans and certain nonhumans crucial for
human welfare have been carried out over long periods of time, giving rise
to entities—or rather, beings—who embody those concerted actions. For
example, the soil becomes Mama Allpa, a being to whom prayers and
offerings are made, who is endowed with understanding, agency, and
sentience, and who responds to the actions of humans. In modernity the soil
has become a “natural resource” bereft of agency, sentience, and
understanding. A natural resource is simply something there for us humans
to make use of, to exploit, without feeling that by doing so we are showing a
lack of respect. In other words, a natural resource does not require us to
reciprocate for what we take since it has no agency. As is well known, where
the preservation of natural resources has been a concern, the logic of
modernity has led to the calculation of their monetary values or, in economic
parlance, making the externalities visible as well as quantified: what today is
called green economics. However, green economics is no more able than
neoclassical economics to help us humans to enact regenerative rituals of
reciprocity with the nonhuman world since giving a monetary value to
aspects of that world in no sense recognizes its agency.
I have written so far only in terms of the soil; however, both in
Amazonian indigenous cosmology and in premodern European peasant
cosmologies, the world was enlivened by a multiplicity of presences, all
belonging to an overarching “world soul,” or anima mundi that did not
exclude us, the humans. In other words, nature and culture were not
conceived of as mutually exclusive categories.14 Acts that make us aware of
the need to return to the soil are fundamental to sustained civilization and
need to be recovered. Such acts are simply taken for granted among peasant
and indigenous societies and in general among what anthropologist Pramod
Parajuli calls “ecological ethnicities.”15 Some others have discussed such an
economy under the rubric of “the gift economy.”

The Gift Economy or the Cosmocentric Economy?

The term gift economy was coined early in what became a classic in the field
of anthropology, French anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (Essai sur
le don), originally published in 1925. Mauss captured with the words “the
spirit of the gift” elaborate rituals of exchange in nonmodern small-scale
societies. Mauss states that in Maori custom “this bond created by things is
in fact a bond between persons.”16 This view that gift exchanges are really
about creating bonds between human persons, thus making the presence of
the spirits invisible or ineffective, has dominated the anthropological
literature on this topic. Gift exchanges always pass through gifts to invisible
beings, namely, the deities or spirits. It is only then that these so-called gift
exchanges become truly regenerative. Viewing gift exchanges as being
“really” between human beings is in keeping with the strong tendency in
anthropology to consider spirits, deities, and the like as representing a reality
belonging to some other aspect of the human domain, such as the semiotic,
social, political, or economic, or some other aspect of human reality. In
general, scholars in that field have not taken the route of giving agency to
those aspects of the natural world responsible for our (us humans’)
sustenance and recognizing the need for humans to reciprocate to those
through offerings in order to regenerate the gifts.
The bounties of the nonhuman world are regenerated by constant
ritualized offerings between people and the spirits, such as in our case Mama
Allpa, the earth mother/spirit, and all the other spirits of the chacra. Those
constantly reiterated actions of making offerings and thus reciprocating
ensure the continual possibility of receiving sustenance and of not depleting
the source of sustenance. In other words, it is the constant reiteration of
rituals of reciprocating offerings that ensures the regeneration of the source
of the gifts. The gift, according to Mauss and many after him, increases
sociality: namely, bonds between humans. I would argue that it also
increases spirituality if we understand by this term a continual flow beyond
oneself and beyond one’s human community toward the nonhuman world
and its spiritual embodiment. “If this were not so, if the donor calculated his
return, the gift would be pulled out of the whole into the personal ego, where
it loses its power.”17 Such enactments deserve to be labeled cosmocentric
economy. The cosmocentric economy is one in which the regeneration of the
sources of sustenance is not taken as an automatic natural or biological
process but is recognized to be dependent on the proper ritual reciprocating
action of humans. It is a radically nonanthropocentric type of economy—in
other words, one profoundly different from the capitalist economy.
The spirits of the chacra for the Kichwa-Lamistas of the Peruvian high
Amazon are not projections of the human world onto the nonhuman world,
metaphors used by humans to represent the nonhuman world. Rather, they
literally embody that which enables the humans living in a particular place to
draw from the food-producing aspects of the nonhuman, or natural, world
without depleting it. Humans reciprocate with their nonhuman sources of
sustenance with offerings to these sources, whose agency is recognized and
whose need to receive respect and gratitude is equally recognized by
endowing them with a humanlike identity: Mama Allpa is both a spirit and
the soil/earth; Mama Qilla is both the moon and a spirit, and so on. Such
actions constitute a severe constraint on the exploitation of the nonhuman, or
natural, world since exploitative behavior would open one (and one’s group)
to the reprisal of the spirits. Such reprisal consists in the degradation of the
soil, the sustainer of civilization. Ritual offerings to the sources of
sustenance ensure the regeneration of those sources and embody an implicit
recognition that such regeneration depends on proper human actions and is
not automatic.
The spirits or deities make certain types of action possible and others
difficult, reprehensible, or sinful. The consequences of such actions are
undeniably material or physical and simultaneously also discursive and
spiritual.18 The difference between a natural resource and the spirit of the
forest or of the soil/earth spells the difference between exploitation and the
regeneration of those sources of sustenance. The consequences also serve to
place severe limits on the human uses of these gifts. These rituals enact or
perform continual biocultural regeneration through a variety of actions and
utterances that embody the entanglement of humans, nonhumans, and the
spirits. It is such entanglements that I want to capture by the term
cosmocentric economy. The cosmocentric economy is a regenerative,
nonexploitative economy in which reciprocity and redistribution among
humans, nonhumans, and the spirit realm tend to produce equity rather than
sharp differences in wealth among the humans, as well as ensure the
regeneration of the sources of livelihood for humans.

The Reformers in sixteenth-century Europe called such rituals “magic” due

to their insistence on the total separation between humans, nonhumans, and
the religious—namely, God. For the Reformers, agency, voice, and meaning
became exclusively human attributes as well as the prerogatives of a God
removed from the material world. Ever since the Reformers’ separation of
matter and spirit, such rituals of regeneration could be understood only as
humans representing symbolically or metaphorically the nonhumans, who
thus became passive and silent. Just as the Puritans in New England, such as
John Winthrop, could feel justified in expelling the Indians from the land,
the conquistadors and the colonial authorities in New Spain felt justified in
making laws mandating the “extirpation of idolatry,” aimed at preventing the
Amerindian natives from performing their regenerative rituals, which were
seen as inspired by the devil, since for the Spaniards the spirits did not really
exist.19
Today, perhaps, we are sufficiently removed from the hold of the
Reformation on everyone, including a secularized anthropology, to reassess
our assumptions.20 The key enactments needed are with those entities of the
natural world that have agency and interact with humans to ensure their
continued sustenance. This is to my mind at once a material and spiritual
endeavor.

The Ecological Situation Today in the Peruvian

High Amazon
When I first discovered the existence of terra preta a few years ago through
reading Charles Mann’s book 1491, it immediately seemed worthy of further
study and possible application in the Peruvian high Amazon.21 I had been
going to the town of Lamas in the Peruvian high Amazon for some fifteen
years and was well aware of the urgency of the situation regarding the local
practice of slash-and-burn agriculture by both poor mestizo and indigenous
farmers. Lamas is situated in the department of San Martin to the northeast
of Lima on the eastern tropical foothills of the Andes, and that department
has the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of deforestation in the
whole of Peru.22 Every year I return to Lamas there is less forest.
The deforestation is the result of several factors. In the 1980s and 1990s,
the region saw an enormous increase in the production of coca for the
cocaine trade, locally identified as the “pocketbook of the guerrilla
movements.” This illicit trade prompted an enormous amount of
deforestation to make way for coca fields.23 In addition, ever since the
region was opened up with the construction of a road in the 1960s by the
government of Belaunde, there has been a dizzying amount of immigration
by land-hungry peasants from the highlands and/or the coastal areas of the
country. The migrants’ ignorance of the special nature of Amazonian soils,
combined with the government’s official stimulus for industrial monoculture
agriculture, has resulted in large tracts of forest being clear-cut to make way
for either cattle ranching or cash cropping, principally with rice, corn,
sugarcane, or cotton.
Slash-and-burn agriculture was introduced when the Spaniards brought
steel tools in the sixteenth century (see below for details). Experts calculate
that for this method of agriculture to be sustainable, a family must own a
minimum of fifty hectares of land, whereas the mean amount of land of
indigenous farmers today is between three and ten hectares.24 This has led to
shorter fallow periods between clearings, with the result that the secondary
forest that regenerates in abandoned food fields or chacras is progressively
less vigorous. It has also led to the rapid growth of degraded lands where
nothing grows except weeds.

The situation of the Quechua-speaking Kichwa-Lamistas in this region is the

result of their conquest in 1656 by Martin de la Riva Herrera. As was the
Spaniards’ practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the
indigenous population was resettled and concentrated—the Spanish term is
reducidos—into new settlements for ease of control and evangelization. The
descendants of these indigenous people can still be found in the part of
Lamas called Wayku, where they were first resettled, as well as in more than
two hundred small rural settlements in the region where they subsequently
fanned out in the course of the last four hundred years. The few Spaniards
who settled the town of Lamas at that time interbred with the local women,
creating a mestizo population, a process that has continued to this day. When
the children of such unions are recognized by the father, they take on
Spanish surnames and identify with Spanish language, culture, and mores.
Ever since the conquest, the more powerful members of the mestizo
population have dominated and exploited the indigenous inhabitants, who
have been relegated to the poorest lands on the steepest slopes and were kept
from access to education until as recently as the 1980s.25
 The government of Velasco Alvarado in the late 1960s and early 1970s
passed legislation that enabled indigenous communities to become legally
demarcated and recognized as comunidad nativas: that is, Native
communities that ran their own internal affairs and whose territories were off
limits to non-Natives.26 In the Lamas region, it is only since the 1980s that
indigenous communities have begun the onerous, costly, and bureaucratic
process of becoming legally recognized as Native communities. To date,
there are some seventy such communities in the region among the more than
two hundred potentially eligible. Furthermore, as Calderon Pacheco points
out, this law, although at the time of its enactment was a revolutionary move,
for the first time giving indigenous people protection from outsiders wanting
their lands, has the unintended effect of preventing them from freely
resettling in more forested areas as they need to do, given their form of
swidden agriculture.27 This has led to the present situation in which the
vanishing forest in their territories is making their customary swidden
shifting agriculture less and less feasible. Such sedentarism is putting a great
deal of stress on the environment of these Native communities, and thereby
slowly but surely increasing the amount of degraded lands.

The leadership of the Kichwa-Lamistas is well aware of the problem. The

former president of the largest of the four Kichwa-Lamista organizations, the
Ethnic Council of the Kichwa People of Amazonia (CEPKA is the Spanish
acronym), Misael Salas Amasifuen, stated this in his talk to US
undergraduates at the Sachamama Center on July 31, 2011:

The vast majority of the Kichwa-Lamistas depend on their chacras for

survival. Due to communal labor, called maki-maki or choba-choba in
Quechua, where kin, neighbors and friends form work parties to work
on each other’s fields or projects, the need for cash is minimal.
Nowadays, ever since the federal government requires all children to
attend school, which means uniforms and other supplies have to be
purchased by the parents, the need for cash has steeply increased.
Kichwas typically sell the surplus produce they raise in their chacras in
the local markets and also sell their labor at times of peak demands
during the coffee harvest for example or other peak agricultural labor
demands in order to acquire cash. However, their ability to grow their
own food is not only an economic necessity but also the guaranty of
 their autonomy. It is that autonomy that in turns enables them in no
small part to keep their distinct identity. Thus food sovereignty for the
Kichwa-Lamistas not only spells their physical survival but their
political and cultural sustainability as well.

The Kichwa-Lamistas are very actively engaged in negotiations with the

regional government for stewardship of the local conservation reserve forest
situated in the nearby mountain range of the Cordillera Escalera, which is
part of their ancestral territory. Unexpectedly, however, the Kichwa-Lamista
leadership is not envisaging carrying out their form of slash-and-burn
agriculture in those forest reserves. What surprised me in this attitude of the
Kichwa-Lamistas is that it seems to accept the logic of the separation
between utilitarian activities on the one hand and conservation or
preservation on the other. Even though they envision activities of hunting
and gathering in the forest, they reject the making of chacra and thus food
sovereignty in it through their traditional form of swidden agriculture.
Forest conservation areas were created in the United States in the second
half of the nineteenth century as nature parks. As William Cronon’s history
of such parks has made us all aware, these “wilderness preserves” were
recast as “God’s Temples.” As Cronon shows, the enclosure of the Indians
on reservations at the end of the Indian Wars in the second half of the
nineteenth century as well as the disappearance of the frontier were key
ingredients in the invention of such preserves. A nature park or preserve was
constituted as a nonutilitarian space of sacred national wilderness. Cronon
points out, “To this day the Blackfeet continue to be accused of ‘poaching’
on the lands of the Glacier National Park that originally belonged to them
and that were ceded by treaty only with the proviso that they be permitted to
hunt there.”28 As is well known, the idea of nature parks and later of
biodiversity preserves was exported worldwide with the attendant
requirement of excluding the indigenous peoples who lived in and from
these lands. However, more recently, several governments have changed
course and allowed the people who used to live in such preserves the right to
remain in them.29 Clearly, for the Kichwa-Lamistas, as for indigenous
peoples everywhere, the sacred and the utilitarian are not separate.30
The Kichwa-Lamista leadership explains that their people have agreed
not to practice agriculture in the area of conservation forest because there is
so little forest left that were they to practice slash-and-burn techniques there
it would lead to the same situation now existing in the Native communities.
The leadership emphasizes the urgency of preserving forests to protect the
very identity of future generations.31 In his talk to US undergraduates in
2011, Misael Salas Amasifuen stressed the need for projects under the
direction of experts to introduce new forms of permanent agriculture in
Native communities. As he confirmed to me at the end of his talk, he had in
mind our own Chacra-Huerto project at Sachamama Center.
It was precisely recognition of this need that led me to create Chacra-
Huerto, a permanent agriculture project conducted in collaboration with the
Kichwa-Lamistas and launched in the spring of 2010. The project’s name is
meant to immediately communicate that the food chacra need not be in the
forest, away from the settlements, but can be created near them, like the
house gardens, or huertos. Such huertos contain fruit trees, herbs, and
medicinal plants as well as the local tomato and chilis, cultivars originating
from the high Amazon region. They are tended mostly by the women of the
house and are permanent.

Amazonian Dark Earth

The recent discovery of Amazonian dark earth in the Amazon basin has
generated a great deal of excitement and already produced many changes in
disciplinary boundaries and the role of soil scientists such as Johannes
Lehmann of Cornell University and William Woods of the University of
Kansas. Soil scientists and others in related fields are becoming innovators
intent on solving issues of food security and climate change, increasing
biodiversity, and producing clean energy.32 The Food and Agriculture
Organization of the UN (FAO) has taken a keen interest in these discoveries
and the possibility they hold for solving such urgent global issues. As W. I.
Woods and W. M. Denevan write: “The topic is now of major scientific
interest, of relevance both to prehistory and to agriculture development and
global climate change today.”33
Although these discoveries have generated a great deal of research,
writing, and revisions of established knowledge as well as efforts to recreate
these amazingly fertile soils, some of them several millennia old, there has
been a remarkable absence of focus on the religious or spiritual aspect of this
phenomena.
 ADE is a pre-Columbian black anthropogenic soil full of broken
ceramics. Such patches of dark earth have been found in many places in the
whole Amazon basin, not only in Brazil but also in Ecuador, Peru, and
French Guyana.34 These patches of ADE vary greatly in size, from two
hectares to ninety hectares.35 The dating of those soils also varies with the
sites. What seems established is that agriculture in Amazonia may have
begun four thousand to five thousand years ago, or even earlier. Manioc, an
Amazonian domesticate, has been found in archaeological sites in coastal
Peru dating some 4000 years BP, thus establishing the existence of its
cultivation in Amazonia well before that time since it is a tropical cultivar
not native to the Pacific coast of Peru.36 The remarkable thing about ADE is
that those soils are still fertile today. In several places contemporary farmers
are using those patches for plantation of various fruit trees as well as for
marketing it as potting soil.37
As Charles Mann’s lively narrative in his book about the Americas
before Columbus, 1491, testifies, older archaeological/anthropological
theories about the pre-Columbian Amazon have been turned on their heads
with the more recent discoveries. This region was not sparsely populated by
bands or tribes of horticulturalists practicing shifting cultivation through
slash-and-burn techniques but rather was the home of large, permanent
settlements with ceremonial centers and permanent agriculture. The older
theories of Betty Meggers about the Amazonian environment putting serious
constraints on the development of permanent agriculture have been proven
wrong by these new publications.38
What made this level of complex civilization possible were the ADE and
permanent agriculture and not swidden—or slash-and-burn—shifting
agriculture. In swidden agriculture, a clearing is made in the forest: trees are
cut and burned to give the poor yellow Amazonian soil some fertilizing
phosphate in the ashes. These clearings can be cultivated for a few years—
from one to four, depending on soil fertility—and then the forest is left to
regenerate. Families stagger their various food fields and are thus constantly
clearing new chacras by burning a patch of forest. Swidden agriculture is not
able to support a large enough population to enable permanent settlements to
emerge.
As the anthropologist Robert Carneiro of the American Museum of
Natural History established in his experiments in the 1970s, the amount of
time required to clear a field of an acre and a half (the average size of a food
field) with a stone ax is over five months. Using steel axes, workers he hired
cleared a field the same size with the same number of workers in eight
workdays.39 According to the geographer William Denevan, metal tools
brought in by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century largely created slash-
and-burn agriculture. This is the form of agriculture used by campesinos,
both indigenous and mestizo, in the Amazon region today. Slash-and-burn or
swidden agriculture has become one of the important forces behind the loss
of tropical forest. Although it permits the forest to regenerate, it is very
inefficient and environmentally unsound under the present land-holding
patterns. The burning sends most of the nutrients up in smoke and releases
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Swidden agriculture is the third-largest
cause of carbon dioxide emissions in the Amazon region, and in general
forest conversion is estimated to contribute globally some 25 percent of the
net carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere.40

The demographics research of Henry Dobyns has shown that in this region a
major demographic collapse occurred shortly after the Spanish invasion.41
Due to a combination of a lack of immunity to such European diseases as
smallpox and influenza, enslavement, and war, the Native population
declined with amazing rapidity within a few decades after the conquistador
Francisco de Orellana and his friar, Gaspar de Carvajal (who wrote of this
voyage), first traveled down the Amazon in 1541, only nine years after the
first conquistador, Fancisco Pizarro, reached what is now Peru. The arrival
of the Spaniards spelled disaster for the Amerindian population: in a few
decades nine out of ten Amerindians died. New scholarship now is taking
Carvajal’s report of his trip down the Amazon much more seriously. There
he describes large settlements and thousands of people lining the banks of
the Amazon to greet the passage of his ship. Since subsequent voyages down
the Amazon reported only forest and very few people, earlier researchers had
concluded Carvajal had made it all up. However, Carvajal’s report and
descriptions from Captain Altamirano, who was with Aguirre in 1561,
mention villages stretching for many kilometers along high bluffs, with
houses touching one another.42 Archaeological digs have confirmed that at
the time of Carvajal’s voyage, large permanent settlements and imposing
ceremonial centers, complete with pyramids, existed. Beautiful, complex
ceramics have also been found.43
Ceramic production in Amazonia may have begun before 7000 BP,
according to evidence from a site called Pedra Pintada, as reported by Anna
Roosevelt. This date places ceramics in Amazonia among the oldest not only
in the Americas, but indeed in the world. It would appear that with the
disappearance of the vast majority of the Amazonian peoples, the memory as
well as the ability to create ADE, and with it the complex civilization it
made possible, was lost. Slash-and-burn agriculture became the norm for the
Native population as well as for the poor mestizo population in the region,
generating a dispersed demographic pattern of small, semipermanent
settlements. Slash-and-burn agriculture was supplemented with hunting,
fishing, and gathering, a pattern that still exists among the Native population.
This population has no memory of what their ancestors knew and of creating
a permanent agriculture.

Amazonian Dark Earth’s Miracle Ingredient:

Biochar
The black color of ADE is due to charcoal carbonized with little or no
oxygen. Scholars are not able to pinpoint the technology used by these pre-
Columbian farmers, but they have analyzed this charcoal and determined
that it is produced by a slow, oxygen-less method called pyrolysis from a
variety of biomass. Biochar is porous and can retain organic nutrients over
extremely long periods, even under conditions of the typical torrential
downpours of the region. This particular characteristic is credited for the
remarkably long-term fertility of those ADE soils. In addition to this key
characteristic, biochar has the capacity to sequester carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere once put in the soil. Furthermore, the process of creating
biochar, pyrolysis, is one that does not release carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere while burning the biomass but rather sequesters CO2.44 In other
words, as Albert Bates notes, the process is a clean one.45
These characteristics inspired a desire to re-create ADE not only for food
security in the Amazon basin but also for atmospheric carbon dioxide
sequestration, addressing issues of climate change not only in that region but
worldwide. One of the pioneer soil scientists who initiated research on ADE
in the 1960s, the Dutch scientist Wim Sombroek, worked incessantly to
safeguard the threatened Amazonian rain forest and develop economically
viable systems of land use. He called this effort the Terra Preta Nova project.
Charles Mann writes in a foreword to Amazonian Dark Earths: Wim
Sombroek’s Vision: “The Terra Preta Nova project, with its vision of the soil
as a key element in our common future, has attracted enormous public
attention to soil science. On a professional level, the scientific collaboration
links soil scientists, archaeologists, geographers, microbiologists, engineers,
ecologists, economists, and atmospheric scientists around the world in a
common project that promises to reveal much about the workings of soil,
may have an enormous impact on agriculture and could even play a role in
climate change.”46
Chapters 18 and 28 in Amazonian Dark Earths are devoted to
Sombroek’s project. In the early 2000s, the Brazilian state of Pará granted
the use of one of its municipalities, Tailandia, for this project. In the last
chapter of the book, soil scientist Johannes Lehmann, who has contributed
enormously to the study of ADE in his soil science laboratory at Cornell
University, concludes, “Biochar is able to directly address actions 3, 4, and 7
of the UN Hunger Task Force. . . . It is a promising approach for the
suggested entry point by the Task Force to invest in soils as a battle against
world hunger. . . . The conversion of biomass into biochar can either be
primarily a net withdrawal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or a net
emission reduction or both.”47
If the biomass utilized for the creation of biochar is chosen responsibly,
that is, mostly from agricultural by-products rather than through cutting
trees, this would constitute a renewable source of clean energy. Since many
of those agricultural by-products are burned in the open air, releasing large
quantities of both methane (from their rotting) and carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere, the systematic conversion of such agricultural by-products into
biochar would reduce CO2 emissions twice over: once by sequestering
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and again by preventing the release of
carbon dioxide and/or methane into the atmosphere through the burning or
open-air rotting of such biomass waste.

Working with Native Communities: Sachamama

Center’s Chacra-Huerto Project
Our demonstrative chacra-huerto at Sachamama Center has been visited not
only by the Kichwa-Lamista leadership but by many other indigenous
farmers. This has led to several communities requesting us to help them
create similar fields in their settlements. The amount of degraded lands in
Native communities is growing and the forest is receding. Many Kichwas
are looking for an alternative. To date we are working with four Native
communities, all within a half-hour ride from Lamas.48 The comuneros, with
the help of our chacra-huerto team, have prepared terraced fields in their
community on degraded lands.49 The communities decided that these fields
would be communal ones, the produce to be used for village feasts, and
everyone works on them in the traditional form of communal labor known as
choba-choba. 50
In the three communities where they have already had a harvest, the
chacra-huertos have produced well. We are of course well aware that only
time will tell whether this experiment can replace the chacra in the forest and
swidden agriculture. It requires that ADE be applied to the fields after each
harvest and mixed with the existing soil in a 50 percent proportion in order
to build up a depth of black soil sufficient for nourishing plant roots.
Thus the Chacra-Huerto project of the Sachamama Center nonprofit
organization in Lamas, carried out in collaboration with several Kichwa-
Lamista communities, is indeed a Terra Preta Nova project corresponding to
Wim Sombroek’s vision of re-creating these amazingly fertile and
sustainable pre-Columbian Amazonian dark earths for the purposes of food
sovereignty for the smallest farmers and of ameliorating the carbon dioxide
level of emission in the region, thus contributing to ameliorating the
emission of greenhouse gases as well as strengthening indigenous spiritual
agricultural practices. The terrain in the Lamas district is mountainous, the
flat river valley floors having been taken by more powerful mestizos and
devoted in large part to irrigated rice cultivation. Lamas and its mountainous
environment is the region where the Kichwa-Lamistas are settled. As
mentioned above, there is evidence of ADE in terraced fields at the higher
altitude in this region, the archaeological sites of Chachapoyas.51

Concluding Remarks
At Sachamama Center we follow the lead of our Kichwa-Lamista
collaborators and give offerings of broken ceramics to our reconstituted
ADE, or yana allpa. We involve US undergraduates in these enactments,
suggesting that they speak in their own words, from their hearts, to the soil,
the water, the forest, the moon, or the sun. We do this as a regenerative
action, one that embodies the recognition that the soil and all the other
elements contributing to sustainable permanent agriculture have agency and
are not part of a mechanical world. We need not subscribe to the Kichwa-
Lamista theology, “belief system,” or “cosmovision” in order to do so. For
us, the spirit of the earth, of the moon, of the water, of the sun, and of the
forest embody the agency of those nonhuman entities. The agency of those
aspects of the natural world implies the rejection of the modernist
anthropocentric worldview of an inert, insentient, mechanical universe, full
of “natural resources” there for us humans to exploit according to only our
own exclusively human will. Making offerings to the spirits is our way of
recognizing that without reciprocating with our nonhuman food source, we
are endangering the regenerativity and therefore the sustainability of the
source of our sustenance. In other words, we engage in cosmocentric
economic activities. At the same time, the presence of ceramics in ADE also
increases its fertility, according to soil science.52 Whether one considers this
a happy coincidence or the gift of the spirits depends on one’s spiritual
inclinations, but either way the nonhuman sources of our sustenance are
regenerated through such reciprocating actions and our dependence on them
is enacted with offerings, a behavior I would argue deserves the label
“cosmocentric economy.”
If we are to ameliorate the climate crisis and avoid the apocalyptic
conflagration of the planetary atmosphere that a pronounced disequilibrium
between oxygen and CO2 would lead to in less than ninety years if we do not
radically alter our course, then we need to start behaving differently,
nonanthropocentrically, and recognize the agency of the nonhuman world
and our dependence on it.53 It is not sufficient to change our thinking; we
need to change our behavior as well. We need to start enacting a different
reality through actions that are at once technical and spiritual, and we need
to involve our youth in such enactments. Studying the Kichwa-Lamistas in
the classical anthropological fashion is not enough; we need as well to learn
from them so as to enact together a healthier and sustainable world in which
regeneration becomes an inescapable human responsibility.
 Study Questions
1. What are the key terms, roles, and deities associated with indigenous
and traditional Peruvian high Amazon farming? How and why are
these important, and how do they function in helping to create a
sustainable farming culture?
2. What is a cosmocentric economy, and how does this relate to
sustainable agriculture in Peru?
3. What is a regenerative action, and how is this important to
cultivating a sustainable agriculture? How might religions articulate
and encourage regenerative actions, and how might they articulate
and discourage actions that are degenerative?

Notes
1. Chacra is a Quechua word (which has entered the local Spanish language) for a food swidden
garden. Mama Allpa is the earth spirit; allpa also means “soil.”
2. Shaño is the local Quechua word that refers to pieces of broken ceramics that the women who
are the ceramicists also grind to a powder and add to the new clay to make new pots.
3. Ingenieros refers to agronomists who overwhelmingly are mestizos (descendants of indigenous
and Europeans persons) and whose scientific education generates this kind of attitude. However, as
Fernando Baez writes in El saqueo cultural de América Latina: De la conquista a la globalización
(Mexico City: Random House, 2008), the act of making the indigenous people ashamed started as
soon as the Spaniards invaded South America.
4. There are two major agricultural campaigns in these tropical eastern foothills of the Peruvian
Andes, June and December, when indigenous farmers practice swidden agriculture, using the slash-
and-burn technique to open food fields in the forest that produce from one to four years until the soil is
exhausted and another chacra has to be opened in the forest.
5. Fabiola A Silva, “Cultural Behaviors of Indigenous Populations and the Formation of
Archeological Record in Amazonian Dark Earths: The Asurini do Xingu Case Study,” in Amazonian
Dark Earths: Origin, Properties, Management, ed. Johannes Lehmann, Dirse C. Kern, Bruno Glaser,
and William I. Woods (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003), 373–85.
6. Alfredo Narváez Vargas, personal communication, August 11, 2012. Dr. Vargas bases his
identification of broken ceramics as offerings on his findings in a site in Tucume on the northwest
Peruvian coast, where he found a great quantity of such fragments in a small altar of the Sacred Stone
of Tucume, a site contemporaneous with Kuelap.
7. The literature on the brutal eradication of indigenous spirituality during the colonial period is
extensive. I would refer the reader to an excellent study ranging from colonial times to the current era
of globalization: Baez, El saqueo cultural de América Latina.
8. Thomas Cummins, personal communication, December 2011.
 9. Alfredo Narváez Vargas, personal communication, August 31, 2012.
10. Gerry Gillespie, “City to Soil: Returning Organics to Agriculture; A Circle of Sustainability,” in
Amazonian Dark Earths: Wim Sombroek’s Vision, ed. William I. Woods, Wenceslau G. Teixeira,
Johannes Lehmann, Christoph Steiner, Antoinette WinklerPrins, and Lilian Rebellato (Springer Digital
Book, 2009), 465.
11. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
12. Stefano Varese, “El dilema antropocéntrico: Pueblos indígenas, naturaleza y economía política”
(paper delivered at the PUCP conference, Lima, Peru, September 17, 2009).
13. R. Alavarado and Jaime Walter, “Fases de la luna y su influencia en los cultivos agrícolas”
(PowerPoint published by the Faculty of Agronomy of the Universidad Nacional de San Martin,
Tarapoto, 2005).
14. Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities, 21.
15. Pramod Parajuli, “Learning from Ecological Ethnicities: Toward a Plural Political Ecology of
Knowledge,” in Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community,
ed. John A. Grim (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 559–89.
16. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian
Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967), 10.
17. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House,
1983), 128.
18. For an argument on the entanglement of the material and the discursive using Niels Bohr’s
understanding of quantum mechanics, see chapter 4 in my Subversive Spiritualities.
19. On this point, see especially chapters 5 and 6 of ibid.
20. As Leora Batnitzky shows in her book How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to
Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), the category of “religion” is a
Protestant one, since for Judaism, as for Hinduism and probably many other spiritual traditions, one’s
spirituality is not a private affair of “beliefs” held in the privacy of one’s mind and heart. But she also
shows how this new category became inescapable for everyone through the establishment by the
nation-state of a separation between a political public sphere and a private sphere where “religion”
belonged. The secularization of anthropology—and for that matter of the modern education system as
a whole—is part of this phenomenon. For anthropology this development is both ironic and
problematic since typically the people it studies do not recognize something like a totally secular
sphere.
21. Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Alfred
Knopf, 2005).
22. Rider Panduro and Grimaldo Rengifo, Montes y montaraces (Lima: PRATEC, 2001).
23. Coca is a traditional plant originating from the high Amazon region and used in the highlands
for both medicinal and ritual purposes since time immemorial. The increase in coca production during
the 1980s and 1990s was due to the enormous upsurge in US demand for cocaine. The traditional uses
require the unprocessed dried coca leaf with an alkaloid content of no more than 2 percent, whereas
the production of cocaine chemically treats the plant and transforms it into a drug with an alkaloid
content of some 80 percent and requires a much higher quantity of the leaf. Since the government of
Fujimori imprisoned the leader of the Shining Path guerrilla movement (in 1994) and arrested the
leadership of the other guerrilla movement, the MRTA, the growing of coca in the region has
dramatically decreased.
24. Lecture in my study abroad program given by agronomist Cesar Enrique Chappa of the Faculty
of Agronomy at the University of San Martin, Tarapoto, January 2007; personal communication, Oro
Verde Fair Trade Coffee co-op, Lamas, San Martin, Peru.
 25. Luis Calderón Pacheco, “Relaciones entre mestizos y Kechwa en Lamas en el contexto de la
globalización,” in Comunidades locales y transnacionales: Cinco estudios de casos en el Perú, ed.
Ivan de Gregori (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005).
26. The person Velasco chose to determine what to do with Amazonian indigenous people was the
Peruvian anthropologist Stefano Varese, who had just (1968) published his justly famous book on the
Asháninkas of the central Amazon in Peru, La sal de los cerros: Resistencia y utopía en la Amazonia
Peruana, 6th ed. (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2006). Varese created both the law of
Native communities and the law of bilingual education in indigenous areas, which were put in effect
around 1975.
27. Calderón Pacheco, “Relaciones entre mestizos y Kechwa en Lamas.”
28. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton,
1995), 79.
29. Luis Vivanco, Green Encounters: Shaping and Contesting Environmentalims in Rural Costa
Rica (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).
30. For the peasant and adivasi cosmovisions as well as practices of sacred groves in South Asia,
see Frédérique Apffel-Marglin and Pramod Parajuli, “Sacred Groves and Ecology: Ritual and
Science,” in Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water, ed. Christopher Key
Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 291–316.
31. Sachamama Center fully supports the Kichwa-Lamistas’ efforts to have control over the
biological reserve Cordillera Escalera.
32. For a sample of publications on this topic, see Mann, 1491; Lehmann et al., Amazonian Dark
Earths.
33. W. I. Woods and W. M. Denevan, “Amazonian Dark Earths: The First Century of Reports,” in
Woods et al., Amazonian Dark Earths, 2.
34. www.clas.ufl.edu/users/caycedo/iquitos (accessed January 6, 2012);
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta (accessed January 6, 2012); Alfredo Narváez Vargas, personal
communication about ADE in the Peruvian high Amazon.
35. See E. G. Neves, J. B. Petersen, R. N. Bartone, and C. A. da Silva, “Historical and Socio-
cultural Origins of Amazonian Dark Earths,” in Lehmann et al., Amazonian Dark Earths, 29–50. A
hectare is the equivalent of slightly over two acres.
36. Ibid, 34.
37. For an informative journalistic portrayal of the story of ADE, see the BBC film The Secret of El
Dorado (2002), available through Google videos.
38. Among these are Anna Roosevelt, Moundbuilders of the Amazon: Geophysical Archaeology on
Marajó Island, Brazil (San Diego: Academic Press, 1991); Mann, 1491; Lehmann et al., Amazonian
Dark Earths; Woods et al., Amazonian Dark Earths.
39. Robert Carneiro, “Tree Felling with the Stone Axe: An Experiment Carried out among the
Yanomamö Indians of Southern Venezuela,” in Ethnoarchaeology: Implications of Ethnography for
Archaeology, ed. C. Kramer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 21–58.
40. S. N. Swami et al., “Charcoal Making in the Brazilian Amazon: Economic Aspects of
Production and Carbon Conversion Efficiencies of Kilns,” in Woods et al., Amazonian Dark Earths,
419.
41. Henry Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in
Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983).
42. See Gaspar de Carvajal, “Discovery of the Orellana River [1542],” in The Discovery of the
Amazon According to the Account of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal and Other Documents, ed. H. C.
Heaton, trans. Bertram B. Lee (New York: American Geographical Society, 1934), 167–235; Mann,
1491.
43. C. Steiner, W. G. Teixeira, W. I. Woods, and W. Zech, “Indigenous Knowledge about Terra
Preta Formation,” in Woods et al., Amazonian Dark Earths, 193–204.
44. Lehmann et al., Amazonian Dark Earths; Woods et al., Amazonian Dark Earths.
45. Albert Bates, The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change (Gabriola Island,
B.C.: New Society, 2010).
46. See Charles Mann’s foreword to Lehmann et al., Amazonian Dark Earths, xiii.
47. Lehmann et al., Amazonian Dark Earths, 482.
48. Ideally, we hope that this Terra Preta Nova experiment will spread to as many Native
communities as possible. In the summer of 2012, in collaboration with Professor Pramod Parajuli (also
one of the editors of this volume), we started a pilot project with the local education board to introduce
the teaching of ecological literacy in schools in the Lamas district. Through this project we hope this
form of indigenous permaculture will spread in the region.
49. There are three types of degraded lands recognized locally according to the weeds growing in
them: shapumbales, yaraguales, and cashukshales. The forest no longer can regenerate on these
unproductive lands.
50. The practice in choba-choba is that the family on whose land the work party labors that day
prepares a large meal for everyone. Through the Chacra-Huerto project, Sachamama Center has been
providing the food, which is cooked by the women of the communities.
51. This does not mean that there were no terra preta sites in the Lamas region, only that no
archaeological excavations have taken place in the area, since there are no spectacular ruins there.
52. This is confirmed in John Vandermeer and Yvette Perfecto, Breakfast of Biodiversity: The Truth
about Rain Forest Destruction (Oakland, Calif.: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1995), 34.
I am grateful to Dr. Peter Sherman of Prescott College for this reference.
53. According to scientists, the upper acceptable limit of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere,
namely 350 parts per million, has already been passed. As of the end of May 2013, we are now at 400
parts per million. At 600 parts per million, the planetary atmosphere is predicted to self-combust,
ending all life on earth (Bates, The Biochar Solution, 76). If we continue with the same industrial,
economic, and cognitive paradigm dominant today and do not change course, this is supposed to
happen around 2100.
 3

Renewal of Non-Western Methods

for Sustainable Living
Eston Dickson Pembamoyo

For several decades, largely due to colonial influences, many Malawians

have turned toward a more “Western” culture of speaking, dressing, and
eating. As a result, they have become ashamed of traditional foods, refusing
to eat or serve them to guests, even at the expense of their own health and
lives.1 Importantly, for the purposes of this book, many have also adopted
“industrial” farming.2 However, not all of this change is necessarily bad.
We in Malawi have much to learn from other cultures’ successes, but we
can also learn from their mistakes and should avoid repeating them. Such a
dialogue about what methods of farming and thus eating—traditional,
Western, or a mix of both—and which are the most helpful and sustainable
for Malawi, both culturally and environmentally, is the focus of this chapter.
Of key concern is that if this replica of Western farming and lifestyle
continues, Malawi might never go back to its historical, precolonial,
community-based food sovereignty. This is a valid concern, and we in
Malawi should adhere to practices and principles of “socio-economic
cultural systems that can be carried out in perpetuity.”3 From my
perspective, in Malawi there must be a deliberate sociopolitical and
religious will to foster change and to develop policies that are eco-friendly,
familiar to symbols and signs already present in Malawi’s historical
practices.4 Given Malawi’s historical antecedents of community-based,
sustainable agriculture, my experience teaching permaculture in Malawi is
that those Malawians who attend permaculture courses find themselves
walking on familiar ground toward mwanaalirenji, or the “Growing of the
Kingdom of Abundance.”5 Permaculture presents a mix of Western and
traditional biocultural farming practices that can help farmers and citizens
of Malawi move back toward a domestic sustainable agriculture that is in
line with their cultural and religious values of sharing and environmental
protection.

Malindi permaculture design course, December 2009—two weeks’ participation results in a

certificate. (Photo by Eston Dickson Pembamoyo.)

This chapter explores the impact that church-sponsored permaculture is

beginning to have on a return to sustainable farming in Malawi, particularly
in certain parts of the country. One key area where this is occurring is
Malindi, which is in the Mangochi District. Malawi is a representative
republic in southeastern Africa; formerly the British protectorate of
Nyasaland, it gained complete independence in 1964. It is bordered on the
north by Tanzania, on the east by Lake Malawi, on the southeast and south
by Mozambique, and on the west by Zambia, with its capital being
Lilongwe.
The following concepts, defined from an African perspective, will help
guide our discussion about religion and sustainable farming in Malawi.
Sustainability. This requires that biotic and abiotic elements of an
ecosystem interact in a way that does not compromise the ability of future
generations of organisms in that ecosystem to live and produce necessary
things for themselves. People who are living sustainably within an
ecosystem keep all their natural resources healthy so that they remain useful
for their own and subsequent generations while ensuring that other species
have adequate access to ecosystem services so that they can continue to
flourish.
Permaculture. This is an agricultural design system that aims to create
stable productive systems that wholesomely provide for human needs and
harmoniously integrate various land uses.
Food sovereignty. This means total control over diversified agricultural
resources, and includes the way people access resources, policies
concerning equitable distribution, and the socioeconomic factors attached to
the resources in a free society.

Map of Malawi. (Based on http://www.maphill.com/malawi/location-maps/flag-map/blank-

outside/free/.)
 Food and nutrition security. This means that a community has enough
varied foods available year round for the physical, mental, and spiritual
health and growth for everyone.

Main Agricultural Challenges in Malawi

A key motivating concern in this discussion is the “environmental
destructiveness” of human society, which in Malawi is becoming evident as
the country adopts certain Western thought systems and lifestyles.6 For
example, the adoption of monoculture farming has led to forests being
cleared away for the creation of huge single-variety fields. Anything else
that grows in such fields is a weed and is either uprooted or sprayed by
chemicals. Historical forestry products such as wild fruits, mushrooms, and
wild animals are no longer available to supplement grown foods, and yet
the food grown is still not enough for everyone. As the result of Western-
influenced Green Revolution farming practices, there is too much loss of
topsoil, which is washed away by just a little amount of rainfall, and this is
exacerbated during Malawi’s rainy season. Siltation therefore takes place in
almost all lakes and rivers, and water levels keep dropping yearly. Fish
catches in various lakes are affected to the point that it is difficult to supply
fish products to the growing population of people; this is also a cultural
issue, as fish products are a part of Malawi’s culinary identity. Furthermore,
industrial farming uses large amounts of freshwater, so some water tables
are rapidly dropping compared to historical levels, and boreholes in some
areas now dry up yearly. Lastly, human-induced climate change is
impacting rainfall patterns, which affects maize production—and maize is a
key crop for almost all farmers in Malawi.
Over the years, the Malawian people as well as the settlers,
missionaries, and colonists who came to the country have debated
agricultural issues intensely and developed the methods they thought were
helpful to meet the needs of their own time. Neglected in these efforts are
rich seams of intellectual and cultural history: the indigenous agricultural
practices, crops, fables, and local ecoreligious knowledge. Since the onset
of the Green Revolution, and more so since the independence of Malawi
and our slow entry into the global marketplace, a lot of resources and time
have been invested on cash and staple crops that use synthetic fertilizers
and chemicals that have affected soil alkalinity, farmer livelihoods, and the
quality of local waters—similar to processes that have occurred in South
America and South Asia, as seen in other chapters of this book.
But a new story is emerging now in Malawi, and it is a story of equality,
based on deep historical antecedents. In this story, we in Malawi are not
duplicates, destined to repeat the mistakes and follow the lifestyles of the
West, but we are not separate, either, given that we live in a globalized
world. We are profoundly connected on this planet. Our interconnectedness
is mutual, not parasitic, at both the macro and micro levels, between
humans, and between humans and nonhumans, and this connection can be
acted out and realized via sustainable agriculture operating under a
paradigm different than that held by Western industrial agriculture. In this
emergent story we will reenter a land of mountains and valleys, watered by
rain, where everyone responsibly takes care of and watches over all things
together. This is the vision for religiously inspired sustainable agriculture in
Malawi.
The story is preparing a new Malawi to be connected with Mother
Earth, with our Malawian ancestors, and with the creator.7 Together we in
Malawi shall fix issues of soil erosion, deforestation, inadequate potable
water, high population growth, the catastrophic increase of HIV/AIDS, and
the decline in fish catch in our lakes. This new Malawi will have “rain fall
[that] is adequate and the earth [will] bear ‘things’ and fish [will] multiply
in all lakes.”8 Our solutions are in part based on permaculture, “a practical
and effective way [that] uses natural patterns and natural principles for
increasing sustainability and quality of life.”9

Colonial Methods of Agriculture

A critical analysis of recent Malawian political-environmental history is
important for understanding the relationship between colonizer and
colonized, white European and black African—between Western farming
knowledge celebrated as superior and African practices presented as
environmentally wasteful, in need of Western technology for improvement.
The truth is, however, that colonial and postcolonial farming methods use
extensive synthetic fertilizers and chemicals that contribute to the food
security and food sustainability problems that Malawi and other African
countries now face. Within this history, the predatory character of some
white settlers and missionaries, and their imperial hunting and farming
methods, greatly reduced wildlife and depleted large tracts of forests. They
were not only responsible for the extermination of indigenous animal and
plant species, but they also introduced new species that affected climate and
brought about new difficulties—diseases and droughts.10
Fortunately, there is still a vast store of ancient farming knowledge in
communities in Malawi. It is good that sustainable farming researchers have
discovered that indigenous farmers, who have sometimes been portrayed as
ignorant and not adaptive, have actually been utilizing very sophisticated
methods of agriculture that could help deal with the current challenges.
These methods can help both developing and developed worlds to grow
more and better food with fewer chemical inputs, slow erosion, control
pests, decrease dependence on fossil fuels, and feed an expanding global
population.
The harmful effects of pesticides, inefficient fossil fuel usage, chemical
fertilizer inputs, genetic monocropping, and laboratory-enhanced farming of
livestock and fish have become increasingly hazardous and must be
checked (see Todd LeVasseur’s introduction to this book). We in Malawi
should build upon the traditional methods that evolved during the
“primitive” years of agriculture. Unfortunately, despite all the disadvantages
of industrial farming methods, the current and recent past generations of
Malawians have neglected much of the knowledge of traditional systems in
pursuit of unsustainable modern industrial methods geared toward
economic profit as the sole determinant of success.
My experience as a lifelong citizen of Malawi is that Western methods
of agriculture have failed us; hundreds of thousands of people in Malawi
are undernourished and still go hungry, and the efforts of the developed
nations to arrest hunger have failed, too. It should teach us that not all that
is “West” is “best”—to be black is not to be blank, and to be white is not to
be right. Together, black or white, yellow or red, we should be focusing
increasingly on sustainable methods of farming that are environmental
friendly, just, and secure, bringing about the well-being of all communities
the world over.
 Alternatives to Intensive Chemical Farming
If current agricultural conditions are to be corrected, we need a science of
design based upon biological principles that can provide a sustainable way
of living. It should be able to blend harmoniously the way humans live with
nature and use the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems
to provide a framework and guidance for people to develop their own
solutions to the problems facing their world, including the ability to
sustainably produce food. Malawi needs a system that is based upon the use
of organic farming in order to produce good-quality food without using
synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides, a system that will help reduce
diseases and lower the current negative environmental impact of industrial
farming.
One large-scale alternative that can help move Malawi toward
sustainable food security and food justice is permaculture. This neologism,
a combination of “permanent” and “culture,” denotes integrated land use
and lifelong habitual processes and practices designed for permanent
sustainable living. This permanent culture works toward a sustainable
lifestyle that creates abundance on earth by designing our lives and
livelihoods to be in harmony with nature. It is about applying a few
strategic inputs to agricultural production systems and achieving a high
output with the help of nature. And, key to the concept, permaculture is an
interlocked cultural farming system that endeavors to bring about an
environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just human
presence on the planet.

Creating Abundant and Better Food in Society

There are numerous environmental challenges in many parts of Malawi,
including Malindi, and they synergistically contribute to the growing food
insecurity of the region and country. Many households in Malindi do not
have enough food toward the end and at the beginning of each year. It was
never like that four decades ago: Malawi was a green land of “plenty.”11
Our climate and rainfall patterns were stable and predictable. A term that
captures this is mwanaalirenji, which means being in possession of all
necessary materials in life. It is not only human beings who need enough
and better food, but also the land that needs to be continually well fed for it
to support plant and animal life sustainably. But how can we speak about
abundance when in many parts of Malawi some families have no food
during the hungry season? When local farmers cannot afford to buy farm
inputs? How can Malawians become food secure when we grow maize
only?

Permaculture Testimonies
People use the term food security differently throughout the world. In
Malawi, some political leaders think that enough maize production to last
the country all year means food security and health. They measure food
security by the amount of calories each household can obtain from an acre
of maize.12 This is why sasakawa, or planting the maize at only ten
centimeters apart, has become standard in Malawi. Perhaps what people
need is not food security but rather food sovereignty—the creation of
abundant varieties of foods and good soils.13
One example of Malawian food sovereignty is seen in the work of Hugh
Brown in Mzimba in the north of Malawi. He writes, “Since 2002 we have
been doing careful trials with the agroforestry legume tephrosia vogelii. In
December 2005 we planted maize in some plots on which tephrosia had
been growing for the previous three years.”14 Brown and his colleagues
claim that yields have exceeded their expectations, and yet the soil in which
they grow their crops is no better than the average Malawi soil, and their
test plots include some stony and gravely patches. No chemical whatsoever
is being used in this farm ecosystem. Interestingly, the highest yields they
got were from the zero-tillage farming system they adopted from
permaculture.
Another permaculture-inspired example of increasing food
sustainability is seen in the work of Harry Phiri, a primary school teacher in
the Zomba-Eastern region. He writes, “In the past 40 years Bill Mollison
and David Holmgren discovered permaculture in Australia and began to
develop their own eyesight to see what happened to their land through
foreign farming methods. Using their [permaculture] methods, it has taken
12 years of design work to change our home at Matawale Township and we
have brought nature back to our door step.”15
Mac Justice Betha, a specialist in approved natural medicines
(ANAMED) from Chikhwawa in southern Malawi, reports on efforts in his
area: “Now Permaculture information is becoming widely available
nationally, advocating the ‘Growing and Eating of More Good Food Using
Less’ and the importance of natural medicines, with these messages
spreading. Shortly the 14 posters of Permaculture Design Course will be
printed, so that the information on ‘how to grow your own better food and
heal yourself’ will be available to many pupils in primary schools in our
area where the posters will be hung.”16 Relatedly, Kamchira Kampandira, a
permaculture coordinator in central Malawi, notes, “It is always amazing to
see that Permaculture practitioners and groups are increasing. Permaculture
is real, we are happy we can grow better food around our home if we only
go nature’s way. We do not sweep our designed grounds any more.
Permaculture is now paying us back more abundantly than sweeping that
only made our home[s] grow taller—as they lost inches to erosion.”17
We all need food produced without “chemical fertilizers, pesticides and
use of hybrid seeds.”18 Permaculture does not demand huge sums of money
to buy agrochemical inputs, and it is emerging as a viable strategy to solve
the dilemma of food insecurity. It applies techniques and principles from
ecology, cooperative economics, appropriate technology, sustainable
agriculture, and the wisdom of indigenous people to create sustainable
human environments. As such, the promise this practice has for both society
and soil extends far beyond abundant food production systems to explore
new horizons for creating a diversely sustainable life on earth.
Permaculture is a helpful strategy for all—rich and poor alike—
facilitating the growth of crops and aiding communities to equitably
distribute and share healthier foods. Richard Matondo, a farmer from
Malindi in Malawi writes, “Permaculture is real, and can help change life
for [the] better. . . . I have food and medicinal forests around my house, and
today people are able to differentiate . . . the house of a permaculture
member from the rest.”19 Those in Malindi who are adopting permaculture
are being rewarded by nature, which provides more bountifully, and the
houses of permaculture members, surrounded by varied crops, enjoying
cool conditions provided by trees, and evidencing improved soil texture and
fertility, strongly suggest that extensive single-crop farming under the
Green Revolution has “undernourished” us.20

Historical and Sociological Attempts to Achieve Sustainable

Agriculture
Interlinked issues concerning the nurturing, keeping, and growing of food
are central in any society. In fact, without this, there could be no society, as
we need food to live. People worldwide have different beliefs, values, and
traditions surrounding such nurturing and growing, including the way food
is kept and used. Families with enough and varied foods all year round in a
community are held with high esteem and accorded dignity, while those
with less or no food are often seen as being no better than “slaves,” or they
may be considered “lazy freeloaders.” Before the coming of Western
lifestyles, those without enough food were helped by fellow local
Malawians, who helped the sick, elderly, and even the lazy prepare their
gardens through dima. 21
Traditionally, Malawians ensured that they had a continuous year-round
food supply through safe storage of yields, and they grew a wide variety of
crops. This is evident in the songs, stories, and rituals of the Yao of Malindi
about the goodness of working hard in a crop field, the need to grow more
than one type of crop in a garden, and the importance of early and timely
planting and weeding, as seen in the lyric “tachilapa sala kogoya” (lest you
shall espouse famine). Permaculture, like the “primitive” and traditional
farming of Malawi seen in such traditional songs, encourages intercropping.
Given good rainfall, an agrochemical farmer will harvest a single crop on
the same piece of land where a permaculture farmer could continuously
grow corn, cassava, millet, soybeans, sorghum, pumpkins, vegetables,
cucumbers, beans, pigeon peas, groundnuts, cow peas, bananas, and some
fruits.22

The Green Revolution—Scientific Discoveries, Inputs, and the

Quest for Sustainable Living
The pursuit of abundance is a perennial human undertaking. At the dawn of
the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, a search for minerals took the
place of the fifteenth-century pursuit of spices. New technologies spread
rapidly, leading to the scramble for the earth’s minerals, oils, and human
resources—mostly for the benefit of political and economic elites, many
based in Europe and later North America. An example is the “triangle
trade” of slavery, which included detestable treaties made with greedy
chiefs in Malawi, all of which greatly benefited Europeans.
The Green Revolution continues this reprehensible trajectory. After
World War II, efforts shifted from manufacturing weapons to developing
agricultural products and processes, including chemical inputs and hybrid
crops, which became the precursor of today’s genetically modified
organisms. Throughout Africa, including in Malawi, huge hectares of
forests were depleted to establish monocropping estates. These require
enormous sums of monies for high-tech equipment and pesticides, and not
many Malawians can afford this kind of farming. Hence, since the 1950s
and 1960s, food insecurity has remained an unresolved issue despite
numerous governmental initiatives and interventions. New agrochemical
policies and increased rules and regulations do nothing to cultivate food
security, as huge swathes of forest land continue to be wantonly cut down
for farming. The locals not only end up being colonized, but they also lose
their natural green woodlands. “Innocent” people who do not follow the
new agricultural policies, agricultural systems, and new colonial farming
methods face charges and penalties.23 The promise of the European Green
Belt, with all its chemical inputs, has spectacularly failed in Malawi.

Modern Malawi and Permaculture: A Little Light Glowing in the

Darkness
Although they were suppressed, old thought systems and agricultural
lifestyles remained in the blood of some Malawians. For decades these old
thoughts have conflicted with those of post-Enlightenment modernity, but
permaculture seems to be hearkening back to some old systems and
practices. Even though we are faced with so many environmental
challenges now, this is the most scientific age Malawi has ever experienced.
It is an age that knows industrial chemical elements in the atmosphere can
be reduced by planting many fruit trees.24 Furthermore, the average
Malawian knows the benefits of using renewable sources of energy and of
recycling, although not many seem to bother. It appears that the mindset of
many Malawians rests on industrial technologies and industrial farming.
Yet, when “people look back to 40 or 50 years ago . . . crops were more
abundant and easier to grow without use of agrochemicals and . . . trees still
covered the hillsides.”25 In light of our current undesirable circumstances,
we must ask ourselves why conditions were better fifty years ago and yet
now “hunger still looms about in most homes.”26
Ancestral farming views and practices probably hold the answers. If
only we saw the little light in this “age of darkness” and used it now, we
should be all right with ourselves and the earth. The ancestral views of
Malawians on food include strong ties with the spiritual world as well as
close links with the forests, deep water, and Mother Earth. Thick forests and
individual huge trees are sacred, not to be cut down without permission
from the elders, who have direct acquaintance with the living dead and the
spiritual world through prayer and worship. In industrial farming, trees in a
garden are merely weeds to be cleared away and deep waters are pumped
for irrigation.
Traditionally, just before the first rains come, sorted seeds are brought to
the elders for prayers. The life of the seeds has to be dedicated to God the
creator, the one who raises life in the seemingly dying seed before it is put
in the womb of Mother Earth to germinate. The elders among the Nyanja,
Chewa, Yao, Lomwe, Ngoni, and many other tribes believe that when seeds
are buried in an intercropped garden, each crop fixes its semen to boost
fertility in the soil, helping to get a well-balanced garden ready for new
healthy life so the young crops can multiply. The religio-spiritual views of
this ancestral system sees soil, “earth crust,” as a living sacred component
and part of society that should be “respected.” For example, Elizabeth
Mzamu, sixty-one, from Pepmphero Orphan Care Centre near Lulanga
Health Centre, stated during a six-day permaculture awareness course in
July 2010, “We have always grown up believing the soil keeps communities
of both plants and animals, and it is a final home for the living dead, yet we
must revere it: that is where we shall all finally go and will be answerable
for any wrong we did to it.”
 In regard to respect for nature, “primitive and spiritualist” farmers in
Malawi’s past looked after their crop fields to avoid loss of soil life.27 They
selected strong seeds that would ejaculate strong semen into the soil in the
subsequent planting seasons. Seeds did not travel long distances, and they
were preserved in clay pots or treated with smoke. In most cases they were
free or bartered because it was believed that life could not be sold but must
be supported to continue. In traditional agriculture, skills and religious
beliefs concerning the growing, preservation, and storage of foods have
been passed on from one generation to the next in homes, in annual public
festivals, and in the initiation rite of passage at puberty. For a sustainable
agriculture to arise in Malawi, such traditional skills and beliefs must be
recognized and respected as valid, so they can be supported and put into
practice.
Among the Yao of Malindi, a young person is allowed to marry if the
uncles are certain that he or she can manage his or her own crop field, build
a hut, make some basic tools, cook, and clean the hut. A young chicken is
given to each inductee during the rite of passage as a necessary part of his
or her new homestead. By the end of a month or two, when most rituals
end, the inductees will have seen their chickens grow to maturity. Such
community rites of passages within a defined kinship structure reinforce
traditional ecological information, passing on needed farming knowledge to
the next generation of subsistence farmers.

Permaculture and the Traditional Rite of Passage

A bridge is developed when permaculture models are compared to and fit
within the traditional agricultural beliefs, values, and traditions of Malawi’s
various ethnic and tribal groups. There is still evidence to this agricultural
past in songs, proverbs, and the teachings passed on during rites of passage
among many tribes across the country that instruct participants to plant
various crops that mature at different times; to plant maize and other crops
together immediately after the first rains; to tend regularly their crop fields;
and to support elders who are attending crop fields. During these
ceremonies, girls are encouraged to feed babies with good foods and are
taught to prepare enough good foods for the family at the right time.
 One famous traditional initiation song among the Yao of Malindi goes,
“Kulindima kwa wula kwende tutile-e, atati na mawo talime-e” (At the
rolling of the thunder, let’s run away; the father and mother will cultivate).28
One proverb is “Jwamlume amloleje palutumbo” (Look at a man on the
stomach).29 If the initiation camp is near a river, as is often desired,
inductees grow vegetables and other quick-maturing crops and also do
some manual work such as mowing thatching grass, which they later sell.

Free-range goats and chickens provide fertilizer and help mulch the grounds at Chapanga in
Chikwawa. (Photo by Eston Dickson Pembamoyo.)

The inductees communally share food in order to increase and strengthen

their relationships. At the end of the period of the initiation, the inductees
learn how to use manure from the chickens or goats reared during their stay
in the bush. They are told that plants and animals are friends of humanity
and they should be well looked after, as they provide timber, reeds for
making coffins and mats, hides, meat, and manure.
During initiation, parents and guardians undertake certain
responsibilities toward their inductees: they provide a sizeable clay pot used
as a bucket for washing, and they give some cash and in-kind goods to the
elders of the initiation in appreciation for their duties and efforts in
instructing the boys or girls. Parents or guardians do not require any
external donors, support partners, or subsidies to send their young into the
bush to “eat honey.”30 On the final day they gather together for a big feast,
thus increasing their sense of unity, belonging, and support for one another.
These “principles and ethics in the rite of passage” among the Yao in
Malindi are what perhaps make permaculture fit well into their system.31

Permaculture and the Renewal of Non-Western

Methods of Sustainable Farming
Permaculture, through its interconnectedness with traditional Malawian
cultural farming values and practices; its system of intercropping; its ethics
of giving reverence to Mother Earth and valuing plants and animal life; and
its admonishment to freely share the resources and wisdom in society
helped people in Malindi to feel that traditional agriculture has come back
to the peoples of “antiquities,” to use the theologian Walbert Bühlmann’s
expression.32 As Malawians learn the principles and ethics of permaculture,
they find themselves walking on familiar ground, interacting with
permaculture through their traditional lifestyles and ancestral teachings.
Therefore, permaculture supports them in their pursuit of sustainable living
and also helps them appreciate the goodness, love, humility, simplicity, and
hospitality in “primitive” agricultural methods.

A Brief History of Permaculture in Malawi

In the mid-1970s, two Australian ecologists, Bill Mollison and David
Holmgren, started to develop ideas for creating stable agriculture systems.
“They called this approach ‘permaculture’ and published it in Permaculture
One in 1978. Since then it has spread all over the world . . . and many
people have adopted [a] permaculture lifestyle.”33 Permaculture slowly
spread into parts of Africa, and in 1994 Malawians, in the wake of
Mozambican refugees depleting native Malawian forests, invited
permaculture practitioners from South Africa to Chilema in Zomba District
for the country’s first official permaculture gathering.34
As a result of the training at Chilema, a Malawi network of
permaculture practitioners was formed, which has subsequently helped train
many other Malawians. Permaculture training posters were developed in
both English and Chichewa, and a training guide for a permaculture
awareness course (PAC) and a permaculture design course (PDC), all in line
with set international standards, was developed and controlled by the
Permaculture Network in Malawi (PNM). The network worked together
with the government and with nongovernmental organizations such as GTZ
(German Technical Programs Support), the European Union, the World
Food Programme, and later the Ministry of Education to disseminate
permaculture practices.35 In 2005 the Regional School Permaculture
Program for Southern Africa Region (ReScope) opened an office in
Blantyre and joined hands with PNM members to introduce ILUD
(integrated land use design) in primary schools. Furthermore, the
participation of the PNM in the eighth International Permaculture
Convergence (IPC8) in Brazil, the hosting of IPC9 in 2009, and Malawi’s
presence at the 2011 IPC10 in Jordan strengthened the resolve of the
Malawi government and line ministries to collaborate with the permaculture
movement. Many people in Malawi now are able to view the future more
hopefully as they work not only for food security but also toward the goals
of generating food abundance, food sovereignty, and above all, agricultural
sustainability as a means to “block” further land degradation.36

Iponga Primary School in Kalonga with permaculture garden. (Photo by Eston Dickson
Pembamoyo.)

Permaculture and the Ancestral Knowledge of Agriculture

Permaculture as a name was born in the 1970s with Bill Mollison and
David Holmgren, but as a practice, permaculture is as old as the earth.
Permaculture “is a way of living that uses organic principles. It is about
blending the way humans live with nature. Permaculture uses the diversity,
stability and resilience of natural ecosystems to provide a framework and
guidance for people to develop their own solutions to the problems facing
their world, on a local, national or global scale. It is based on a philosophy
of cooperation with nature and caring for the earth and its people.”37 It is a
system of sustainable living based on the observation and imitation of
natural systems, and it builds on the knowledge of our ancestors and applies
this to modern life. If you ask old people what they used to eat in Malawi,
the answer is almost always nsima (thick corn flour porridge). But the
nsima was made from many different crops—millet, sorghum, yams, green
bananas, and other traditional staples—all intercropped in one field.
Almost all the foods now common in Malawi—maize, cassava, sweet
potatoes, onions, tomatoes, Chinese cabbage, rape/canola, mustard, and
many others—were introduced as foreign crops. There are over six hundred
local foods that we could grow and eat, yet we are still relying on a small
handful of foreign, difficult-to-grow crops to meet our food needs. Instead
of celebrating the resources we have to keep us healthy, we are ignoring
them and have become ashamed of the very part of our culture that allowed
our ancestors to survive for thousands of years.
Permaculture helps people to realize that all life is dependent upon a
balanced ecosystem, and that dependence is unlikely to decrease in the
foreseeable future, given the rise of modern industrial civilization based on
the use of nonrenewable resources that are generating greenhouse gasses.
As Meyer et al. state, “With the rapid population increases now confronting
the peoples of the world the demands for plant products are at an all-time
high and can be expected to rise continuously. . . . Whatever the future may
hold for the development in atomic energy and direct utilization of solar
energy, we can safely anticipate that green plants will long remain the most
important source of food energy.”38
In light of Meyer’s comments, efforts should be directed toward
nurturing the environment, creating a sustainable ecosystem in which green
plants can continue to thrive. To reverse our current global warming and
food insecurity requires our realization that when land is exhausted, without
having manure applied or without being allowed to “recover its goodness
during fallow periods, soil erosion occurs.”39 All these insights are
“primitive” in the sense that our ancestors followed them, and it wasn’t
until relatively recently that we began following a different, destructive
path: until about the 1970s in Malawi, forests were still intact and soil was
generally healthy.
With the introduction of permaculture in the mid-1990s, Malawians
found themselves singing a familiar song. They became strongly connected
again not only to their roots but also to the desires of their Mother Earth.
They are connected back to the farming traditions and the cultural values
and practices that they knew before the coming of external powers and
colonial methods of agriculture. Before foreign agricultural policies were
introduced, Malawians planted crops with various functions in a single
plant station, and this not only balanced the soil fertility and created
healthy, diverse meals that came right from the field, but it also increased
the amount of native crop diversity for a growing population. “Primitive”
agricultural practices increased the relationship of organisms in what in
permaculture is called a guild, and thus ancient people applied the truism of
permaculture ethics in their own practices, which scaled up their food
diversity and sovereignty. It is obvious that the indigenous farming methods
enabled farmers to reap a wide choice of foods maturing at different times
during the year, leading to a more resilient food security than is seen in
Malawi today.

Little Light Refracts in the “Mirror”

The introduction of colonial methods of farming discouraged many
Malawians from planting varied crops on the same plant station and in the
same field. It is alleged from oral sources that penalties were given to those
who defied European farming methods.40 Farmers were rewarded for
weeding clean all the ridges in their entire crop gardens and for uprooting
all trees and other plants that grew as “weeds” inside their monocrop fields.
These crop fields are now infertile and fail to feed their owners.
Permaculture holds out the hope for rebuilding the soil once again, in that it
encourages the making and use of manure and/or mulching, prescribes
minimal or zero tillage, advocates for agroforestry practices and
intercropping, and utilizes many other land, crop, and animal husbandry
practices that improve soil fertility in gardens. Overall, it attempts to weave
together climate, plants, animals, building designs, soil, water, and energy
management into cohesive and sustainable socioeconomic systems.
Therefore, the promise permaculture makes to communities is abundant
life. This extends far beyond food production systems and sovereignty to
explore new potential horizons for the sustainable life that Jesus claims in
John 10:10b.41

Permaculture Awareness Introduced in Rural Communities

Some local farmers who pioneered permaculture in 1994 have proved to
society and line government ministries that permaculture is a tool for
sustainable living.42 The practice of permaculture is growing and spreading
into many parts of the country, and it recently found its way into various
levels of governmental leadership and into the national education system. If
permaculture succeeds, it will in part be thanks to the African continent’s
permaculture education. Malawi, endowed with all its natural resources, has
the potential to show the world the path to sustainability if it fully adopts
the principles of permaculture. It is a place where some communities are
making efforts, including through education initiatives in the primary
schools, to retain their bond with their natural heritage through
permaculture. It is perhaps now being accepted that permaculture may
provide a practical and commonsense approach to identifying and
maximizing the country’s available natural and social capital in order to
empower people for a new sustainable and self-sufficient Malawi. There is
even a recent desire seen in some sections of the government to adopt
permaculture in order to improve food security and the social and economic
well-being of people through the use of organic, low/no cost techniques,
including participatory approaches to community development.43

The Mothers’ Union Model

Women in Malawi increasingly hold positions of power in their
communities and in the government. Their influence is especially evident in
churches and local gatherings. Moreover, it is probably true that women and
children provide the bulk of Malawi’s workforce in both subsistence and
industrial farming. The Anglican Church in Malawi has embraced
permaculture to help women easily grow more and better food.44 A book
called More and Better Food, launched in Malawi in July 2011, intends to
support “those who already grow some food but want to grow more, with
less effort and fewer inputs.”45 The book aims to assist those affected and
infected with HIV and AIDS and to reduce the workload of poor women
involved in food production. Although the Anglican Church is not
sanctioning child and women labor, it is trying to help women increase food
yields through permaculture, at the same time allowing nature to do some of
the work.

The Interfaith Permaculture Approach at Malindi

Surprisingly, when permaculture in its “new forms” was first introduced in
Malawi in 1994, a good number of the participants invited to Chilema were
Muslim and Christian clerics.46 Unlike the case in other countries in Africa,
members of the same family in Malawi often belong to different religions—
without conflicts. According to the Qur’an, catastrophes like natural
disasters do not happen only on account of humanity’s violations of
environmental composure; they also are caused by widespread human
moral decay. The use of the following verses in conversation with Islamic
groups in Malindi has helped to spread permaculture ethics and principles
for sustainable living: “And the earth We have like a carpet; set thereon
mountains firm and immovable; and produced therein all kinds of things in
due balance” (15:19–21). Moreover, the following verses from the Qur’an
surprised many first-time listeners in Mangochi: “And We send down water
from the sky according to due measure, and We cause it to soak in the soil
and We certainly are able to drain it off with ease. With it We grow for
gardens of date-palms and vines, in them have ye abundant
fruits . . . produce oil, and relish . . . for food. And cattle . . . We produce
milk for you.”
The Qur’an defines the key players in the ecological balance as follows:
animals (birds, insects, mammals, fishes, and invisible living things), plants,
air, mountains, rivers, oceans, soil, land, forests, and fields. Importantly, the
care of all rests in people’s hands. From a Christian perspective, the earth is
not fully created if there is no water, no flora and fauna growth. After
creating human beings God takes a break to rest. Thus, the creation story
(Genesis 1:13–31) reaches its climax after man and woman are created and
given responsibility to look after all God has made. Besides the creation
story, most of the stories and parables Jesus shared, as in Luke 15, as well
as the concepts of the prodigal son, the loving father, and many others are
agrarian and centered around issues of crops and animals.47

Malindi Parish Permaculture

In December 2009, thirty-five members of the local community resolved to
be trained in permaculture in order to turn their surroundings into better
places to live. They realized that most houses had lost inches of soil as the
surface was washed away by rain runoff and sweeping. They had noticed
that the fish catch in the lake dwindled each year, that the human population
kept increasing, that there was a scarcity of clean water, that forests were
disappearing, and that the weather had become hotter and hotter.
They realized that although they strove in vain to add days to their lives,
they failed to strive to add life to the days of the essential natural resources
in their surroundings. As a result of these insights and for the sake of their
children, these residents established a demonstration plot near the rectory.
After only two rain seasons, it became a learning center admired and
emulated by people in the area. The herbs, both medicinal and culinary, and
other food crops grown were ready for use. The moringa trees provided
relish for some guardians at St Martin’s Rural Hospital. Aloe vera and neem
in the plot were helpful to the community.
Overall, the project was sponsored by a UK-based charity, Malawi
Association for Christian Support (MACS). The collaboration points toward
more fruitful relations between Africa and Europe not based on the
imposition of Western technologies and views.

Permaculture, the Real Solution for Sustainable

Living
Permaculture is an appropriate solution for sustainable living in that it
connects rules, values, religious beliefs, and the customary traditions of
society. Furthermore, following the laws of nature helps people to fashion
their conduct according to its model. Unless there is mutual interaction
between the planet and all that live on it, care, love and peace shall never
prevail on earth, and only if we strongly teach our children to honor all of
nature’s gifts—water, soil, air, trees, and animals—will the joys and
beauties we desire exist. We are slowly rediscovering the principles that
inspired ancestral farming but were lost with the onset of colonialism,
principles central to sustainable living. Permaculture, when merged with the
goals of justice and earth stewardship espoused by religious values, has the
capacity to generate sustainable food security for Malawi.

Study Questions
1. How is the history of Malawi in relation to colonialism and the
Green Revolution similar to that of other case studies in this book?
2. What are some of Malawi’s traditional farming practices and
concepts that are similar to the teachings and farming methods of
permaculture, and why might these provide a more just foundation
for sustainable agriculture in the country compared to Green
Revolution technologies and colonial worldviews?

Notes
1. In an interview after a governance and leadership training organized by AID-Star Two Project
for Non-governmental Organizations at Lilongwe Hotel, Malawi, from July 31 to August 4, 2013,
senior traditional authority Chief Kalonga stated, “The country’s dependence on maize [corn] alone
has introduced the ‘hungry season.’ Malnutrition and hunger-related diseases are all relatively recent
events in Malawi’s history. They are probably caused by the way politicians have handled issues of
food and also because people have stopped growing and eating local foods. They have opted for
tinned and factory-made foods from Europe, [and these] are expensive, besides having lost essential
food values in them as they travel miles and miles.”
2. Robert Prosser laments, “The countryside [of Malawi] is still being destroyed at an alarming
rate by the subsidy system of Common Agricultural Policy, which encourages ripping up of
hedgerows, destroying woods and using too much fertilizer and pesticides. . . . [These] agricultural
policies damaged the countryside.” Human Systems and the Environment (Edinburgh: Thomas
Nelson and Sons, 1992), 146–54.
3. Bill Mollison and Mike Holmgren, quoted in Terry Leahy, Permaculture Strategy for the South
African Villages (Callaghan: University of Newcastle, 2009), 11.
4. Comment by Hogson Liposa, a participant in a two-week permaculture design course held at
Malindi in December 2009. As a result of this design course, some Malawians at Malindi and many
other places in the country have adopted permaculture as a bridge to cross back toward abundance.
5. Mwanaalirenji literally means “plentiful” and refers to the availability of all necessary
resources in a household year round, the Growing of the Kingdom of Abundance, whereby a child
does not cry because there is plenty to eat in the house. This relates to Malawi’s agricultural history
and the disasters of the country’s recent participation in the Green Revolution. Malawi has three
seasons: a rainy season from December to April, when crops are historically planted; what is now
called the “hungry season” in April and May, when the previous year’s food supply is running low,
stretching into the cool/dry season of July and August; and the hot and dry season of October and
November, when crops are harvested. This is followed by the next rain season, and the planting once
again of crops. Thus, Malawi has recently suffered recurrent periods of food scarcity, so that having
plenty of food in the house is seen as a blessing.
6. Michael Raw, Manufacturing Industry: The Impact of Change (London: Collins Educational,
1993), 11.
7. As stated in Deuteronomy 11:8–13 by the creator in his covenant with Israel: we shall
remember to “love the Lord our God and serve him with all our heart. If [we] do, he will send rain on
[our] land when it is needed . . . so that there will be corn, wine, and olive-oil for [us], and grass for
[our] cattle. . . . [We] will have all the food [we] want.”
8. Anglican Council in Malawi, Mapemphero ndi Nyimbo za Eklezia (Masiku Opemba: Likuni,
1996), 98.
9. Yayasan Idep, A Facilitator’s Handbook for Permaculture Solutions for Sustainable Lifestyles
(Bali: Permatil and IDEP, 2006), 1.
10. According to Brigldal Pachai, after colonial partition of the continent, Africa already had an
emerging comparative advantage in the export of certain agricultural products such as maize,
groundnuts, tobacco, and sugarcane, some of which demanded high chemical input and vast amount
of lands to be cleared so they could be produced. In many parts of Malawi it was in the joint interests
of some local chiefs, European merchants, and the colonial administration that created and enforced
agriculture policies and bylaws to replace the existing “primitive” farming methods. The new policies
and crops were intended only to further white settlers’ access to foreign markets for export and thus
profits. If the hunger season is to be reversed, Malawians need to look back to their precolonial
farming history and adopt some of the good methods that kept our ancestors in harmony with their
natural surroundings. Brigldal Pachai, ed., The Early History of Malawi (London: Longman Group,
1972), 42–47.
11. There used to be plenty of crop varieties that matured at different times of the year and that
made our country bountiful. We can easily go back and see in the historical record that we supplied
our agricultural excess to nearby countries.
12. Much of the corn grown in Malawi is for human consumption, whereas in the United States
most of its production is subsidized and it ends up being used to feed livestock or to generate high
fructose corn syrup, which is then used as a food additive/sweetener.
13. In terms of food security, agricultural research in Malawi is primarily focused on creating
hybrid seeds and animals. The government subsidizes synthetic farm inputs to grow more, but this
applies to maize only. Tobacco farming claims vast lands and heavy use of chemicals as well, so that
in the end the profits are not enough to enable farmers to provide their families with essentials. When
maize harvests fail, the government and many organizations respond by importing maize to
distribute. This is opposed to the practices and beliefs of precolonial farming ideologies, which
encouraged mwanaalirenji: abundance and balanced food right from the field, derived through
intensive intercropping to improve both the soils and the quality of human meals.
14. Quote and data taken from an unpublished article sent to the editor of the Permaculture
Network Newsletter compiled at the Secretariat in Zomba in Malawi for the November 2007 issue.
15. Unpublished article sent to editor of the Permaculture Network Newsletter for October 2009.
16. Unpublished article sent to editor of the Permaculture Network Newsletter for June 2008.
17. Unpublished article sent to editor of the Permaculture Network Newsletter for October 2009.
18. Anne Bayley and Walter Nyika Mugove, More and Better Food: Farming, Climate Change,
Health and AIDS Epidemic (Oxford: Strategies for Hope Trust, 2011), 7.
19. Permaculture Network Newsletter, January 2012.
20. According to the Ministry of Health’s nutritional rehabilitation unit posters distributed
throughout the country in 2006, 50 percent of our Malawian children are developmentally stunted, 80
percent have iron deficiencies, and 59 percent have vitamin A deficiencies. Nutritional rehabilitation
units are taking in new patients every day, and many adults are susceptible to disease, especially
people living with HIV.
21. In this practice, different family members gathered together to help in the garden of one
community member, and at the end of the labor they shared food and drinks. The following day, they
would share labor in another garden, repeating the process.
22. The various crops grown by the permaculture practitioner are harvested at different times of
the year, and therefore the farmer has food year round. The varied crops in the same garden offer one
another natural protection, support, ground coverage, natural digging, soil improvement, and natural
disease and pest control. Although the farmer gets steadily smaller quantities of varied yields, there is
enough better and healthier food for the family.
23. John Weller and Jane Linden, The Mainstream Christianity to 1980 in Malawi, Zambia and
Zimbabwe (Gweru: Mambo, 1984), 9. In “Precolonial Africa, everyday life had a mysterious
dimension. A woman digging in her garden believed that good harvests depended on the help of the
spirits as well as on her own efforts.” Sadly, with the onset of colonialism and the introduction of
new farming technologies after World War II, all such good and innocent people were forced to
change their farming ideologies. The thangata system of tenants and lords always favored white
farmers over the indigenous owners of the land.
24. Constance Mungall and Digby J. McLaren, eds., The Challenge of Global Change: Planet
under Stress (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991), especially 19.
25. Bayley and Mugove, More and Better Food, 16.
26. In a permaculture design course in December 2009 at Malindi, it was discovered that families
fail to produce enough food these days because the soils are exhausted. The same amount of land is
used by subsequent generations of extended families, and agrochemical inputs, hybrid seeds, and
animals are expensive. Government agrochemical policies encourage farmers to abandon malimidwe
a makolo, ancestral farming methods.
27. Weller and Linden, Mainstream Christianity, 11. The authors also share that when the British
missionary and governmental employee David Livingstone “visited the Shire in 1859, he was not
allowed into the gardens for fear he would spoil the crops by disturbing the spirits” (9).
28. Although the song is sung positively, it is in fact meant to discourage young people from
running away during the farming period. The singer, typically a counselor, explains the meaning at
the end, advising young people not to go away from their parents when the rains are about to fall
because such behavior causes hunger in society.
 29. This proverb teaches women to treat their husbands well, giving them enough good food so
they will be energetic and healthy.
30. Among the Yao in Mangochi, children are taken into the bush to “eat honey”—a euphemism
for circumcision used to avoid frightening the new initiates.
31. The ethics of permaculture are: care of the earth, care of the people, and fair share (or equitable
distribution of resources and setting limits on consumption and populations). The permaculture
principles are: each element in nature performs many functions; each important function is supported
by many elements; use everything to its maximum; always see solutions and not problems; look for
sustainable solutions; make things pay—recycle everything, work where it counts—use two-thirds of
your time to plan and the other third for working; like nature, do not compete but rather cooperate;
maximize the edge effects; place elements where they can assist other elements; intercrop; nature
never monocrops; produce food where you live, even in cities; and remember that nature does not
demand systematic and strategic planting in lines. http://permacultureprinciples.com/ethics/ (accessed
December 17, 2013).
32. Walbert Bühlmann, The Coming of the Third Church (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1976),
19.
33. Neil Russell-Jones, Your Own Allotment: How to Find and Manage One and Enjoy Growing
Your Own Food (Oxford: Spring Hill Books, 2008), 55.
34. Among the first participants in Chilema were June Walker, the current matron of the
Permaculture Network, resident in Mangochi District; Mac Justice Betha, a board member from
Chikwawa; and the Reverend Ndomondo of the Baptist Evangelical church in Liwonde, to mention
just a few. The homes of these members are good permaculture sites in the country. Today the
Permaculture Network has created other permaculture sites in almost all the twenty-seven districts
and many primary schools throughout Malawi.
35. Through such collaboration, permaculture is presently incorporated into college curricula in
some universities and colleges throughout Malawi. Many organizations adopted permaculture, and
some selected particular areas in permaculture to target specific groups in society.
36. Martin Duddin, ed., Aspects of Applied Geography, Rural Land Degradation (London: Hodder
and Stoughton, 1993), 3.
37. Russell-Jones, Your Own Allotment, 55.
38. Bernard Meyer, Donal Anderson, and Richard Bohning, eds., Introduction to Plant Physiology
(London: D. Van Nostrand, 1960), 3.
39. Peter Zinditha, “Population and the Environment in Mt. Mulanje,” Mulanje Mountain
Conservation Trust Newsletter, December 2009, 7.
40. A colonial agriculture minister once even jailed some local farmers for not making ridges and
continuing to use local methods. While the making of ridges and purchasing of chemical fertilizers
drained the farmers’ energy and financial resources, it also displaced manure and shifting cultivation
and the making of dunes, all of which were considered primitive in the eyes of missionaries
espousing Green Revolution industrial farming practices. The Reverend Canon Chisuwi, the pioneer
indigenous/Malawian priest, while adhering to the missionary’s mindset, could not see the wisdom in
local farming worldviews. This is seen in his book, Kalilole Wa Ana (“Mirror for the Children”). He
calls the primal worldviews of the Nyanja peoples “Nthawi ya mdima” (the time of darkness) and
hails the coming of the missionaries and new, Western methods of agriculture, health, and education,
claiming these will help bring Malawi into the modern age. If Chisuwi had only lived to the present
day, he would see what the “Mirror” has done for the children of the darkness, leaving them with
depleted forests, lost soil, and compromised food security.
41. “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
 42. Kenneth Mwakasungula is leading permaculture by example and has turned his home into a
veritable Garden of Eden in Kalonga, in the northern region. The Nordins family and the Chawawa
family at Mchezi operate the best permaculture sites in Lilongwe. June Walker’s site at Tanthwe in
Monkey Bay, MOET’s (Mangochi Orphan Education and Training) near Club Makokola, and
Malindi are all shining examples of permaculture in Mangochi. Lastly, Panthunzi and Changoima in
Blantyre and Chikwawa respectively are also viable permaculture sites in southern Malawi. At all of
these locations, permaculture methods are building soil fertility, and the sites serve as learning
centers for neighboring farmers so they can learn to do the same.
43. Government interest is indicated by discussions that took place outside a July 2012
parliamentary debate concerning GMOs, and the subsequent comments some members of Parliament
made in support of permaculture ideology when the philosophy was shared with them by
permaculture lobbyists. See also unpublished extracts from the 2005 design meetings reports between
the Ministry of Education and members of the Permaculture Network in Malawi.
44. Permaculture has found its way into the theological training institution. For example, in 2008
the Reverend Canon Alinafe Kalemba, who is the college dean, and Canon Martin Mgeni, both of
Leonard Kamungu Theological Seminary, related the principles and ethics of permaculture to the
teaching of the church concerning sustainable growing of crops and rearing of animals and decided to
request PAC training. The permaculture training and practice at the seminary now prepares lecturers
and students to face diligently the real challenges of sustainable agriculture in the community.
45. Bayley and Mugove, More and Better Food, 9.
46. It is, of course, somewhat ironic to refer to permaculture’s “new forms.” When introduced to
permaculture principles and ethics, many elderly Malawians nod their heads, signaling that this is
what they knew and practiced all along before the coming of Western agricultural methods.
47. The church at Malindi teaches Sunday school pupils permaculture principles with stories from
both indigenous traditions and the gospel.
 4

Nature Spirituality, Sustainable

Agriculture, and the Nature/Culture
Paradox

The Permaculture Scene in Lower Puna,

Big Island of Hawaii
Michael Lemons

Nature Girls
Ellie Harris loves climbing trees.1 She’s from England, did her
undergraduate work at Oxford, and obtained two master’s degrees—one
from Stanford and one from Berkeley—before ditching her Berkeley
doctoral dissertation for a back-to-the-land lifestyle in the rainforests of
Hawaii. She is a raw vegan who drinks concoctions of ginger and aloe mixed
with bananas and coconut cream each morning. “Organic is good, local is
better, and raw is essential”—that is her credo. She drinks the neighbor’s
homemade cherry wine but refuses beer from the local grocery store. She
puts honey on her staph infections but turns down my antibiotic ointment.
She likes drum circles but not rock concerts. She likes weeding but hates the
mower. She also avoids commercial soaps and shampoos; instead, Ellie likes
to stand naked under the spout of the water catchment and scrub her hair and
body with the fruit of the noni tree.
 Ellie and a handful of others lived for a while on a piece of property
belonging to a middle-aged woman named Ana. Ana is from California and
has a Ph.D. in biology. Cheerful and fit, she bought her property years ago
when land was still cheap in Hawaii, and she is now dedicated to low-impact
living. She no longer owns a car. She poops in a pit and covers it with soil
and compost. Once a month, the pit gets buried and a new one is dug nearby.
In a few months, the buried pit will become the home of a nut or fruit
sapling. Ana has been doing this for years and now gets nearly all of her
food from the trees, vines, and vegetables she tends on her property. The
detailed list she gives me of the one-hundred-plus food items she grows or
gathers on a regular basis shows coconut, eggs, breadfruit, avocado, banana,
and papaya to be her top six food sources. Her property borders a native
forest reserve, and she frequently heads into the reserve to kill nonnative
species that have become intermixed with the indigenous plants and trees.
Pigs and mongoose—nonnative to the island, as she points out—are forever
wandering out of the forest into her backyard cornucopia, where they
become fertilizer for her for food crops. She used to bury them when they
died, but not anymore; she says it is unnecessary effort compared to just
leaving them in the open where they’ve fallen and letting nature do the work.
When I ask how the animals die, Ana just smiles and says, “I facilitate that
process.”
In many ways, Ellie and Ana are model “nature girls” whose back-to-
the-land lifestyles might serve as an inspiration for many in an era
increasingly concerned with deliberately fashioning a culture of
sustainability. They are two of a handful of individuals who served as key
informants at my research sites in the lower Puna District on the Big Island
of Hawaii. Permaculture communities were defined as groups of two or
more persons living on one or more acres of land who either (1) used the
permaculture trope as part of community advertisement or community
identification, or (2) were described by members of the first group as being
examples of permaculture. I have been trying to understand exactly how
Ellie’s and Ana’s worldviews—the pattern of perceptual interpretation and
categorization by which they define and find meaning in themselves, their
environment, and society in general—are different from those held by
people who live more typical fast-food, air-conditioned, 9-to-5 lives in
nearby neighborhoods. Ellie’s and Ana’s beliefs and actions invoke an image
of deep concern, connectedness, and integration with the natural world that
symbolizes the ideals of “sustainable living” and “harmony with nature”
currently emerging in local, regional, national, and transnational contexts
around the world, including other case studies highlighted in this book. Their
apparent embodiment of these ideals lead them to be highly admired by the
throngs of young adults who arrive here from the mainland each year to
experience “natural” living for a few months at the various permaculture
communities in the area. But what emerges as most interesting to me about
Ellie and Ana is that they seem to have achieved these ideals in a way that
contradicts the message currently being espoused by academic spiritual
ecologists and environmental ethicists and historians—for they have done so
by accentuating the profundity of a perceived nature/culture dichotomy.
Map of permaculture communities in lower Puna. Community C had properties in both lower Puna
and the south Hilo District. Lower Puna unofficially comprises areas of Puna located in lava zones 1
and 2. Zone 1 constitutes the ridge of the Kilauea East Rift Zone. (Based on information provided by
Michael Lemons.)

Current academic theorizing in Western thought seeks ways to frame a

universal discourse of the environment. This trend denounces a perceived
nature/culture dualism and seeks instead a coherent nondual approach
intended to resemble non-Western thought.2 But Ellie and Ana haven’t
transcended or erased the nature/culture distinction—they’ve emphasized it,
and made a run toward the “natural” end of things. “Nature” has been
conceptualized as a realm of beliefs, practices, processes, and things that are
generally benevolent, healthy, desirable, sustainable, spiritual, and in
opposition to beliefs, practices, processes, and things associated with the
malevolent elements of a dominant mainstream industrial techno-“culture.”
In turning away from this realm of industrial techno-“culture” and running
toward this realm of “nature,” Ellie and Ana are demonstrating a faithful
embrace of nature/culture duality in a manner that, ironically, ends up
guiding them toward lifestyle choices that symbolize the evasive ideals of
nature/culture harmony.
As I will argue, the concerns that give rise to Ellie and Ana’s ideals of
nature/culture harmony are more than solely environmental in origin; they
include social and metaphysical concerns that, upon deeper examination,
prove as important as environmental issues for many of those who pursue
community forms of permaculture in Puna. Within the permaculture setting,
this perceived dichotomy between the moral, pure world of the natural and
the immoral, impure world of techno-industrial culture serves a role that Roy
Rappaport termed the Ultimate Sacred Postulate.3 Seeing the world through
such a lens helps to catalyze initial interest and participation in permaculture
communities. Furthermore, it serves as a latent conceptual point around
which consensus is built within these communities during the ongoing
process of deciding which beliefs, behaviors, objects—and sometimes which
people—belong on the bus and which don’t. But, like any conceptual
platform that serves to define a movement’s liturgical order, the same
apparent formulaic simplicity that allows permaculture to become such an
attractive no-brainer solution to many of the world’s current pressing
problems simultaneously leaves the meaning of permaculture itself open to
an increasingly wide range of interpretations as the movement attracts
growing numbers of adherents.
 Nature/Culture and Nature Spirituality: Scripts
Guiding Permaculture Drama
The term permaculture first appeared on the sustainable agriculture scene in
Australia during the late 1970s; since then it has gained increasing
acceptance as one of the leading tropes for implying a back-to-the-land,
grow-your-own approach to sustainable living. Founding permaculture
manuals focus on details of sustainable homestead design guided by three
principles: care for the earth, care for people, and a conscious reduction of
resource use and population. Permaculture’s growth has paralleled growing
concerns for sustainability and desires for alternatives to economic and
cultural paradigms associated with industrial capitalism. The years following
publication of its founding texts have witnessed a steady proliferation of
books, magazines, societies, academic articles, and the like, nearly all in
praise of the promises of permaculture and presenting permaculture practice
as a solution to many impending social and environmental problems.
However, the realities of actual on-the-ground pursuit of permaculture
can depart substantially from the meanings and aspirations attached to it by
academics, literati, and the progressive urban collective. My goal in this
chapter is to paint a picture of the permaculture scene as I experienced it
from 2006 to 2010 during participant-observation sessions, interviews, and
follow-up visits at locations throughout the lower Puna District of the Big
Island of Hawaii. Using a dramaturgical perspective, I present permaculture
as a theatrical performance, with participants as actors whose scripts are
driven by an underlying theme of nature/culture dualism.4 Staging the action
in the volcanic tropical jungles of Hawaii’s lower Puna District magnifies
and spiritualizes this script. The end result is Puna’s permaculture drama. I
present here vignettes from various scenes in this drama—scenes that
ultimately tie into a millenarian storyline that forever wends its way toward
an intended climax of social and environmental salvation made possible
through communitarian “back-to-the-land” living.5
It is important to note that I present this story not just as a scholar but
also as a past client of and participant in the sustainable agriculture and
community permaculture scene. My personal history outside academics is
that of a postmaterialist nature-loving spiritual seeker. Not surprisingly, I
found the community life that arose around sustainable agriculture one of the
few places I could find myself rubbing elbows with those of like mind. It
was through this elbow-rubbing process as a client and participant during
periods throughout my early twenties to midthirties, and later through
participant-observation and in-depth interviews as a scholar during my
graduate career from my midthirties up to the present, that I learned I was
not the only one drawn to the sustainable agriculture scene for metaphysical
reasons that went beyond a pragmatic concern with food security. Nor was I
the only one who found the on-the-ground pursuit of back-to-the-land
sustainability somewhat less utopian than imagined—and often even
downright disillusioning. I tell a small part of that story here with a reflexive
conviction that comes from recognizing that the narrative is as much a
critique of my own path as anyone else’s, while at the same time recognizing
that, although this may be a path less traveled by the majority culture, I have
not walked this path alone.
It is also important to note that, although the story I tell may reflect many
aspects of other sustainable agriculture projects, it is not intended to be
representative of all forms of sustainable agriculture, back-to-the-land
community lifestyles, or even permaculture lifestyles in particular. My
intention here is to tell the tale of a specific brand of sustainable agriculture
(communitarian forms of back-to-the-land living that use the “permaculture”
trope for purposes of self-identification or are identified as examples of
“permaculture” by residents of other back-to-the-land communities) as it
occurs within a specific geographic location.6 For these communities,
identification with the permaculture trope is a means by which to declare a
particular locus of shape and flavor within the broader spectrum of available
sustainable agriculture forms and alternative identities in general.
For purposes of brevity, I am not providing a description or typology of
the various identifiable forms of back-to-the-land projects that are to be
found in lower Puna and elsewhere, the various flavors and expressions of
nature spirituality that occur here and elsewhere within the Western world,
or specific descriptions of permaculture and its meaning as it is interpreted
and experienced in other settings.7 What is worth noting here before
continuing with the story is that back-to-the-land projects in lower Puna
have gained a reputation—on the Big Island itself as well as within the
greater Western permaculture scene and the alternative identity scene in
general—for being particularly “woo-woo.”8 I argue that this reputation
stems from the degree to which postmaterialism, egalitarianism, and
mysticism influence lower Puna’s permaculture participants’ overall beliefs
and attitudes toward nature and spirituality. Furthermore, I argue that the
tropical Hawaiian volcanic island setting itself helps shape the cultural
character of permaculture projects here and the degree to which spiritualized
forms of nature/culture dualism tend to prevail among lower Puna’s
permaculture participants.

The Stage: A Short History of the Lower Puna

District
“No other place in America combines a deep spiritual connection to the land
with such a hot real estate market.”9 “The district of Puna is Hawaii’s
wildest outpost with a reputation for free spirits, hippies and other
nonconformists.”10 Home to “pakalolo (marijuana) farms, FBI fugitives and
the un-bathed.”11 Thus go descriptions of the lower Puna District, the lower
half of one of nine districts of the Big Island of Hawaii. At 499 square miles,
the Puna District as a whole is nearly the size of Oahu, Hawaii’s main island
and home to the capital, Honolulu. Yet the contrast between the Puna
District and Oahu could hardly be more dramatic: Oahu is a wealthy
cosmopolitan island of white sandy beaches holding over 1 million
permanent residents, while Puna is a black-sand jungle frontier community
of twenty thousand living on the side of an active volcano.
One portion of this volcano, the Kilauea East Rift Zone, is caused by a
track of underground lava dikes running east of the Kilauea volcano summit
through the lower half of the Puna District. The land area covered by the
lava flows from this active dike system separate the Puna District
geologically into two informal sections: upper Puna and lower Puna. The
lava flows of lower Puna result in black-sand beaches, while Puna’s
windward location on the island leads to rain-cloud skies, rainforest
precipitation patterns, and thick growths of ferns, mosses, and lichens as
well as various unplanned tangles of weedy exotics and invasives that find
habitat along the roadsides. The overall effect is a raw, prehistoric vignette
of nature that confounds the mainstream’s whitesand visions of paradise and
compels the typical tourist to seek sunnier skies on the other side of the
island. These same traits have helped shape Puna’s reputation as a hippie
haven, which began with a steadily increasing trickle of alternative-minded
individuals throughout the 1970s.12 Lower Puna’s relatively nonarable soil
types and constant lava hazards result in dirt-cheap land in the tropics with
little policing, zoning laws, or other interference from mainstream techno-
industrial interests.
Overall, lower Puna embodies the necessary prerequisites of availability
of open land, lack of rigid social limitations, and other economic and
geographic peculiarities noted by historians such as Hicks and Edgerton as
typical attractions for communitarian-minded imaginations.13 In this setting,
lower Puna has become a flower power paradise for a fair share of offbeat
adventurers hoping to settle into an alternative “good life.” Individuals
arriving with this mindset find compelling reasons to equate lower Puna’s
environment and geography with their vision of paradise. As Grove points
out, islands in general and tropical islands in particular have, in the Western
mind, long been associated with the location of paradisiacal “gardens of
Eden”—isolated and peripheral refuges harboring the essence of a lost,
innocent, pristine Other that is both dear and fragile while at the same time
offering possibilities of environmental abundance and benevolence.14
Simultaneously, the flowing lavas of the Kilauea and law and infrastructure
exemplify an image of nature found in lower Puna that confounds
mainstream visions of Hawaiian paradise as it attracts spiritually oriented
individuals seeking to experience communitas within an apparent axis
mundi. 15
Kehena Beach’s black sand, volcanic soil, and rocky shoreline provide the essential raw imagery of
Eliade’s “axis mundi,” lending credibility to the belief that locations such as this are natural centers of
sacredness and power characterized by an increased accessibility to the magic and influence of the
supernatural world. (Photo by Michael Lemons.)

The Actors: Vignettes of Nature/Culture Dualism

and Nature Spirituality
Scene 1: Willow is mulching a taro patch and rolling her eyes at the voice on
her portable radio. It’s a public radio announcement reminding everyone to
wear sunscreen, since the sun’s rays are harmful and can result in skin cancer
after prolonged exposure. “Don’t they understand that UV and the sun are
natural?” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with sunshine!” I could take that
statement as representative of a basic latent nature/culture dichotomization
that permeates every organic farm, health retreat, and permaculture
community I’ve worked at here in Hawaii. Vilifying the beliefs of the
modern techno-“culture” while simultaneously identifying and glorifying a
realm of “natural” beliefs, behaviors, and objects that is at odds with this
“culture” is a consistent ideological pattern that I’ve seen expressed at each
of these various alternative living experiments. It is an inherently
countercultural ideology that can easily take on utopian dimensions within
circles of the most faithful. Rules of right and wrong, and beliefs about
whom to trust as authoritative holders of knowledge can become reversed.
Within these circles, discussions of the possibility of breatharianism are
likely to go unchallenged, as are diatribes declaring that the need for
sunscreen products is a lie promoted by a conspiratorial corporate-
government industrial complex. Noni fermentation, composted human
manure, raw meat—these things are “in,” as are many things considered
naturally stinky, gross, unacceptable, and/or unthinkable by the majority
culture. If there is an indigenous tradition somewhere in the world that can
be interpreted to be in alignment with the latest trending belief, then that
belief may find itself promoted into the higher echelons of bona fide
alternative knowledges, a subversive realm of sorcerers’ stones and
panacean paths of escape from the closet of mainstream lies, home to lost
truths that bring the believer one step closer to the salvation and freedom
that exist on the Other Side.

Images from the websites of two communities in lower Puna that use the permaculture trope as part of
their self-description. Understanding the postmaterialist, egalitarian, and mystic orientations of the
typical permaculture participant helps to explain why themes of nature communion, community,
spiritual connection, and personal healing become emblematic of the permaculture experience.
(http://permaculture-hawaii.com/.)
 Scene 2: Angel is driving me crazy. He is a twenty-something haole from
urban, middle-class New Mexico who arrived in Hawaii with the belief that
he wouldn’t need much money since it would be easy to grow his own food.
Now he’s waiting for his parents to finance his plane flight home. Angel
started out at the La’akea Permaculture Community but didn’t like the fact
that he had to pay $360 a month for room and board even though he was
working for the community twenty-eight hours each week. His next stint, at
Josanna’s Organic Garden, had promised him as much free food from the
land as he could eat, but he wasn’t satisfied with the sparse raw diet that the
promise entailed—“a lot of things just aren’t in season right now”—nor with
the workload that came along with growing food in paradise. At the moment
I’m giving him a ride into town so he can spend his recent allotment of food
stamps at the local health food store. He is looking out the window of my car
at a green expanse of ferns and ohia trees and trying to convince me that a
few acres of this land has everything you need to survive, “if only we knew
how to tend the jungle like the original Hawaiians did.” I try to tell him that
no traditional Hawaiian with a choice would ever attempt intensive crop
production on the soilless lava rubble from which this ohia-fern forest
sprouts, and that as far as anyone knows such areas were typically used
mainly for hunting or the gathering of herbs, nonfood ornamentals, and
construction materials. But Angel remains certain of his convictions. Plots of
land in the ohia-fern forest sell for cheap, and he wishes he could persuade
his parents to lend him the money to buy a small piece of land here. Then, he
says with confidence, he could start his own permaculture community in
which the food grown would be free to anyone willing to work.
Scene 3: Riox has just returned to the garden. She’s a thirty-something
office professional from Texas who recently left an unfulfilling marriage and
“felt a call” to go to Hawaii. Now, absolutely naked, she’s pulling weeds
next to me at a raw vegan community called Pangaia. After asking me a few
questions about my research, she shifts gears and tells me with a wide-eyed
smile how incredible it feels to be pulling weeds without any clothes on
—“cleansing” and “liberating” are two of the words she uses. Like many
newcomers from the mainland who arrive fresh on Puna’s permaculture
scene, Riox at the moment seems open to just about anything. Personally,
I’m feeling very square at the moment, clothed and closed. If I take my
clothes off too and go along with Riox’s ecstatic flow, will that be part of
cultural immersion?16 I decide to keep my clothes on and work my way over
to an isolated corner of the garden, validating my distance on the basis of
ensuring sound research that doesn’t cross some ethical boundary between
researcher and subject. At the same time, I am in full knowledge that such
boundaries are exactly the kind that communities like this are trying to break
down.
Although Riox is a few years older than the typical permaculturist who
arrives in Puna from the mainland for a few weeks, months, or years of
back-to-the-land living, Willow, Angel, and Riox all fit a certain profile that
tends to prevail among the crowd of permaculture participants in Puna: they
are nearly all Caucasian, well educated, intellectually oriented, left of center
in political beliefs, and from urban/suburban middle-class backgrounds. That
pattern becomes apparent to anyone who spends a few days or even a few
hours at any one of Puna’s permaculture communities. However, the
majority of Americans fitting this profile aren’t rushing off to join
permaculture communities. In the end, the most important differences that
separate Puna’s permaculture participants from the majority culture seem to
be along the finer lines of a nature-oriented spiritual belief system, coupled
with a tendency toward mystical experiences and combined with an
open/experimental and altruistic/other-oriented value system most aptly
summarized as egalitarian.17
These particular differences became apparent as a result of time spent in
participant observation at five permaculture communities, and were further
supported by the results of in-depth interviews with twenty-five of Puna’s
permaculture participants spread over six communities. These observations
were tested statistically through seven surveys administered for the purpose
of comparing Puna’s permaculture participants to three control groups used
to represent majority culture. While space limitations prevent me from
presenting and expounding upon the results of all seven surveys, I provide
here a short summary of the results of one of them in order to demonstrate
my thesis that the variables measured by these surveys can shed light on the
differences in nature spirituality and nature/culture dualism between Puna’s
permaculture participants and members of the majority culture.18 My goal is
twofold: to show how these variables catalyze, drive, steer, and reinforce
dualized nature/culture beliefs, and to highlight how these variables
demonstrate and elucidate some common patterns among Puna’s
permaculture participants that may be at odds with permaculture’s basic
pragmatic goal of sustainable food production and consumption.
 Performance Catalysts: Postmaterialist Ideals
Driving a Materialist Pursuit
Not everybody finds inspiration in Puna’s permaculture communities. Each
semester, I offer my Hawaii Community College anthropology classes a
chance to participate in a field trip to the La’akea Permaculture Community
in lower Puna. The students are mostly young local adults fulfilling course
prerequisites for acceptance to the college nursing program. While many
experience La’akea’s endeavors as positive, healthy, and honorable, others
view the community as negative, dangerous, and even a little bit foolish:

The community college needs to be very careful because that field trip
we went on the homes were not safe to be in, they had no final
inspection, and was totally illegal. They could have been a major law
suit if someone was injured. . . . The La’akea project was worth 4 total
extra credit points, but that place was filthy, and would not recommend
this to other students. . . . I think the community college needs to take a
second look at this instructor who potentially could have put our lives in
danger, especially because we were down in [lower Puna] which is in a
lava flow zone. thanks.19

To understand the basis for such differences in opinion, one good place
to start is by looking at the basic differences between materialist and
postmaterialist worldviews. The quote above (taken from an anonymous
end-of-semester course evaluation), expressing physical safety concerns
posed by a lack of institutionalized standards and the presence of natural
hazards, presents a typical if extreme example of a “materialist” worldview
as defined by Inglehart.20 Permaculture participants, on the other hand, are
predominantly “postmaterialist” in outlook. In fact, survey results showed
the single most significant difference separating Puna’s permaculture
participants from the majority culture was the degree to which Inglehart’s
postmaterialism survey demonstrated among Puna’s permaculture
participants a preoccupation with postmaterialist concerns.
Inglehart has administered his postmaterialism survey to over sixteen
thousand people in fifty countries to test his theory that individuals raised in
conditions of insecurity and material want spend their adult lives concerned
with matters of material security and wealth, while individuals raised in
relative safety and comfort tend to have “postmaterial needs” that focus on
nonmaterialist forms of morality, pleasure seeking, and aesthetics.
Postmaterialists, as a result, give high priority to nonmonetary ideals, the
importance of community input, and the need to maintain clean and healthy
environments, rather than to values associated with materialist concerns such
as economic growth, a strong national defense, and “law and order.”21
Inglehart’s theory of postmaterialism thus sees the novel value changes
associated with environmentalism and other substantive concerns as the
result of having grown up with a sense of material security.22 As materialist
concerns have been met in earlier years through economic and physical
security, attention is increasingly focused on aesthetic, relational, and
quality-of-life issues.23 The postmaterialist leaning of Puna’s permaculturists
is particularly interesting considering that the ultimate goal of permaculture
system design is long-term material security and autonomy—a materialist
concern—while the ethical imperatives that drive Puna’s permaculturists and
serve as the key means to this end are postmaterialist at heart.
The graphs below show the postmaterialism score results for
permaculture participants in Puna versus three control groups in Hilo,
Hawaii, representing majority culture (Hawaii Walmart shoppers, a
University of Hawaii, Hilo, SOC100 class, and a Hawaii Community
College SOC100 class). Higher scores reflect a greater degree of
postmaterialism.
In essence, a postmaterialist focus means that, for the typical Puna
permaculturist, the overall goal of life does not necessarily begin with, and
certainly doesn’t stop at, a concern for food, shelter, water, and other forms
of needed security. Following Inglehart’s logic, Puna’s permaculturists as a
group are among those whose focus on material concerns is substantially
less driving than for most people—they are exactly those who are the least
likely to be satisfied with the simple, low-impact, pragmatic pursuit of a
permanent supply of food, shelter, and water that was originally intended to
constitute the prize at the end of the permaculture rainbow.24 Something else
underlies these individuals’ drive for permaculture participation, something
else that led them to Puna in the first place. Attitudes and actions oriented
toward food, sustainability, and the natural environment in these
communities likely arise more from social, spiritual, and existential needs
than from material pragmatism; likewise, the drive to perform farming
activity within Puna’s permaculture scene is likely being catalyzed more by
a desire to engender a social experience of communitas and a sense of sacred
connection with the natural environment than by a primary preoccupation
with securing a long-term source of future food and shelter needs.

Postmaterialism Score: Permies (n=34)

Postmaterialism Score: Hawaii Walmart (n=31)

Postmaterialism Score: University of Hawaii Hilo Soc100 (n=36)

 Postmaterialism Score: Hawaii Community College Soc100
(n=25)

If the postmaterialist pursuit of material sustainability presents an irony

for the typical permaculture project in Puna, it may ultimately pose a
problem for the spread of the permaculture paradigm as a solution to
worldwide social and environmental problems. On a planet with a
burgeoning population, in which most material resources are becoming
increasingly overutilized, one can project a future that will witness an
increasing number of individuals born into and growing up in circumstances
far less materially secure than those that theoretically bred the
postmaterialist orientations of Puna’s permaculturists. Such circumstances,
according to postmaterialism theory, tend to breed a materialist outlook on
life—and materialist beliefs and actions are likely to be at odds with
permaculture’s postmaterialist approach to long-term material sustainability
and social/environmental equity.
As the survey results in the postmaterialism scores suggest, the majority
of Puna’s permaculturists tend to demonstrate postmaterialist leanings of the
most extreme nature. Comparably, even the typical resident of Hawaii—
already relatively likely to be far more materially secure than the average
member of the worldwide population—tends toward the materialist end of
Inglehart’s material/postmaterial spectrum.25 Hence, Hawaii residents mirror
the typical worldwide results of the postmaterialism survey, in which even
nonextreme forms of postmaterialism tend to remain a minority viewpoint,
even in the most industrialized countries.26 Thus, one of permaculture’s
greatest obstacles may be that its intentional, spiritualized approach to the
need for an environmentally sustainable lifestyle, focused ideally on the
autonomous and sustainable production and consumption of agricultural
products, may continue to be a postmaterialist endeavor of substantial
concern only to a select and relatively materially privileged portion of the
population.

Study Questions
1. What, according to Lemons, is paradoxical about the relationship
between current academic theorizing on nature/culture
dichotomization and observations of permaculture participants on
the Big Island of Hawaii?
2. In what ways, according to Lemons, does postmaterialism conflict
with the basic goal of permaculture?

Notes
1. All names in this chapter have been fictionalized.
 2. Many scholars consider the tendency to conceptualize nature and culture as separate categories
to be a uniquely Western way of thinking, or at least particularly pronounced in Western culture. For
the former view, see Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western
Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967); Stephen Horigan, Nature and Culture in Western Discourses (London: Routledge, 1988);
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993);
Max Oelschlager, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1993); Vandana Shiva, Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health, and
Development (London: Earthscan, 1994). For the latter position, see Elizabeth Croll and David Parkin,
Bush Base, Forest Farm: Culture, Environment and Development (London: Routledge, 1992);
Philippe Descola and Gisli Palsson, Nature and Society (New York: Routledge, 1996); Roy Ellen and
Katsuyoshi Fukui, Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture, and Domestication (Washington, D.C.: Berg,
1996); Helaine Selin, Nature across Cultures (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2003). Modern critics of
nature/culture dualism see its most basic flaw as stemming from the way it historically misrepresents
the interdependent and seamless relationship that truly exists between humans and the ecological
environment. See Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science, March 1967,
1203–7; Bruce Winterhalder, Historical Ecology (School of American Research, 1994); William
Balee, “The Research Program of Historical Ecology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (October
2006): 75–98. This resulting misrepresentation causes dualized nature/culture thinking to play a
central role in the emergence and persistence of various social and environmental problems, including
historic Western patterns of environmental conquest and the use of nature/culture dichotomization to
justify uneven power relationships between men (representing refined “culture”) and women
(representing “nature”) as well as between humans (higher “culture”) and other animals (lesser
“nature”). For environmental conquest, see Richard Grove, Green Imperialism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967); Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999). For uneven power relationships, see Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as
Nature Is to Culture?” Feminist Studies 1, no. 2 (1972): 68–87; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of
Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980); Carol
MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, Nature, Culture, and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980); Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern
Science (New York: Routledge, 1989); Rosemary Ruether, New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies
and Human Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1995); Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the
Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). These critiques have
led many scholars to begin exploring ways to rethink the nature/culture relationship as a means of
overcoming the limitations and problems posed by dualized thinking. See Donna Haraway, Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); William Cronon,
Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: Norton, 1995); Arturo Escobar, “After
Nature: Steps to an Anti-essentialist Political Ecology,” Current Anthropology 40, no. 1 (1999): 1–30;
Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment (London: Routledge, 2000); Val Plumwood,
Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (New York: Routledge, 2002); Philippe
Descola, “Beyond Nature and Culture: Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology, 2005,” in
Proceedings of the British Academy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 139:137–55; James
Proctor, “Environment after Nature: Time for a New Vision,” in Envisioning Nature, Science, and
Religion, ed. James Proctor (West Conshohocken, Pa.: Templeton Foundation Press, 2009), 1–14.
3. Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
4. Dramaturgy is a sociological perspective that looks at daily human interaction as similar to
staged theatrical events; two of its main arguments are that (1) people’s beliefs, actions, perspectives,
and motivations are dependent upon location, time period, and the audience; and (2) people’s daily
“performances” during everyday interactions are meant to create/cause/manage a particular impression
or dramatic effect (typically self-serving and/or dependent on acceptance by and amenability with the
audience) that requires the suppression of beliefs, actions, perspectives, and motivations that do not
contribute to the intended impression or effect. These performances typically follow loose “scripts”
that are meant to provide the “actor” with some guidance and direction regarding what is and is not an
appropriate belief/behavior for purposes of acceptable performance.
5. Millenarianism typically refers to a belief pattern in which the core belief entails the coming of
a major transformative moment or event. This core belief is accompanied by one or more secondary
beliefs that may include an apocalyptic moment associated with the transformative moment or event;
the arrival of a supernatural or preternatural entity or force in association with this transformative
moment or event; belief in a current period of malevolence, corruption, or evil leading up to the
transformative moment or event; belief in a time period previous to the current period that was
relatively free of corruption and/or evil; and/or a belief that particular actions associated with group
membership will allow group members to experience a positive post-transformative or postapocalyptic
period that will not be experienced as positive by nonmembers.
6. By referring to permaculture as a trope, I intend here to recognize the fact that the rapid rise and
widespread popular use of the term permaculture has resulted in various groups, communities, and
individuals utilizing the word in ways that vary in respect to meaning, intention, and associated action.
What may be understood by one group, community, or individual to be an example of a permaculture-
related action, concept, or motivation may not fit into another group’s, community’s, or individual’s
understanding of what the word means or encompasses. The result is that the word permaculture, as a
popular trope within the alternative lifestyle scene, ends up having a much wider range of meanings,
associations, and uses than that originally intended by its founders and/or those falling into the
category of strict traditional practitioners, for whom the term implies a much more specific and
therefore narrow range of agreed-upon meanings. “Permaculture” thus demonstrates a memetic quality
that contributes to its increasingly widespread use as a signifier of participation in the alternative
agriculture scene and alternative lifestyle pursuits in general. One consequence of this memetic quality
is that there is little consensus on whether this use of the trope in association with an increasingly
varied range of circumstances is or is not appropriate. For purposes of fairness and objectivity in this
chapter, I do not make any claims about the authenticity of any single group’s, community’s, or
individual’s definition or understanding of the word. Instead, as mentioned in the text above, I allow
my working definition of a Puna “permaculture community” to include (1) any group or community in
Puna that utilizes the “permaculture” trope as part of its self-definition, self-advertisement, and/or self-
description; and (2) any group or community in Puna that is claimed to be an example of permaculture
by members of other groups or communities in Puna, including those groups or communities that self-
define themselves as such.
7. See Michael Van Patrick Lemons, “Lifestyles of the Down and Prosperous: Nature/Culture,
Counterculture, and the Culture of Sustainability” (Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 2012) for an in-
depth discussion of these aspects.
8. In other words, they tend to be characterized by a relatively high prevalence, acceptance, and
outright expression of spiritualized New Age themes.
9. Patricia Leigh Brown, “Life on a Lava Field,” New York Times, July 2, 2005.
10. Big Island Visitor’s Bureau, “Pull over and Park It in Puna,”
http://www.bigisland.org/daytrips/228/day-two-pull-over-park-it-in-puna (accessed April 9, 2007).
11. Rod Thompson, “Ice Storm: Epidemic of the Islands,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, September 12,
2003, http://starbulletin.com/2003/09/12/news/story4.html (accessed April 10, 2007).
12. Ibid.
13. George Hicks, Experimental Americans: Celo and Utopian Community in the Twentieth Century
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); John Edgerton, Visions of Utopia (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1977).
 14. Grove, Green Imperialism.
15. Mircea Eliade used the term axis mundi to describe a physical geographic location that is
interpreted to be a communication point and/or point of accessibility between the earth and
supernatural realms located above or below the earth. Key to Eliade’s use of the term was the concept
that the physical and geographic characteristics of these locations lend themselves to such
interpretations. Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1991).
16. When using the “participant-observation” approach to immersion in another culture, the field
researcher faces the ethical problem during participation of deciding which activities are and which
are not acceptable means of accessing the native worldview. Anthropologists (for example, Bronislaw
Malinowski) have been known to marry into the tribes they study and even participate in tribal warfare
against neighboring villages. Sociologists studying gang mentality have participated in brutal and
illegal initiation ceremonies; others have had themselves arrested in order to study the sexual habits of
prison inmates. Efforts within the modern social sciences increasingly attempt to define and
standardize the limits of participant-observation as a means of protecting both researcher and subject;
nonetheless, the basic act of cultural immersion into the unknown Other will continue to remain an act
that requires crossing those very same physical, cultural, and ethical boundaries that seem to
distinguish “Us” from “Them” in the first place.
17. Egalitarianism in this case is used in Mary Douglas’s meaning, in which a sense of purity,
harmony, and intrinsic concept of fairness and righteousness during interactions and exchanges is the
idealized experience within the defined body. This body can be the physical body itself, a social body,
and/or an environmental body that includes interactions between humans and nonhumans. Crucial to
this definition is a sense that this egalitarian body is different than some other nonharmonious,
nonegalitarian body that becomes contrasted to the perceived ideal body of which one is part, trying to
become part of, or trying to create or re-create. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (New York:
Routledge, 1970).
18. See Lemons, “Lifestyles of the Down and Prosperous” for an in-depth look at the results of each
of the seven surveys. The seven surveys were: Inglehart’s materialism/postmaterialism survey (Ronald
Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics
[Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977]); Dake’s grid/group survey (Karl Dake, “Orienting
Dispositions in the Perception of Risk: An Analysis of Contemporary Worldviews and Cultural
Biases,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 22, no. 1 [1991]: 61–82); the Schwartz values survey
(Shalom Schwartz, Gila Melech, Arielle Lehmann, Steven Burgess, Mari Harris, and Vicki Owens,
“Extending the Cross-Cultural Validity of the Theory of Basic Human Values with a Different Method
of Measurement,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 32, no. 5 [2001]: 519–42); the Hood
mysticism survey (Ralph Hood, “The Construction and Preliminary Validation of a Measure of
Reported Mystical Experience,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 14, no. 1 [1975]: 29–41);
Jacob’s back-to-the-land survey (Jeffrey Jacob, New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and
the Search for a Sustainable Future [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997]); the
connectedness-to-nature scale (F. Stephan Mayer and Cynthia McPherson Frantz, “The Connectedness
to Nature Scale: A Measure of Individual’s Feeling in Community with Nature,” Journal of
Environmental Psychology 24, no. 4 [2004]: 503–15); and the modified new ecological paradigm /
dominant social paradigm (NEP/DSP) survey (Helen La Trobe and Tim Acott, “A Modified NEP/DSP
Environmental Attitudes Scale,” Journal of Environmental Education 32, no. 1 [2000]: 12–20).
19. Direct quote (anonymous) from a Hawaii Community College student’s ANTH200 course
evaluation of a field trip to the La’akea Permaculture Community.
20. Inglehart, The Silent Revolution.
21. Ronald Inglehart, Miguel Basanez, Jaime Diez-Dedrano, Loek Halman, and Ruud Luijkx,
Human Beliefs and Values: A Cross-Cultural Sourcebook Based on the 1999–2002 Values Surveys
(Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2004).
 22. Inglehart, The Silent Revolution.
23. Ronald Inglehart, “Aggregate Stability and Individual-Level Flux in Mass Belief Systems: The
Level of Analysis Paradox,” American Political Science Review 79, no. 97 (1985): 116.
24. Inglehart, The Silent Revolution.
25. See Lemons, “Lifestyles of the Down and Prosperous,” appendix A, for an explanation of why
Hilo Walmart shoppers were used to represent majority culture in Hawaii.
26. According to Inglehart et al. (Human Beliefs and Values), the countries with the highest
worldwide percentage of postmaterialists as of the year 2000 were Australia (35 percent), Austria (30
percent), Canada (29 percent), Italy (28 percent), Argentina (25 percent), and the United States (25
percent). From the graphs above, using scores from 7 through 10 as the range indicating a
postmaterialist worldview, survey results show that 22 percent of the Hawaii Walmart control group
comprised postmaterialists (very close to the US average) while 100 percent of the permaculture test
group comprised postmaterialists.
 5

Hindu Traditions and Peasant

Farming in the Himalayan Foothills of
Nepal
Jagannath Adhikari

This chapter examines how Hindu concepts of life and the cosmos shaped
human relationships with the environment—particularly the human use of
resources for agriculture in a subsistence farming system prevalent in the
Himalayan foothills of Nepal. Even though Hindu societies now are no
better than other societies following different faiths in conserving the
environment or reducing pollution, whether on farms or in cities, certain
concepts contained in the Hindu religious belief system based on dharma
(merit), paap (sin), and karma (deed) encompass moral principles that may
help in the conservation of resources like soil, water, and forest; in the
maintenance of biodiversity; and in the preservation of community cohesion.
These spiritual concepts can be useful in conserving resources if applied in a
way to suit the present context. This is especially so in rural farming
communities. After all, the resource management system in Hindu society is
a long-established one, clearly indicating that it has some elements that
could help stabilize the ecological system while growing food in a
sustainable manner. In this chapter, I attempt to identify those elements.
In this essay, I will analyze Nepal’s efforts to modernize agriculture,
efforts that have led to deteriorating environmental conditions. I bring
insights from my own birthplace, Baidam in the Pokhara Valley in
midwestern Nepal. Next, I will examine traditional agrarian ways of life
based on Hindu religious worldviews to explore the ecologically prudent
ways and beliefs inherent in this system. I look at their relevance to today’s
world in reducing the sustainability crisis of present-day chemical
agriculture in a farm-based economy. It is not my aim to romanticize the
traditional farming system or the Hindu religion, as the society following
these traditions has also undergone tremendous stress in the past fifty years
caused by population growth and the new desires of people to participate in
the consumerism perpetrated through the globalized economy. There is also
controversy as to whether the whole Hindu religion is conducive to nature
conservation. This leads to the question of why those ecologically prudent
practices were not applied to solve environmental problems. I also attempt to
answer these questions.

Situating the Context

Hindu religious texts like the Vedas as well as daily practices contain
references to the earth in general along with guidelines regarding how to
manage agricultural fields.1 The general guidance addresses the purpose of
farming as well as specific components of the farming system. A handbook
on sustainable agriculture written in Sanskrit in verse, Krisi-Parashar, dates
back to as early as the sixth century CE.2 Saint Parashara wrote this work to
benefit farmers in their farming practices. The book illustrates the basic
principles of farming, including how astrology—the positions of the sun,
moon, and other stars—guide farming practices. The book gives prominence
to how the early Aryans, followers of the Hindu belief system, accorded
importance to the gods of natural and atmospheric elements like the rain, the
wind, and agriculture in general. This treatise covers all aspects of farming
—weather and climate, management of land, management of cattle,
agricultural tools and implements, seed collection and preservation, and all
agricultural processes from preparation of fields to harvesting of crops and
storage of yields.3
As these guidelines were developed long ago, questions have often been
raised as to their relevance solving present-day ecological problems. In this
regard, it should be noted that the ancient system of farming was managed in
line with principles to which we do not give much value now. On the other
hand, they could still give us useful guidance. The basic purposes of farming
or producing food in ancient times (about the first to the tenth century CE)
were subsistence and to fulfill religious functions, including sharing food
with others. In an encompassing worldview, “others” included guests,
pilgrims passing by any village, temple, or sacred place, and more-than-
human species. The traditional farming system that still survives in the
mountains of Nepal remains subsistence oriented. Such a long-established
system has become complex, characterized by high species diversity in
terms of the varietal composition of plants and what people grow. The
interconnection among the components in this type of farming system, such
as recycling, self-pollination for seed production, and selection for seed
improvement, was and is emphasized. The culture stresses sharing food and
other resources. Moreover, these management principles underscore the
interconnection of human and more-than-human natural elements. Ancient
Hindu agricultural texts accented the belief that natural agencies like rain,
clouds, and sun respond to the behavior of humans, and thus humans should
not take these entities for granted but behave responsibly in order to assure
their cooperation in efforts to produce food. This ultimately means the
recognition that a reciprocity, an exchange between natural agencies and
humans is needed for sustaining the environment and for growing food.
In a long-established system like agriculture informed by core Hindu
religious values, there are certainly various elements that are well adapted to
the environment and are resilient. They are sure to have experienced many
perturbations in the system in the course of their long history, but they had
the ability to adjust and remain viable. This resilience is what is required in
the agricultural system at the present time in the face of environmental
uncertainties, including the impact of climate change. As I discuss below,
unlike the Hindu-based systems of agriculture and food, the modern
agricultural system emphasizes monoculture and the greater use of energy
inputs in the form of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, hormones, and other
chemicals. Even within a short period of fifty to sixty years, this system,
based as it is on external inputs, has caused instability in the ecosystem in
the hills and mountains of Nepal. The external chemical-based system has no
self-organizing properties like adaptability, biodiversity, stability, nutrient
recycling, and conservation. In this context, it is important to learn lessons
from the time-honored resilient system which, despite facing various ups and
downs and crises, has demonstrated in-built capabilities to regenerate
through self-organizing principles. Sadly, these principles have been lost in
the modern agricultural system.
 As I refer to it here, Hindu religion, or tradition, denotes diverse types of
faiths and practices that broadly follow certain beliefs considered to be the
core principles of this religion: the principle of reincarnation, the existence
of one absolute being of multiple manifestations (supreme being), the law of
cause and effect (karma), the need to follow the path of righteousness
(dharma), and the desire for liberation from the cycle of birth and death
(moksha). Different groups within this religious tradition follow different
core ideas, and thus it is difficult to define Hinduism as a religion. It is
largely considered a way of life or tradition that has to be experienced in
order to know it. At the grassroots level of the geographical area that I study
in this chapter, there is an intermixing of Hinduism, Buddhism, and
shamanistic and animistic faiths. Agricultural practices in village society are
informed by a combination of all these faiths and practices.
The Vedic model of agriculture could integrate all the elements of a
stable farming system producing quality food for self-sustenance and
feeding others who do not farm. I offer a closer look at these dynamics in my
own birthplace, Baidam—a community by Phewa Lake within the
metropolis of Pokhara in midwestern Nepal.

Nepal’s Deteriorating Agriculture: The Case of

Pokhara Valley
In the Pokhara Valley of Nepal, I have witnessed drastic changes in the
tradition of farming—not only in the values attached to land, fauna, flora,
and domestic animals, but also on the traditional concept of human
membership in the community of life in the village.4 Until about thirty to
forty years ago, these resources were considered, especially by elderly
people, as living creatures capable of cursing humans for misusing them.
Farmers were constantly worried about what their resources would do if they
were not used properly. While doing farming or any other work related to
natural resources, the conceptual trilogy of dharma (merit), paap (sin), and
karma (deed)—based not only on the traditional worldview of the Hindu
religion but also on local faiths like animism and Buddhism—was invoked.
Dharma, paap, and karma also informed the objectives of farming and the
way it was to be organized. (I elaborate on the properties of these concepts
below.) These beliefs also contained strong elements of social justice—like
the importance of distribution and the avoidance of accumulation—and of
moral ecology—reciprocal exchange between the human and more-than-
human worlds.
Practicing Hindus accepted the notion that there was unity in diverse
forms of life and that in all species there is the presence of one supreme
power.5 Such an ontological view guided people to view themselves as
merely one part of the ecosystem, equal to other life-forms, thus enhancing
the value of diversity and encouraging its preservation. This helped to
promote localism; the flora and fauna found in the local environment were
linked to human rituals and were also important for achieving a balanced
food system as well as maintaining health. It is notable that certain foods
were considered medicines, used for the healing of the human body as
postulated in Arurvedic tradition.
In recent times, Pokhara has urbanized and modernized with the influx of
people from within Nepal and abroad. In what farming has remained in the
area, modern chemical inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, and hormones) and the
hybrid seeds of only a few crops are used for the production of food. This
type of farming has contributed to environmental pollution (for example,
pollution of local bodies of water, leading to a rapid decline in dissolved
oxygen, the growth of various plants, and the death of aquatic species like
fish) as well as the production of food unsafe for human consumption, which
has caused various health problems.
Location of Pokhara in Nepal. (Based on http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/country/nepal.html.)

The pursuit of modernized farming—through government interventions

as well as the people’s new orientation to adopt modern ideas—seen in
Pokhara is common throughout Nepal nowadays except in some pockets
where modernization forces have not yet reached. Nepal’s agriculture has
still remained subsistence oriented, intended primarily to fulfill the
requirements of the family, although as of now, about 60 percent of families
who rely on agriculture as their main occupation cannot meet their food and
nutritional requirements by their farming. Unlike in the Western developed
countries, farming in Nepal is done on small landholdings, basically family
farms. On average, a farm consists of only about 0.7 hectare; very few farms
are larger than 4 hectares.6
The traditional farming system in the middle hills region of Nepal, and
particularly in Pokhara, was mixed: forest, farm, and animals were
integrated for growing a diversity of crops and foods. A typical farm
household would produce different types of cereals, pulses (lentils),
herbs/medicinal plants, vegetables, and fruits, supplementing the family diet
with wild foods collected from the forest. A few domestic animals were kept
—cows, buffaloes, chickens, pigs, goats, or sheep—depending upon the
specific cultural practice of the people. These used the crop waste and
converted it into milk/milk products, eggs, draft (animal) power for plowing
and transporting, and manure. Domestic animals also used forest resources
like pasture and fodder; these animals, in turn, produced foods for human
consumption and other products like manure to increase soil fertility. Forest,
pastures, and water sources were managed by the communities and were,
and still are, common properties.
A diversity of crops was grown on the farm, and some crops were
intermixed. Generally, cereals and lentils were intermixed with crops so that
the pulses would capture the nitrogen from the air and enrich the soil, at the
same time providing a protein supplement to cereal-based diets like rice,
corn, and millet. Vegetables, both seasonal and perennial, were cropped near
the house to meet the family’s nutritional and ritual requirements. Many
other plants were grown and conserved as required for the rituals. All the
required inputs—seeds, manure, knowledge, and labor—were local. Farmers
did not have to purchase seeds or know-how, as both were shared freely.
Seeds were open-pollinated and improved in each generation through
selection. Farmers used to take special care in the selection and storage of
seed. This is evident from a popular saying: “Anikal ma biu joganau hulmul
ma jiu joganau” (One has to protect seed during famine and one’s life in a
mob).
A typical model of a traditional farming system followed by Nepali farmers that integrated different
ecological niches like farmland, forest, pasture, and livestock. Mixed farming conserved biodiversity
and provided necessities to households including medicinal herbs, fruits, vegetables, and NTFPs (non-
timber forest products). (Figure by Jagannath Adhikari.)

Chemicals like fertilizers, herbicides, hormones, and pesticides were not

available in those days. In cases of pest or disease attacks, people depended
again on local biological materials, such as herbs. The basic advantage of
this integrated, mixed, and diverse farming system, even practiced on the
small unit of the family farm, was that there was recycling of resources and
thus the sustainability of the system was maintained. Humans were provided
with a diversity of foods as required for a balanced diet and a healthy life.
Attempts to modernize agriculture in Nepal started in earnest in the
1950s, when the country was opened to the outside world. The concept of
modernization followed the Western urban-industrial model of development,
which was imagined and then imposed as a better course to meet the
challenges posed by population growth and new expectations of a high
standard of material living. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides were
promoted; initially they were given to farmers as gifts, but later on prices
were charged—and regularly increased. Traditional or indigenous seeds
were considered “backward” and unproductive. Even the government
agricultural extension programs discouraged farmers from using local seeds,
urging them instead to plant either modern seeds that came from abroad or a
few improved varieties released from research stations. Since the 1990s, the
use of hybrid seeds has been increasing. The soil has become so poor that it
needs a strong dose of fertilizer, pesticides, hormones, and other chemicals
to sustain the production of crops. Although recently there has been some
resistance to these new seeds and the new style of farming based on
chemicals, their use has been growing because of a perception that whatever
is modern and developed (the Nepalese call that bikase) is better. The
traditional social and cultural values guiding land use and growing food have
declined. Current agrarian values and practices, including monoculture and
the excessive use of external inputs, are guided by market demands.

Farming and the Concepts of Dharma, Paap, and

Karma
Dharma in the Hindu religion/tradition refers to the duties of people as
defined by the society, depending upon the position of the individual. Doing
one’s dharma (svadharma) means not only acting ethically but also assuming
the duties that are proper to the class or caste into which one was born (due
to one’s past karma) and to the stage of life one is presently in. Hindu
philosophy defines four stages of life—brahmacharya (study leaving the
family), grihastha (householder), vanaprastha (retreat from household
chores and living in the forest), and sannyasa (renouncing the world and
withdrawing from material life), which represent a progression from lower
knowledge to higher knowledge and, ultimately, to moksha (salvation). The
first three stages are connected to the household and living in this worldly
life, whereas renouncers become ascetics by denying the materialistic life.
There is also a connection between these two broad categories. The
householders are supposed to look after the renouncers, and thus food
production is meant to be shared with such people. Food producers therefore
have some moral responsibilities and are guided by religious requirements.
There are two models in Hindu religion—householders-cum-farmers and
ascetics. The former are called to follow the “devotional” model because
they have passions and devotions to worldly affairs and to material wealth.
But this way of life is not isolated from the ascetic model—those who follow
this model reduce the pressure on available resources because they live with
only a few basic necessities and they do not have accumulative attitudes.
Farmers are supposed to follow what is called kisan dharma (or farmer’s
dharma), and this dharma means virtue. Virtue was understood as right
ecological action and right ritual activities related to farming communities
and farming resources. Farming is a secular (sansaric, devotional or
worldly) world, which is again opposed to the religious world. In religious
dharma, there is more emphasis on the transience of life, which calls for
withdrawal from the world (ascetism). But in sansaric dharma and kisan
dharma, farmers are to work on the land, producing more food as they
develop harmony and balance in the ecosystem, considering themselves as a
part of all life forms in the farm ecosystem.
Kisan (farmer) is the second stage in the life of people following the
farming profession, and to embrace this occupation is to become a
householder. In this stage of life, a farmer needs to properly pursue not only
dharma (religious duties) but also artha (material prosperity) and kama
(passion and reproduction). The farmer/householder has the responsibility
not only to sustain his or her household but also to support needy community
members, including ascetics, through alms and gifts and organizing rituals.
Rituals were aimed at benefiting nature and society as well as oneself.
Accordingly, many rituals to be followed were traditionally aligned with
agricultural cycles. Remnants of a few of these rituals can still be observed
in rural areas. The rituals include worshipping other life forms, which
essentially means showing reverence toward them. Among these rituals are
the worship of serpents (on a special day the virtues of snakes are extolled),
frogs, land, vultures (garuda), trees, and crops; the marriages of trees are
also celebrated. These rituals are aimed at creating a balance in the
ecosystem and producing more food. They serve the practical purpose of
biologically controlling insects and other pests that might cause damage to
the crops. For example, rituals related to snakes and frogs would help in
maintaining a balance of rats, snakes, frogs, and vultures to avoid an
overpopulation of rats.
Like land, water, too, has a special place in Hindu tradition. It is regarded
as one of the five primal elements (pancha-tatva) of the universe. Water is
also considered a source of purification and expiation. The sources of water
were sacred and were worshipped with respect. Polluting water sources was
considered sin (paap).7 Accordingly, rivers were/are also sacred. The
Himalayan mountains, considered a water tower, are worshipped and
respected, believed to connect earth and heaven. Hindu scriptures clearly
mention that the sight of the Himalaya in early morning takes away one’s
sins, and these mountains are to be admired from a distance—not to be
conquered by humans. Adherence to this philosophy might have maintained
the rivers and other water bodies clean because the Himalaya is the source of
water. Aptly, one of the mountains in the Himalayan range just north of
Pokhara valley is called Annapurna—the storehouse of grain. The snow
collected here was traditionally considered grain because it supplied water to
rivers and other water sources. Some rural people, especially the elderly, still
regard natural lakes as having sacred waters and feel cleansed if they bathe
in these waters. For some time, people had no scientific knowledge of the
cause-and-effect relationship of throwing modern inputs such as chemicals,
fertilizers, and plastics into the water and ecological pollution.
Many of the resources in the villages were kept communally, considered
“common goods.” People who expanded, enhanced, and enriched these
common goods would have more dharma. There were no patent rights on
innovations. A farmer would freely share or exchange good seed developed
on his or her land. Giving seeds to places and people struck by famines was
a great dharma, an act earning merit, for the farmers. People would help each
other mutually by donating free labor. Maintaining a common
communitarian life was itself a dharma—dharma as a neighbor or as a fellow
villager.
The fear of paap, which is the opposite of dharma, was invoked to
restrain people from doing adharmic things. There is paap in not following
the moral obligation to help or support people in need, the poor, and the
destitute. There is paap in harming one’s fellow human beings. The concept
of paap is equally invoked in doing harm to nature and not following one’s
dharma to use it properly. The mirror-image concepts of dharma and paap in
Hindu religion/tradition were aimed at making people identify with nature to
maintain harmony with all of creation.

Karma: Source of a Caring Attitude

Karma is a concept closely related to dharma. Using the idea of karma,
peasants used to connect their actions and the consequences thereof not only
to the present but to the past of their ancestors and to the future of their
descendants. It would also encourage them to do right karma and to accept
natural events without complaint. Whatever benefits or harm people reaped
from their actions, they would be content, saying it was the karma ko phal
(the fruit of karma). In fact, according to scriptures, once karma (action) is
started, it continues without a break. Even when a person dies, his or her
karma survives in the form of memory and carries over into the next life.
Sometimes the consequences of karma are indecipherable to individuals—an
individual’s family members and later descendents may be forced to pay for
past crimes or may benefit from past good actions.8 The concepts of karma
and reincarnation could help make people compassionate and caring for
others even as they encouraged them to practice self-restraint.

Unity and Diversity in the Farm Ecosystem:

Making Connection with the Cosmos
The mixed, diversified, and integrated farming methods that were followed
under the subsistence system described above and the rituals contained in
this system were aimed at nurturing unity among diverse life forms. This
was achieved in a self-contained farming system geared toward producing
what was required for the family and community not only in terms of human
needs but also to connect human life with the natural world. This entailed a
diversified farming system with emphasis on preserving various species of
plants and animals and developing interconnections among them for reuse
and recycling of resources and avoiding waste. The major emphasis was on
maintaining the dynamic balance between the five basic elements of the
universe—prithiwi (land), jal (water), tej (radiation, energy, or fire), bayu
(air), and aakas (cosmic space)—as they relate to human activities. That
dynamic balance formed the structure and infused the life of all creatures. It
was believed that if this balance were not maintained, then both nature and
the human body would become sick and dysfunctional.
Farm and forest were viewed as interconnected spaces for the transfer of
energy as well as for the shifting of people’s residence. According to Hindu
philosophy, the farm or agrarian life needs to be connected with the forest
life for the regeneration of energy and creativity. Forests were seen as spaces
where teaching and thinking could be conducted. The remnants of these
sacred forests are still found in many villages in Nepal. Many books were
composed when the sages stayed in the forest. Many kings in the past, like
King Rama of the epic Ramayana, stayed in the forest, becoming
philosopher-kings, in order to understand the complexity and dynamics of
natural life, which would make them wise.
Intimately linked to biological diversity are cultural practices and
customs, such as myths regarding the virtues of sacred plants and trees,
festivals for the germination of seeds, and customary rights setting limits on
the use of natural resources. The practice of navadhanya (nine seeds to be
used for rituals) embodies a link between cosmic influences and life forms
on earth since each of the nine seeds is associated with a planet or cosmic
force—like chickpea representing Jupiter, sesame Saturn, rice Venus, and
barley the sun. In Durga Puja (worship of the goddess Durga), barley, rice,
and the leaves of various plants are required. People need to germinate,
grow, and maintain these plants. As food rituals (systems) also change
according to the seasons in order to cope with the challenges of particular
seasonal patterns, diversity in food production is required. Such a repertoire
of rich diversity was based on local fauna and flora cultivated in gardens and
farms as well as found in the nearby forests. Thus biological and cultural
diversities reinforced one another.
For example, seed was considered not only a source of food but also an
element of culture and rituals. One such ritual is called satbeej charne
(hundred-seed dispersing), wherein people have to disperse at least one
hundred types of seed in a sacred place, some of them located in high
mountain areas. This ritual is to be performed by someone within a year of
the death of a family member. In some places the seeds could propagate
naturally; in cold areas in the mountains, they could be stored for two or
three years, providing a storehouse that could be accessed in times of
famine. The practice was also a basis of maintaining biodiversity.
The traditional system of farming was so effective in preserving
agrobiodiversity that there were as many as two thousand landraces
(varieties) of rice in Nepal alone, growing in areas from 60 meters in altitude
to 3,050 meters.9 However, a study revealed that of the known eighteen
hundred varieties of indigenous landraces of rice, including wild species in
Nepal, only one variety is popularly cultivated in Tarai, where rice is widely
grown.10 In Pokhara Valley, fifty-three local varieties of rice were recorded
as late as 2007 in the small village of Begnas.11 A few popular varieties of
this rice are still grown, but most others are replaced by modern varieties.
This evidence suggests that local species and landraces are disappearing.
Modification of cropping patterns and the expanded use of hybrid seeds and
imported seeds of a few improved varieties are the main causes of this
decline in agrobiodiversity.

Localism: Exchange and the Moral Economy

The value of local self-sufficiency in traditional farming historically helped
to avoid long-distance trade in food. The local rituals required that crops and
animals be produced in the local context. As a result, farming preserved
biodiversity. Some exchange was practiced, but the food mileage was very
low. In fact, the exchange of produce, seeds, manures, labor, and ideas to
preserve the land and produce more food was emphasized. Donations of
seeds and food were considered sacred and were done for free, and this act
of distribution was required if there was surplus production in a year. The
purpose was to earn religious merits (dharma), not money. This ideology
contrasts sharply with the present-day practice of selling the seeds and
patenting them. Traditional farmers constantly improved their seeds, but they
did not receive any patents—it was done for their kisan dharma. Seed
exchanges also took place between communities, but this exchange was
done not with the idea to compete with others or to destroy another seed.
Such practices merely added biodiversity.
As high-yielding varieties and chemical pesticides are widely used now,
the practices associated with traditional varieties have fallen into oblivion.
Hence, the erosion of crop diversity is accompanied by a loss in cultural
diversity. Biodiversity has been reduced because of homogenized growing
conditions, such as using the same few high-yielding crops, the same few
high-yielding seeds, and the same kind of surface irrigation. As a result, the
erosion of genetic diversity has accelerated.
The decline of biodiverse cropping systems I have seen in Nepal is not
an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it is linked to broad processes of change
shaped by dynamic political and socioeconomic forces—the introduction of
the Green Revolution, liberalization of the economy, and other aspects of
globalization. The increased emphasis on export-bound crops and the advent
of agribusiness justify the expansion of monocultures of corn, cabbage,
tomatoes, and other crops. At the same time, the penetration of corporate
food industries’ highly processed and packaged food (biscuits, canned food,
noodles, and other products having a long shelf life) is destroying local food
culture, biodiversity, production, and human health.

Reflection on the Future of Agriculture

The traditional farming system, informed by the Hindu ethos and principles,
was influenced by a distinct worldview. As I have shown above, within this
worldview, nature was valued differently—not merely as an object or a
commodity but as an embodiment of spiritual values with a deep connection
to divine processes, or the realm of the sacred. In this chapter, I have
examined a community in which the Hindu religion is dominant but, as
practiced at the grassroots level, is a confluence of Hindu principles,
Buddhism, shamanism, and animism. As argued by Nepali anthropologist
Pramod Parajuli, the coeditor of this volume, despite their religious
affiliations, locally specific, place-based people depending on nature for
survival and sustenance could be considered “ecological ethnicities.”12
Some of the principles of Hinduism have been embedded in rituals that
contain wisdom for the conservation of nature. The concepts of dharma,
paap, and karma as understood by people socialized in Hindu communities
encouraged people to do the right thing for nature, the land, and one another,
without regard to the generation of wealth. The right act was to produce food
for the sustenance of human beings and the regeneration of nature. The
ultimate goal was the well-being of both the community of human beings
and of more-than-human species through food consumption and ritual
activities. As a result, biodiversity was maintained through rituals, and
localism was emphasized in the production and use of the produce. Dharma
and rituals also defined what level of consumption is righteous and the
criteria for the right accumulation of wealth. The pursuit of dharma and
other achievements like artha (wealth) and kama (passion) did not lead to
conspicuous consumption. Today’s problem in Nepal, and for that matter in
all developing countries, is not only decreasing production but also
conspicuous consumption and the wrong kind of consumption.
The Green Revolution model of agriculture in conjunction with the
urban-industrial model of development as pursued in developed countries
emphasized “productivity” at the expense of biodiversity. Biodiversity
became a burden and an obstacle rather than an asset. The Green Revolution
put emphasis on a few select crops like wheat, corn, and rice. The so-called
high-yielding varieties (HYV) of seeds of wheat and rice were brought from
developed countries and disseminated in Nepal. Vandana Shiva has argued,
“HYV seeds are misnamed because the term implies that the seeds are high
yielding in and of themselves. The distinguishing feature of these seeds,
however, is that they are highly responsive to certain key inputs such as
fertiliser and irrigation. They are actually, high response varieties.”13 The
continued use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides has altered the ecological
balance in many parts of the world. Despite these interventions, yields are
stagnating and the growth rate of production is on the decline. Other side
effects include waterlogging, soil deficiency in micronutrients, and an
increase in soil salinity.
In the context of today’s ecological crises, exacerbated by modern
chemical- and fossil fuel-based agriculture, recovering and regenerating
some central elements of the traditional Hindu principles of farming could
be useful. The concept of two-pronged dharma (one emphasizing the moral
economy in the distribution of food and feeding others, and another focusing
on giving back to nature to maintain its reproductive capacities) seems very
relevant in today’s world. Such an approach would reduce social inequality,
malnutrition, and food crises, and at the same time maintain the
sustainability of the ecosystem. The ideas of food sovereignty and localism
are also contained in this philosophy, as explained above. In its simplest
form, dharma is a mechanism that creates respect for nature and improves its
capacity to regenerate.14 Such a relationship of respect is imperative if we
want to achieve sustainable agriculture.
Reflecting back on the resiliency of what I considered a Vedic system of
agriculture, I certainly do not think it advisable to go back to ancient times.
However, concepts emphasizing a balanced and harmonious relationship in
the ecosystem between the human and more-than-human worlds as practiced
in the past may sensitize the consciousness of present-day farmers and
policy makers. To this end, I propose that building a locally based, diverse
food production system could be a highly effective way forward.

Study Questions
1. Do ancient texts, beliefs, rituals, doctrines, and customs that were
generated long before concepts such as evolution and soil science
arose have something to contribute to contemporary sustainable
agriculture? What elements of rural Hinduism does the author
suggest might be relevant, and why?
2. What are examples of management principles that “underscore the
interconnection of human and more-than-human natural elements,”
and how do these differ from industrial agriculture?
3. What was locally exchanged in rural Nepalese farming, and how did
this contribute to a sustainable agriculture as well as the creation of
place-specific Hindu concepts and rituals?

Notes
1. Suchitra J. Sarma, “The Circle of Existence and Interdependence: Ecopoetry of the Vedic Ksetra
or Field,” Interdisciplinary Studies on Literature and Environment 11, no. 2 (2004): 79–106.
2. Krishi-Parashara (Agriculture by Parashara), trans. Nalini Sadhale, Asian Agri-History
Foundation, bulletin 2 (Secundarabad: Asian Agri-History Foundation, 1999).
3. Manikant Shah and D. P. Agrawal, “Krishi Parashara: An Early Sanskrit Text on Agriculture,”
n.d., www.indianscience.org/essays/24-%20E-F-Krishi%20Parashar.pdf (accessed August 1, 2010).
4. Pokhara metropolis is now an urban society, but I will discuss farming practices that obtained
when it was still a rural society, that is, the situation in the 1960s and 1970s. This place, a popular
tourist destination now, has been modernized and urbanized at a rapid rate. Detailed description about
the changing nature of this town can be found in Jagannath Adhikari and David Seddon, Pokhara:
Biography of a Town (Kathmandu: Mandala Book Point, 2001).
5. Ranchor Prime, Vedic Ecology: Practical Wisdom for Surviving the 21st Century (San Rafael,
Calif.: Mandala, 2002).
6. Central Bureau of Statistics, Nepal Living Standard Survey, vol. 2 (Kathmandu: Central Bureau
of Statistics, 2012).
7. Sudhindra Sharma, “Water in Hinduism: Continuities and Disjuncture between Scriptural
Canons and Local Traditions in Nepal,” Water Nepal 9–10, nos. 1–2 (2003): 215–47.
8. O. P. Dwivedi, “Dharmic Ecology,” in Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky
and Water, ed. Christopher Key Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 3–22.
9. Bal K. Joshi, “Rice Gene Pool for Tarai and Inner Tarai Areas of Nepal,” Agricultural Research
Journal 6 (2005): 10–22.
10. G. L. Shrestha and M. P. Upadhyay, “Wild Relatives of Cultivated Rice Crops in Nepal,” in Wild
Relatives of Cultivated Plants in Nepal: Proceedings of National Conference, ed. R. Shrestha and B.
Shrestha (Kathmandu: GEM, Nepal, 1999), 72–82.
11. R. B. Rana, C. Garforth, D. Jarvis, and B. Staphit, “Influence of Socioeconomic and Cultural
Factors in Rice Variety Diversity Management on Farm in Nepal,” Agriculture and Human Values 24,
no. 4 (2007): 461–72.
12. Pramod Parajuli, “How Can Four Trees Make a Jungle?” Terra Nova 3, no. 3 (2004),
republished in Terrain Magazine, http://www.terrain.org/essays/14/parajuli.htm.
13. Vandana Shiva, Afsar H. Jafri, and Ashok Emani Manish Pande, Seeds of Suicide: The
Ecological and Human Costs of Globalisation of Agriculture (New Delhi: Research Foundation for
Science, Technology and Ecology, 2002), 2.
14. Pankaj Jain, Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities: Sustenance and Sustainability
(Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2011).
 6

Dharma for the Earth, Water, and

Agriculture

Perspectives from the Swadhyaya

Pankaj Jain

This chapter is about the Swadhyayis, Swadhyaya practitioners, in the

Indian states of Gujarat and Maharashtra. The Swadhyaya movement arose
in the mid-twentieth century in Gujarat as a new religious movement led by
its founder, the late Pandurang Shastri Athavale (1920–2003). In my
research, I discovered that there is no category of “environmentalism” in
the “way of life” of Swadhyayis living in the rural areas of western India.
Following Weightman and Pandey, I argue that the concept of dharma can
be successfully applied as an overarching term for the sustainability of
ecology and agriculture and the religious lives of Swadhyayis.1 By
developing reverential relationships with trees, water, cows, and other
ecological resources, Swadhyayis strive to develop their dharmic teachings
into practice.
Athavale often cited the definition of dharma from the Mahābhārata
(12.110.11): that which sustains both the personal order and the cosmic
order. Swadhyayis, like many other Hindu communities, use “dharma” to
describe their ethos as it relates to their religion and the natural order. For
them, the distinction between the religious ethos and the ecological order is
negligible, so they express both with the common term dharma or dharam.
Dharma as “virtue ethics” has served as a moral guide for Indians for
millennia.2 In my research with the Swadhyayis, I found that their
inspirations were the Hindu epic heroes and their guru, whom they see as
role models practicing dharma to attain moksa, spiritual liberation. Athavale
repeatedly stressed that only actions done with a devotional motive can be
considered dharmic actions leading to moksa. He correlated the motive of
the action with the potential for moksa. Based on my case study of
Swadhyayis, an ethical framework based on dharma and karma that is also
integrated with moksa can serve as an important step in the development of
a comprehensive Hindu environmental ethics.

Gujarat and Maharashtra coast. (Based on http://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/16464/IN.)

 McKim Marriott has suggested that dharma can be an ethnosociological
category to study and analyze the Indic world that frequently transgresses
the world of religion, environmental ethics, and the human social order, as
is evident from my case studies of Swadhyayis.3 Swadhyayis, like other
Hindus, use dharma to mean both their religious practices and their social
duties. Thus, I suggest that dharma can function as a bridge between the
ecological notions and environmental ethics of local Hindu communities
and the ecological message related to the planet earth. The word dharma
can be effectively used to translate the ecological awareness to reach out to
local communities of Hindus based on its meanings related to duties,
ecological order, sustenance, virtues, righteousness, and religion.

Swadhyaya’s Dharmic Ecology

Swadhyaya is one of the least-known new religious movements that arose
in the mid-twentieth century in the western states of India. Although this
movement now has some presence in several Western countries, including
the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, it has not received the
attention of scholars of Hinduism with the exception of a few introductory
essays.4
Having heard about the new religious movement Swadhyaya during my
trip to India in 2006, I called the organization’s office in Mumbai to
investigate. Soon I found myself on my way to Valsad in Gujarat, where I
arrived at the home of a Swadhyaya volunteer, Maheshbhai, who took me to
some of the farms and water-harvesting sites managed by local
Swadhyayis.5 All of them welcomed me warmly and enthusiastically
explained their activities and the ideologies of the Swadhyaya movement.
As the Swadhyayi farmers told me about the way they perceive nature and
the vision of their guru Athavale, I asked questions related to
environmentalism and sustainability. What I present below is based on
several such interviews with Swadhyaya followers. I have also extracted
relevant information from the literature of Swadhyaya that is based on the
video-recorded discourses of Athavale.
Swadhyaya (literally, self-study) was inspired by its founder, Pandurang
Shastri Athavale, known as Dādājī (meaning “elder brother” in Marathi and
“grandfather” in Hindi). He was born in 1920 to a Maharashtrian Brahmin
family. His father had founded a traditional school in 1926 called Gītā
Pāthshālā (Bhagvad Gita School) to teach the Hindu scriptures in Mumbai.
In 1942, when suddenly his father fell ill, young Athavale took over
responsibility for the school. Although a Maharashtrian by birth, he
developed fluency in Gujarati since most of his listeners were Gujarati. Not
much is known about the early years of Athavale’s work, which seems to
have been limited to preaching based on traditional Indian texts. However,
his focus soon changed when he participated in a religion conference in
Japan in 1954. This proved to be a turning point in his life. Apparently, he
was challenged there to show any village in India where people live based
on the Bhagvad Gita’s message.6 After his return from Japan, he decided to
develop a role model based on the traditional dharmic teachings. His work
first took shape in 1956 when he launched Tattvajñāna Vidyāpīţha, a
residential school with a mission to study the Indic traditions and
philosophies. This event can be considered one of the early milestones of
his work.
For the first few decades after starting his work, Athavale’s focus was to
teach and spread the doctrine of the “Indwelling God,” the divine presence
within humans and other beings. For Athavale, asmitā (self-esteem) was an
important virtue to be developed based on the awareness of Indwelling
God.7 Although the ancient Vedantic texts identify Ātman within each
living entity as identical with Brahman—the all-pervading soul of the
universe—such Brahminical concepts have largely been the subject of
research and discussion among scholars rather than practiced in the daily
lives of ordinary Indians living in villages. I should note here that during
this period, Indian villages were largely undeveloped, and the fruits of
Indian economic progress had not yet reached these rural areas. Thus,
Athavale must have faced an uphill battle to infuse a sense of self-esteem
and faith in Indian cultural traditions in villagers struggling to make ends
meet. When Western societies were already in their “postmodern” phase of
facing the environmental problems that arose due to industrialization,
Indian villagers were still in their “premodern” phase of agricultural
economy. It is noteworthy that Athavale succeeded in his mission even
under these circumstances.
Before I introduce the ecological work of the Swadhyayis, it is
important to mention that they deny their environmental significance. In
fact, one was taken aback when I told him about my topic of research. In his
own words, “You might misrepresent Swadhyaya if you choose to research
it from an ecological perspective. Swadhyaya and its activities are only
about our devotion to the Almighty; sustainability is not our concern.
Environmental problems are due to industrialization and the solution lies
beyond Swadhyaya’s activities. Swadhyayis are not environmentalists!”
Based on my observations of Swadhyaya’s several activities, I tend to
agree with him. Athavale repeatedly emphasized that the main goal of
Swadhyaya is to transform human society based on the Upanishadic
concept of Indwelling God.8 According to him, since the Almighty resides
in everybody, one should develop a sense of spiritual self-respect
irrespective of materialistic prestige or possessions. In addition to
expressing one’s own dignity, the concept of Indwelling God also helps
transcend the divisions of class, caste, and religion, and Athavale exhorted
his followers to develop the Swadhyaya community as a global family. The
activities of Swadhyaya, woven around this main principle, are aimed at
Indian cultural revival.
Although sustainability is neither the means nor the goal of
Swadhyaya’s activities, natural resources such as the earth, water, trees, and
cattle are revered and nurtured by Swadhyayis. I argue that a multivalent
term like dharma can comprehend and describe this kaleidoscopic
phenomenon and the way it relates to ecology. Swadhyaya followers do not
regard environmentalism as their main duty, their dharma. Alternatively,
from the outside, one can regard their dharma, their cultural practices, as
ecologically sustainable, as I show below. I also want to note that my
observations are based on their activities in the rural parts of India; the
urban and the diasporic Swadhyayis do not have such ecological projects
yet.

Swadhyaya’s “Earth Dharma”

Athavale’s reverential discourses about the earth and water took a
constructive shape when his followers launched several projects related to
groundwater. In a country like India, where the agriculture in large parts of
the country is dependent on rainfall, a lot of work is being done to raise
public awareness of rainwater harvesting. Although various Indian
organizations have started harvesting the rainwater, Swadhyaya’s work in
this regard is different because of its underlying inspiration based on
devotional reverence for the water and for the earth.9 According to
Athavale, “If you quench the thirst of Mother Earth, she will quench yours.”
This “earth dharma” became the driving force for Swadhyaya, especially
after three successive droughts between 1985 and 1987 in Gujarat. Some
Swadhyayi villages started trying out well-recharging experiments. By 1992
the efforts started taking the shape of a movement, and all the nearby
farmers began collecting as much rainfall as they could on their fields and
in the village, canalizing it to a recharge source. The Swadhyaya “water
ethic” is “Rain falling on your roof stays in your house; rain falling in your
field stays in your field; rain falling in your village stays in your village.”
Swadhyaya’s work demonstrates a great potential to mobilize the
community to undertake ecological restoration at the grassroots level by
invoking the cultural and dharmic paradigms. N. R. Sheth describes similar
observations:

Some friends and I observed in June 1994 an outstanding effort in

recharging of water resources in a village where a project of
constructing a simple check-dam to impound waters flowing in a rivulet
was in the final stage of completion. A group of young men
constituting the local unit of the Swadhyaya youth centre had conceived
and undertaken this project to store the rivulet water in a tank created
within it by means of the dam. The stones and soil dug out to make the
tank were used to build a 100-metre long dam. The main purpose of
this project was to preserve water in the river tank to raise the water
table for wells in the neighboring villages. The entire project was
executed by an extremely innovative deployment of collective labors.
Over a thousand men and women from villages around the dam site had
offered their time and energy for the purpose in the spirit of
śramabhakti (devotional labor). Typically, the males worked on the
dam site for about six hours from 7:30 pm in the evening after they had
finished work on their own farms. The females worked during the day
in neighborhood groups. The people had followed this pattern of work
for nine months when we visited the place and they were expecting to
finish the work within a week. Barring small amounts of money spent
 on explosives to break stone, no cash expenditure was involved in this
work. Had the project been executed in a conventional manner, it would
have cost around Rs. 400,000. A visitor to a Nirmal Nīr work-site
cannot fail to be moved by the picnic-like social atmosphere as well as
a crusader-like spirit exuded by the volunteers in spite of very hard
physical labor they perform at a time when they normally relax or
sleep. The social bonding of love and goodwill, which is created among
Swadhyayis as well as between them and others is truly remarkable.10

One of the most remarkable features of this work is its consistent denial
of any outside financial, political, or social help. It has continued to depend
solely on the devotional inspiration of its own volunteers. According to
Jitendrabhai, a senior Swadhyayi who has supervised several Nirmal Nīr
projects in Gujarat in his volunteer work for Swadhyaya for more than two
decades, it is important to note the dharmic perspective in Nirmal Nīr
prayog:11

In the morning, we ask for her [the earth’s] forgiveness since we touch
her with our feet as we wake up. We bow to her and call her as the wife
of Visnu; thus the earth is our divine mother. Just as Śiva Linga is
worshipped by pouring clean water on it, Nirmal Nīr is also our way to
worship the earth with clean water. It is an abhiseka, ritual of
sprinkling, done for Mother Earth. In this prayog, water is cleaned in
different stages using sand, brick powder, and coal, and this clean water
is stored in wells and ponds. Water enters the wells through the small
holes and splinters in their walls. Existing ponds are also deepened in
this prayog. People work together to deepen the wells, which also
deepens their mutual relationships.

Recalling the visit of water conservationist Rajendra Singh, winner of the

Magsaysay Award, to the Nirmal Nīr, Jitendrabhai continued:

Swadhyayis of one village worked for other villages selflessly with

great motivation. Everybody brings his or her own food and shares it
with others. This working and sharing with each other builds and
develops relationships among all castes and classes of the village.
 Muslims work together with Hindus, Harijans work together with
Brahmins. Muslims recite their Qur’an verses while Hindus recite
Sanskrit verses at the time of regular prayers. After the Gujarat riots,
Muslims of Lunāwādā village in Anand District had told the district
collector that only Swadhyayis should be trusted to deliver government
aid to the Muslim victims of the riots since most other Hindus had
turned against Muslims. Earlier farmers used to quarrel if water from
neighboring farms would enter their own farms, but after working
together in Swadhyaya prayogs they now welcome water drained out
from neighboring farms to come to their farms. This reflects increased
cooperation and unity among the farmers. In another example, farmers
of Maganpura village share each other’s losses if anybody’s cotton
crops fail to yield sufficiently. Another benefit of Swadhyaya prayogs
that villagers experienced is that the water tables of all nearby wells
increased.

The above ideas expressed by a lay Swadhyayi clearly show the zeal
and the spirit of the Swadhyaya work. Although communal tensions have
flared up several times in Gujarat, Swadhyayis show a different attitude
existing in this state. In addition, most people would be surprised to note the
selfless enthusiasm of Swadhyayis. Their motive is not just to do the
utilitarian work of the village, or even to protect the ecological resources of
the village. Rather, the underlying objective of Swadhyayis is to bring about
constructive social manifestation of their spiritual understanding toward the
divine that is dwelling in them, their village society, and the village ecology.
Indeed, Jitendrabhai succinctly summarized this in his own words:

In ancient times, Indian sages also were aware of agriculture and

ecological resources. For instance, Kaśyapa is referred to as “the father
of Indian soil.” Similarly, Pārāshar is attributed as the writer of Krsi
Pārāshar, a Sanskrit text for agriculture. Similarly, several community
leaders and wealthy people had built water tanks called Bāvadi in many
villages and towns with Hindu idols near them. However, Swadhyaya
prayogs are based on Karma Yoga, not Karma Kānda. Nirmal Nīr
prayogs do not have any ritualistic idol worship. They are prayogs for
implementing devotion in one’s behavior instead of limiting it to
 rituals. This openness invites people of all castes, sects, and religions to
come and work together.

Overall, Swadhyayis’ attitude toward water and the earth shows their
long-standing relationships with their ecology, which is revitalized by the
thoughts and teachings of Athavale. I now present the agricultural work
undertaken by Swadhyayis, a widespread experiment undertaken mostly in
Gujarat and Maharashtra because most followers come from farming
communities there.

Yogeśvara Krsi: Swadhyaya’s Experiments with Agriculture

According to Athavale, agriculture includes four components: trust of
neighbor, love for animals, faith in God, and respect for nature.12
Obviously, the second and fourth components affect ecology directly. In
several Hindu festivals, oxen used in Yogeśvara Krsi are bathed and
beautifully decorated, and their procession is arranged in the entire
village.13 Ladies smear the foreheads of their husbands and the oxen with
the sanctified red color and welcome them. Later, the farms are tilled
together, all the oxen participating. Often, the response is so overwhelming
that more oxen are brought to a particular piece of land than are required for
farming. Thus, this experiment also develops unity, harmony, and goodwill
in the entire village.
A related experiment, Śridarśanam, involves twenty villages. Twenty
people from different villages periodically come together to live on a
monthly or yearly basis. One cow also lives with every twenty people to
supply their dairy needs. This cow is dearly cared for by. Since the people
participating in this devotional experiment treat this cow reverentially, their
attitude becomes reverential toward their own personal domestic animals
when they return home to perform their routine farming. Thus, in this
mechanical age of tractors and other machines, the relationship of farmers
with their farm animals is strengthened and revitalized. Yogeśvara Krsi also
inspires farmers to develop respect and love for nature. One of the
Swadhyayi volunteers, Jitubhai, explained: “One who goes to farms just for
work is a farmer, but one who goes to enjoy and respect greenery goes with
reverence for and gratitude to God. This reverential perspective inspires to
make the entire world green.”
Another volunteer explained that they cannot avoid the bare minimum
of violence required during the harvest, but they try to avoid harming the
nearby plants, trees, and bushes. Vermiculture compost has also been taken
up by the villagers on a large scale.14 The products generated from this
devotional farming are treated as the prasāda (divine gift) from the
Almighty. This helps develop the understanding that nature is not just for
anybody’s consumption or exploitation but should be revered since it is
God’s creation. Similarly, the inherent love for animals in farmers is
strengthened by such experiments. To recount an example from Yogeśvara
Krsi, a Swadhyayi narrated this incident. Swadhyayis go to offer their
efficiency at Śridarśanam periodically, as I noted above. When one’s turn
came, his wife was extremely sick and his crop was ready to be cut. He was
in a dilemma whether to go or not. Eventually, the couple decided that the
husband should give priority to “God’s work,” and the wife stayed alone at
home. When the husband came back, he found that his farming needs were
already taken care of. Later, they discovered that other Swadhyayis had
secretly helped the couple by neatly collecting their crops in their
warehouse. These secret helpers had criminal records but now, with
Swadhyaya experiments, they were so deeply transformed that they were
moved by the feeling of divine unity to help others.
It is important to note that the Swadhyaya agricultural experiments are
different from the purely “natural farming” pioneered by Masanobu
Fukuoka in Japan in the 1940s.15 Although natural farming is also being
promoted by Mohan Shankar Deshpande and other Indians, Swadhyaya’s
approach is different.16 In the latter case, there is very little mention of
Kriśipārāśara, the ancient Sanskrit text about farming. Unlike natural
farming, or Rishi Krishi, Swadhyayis do not hesitate to till the ground or
use natural fertilizers. Rather than rejecting the commonly used tools and
methods of agriculture, the Swadhyaya approach is simply to bring about
the ethical, spiritual, and social transformation of the farmers (and of the
rest of the society). This transformation seeks to develop a familial
interrelationship among the farmers of a small village and a reverential
perspective toward Mother Earth.
 The noted Indian environmentalist the late Anil Agarwal has mentioned
that Hindu beliefs, values, and practices, built on a “utilitarian
conservationism, rather than “protectionist conservationism,” could play an
important role in restoring a balance between environmental conservation
and economic growth.17 Swadhyaya experiments do not fall in either
category. In fact, when I interviewed some Swadhyayis, they vehemently
denied both utilitarian and protectionist motives behind their experiments,
underscoring instead the devotional motive.

In line with anthropologist David Haberman’s theoretical framework and

his observations from fieldwork on the banks of the Yamuna, these
Swadhyaya experiments are Indian counterparts of what could be called
“environmental activism.”18 Similar to Haberman’s examples, Swadhyaya
experiments are inspired by Indic traditions. I visited one farm in Gujarat in
2006 where local Swadhyayis had told me that devotional farming has
inspired the farmers to grow more trees even on their personal farms. They
also started using more organic and traditional fertilizers, such as
earthworms. Their perspective toward trees was changed from exploitative
to reverential. When I asked them about the practical challenges or
difficulties related to Swadhyaya experiments, they noted several. The
biggest challenge is to be able to sustain the transformation based on
Swadhyaya’s teachings. Without the dharmic perspective, the work can
become “mechanical.” Another challenge is to take these experiments and
replicate them at a more far-reaching level. So far, these have remained
smaller local initiatives at the district level rather than projects at the
regional or national level. They also confessed that the number of
volunteers available to work at different farms varies according to the
intensity and depth of belief in Swadhyaya’s principles in the surrounding
villages. Since the spread of Swadhyaya is not uniform across the different
villages and towns of Gujarat and Maharashtra, the number of volunteers
working at such experiments is also not uniform.
The practitioners of these experiments do not label them as
“environmental projects,” and yet they have succeeded in sustaining natural
resources in many Indian villages. As in other such work, the challenge
now is to maintain the projects and to develop new such experiments,
especially since Athavale, the motivating force behind the movement,
passed away in 2003. To my knowledge, the current leadership has not
developed new ecological experiments. However, it seems focused on
strengthening existing experiments by inspiring more villagers to join the
movement.
Swadhyaya is still a nascent movement with the charisma of its founder
yet fresh in the memories of its followers. Will they become more active
environmentalists in the new century in the absence of Athavale?
Swadhyaya is also emerging as a global movement. When Swadhyayis
migrate to different parts of the world, will they mobilize their
environmental sensibility to respond to the problems of climate change in
their diasporic environments?

Overall, we can conclude that the dharmic ecological work done by

Athavale and his followers can be compared with ecological work done by
environmental NGOs. However, for the Swadhyayis, their work is simply a
reflection of their krtibhakti, activity inspired by their devotion to the
divinity inherent in themselves and in nature around them. For Athavale’s
followers, trees and plants merely symbolize the divine force that works to
connect human society and nature. As Swadhyayis told me: “To be is to be
related.” By developing reverential relationships with trees, water, cows,
and other ecological resources, Swadhyayis strive to develop their dharmic
teachings into practice.

Study Questions
1. How might the practice of sustainable agriculture be impacted if
there were no separate category of “environmentalism” within a
culture/worldview? How does the concept of environmentalism
inform your own understanding about the goals of sustainable
agriculture?
2. How does understanding the importance of dharma help us better
understand what we would call ecological practices, especially as
these occur in Swadhyayi communities?
3. How might basing farming culture on devotion influence farming
activities?
 Notes
1. S. Weightman and S. M. Pandey, “The Semantic Fields of Dharma and Kartavy in Modern
Hindi,” in The Concept of Duty in South Asia, ed. Wendy D. O’Flaherty, J. Duncan, and M. Derrett
(Columbia, Mo.: South Asia Books for the School of Oriental and Africa Studies, 1978).
2. Bimal Matilal, Ethics and Epics: Philosophy, Culture, and Religion, ed. Jonardon Ganeri
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
3. McKim Marriott, ed., India through Hindu Categories (New Delhi: Sage, 1990).
4. Between 1994 and 1996, some observers and scholars visited the Swadhyaya villages. Their
observations were compiled in an edited volume by Raj K. Srivastava: Vital Connections: Self,
Society, and God: Perspectives on Swadhyaya (New York: Weatherhill, 1998). This is a helpful
introduction to the movement. In addition, see G. Dharampal-Frick, “Swadhyaya and the ‘Stream’ of
Religious Revitalization,” in Charisma and Canon: Essays on the Religious History of the Indian
Subcontinent, ed. Vasudha Dalmia, Angelika Malinar, and Martin Christof (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2001); G. A. James, “Athavale and Swadhyaya,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion
and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor (New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005); J. T. Little, “Video Vachana,
Swadhyaya and Sacred Tapes,” in Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, ed.
Lawrence A. Babb and Susan S. Wadley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); M.
Paranjape, ed., Dharma and Development: The Future of Survival (Delhi: Samvad India Foundation,
2005); Trichur S. Rukmani, Turmoil, Hope, and the Swadhyaya (Montreal: CASA Conference,
1999); Devinder Sharma, “Shedding Tears over Failed Watersheds,” Business Line, June 14, 2000;
and Betty M. Unterberger and Rekha R. Sharma, “Shri Pandurang Vaijnath Athavale Shastri and the
Swadhyaya Movement in India,” Journal of Third World Studies 7 (1990): 116–32. Ananta Giri has
published a monograph on self-development and social transformation brought about by Swadhyaya:
Self-Development and Social Transformations? The Vision and Practice of the Self-Study
Mobilization of Swadhyaya (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2009). My own monograph also has a
significant chapter on Swadhyaya: Pankaj Jain, Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities:
Sustenance and Sustainability (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2011), 17–50.
5. In this chapter I have used pseudonyms except for the well-known personalities within the
movement.
6. Srivastava, Vital Connections.
7. Asmitā is also mentioned in the Yogasūtra (1.17) as a positive attribute to the state of Samādhi
and as a negative attribute to be cleansed from the mind (2.3 and 2.6).
8. The Hindu philosophical texts the Upanishads describe “God” as the Absolute or Supreme
Soul. The relationship between Supreme Soul and individual soul is likened to the Indwelling God
and the soul within one’s heart.
9. Sharma, “Shedding Tears over Failed Watersheds.”
10. N. R. Sheth, “A Spiritual Approach to Social Transformation,” in The Other Gujarat, ed.
Takashi Shinoda (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2002), 14.
11. In the Indian languages Sanskrit, Gujarati, Marathi, and Hindi, prayog means experiment, and
the word is used widely in several Swadhyaya activities.
12. Information in this section is based on my interviews with several Swadhyayis in India in
2006.
13. Ann G. Gold, “Story, Ritual, and Environment in Rajasthan,” in Sacred Landscapes and
Cultural Politics: Planting a Tree, ed. Philip P. Arnold and Ann G. Gold (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate,
2001) has observed that such celebration of cattle is linked with the collective management of
rainmaking and fertility themes. It also helps develop appropriate harmonies among people and
between people and the environment (see especially pp. 128–29).
14. B. K. Sinha, “The Answers Within,” Down to Earth, May 1998.
15. Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale, 1978).
16. See http://www.rishi-krishi.com/index.htm (accessed January 20, 2007).
17. Anil Agarwal, “Can Hindu Beliefs and Values Help India Meet Its Ecologcial Crisis?” in
Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water, ed. C. Chapple and M. Evelyn
Tucker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 165–79.
18. David L. Haberman, River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
 7

Gandhi’s Agrarian Legacy

Practicing Food, Justice, and

Sustainability in India
A. Whitney Sanford

Almost a century ago, Mohandas K. Gandhi offered a paradigm for food

democracy that emphasized sustainability, equity, and social justice
regarding natural resources. Since 1959, members of Brahma Vidya Mandir
(BVM), an intentional community for women in Paunar, Maharashtra,
situated deep in the heart of the Indian subcontinent, have wrestled with the
practical implications of translating Gandhian values such as self-
sufficiency, nonviolence, and public service into specific practices of food
production and consumption.1 Today, members of BVM and associated
farmers illustrate how Gandhi’s thought shapes a religious response to the
environmental and socioeconomic problems wrought by globalized large-
scale agricultural systems.2 They articulate their responses to failures in
contemporary industrial agriculture in religiously inflected language drawn
from the Bhagavad Gita. They use the Bhagavad Gita, a central Hindu text,
as a guide to develop agricultural practices that they deem nonviolent. Like
Gandhi and BVM founder Vinoba Bhave, the members of the Brahma
Vidya Mandir question the dominant narrative of what constitutes the
public good and, in terms of food and agriculture, what constitutes good
food.
Vinoba Bhave (1895–1982), a contemporary and a follower of Mahatma
Gandhi (1869–1948) who is considered Gandhi’s spiritual successor,
established BVM and five other ashrams (spiritual retreats or communities)
throughout India to ensure the continuation of Gandhi’s lifework on
nonviolence and justice for the poor. A Brahman from Maharashtra, Bhave
began following Gandhi in 1916 at the age of twenty-one and worked to
implement and practice Gandhi’s social thought throughout his life.
Although Bhave founded six ashrams, he spent much of his life focused on
the two in Paunar, Maharashtra: the Paramdham Ashram for men
(established 1938), and BVM for women (1959). He established these
“experimental laboratories” in remote sites but intended them to be socially
relevant, showcasing a nonviolent community that was self-reliant and
cooperative. Residents would engage in productive labor, not relying solely
on gifts (as is the case with many ashrams), and their existence would
demonstrate the possibility of new, more egalitarian social structures.
Ashrams, or religiously oriented intentional communities, are a common
feature of the Hindu landscape, and these founded by Bhave bear structural
similarities with others, including the taking of vows, separation of sexes,
and devotional practices. Nonetheless, few ashrams emphasize social
change as BVM and Bhave’s other ashrams do, making them highly
idiosyncratic.
While the women of BVM have removed themselves from mainstream
society both geographically and psychologically, they continue Gandhi and
Bhave’s work both through the examples of their own lives and by
educating and training short- and long-term BVM visitors, who are
primarily, but not exclusively, women. Nilayam Nivedita and Samvad
Farm, two nearby agricultural ashrams, for example, have adopted and
enacted practices learned at BVM. The women of BVM and the farmers
who work with them enact a counternarrative to the prevalent one that
large-scale agriculture is inevitable, necessary, and the sole possibility of
feeding the world. They consciously reject a narrative of progress that
privileges centralization of knowledge and power and increases reliance on
expensive technologies. The narrative of contemporary agriculture, for
example, emphasizes productivity, that is, high yields (an arbitrary
standard), as the sole measure of value, and progress in the form of
improved seeds and inputs such as fertilizers that are priced beyond the
reach of most farmers.3
In contrast, BVM members grow a diversity of foods and crops that
reflect traditional systems of intercropping and small-farm diversity. These
women consciously live out ideals of self-rule, nonviolence, and local
economies through their methods of farming and food distribution. Their
choices of low-input technologies echo Gandhi’s call for appropriate
technologies. Their lives and language reflect a Gandhian critique of the
paradigms of agricultural modernity.
Gandhi’s attention to agricultural conditions and distribution of natural
resources reflects a form of environmentalism that incorporates equity
concerns.4 Environmental movements in the Global South tend to pair
ecological and equity issues, creating a robust environmentalism of the
poor, which notes that equity has not always been recognized as an
environmental concern due to its emphasis on social concerns. Gandhi’s
environmental thought addressed agrarian and environmental issues in the
context of the social needs of village India.5 Freedom lay in democratic and
broad access to the means of production and survival: for example,
community access to forests, water, and healthy soils. His environmental
thought offers a paradigm to evaluate the intimate—and frequently
overlooked—ties between the environmental degradation and social
inequities that inform contemporary concerns about sustainability and the
food we eat.
Although communities such as BVM contribute to a growing chorus in
India and abroad of those questioning the existing industrialized food
system, they by no means constitute a large and powerful movement.
Today, India proudly proclaims its sizeable and growing middle class, and
while many Indians revere Gandhi as a national hero, they have also, en
masse, rejected Gandhian austerity in favor of US-style consumerism.
Nonetheless, these communities prompt us to imagine what it means to
enact alternative agricultural and social practices, and they help us envision
how we might adapt and apply Gandhian ideas in other social and
geographic contexts.
The counternarrative BVM’s residents practice demonstrates how
community members work out the practicalities and trade-offs in their
application of self-sufficiency, nonviolence, and radical democracy to their
own social and geographic context. Few visitors are likely to join small
communities such as BVM, and many features of them, such as consensus-
style governance, are not scalable for larger social networks or
communities. Even so, small communities such as BVM are necessary for
the process of social change—they demonstrate alternate frames of
reference. What if values championed by Gandhi, such as nonviolence
(ahimsa), commitment to the public good (sarvodaya), and the Jain concept
of nonpossessiveness (aparigraha), replaced profit and efficiency as
indicators of success in food production?

Gandhi’s Thought and the Bhagavad Gita

In developing his moral philosophy, Gandhi drew on two traditions: the
Hindu, especially the Vaishnava branch, and Jain.6 Gandhi’s home state of
Gujarat, while predominantly Hindu, housed significant populations of
Jains, from whom he imbibed an ethos that emphasized nonviolence and
nonpossessiveness. The Bhagavad Gita provides the religious framework
for understanding Gandhi’s views on sacrifice, duty, and nonviolence.
Indeed, the contemporary Gandhi-focused agriculturalists I interviewed
stressed the importance of the Bhagavad Gita as a moral framework,
especially regarding selflessness and reducing ego attachments. The
Bhagavad Gita (The Song of the Lord), composed between 200 BCE and
200 CE, is included within the Mahabharata, one of Hinduism’s two great
epics.7 The Mahabharata and other epics are especially important to Hindu
ethical theory and practice because the situations narrated in the epics
present contexts to think through and resolve ethical dilemmas. The
Bhagavad Gita deeply influenced Gandhi’s thought and practices, and he
frequently cited the importance of this text and its teachings on karma yoga,
the path of action to spiritual liberation.
For Gandhi, Bhave, and countless Hindus, Krishna’s discourse offers a
guide to transform one’s actions in the world into devotion to the divine.
Bhave also considered the Bhagavad Gita a guide in philosophical and
practical matters, and he communicated these insights in his Gita
Pravachan, or Talks on the Gita. For the karma yogi, one following the path
of selfless action, all actions are motivated by love and service first and
only then by the practical result; the karma yogi farmer, for example, works
to feed society and to establish a basis of love with all beings, not simply
for wages. Work and labor become a prayer; and compassion and love
render service a joy rather than drudgery.8 “[The Gita] will come to the
lowliest of the low, to the poor and the weak and the ignorant, not to keep
them in that state, but to grasp them by their hands and lift them up. Its only
desire is that man should purify his daily life and reach the ultimate state,
the final destination. In fact, this is the very aim and object of the Gita.”9
For both Gandhi and Bhave, the Bhagavad Gita provided the frame and
authority to restructure society to benefit the poor and oppressed.

Practicing a Gandhian Agriculture

Both Gandhi and Bhave established ashram-agricultural communities, such
as Phoenix in South Africa and Sevagram in Wardha, Maharashtra, that
elevate “agriculture and artisanry [to a] a spiritual dimension.” Ashram
residents, for example, gather for religious services either daily or weekly.10
These utopian farm-ashrams emphasize the dignity of human labor and
promote “bread labor,” that each person should contribute his or her own
labor for goods consumed. Gandhi borrowed the concept of bread labor
from Tolstoy, but stated that the third chapter of the Bhagavad Gita reflects
this principle—that is, food eaten without sacrifice, or bread labor, is
stolen.11
Vandana Shiva, founder of the Delhi-based Research Foundation for
Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE), has become a prominent voice
in food sovereignty movements in India and abroad. Her thought, rhetoric,
and activism draw significantly on Gandhian ideals and symbolism. The
1998 “Monsanto Quit India” campaign against Monsanto’s Terminator
technology, for example, echoed Gandhi’s “Quit India” rhetoric of
independence, and Shiva has framed her continued resistance to GMOs
(genetically modified organisms) in India as seed democracy, a trope that
circulates globally as food democracy.12 Shiva includes seed democracy,
food democracy, and water democracy as essential elements of earth
democracy.
While Shiva is perhaps the best-known agricultural activist, less
familiar farmers and activists also frame their responses in Gandhian terms.
Gujarati farmer Bhaskar Save, named “the Gandhi of Organic Farming,”
has become a spokesman and an early adopter of organic, or natural,
farming based on Gandhian principles and has inspired countless others in
this endeavor.13 “Non-violence, the essential mark of cultural and spiritual
evolution,” he has contended, “is only possible through natural farming.”14
Kalpavriksha, his fourteen-acre farm, lies just north of the Gujarat-
Maharashtra border and yields a variety of fruits, vegetables, and rice,
outproducing many chemically based farms. Save was influenced by the
writings of Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave as he developed his agricultural
methods, particularly Bhave’s work on Adivasi (indigenous or tribal)
intercropping techniques that rely on symbiotic plant relationships. Save,
like other farmers who embrace Gandhi’s concept of local economies, has
not entered the export market and has chosen to trade or sell his food
nearby.15

Brahma Vidya Mandir

In the context of this work, in 2008 and 2009, I visited BVM and two
agriculturally focused ashrams, Nilayam Nivedita and Samvad Farm, and
spoke with Gandhi-inspired farmers who visited BVM. These farmer-
activists are located in rural Maharashtra, far west of the urban center of
Mumbai, and are proximate to Wardha, where Gandhi established his own
ashram, Sevagram. Gandhi chose Wardha because it represented,
geographically and symbolically, the heart of India. Today, this agricultural
region hosts a growing community of farmers who have established farms
based on Gandhian social thought and Hindu practice. BVM and Nilayam
Nivedita are in Paunar, ten kilometers from Wardha, and Samvad Farm is
approximately two hours by bus north, creating a triangle with Nagpur, the
largest urban center in eastern Maharashtra.
These farmers and activists articulated their concerns regarding
industrial agriculture, the global financial system, and the overwhelming
power of multinational corporations, consistently framing their own actions
in terms of engaged critiques of big agriculture, big business, and greed.
The women in the ashram are well educated and informed, and have
dedicated their lives to service. They represent a small demographic of
India’s population—a subset living out Gandhian values. A parallel in the
United States might be the small population of college-educated, middle-
class Americans who have chosen to populate agrarian-focused intentional
communities. In short, I interacted with a set of farmers and activists who
have the power, education, and means to focus their energies on their social
and environmental concerns, so when I use the word farmer, it refers to
these farmer-activists, not to the social groups, often peasants, to whom the
term is usually applied.
Vinoba Bhave established BVM for women to achieve spiritual
liberation and to practice ideals of self-sufficiency, nonviolence, and self-
discipline in a community setting. He thought that India needed a class of
what he called “social workers” whose work and lives would demonstrate
by example how to build a new form of society, in part by living together
without regard to caste, language, religion, or nationality.16 Bhave realized
that India had a long tradition of Brahma Vidya, the search for knowledge
of the divine, but that few of India’s philosophers had reflected on
community life. So BVM would maintain India’s long philosophical
tradition but would do so communally, a collective spiritual liberation—in
the hands of women.17 Approximately twenty-five women resided there,
and most have taken vows of celibacy (brahmacarya) and thus have the
status of religious sisters.18
The community emphasizes performing one’s duty, practicing
nonviolence, and reducing ego to decrease greed and attachment to
consumer goods. They are primarily self-reliant in terms of food and water;
they spin daily, although not enough to make their own clothes. When I
visited, I participated in daily activities, including gardening and food
preparation, and observed outreach activities in the form of a conference of
Gandhian activists. They have no designated leader, and all decisions are
made by consensus. This cohesive, bounded community, with its emphasis
on participatory decision making, exemplifies to me the critical role of
small grassroots organizations for social change.19 This ashram has become
a hub of agricultural resistance to large-scale industrial agriculture, and the
women have trained a number of farmer-activists, men and women, who
themselves train others.
BVM sits along the Dham River, which narrows to a trickle in the hot
months before the summer monsoon. Upon arriving at the ashram from the
main road from Nagpur, one must cross the bridge over the river, then
double back onto a smaller access road and cross the river again. Beyond
the entrance gates (which are closed for several hours in the afternoon), a
short stretch of road, approximately one hundred yards, continues up a
small hill to the ashram’s buildings. Visitors first see a fenced in garden on
the right side of the road, then a set of one-story buildings, including rooms
that house male visitors and guests during ashram events and a kitchen that
can produce food for large numbers of people.
Most of the ashram’s residents and female guests live in the buildings
that form a quadrangle around the central courtyard. The garden, worked by
members and guests, covers approximately half the courtyard. The other
half holds long-buried statues of deities discovered by Bhave when he
established the ashram as well as several large sundials that Bhave liked.
These buildings also house the ashram bookstore, featuring publications by
Gandhi, Bhave, and others; the temple; the kitchen and dining area; and a
conference room. Many of the buildings feature covered walkways, sitting
areas, and a platform for prayers and spinning.
Map of India. (Based on http://www.geography-site.co.uk/pages/countries/atlas/india.html.)

The residents of BVM perform communal prayers, reciting from the

Ishavasya Upanishad at dawn, the Vishnu-Sahasranama (One Thousand
Names of Vishnu) at midmorning, and the Bhagavad Gita in the evening.
During midmorning prayers, they make homespun cloth. For Gandhi,
spinning was a dense and critical symbol that encapsulated his views on the
multiple facets of independence, self-sufficiency, and inner control. Gandhi
believed home-based work such as spinning offered women unprecedented
autonomy over their economic lives. As a political symbol, the spinning
wheel, or charkha, represented freedom from Great Britain’s cotton
industry that had blocked India’s attempts to develop its own manufacturing
base. Even today, virtually every village in India holds a Khadi Emporium
that sells cloths and other village-produced items. While many Indians and
Europeans saw technology, urbanization, and industrialization as forms of
progress, Gandhi critiqued these trends because he feared that the need for
goods and the accompanying technologies would enslave people.20
Gandhi considered personal transformation necessary for meaningful
social change, and BVM community members stress mindfulness and a
disciplined self as critical for the practice of nonviolence. This disciplined
self is able to control desires that lead to greed and violence. As people
adopted the discipline and practice of spinning, reciprocally, their identities
changed, and this practice changed their ideas of what constituted
appropriate clothing—from British to local homespun. Similarly, food, like
clothing, is central to our identities, individual and social, and our intimacy
with food and clothing offers possibilities to enact choices that are socially
and environmentally sustainable at the personal, community, and political
levels.
While the women do not make their own clothes, they wear khadi,
either saris or salwar-khameez (a long tunic with baggy, pajama-like pants).
Wearing these clothes maintains and enlivens the symbolic nexus
popularized by Gandhi, but it also integrates contemporary controversies
surrounding cotton production. Today, the seeds and necessary
technological packets, such as herbicides and pesticides, incur both massive
debt and high ecological costs, and many cite the nutritional deficits that
resulted when monoculture cotton crops replaced traditional systems of
intercropping food and cotton. The journalist Aparna Pallava, for example,
has described efforts in rural Maharashtra to reintroduce traditional (and
nearly extinct) intercropping methods in which women plant vegetables and
pulses amid rows of cotton.21 BVM is able to source a small percentage of
its cotton locally, from an ashram between Wardha and Paunar, thus
supporting regional self-sufficiency and local economies, and this cotton is
organic. Most of BVM’s cotton is local but not organic, so the members,
perhaps not consciously, have had to choose between the violence of a
globalized distribution system to obtain organic cotton and the violence of
conventional agriculture.
In the morning after prayers, residents and visitors work, performing
such tasks as sweeping, food preparation, and gardening. Visitors generally
do approximately thirty minutes of sweeping and thirty minutes of work in
the garden in addition to food preparation. Equitable distribution of
agricultural and other tasks mean that those who might romanticize this
labor actually perform it. Bhave believed that three to three and a half hours
of productive and well-planned labor, which is also considered a form of
worship, would be sufficient to support the ashram and that all labor should
be considered equal.22 Several sisters emphasized to me that this practice
reflected Bhave’s philosophy of voluntary labor—work, especially
agricultural work, is better than meditation for spiritual development
because it helps to open up the mind.
Bhave considered physical labor, including cleaning, a form of “faith in
action,” and bodily labor must be voluntarily undertaken with love.23
Recounting his first meeting with Gandhi, Bhave noted that his “initiation”
into service and ashram life was peeling vegetables, a task that he had never
before performed. Seeing Gandhi himself, a national leader, preparing food
taught him a lesson about bodily labor and illustrated the meaning of karma
yoga, which, in Bhave’s eyes, was embodied by Gandhi.24 BVM’s food
practices, consensus-style decision making, and shared labor practices help
the sisters reduce ego attachments and personal inclinations that would
otherwise disrupt the community.
The Bhagavad Gita’s discussion of sacrificing the fruits of one’s labor
to the divine provides philosophical and practical resources in the difficult
task of subverting one’s own ego and needs to that of the larger group,
never an easy process. Decisions about what vegetables should be grown
and under what conditions are made by consensus so that all residents have
a voice in the process; however, the trade-off is that this process diminishes
the influence of those who might have the most agricultural experience. So,
in one case, one sister with strong gardening skills wanted to mulch, but
others objected, concerned that mulching would lead to increased mosquito
populations, a significant concern in a region where malaria is prevalent.
This instance of competing values, consensus versus self-sufficiency
through agriculture skill, demonstrated the difficulties of actually living a
set of values.
The sisters eat a vegetarian diet and generally avoid addictive
substances, including tea and coffee, although they serve tea during
conferences. The food was pure and sattvik, a category describing light
foods that do not arouse the passions. Their food reflects a traditional
simple Indian meal, based on rice and dal, vegetables, chapattis (unleavened
wheat flat bread), yogurt, and milk. When I visited in December 2009, we
prepared and ate seasonal vegetables such as radish, eggplant, and lauki, a
mild gourd. When cutting these vegetables, I was admonished to do so with
ahimsa, that is, to avoid harming the worms that inevitably appear in
organic produce. Their food was locally sourced: the milk, ghee (clarified
butter), and yogurt came from their own cows, and the remaining milk was
made into pedas, a popular dessert. The cow manure was used for fertilizer,
and the ashram has a biogas digester for the cow manure that provides some
of their energy needs.
The biogas digester illustrates what we now think of as an “appropriate
technology” (a term popularized by E. F. Schumacher in Small Is
Beautiful).25 Gandhi argued for human-scale, village-based technologies
that enhance agricultural productivity and return the benefits to village
populations.26 To evaluate appropriate technologies he simply asked, “Who
benefits?” This question was rooted in neither an antiscience nor an
antitechnology view; its point was that appropriate technologies diffuse
knowledge, fit local conditions, and benefit local economies and so
represent alternative and more equitable paradigms for development.
The sisters grow their own vegetables without inputs such as herbicides
and pesticides. Water from the kitchen’s gray-water system provides some
fertilizer; the sisters use ash to first wash the pots and dishes, and the ash
water then fertilizes the garden. The sisters use only hand tools in the
garden, a practice established by Bhave. Wheat and pulses grow in the
fields surrounding the ashram, and villagers provide the labor in these fields
(along with the labor for the biogas), using teams of oxen. As Bhave found
in his own experiments with food, like giving up milk, the sisters have to
balance competing principles when considering food: spiritual health;
bodily health; swadeshi, or local; and cost.27 Reflecting Gandhi’s emphasis
on experimentation, their grappling with translating broad principles such
as nonviolence into the realities of everyday life demonstrates that their
chosen practices are not inevitable or singular solutions but the result of
consciously evaluating the trade-offs and benefits within their specific
context. Their chosen practices illustrate one particular instantiation of
Gandhian values—these practices are not necessarily generalizable or
scalable, but they encourage visitors to consider how these values might be
translated to their own circumstances.

Nilayam Nivedita and Samvad Farm

The farmers of BVM, along with those of Samvad Farm and Nilayam
Nivedita, draw significantly on a set of interrelated Gandhian ideals,
especially regional self-sufficiency, nonviolence, and appropriate
technologies, to rethink food and food production in the context of
contemporary agrarian challenges. Residents at these agricultural ashrams
who have learned the philosophical approaches in tandem with agricultural
techniques have established their own farm-ashrams and train students
there. They embody Gandhi’s emphasis on praxis over theory. Nonviolence,
for example, is a call to action, not simply a lack of action or withdrawal,
and these farms are actively rethinking and consciously approaching all
aspects of food production, including distribution, using the rubric of
nonviolence.
A BVM student founded Nilayam Nivedita twenty-five years ago. The
farm relies on animal traction and grows bananas, pulses, barley, and wheat.
Only four acres are suitable for farming, and this soil has been heavily
amended. The local soil, heavy with red clay, is poor, and the amended soil
in the four acres under production is visibly distinct. This farm-ashram
primarily trains students who leave to start their own farms after
approximately six years.
In May 2008, after a two-hour bus ride, I arrived at Samvad Farm, a ten-
acre farm with six acres of orchard, in Amarvati, Maharashtra. Samvad
Farm’s bioregion is wetter than that of BVM and Nilayam Nivedita, and
during the bus ride, I was struck by the difference in fertility and vegetation.
Karuna and Vasant Funtane founded the farm in approximately 1984, and
now run it with their two adult sons. Karuna Futane lived at BVM from the
age of four and has maintained close ties with the organization. Samvad
Farm also has an active educational and outreach component, hosting local
schoolchildren, foreign students, and others who wish to learn about its
farming, water, and building practices. As stated in its brochure, Samvad
Farm is a “group of volunteers working in the Gandhian way for sarvodaya,
the ‘upliftment of all’” and is open to visitors and volunteers.
Samvad Farm practices what is described as “need-based” approach,
cultivating plants and trees to fill its members’ food and shelter needs.
When Vasant showed me around the farm, he pointed out how the bulk of
their needs, including medicinal, are fulfilled by materials from the farm. In
addition to crops and orchards, the two-acre “food forest” provides plants
for food, medicinal needs, and building. The buildings, including the house,
a cow stall, and a hostel for visitors, were all built from local mud and
materials. The term need-based reflects Gandhi’s statement that “the world
has enough for everyone’s need, but not everyone’s greed” and his idea of
“trusteeship,” that it is one’s duty and service to nurture the land. Today,
these farmers and others have argued that agriculture and the contemporary
consumer-driven society have moved from “need-based to greed-based”
lifeways, confirming Gandhi’s fears.28
Using only what they need and being self-sufficient offers the members
of Samvad Farm a freedom not enjoyed by farmers trapped by debt.
Instead, Bhave argued that restoring the land and soil fertility should be
considered a ritual sacrifice (yajna); all production, including that of food
and clothing, should function as a ritual sacrifice to replenish what has been
taken from nature.29 These farmers draw upon the Bhagavad Gita’s
emphasis on performing one’s duty and reducing ego to reduce greed and
attachment to consumer goods.
Both Samvad Farm and Nilayam Nivedita have developed and
reintroduced local varieties of crops such as mangos and sorghum (jowar)
to ensure the continuation of local knowledge and control of agricultural
techniques. Those at Samvad Farm, for example, have developed new
varieties of mangos appropriate for the particular soil and weather
conditions and maintain varieties in danger of being lost. In line with
Gandhian ideals, however, they sell and trade the produce only locally even
though they have the opportunity to export their mangos to urban markets.
In choosing to serve their immediate vicinities, these farmers consciously
reject the neoliberal model proposed (and sometimes mandated) by
international trade organizations that sees export-driven trade as the best
means to global food security.
 These sites of agricultural activism maintain nonviolent farming
practices, broadly extending the reach of what might be defined as
nonviolent. It is not a stretch to consider toxic pesticides and herbicides as
violence, given their harm to human and nonhuman communities. Yet the
violence of institutionalized inequity, unjust economic relations, and food
systems designed around the needs of the wealthy are less obvious.
Cultivating inner nonviolence through attention to the Bhagavad Gita and
using a consensus-based decision-making process to establish nonviolence
is an interior practice related deeply to personal transformation.
These farmers’ practices reflect Gandhi’s broad understanding of
violence and nonviolence and the principle that self-reliance and self-rule
are intimately linked with—and rely upon—concepts of nonviolence and
decentralization. Centralization, and the resulting need to enforce laws and
regulations, was to Gandhi a form of violence.30 Moreover, what many
deem “progress” might inflict violence on marginalized populations.
Gandhi implicated the railway system, which has often been lauded as
Britain’s great contribution to India, in famines because trains transported
grains from rural areas to cities and markets. Producing food locally, he
believed, reduces food waste and enhances diversified agricultural
knowledge of local seeds, landraces, and soils.31
In this vein, BVM, Samvad Farm, and Nilayam Nivedita maintain seed
banks of local varieties that protect indigenous agrarian knowledge and are
adapted to local drought conditions. Echoing activist Vandana Shiva’s
condemnation of the violence of the Green Revolution and the promised
“gene” revolution, these farmers characterize GMOs as violence toward
nature and human communities. Although none of these farms are of a size
or scale to use these seeds and their associated technologies, they have
witnessed the social and economic consequences to farmers in Maharashtra
and nearby Andhra Pradesh.
As a result, Samvad Farm and Nilayam Nivedita have crafted their
market practices in accord with Gandhi’s call for swadeshi—localized
economics. According to the Gandhian Satish Kumar, the village-based
approach is inherently environmentally sustainable and community
enhancing, in part, because it encourages villagers to “take care of
themselves, their families, their neighbours, their animals, lands, forestry,
and all the natural resources for the benefit of present and future
generations.”32 Swadeshi, Gandhi argued, cannot be legislated or enforced
with violence. Instead, the transition to a local economy lies in a personal
cultivation of nonviolence and sarvodaya (benefits for the many); moreover,
persuasion and education encourage peaceful transition.33 Unlike his
Marxist contemporaries, Gandhi did not advocate class conflict or violence
in land reform. Instead, he called for large landowners, or zamindars, to
become “model landowners” and use property for the good of the
peasants.34

Lessons from BVM, Samvad Farm, and Nilayam

Nivedita
These farm-ashrams apply a Gandhian framework—not a dogma—to
fashion equitable alternatives to existing narratives about food, agriculture,
and society. Gandhi referred to his own work as a series of experiments and
rejected the term Gandhism, which would imply a particular ideology,
although many have continued to use the term.35 Gandhi’s social thought
offers a flexible framework that can be adapted to a variety of conditions
and even used in ways that Gandhi himself might not have wanted. What,
then, does it mean to follow Gandhi?
BVM, Samvad Farm, and Nilayam Nivedita enact their values in food
production and consumption and demonstrate a balance of reflection and
practice. Their focus on practice as well as consensus decision making
places these communities in a context of process and experimentation,
rather than adherence to fixed dogma. The reflexivity of engagement and
assessment ensures that this process is not a simple application of a
Gandhian platform or an ideological absorption in which theory is divorced
from practice, a persistent problem for intentional communities seeking
social change.
Like Gandhi, these communities are not nostalgic for a premodern
utopia, nor do they seek to reclaim a romanticized past, concerns raised by
Nanda and Mawdsley, among others.36 While Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj lauded
India’s traditional values and villages, he did not advocate a nostalgic return
to feudal or premodern styles of living in which decision making was
limited to very few people. Instead, he proposed novel forms of village
development and participatory democracy based on his concept of swaraj,
which offered unprecedented levels of autonomy to populations such as
women and the poor.37 Similarly, the members of BVM have sought new
ways to promote democracy and to avoid replicating existing repressive
hierarchies in their own community. In experimenting with innovative and
integrated forms of governance, sustainable agriculture, and religious
practice, members reenvision concepts of and relations between self, nature,
and community. In these ways they demonstrate how relations within small
communities can contribute to broader and positive social and
environmental change.
These practical and religious responses are situated in a holistic
paradigm that integrates material, economic, social, and religious realms.
These holistic worldviews reflect a new agrarianism that rejects
reductionist, scientific agriculture with its modern separation of religious,
economic, and scientific realms.38 Instead, this new agrarianism privileges a
holistic understanding that integrates sustainable agriculture and religion
and firmly acknowledges the material dimensions of agriculture and social
equity, including health and nutritional benefits. Similarly, BVM, Samvad
Farm, and Nilayam Nivedita are not antiscience, but they explicitly
consider the financial and social dimensions of agriculture.

Since independence, India has steadily retreated from a rural, agrarian-

based society and moved toward an urban-focused, consumer-based society.
To some, a Gandhian platform emphasizing agrarian values, nonviolence,
and regional self-sufficiency appears quaint and a step in the wrong
direction. One might reasonably wonder what small, intentional
communities such as BVM can contribute to an increasingly corporate,
violent, and unsustainable world: their agricultural production will not feed
a hungry world, nor can more than 7 billion of us engage in consensus-style
governance. Vinoba Bhave predicted that the world would face two
competing narratives: commitment to the public good, or what Gandhi
warned of—corporate tyranny and the seductive lure of consumer goods.39
The intentional communities I have analyzed in this chapter provide
counternarratives and lived counterexamples of radical democracy to the
tyranny Gandhi warned of and resisted.
 BVM presents Gandhi as a frame within which to redirect our thoughts
about food and community and, in focusing visitors’ attention on the source
of food and its production, offers a new awareness for many who have not
questioned these issues. Scholarly studies and pop culture phenomena both
suggest that in many ways, concerns about food sources and safety are
growing in both developed and developing countries.
Our food choices would look significantly different if we grounded our
decisions in a Gandhian framework. BVM offers that framework and
demonstrates one possible application of Gandhian values in the context of
a Hindu-oriented intentional community. Bhave himself used the example
of yogurt, stating that the ashram’s work, like yogurt, could be mixed with
milk to make more yogurt that could be spread to other villages.40 Visitors,
then, can make changes appropriate to their own situations, as did the
founders of Nilayam Nivedita and Samvad Farm, and then demonstrate
specific applications of Gandhian values to ever-widening circles.

Study Questions
1. How would our food choices look different if they were grounded
in a Gandhian framework?
2. What is the role of narratives in shaping food choices?
3. How might living in an intentional community aid one’s ability to
make more sustainable food choices?

Notes
This research was originally published in Journal of the International Society for the Study of
Religion, Nature, and Culture 7, no. 1 (2013): 65–87. I wish to thank the editors of the journal.
1. Brahma Vidya Mandir can be translated as the temple (mandir) to seek the knowledge and
wisdom (vidya) of the absolute (brahma).
2. Shahid Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–2,” in Subaltern
Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press India, 1984), 25; Pramod Parajuli, “Revisiting Gandhi and Zapata: Motion of Global
Capital, Geographies of Difference and the Formation of Ecological Ethnicities,” in In the Way of
Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalization, ed. Mario Blaser and Harvey Feit
(London: Zed Books, 2004), 2–3. The gender implications of the organization, although fascinating
and critical, are the subject of a separate work.
3. Whitney Sanford, Growing Stories from India: Religion and the Fate of Agriculture
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011).
4. Readers interested in a more comprehensive discussion of Gandhi’s environmental and
agricultural thought are directed to M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography; or, My Experiments with Truth,
trans. Mahadev Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1927); M. K. Gandhi, Village Swaraj, ed. H. M. Vyas
(Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1962); Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of
Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London: Earthscan, 1997); Ramachandra Guha, How
Much Should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006); David Haberman, River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The
Yamuna River of Northern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); David Hardiman,
Gandhi in His Time and Ours (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003); Vinay Lal, “Too Deep for Deep
Ecology: Gandhi and the Ecological Vision of Life,” in Hinduism and Ecology, ed. Christopher Key
Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Rudrangshu
Mukherjee, ed., The Penguin Gandhi Reader (Delhi: Penguin Books, 1993); and Larry Shinn, “The
Inner Logic of Gandhian Ecology,” in Chapple and Tucker, Hinduism and Ecology.
5. Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours, 75–76; Guha and Martinez-Alier, Varieties of
Environmentalism.
6. Vaishnavas are those Hindus who worship the deity Vishnu or one of his earthly descents such
as Rama or Krishna.
7. The Bhagavad Gita recounts the dialogue between the warrior Arjuna and his charioteer, the
deity Krishna, on the eve of the great battle between cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Arjuna
asks how it could possibly be right to fight his family members on the battlefield, and Krishna offers
a discourse about duty, selfless action, and devotion to God. This massive war ushered the earth into
the Kaliyug, the era of immorality and decay, and, illustrated in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, the
bloodied fields of Kurukshetra lay as a testament to its devastation. Gandhi interpreted the Bhagavad
Gita as a paean to nonviolence, an idiosyncratic reading at odds with historical Hindu understandings
of the text. Bradley Clough, “Gandhi, Non-violence and the Bhagavad-Gita,” in Holy War Violence
and the Bhagavad-Gita, ed. Steven J. Rosen (Hampton: Deepak Heritage Books, 2002), 61.
8. Vinoba Bhave, Talks on the Gita, trans. Parag Cholkar (Wardha: Paramdham Prakashan, 2007
(1940), 48–50, 58.
9. Ibid., 82.
10. Gandhi, Village Swaraj, 94–96; Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours, 76.
11. Gandhi, Village Swaraj, 43.
12. Ian Scoones, Science, Agriculture, and the Politics of Policy: The Case of Biotechnology in
India (Hyderabad: Orient Longsman, 2005), 305–6.
13. This information is compiled from Martin Khor and Lim Li Lin, “Water-Efficient Trench
Irrigation for Horticulture,” in Good Practices & Innovative Experiences in the South, vol. 2, Social
Policies, Indigenous Knowledge and Appropriate Technology, ed. Martin Khor and Lim Li Lin
(London: Zed Books, 2001), 178–95; Bharat Mansata, The Vision of Natural Farming (Kolkata:
Earthcare Books, 2010); and Anahita Mukherji, “Gandhi of Organic Farming Honored,” Times of
India, September 4, 2006.
14. Mansata, The Vision of Natural Farming, 235.
15. Khor and Lin, “Water-Efficient Trench Irrigation for Horticulture,” 190.
16. Brahma Vidya Mandir pamphlet; Marjorie Sykes, Moved by Love: The Memoirs of Vinoba
Bhave (Wardha: Gram-Seva Mandal, 2006), 119.
17. Sykes, Moved by Love, 222–24.
 18. Men participated in programs and conferences organized by BVM, and several of them resided
as brothers at BVM on a permanent basis.
19. Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Prakas, Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures
(London: Zed Books, 1998); Anna Peterson, Seeds of the Kingdom: Utopian Communities in the
Americas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
20. Mukherjee, The Penguin Gandhi Reader, 16–18.
21. Aparna Pallava, “What’s for Lunch, Mother?” Hitavada, June 8, 2008.
22. Sykes, Moved by Love, 225.
23. Ibid., 218–21, 246–47.
24. Ibid., 71, 73.
25. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (London: Blond and
Briggs, 1973).
26. Gandhi, Village Swaraj, 26–27.
27. Sykes, Moved by Love, 244.
28. Priti Agrawal, “Shaswat Yogic Farming,” Times of India, July 19, 2011.
29. Bhave, Talks on the Gita, 245–46.
30. Gandhi, Village Swaraj, 34, 39.
31. Ibid., 125; Mukherjee, The Penguin Gandhi Reader, 23.
32. Satish Kumar, “Gandhi’s Swadeshi—The Economics of Permanence,” in The Case against the
Global Economy and for a Turn toward the Local, ed. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (San
Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997), 420.
33. Gandhi, Village Swaraj, 35, 58; Mukherjee, The Penguin Gandhi Reader, 41–46.
34. Gandhi, Village Swaraj, 47, 53, 98–99; Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours, 83–84;
Mukherjee, The Penguin Gandhi Reader, 34–38.
35. D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1960), 4:4.
36. Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backwards: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu
Nationalism in India (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Emma Mawdsley,
“Hindu Nationalism, Neo-traditionalism and Environmental Discourses in India,” Geoforum 37, no.
3 (2006).
37. M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (New Delhi: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
38. Frederick Kirschenmann, Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer
Philosopher (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010); Norman Wirzba, The Essential
Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2004).
39. Sykes, Moved by Love, 123–24.
40. Ibid., 125.
 8

Thailand’s Moral Rice Revolution

Cultivating a Collective Ecological

Consciousness
Alexander Harrow Kaufman

Thailand possesses a rich history embedded in the cultivation of rice

varieties adapted to diverse biogeographical zones. Rice is more than the
staple food of the Thai people; it is the cornerstone of the Thai culinary arts.
Rice is a life-giving force that plays a crucial role in social systems and
religious practices. For thousands of years, varieties of Oryza officinalis
(wild rice) were cultivated at subsistence levels to feed farmers’ families.1
Farmers relied upon “embodied knowledge” that was passed on from
generation to generation to crossbreed the most resilient and tasty strains of
rice.2 As farmers were dependent on natural weather patterns, the
introduction of formal irrigation systems (700 CE) was a defining moment in
Thailand’s economic history. Improved water access contributed to greater
food security and the advancement of Thai civilization.3 As such, rice
cultivation in Thailand is laden with political, economic, and sociocultural
values.
The religious practices of Thailand’s first human inhabitants
(predominantly Lao, Mon, Khmer, Shan, and Tai) governed the process of
rice cultivation. Although Theravada Buddhism was installed as the official
religion in Thailand, changes in religious practices were slow to take hold.4
Animist and Brahmanic rituals were entrenched in the local culture and
closely tied to rural community life.5 Farmer households paid reverence to
Khwan Khao (Rice Soul), Mae Phosop (Rice Mother), Mae Thoranee (Earth
Mother), and Mae Khongka (River Mother). Rituals were performed on
behalf of specific deities at each stage of the cultivation process: plowing,
sowing, transplanting, harvesting, and threshing.6 For example, an
auspicious day was chosen for plowing, and the fields were approached
“from the South in the belief that [this] would burst the stomach of the Naga
(serpent deity) to spread its excrement and to fertilize the soil.”7 Sowing was
the next significant activity in the rice farmers’ schedule, and in central
Thailand a ceremony was performed to “invite the Rice Mother to come out
of the granary for the rice to be sown in the field.”8 In Issan (the northeast
region of Thailand), where rice was transplanted rather than sown, a ritual
was conducted to venerate the reincarnation of the Rice Mother by
transplanting seven stalks of rice (inhabited by the Rice Soul) to the paddy
fields. After the grains were formed, it was believed that the rice seedlings
had been impregnated by the Rice Mother. Offerings were given to relieve
the pains of pregnancy, and the farmer recited kind words “to soothe and
flatter” the Rice Mother. Before the seasonal harvest, the Issan people reaped
seven stalks of rice. Next, the rice grains were released from the seven stalks
in what was called pong khao, which was meant “to invite the Rice Goddess
(or Mother) down to the floor for threshing.”9 This ceremony aimed to
appease the Rice Mother and to avoid frightening the Rice Soul. Lastly,
farmers took offerings of boiled eggs, rice cakes, liquor, and bananas along
with the seven rice plants as a representation of the Rice Soul. After these
numerous acts of reverence were completed, the rice was ready for human
consumption.
Organic rice paddies in northeastern Thailand. (Photo by Alexander Harrow Kaufman.)

Rituals also were conducted on behalf of domesticated farm animals, in

particular the Asiatic water buffalo. Thai farmers relied upon buffalo to
produce natural fertilizer and pull plows. They served as a source of meat
and nutrition as well. Thai buffalo were venerated for their contributions to
rice farming through two traditional rites. Su Khwan Kwai, a ritual whereby
a Buddhist monk performed a blessing on behalf of the buffalo, was one.
The second rite, not identified by name, was conducted by the farmer to
honor the buffalo for their role in the cultivation of rice. Despite the arduous
tasks performed by the buffalo, they were afforded adequate rest and
considered trusted members of Thai agrarian society.10

Although the aforementioned ritual practices appear to signify a deep respect

for Mother Nature, some researchers claim these practices were nothing
more than a reaffirmation of the economic benefits of animal husbandry.
Along these lines, some experts argue that the rituals found in many early
agrarian societies were merely attempts to control the unpredictability of the
natural environment.11 Nonetheless, ethnographers show that up until the
mid-twentieth century, Thai rice farmers practiced traditional forms of
agriculture and took active steps to conserve natural resources in their
respective communities.12
Yet in spite of the value of this so-called local knowledge, most farmers
discarded traditional methods in favor of the productivity gains offered by
modern agricultural technology.13 Although some farmers benefited from
increased productivity, the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides
contributed to high rates of soil erosion and a reduction in soil quality.14 Not
only has the misuse of pesticides played a part in the degradation of natural
resources, but farmers have also suffered from associated health problems;
research shows that in some cases, Thai farmers have died from pesticide
exposure.15 Moreover, the capital demands of these innovations in
agriculture have contributed to the exodus of rural folk to the cities in search
of paid employment.16 This dynamic mirrors the migration of Mayan
farmers from their ancestral lands discussed in chapter 1 of this volume.

Buddhist Environmental Values

Responding to the failures of the Green Revolution, scholars have sought to
restore the dignity of Thai farmers and transform rural society through a
traditional way of life based on Buddhist principles.17 Some scholars have
called upon the Buddhist tradition to argue that the Thai people, and in
particular rural dwellers, have a predisposition to pro-environmental
values.18 Researchers cite the example of sacred trees ordained with a
saffron cloth wrapped around them as an indicator of environmental
stewardship. Stories of powerful Buddhist monks acting as custodians of
community forests have become part of contemporary Thai folklore.19
Along these lines, rural dwellers are said to draw upon a pro-environmental
Buddhist vernacular in their daily life. For example, Thai farmers commonly
use the word dhammachart (nature), which has its roots in the Pali language
and the Pali Canon (Buddhist scriptures), while Bangkok residents tend to
employ the more modern term singwaedlom (environment), which was
introduced by central Thai authorities.20
In the last few decades, the concept of “Buddhist agriculture” has been
advanced by Thai environmental activists, farmer leaders, and socially
engaged Buddhist monks.21 While Prawes Wasi, a social activist,
popularized the term, the idea of Buddhist agriculture is said to have
originated from the teachings of Buddhadasa (former abbot of the
Suanmokkh Temple in southern Thailand). Buddhadasa sought to bring back
dignity to the profession of farming: “The Dharma in rice farming, with its
dutiful ploughing in the hot sun behind a buffalo, is enjoyable and conducted
with a felt smile. The early rice farmers knew such satisfaction because they
felt their duty as their most important moral responsibility and action. The
most important thing we can do is our duty. We call it ‘farming’ using the
ordinary materials—natural resources—to produce the harvest, which when
we commit our minds and spirits, is nirvana.”22 Buddhadasa’s words imply
that through “moral” work, the farmer has the potential to achieve nirvana,
or “a state of absolute calm or enlightenment.”23 His sermon glorified the
union of farmer, animal, and the natural environment in the process of
making rice.
Building on Buddhadasa’s teachings, alternative agriculturalists and
scholars have borrowed the first of the Five Precepts to contend that
conventional farming methods (the use of synthetic agrochemicals)
contravene the teachings of the Pali Canon: “The concept of morality
manifests itself in the five basic precepts underlying the rules for monastic
life and for laypeople’s conduct respectively: 1) not to kill any living being
(often interpreted as ‘not to harm’); 2) not to take what is not freely given by
the owner (stealing); 3) not to indulge in sexual misconduct; 4) not to lie;
and 5) not to consume intoxicants that lead to carelessness.”24
Despite the “merits” of a shift to organic farming methods, some
scholars have found fault with what they argue are “Western” interpretations
of the Buddhist scriptures.25 While scholars labor over the alleged misuse of
the First Precept, the majority of Thai Buddhist farmers have embraced
conventional, chemical-based agriculture methods as a panacea for their
economic woes. Conversely, scholars have found that conventional
agriculture methods have contributed to farmer debt and eroded community-
based social safety nets.26 Although experts are critical of the social and
environmental costs of unabated synthetic agrochemical use, governmental
programs and multinational corporations continue to support productivity
gains through conventional agriculture methods.
 The Thai Alternative Agriculture Network
In the 1970s, Asian and Western alternative agriculture groups extended
their reach into Thailand with assistance programs aimed at reducing
agricultural debts and rejuvenating soil productivity. Foreign experts
collaborated with their local counterparts in the delivery of organic extension
programs in the north and northeast regions, where poverty levels were
reported to be the highest in Thailand.27 Civil society organizations (CSOs)
reintroduced traditional/organic farming methods to empower rural farmers.
Academic institutions, CSOs, and select government agencies lobbied for
policies directed at “smallholder agricultural development.”28 In 1997, His
Majesty the King of Thailand (HMK) called upon Thai farmers to embrace
the “Sufficiency Economy” philosophy and adopt New Theory Agriculture
(NTA), a flexible set of guidelines based on the diversification of
landholdings through low-input, sustainable agriculture methods.29 The
Agri-nature Foundation developed a national-level program to teach Thai
farmers ways to apply NTA to diverse agroecosystems. The Green Net
Cooperative / Earth Net Foundation launched assistance programs to support
farmers with organic certification requirements and to provide access to
niche markets.30 The controversial Santi Asoke Group established
agricultural communes that linked Buddhism and alternative agriculture
through a formal doctrine of practice.31 As a way to lobby for changes in
government policies, CSOs and farmer groups came together to form the
Thai Alternative Agriculture Network (AAN).
Despite the efforts of sustainable agriculture proponents and consumer
demands for safe food, less than 1 percent of Thai farmers have shifted to
organic farming methods.32 While researchers have shown some of the
financial advantages to making this shift, fewer studies have examined what
prevents Thai farmers from adopting organic agriculture methods.33 In this
chapter I explore the development of a Buddhist-inspired farmers’ group in
northeast Thailand and exhibit the socioecological benefits of the farmers’
collective work.

The Dharma Garden Community and Temple

In the early 1970s, two schoolteachers from Patiew Village in Yasothon
Province donated an old jute plantation to Monk Khammak as a place for
Buddhist practice and meditation. Guided by the Five Precepts, Monk
Khammak and his followers chose to become vegetarians and designated
this land as a conservation area. Monk Khammak decided to name this
community the Dharma Garden. At this time, he took the name Luang Poh
Thammachart (Nature Abbot). To support his vision, followers grew rice,
fruit, trees, and vegetables using only natural agriculture methods.
Gradually, the Dharma Garden Community and Temple became a center for
farmers seeking to learn natural agriculture methods. In 1987, the Dharma
Garden Foundation was registered as an official institution under the
direction of Luang Poh Thammachart and local farmers. Rice cultivated
under the foundation’s auspices gained International Federation of Organic
Agriculture (IFOAM) certification in 2004.34
Currently, the Dharma Garden Community covers 150 rai (1 rai = .16
hectares), one-third of which is designated for religious activities, and two-
thirds for agriculture and training purposes. There are fifteen regular resident
volunteers, eleven monks, and thirty laypersons who reside at the temple for
different periods of time. There is a central temple, huts (for monks and
nuns), a residence hall, rice paddies, vegetable gardens, a mill, a fertilizer
factory, a holistic health center, learning centers, cooperative stores, a radio
station, and a vegetarian restaurant on the property.
Map of Thailand with detail of Yasothon Province. (Based on National Statistics Office Statistical
Yearbook, 2010, http://web.nso.go.th/eng/link/solink.htm; United Nations Cartographic Section,
Thailand map 3853, revision 2, July 2009,
http://www.un.org/Depts/Cartographic/english/htmain.htm.)

Temple activities are managed by a committee of monks and elders with

help from resident and nonresident volunteers. Daily activities are overseen
by a layperson, Nikom Phetpha. Previously, Poh Nikom was a soldier in the
Thai army and held a senior position in the Bank of Agriculture and
Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC).35 Poh Nikom’s prior experience helped
to secure BAAC funding for a program to assist farmers with debt
rehabilitation through organic agriculture. Poh Nikom also acts as a
facilitator, a spokesperson, and an extension specialist. Once I found Poh
Nikom thirty meters up a tree removing decaying branches to avert damage
to temple property. As temple volunteers do not receive salaries, Poh Nikom
also maintains an organic rice farm to help support his wife and two
children.
A joint interview with Poh Songkran, a part-time volunteer (and working
member of the fertilizer cooperative), and Khun Grasehboon, a full-time
volunteer, provided further details about temple activities.36 Poh Songkran
described himself as a former Bangkok taxi driver who was once a drug
abuser and gang member. He claimed to have made a full recovery through
his association with the temple and work as an organic farmer. Khun
Grasehboon was formerly employed with other nonprofit organizations that
provided social services. Both volunteers also ran their own organic farms
when not occupied with temple activities.
Through the temple’s community radio station, 91.5 MHz FM, monks
and followers broadcast news, music, training programs, and Buddhist
teachings. Poh Songkran and Khun Grasehboon serve multiple roles at the
temple, including as radio disc jockeys. They take great pride in their
broadcasting work:

The radio station was started in 2002 by SIF (Social Investment Fund),
and it serves as a center to connect Dharma Garden Temple projects.
The station now reaches five other provinces: Ubon Ratchathani,
Sisaket, Amnat Charoen, Roi Et, and Mukdahan. I believe that there are
at least twenty-one thousand people listening to our radio station, and 80
percent are farmers. The station has volunteers who assist with work all
year round. Our objective is to deliver radio programs that cover
Buddhism, art, culture, way of life, and self-reliant agriculture ventures.
The radio station talks more about organic farming on weekends, and we
often invite local wise men to talk about or discuss their experiences.
Mother Earth ritual. (Photo by Alexander Harrow Kaufman.)

Poh Nikom, who also serves as the station director, provided further
information about the radio programs: “It is estimated that [our] member-
listeners produce three hundred thousand kilograms of rice per year. There is
no advertising on the radio station, and efforts are funded mainly through
donations. Various community residents and the temple’s abbot serve as the
announcers. Many members reported that they were attracted to the temple
through the radio station. As such, the radio station has become an important
tool in the Dharma Garden Foundation’s organic extension and spiritual
development outreach programs.”

The Moral Rice Network

In 2005, the newly appointed abbot Luang Poh Supatto and lay members
initiated a specialized program to support their mission, calling it Kow
Khunatham (Moral Rice). The Moral Rice mission is to impart Buddhist
teachings, expand organic agriculture, reduce farmer debts, and encourage
the consumption of healthy and vegetarian food. The Dharma Garden
Temple invites farmers from around the nation to participate in organic
agriculture support programs and sell rice through the temple’s specialized
marketing channels. The organization’s training programs include topics
such as leadership skills, team building, detoxification, soap making,
Effective Microorganisms (liquid fertilizer), and dry organic fertilizer.37
Farmers who join Moral Rice are encouraged to work in closely knit
groups to produce natural fertilizers and other inputs used to enhance rice
quality and output. To be accepted into the program, farmers are asked to
take seven vows:

1. Adhere to the Five Precepts and quit all types of vices (for example,
drinking, gambling, and smoking).
2. Commit to self-reliance. For example, members must pay for their
own organic agriculture certification at a cost of 360 baht.
3. Commit to exchanging knowledge at least once a month and
participating in quarterly meetings each year at the temple.
4. Gain knowledge of the management process after harvest to
maintain the quality and standard of husked rice of at least 38
percent (per gram), a moisture content of not more than 15 percent,
and contamination of not more than 2 percent.
5. Strive to build the Moral Rice brand as a way to help society with
good and low-cost rice.
6. Manage the Moral Rice market in two directions: help Moral Rice
and its satellite centers process and sell milled rice to the
marketplace, and gather together with all members to increase
negotiating power in the sale of husked rice.
7. Strive to build food security for themselves, their families, and
society.

The “accreditation” process was carried out through a “circle of trust”

whereby members monitor each other’s progress against the Five Precepts.
Members also are encouraged to conform to IFOAM standards. Through
their network, members sell a diversity of organic rice products to both
domestic retail shops and international exporters. Registries in early 2015
showed a total of 119 Moral Rice Network members and 400 certified
organic members. Despite a shortage of Moral Rice farmers, over two
thousand people subscribed to the temple’s social welfare fund.

Moral Rice: a pyramid of relationships. (Moral Rice Network, 2012, http://www.moralrice.net.)

Wijit Boonserng, Moral Rice chairperson and farmer, explained the

benefits of what members call the “One Day, One Baht” fund to farmers and
their families: “The way to start becoming a member of Moral Rice is to
have them join the Dharma Garden Temple, learn to sacrifice themselves,
and give to the others by becoming a member of the savings cooperative.
They give one baht a day [1 baht = 1 US$] to support other members when
they are in trouble. The fund is separated into two parts: one is for members’
welfare—helping those in the hospital—another is to support Moral Rice
activities like buying rice from members, buying machines and tools for the
mill, and making fertilizer.”
Poh Wijit is a key decision maker in temple affairs and was a founding
member of the organic training center. I asked Poh Wijit to talk about the
origins of Moral Rice:

Organic farming was started at the Dharma Garden Temple in 1972 by

Monk Khammak, and he expanded this knowledge to the villagers—for
these actions he was named Luang Poh Thammachart. Luang Poh is the
role model for organic farming, as he practiced and did it himself. He
allowed homeless people to live on temple property under the condition
of helping with farming, and then they got some land to farm for
themselves. Luang Poh made the example of organic farming for people
to have good, safe food aligned with nature while producing excess food
for sale. They had the IFOAM certificate when they opened the temple,
but the objective was to move away from the idea of only thinking about
selling. You have to change yourself first. Organics is part of good
Buddhist practice, which is training by combining Buddhism and
organics together, thus leading to Moral Rice. To make rice you must
have morality, and farmers must be moral, make sacrifices, and not only
talk about it.

According to Poh Wijit, Moral Rice farmers not only acquired new
agricultural methods, but they also underwent a spiritual shift through their
involvement with the temple: “The Four Types of Lotus is about changing
people’s ways.38 If the new member can accept this point, that means they
truly want to change their way of thinking. If they think this change is good,
then they can decide to become a Moral Rice member later on. However, to
be a Moral Rice member one needs to strictly practice the Five Precepts.”
Poh Wijit described some of the social and ecological benefits of Moral
Rice to farmers, families, and consumers:

Moral Rice happened because I gave them a way to solve the problem
and a protection method from the economy, to solve the farmers’ flaws
and that of their families, by using dharma as the basis, the Five
Precepts to support their mind. Farmers should have safe food to
 consume—this is the most important point about joining Moral Rice.
Next the farmer should live in a proper environment to keep the
environment safe. Keep the consumers safe. Manage marketing as a
means for leftover production rather than a need to sell to the market,
which is why they need IFOAM as a guarantee for the customers
worldwide.

Although organic-certified rice offered growers a higher market price,

Poh Wijit conveyed the value of Moral Rice in terms of spiritual and
physical health: “The benefit of Moral Rice is that it can raise the farmer’s
level of spirituality. Which brings good spirits to the rice, and it does not
produce toxins. The producer does ‘good’ by making pure food for himself,
his family, and for consumers. The aim is for consumers to have good health.
To make the rice pure, the farmer’s spirit must be pure first and then good
things will come back to him.” While to some extent Moral Rice teachings
emulate the rhetoric of Buddhist agriculture, members also engage in
traditional rites to pay reverence to spirits (see below).
Poh Suvit, a former chairperson of Dharma Garden Temple and president
of the Nong Yoh Rice Mill in Kudchum District, explained the ethical basis
of Moral Rice: “Moral Rice is a second-stage objective of Dharma Garden
Temple created through the Buddhist religion, such as the Four Noble Truths
and some other teachings that equate with Moral Rice.39 Most people do not
look at morality as having an application to farm work, because they just
want to make more money, with a focus on high production only. But for
me, morality is the thing that one can implement in their daily life and it
does not have a negative effect on others in the community, the environment,
and finally visible and invisible matter.”
The Moral Rice program set itself apart from other alternative agriculture
initiatives through an emphasis on ecospiritual benefits, as Poh Suvit made
clear: “Before I joined Moral Rice I lived in the village, but now I have
moved to live in my rice field. At the beginning, we felt alone, then we
realized that we were living in symbiosis with the environment, as we grow
plants and trees for air and also animals—we raise the cow, the cow eats our
plants, and the cow manure is good for the plants and the soil. When the soil
is healthy, it helps to manufacture my products. You know the value of food
and you know how all living things can live together.” As Poh Suvit
explained, the methods he used to boost soil fertility led to a series of
broader physical changes in the ecology on his farm. As a result of both
physical and spiritual work, he developed a deep connection with the natural
environment on his family’s farm. This new perception of the world carried
with it a distinctive set of ecospiritual values.

Buddhist Environmental Values Revisited

To examine the environmental values of Moral Rice farmers, I conducted
structured and unstructured interviews with temple leaders and thirty-six
members of the Dharma Garden Temple from 2007 to 2009. My data
analysis showed that Moral Rice farmers’ worldviews are significantly
correlated with their religious beliefs, values, and collective practices.40
These findings were similar to the research of Narong and Nuntiya
Hutanawat, which revealed that the “adoption of a new vision” is a critical
factor in Thai farmers’ ability to sustain organic agriculture.41 While my
findings also highlighted the importance of technical assistance in staying
the course of organic agriculture, farmers’ decisions to adopt organic
methods are associated with Buddhist environmental values.
To explore the concept of Buddhist environmental values, I asked
participants to define “nature” in their own words. Many mentioned the Five
Precepts in their responses:

I believe organic farmers must believe in themselves to produce organic

food in order to protect nature; the Five Precepts help farmers to be
honest (Poh Peng).

I believe the Five Precepts are a good path for organic farmers, because
they do not kill other organisms (Mae Pikul).42

Without the Five Precepts in a farmer’s heart, they can’t be a true

organic farmer, because they might easily break the rules (Mae
Boontham).
 While Moral Rice members linked organic agriculture to concepts of
environmental stewardship, many showed a more spiritually based
connection to nature. Poh Nikom explained some of the ways that traditional
rituals support organic farming: “Before the rice is sown the family performs
a ritual. First we say a prayer, satoo duu [a Pali-Sanskrit prayer]: we want to
grow rice and fruit in the soil, we wish that the Earth Mother will take care
of the soil and help the plants to provide a bounty for eating, giving, and
sharing with others.” Reverence to the Earth Mother resembles the belief in
Mama Allpa of the Kichwa-Lamista farmers based in the high Amazon
region of Peru (see chapter 2 of this volume). Poh Nikom further describes
the role of the Earth Mother, the Rice Mother, and the River Mother in the
Thai conceptualization of nature (dhammachart): “No matter where you fall,
or where you are, you fall into the soil. Rice represents all kinds of food that
come from the earth. And you need water. Every single drop of water comes
from the Earth Mother.”

Organic farmer providing offerings to the Earth Mother. (Photo by Alexander Harrow Kaufman.)

Despite responses that showed Moral Rice farmers espoused a Buddhist

ecological worldview, many participants spoke of enhancing nature as a duty
to society. Moral Rice farmers also linked the integrity of the natural
environment to better health and food security. According to Mae Kluay:
“Better soil: soil is much healthier. Better ecosystem: more natural food such
as fish, crab, snail, and shrimp. More natural vegetables occur. Less
shopping because you can grow anything such as vegetables and fruit in
healthy soil.”
In several queries, I prompted members to discuss the differences
between themselves and conventional farmers. Participants revealed that for
the most part their farming practices were guided by Buddhist teachings:

To be a devout Buddhist, Buddhists must live in harmony with other

lives, protecting the environment and microorganisms to keep the
environment in balance; so farmers must keep the rice field in balance
(Mae Kampoon).

Organic farmers are more devout Buddhists because the organic farmer
has more morals in order not to kill lives and is more honest (Mae
Jansri).

Organic farmers are more devoted to Buddhism because to be a true

farmer one must study and practice Buddhism in order to be able to talk
about organic farming with others (Poh Si).

Organic farmers are more devout Buddhists because we are not greedy
(Mae Wanee).

However, some participants felt uncomfortable making comparisons

between themselves and conventional farmers:

Organic farmers are not more devout than chemical farmers—it all
depends on each person, but it doesn’t have anything to do with farming
(Poh Ratri).

I disagree that organic farmers are more devout Buddhists because any
Buddhist can be devout (Mae Ngern).
 Buddhism teaches people to love nature, but that does not mean that
chemical farmers are less devout (Mae Malaa).

While Moral Rice farmers expressed an acute understanding of the

ecological benefits of organic agriculture, their perspectives of nature were
also influenced by family members, colleagues, and spiritual leadership.
Members nurtured soil ecology as set out in IFOAM guidelines, and in the
process were rewarded for their actions through naturally occurring foods in
their rice paddies. Ways of practice were influenced by both knowledge
acquisition and availability of the factors of production. Knowledge was
acquired and put into practice through formal training courses, sharing
experiences, and a process of trial and error on the farm. Significantly, the
production of organic fertilizer depended on both technological innovations
and the natural resources accessible through their local collectives. However,
collectives were also highly valued for their social capital, rather than merely
as an access point to the factors of production.43 Reliable marketing
channels were also an important means of sustaining Moral Rice
membership.

Moral Rice as a Business Development Strategy

In 2009, the Dharma Garden Temple initiated some changes in its marketing
strategy through an alliance with TV Burabha (a Thai television production
company), which purchases almost 70 percent of the temple’s rice products.
TV Burabha helps to market Moral Rice through four key channels: (1) the
Symbiosis program, (2) special events, (3) green shops, and (4) large retail
outlets. Under the Symbiosis program, products are delivered to consumers
in what resembles a “farm to table” scheme.44 In addition to the benefits of
consuming Moral Rice, urban members also have the opportunity to
participate in organic farmer home-stay programs. The temple also
established a relationship with the Kasetsart University Farmer Shop, where
it sells 20 percent of its rice production. The final 10 percent of products are
sold to local residents through the Dharma Garden Store. Hence, Moral Rice
has become more than a brand name; it is a producer/consumer community
composed of monks, farmers, and both rural and urban dwellers.
For Moral Rice farmers, the adoption of organic agriculture is more than an
ethical decision; it signifies the acceptance of a new way of life. Members
build diverse food systems that afford them additional sources of income and
greater food security. The decisions they make regarding the use of natural
resources are influenced by Buddhist teachings, a scarcity of natural
resources, and the necessity to feed their families. Members substantiate
organic agriculture practices as part of being “good” Buddhists. Through the
act of nurturing the soil, members come to see themselves as interconnected
to an extended community of life. Moral Rice farmers work in close-knit
groups to monitor each other’s progress in relation to the Five Precepts. By
working in groups, members are able to access key natural resources and the
factors of production. The Buddhist scriptures guide members’ actions vis-à-
vis each other and the natural environment.
Based on my research, staying the course of Moral Rice is influenced by
a multifaceted set of variables. Moral Rice farmers’ worldviews, knowledge
systems, and practices affect their relationship with the natural environment
and bear upon their quality of life. Members report improvements in their
well-being through greater self-reliance, mental and physical health, and the
development of social capital through farmer collectives. Similar to the
findings of Opart Panya and Solot Sirisai, I found that the religious beliefs of
some Thai rural dwellers contribute to ecocentric values.45 As Dharma
Garden Temple members realize the extrinsic and intrinsic benefits of
organic agriculture, ecocentric values are reinforced. Nevertheless, only a
small percentage of temple members have qualified under the strict
requirements of Moral Rice. While the Moral Rice Network struggles to
build a future for organic agriculture in Thailand, external socioeconomic
and environmental factors continue to bear upon the decision making of
members and their families.

Study Questions
1. What influence does religion have upon the decision making of
farmers in your country?
2. What strategies could the Dharma Garden Temple employ to attract
more Thai farmers and consumers to the Moral Rice Network?
 3. How could the Moral Rice program be adapted for use in Western
countries?

Notes
1. Paul White, “Rice: The Essential Harvest,” National Geographic, May 1994, 48.
2. Shigeharu Tanabe, Ecology and Practical Technology: Peasant Farming Systems in Thailand
(Bangkok: White Lotus, 1994).
3. Lindsey Falvey, Thai Agriculture: Golden Cradle of Millennia (Bangkok: Kasetsart, 2000).
4. Prah Payutto, Thai Buddhism in the Buddhist World (Bangkok: Buddhadhamma Foundation,
2001). Theravada Buddhism, or the “Teaching of the Elders,” was said to have arisen in Ceylon (Sri
Lanka), taking hold on the Siam (Thai) Peninsula between the sixth and ninth centuries. The Noble
Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Dependent Origination, and the law of Karma are the key principles of
Theravada Buddhism.
5. Chatumarn Kabilsingh, Buddhism and Conservation (Bangkok: Thai Tibet Center, 2010).
Thewadas (angels) and pii (ghosts) were said to inhabit certain forests, mountains, and bodies of
water.
6. Falvey, Thai Agriculture.
7. Solot Sirisai, “Rice Goddess and Rice Farming in Thailand,” in Development, Modernization
and Tradition in South East Asia, ed. U Kyaw Than and Pinit Ratanakul (Salaya: Mahidol University,
1990), 168.
8. Ibid., 169.
9. Ibid., 171.
10. Iam Thongdee, “Thai Farmers and Buffaloes: A Cultural Interpretation,” in Than and Ratanakul,
Development, Modernization and Tradition in South East Asia, 178.
11. Terry Rambo, “Conceptual Approaches to Human Ecology” (Research Report 14, East-West
Environmental and Policy Institute, Honolulu, 1983).
12. Tanabe, Ecology and Practical Technology.
13. Falvey, Thai Agriculture.
14. United Nations Development Programme, Sustainable Human Development and Agriculture
(New York: United Nations Development Program, 1994).
15. Data from 606 farmers in Thailand according to IPM DANIDA pesticide health surveys. See
report 62 by the IPM DANIDA Project: “Strengthening Farmers’ IPM in Pesticide-Intensive Areas,”
http://thailand.ipm-info.org/download_documents.htm (accessed October 1, 2010).
16. Opart Panya, “‘Community-First’ Agriculture: A Search for Thailand’s Post-crisis Sustainable
Transformation,” in Strengthening Community Competence for Social Development, ed. Robert Doyle
(Phitsanulok, Thailand: Asia-Pacific Perspectives, Naresuan University, 2003), 219.
17. Praves Wasi, “Buddhist Agriculture and the Tranquility of Thai Society,” in Turning Point of
Thai Farmers, ed. Seri Phongphit and Robert Bennoun (Bangkok: Thai Institute for Rural
Development, 1988), 1.
18. Falvey, Thai Agriculture.
19. Jonathan Rigg, Southeast Asia: The Human Landscape of Modernization and Development
(London: Routledge, 1997).
 20. Opart Panya and Solot Sirisai, “Environmental Consciousness in Thailand: Contesting Maps of
Eco-Conscious Minds,” Southeast Asian Studies 41 (June 2003): 59–75.
21. Apichai Puntasen, “Buddhist Economics: Evolution, Theories and Its Application to Various
Economic Subjects,” special issue, Chulalongkorn Journal of Buddhist Studies, November 2008.
22. Lindsey Falvey, AgriDhamma: The Duty of Professional Agriculturalists; A Lecture by
Buddhahassa Bhikku to Agricultural Teachers and Officials on 25 March 1991 at Suan
Mokkhapharam, Chaiya, Surat Thani Province, Thailand (Adelaide, South Australia: Institute for
International Development, 2002), 11.
23. Ibid.
24. Daniel Henning, A Manual for Buddhism and Deep Ecology (Bangkok: World Buddhist
University, 2002), 37; Chatumarn Kabilsingh, “Early Buddhist Views on Nature,” in Dharma Gaia: A
Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology, ed. Allan Hunt Badiner (Berkeley: Parallax, 1990), 8.
Kabilsingh states that the First Precept teaches not only that practitioners should refrain from killing
but that they should radiate metta, or loving-kindness, to all living creatures.
25. Rigg, Southeast Asia.
26. Wasi, “Buddhist Agriculture and the Tranquility of Thai Society.”
27. Walaiporn Od-ompanich, Areerat Kittsiri, and Thongchai Manitchara, Organic Rice Marketing,
Organic and Inorganic Rice Production, 2007,
http://www.wiso.boku.ac.at/fileadmin/_/ . . . /2007_Lassmann_DA.pdf (accessed January 20, 2009);
National Statistics Office Statistical Yearbook, 2010, http://web.nso.go.th/eng/link/solink.htm
(accessed October 1, 2011).
28. C. Thongtawee, “Attractors in the Paradigm Shift Process towards Sustainable Agriculture of
Farmers” (Ph.D. diss., Mahidol University, 2006).
29. Charan Chantalakhana and Lindsey Falvey, Sufficiency Economy: An Approach for Smallholder
Agricultural Development to Enhance Peace and Stability (Bangkok: Sermmit, 2008). The Sufficiency
Economy Philosophy was introduced by the king of Thailand, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, with the
aim to promote moderation, self-sufficiency, and reasonable consumption patterns among Thai
farmers and the general population.
30. Panee Samerpak, “A Strategy for Sustainable Agriculture System by Rak Thammachat Club in
Kudchum District, Yasothon Province, Thailand” (M.A. thesis, Asian Institute of Management,
Manila, 2006). See Rigg, Southeast Asia.
31. Juliana Essen, “Right Development”: The Santi Asoke Buddhist Reform Movement of Thailand
(Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005).
32. FiBL and IFOAM, The World of Organic Agriculture Statistics, 2013, Frick and Bonn,
http://www.organic-world.net/2413.html?&L=0 (accessed September 13, 2013).
33. Narong Hutanawat and Nuntiya Hutanawat, Sustainable Agriculture: Vision Process and
Indicators [in Thai] (Nonthaburi: Kledthai, 2006).
34. International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements,
http://www.ifoam.org/growing_organic/definitions/doa/index.html (accessed January 2, 2010). This
work employs the term organic as defined by IFOAM: “Organic agriculture is a production system
that sustains the health of soils, ecosystems and people. It relies on ecological processes, biodiversity
and cycles adapted to local conditions, rather than the use of inputs with adverse effects.”
35. “Poh” is a title equivalent to “Father” or “Elder” in the northeastern Thai dialect.
36. “Khun” is a title equivalent to “Mr.” or “Mrs.”
37. Sununtar Setboonsarng and Jonathan Gilman, Alternative Agriculture in Thailand and Japan,
Asian Institute of Technology, 1999, http:www.solutionssite.org/cat11_s0185.htm (accessed December
11, 2007). Effective Microorganisms is a highly concentrated liquid fertilizer and the trademark of the
Kyusei Foundation in Japan.
 38. Kabilsingh, Buddhism and Conservation. The Four Types of Lotus refer to different stages of
human awareness from a Buddhist perspective. Some lotuses are submerged and thus eaten by animals
in the pond, while others rise well above the surface. The height of the lotus corresponds with
developed faculties, such as mindfulness, meditation, and wisdom.
39. Payutto, Thai Buddhism in the Buddhist World, 7–8. The Four Noble Truths are as follows: (1)
the Noble Truth of Suffering, (2) the Noble Truth of the Origin of Suffering, (3) the Noble Truth of the
Extinction of Suffering, and (4) the Noble Truth of the Path Leading to the Extinction of Suffering.
40. Alexander Kaufman and Jeremiah Mock, “Cultivating Greater Well-being: The Benefits Thai
Organic Farmers Experience from Adopting Buddhist Eco-spirituality,” Journal of Agricultural and
Environmental Ethics 27, no. 6 (2014): 871–93.
41. Essen, “Right Development.”
42. “Mae” is a title equivalent to “Mother” or “Elder” in the Thai northeastern dialect.
43. Alexander Kaufman, “Organic Farmers’ Connectedness with Nature: Exploring Thailand’s
Alternative Agriculture Network,” Worldviews, Global Religions, Culture and Ecology 16 (January
2012): 154–78.
44. This marketing alliance is no longer as discussed in the text due to recent changes.
45. Panya and Sirisai, “Environmental Consciousness in Thailand.”
 9

The Seven Species and Their

Relevance to Sustainable Agriculture
in Israel Today
Elaine Solowey

Sacred to Judaism and at the center of modern Jewish and Israeli holiday
traditions is the plant set known as the Seven Species. These plants were also
crucial to the agricultural systems of biblical times, when they supplied more
than 90 percent of the locally produced food. To this day, the Seven Species
have not been surpassed as sustainable and ecologically sound crops for the
arid areas of the Middle East. They are an interesting mix of species: two
grains, wheat and barley; two deciduous fruit trees, the pomegranate and the
fig; one palm, the hardy date; the vine; and a Mediterranean evergreen tree,
the olive. From these plants, according to the 104th Psalm, came bread, fruit,
oil “to make the face shine,” and wine “to gladden the heart”—in essence
almost all the food and drink that was produced in the area.
A few words on what sustainability meant in biblical times in an arid
area are first needed, as the situation of the people living then is difficult for
modern people who gain their calories from Green Revolution technologies
to understand. Trade was limited; only luxury goods with a high margin of
potential profit justified the risk and labor of importation. Thus, while there
was a trade in spices, salt, dyes, cloth, and medicinal and sacred herbs, very
little food was imported. Dates, wine, and olive oil were sometimes
exported, and the Judean date was famous for its size and flavor until the end
of Roman times. But a local failure of a staple crop usually meant that the
lack could not easily be made up. Indeed, one of the most memorable stories
in the Bible deals with the famine that engulfed the entire Near East, sparing
only Egypt. In order for his people to survive, the Patriarch Jacob was
obliged to send his sons to Egypt with what silver and gold his tribe
possessed to buy grain, which they carried back to Canaan on the backs of
donkeys and camels.
Because there was little chance of procuring food from outside,
sustainable agriculture in the biblical era was extremely conservative,
concentrating on reliable crops that were able to produce with sparse and
sometimes irregular supplies of water and other inputs. These crops were
also protective and generative of the soil, producing many useful yields to
feed both humans and animals.
Following the core belief expressed in the book of Genesis that humans
were meant to be the stewards and guardians of lesser creatures, relatively
complex laws protecting animals, plants, and the use of water and land were
strictly observed. Hence, it was forbidden to muzzle the ox used to thresh the
grain, to consolidate farms and drive neighbors away, and to deplete or foul
running water. Every seventh year was a sabbatical year in which land lay
fallow and debts were canceled; after seven sabbatical cycles, during the
fiftieth jubilee year, indentured servants were freed. These rules and customs
were so important that their execution was overseen by religious authorities.
Disputed matters could even be referred to the king if agreement could not
be reached at a local level.
Economically and socially, the Seven Species matched the spirit of the
times. It was assumed that people would earn their bread by the sweat of
their brow and that food should be stored up for lean years. It was also
assumed that the community would care for the widow, the orphan, and the
disabled from whatever local surplus it was possible to generate. The Seven
Species plants also had a vital and sacred dimension. The Hebrew calendar
is to this day lunar (with a correctional leap month that aligns it with the
solar year) revolving around festivals of a distinctly agricultural nature.
Examining the Seven Species one by one reveals their great value and
demonstrates the difficulty of separating the element of “culture” from that
of “agriculture.”
The wheat of both ancient and modern Israel is emmer, the tetraploid
“mother of grains.” Emmer wheat (Triticum diccocum) is versatile in the
field as it grows well in both sandy and clay soils, is tolerant of salinity, and
has a short, heavy stem that prevents it from lodging in the fierce south
winds of the region. Emmer is also the raw material of flour for bread
baking, edible oil, and fermented grain products; and unlike many wheat
varieties, its straw is suitable for both feed and building material. Wheat
bread from tetraploid emmer is an excellent food. Producing a harder and
denser loaf than bread made from the hexaploid bread wheat that would
appear later, it was also higher in protein. This is the hearty bread referred to
in the Bible as the “staff of life.” In fact, the modern Sabbath loaf has the
shape of a three-strand braid, shaped to resemble an ear of emmer wheat.
Barley, one of the hardiest of grains, is water thrifty and very salt
tolerant. Barley was grown in areas that were supplied with water by
seasonal flooding, including terraced canyons and salt marshes. It is also
resistant to heat and cold, and barley straw is particularly valuable for animal
feed and thatch. Barley bread was the mainstay of the poor and was prepared
unleavened, baked on a heated stone, and is very much like a chapati or a
whole grain matzah. The barley harvest was cause for celebration as barley
was hardier than wheat and sometimes did well when the wheat crop was
sparse.
Both grains are symbolic of human fertility and courage. The “precious
seed” referred to in Psalm 126—“Those who go forth weeping, bearing
precious seed, will come again rejoicing, bringing their sheaves with
them”—is a direct reference to banished and imprisoned Jews of various
captivities, coming out of exile into their own lands again and bringing with
them their children who had been born in exile.
The grain harvest was celebrated in two holidays, Shavouth, the festival
of the first harvest for the emmer types grown over the winter, and Succoth,
or Tabernacles, for the grains grown over the summer. Sheaves of grain are
the most common decoration on the Shavuoth holiday, and the book of Ruth
is read publicly in the synagogue and at holiday gatherings. Ruth, who was
by birth a Moabite, left her land and her people to live with her mother-in-
law, Naomi, who lost her husband and her two sons in Moav. She declares to
Naomi in what is perhaps the most famous declaration of love and loyalty in
the Western tradition: “Wherever you go, I will go, your people will be my
people and your God my God and where you die and are buried there I shall
be buried as well” (Ruth 1:16). Ruth, childless and widowed in her teens but
destined to be the great-grandmother of King David, so becomes the most
celebrated of converts, meeting her second husband, Boaz, in a field where
she is claiming the right of the poor by picking up the scattered ears of
barley left by the reapers. By the act of gleaning she is both proclaiming her
and Naomi’s poverty and assuming responsibility for supporting her mother-
in-law. At the height of the barley harvest, Ruth approaches Boaz and asks
that he be the kinsman who “redeems” her from her childless state.
David and Coleen Montgomery, who live near Kiryat Malachi in modern
Israel, are cultivating two-rowed biblical barley. They claim, “As a fodder
crop it is without compare. It grows well with little water on poor soils and
takes easily to organic cultivation methods. The animals love the straw. The
grain itself is so fat and beautiful it seems to symbolize abundance itself. The
ground grain makes a wonderful bread by itself or mixed with wheat flour.
Two-rowed barley malts well for beer and ale, too. We’ve raised different
grain crops, but biblical barley is a special crop.”1 David and Coleen are
modern Israeli farmers who are utilizing ancient seed and farming wisdom
as they help to create a regionally sustainable food supply. Their farming of
barley also suggests that the book of Ruth demonstrates the intertwined
connections between grain and fertility, grain and social responsibility, and
grain and the notion of real wealth.
To this day, formal and holiday meals in Jewish households begin with
the blessing of the bread. In this way the food is blessed and God is thanked
at the same time, elevating the meal from a mere stop for bodily refueling
into a celebration. The act of breaking bread together became an act of
friendship and unity, creating a sacrament, and guests, especially strangers,
were traditionally welcomed with food. There is no doubt that bread and
wine were considered irreplaceable on the table and in the pantry in ancient
times. What is less well known is the importance of bread and wine in
worship, for the sharing of these foods was the original “communion,” a
primal sacred act.
Another contemporary Israeli farmer, Elisheva Rugosa of Ariel, has
spent two decades promoting the cultivation and use of emmer wheat both in
Israel and the United States. “It is a healthier grain,” she said in a 2002
interview. “The hexaploid bread wheats are unbalanced nutritionally. They
raise the blood sugar too steeply and sharpen hunger rather than satisfying it.
Emmer wheat is more balanced and should be used to make our daily
bread.” Here is another contemporary Israeli farmer benefiting from the
place-specific Seven Species that were the backbone of ancient Israeli
farming. For modern-day farming in Israel to move away from Green
Revolution technologies and in order for a sustainable farming culture to
flourish, it appears that farm management decisions based on the Seven
Species can provide food that is healthier for the soil and for our bodies.
The olive tree also had a unique and sacred role. Pure olive oil was the
anointing oil of the kings of Israel, a symbol of God’s blessing. In the 23rd
Psalm it is written, “He prepares a table for me in the presence of my
enemies, He anoints my head with oil.” King David, the author of this
psalm, was chosen by a prophet who ignored his older and stronger brothers.
Saul, who ruled before him, pursued him with insane jealousy. King David
knew from firsthand experience what it was like to have a table prepared for
him in the midst of his enemies and what it was like to feel the sacred
anointing oil on his ruddy head.
Olive oil lamps lit the Tabernacle and the Temple in addition to
providing illumination for ordinary homes. Chanukah, the Jewish festival of
lights, celebrates a particular miracle: after the Temple was retaken from the
pagans during the Maccabbean war, only one container of pure olive oil
remained. To make more oil for the Temple menorah would take several
days. The miracle of Chanukah was that the one cruse of oil lasted eight
days, more than enough time for more oil to be made. Given the variety of
ways in which the products of the olive tree were used, often in very sacred
settings, the olive tree became a symbol of purity.
Good olive oil was considered as valuable as a good reputation. The
olive may have been the source of the anointing oil for kings, but olive oil
had a much more prosaic purpose, supplying much of the caloric intake in a
biblical diet that had few sources of fat or oil. The olive was so vital for
health that in the fable of Yotam (Jotham), an ancient tale in the book of
Judges (9:8–11), the olive tree refuses the honor of becoming the king of
trees. “What would the people do without my fruit and my oil?” the tree in
the story asks. “Without me they will suffer and be hungry.” Other fruit trees
refuse the honor as well. In the end, in a bit of ancient irony, the thorn tree
accepts the honor, as this tree has nothing better to contribute than its fierce
appearance. The olive branch also symbolizes peace and reconciliation. It
was the first plant to emerge from the biblical flood, brought back in the
beak of one of the birds Noah released. So the olive is a tree that makes
kings, brings peace, feeds the hungry, and fills both humble and exalted
dwellings with light. If Yotam’s fable were to be rewritten from the point of
view of sustainability, the olive tree would be crowned despite its protests.
 Adam of Noam Village is a modern organic grower of olive trees who
produces oil using ancient techniques. He shares, “To get the mild virgin oil
you can dip your bread in, you have to pick the olives when they are perfect,
not let them sit, grind the fruit on stone and press the pulp, unheated, not
contaminated by solvents or any modern tricks. Then you have wonderful oil
all year that never gets acid, never goes rancid.” He continues, “Olive wood
from the pruning is great too. I can make handles for my tools and little
carvings. The olive is the king of Mediterranean trees—it is so useful and it
grows on really rough and dry lands with just the rain that falls.” Once again
we see that the place-specific domesticated Seven Species of the ancient
Israelites are able to form the backbone of a regionally specific sustainable
agriculture, one that merges plants and religious heritage.
Another extremely hardy tree woven deeply into the fabric of life and
tradition is the date palm. References to the date palm, one of the only
sources of sugar in biblical Israel, abound in the Bible. A righteous man in
Psalm 92, verse 12 is said to flourish like a date palm. Tamar, or “date tree,”
is a common woman’s name. The male counterpart of this name is Tomer.
Another popular man’s name, Tamir, means literally as impressive as a palm
tree. Many coins from both Israel and Judea carry the symbol of fruit-laden
date trees.
From the date tree comes date fruit; date sugar (from collected sap); fiber
for rope, mats, and twine; leaves and fruit stalks for basket making; and
fronds for thatching. Judean dates were procured by Roman emperors for
their table. The Romans, who had nothing else good to say about the
inhabitants of ancient Israel, very much appreciated the quality of their
dates. The date tree, which grows with irregular and saline water in some of
the most barren areas in the Mideast, is also one of the four species of plants
celebrated during the Feast of Tabernacles (the original fall feast of
thanksgiving) as symbolic of the people of Israel. Its presence is seen on the
holiday table in the form of an unopened date frond, or lulav.
To Lisa Solomon, an expert on date cultivation who lives in Israel’s arid
and saline Arava Valley, the date is the most majestic of trees. “Our dates
give an average of 180 to 200 kilos per tree per season. This yield from one
of the hottest and most barren places in the world. We have to take good care
of them, of course, to make sure they are irrigated, pollinated on time; we
support all the heavy bunches by tying them to the fronds in the crown. We
thin our dates and protect them with screen bags. But the result is fine fruit,
some of the best in the world, that gets packed locally, then exported all
over.” Lisa uses modern farming practices that do not depend on chemical
inputs in order to produce a key food staple of the region. The resiliency of
the traditional date will be vital as Israel becomes even more arid with the
onset of climate change, helping form the basis of a sustainable agriculture.

Kibbutz date orchard in Israel. (Photo by Elaine Solowey.)

The fig and the vine are two plants that are often mentioned together. A
fig tree was considered a necessity both on a farm and in a city garden. In a
just and peaceful world, according to the Bible, every man would sit under
his own fig and his own vine. The vine, grown over a trellis or arbor, would
make a shaded place to rest during the long hot summer days. The grapes,
fresh or made into wine, quench thirst and “gladden the heart.” The fig,
which produces delicious fresh fruit that can also be dried and preserved,
provides a source of both beauty and nourishment. Together, the fig and vine
came to symbolize the abundance of the natural world as well as peace and
prosperity.
The vine by itself has come to symbolize the love and grace of God. The
biblical Joseph who saved Egypt and his people from famine is called “a
vine taken out of Egypt and planted by a well” in Psalm 80. Worn down by
slavery and famine, the children of Israel were told that they would bud like
vines in the springtime when they came into the Promised Land.
Chaim Oren from the Jordan Valley works for the Ministry of
Agriculture as a consultant for the fig crops in Israel. Chaim explains, “It is a
prefect tree, a perfect food. Good for digestion and full of moisture. The fig
is wonderful dried and makes a lovely wine when fermented. The sap of the
fig is healing and has anticancer properties, did you know that? That is why
everyone should have his own fig and his own vine like in the Bible. The fig
for health and the vine for happiness.” Chaim continues, “The vine is
important too. It roots you to the place, to the earth, shades your arbor, and
there is nothing better than ripe grapes right off the vine in the summer, like
a wonderful drink in little bottles that you can eat. It makes living in a desert
almost nice when you have figs there and vines.” Figs can be grown with
minimal chemical inputs, and there is a growing tendency on various
kibbutzim and other farms to grow figs with sustainable practices.
The last of the Seven Species, the pomegranate, is a crop of some
importance in modern Israel raised for juice, wine, and materia medica: the
same reasons it was cultivated in biblical times. This small, graceful tree
grows well on marginal lands, while its wild relatives adorn many rocky
hillsides. The distinctive scarlet blossom and the beautiful fruit came to
symbolize beauty in both the male and female form in biblical times. The
pomegranate is considered the most beautiful of the trees of the field.
Semidomesticated and diverse in height, habit, and fruit quality, the
pomegranate probably originated in what is now Iran. It had spread all over
the Middle East by biblical times and was a valued source of fruit, wine and
other beverages, dye, fine timber, and medicine. Images of pomegranates
made of precious metals even decorate the posts of the Torah scroll (the
scroll itself is called the Tree of Life).
Pomegranate trees in Israel. (Photo by Elaine Solowey.)

In the Song of Songs the beloved’s lips are like the pomegranate. Other
sacred verses find the colors of the pomegranate fruit in rosy cheeks and the
tree’s graceful shape in the human form. The pomegranate is reputed to have
613 seeds inside it, the exact number of Judaism’s major and minor
commandments. The edge of the high priest’s garment was decorated with a
row of bells and pomegranates that rang as he walked. Indeed, one of the
few documented and dated First Temple artifacts is a tiny pomegranate
carved from ivory that may have graced a priestly garment.
Dan Rimon of the Pomegranate Growers Association in Israel is full of
praise for the pomegranate. “It’s a beautiful tree that needs little water. It
adapts well to most climates. The fruit, when cultivated properly, is big,
juicy, and beautiful. A pomegranate tree in flower or fruit is a sight to make
you catch your breath. Wine and liqueur from pomegranates is tasty and
healthy, too. The fresh juice is considered a drink good for the heart. Oil
from pomegranate seeds is used to control high blood pressure. They knew
what they were talking about in the old days when they put pomegranates as
ornaments on the Tree of Life.”

Pomegranate fruit in Israel. (Photo by Elaine Solowey.)

In addition to food for the people of ancient Israel, these Seven Species
contributed much else to the agricultural economy of the day: animal feed,
mulch, thatch for the roof, timber, wood for plows and tools, materia medica,
dyestuffs, sugar, and coarse fibers. Traditional Jewish agriculture survived
the Seleucid conquest and endured into the Roman occupation, adding only a
few new crops, such as carobs and saffron. The agricultural traditions
continued after the failed Bar Kochba revolt in 70 CE in places like Yavne,
Safed, and Ein Gedi, but were unable to survive the Muslim invasion in the
eighth century when many remaining Jewish farmers fled into the Diaspora.
Farmers and agriculture suffered greatly in the next centuries as the area
was invaded by competing strains of Muslims, Mongols, and then European
crusaders, each group looting and laying waste to the orchards, water
systems, cisterns, and aqueducts until very little remained of what was once
a fertile and productive agricultural area. When the Ottoman Empire ruled
the area (from 1299 until World War I), it was so agriculturally depressed
and devastated that new crops were brought in from other parts of the
empire, including new strains of dates, beans, and grains.
The sixteenth century saw some revival of traditional Jewish crops and
settlement outside of the narrow walls of surviving cities, a pattern that
continued for the next two centuries. Still, agriculture remained stuck
somewhere between the biblical past and the Ottoman system of domination
and taxation that reduced Arab peasants, Greek and Armenian merchants,
and Jewish craftspeople alike to extreme poverty.
Upon seeing the plight of their coreligionists in the 1800s, wealthy Jews
from Europe invested large sums of money to bring new crops, such as
citrus, and to revive older crops, such as wheat and vines. Among them were
the Baron de Rothschild, still known in modern Israel as “the Generous
One,” and Moses Montifiore, who brought updated agricultural equipment to
the Middle East and built windmills in Jerusalem. With the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire, the British became responsible for some areas of the
Middle East, and the French for others. The political storms that periodically
swept over the region greatly reduced agricultural production until most of
the Middle East was an international charity case. Indeed, after Israel
declared independence in 1948, absorbing Jewish refugees from Arab
countries and displaced persons from World War II, it was necessary to
strictly ration food. This was because not enough of any variety of crop, old
or new, was being grown to feed the population, and the new country,
boycotted by many nations, struggled to survive. This period was called the
Tsena, or “austerity period,” and left such a vivid impression on the soul of
the new nation that agricultural research became a priority, leading to an
explosion of innovation in irrigation, plant breeding, water desalination, and
agroarcheological research.
New and traditional varieties of orchard trees were developed by
agricultural pioneers. Modern drip irrigation was invented, and Israel
became a world leader in irrigation technology. The ancient Israelite water
systems of the Negev were mapped and explored, and Michael Even Ari
restored and activated the rain-fed Nabaetan system of water collection by
the ruins of the ancient caravan city of Avdat, growing grains and trees in an
area with fewer than eighty millimeters of annual rainfall.
 Although much of modern Israel’s agriculture is geared toward the
export market, there have always been farmers who grow traditional species.
Dates are the most important crop in the desolate Arava Valley south of the
Dead Sea and the arid zones of the Jordan Valley. They are packaged and
shipped from these barren valleys all over the world and are one of the more
profitable crops for modern farmers as well as one of the few halophytes in
the modern crop library. Olives are a widely planted crop in the Galilee and
western Negev, supplying most domestic olive oil as well as kosher olive oil
for Jewish communities abroad. Grapes for the table and for wine are
cultivated in many hill areas from the Lebanese border to the western Negev,
with the southernmost vineyard at Naot Smadar in the mountains just north
of the Red Sea. In Israel today, figs and vines are the most popular plants in
the “house orchard” and the walled garden.
Israel actually has a tiny “wheat belt” between Kiryat Malachi and
Beersheva where Jewish and Bedouin farmers sow wheat each year on rain-
fed fields. The wheat from this area is particularly well suited for making
pasta. Barley is used as a bioremediation plant and for reclamation of saline
soils slightly to the south of this region in areas with less annual rainfall.
Barley has gone out of favor as a bread grain in the Middle East and is
mostly used for beer making, as a whole grain in soup and crackers, and as
an animal feed.
A larger theme emerges regarding the Seven Species and contemporary
farming in Israel: sustainable agriculture is about not only farming practices
but also cultural knowledge. If there is a sustainable culture, as in the case of
Israelite identity with local landscapes that stretch back thousands of years,
then there is the chance for a sustainable agriculture. Cultural values can
play a role in inspiring good, sustainable farming practices.

My Own Experience
I have found a good deal of inspiration and common sense in the agricultural
customs described in the Bible and the Talmudic tractate called “Seeds.” I
will start with the “commonsense” factor. Our modern system of agriculture
is based on the continuous abundance of water, fuel, and fertilizer. The
biblical systems are based on thrift, scarcity, and an irregular climate. It is an
agriculture designed for hard times. However, hard times do not excuse the
mistreatment of neighbors.
Water by law must be fairly portioned between upstream and
downstream users and cannot be fouled by those upstream. Farms should not
be bought up until one owner owns all the visible land around his or her
house. Neighbors stopping in an orchard may eat, drink, and refresh
themselves with fruit and water but may not carry part of the crop away
without permission. The reaper may not turn back for missed stalks or reap
around the edges of the field, as these remnants are left for the poor. The first
fruits of the trees and vines are also left for the poor. And even in times of
war fruit trees must not be destroyed in the territory of the enemy.
The sabbatical years and the jubilee year are fallow years for intensive
agriculture. Farmers may harvest from their trees and vines, but they were to
let the earth rest and the soil structure re-form. This was especially important
in areas with poor soils and limited rainfall.
Scarcity and the need for thrift do not excuse cruelty to animals. Animals
must be milked, fed, and put out to graze or brought into the fold regardless
of the circumstances of their human owners. Human owners are responsible
for damage caused by their animals, not the animals themselves. The ox that
treads the grain must not be muzzled, and animals of unequal strength
cannot be yoked together. Moreover, in general hunting was discouraged as
it was assumed that the wild animals belong to God. These ideas are sensible
in an area where everything, even the rain, is scarce and precious. In other
words, the Seven Species and the system of farming described in the Hebrew
Bible represent a form of traditional ecological knowledge that is both
practical and viable for creating a resilient, sustainable agriculture in
contemporary Israel.
For example, some of our modern dilemmas can be addressed by the rule
of Kil-i-yim, or the unwise union or hybrid. It is forbidden to breed a dog
with a wolf as the result would be a wolfish dog, a danger to flocks and
children, or a doggish wolf, unable to hold a place in the pack. In this age of
chimeras, genetically engineered plants, and organisms modified with
human DNA, it may be necessary to think about the relevance of this ancient
law. A wolfish dog is not what it seems—it is not truly domesticated and is
more of a danger than an ordinary dog. In the same manner, a plant that
looks like a normal fruit or vegetable but contains the genes of inedible
plants or secretes its own pesticides is more of a danger than an ordinary
food plant. A doggish wolf has been handicapped in its ability to survive. In
the same manner, a plant modified to do something it has not evolved to do
or to have an abnormally high harvest index may be hampered in its growth
and viability. This is a clear message to those who breed (and modify) both
plants and animals: it is unwise and against biblical law to change living
things with no thought for the organisms’ own needs. I believe these are
commonsense rules that could be applied to modern practices, some of
which are very damaging to the countryside.
I have been inspired and intrigued by the descriptions of plants in the
Bible and the explanation of their uses, from the food of the poor (barley) to
the frankincense, myrrh, and basalms necessary to worship in the Temple.
The incense trees were as important to the religious and spiritual life of that
day as the Seven Species were to the economic life; indeed, it is hard to
determine where elements of religion ended and economic elements began.
Since many food plants were also used medicinally, one begins to sense a
rich and integrated tapestry of law, custom, use, and belief that we moderns
are only beginning to understand.
Much of my research now is based on admitting what I do not know and
defining what I would like to find out using biblical and Talmudic laws and
practices as clues. The fact that five of the Seven Species are so important to
today’s economy in Israel is a testament to the hardiness and adaptability of
these plants. Hardiness, however, is only one reason that the Seven Species
have endured. The plants have many qualities that made a sustainable and
prosperous life possible in an area with an unstable arid to semiarid climate.
Indeed, the First Jewish Commonwealth, based on the cultivation of
these species, endured for eighteen hundred years. These species were all
indigenous or had become naturalized early in biblical Israel’s history. They
required little water or were able to survive on an irregular water supply.
They produced multiple products that were easily stored and integrated into
everyday life. These species were tolerant of a wide variety of soils and were
both heat and cold tolerant in the climate of ancient Israel, which varied
from searing heat to freezing winter winds and occasional snowstorms.
These plants accompanied the Jewish people on their long historical
journeys: they were the vegetation of the spiritual landscape, the species
planted in the heart.
Religion, agriculture, and tradition are so intertwined in the cultivation of
these plants that it may well be asked if they were important because of their
sacred dimension—or if they were considered sacred because of their
extreme importance to the very survival of the people who grew them. Other
crops were cultivated in biblical times, but none were considered such vital
elements in the spiritual and agricultural landscape as the Seven Species.
And none of the new crops introduced in the last three hundred years to the
Turkish province of Palestine (part of which would become a British
mandate and then modern Israel) have attained the status of the ancient
crops.
Modern Israel is a small country with limited arable land and little water,
but it is home to a vigorous agricultural community that has experimented in
growing everything from cotton to bananas. While some crops have
flourished for a time, their cultivation is often faddish, and new crops usually
vanish in times of recession or drought. That is when the influences of the
unstable climate and the arid landscape return to shape the crop library,
eliminating all but the most beloved, useful, and hardy plants. In recent
decades there has been a renewed interest in biblical crops as sustainable
alternatives. Among both new and more veteran agricultural endeavors, the
Seven Species reappear in their sturdy glory as the once and future
sustainable crops of the land of Israel.

Study Questions
1. Why is it important to understand the “culture” of agriculture? And
how was ancient Israeli farming a result of both geography and
culture?
2. How might the Seven Species be important to the region in the
future, given climate scenarios that suggest the region will be more
dry and crowded in the years to come?
3. What might our farming system look like if we observed sabbatical
years, and let people glean leftovers from fields? Are there any
fields near your house? How might our farming system differ if
farmers were forgiven debts so they could invest in their farming
practices? Is this fair to nonfarmers? Would it help struggling family
farmers?
 4. What commonsense rules may help generate sustainable farming in
your bioregion? Are any local farmers following such rules?
5. What edible plant/animal species are (or were) indigenous to your
area, and is anyone growing these now? How might the
commodification of genetic knowledge influence this?

Note
1. This and all subsequent data from Israeli and regional farmers come from interviews conducted
by the author.
 10

Tending the Garden of Eden

Sacred Jewish Agricultural Traditions

Yigal Deutscher

As farmers, our invitation is to remember we are tending a story, one so

much bigger than our own individual selves, so much larger than our own
personal fields. We are never just cultivating a field. The “field” we are
tending is the story we live in. The landscape is the storybook; the plants
are its words. This is a living story, dynamic and growing, changing with
the seasons and the years. To dig deep into the soil is to reach into the depth
of memory, to remember what we may have forgotten, and to uncover
layers of the story we may never even have known. To seed into this soil is
to add to it, to enrich it with new memory, new experience. In this way, the
soil can dream and the story can evolve.
This canvas of soil, this story, is the foundation of culture. The word
culture comes from the Latin cultura, which actually means cultivation.
Culture, like our soils, is something that is tended and nourished. It is the
story of society, ancient and new, all together. It is within the fertility of our
fields that this story grows. It is within the flavors of our harvests that this
story is savored. Similarly, when we erode the soil and disrespect the
landscape, we lose our cultural story. These are reflections of one another,
and the vibrancy of the two are directly linked.
With our seeds, our pitchforks, our harvests, we might choose to
approach farming as businesspeople, educators, laborers, artists,
researchers, homesteaders. But we are always storytellers, carrying a story
that began long before us. How, as farmers, can we cultivate and tend the
majestic vitality of this living story so its seeds can sprout, grow beautifully,
flower, and form fruit?
The beauty and mystery of this story is that it has many beginnings.
Each of us can find the indigenous memory of this story, its unique origin,
depending on where our farm is planted, who our ancestors are, and in
which community we live. The answers can be found in the soils. The land
opens our senses, our intuitive knowing, and our remembering. The land
cultivates us, and tends to our own growth.
My personal story and ancestry has Jewish roots, so I follow these
unique branches and pathways for the answers to my questions. After my
introduction to farming, it was the land and soils of Israel that whispered to
me, courted me. And I chose this encounter.
Much of my learning happened in the days and nights in this land, in her
gentle valleys nestled between rolling hills: a rocky landscape with a sparse
Mediterranean shrub forest, deeply green with lush grasses and colorful
with wildflowers in the wet winter months, and unforgivingly dry in the
summer months. This landscape held a rich and diverse plant community.
Sage, marjoram, hyssop, mustard, fennel, and a mixture of wild grains grew
below the trees and surrounded the protruding boulders. There were figs,
olives, almonds, and carobs growing wildly, as well—remnants of earlier
plantings from farmers long before me. This land had been lived in for
thousands of years, by many peoples, and during my wanders through the
hills I would find the remains of old stone houses, terraces, and carved
cisterns, some of which still held the winter rainfalls within. The skies were
filled with migratory birds in the spring and fall, making their way over the
land corridor linking Africa, Europe, and Asia. In the early dawn and last
light of day, you could spot gazelle and fox in the hills. With the coming of
evening, you heard the howling of the jackals, in unison, welcoming the
approaching darkness. And hours later, with the coming sunrise, the
stillness and quiet of the night would be broken by a chorus of harmonic
birdsong, the fluttering of wings.
Within this setting, we planted biodiverse gardens of herbs, vegetables,
flowers, and fruit trees. We grew for an on-site market and for the members
of our CSA (community-supported agriculture program). We hosted an
educational farming apprenticeship for students from around the world,
similarly called by their own curiosity toward a connection with this
ancient, magical, and wild storied landscape. The farm itself was a canvas
for learning, an invitation for deep connection, more so than a business for
production. We were growing crops, and we were growing our own selves.
It was in this land, as I learned from the plants and seasons; as I walked
through the fields and wild hills at dawn and dusk; as I watched the
migratory birds passing above; as I shared alongside elders and apprentices,
asking, wondering, and exploring; as I sat on the Sabbath day of rest in the
gentle shade under a tree, with an open Bible on my lap, the ink of the
pages mixing with the soils of the field—it was here that I was initiated into
the story, and it was here that I truly became a farmer.

Soil and Service

In Israel, the rainy season begins in the fall, after months of dry, barren
skies, and this is when the first seeds are planted in the soils. It is during
this time that the Torah is opened from its beginning and read once again,
each Sabbath a new section.1 And it is during this sacred reading, during
seeding time and calling forth the rains, that we are first introduced to
humans and farming.
Early in the biblical story, humans are introduced as adam, birthed from
adamah, the soils of the earth (Genesis 2:7). Human body and earth body
are intimately connected, reflections of one another. But the desire, the
arousal for our birth came from a lack: “The shrubs of the field were not yet
on the earth, and the grasses of the field had yet to sprout, for God had not
yet sent rain upon the earth, and there was no human la’avod the soil”
(Genesis 2:5).2
It is the lack of our unique offering that initiates the necessity for our
participation in the story of creation. And our unique offering has to do with
a particular relationship with the soil. The word la’avod is usually
translated “to work” and, in this context, has popularly been understood as
“to till.” In this agrarian reading, there was no human to work the soil, so
there was no plant yet growing. Everything at this stage was in a dormant
state of potentiality and possibility. All the elements of creation were there,
but the synthesis and synergy of dynamic growth had yet to be activated.
Why? Because our efforts—our unique relationship with soil—had yet to
enter the fabric of the story.
The noun form of la’avod is avodah. This word appears throughout the
Torah, and its most common context does not actually involve agricultural
tillage. Rather, the most literal translation of la’avod is “to serve,”
referencing the priestly service, the sacred work that first began in the
Mishkan, the desert tabernacle, and continued with the Beit Hamikdash, the
Holy Temple in the land of Israel. This was an intricate and detailed
relational courting of Spirit, which involved daily immersions in purifying
waters, tending the sacred eternal fire, lighting the incense smoke, and
offering the animal, grain, and oil sacrifices on the altar.3 These offerings
are called korbanot, a word that comes from the verb me’karev, “to draw
close, to draw near, to come together.” The holistic service of the priests
was a sacred invocation and unification, a feeding, revealing, strengthening,
and honoring of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all beings.
This is the foundational intention of avodah.
After the temple and altar were destroyed, nearly two thousand years
ago, this service transformed and evolved into new realms of internal and
personal dimensions for each individual, and the rabbis began to refer to
this evolution of service as prayer, avodat ha’lev, the service of the heart.4
Our prayers of gratitude, honoring, and reverence are meant to recognize
and restore the threads that weave together. Prayer is a sacred conversing, a
participation in the living conversation, the mutual story, shared among all
creation.
This is the paradise of the Garden of Eden, in which we were placed
la’avdah (Genesis 2:15). Eden, as told in the narrative of scriptural
mythology, was a sacred space, a wild space, a place of abundance, peace,
and nourishment. It was a green landscape, filled with the diversity of plant
life. The word used for plant in this narrative is siach, sharing the same root
letters as the word sicha, “conversation.” This is the conversation of the
elements: the roots conversing with the soils, the sun conversing with the
leaves, the birds conversing with the flowers, the seeds conversing with the
winds and animals.
The soil was the canvas, the host, for this expansive, unfolding
conversation of creation. And the soil was the mythic, primal umbilicus of
our own physical nature. This was our first relationship to soil. We were
entered into the midst of these conversations as pollinators, to nourish and
tend this intimate dialogue of life with our own humble gratitude, to honor
and recognize these conversations through the beautiful offerings of our
voice, the sacred service of our hands and heart: the original essence of
avodah.
And this was all before the birth of agriculture. In fact, the first we hear
of agriculture is actually a curse. A common reading of the Eden story is
that the expulsion from this paradise was humanity’s transition to farming
and the embrace of the agrarian lifestyle, that Adam and Eve’s harvesting
and eating from the forbidden “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” was
our symbolic remembering of the first cultivation of grains, one of the
earliest domesticated crops of agriculture.
In the curse of exile from Eden, the word avodah appears once again.
But this time, it is far different from its original intention. “The Lord God
banished them from the Garden of Eden, la’avod the soil from which they
were taken” (Genesis 3:23). Now avodah is used in a form meaning burden,
toil. What was before an act of ease and simplicity, a natural flow, has
become removed and distant. “Cursed be the ground because of you; by toil
shall you eat of it all the days of your life. . . . By the sweat of your brow
shall you eat bread until you return to the ground” (Genesis 3:17–19). This
is tillage: cultivation as control and domination, cultivation as manipulation
rather than interconnection. This is a new form of avodah, a shadow and
falling from the original sacred service of Eden. This new service is linked
with the word eved, sharing the same root letters as avodah. Eved means a
slave, and thus this form of service is imposed, forced labor.
So according to Jewish tradition, is farming a curse? It would appear so.
And as a farmer, what is the story I am cultivating? Am I perpetuating this
curse each time I till, each time I seed? Luckily, no story is static. And we
are crafting the story as we live it. Through the mythic remembering of our
past, we can dive into the layers of this story. We can trace its own
evolution, its own seeds of transformation.

The Agrarian Change

If we were to place the mythic Garden of Eden on a map, a common
landing place would be somewhere in the Fertile Crescent. From the
narrative of the Torah (Genesis 2:10), we know Eden was a lush landscape
of abundance surrounded by four rivers that flowed perennially, nourishing
the land. Similarly, the Fertile Crescent is an ancient area of lush river
valleys and rich soils stretching in a crescent shape from the Nile to the
Tigris and Euphrates. It covers modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon,
Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Kuwait as well as parts of Egypt, Turkey, and Iran.
This land is known as the cradle of civilization, as it is the birthplace of
agriculture as well as of the ripples of human necessity and desire that
emerged from agrarian living: settled tribes, growing populations, surplus
and storage of harvests, wealth and economic class distinctions,
specializations in the workplace, hierarchical governance, organized
religion, writing, money, cities, weapons, war, and empires. Taken together,
these filled the canvas of civilization as we know it, with its diverse
blessings and curses.
The Hebrew calendar dates the Garden of Eden story to about 5,750
years ago, close enough to this cultural transition that the agrarian
civilization would have still been in its early stages of development. The
Eden narrative offers a snapshot of a much longer evolutionary period.
Historians date the transition to agriculture as beginning around 9000 BCE,
fully established in parts of the Fertile Crescent by 6000 BCE. This
landscape was a unique and fitting laboratory for the evolution of plant
domestication and cultivation. The altitudes of the Fertile Crescent range
from the lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea, to the alpine peaks of the
Zagros mountain range in modern-day Iraq and Iran. This wide range of
ecosystems accommodated a high diversity of plant communities, many of
which are the wild ancestors of the domesticated crops we eat today, and
also provided a wide range of movement for the nomadic peoples of the
area, who seasonally migrated to higher altitudes during the summer
months and lower into the valleys during the winter months in search of
food and game.

From this landscape, two archetypes emerged: the farmer and the shepherd.
The farmer claimed the possibilities of the post-Edenic life, while the
shepherd remained more aligned with the earlier, preagrarian
hunter/gatherer nomadic lifestyle. In our biblical narrative, the farmer is
named Cain, the shepherd Abel. Their names hold their essence, and their
characters are embodiments of the energies of their names.
The farmer’s name, Cain, comes from the Hebrew kaniti; Eve
proclaims: “I have kaniti a male with God” (Genesis 4:1). Kaniti means
“acquire,” and all forms of this word have to do with acquisition,
ownership, and control. Similarly, sharing the same root letters, a kinyan is
an object of acquisition, a commodity, something that appears in contractual
language.
The shepherd, on the other hand, has the Hebrew name Hevel, which is
the word for the out-breath, the exhalation. While many commentators also
translate this word to mean “futility,” it is only a futility when compared
with the dominance of the farmer. Rather, this energy is a powerful form of
surrender, of release, of flow. The out-breath is a simple allowance, a giving
over in faith and trust to what is beyond our control. And this is the
shepherd in his or her role: following the wild path of the animals. Yes, a
form of domestication, but much less controllable than the crops we plant.
These two archetypes exist together in tension. In the biblical narrative,
Cain and Abel both gather their harvests and make an offering to Spirit.
God accepts the offering of the shepherd but does not accept that of the
farmer. Cain is enraged with jealousy, and God speaks to him directly. We
can understand these words as spoken to every farmer to this day: “Why are
you angry, and why is your face fallen? Surely, if you do right, there is
uplift. But if you do not do right, sin crouches at the door; Its lust is toward
you. Yet you can be its Master” (Genesis 4:6–7).
This is the burden of the farmer. We have chosen a path that is rooted in
exile from Eden, work that is full of temptation and amnesia. “Sin crouches
at the door.” This is the desire of control, of arrogance, of claiming the
power as our own, of seeing the crops as commodities, the service as work,
and the land as our own property. The act of farming can become a fierce
hunger, a need to receive, to take, to claim, until there is nothing left. The
amnesia within this hunger is a forgetting of the story of Eden, of
connection, of avodah as feeding the interconnected relationships within
and between all life.
However, the words of God to the farmer are quite different than the
curse given to Adam and Eve. “Surely, if you do right, there is uplift.”
Ultimately, Cain ignores these guiding words and kills his brother, a murder
of archetypal proportions. So today, in a world of agricultural dominance,
we are still left with the question: What is the “right” avodah of farming?
And how can we use farming to master the desires of control it creates
within us?

The Third Path

Throughout the Bible, the Hebrew people chose the path of the shepherd,
not the farmer. The families of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were all nomadic
shepherds traveling the land of Canaan. Arriving in the Nile Valley in the
land of Egypt during a severe drought sweeping the western lands of the
Fertile Crescent, the Hebrew tribes remained as shepherds, even to their
own demise, eventually becoming enslaved to the agricultural empire of
Egypt.
The story of their exodus is a story of liberation from slavery and
oppression. But it is also a story of unlearning. The Hebrew tribes spent
almost four hundred years in Egypt, experiencing the abuses and
inequalities an agricultural civilization can create. Their passing through the
parted sea was their passage through a birth canal, a cleansing and a rebirth.
The period of forty years of travel through the desert was an initiation and a
collective spiritual awakening.
The landscape of their travels, the wilderness, is called the Midbar,
which means “the Speaking Place.” Here they would awaken from their
amnesia, remember avodah in the Edenic sense, remember the archetype of
hevel, of surrender. In this Speaking Place they would relearn the sacred
conversations, the sacred connections between all life, and their service of
celebrating this web. This is the place of truth, of clarity, of vision, where
layers of separation are peeled back. The Midbar cannot be owned or
purchased; it is a place beyond control, beyond the realm of agriculture. It is
the place of revelation, the home of the natural rhythm of death and birth,
where life decomposes and sprouts forth in a seamless cycle, beyond our
powers. It is the home of alchemy and transformation, where the elements
merge together in continual co-creation and communication. This place is
our teacher.
 Here, in this untamed landscape of mountain, soil, and rock, the Hebrew
tribes would struggle, sometimes bitterly, confused and lost, longing for the
slavery they had become accustomed to, begging for the cultivated
vegetables they had known growing on the banks of the Nile in the land of
Egypt. And here, passing through this struggle, they would relearn avodah.
They would activate the service of the priesthood, offering daily sacrifices,
daily courting and connection. Here they would gather the manna, wild
nourishment of the desert, a food beyond cultivation, collected in equal
portions for all peoples—a food that would be gathered daily, without the
ability to be hoarded or accumulated in storage (Exodus 16:13–23). Here
they would learn the practice of shabbat, of rest, of weekly surrender and
exhalation. And here they would stand before the mountain of Sinai and
receive the Torah, their guidance. And this guidance is one that crafts a path
for them, for home. They would journey for forty years to this place, and
once they arrived, for the first time in their collective history, they would
settle and become farmers; they would begin forming an agrarian society.
They would enter into the lineage of Cain, but not before recognizing the
shadows of this path, not before relearning the arts and skills and service of
Abel. And in this way, they would be initiated into a third path, a merging
and blending of farmer and gatherer, farmer and shepherd.

Foundations of Jewish Agriculture

The Torah the Hebrew people received in the Midbar was a blueprint for
this third path, offering the foundations for a sacred agriculture, a farming
in covenant with the wild. These agreements tell a new story of farming, not
as a curse of exile or expression of empire, but as a pathway toward
redemption, toward home. Within this blueprint, farming becomes a form of
avodah, sacred service, aligned with the service of the Garden of Eden, the
feeding and nourishing of the relations between all life. This becomes the
new story for the new land, the story we have been invited to tend in our
fields, in ourselves, and in our communities. What follows are the
foundations for this covenant, the intentions for a sacred agriculture and
sacred culture
Rest and Release
The Hebrew story of creation unfolds within a cycle of seven. “Six days
you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; you shall cease from
plowing and harvesting” (Exodus 34:21). Six days of sacred action
followed by a sacred shabbat, a temple in time. The seventh day is a period
of stillness, completion, and wholeness. Rather than the end of a linear
momentum in time, the seventh is the center, the heart of creation.
Welcoming the seventh day during shabbat prayers, within the poetic liturgy
of Lecha Dodi, we sing: “She is the source of blessing for all
creation . . . last in deed but first in thought.” This seventh day offers us a
gift, a sacred period of rest, of renewal, and of reflection. A time to cease
from agriculture, to remember the bigger story we are a part of, in service
of. This day is a guide, informing the activity and intention of the six days
that follow. The period of nondoing is the teacher for the doing. How we sit
in rest, in stillness, will teach us how to engage in action, in creating.
In this relational dance between rest and action, between the days of
creation and shabbat, the elements are in eternal, dynamic balance, each
feeding the other. The fabric of the entire Jewish cosmology, culture, and
story is interwoven with the patterns of this cycle. Just as there is a
celebration of shabbat, of rest, every seventh day, there is a collective
celebration of release every seventh year, a time known as the shmita.5
“When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a
Sabbath of the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field . . . but in the
Seventh Year the land shall have a complete rest” (Leviticus 25:2–3). For an
entire year, farmers and farmland release from the rhythms and practice of
agriculture. Our muscles and bodies release our grip on our tools, release
our grasp on the land. The land itself expresses herself in her wildness,
beyond domestication, beyond cultivation. Her soils are rejuvenated and her
nutrients restored. Just as the land re-wilds, so too, we re-wild. We settle
into observation, watching the needs of the land, the interactions of land,
animal, and plant with sun, water, and wind, without human intervention.
We are guided to release and surrender in faith, to learn from this period, to
humbly gather the wisdom of knowing the land in this way.
Shmita is the law of the wilderness, the law of the Midbar, the Speaking
Place beyond human control. If we are to develop agriculture, we must do
so with the seed of the wild planted in our hearts, planted in our tools, in
our fields. Shmita, like the weekly shabbat, offers us a delicate edge where
our two identities, our civilized and wild reflections, can meet and merge
together in sacred balance. When every seventh year passes, and we do
return to the tools of tilling and cultivating, the hope is to do so as a sacred
act, feeding the wild within us and around us, nourishing that which
continues to feed us. The cycles of shabbat and shmita guide us with this
question, this riddle, and challenge: What would an agricultural society
look like if it ceased from agriculture every seventh day, every seventh
year? How can this system be designed for shared nourishment and
ecological abundance?

Sacred Land
After forty years of wandering through the Midbar, the Hebrew tribes
finally entered the land of Israel, crossing the Jordan River. On its banks
they camped and made offerings of gratitude, celebrating once again their
exodus from Egypt, their release from slavery. Here, on this soil, they
would begin their own story as farmers. During a solo excursion deeper into
the land, Joshua, the leader of the Hebrew tribes, received a message from
an angel in the guise of a warrior. Joshua fell on his knees, bent low to the
earth, and humbly asked: “What does my lord say to his servant?” And this
angelic being responded to Joshua, “Take your shoe from off your foot; for
the place on which you stand is holy” (Joshua 5:14–15). This story reflects
back the same message Moses received at the place of the burning bush in
the wilderness. The land is holy; the land is sacred. If you are to begin
farming, you must know this in every fiber of your being. Every tool you
use, every seed you plant, every harvest you gather: you are interacting with
the sacred. Through direct relationship with the soil you will know the
divine.
When the people settled in Israel, the land was portioned out to each
tribe, the size of each parcel according to the tribal population. Each land
had its own soils, its own resources, its own unique crops. And as the
people of each tribe began to cultivate their soils, they would develop an
intimate relationship with place, extending from generation to generation.
The stories of their families would merge with the story of the landscape.
Each would be woven in with the other. If land were to be sold, it would be
only for a short period. After seven shmita cycles, the fiftieth year would
mark the jubilee, the yovel (Leviticus 25:8). In this year, all tribal peoples
would be invited to return once again to their ancestral lands. If they had
lost their family land through debt or had chosen to sell it, they would still
have equal right to return. Part of the sanctity of the land was the sacred
bond with the particular peoples of the land. For the story of the land to be
vibrant, it required the partnership and participation of these peoples. In this
way, land never became an object, a resource, or a commodity. Even if it
did enter the market, the land itself would have no price. The only “sale
value” was on the estimated amount of harvest that would be gathered in
the years leading up to the next jubilee.
To further support the wild sanctity of land, in each tribal holding, cities
would be surrounded by a migrash, an open space (Numbers 35:2). This
open space was dedicated land for animals, for wilderness, for shepherding.
In our planning of cities and agricultural landscapes, there would always
remain the connection to the wild, the uncultivated.
Supporting this multigenerational connection to place and the wild came
with the recognition that humans are humble guests, graciously receiving a
divine gift. The land ethic of Israel was based on this understanding, as
given by God: “The land is Mine, and you are temporary settlers with Me”
(Leviticus 25:23).

Perennial and Wild Allies

The celebrated native and heritage plant species of the land of Israel are
known as the Seven Species, the Shivat Minim. Through their bodies and
fruits, these plants tell the story of the land. “For the Lord your God is
bringing you into a good land . . . a land of wheat and barley, of grape
vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey [date palms]”
(Deuteronomy 8:7–8; also see chapter 9 by Elaine Solowey in this volume).
Besides these crops, the land was rich in a variety of other fruit trees and
wild edibles, such as the fruit trees carob, pistachio, almond, and mulberry;
the herbs sage, hyssop, marjoram, and mallow; onion and asparagus; the
seed crops of oats, lentils, and chickpeas. These plants became the
foundation for the earliest forms of agriculture in the land. And the tending
of these particular crops created an open portal to a more regenerative, wild,
and diverse food ecology, in unison with the culture of the land.
Every seventh year, all soil cultivation—tillage and seeding—ceased.
Yet this year was meant to be one of abundance, of food to be eaten and
shared with all: “Whatever the land yields during its Sabbath will be food
for you—for yourself, your male and female servants, and the hired worker
and temporary resident who live among you” (Leviticus 25:6). Without
agricultural production of grain, legume, or vegetable, the primary harvests
of this year were the wild edibles and perennial plants. The need for
widespread availability of these crops during the seventh year required a
deep respect and awareness, a stewarding and honoring of these plants,
during all years of the shmita cycle.
With this rhythm—six years of farming and one year of complete fallow
—the natural food ecology that developed integrated perennials as a
keystone species in plant production. And this supported a healthier
agricultural system. Perennial crops retain their predomesticated vigor and
are less dependent on the agricultural inputs of soil cultivation, irrigation,
and fertilization, efforts that often come with costs such as soil pollution,
erosion, and salinization. Perennials invest more into their own plant body
than annuals do, giving them resilience for survival. Their longer and
stronger roots make them more drought tolerant and more able to access
nutrients in the soil. Their stronger plant bodies allow for stronger
resistance to disease and insects. Furthermore, over seasons, decaying
organic matter from dead leaves and roots leads to building organic matter
within their own soils.
Beyond the tending of perennial food crops, the shmita tradition also
inspired an open relationship with the wild lands beyond the borders of
agricultural fields, abundant in foods growing without a dependency on
human efforts. And the diet was enriched by this. Wild plants tend to have
much higher levels of nutrients than our domesticated crops, as their roots
dig deeper for their own survival through soils that have not been
cultivated. Also, with no irrigation provided, their bodies and fruits may be
smaller, but their flavors are much more concentrated.

An agriculture allied with a diverse community of wild and perennial plants

is an agriculture of permanence, in partnership and relationship with the
natural ecology. This is an agriculture reflecting the Garden of Eden. It is an
agriculture that requires patience and deep observation skills; it requires
long-term visioning of land protection and fruit-tree tending; it requires
education to know how to identify, properly gather, and prepare wild
edibles. It is an agricultural planting and tending not simply for this
season’s harvest but for the generations ahead, harvests our children will be
able to enjoy and be nourished by.

Offerings of Gratitude
The earth provides, and with our inputs of seed, water, and fertility, our
agricultural landscapes are one of abundance. Yet, for each taking, there
must be a return, a giving back, an offering of gifts. Jewish agriculture is
embedded in a relationship of reciprocity and mutuality, with specific
instructions for agricultural offerings. These offerings were a way to
celebrate all the ways we were being fed and to tender something in return,
an alchemy born from shared effort, of the primal elements of sun, water,
air, and earth, the life force of plant and animal, the farmer’s hands, sweat,
and tools. These offerings mentored us as well, cultivating our own sense of
self-discipline, generosity, and sacred humility.
With every harvest, the first crop to ripen was not for our own
consumption. Rather, this was designated as sacred, as bikkurim, first fruits
to be dedicated to the Temple in Jerusalem. From the spring harvests of
grain to the late-summer harvests of fruit crops, the farmers of Israel would
make the journey to the Temple with fresh or dried harvests, depending on
their distance of travel. And they would arrive in celebration, in a
pilgrimage and parade of thanksgiving and gratitude, with decorated
wagons pulled by decorated oxen, loaded with ornamentally displayed
harvest baskets, with musicians leading the way, guiding them onward to
the Temple (Mishnah Bikkurim 3).6
Beyond the seasonal offerings of the bikkurim, there were sacred
offerings from each harvest, dedicated to the Kohanim and Levites. Unlike
the other tribes of Israel, these peoples did not receive a land-based
heritage; instead, their avodah was strictly through Temple service. The
offerings of the farmers would link these priests to the land while
simultaneously linking the farmers to the Temple. Of every crop that
entered the home, 10 percent was separated as a terumah, a gift, to these
priests.
Once the Temple was destroyed, the rabbis of the Talmud taught that the
new altar for service was the table within our home. The table itself became
the altar; the food we place on it became the offerings; and the prayers we
offer became the avodah. The rabbis understood that to eat a food before
offering a blessing would be the equivalent of theft. Regardless of the work
we as farmers put into the growth and harvest and preparation of this food,
it is not ours at all. It belongs to Spirit, to creation, which we serve through
our farming. It is the offering of the blessing that allows us the spiritual
capacity to consume these foods and be nourished by them. Each blessing is
worded in the present tense: “Blessed are you Creator who is creating.” We,
as farmers, participated in a part of the process, but the existence of the
food itself is beyond our own efforts. The first blessings, before
consumption, relate to recognition and awareness of this understanding, an
honoring of the life we have tended and taken. The second blessing, after
consumption, is of gratitude and thanksgiving. These prayers are the final
act of cultivation, which began in seed form, continued through tillage,
through weeding, through irrigation, beyond harvest, and finally is
completed with the cultivation of gratitude and honoring.

Courting the Rains

Unlike the Nile of Egypt and the lush river valleys of the Fertile Crescent,
which allowed for human-controlled and human-directed canal irrigation
systems, the land of Israel was an arid landscape, “a land of hills and
valleys that drinks its water from the rains of the heaven” (Deuteronomy
11:11). The falling of the rain during the short winter months was the life
force for this land and its people. It completely shaped their culture and
spiritual worldview. “If, then, you observe the commandments that I place
upon you this day, to love the Lord your God and serve him with all your
heart and soul, I will send the rain for your land in season, the early rain and
the late rain. . . . Watch yourselves that your heart is not seduced, and turns
aside to serve other gods and bow to them. For the Lord’s anger will flare
up against you, and he will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain
and the ground will not yield its produce” (Deuteronomy 11:13–17).
 Our vulnerable dependence on rain, our total lack of control in its
falling, was a critical aspect in cultivating the farmer’s faith and humility.
Farmer became rainmaker, or rain steward, in this way, through
relationships of interdependence rather than through human force or labor.
If we love God—if we love the wild ecology, plant life, the connections and
conversations between all beings; if we honor and steward them—these
ecological systems will remain intact and rains will fall. If, however, we
disturb these relationships—these connections among plant, earth, animal,
and water—the systems will be disrupted, the rain patterns and rhythms will
be broken. There will be destructive floods. There will be drought. In this
way, there was deep reciprocity and reflection between the human and the
wild.
The cycle of the Jewish year followed the rainfall. Each fall season, the
new year would be marked by weeks of purification, of repentance, of
blowing a shofar, ram’s horn, to awaken self, the skies, and the earth for the
change of season. This period of prayer would create the bridge, the passing
into the new year, and a portal into Sukkot, the fall harvest festival. During
these seven days, as the last of the tree crops would be gathered in from the
agricultural fields, those who had made pilgrimage to Jerusalem would
participate in a festive rain ceremony called Nisuch Ha’Mayim, the Pouring
of the Waters, which involved ritualistic collecting of groundwater from a
flowing mountain spring, parading it to the Temple, and pouring it onto the
altar as a libation and invocation. The morning ritual was followed by a
night of festive dancing, singing, and music called the Simchat Beit
Ha’sho’eva, the Rejoicing of the House of the Water Drawing, held in the
Temple courtyard (Mishnah Sukkah 4–5). The purification process of the
new year rituals was to serve as a guide toward this culminating holiday and
the moment of becoming a rainmaker for the season ahead. This is a
worldview in which humans and rain cycles are directly linked, reflections
of one another. As humans return to the source of all life in sacred
relationship, so, too, the rainfall returns to the earth in its proper time, for
blessing.
From this day onward, until spring and the Passover holiday, courting
the precious rains would be a part of the farmer’s daily avodah through
offerings of prayer, and throughout the year, farmers would perform
physical tasks that received and welcomed the rains, such as crafting
terraces in their hillsides to allow the earth to drink deeply, digging cisterns
to hold the rains beyond the wet months, and planting arid-land fruit trees,
shrubs, and herbs. These physical prayers mark the landscape of Israel to
this day.

Tending Community
The memory of ancestral slavery in a land of agricultural power and wealth
was deeply embedded in the tribes of Israel. While they traveled in the
desert in preparation to farm the land they would settle in, the laws they
received came with strict guidance for sharing the foods they grew with
those who were hungry or without land, as well as for offering tithes to
local community members in poverty. The responsibility of the farmer is to
cultivate relationships, not just food. And these relationships extend beyond
plant and soil. These relationships extend into family, into community. Food
is the carrier of nourishment, of story, of sustenance, and it is the nexus of
community. In this way, the tending of relationships in the fields was a
microcosm of the tending of vulnerable relationships within society.
With each cultivation, a corner of the field would be sown and tended
but not harvested by the farmer. This section, peah, would be dedicated to
community members who were without land of their own (Leviticus 19:9–
10). The peah would be open for them to come and freely harvest as
needed. Similarly, during the harvest season, gleaners would be welcomed
to enter fields and collect from remaining crops, a tradition known as leket.
This is a remembering of food as nourishment, not as commodity. This is a
remembering of land as commons, not as private property.
The peak of this remembering came on the shmita year. The cultural
shift of the agricultural fallow recalled the gatherer society, the harvests of
Eden, the collection of manna in the desert, equal portions for all people. In
this year, everyone—landowners, field workers, and landless peasants alike
—would be able to enjoy the harvests of the field as equals. The foods that
did grow on their own during this time were considered ownerless, hefker.
In this year, all fields would be left open for harvest, with fences unlocked
or taken down. The crops that were collected could not be accumulated or
stored for private wealth. Food was completely separated from commerce
and the marketplace. As public commons, the harvests were to be shared
and fairly distributed through the village network; collective sustenance
depended on families tending to one another’s mutual and interdependent
needs.
In addition, debts would be forgiven during this time, which had a direct
impact on farmers (Deuteronomy 15:2). In any year, a poor harvest would
result in the need for a loan, in the form of seeds, animals, or money, for the
next growing season. To alleviate the financial risk of taking a loan, no
interest was to be charged (Leviticus 25:36). However, if a second season of
poor harvest followed, it would create a downward spiral for affected
farmers until they would lose their land or become indentured servants to
pay off their debt. In the seventh year, at the release of debts, these farmers
would have a chance to start over without burden.
The shmita year offered a profound and challenging reminder that we,
as farmers, are not owners. And this message became a guiding value for all
years. A healthy soil or plant ecology must coexist with a healthy social
ecology. The farmer is tending to both of these visions. Beyond any
economic value placed on the foods we grow, foods are never just a
resource or a commodity. Food is nourishment; it is life force, the
foundation for community stability, resiliency, and growth. In avodah, in
sacred farming, profit is never the goal. Rather it is tending and stewarding
relationships, on the field and beyond.
And it was this tending that was at the heart of the sacred service that
Spirit desired. Even if the Temple offerings were being practiced, they were
meaningless without the conduct of sacred service outside the Temple
walls. “The multitude of your [Temple] sacrifices—what are they to me?”
says the Lord. “I have more than enough of burnt offerings. . . . Wash
yourselves; make yourselves clean. Remove your evil deeds from my sight;
stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Aid the oppressed.
Uphold the rights of the orphan; defend the widow” (Isaiah 1:11, 16–17).
This message expanded, transcended, the Temple borders and brought the
call for sacred service directly to the fields, the home, and the community.

Living the Story of Sacred Service

Each year, in the early summer season, after the last rains have fallen and
the fields have turned brown, the land of Israel observes Shavuot, a holiday
that celebrates simultaneously the anniversary of receiving the Torah and
the start of the annual wheat harvest, a joint remembering of the wilderness
of the Midbar and the domestication of grains. During the times of the
Temple, two loaves of bread, freshly baked with flour from the new wheat
crop, were offered on the altar, embodied representations of the alchemy of
agriculture. This is a harvest holiday, symbolically merging the harvest of
plant and spirit, honoring the relationship between the seed and the sacred.
Each of these two layers, of agriculture and Torah, is woven into the other;
they are reflections of one another. They are bound together by the
agreements for a sacred agriculture and a sacred culture. Each year, Shavuot
offers us a reminder of this covenant.7
And this covenant is not easy or simple. These agreements continue to
be wrestled with by Jewish people in Israel and beyond, and by all peoples,
with their own unique sacred pathways and relationships among plant,
people, and place. The vision for sacred agriculture is timeless. It is
applicable today, with our advanced farming technology and our global
agricultural marketplace. It is needed more now than ever. The challenge of
farming, its possibility of being a curse for the land and for humanity, is just
as real today, if we neglect such relationships.
This is a story of farmer as priest, in sacred avodah, tending the
relations between all lives, in service of the conversation among all beings.
I share this story as a reminder. Today, in the modern agricultural landscape,
you may not see these practices at first glance. Modern farming in Israel, as
in many lands, is guided more by the priorities of efficiency, productivity,
profit, and technological innovation than by a desire to facilitate deep
connection with land and community. The covenant of sacred agriculture is
easily forgotten. The Temple in Jerusalem no longer stands, and the
agricultural rituals associated with it are no longer active. The tribal
identities and land associations have been lost. The jubilee counting has
ceased; shmita is not widely observed. The visions of land and food justice
have been overlooked.
While the rituals and service of today may not be the same as in ancient
Israel, and while the cultural landscape has changed over the many passing
years, the values and intentions of these agreements are as clear as ever.
They are very much alive, within us and within our soils, as creative seeds
of vision, prayer, and practice. This is the beating heart of the story, and
peeling back the superficial layers of farm and marketplace will reveal these
threads of indigenous knowing and prayerful intention. Through our
knowing them and remembering them, they can be woven back together
into a beautiful fabric of culture and agriculture. These principles have been
the guiding factors in my own agriculture, in my own relationships with
plant, place, and Spirit, and for this I am grateful. And these principles are
at the heart of the resurgence and reawakening of Jewish farming practices,
both in Israel and around the world. We are breathing this old and new story
back to life, slowly, delicately, vulnerably, and beautifully. The Temple is
our home and our fields. The altar is our table. And we are the priests.
Today, it is a choice to tell this story, to believe in it, to remember it, as
we work the field, cultivate the crops, share the harvests. This is the story of
the soil, the story of our own body, told through the generations,
remembering all the way back to the Garden of Eden. And this particular
story is a piece of our larger human collective story, of our sacred origins,
and of our sacred relationship to all life. This is our story to remember, our
story to tell, our story to live.

Study Questions
1. What is the indigenous agricultural story of the land you cultivate?
How are you feeding and being fed by this story?
2. What are the foundational values at the heart of this story, guiding
your farming in a sacred manner?
3. If you no longer remember this story, how can you form a new one
with the place you call home, with the soils you cultivate, with the
community of friends and neighbors nourished by the sustenance of
your land?

Notes
1. The Torah (literally, the Teaching or the Instruction) refers to the five books of Moses, from
Genesis to Deuteronomy (in Hebrew known as Chumash; also known as the Greek Pentateuch). The
Torah comprises the first books of the Jewish Bible (in Hebrew also known as the Tanakh; in
Christian tradition also known as the Old Testament). Each week on shabbat, a portion, or parshah,
of the Torah is read from the Sefer Torah, literally, the “Scroll of the Torah,” the five books of Moses
handwritten in Hebrew by a scribe, with quill and ink, on pieces of parchment sewn together into one
long scroll rolled around carved wooden handles. This ritual reading cycle takes one full year.
2. All references in this chapter are structured by book, chapter, and verse. Translations are by the
author.
3. The Hebrew faith believes in God as one universal, cosmic force within and beyond creation.
Spirit is called by many names, including HaShem, which means “the Name,” as well as YHVH and
Elohim (representing the masculine aspects of Spirit), and Shechina (representing the feminine
aspects of Spirit).
4. The First Temple (also known as Solomon’s Temple) was destroyed during the Babylonian
conquest in 586 BCE. The Second Temple was rebuilt in 515 BCE and stood until 70 CE, when it
was destroyed during the Roman conquest, although by this period—due to the disruption of Temple
service by the Seleucid Greek empire (169–166 BCE) and politicizing of the priestly service under
imperial rule—ritual practice and tradition had already begun transitioning away from the Temple
and toward the home.
5. Translated as “Release.” Commonly referred to as the sabbatical year. In the Torah, this time
period is also called Shvi’it (“the Seventh”) and Shabbat Ha’Aretz (“the Sabbath of the Land”).
6. The Mishnah (literally, “to repeat” or “to study”) is a codification of Jewish oral teachings,
known as the Torah She’Ba’al Peh, which supplement and clarify the Torah She’Bichtav, the Written
Torah (the Jewish Bible). The Mishnah was compiled by numerous early rabbis (tann’aim) in Israel
during the first and second centuries and was completed around 200 CE, after the destruction of the
Second Temple. The content of the Mishnah focuses on sets of rituals and legal and social practices
that form the basis for rabbinic Judaism and Jewish law (halacha).
7. Shavuot is celebrated fifty days after the holiday of Pesach (Passover), which recalls the
exodus from Egypt. These holidays are linked through the Sefirat Ha’Omer (“the Counting of the
Grain Sheaf”), a forty-nine-day counting period in anticipation of the wheat harvest (Leviticus
23:15–16). The fiftieth day, after seven weeks of counting, marks Shavuot and the start of the
ingathering of the wheat. This arc is a bridge from slavery to liberation; it takes us from the
agriculture of empire (Egypt) to the agriculture of sacred avodah. This counting is also a fractal of the
seven shmita cycles (forty-nine years) and the jubilee (fiftieth year).
 11

Religion, Local Community, and

Sustainable Agriculture
Anna Peterson

Most discussions of sustainable agriculture focus on its practices and scale.

However, religious and cultural dimensions often play just as great a role in
a farmer’s ability to achieve social, environmental, and economic goals.
This chapter examines two different types of rural communities, both of
which have used their religious commitments as the foundation for
innovative efforts to farm in environmentally and socially sustainable ways.
The practices of the Old Order Amish are among the longest-running and
most successful examples of sustainable agriculture in North America.
Amish achievements are rooted not only in their farming methods but also
in their social organization, which in turn rests on their religious values and
worldview. The same is true of the communities created by displaced
peasants in postwar El Salvador. A comparative analysis of the two groups
reveals both the promise and the demands of religiously based sustainable
farming practices and communities.

The Old Order Amish

The Amish are Anabaptists, part of a minority group of Christians (also
called the Radical Reformation) that emerged in the 1520s in Switzerland
and Holland. Anabaptists rejected infant baptism, believing that baptism
entailed a serious commitment on the part of the believer that should be
entered into only by willing and knowledgeable adults. They created
voluntary communities that sought to live by biblical values of mutual aid,
peaceableness, and isolation from the corrupting influences of the world.
Despite their rejection of violence, Anabaptists frequently came into
conflict with civil authorities because of their refusal to swear oaths or
serve in the military.
Anabaptist nonconformity also led to persecution by Catholics,
Lutherans, and Calvinists. By 1535, ten years into the movement, about
fifty thousand Anabaptists had been killed, probably more than all the
Christians killed by Romans in the first three centuries of the common era.
Thousands more were killed in the succeeding decades. Nonetheless, the
movement grew rapidly, confounding its persecutors. As one German
official lamented, “What shall I do? The more I cause to be executed, the
more they increase.”1 Many Swiss, German, and Dutch Anabaptists sought
safety by migrating, first to eastern Europe and then, in the nineteenth
century, to the United States and Canada.
Most Anabaptists today belong to liberal or acculturated denominations,
mainly Mennonites. The smaller but more visible “old orders” include the
Hutterites, Brethren, Old Order Mennonites, and Amish. While the old
order groups vary, most reject certain modern technologies and practices,
including electrical utilities, home telephones, and automobiles. They seek
separation from mainstream society and depend upon the extended family
and religious community for material and moral support. The largest old
order group by far is the Amish, with 180,000 baptized adults and children
under baptismal age. Most live in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana,
although there are Amish settlements in many other states as well as in
Canada and Latin America. The Amish population has grown rapidly in
recent decades, fueled by birth rates averaging six children per family and
retention rates of over 80 percent for most communities.
Along with this growth, Amish life has changed significantly since
World War II. Although most communities remain rooted in agriculture, the
proportion of families that earn their living by farming has fallen, mostly
due to the decreasing availability and rising cost of farmland. A growing
number of Amish adults work in small businesses making items for the
local community or the tourist trade or even for Internet sales.2 A smaller
proportion have gone to work in factories, which leaders fear threatens their
ability to continue to live according to their religious values.
 Still, agriculture remains not only a major way of making a living but
also a key element of collective identity in most Amish settlements in North
America. This continues a tradition begun in Europe when persecuted
Anabaptists fled to remote rural areas in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. The environmental pressures of farming on hilly, infertile land
encouraged them to try novel methods of raising livestock, fertilizing,
clearing land, and rotating and diversifying crops.3 The main goal of Amish
agriculture is self-sufficiency, so that the religious community can live
without depending on the outside world (this is one reason the Amish reject
electricity from public lines, which they describe as an “umbilical cord” to
secular society).
The Amish have largely defied national and global trends toward larger
farm size, mechanization, and industrialization. A 1990 study of Amish
farms in Iowa showed a dramatic contrast between Amish and non-Amish
farms. In Buchanan County, center of the second-largest Amish community
in Iowa, only two Amish farms out of about 180 total in the county were
sold during the farm crisis of the 1980s. This represents “an incredible
survival rate” in contrast to the numerous foreclosures of non-Amish farms
in the same county.4
The economic resiliency of Amish farmers rests on their rejection of
most aspects of mainstream agriculture. First, their farms are small,
averaging around sixty acres, in contrast to over four hundred acres for
conventional farms. In addition to this quantitative difference, Amish farms
are distinguished by their rejection of government subsidies and many
technologies as well as of most forms of nonrenewable energy. Their
unconventional approach has led to average higher profits per acre and per
animal than conventional farmers achieve, along with lower debts and
expenses.5 As sustainable agriculture advocate Gene Logsdon summarizes:
“The fact is that Amish farms have mostly survived, if not thrived, right on
through the current economic malaise despite the fact that, by the standards
of the technocrats, small farms are supposed to be on the way out.”6
This success has encouraged sustainable agriculture advocates to study
Amish farming, with an eye to what mainstream society can learn from
their practices. Amish sustainability begins with an extremely efficient use
of energy. A 1977 study comparing the energy budgets of Amish and non-
Amish farms in three states concluded that despite regional variation,
overall the Amish farms had much better energy ratios of inputs to outputs.7
Even the most efficient modern farms, “according to this research, ‘require
65% more energy per kg of milk’ than the Amish ones.”8 The greater
energy efficiency of Amish dairy farms results not only from the use of
draft animals and the lack of electricity but also from specific agricultural
practices such as crop rotation, greater use of manure, and heavier reliance
on hand cultivation and human labor.
In addition to efficient use of nonrenewable energy, other Amish
farming practices minimize their environmental impact. While few Amish
farmers are completely organic, most use commercial fertilizers and
chemical herbicides in much lower quantities than conventional farmers.
This stems from their traditional reliance on animal and green manures and
on controlling weeds by tilling, crop rotation, and crop diversity. One study
found that when Ohio Amish farmers did use petrochemical fertilizer, they
applied about half the recommended dosage, and they rarely used soil
insecticides.9
Amish farms also excel at conserving topsoil, one of the most urgent
challenges facing farmers in the United States and elsewhere. Most
contemporary experts advocate “no-till” methods, which reduce soil erosion
but require large quantities of herbicide. In theory, the intensive plowing on
Amish farms should cause serious loss of topsoil year after year. In the mid-
1980s, the Soil Conservation Service in Holmes County, Ohio, estimated
that Amish farms ought to be losing seven to fifteen tons of topsoil per acre
each year. Since many of the Amish farms have been under tillage for as
many as 150 years, concluded one researcher, “these farms should have no
topsoil left. This is obviously not the case.” Soil analyses found that not
only did Amish farms have sufficient quantity of topsoil but the soil was of
excellent quality.10 This is due to the use of horsepower and crop rotation,
which enable Amish farmers to improve the soil rather than degrade it.
The soil erosion studies point to the inadequacy of conventional
measures to evaluate Amish agriculture and perhaps other alternatives to
the mainstream. They underline, further, the error of assuming that Amish
farmers blindly continue practices that modern ways have rendered
obsolete. Traditional Amish horse plowing, it turns out, is better for the soil
than new no-till methods. Other studies have pointed to the contemporary
relevance of other practices common among Amish farmers since the
eighteenth century, such as crop rotation, the use of animal and green
manures, and mixing production among diverse plant and animal species.
The Amish combine new ideas and technologies with time-tested practices,
creating horse-drawn mechanisms as sophisticated as those that
conventional farmers pull with tractors. At the same time, skepticism about
new technology means that innovations are not adopted simply because
they are new but only when they have been shown to work better than
traditional models. Some Amish farmers use wind or solar power or employ
diesel generators to power refrigerators for milk they sell commercially.
The Amish, in sum, “are not opposed to incorporating new ways of farming
which have stood the test of time and increase the economic self sufficiency
of their families and communities without jeopardizing their religion.”11
Religious priorities and values shape both social and agricultural choices,
replacing mainstream goals such as profit or efficiency.
Amish farms provide a unique opportunity to study the results of
sustainable practices over time. “Because the Amish have such a long
history of experience as designers and practitioners of low-input sustainable
agriculture,” an Ohio study concluded, “researchers and non-Amish
practitioners of sustainable agriculture could learn a great deal from Amish
farmers; not only in terms of determining what types of sustainable systems
are economically and environmentally viable, but also in terms of
understanding why they work.”12 The “why” is related to religion, which
makes possible the supportive community, local focus, and reflective
decision making that have enabled Amish farms to thrive despite the
transformation of conventional agriculture.

Repopulated Communities in El Salvador

Just as the Amish demonstrate the possibility of more sustainable
agriculture in contemporary North America, a very different kind of
community shows an alternative to conventional farming in a Global South
setting. El Salvador is not only one of the smallest but also among the
poorest and most violent nations in the Americas. Small farmers have long
been at the bottom of the country’s highly unequal social hierarchy. By
1975, three-quarters of Salvadoran rural families owned no land or less than
one hectare, often in the least fertile and accessible regions. Tens of
thousands of peasants migrated in search of work, and many small farmers
fell heavily into debt. Economic deprivation was exacerbated by a lack of
democratic institutions and a military that responded to criticisms with
rapid and harsh repression.
For most of the country’s history, the dominant Catholic Church sided
with the military, ruling class, and government to keep peasants in their
place. This changed as a result of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965)
and the subsequent flowering of progressive ideas and practices. The best
known is liberation theology, which combined a participatory approach to
religious community with a commitment to human rights and social justice.
Progressive pastoral agents in El Salvador began working with peasant
farmers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, building communities, teaching
literacy and other skills, and imparting new theological ideas. These
experiences were radicalizing for both the pastoral leaders and the
laypeople involved, many of whom went on to participate in reform efforts
such as agricultural cooperatives, land reform, and peasant organizations.
Their guiding question, as one early participant remembers, was “How does
God want us to organize?”13 How, in other words, could they translate their
religious values into concrete practices and new ways of living together?
The peasant movements faced harsh repression, including torture and
assassination of many leaders. The violence in rural areas intensified after
civil war began in early 1981 between the military-dominated and (US-
supported) government and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti Front for
National Liberation (FMLN). The war led to the depopulation of rural
areas, especially in northern provinces (departamentos) like Chalatenango,
Morazán, and Cabanas, all FMLN strongholds that suffered aerial
bombings, massacres, and the destruction of their homes and crops. Tens of
thousands of peasants fled to refugee camps in Honduras, mostly run by the
United Nations, where they waited for the war to end.
By the mid-1980s, with no end to the war in sight, refugees began to
plan their return. The Salvadoran government had wanted them to go to
areas under government control, but refugees insisted on returning to their
places of origin in the war zones.14 In October 1987, the first repatriation
occurred when four thousand residents of the Mesa Grande refugee camp
returned to several villages in and around Chalatenango province, the heart
of FMLN territory. The first repopulators (repobladores) encountered
daunting conditions as a result of bombings and subsequent years of
neglect. Most buildings were destroyed, fields were overtaken by shrubs
and weeds, and wells and water lines had been obliterated.
The repopulators faced not only the uphill work of reclaiming farmland
and building shelter but also constant harassment from the government
military, including aerial attacks, ground incursions, and selective
assassinations of teachers, health workers, and other community leaders.
Skirmishes between government and guerrillas also took place frequently in
the villages and surrounding hills. Despite the dangers and hardships, the
repopulations quickly became known as a success story because of their
ability to put their social vision into practice. As refugees still in Honduras
learned about the experiences of the first returnees, thousands more
returned over the next few years.
During this period, the military conflict between the government and the
FMLN remained stalemated, broken finally by a major guerrilla offensive
in November 1989. In the midst of the fighting, government soldiers
assassinated six Jesuit priests, among the country’s most prominent
intellectual and moral leaders. Their deaths brought the number of
progressive Catholic pastoral agents killed by the government military and
right-wing death squads to over two dozen.15
The aftermath of this offensive led to serious discussions about a
negotiated end to the war, which had claimed over eighty thousand lives,
mostly of civilians, and displaced about a third of the population. The two
parties reached agreement on New Year’s Eve, 1991, and signed the treaty
in Mexico City on January 16, 1992. The peace accords called for the
demobilization of the FMLN, which would become a legal political party.
The accords also mandated the transformation of the government army,
including the removal of several units and of over a hundred officers
associated with human rights violations. In addition, the accord called for
greater political openness, judicial autonomy, and most important for rural
areas, the transfer of thousands of acres to peasants and former combatants,
transforming the pattern of rural land ownership.
After twenty years of peace, El Salvador is still marked by severe
economic inequities and widespread poverty as well as numerous social and
environmental problems, including severe air pollution, soil erosion, and
water contamination, all intensified by deforestation and urban sprawl. The
ability to address these issues is key to the success of the repopulations and
their religiously grounded vision of a different kind of society.
Environmental sustainability, in this context, cannot be separated from
efforts to achieve social justice, economic security, and democratic political
participation. Many forms of environmental destruction, including
overlogging and the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, are directly
related to poverty and economic insecurity. Without economic security,
people will continue to cut down trees for firewood and plant on exhausted
soils. Most peasants realize that environmental problems make their
struggles for economic subsistence, health, and equitable development more
difficult. However, structural reforms will be required to change these
practices at the local level.
Of the various environmental issues facing the repopulated
communities, the most important are related to agriculture, especially the
loss of topsoil. To control erosion, many communities in war zones have
begun reforesting and terracing. In addition, most farmers have stopped
burning fields and now leave old crops and leaves for mulch. Some have
also begun rotating crops, to the extent possible on their small plots. They
have made less progress in reducing their reliance upon chemical fertilizers
and pesticides. Most farmers realize that chemicals can harm the
environment and human health but continue using them to make the poor
local soils produce. There have been some successful initiatives to
encourage sustainable practices, including land-use plans to diversify crops
and encourage reforestation. Instead of only corn and beans, most families
now have some land in fruit trees, some in perennial herbs, some in
vegetable gardens, and some in trees for shade and firewood. Some of the
most successful experiments with sustainable agriculture have taken place
in repopulations in the Lower Lempa River region, where the war created
an advantage: the abandonment of fields and orchards for years has
facilitated the process of organic certification, which enables local
producers to take advantage of international markets.
In addition to developing more sustainable ways to farm, communities
have tried to set some land apart from intensive human use and create better
habitat through reforestation efforts in both rural and urban areas. In
Guarjila, one of the first repopulations, the local Comité Ecológico and
other organizations have provided fruit and shade trees to all the families in
the village. The hills surrounding Guarjila are now covered by a green
canopy, where before there was only dust. Residents also regularly see
many formerly rare or absent bird species, including parrots, which have
returned due largely to reforestation efforts. Older people take pleasure in
seeing species they remember from their youth and sharing their knowledge
with younger people, who interpret this in relation to concepts such as
biodiversity, endangered species, and even wildlife corridors, with which
they are increasingly familiar, thanks to the work of Salvadoran and
international NGOs and education efforts.
Salvadoran farmers know that if they exhaust the land, they have no
source of survival. As a peasant leader put it, “We live from the land, so we
have to take care of it” (Vivimos de la tierra, tenemos que cuidarla).16 This
balancing act characterizes all efforts at sustainable agriculture: how to
make a living while caring for the land. In El Salvador, as elsewhere,
governments, community organizations, and individual farmers must find
resources to develop alternative energy and organic fertilizers and pest
controls and to restore forests and watersheds, and they must do so in a
political and economic context that is acceptable to local residents and with
methods that match their vision of their communities’ future. In El
Salvador, this vision is strongly shaped by religious values and traditions.

Religion and Sustainable Agriculture

Agriculture is not always seen as part of the solution to environmental
problems. Some environmentalists see the domestication of plants and
animals and the cultivation of land for agriculture as the beginning of the
end of sustainable lifeways. By enabling people to live beyond the limits of
their local ecosystem, in this view, agriculture fosters both unsustainable
ways of life and instrumental views of nature.17 This is what Wes Jackson
calls the problem of agriculture, larger than problems in specific techniques
or practices.18 However, there are no clear alternatives to agriculture to
support the current human population, at least in the short or medium term.
Other critics suggest that the problem is not necessarily the existence of
agriculture per se but rather the more recent emergence of particular
agricultural methods, scales, and technologies. Traditional family farms
throughout the world were small in size, used simple technology, relied
primarily on human and animal labor, and produced a variety of plant and
animal products for home consumption, selling any surplus in local
markets. This model of agriculture was relatively benign environmentally.
Most such farms allowed room for wildlife at the margins of cultivated land
and in woodlots, preserved topsoil, and consumed few fossil fuels and
chemical inputs. Small farms also supported diverse local economies,
widespread ownership of land, and neighborly cooperation.
Of course, not all traditional farmers are or have been consistently
attentive to ecological and social values. Even before the advent of
industrial agriculture, agriculture contributed to deforestation, species
extinctions, and water contamination in many parts of the world. Farming,
further, has often been an insecure and dangerous way to make a living,
both because of its dependence on unpredictable natural systems and
because of its entanglement in social, economic, and political structures.
These problems have intensified many times with the rise of industrial
agriculture since the Second World War. These issues have given rise to
countless discussions and initiatives to create a more environmentally and
socially sustainable way to make a living off the land.
Amid great diversity, some common principles for sustainable
agriculture have become evident. One is a return to a smaller scale of
production. Smaller farms are more likely to be diverse in their crops, to use
fewer pesticides and artificial fertilizers, and to be tied to local economies
and cultures.19 They are also more productive, when productivity is
measured by yield per unit of land or per unit of energy used, producing as
much as triple the output per unit area as industrial forms of farming.20
Although small farms have a potential for high productivity and more
positive environmental and social contributions, economic trends and
government policies have made it increasing difficult to farm on a small
scale in the United States and elsewhere. This makes the experience of
Amish farmers especially important. Their success stems from a variety of
factors: reliance on inexpensive human and animal labor, modest standards
of living, and probably most important, a supportive social context. The
latter, in particular, depends on shared religious values and community
structures. The same is true in the repopulated communities in El Salvador,
although some of their limited scale has been based less on deliberate
choices than on poverty and lack of access to land.
 A second important feature of sustainable agriculture is a focus on local
markets and an intent to meet the needs of local consumers. Production for
distant markets is destructive not only because it requires energy for
transportation and storage but also because it discourages diversity in
production and reduces local autonomy. Despite recent changes, Amish
communities remain largely self-sufficient and locally oriented in food and
other necessities. In El Salvador, repopulated villages have sought to
produce more for local markets, recognizing that they cannot compete
nationally with imported products. The Salvadoran government’s policy of
supporting export-oriented crops and importing basic foods makes it harder
for subsistence farmers to sell their small surpluses locally and make an
adequate cash income. The stable, relatively self-sufficient local economies
of Amish settlements might serve as a model for other areas, but
government policies and poverty make realization of this goal unlikely in
the short term. Larger structural changes, in other words, must complement
local efforts to achieve economic security.
A third characteristic of sustainable agriculture is that rather than
working against the ecosystem in which it is placed, the farm uses its
existing strengths and possibilities, asking what is possible in a particular
place. Ecologically sound farms include diverse plant and animal species,
do not rely on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and engage in intensive
recycling. In this regard Anabaptists have been pioneers. Amish farms have
a relatively closed cycle: most food needed by animals and humans is
grown on the farm, most crop fertilizer comes from animal and green
manures produced on-site, most labor comes from resident animals and
humans, and most energy is provided by renewable sources such as wind
(to pump water), wood (for heating), and the sun (to produce food and
fertilizers). Many Amish farms use some fossil fuels, for example, for
diesel generators or tractors used around the barn, but their consumption of
nonrenewable resources is vastly lower than that of conventional
agriculture. Fossil fuel consumption is also low in repopulated communities
in El Salvador, but again this is due primarily to poverty and lack of access
to machinery and fuel. Most work is done by people and domestic animals,
although under conditions of hardship rather than deliberate design. The use
of some sustainable practices is increasing in the repopulations, particularly
when national and international organizations, including ecumenical and
church-based groups in both North America and Europe, provide technical
and financial assistance. Some small farmers have experimented with waste
recycling, compost and organic fertilizers, and alternative methods of pest
and weed control. It remains to be seen, of course, what will happen to per
capita consumption if and when overall prosperity increases in the
communities.
Sustainable agriculture also leaves room for wild nature, for example, in
hedgerows, woodlots, and wild areas on the edges of cultivated land. Aldo
Leopold defined a good farm as one where the wild flora and fauna have
lost ground without losing their existence.21 Amish farmer David Kline
cites this as a guiding principle for his own farming and for traditional
Amish practices that create better wildlife habitat.22 In El Salvador, many
native species no longer survive due to habitat loss and hunting, although
ironically the war helped some species recover, since it caused human
populations to decline sharply in many rural areas. Intensive restoration
work will be required to develop additional habitat in the repopulations and
other rural areas. Some successes have already come as a result of
reforestation projects that have expanded habitat for bird species.

The Role of Religion

Sustainable agriculture as defined above requires cohesive and stable
communities. Religion plays central roles in both the Amish and Salvadoran
cases studied. It is important both ideologically, insofar as it provides
reasons to value nonhuman nature, and socially, because it undergirds the
institutions and relationships that make it possible for people to put their
values into practice.
In theological terms, both Catholic and Anabaptist traditions are
theocentric, or God-centered, rather than anthropocentric, or
humancentered. In this framework, animals, plants, wild places, and other
aspects of the natural world have special worth because they are created and
valued by God. Respectful treatment of nature thus reflects respect for God;
mistreatment of nature is a sin against the creator. Amish farmer David
Kline points to a traditional prayer that includes the line: “Help us be gentle
with your creatures and handiwork so that we may abide in your eternal
salvation and continue to be held in the hollow of your hand.” This, Kline
asserts, is the Anabaptist “theology for living.”23 It is also a good summary
of a theocentric ecological ethic: recognizing that other creatures, and
nature in general, are God’s creations, and that humans’ religious duty and
hope lie in the effort to treat this creation properly. This perspective differs
from some radical ecological views in its assertion that creation is given for
human use; it does not have to be left alone as wilderness, or at least not all
of it does.
Similar themes emerge in thinking about social justice. It is God’s
intention for people to live in particular ways, both Anabaptist and Roman
Catholics argue, and failure to do so represents not just a social but a
religious problem. Catholics and Anabaptists share a conception of humans
as social beings who can live full and proper lives only as part of a
community and who can be saved only collectively. The social community
is necessarily a natural community as well. Humans depend on each other,
on God, and on nature. This mutual interdependence is part of an
overarching natural and divine order, and what happens between humans
has real and lasting effects on what happens in the natural world and vice
versa. Common principles guide both natural and social realms, and human
behavior in both areas ought to be consistent. For both Catholics and
Anabaptists, religious ethics rest on a model of the reign of God as an ideal
community in which all members adhere to the same high standards.
This religious community is also one that should allow no member to
“fall through the cracks.” This principle is expressed in the Anabaptist
tradition of mutual aid and the long-standing Catholic insistence on a
preferential option for the least well off, both of which are as relevant to
farming practices as to any other social issue. The US Conference of
Catholic Bishops, for example, extends special concern to agricultural
workers, noting, “While some are doing well, others are vulnerable or
struggling and poor. Those who farm, work in the fields or on ranches, and
process our food must have decent wages and a decent life. . . . An
important moral measure of the global agricultural system is how its
weakest participants are treated.”24 Equally important is solidarity with
those who are hungry and do not benefit from current agricultural
production or distribution systems.
Another shared value is a conviction that social, economic, and
environmental problems are connected in both their causes and their
potential solutions. This differs from ecocentric perspectives that seek to
solve environmental problems by keeping humans out of wild areas. Many
Third World environmentalists believe this perspective reflects the self-
interest of wealthy North Americans who want to enjoy nature for its
aesthetic and recreational possibilities. In contrast, they argue, poor people
who have to make a living from the land cannot afford to set aside parcels
of wilderness. If the poor majorities in countries like El Salvador are to
survive, then environmental protection must take place in the context of
human inhabitation and use of nature. Critics also point out that the high-
consumption practices of wealthy elites, in both developing and industrial
societies, create more environmental damage than subsistence farmers.
This political critique agrees with Catholic and Anabaptist arguments
that God intended creation for the use of all and Christians should use it in
respectful and conservative ways. The good life does not require excessive
consumption. Some human use of natural resources is necessary, but
overexploitation causes both environmental destruction and deprivation for
other humans. The Amish keep consumption low because they do not want
consumerism to penetrate their culture and displace more important values
such as community well-being and faithful discipleship. In El Salvador,
consumption is also low, due in large part to extreme poverty. Few people
have cars or telephones because few can afford them. Still, the differences
are not only a result of economic pressure. Salvadorans in the repopulations
are working explicitly to create communities that offer an alternative to
individualist and consumerist values that dominate in both Salvadoran and
US society.

Sustainable farms, and the communities in which they are embedded, are
much more complex than idealized and abstract images allow. Further, they
are intimately involved in and shaped by what happens at larger scales.
Even the most apparently self-sufficient communities, such as the Amish,
are enmeshed in national and international policies, structures, histories,
and social relations. The promise of sustainable agriculture, including its
religious dimensions, cannot be understood in isolation from economic and
political processes, institutions, and forces. These interactions may be more
intense now than ever, especially in the face of increasing globalization,
climate change, and other contemporary complications. Thus the biggest
challenge facing sustainable agriculture, at least in the communities profiled
here, is how to negotiate these conditions and forces that are beyond the
control of individual farmers and local communities. Production and
distribution structures as well as government subsidies (especially in the
United States) for industrial-style agriculture all make it hard for small
farmers to compete with the prices offered by corporate farmers.
On the other hand, both the Amish and Salvadoran communities
demonstrate that it is possible to survive and even to thrive while farming in
environmentally and socially sustainable ways. Their success is possible in
large part because of their religious commitments, which hold together their
communities and provide grounds for making collective and individual
decisions on the basis of principles rather than profit or expediency.
However, religious identity is not something that can be created or held
together spontaneously. Its benefits, for individuals and communities, often
come only as the result of shared history as well as shared values.
Comparing these religious communities to other successful experiences of
sustainable agriculture may provide grounds for identifying the distinctive
contributions of religion to alternative ways of farming as well as point to
aspects that might be replicated in secular settings.

Study Questions
1. What common principles underlie the Catholic and Anabaptist
approaches to sustainable agriculture?
2. When might these communities’ religious principles conflict with
ecological principles for sustainability?
3. What is the connection between social and ecological sustainability
in these communities?
4. What differentiates these communities and their approach to
sustainable agriculture from secular approaches?

Notes
Portions of this chapter are taken from Anna Peterson, Seeds of the
Kingdom: Utopian Communities in the Americas (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
1. Thieleman J. van Braght, Martyrs Mirror (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald, 1938),
2. Some Amish families raise puppies for pet store and Internet sales, often under inhumane
“puppy mill” conditions.
3. Jean Séguy, “Religion and Agricultural Success: The Vocational Life of the French Mennonites
from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 47 (1973): 187.
4. Rhonda Lou Yoder, Amish Agriculture in Iowa: Indigenous Knowledge for Sustainable Small-
Farm Systems (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1990), 43.
5. Steven Stoll, “Postmodern Farming, Quietly Flourishing,” Chronicle of Higher Education,
June 21, 2002, B7–B9; Gene Logsdon, “Amish Economy,” Orion Nature Quarterly 7, no. 2 (1988):
22–33.
6. Gene Logsdon, Living at Nature’s Pace: Farming and the American Dream (White River
Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2000), 140.
7. Warren Johnson, Victor Stoltzfus, and Peter Craumer, “Energy Conservation in Amish
Agriculture,” Science, October 28, 1977, 373–78.
8. Peter Craumer, “Farm Productivity and Energy Efficiency in Amish and Modern Dairy
Farming,” Agriculture and Environment 4 (1979): 292.
9. Deborah H. Stinner, M. G. Paoletti, and B. R. Stinner, “In Search of Traditional Farm Wisdom
for a More Sustainable Agriculture: A Study of Amish Farming and Society,” Agriculture,
Ecosystems, and Environment 27 (1989): 83.
10. Mary Jackson, “Amish Agriculture and No-Till: The Hazards of Applying the USLE to
Unusual Farms,” Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 43 (November-December 1988): 483–84.
11. Stinner, Paoletti, and Stinner, “In Search of Traditional Farm Wisdom,” 86.
12. Ibid., 86–87.
13. Juan Fernando Ascoli, Tiempo de guerra y tiempo de paz: Organizacion y lucha de las
comunidades del nor-oriente de Chalatenango (1974–1994), adapted by Miguel Cavada Diez (San
Salvador: Equipo Maiz, n.d.), 21.
14. While most refugees did return to their regions of origin, many did not go back to their
particular home villages, at least not initially. Since the repatriations took place in stages, people
wishing to return to El Salvador at a given time could not choose their exact destination.
15. The victims included Archbishop Oscar Romero, twenty-two Catholic priests and nuns, a
seminary student, and a Lutheran minister.
16. Carlos Quintanilla, president of junta directiva, interview by author, Guarjila, Chalatenango, El
Salvador, January 5, 2002.
17. Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene (San Francisco: Island, 1998).
18. Wes Jackson uses this phrase frequently in his writings and lectures. See, for example, Wes
Jackson, Altars of Unhewn Stone: Science and the Earth (San Francisco: North Point, 1987).
19. Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (San
Francisco: North Point, 1981), xi.
20. Jack Manno, “Commoditization: Consumption Efficiency and an Economy of Care and
Connection,” in Confronting Consumption, ed. Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 84–85.
21. Aldo Leopold, cited in David Kline, “An Amish Perspective,” in Rooted in the Land: Essays
on Community and Place, ed. William Vitek and Wes Jackson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1996), 39.
 22. Kline notes that not all Amish farmers observe these practices, especially in communities with
high land prices, where the temptation is to “farm to the road” in order to maximize tillable acreage.
David Kline, Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer’s Journal (San Francisco: North Point, 1990), xx.
23. David Kline, “God’s Spirit and a Theology for Living,” in Creation and the Environment: An
Anabaptist Perspective on a Sustainable World, ed. Calvin Redekop (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000), 61–62.
24. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “For I Was Hungry & You Gave Me Food:
Catholic Social Teaching and Agriculture,” 2003, http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-
life-and-dignity/agriculture-nutrition-rural-issues/for-i-was-hungry-cst-and-agriculture.cfm (accessed
November 28, 2012).
 12

Heideggerian Reflections on Three

Mennonite Cookbooks and a
Mennonite Farm in Northwest Ohio
Raymond F. Person Jr. and Mark H. Dixon

Stephanie Nelson posits, “Farming . . . implies a particular understanding of

nature, of the cosmos, and of the divine, and of our own relation, as human
beings, to the physical world, to other human beings, and to God.”1 This
connection between a philosophical, spiritual, and rustic life—with its
farms, gardens, and animals—is an ancient one. In the Georgics Virgil
reflects on agriculture, viniculture, human nature, and historical events.
Virgil’s poem is a response to the Hesiod’s Works and Days, an older poem
in which Hesiod advises Perses on the interconnection between matters
moral, religious, and agricultural. The Confucian philosopher Mengzi
builds the ideal political system around a specific agricultural model—the
well-field system. Zen gardens mirror certain cosmological principles and
facilitate philosophical reflection. The Cistercians sought to combine the
spiritual with the rustic through a grange-based agricultural system, uniting
solitude and an intimate connection with the natural environment.
These illustrations raise a question that is as crucial as it is pressing:
How do we, as human beings, interpret our connection to the earth as
embodied and emplaced beings, and live our lives accordingly? Below we
will strive to reflect on this question from a Christian, specifically an
Anabaptist/Mennonite, perspective. Too often Christian theology and ethics
have been based upon a dualistic understanding of spiritual versus material
and a marked anthropocentric view of the world. Mennonites are not
immune to this theological problem, which admittedly has contributed to
the ecological crises we face today.2 However, some Mennonites have
recently insisted that the Anabaptist theological tradition, which is “strongly
identified with the values of simplicity, nonresistance and nonviolence, and
community living,” can provide resources for theological solutions to these
problems.3
Mennonites have a long history in agriculture, starting in Europe and
continuing into North America and other places where they sought refuge
from the persecution they experienced in Europe.4 Despite their long
experience of working the land, current Mennonite practice too often
reflects the theological problems within the tradition, thereby bringing
current practice into conflict with Anabaptist values. Thus, Heather Bean
concludes: “In North America, Anabaptists seem to become less interested
in environmental issues and land ethics as their ties to their traditions
decrease and they depart from the simple life of agricultural communities to
assimilate into the materialistic mainstream culture. . . . The resulting
prosperity and consumption is in direct conflict with Anabaptist values of
simplicity and nonviolence.” She notes that most North American
Mennonite farmers farm no differently than their non-Mennonite
neighbors.5
We agree that the Anabaptist values of simplicity, nonviolence, and
community are excellent resources for developing an environmental ethic.6
Below we attempt to develop “simple living” as an embodied theology that
provides an answer to the question concerning how we humans should
interpret our connection to the earth and live accordingly. In order to
understand simple living more thoroughly, we delve deep into what it
means to be human beings, mammals, earthlings (in the sense of the
Hebrew of Genesis 2:7: an adam [earthling] made from adamah [earth]).7
We do this, first, by exploring the philosophical thought of Martin
Heidegger, who provides an invaluable lens through which to understand
the relationship between humans and the natural world. This abstract
exploration helps us more clearly explicate the more mundane and concrete
expressions of the theology of simple living as expressed in three
cookbooks commissioned by Mennonite Central Committee and embodied
(at least partially) in the community that farms one of the historical Swiss
Mennonite homesteads in northwest Ohio.
 To Live, to Dwell, to Cultivate
In “Building Dwelling Thinking” Heidegger formulates the concept of
“dwelling”—“To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It
means to dwell.” Heidegger then argues that to dwell is to build, which
results in the equation To be is to dwell is to build. “To be” is, in the most
basic sense, to exist, but it is more than existence simpliciter. “To be” also
concerns the mode in which we exist or live. As human beings, this means
our inevitable thrownness—Dasein—which, in Heidegger’s conception, is
never abstract but rather a radical factical existence. “To dwell” is the basic
mode that underlies or defines human existence—“The manner in which we
humans are on the earth is Buan, dwelling.” “To build”—bauen—implies
more than architectural construction; it also means to “to till the soil, to
cultivate the vine.” “To build,” then, encompasses both architecture and
agriculture. “To build” implies more than the obvious realization that to be
human is to live on the earth. It also establishes a fundamental connection
between builders, what is built—whether cathedral or vegetable garden—
and the environment in which it is built and which provides the resources
and materials for its building. This connection requires human beings to
cherish, to protect, to preserve, to care about the environment.8 Thus
Heidegger writes, “To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace
within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its
nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and
preserving. It pervades dwelling in its whole range.”9
This much is exegesis of Heidegger’s essay. What follows is an attempt
to elaborate on Heidegger’s concepts to articulate an explicit ethical
foundation (a foundation that may be absent in Heidegger). The language
Heidegger uses to describe the relationship—“to cherish,” “to protect,” “to
preserve”—suggests a definite ethical dimension to the connection between
human beings and the natural environment. Thus, as
dwellers/builders/cultivators, human beings ought to cherish, protect, and
preserve the land—this is dwelling’s fundamental character. The ethical
dimension, then, is neither epiphenomenal nor emergent but foundational,
built into the necessary connection between human beings and the natural
environment.
 Hence, in order to realize their fundamental nature as dwellers, human
beings must nurture a lifestyle that incorporates a close connection to the
earth. Our contention is that a paradigmatic lifestyle is the farm, with its
gardens, animals, and orchards. Moreover, the ethical dimension of this
lifestyle operates on multiple levels, among and within the personal, social,
and ecological communities that intersect on the farm. Thus, there is
unequivocally an ethical dimension to cultivation. The question remains,
though, whether there is also a spiritual dimension. As with the ethical
dimension, the spiritual dimension emerges as we explore what it means to
dwell in more depth.
Christine Swanton notes that what distinguishes Heidegger’s
perspective is that it focuses on human beings as beings in the world—
dwellers, builders, cultivators, conservers, and protectors—and also as
mortals. Heidegger even argues that human reason is bound to the essence
of human beings as dwellers. To ignore or dismiss what it means to dwell
makes it impossible to appreciate either human reason or the human virtues.
Then what does it mean to dwell? Swanton writes that, in order to
appreciate what it means to dwell, we must grasp: (1) Heidegger’s ideas
that human beings are beings-there-in-the-world (Dasein), and (2) the
orientation to the world that is appropriate to dwelling.10 The second point
is most essential to our current purposes.
In essence, the appropriate orientation to dwelling is that we be open to
the earth’s mysteriousness as a whole Being and as a dwelling place, and
that we be open to the earth as a place that cares about human beings and
also a place that human beings must care about in return. These are
impossible goals, Swanton argues, unless we are able to overcome our
incessant need to calculate the natural environment’s value and instead see
through to the environment’s holiness.11 Thus, the fundamental orientation
that is appropriate to dwelling is one that “opens up” the earth as sacred.12
This “holiness” or “sacredness” is where the spiritual dimension enters
into the connection between human beings and the natural environment.
Moreover, the spiritual dimension and the ethical dimensions are
inseparable, since both presuppose that what motivates our attitude to (and
interactions with) the earth is a fundamental sense of benevolence or
compassion. Thus, to see the earth’s holiness requires that human beings
cultivate certain virtues, such as caring, benevolence, and love. Swanton
also notes that the wonder and awe that define the sacred orientation
underlying dwelling operate on a universal as well as a local level.13 As
individual dwellers we are connected to the specific place where we dwell.
Moreover, in dwelling we find the recognition that the entire earth deserves
our respect and concern. When we are able to dwell in this sense, then we
will “be at peace . . . be brought to peace.”14

As we noted above, a farm encompasses more than the relations between

the individual and the farmland and between the farmland and the natural
environment; there is also a social dimension—that is, in the same manner
that farms exist within the larger natural environments, farms also exist
within larger social (religious, political, economic) environments.
The farm-social environment relation raises certain questions. Does
Heidegger’s equation To be is to dwell is to cultivate have direct
implications on one’s lifestyle, over and above the obligation to cherish,
protect, and preserve—to see the world in its holiness? In particular, does it
advocate a simple and sustainable lifestyle? Does his equation require that
we also place similar constraints on relations between humans and humans
(that is, does it have a social component) and on humans and nonhumans
(that is, does it have a species component)? Does it require that we act to
cherish, protect, and preserve other human beings and nonhuman animals?
In one sense the answer to these questions is simple. When we realize
that human beings, their cities, and their farms are themselves components
with the natural environment, the inevitable conclusion is that whatever
obligation we have to cherish, protect, and preserve the environment must
also include both human beings and nonhuman animals. The details,
however, are rather more complex.

The Simple Life

The constraint on lifestyle seems the more direct implication. To act in a
manner that cherishes, protects, and preserves the earth and therefore
recognizes and acknowledges the earth’s holiness would necessitate certain
constraints on how we live. In Heidegger’s discussions about Dasein in
Being and Time, he implies that dwelling, among other things, is the
realization that not all manipulations and utilizations are permissible.15 “To
save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth
does not master the earth and does not subjugate it.”16 What is essential to
avoid and what “dwelling in holiness” allows us to overcome is the mindset
that sees the natural environment as containing mere resources to pursue
human ends. What further inculcates and reinforces this mindset are the
technologies upon which much human life relies.17
The obvious problem, though, is that since human beings (indeed, all
animate creatures) must manipulate and utilize environmental resources in
order to survive, are there some guidelines here? How do we determine
when manipulations or utilizations are inappropriate? An answer to these
questions lies in the Anabaptist value of simple living. Do Heidegger’s “to
dwell” and “to cultivate” require simple living? We think so. There can be
no doubt that a genuine commitment to cherish, protect, and preserve the
earth is incompatible with overconsumption and wanton environmental
destruction. Moreover, as this concerns agricultural practices, the evidence
is unequivocal that modern commercial, monocultural agriculture is
destructive and unsustainable. In contrast, an agriculture that focuses on
smaller-scale practices, with appropriate technologies, promotes both
human and environmental health.

Dasein and the Social Life

Heidegger’s analysis seems to emphasize the individual. In particular, this
appears to be true in Being and Time, where, as Todd Lavin writes,
Heidegger’s analysis foregoes a “real political or collective dimension and
remains private and personal.”18 Moreover, this is the principal
characteristic that separates Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis from
traditional Western philosophical analysis: the elevation of the individual’s
subjective experiences to legitimate philosophical status. This assumption,
though, is rather too precipitate.
Our being in the world and the manner in which we relate to Being
(Dasein) can be authentic or inauthentic. Lavin argues that implicit in
Heidegger’s analysis is the recognition that an authentic existence is
impossible unless there is also a commitment to social activism.19 Though
Lavin’s main interest is in political commitments, it seems obvious that
these commitments must include ecological ones. In fact, we can translate
Lavin’s conclusions to insist that Heidegger is implicitly advocating values
closely associated with the Anabaptist tradition—simple living,
nonviolence, and the importance of community.
This analysis suggests that human relations to the natural environment
through agriculture operate over at least three levels—the relation between
farmers and the environment, the relation between farmers and the other
animals within the farm environment, and the relation between farmers and
their larger social communities.

We Are What We Eat: Toward a Mennonite Food

Ethics
Below we use the connections drawn above between human beings, nature,
farms, and spiritual and religious realization to examine one specific ethical
approach to cultivation and consumption—a simple-living approach as
advocated in three cookbooks that were commissioned by Mennonite
Central Committee (MCC): More-with-Less, Extending the Table, and
Simply in Season.20 “MCC is a relief, community development, and peace
organization of the Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches in Canada
and the United States.”21 That such a church-related organization would
commission cookbooks is unusual enough, but these are not mere
collections of recipes. We will begin with a brief discussion of Mennonite
cookbooks as expressions of the Christian gospel before looking
specifically at these three cookbooks. We will close this section by
returning to our reflections on Heidegger as a lens through which to better
understand the cookbooks’ theology of food.
In his review of various Mennonite cookbooks—including More-with-
Less and Extending the Table—Matthew Bailey-Dick concludes:
“Moving . . . toward a more explicitly missiological understanding of
Mennonite foodways, we can both acknowledge how values and
convictions become visible and enacted in particular ways, including the
way a community conveys, enacts and remembers its cuisine (as visible
contextualization), and see the cookbook as one place in which the Gospel
is being translated into ‘understandable terms’ for other cultures. The
cookbook, therefore, stands as a witness to the Gospel and a mission partner
for God’s work in the world.”22 From his analysis, Bailey-Dick identified
the following eight themes found in Mennonite cookbooks: simple living,
globalization of Mennonites, remembering the past, Mennonite migration
patterns, gender roles, Anabaptist history, acculturation, and inter-
Mennonite cooperation. For our purposes, the most important of these
themes is the first—simple living.
MCC commissioned each of these cookbooks for reasons directly
related to its Christian vision: “MCC envisions communities worldwide in
right relationship with God, one another and creation.”23 According to their
title pages, More-with-Less was commissioned “in response to world food
needs”; Extending the Table “to promote global understanding and celebrate
the variety of world cultures”; and Simply in Season “to promote the
understanding of how the food choices we make affect our lives and the
lives of those who produce the food.”
More-with-Less also established the process by which these cookbooks
were compiled. Notices were published in Mennonite and Brethren in
Christ publications, soliciting recipes and anecdotal contributions. From the
thousands of submissions, the authors chose recipes that were then sent to
various “home economists,” who tried the recipes in their homes and
provided feedback. The authors then selected the final recipes for inclusion.
Thus, the process itself was truly a communal project of the churches
participating in MCC. The recipes and anecdotes were published with the
names of their contributors immediately following the entry, and the
acknowledgments in each volume include a long list of those involved in
the evaluation and selection process.
The three cookbooks are certainly more than mere collections of
recipes. More-with-Less includes a lengthy introduction by editor Doris
Janzen Longacre. First, she describes how North Americans currently live
“less with more”: “We are overspending money. We are overeating calories,
protein, fats, sugar, superprocessed foods. We are overcomplicating our
lives.” She concludes, “Getting more with less means eating joyfully. We
can release resources for the hungry. We can gain more nutrients for
ourselves. We can get more for our food dollars, and eat with more creative
expression and good taste.”24 Similar thoughts are expressed in the
foreword by Mary Emma Showalter Eby originally published in the first
edition of the book in 1976: “More joy, more peace, less guilt; more
physical stamina, less overweight and obesity; more to share and less to
hoard for ourselves.”25 As well as theoretical discussions, Longacre
provides practical advice, including a chart outlining complementary
meatless proteins. Thus, she addresses two interrelated concerns—world
hunger and the unhealthy diets of North Americans.
Although the other two cookbooks’ introductions are not as extensive,
they nevertheless provide information other than recipes. Extending the
Table includes stories of the generosity that missionaries experienced from
the poor in various parts of the world as well as practical advice about
where to locate some of the unfamiliar ingredients. Simply in Season is
organized according to the seasons of the year to guide readers in buying
seasonal local produce. At the bottom of some of the pages are
remembrances of times past (“Nothing sweeter than grandma’s peas”),
discussion of current trends (“Globesity: too much, too little”), and other
bits of wisdom. Each section ends with “Invitations to Action”—such as
“Support locally-owned grocery stores, restaurants, and cooperatives.”26
Thus, all three cookbooks call for resisting the current corporate models
of food production and supporting new paradigms of production and
consumption that are more consistent with simple living. Moreover, all of
this is connected to an understanding of the Christian gospel. In the words
of Mary Beth Lind, in her “Foreword to the Anniversary Edition” of More-
with-Less: “When we make food an integral part of our lives and our
homes, it becomes part of our theology. We are connected to our food—
cultivating it, preserving it, and preparing it. We are nurturers instead of
consumers. This shift affects our relationship to the Giver of our daily
bread. We become co-creators with God and stewards of God’s garden.”27
Lind’s words hold true for all three cookbooks.
In “Mennonite Cookbooks and the Pleasure of Habit,” Rebekah
Trollinger analyzes these three cookbooks, concluding that they are
concerned with Americans’ spiritual and physical addiction to unhealthy
superprocessed foods. She argues that the cookbooks are interested in
encouraging their readers to consciously decide to resist such food
addictions in order to create good habits that not only address the concerns
of world hunger and North American obesity but also bring more pleasure.
Trollinger describes how each cookbook “builds on and transforms the
previous”: “First, More-with-Less develops the ethic of habits. Then,
Extending the Table introduces new tastes, rejecting the idea that habit must
be automatic. Finally, Simply in Season celebrates the pleasure of
promoting local foods. In its simplest form, this progression moves away
from habit and toward pleasure.”28 However, she also notes that this
schema may give the false impression that the habits created through More-
with-Less need to be abandoned in order to enjoy the pleasure found in
Simply in Season. “The three cookbooks never regard habit as static, but
rather flexible, often providing room for pleasure”—for example, all three
cookbooks encourage readers to alter the recipes as ways of exploring the
joys of cooking. Thus, Trollinger concludes,

In a society in which free will is continually lauded as the path to

pleasure, and in which that free will is simultaneously dismembered by
the specter of compulsion, opting for habit is surely radical. But more
radical than that is to suggest that pleasure is inherent in and necessary
to habit. Taken together, the three M.C.C. cookbooks approach this
radicalness: More-with-Less reveals the social justice of moving outside
the paradigm of free will and compulsion and into a practice of habit;
Extending the Table revives sensory experience; and Simply in Season
shows the moral imperative of allowing habit, each day, to unfurl the
pleasure of the familiar.29

As Trollinger’s analysis shows, simple living can bring joy and pleasure
to those who have developed the necessary good habits. However, just as
simple living is a radical rejection of the current hyper-subjectivist and
individualist notions of free will as well as of the societal addiction to
overconsumption, simple living should also be understood as a radical
rejection of the easy life or the lifestyle of the rich. The easy life glorifies
individual choices to consume excessively those unnecessary “goods”
whose production depends on the unjust and violent exploitation of the poor
and natural resources. The simple life strives to minimize this exploitation.
As such, living the simple life is not effortless, and these cookbooks
recognize that. In her section entitled “Building a Simpler Diet,” Longacre
argues that a simpler diet saves money and reduces waste but also requires
more time spent acquiring food (through gardening and shopping),
preserving food (through home canning, freezing, dehydrating), and
preparing food (by using nonprocessed foods). Such work is not easy.
“Home food preservation is hard work, but it can provide meaningful
opportunities for family members to work together.”30 Of course, as we can
see in this comment, hard work is not necessarily drudgery, for the time
spent doing such work can also be time spent building community.
If simple living is not easy, then what is “simple” about it? The
“simple” in simple living refers to the whole system of production—for
example, in contrast to the food production system that provides
“convenience” foods for the easy life made from ingredients culled from a
wide geographical range, a simpler diet greatly reduces “food miles”—the
input of transportation. This is illustrated well by Cathleen Hockman-Wert’s
remarks at the bottom of the page for cornmeal wheat pancakes in Simply in
Season:

Three good reasons to support local farmers:

1. Good food: We all need to eat. Fresh food tastes better and retains
more of its nutrients.
2. Good for the environment: When farming is spread out on small
diversified farms, rather than concentrated in huge industrial
facilities, it tends to have a lower impact on the environment. Less
packaging may be needed, so less waste ends up in landfills. Foods
sold fresh soon after they’re harvested require less processing and
refrigeration and thus use less energy. Eating locally-produced
foods also reduces the use of transportation powered by fossil fuels;
those emissions release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which
contributes to global warming.
3. Good for communities: In areas with large corporate farms, small
towns tend to die off. Skilled jobs are reduced, machines do more
work, and low-wage/high turnover positions increase while
corporate profits are pocketed by distant shareholders. Local
farmers, in contrast, reinvest in local businesses, hire local labor
and contribute to the civic strength of their communities. The
results: higher employment and a more vibrant social fabric.31
Hockman-Wert contrasts the easy life, with its “huge industrial facilities”
that disproportionately benefit “distant shareholders,” with simple living
and its more ecologically sustainable means of food production that support
“a more vibrant social fabric.” Therefore, even though the simple life may
involve hard work, it creates healthier, more livable communities in which
pleasure for a greater number of individuals may be found.
We have argued that inasmuch as Heidegger’s dwelling implies building
and cultivating, it has direct ethical implications, most prominently
obligations to protect and preserve the natural environment. Moreover, it
also encourages us to inculcate certain virtues, such as love and
compassion. Thus, Heidegger’s analysis has direct implications on how we
ought to use the generous and bounteous returns that nature provides
conscientious cultivators. In other words, it would seem farcical to cultivate
the land with tenderness and benevolence and then waste the result in
conspicuous overconsumption. Such waste violates Heidegger’s concept in
both spirit and letter.
The Mennonite food ethics that underlie and motivate the three MCC
cookbooks push Heidegger’s ideas to their logical conclusion. To dwell as
human beings who approach the natural environment with awe and
reverence encourages a lifestyle that is simple in the footprint that we leave
through building and cultivation as well as in our consumption patterns.
Thus we realize our ethical and spiritual connections to the environment in
both its cultivation and our consumption. Over and above the basic virtues
of benevolence and love, we ought to cultivate other virtues as well—
frugality, generosity, and humility. Perhaps even more essential is to
inculcate gratitude. In other words, Heidegger’s notion of dwelling requires
the Anabaptist virtues of simplicity and nonviolence as practiced within a
community in which gratitude and thanksgiving are expressed to God in
worship, in service to others, and in care of creation.
More-with-Less, Extending the Table, and Simply in Season provide the
means to appreciate the harvest that our cultivation provides in a manner
that respects the land’s offerings. What is even more special is the
collaboration and inclusiveness that these cookbooks represent. In
numerous religious traditions meals are seen as a time to reflect upon life as
well as to commune with those with whom we share our meals. These
cookbooks encourage intentional awareness about the meal’s source,
production, collection, and preparation. It is this intentional awareness that
(at least in part) comprises dwelling.
Dwelling is not a given. We might exist, we might survive, and still fail
to dwell in Heidegger’s sense, where true dwelling implies bringing forth a
truthfulness in our existence. We must learn to dwell, and the initial stage in
this process is, as Trollinger suggests, to begin to inculcate certain habits.
Although we have an inclination to see habits as negative character traits,
habit is the essential prerequisite to virtue as well as vice. And the habits of
simple living that Trollinger identifies in the cookbooks place us on the path
to a simple, pleasurable, wholesome, sustainable—that is, virtuous—
lifestyle.

The Farm as Spiritual Canvas

We have argued above that for human beings to dwell we must nurture a
lifestyle that incorporates a close connection to the earth and that recognizes
“natural” things—both animate (humans, nonhuman animals, and plants)
and inanimate (land, water, air, and minerals)—as well as “built” things,
such as houses, barns, pastures, bird nests, and spiderwebs. In the
ecological sense, a fundamental connection exists between the animate and
inanimate as well as the “natural” and the “built.” Hence, we are
fundamentally related to all other beings in and of the earth—that is, a
fundamental connection exists between builders, what is built, and the
environment in which it is built and which provides the resources and
materials for its building. When we are aware of this interconnectedness we
can dwell with awe and wonder. Therefore, what is essential to avoid and
what “dwelling in holiness” allows us to overcome is the perverted mindset
that views the natural environment as the distant “other” and therefore as
mere resources to manipulate and use for human ends.
However, as is true of all animate beings, we must take from inanimate
matter; as is the case with all other animals, we must take life (animal
and/or plant) in order to survive. This fact of life creates a conundrum. How
do we determine whether manipulations or utilizations are appropriate or
inappropriate? Our answer includes simple living as is demonstrated,
although imperfectly, on the farm discussed below. Although any type of
building—whether agriculture or architecture—requires some manipulation
and utilization of the environment and its resources, simple living provides
a framework for reflecting on the relationships between human beings and
the inanimate beings in the environment, between human beings and other
animate beings, and between human beings and the larger social
communities in which they live.

Aerial view of the farm. (Photo by Raymond F. Person Jr.)

In June 2002, Ray and Elizabeth bought one of the historic Swiss
Mennonite homesteads located between Bluffton and Pandora, Ohio.32 The
twenty-acre farm is a portion of a larger farm originally homesteaded by
John Amstutz in the 1850s. The original portions of the current house date
to the 1860s, and the current barn was built from hand-hewn timber from
the property in 1868.
Before Ray and Elizabeth bought the property, they and four other
families shared the vision of running the farm as a cooperative. This group
now includes nineteen families in their twelfth growing season. Three main
goals guided their collective vision: (1) to produce quality food using
organic practices, (2) to build human community, and (3) to (re)build
nonhuman community through the improvement of wildlife habitat. These
goals grew out of their common Christian faith that living more simply
leads to being better stewards of God’s creation.
The farm comprises a large garden, an orchard, a pasture, a hayfield,
beehives, Ray and Elizabeth’s house, the barn, a workshop, and the garden
tool shed. In the garden grow over fifty varieties of vegetables plus a large
strawberry patch. The orchard has raspberries, cherries, pears, grapes,
hickory, black walnut, and other fruit and nut trees that have not yet
matured. The barn, pasture, orchard, and hayfield are home to domesticated
livestock—goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, and pigs as well as two dogs and
a cat—and wildlife—mostly insects, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and
rodents as well as various larger mammals that wander through.

A closer view of the farm. (Photo by Raymond F. Person Jr.)

Even while he was working on his dissertation in the late 1980s, Ray
had a vegetable garden in his yard. His passion for gardening was nurtured
by the small gardens his parents and grandparents had during his childhood
and while he was a college and seminary student at Phillips University in
Enid, Oklahoma. As a student, he became actively involved in peace and
justice issues, especially opposing nuclear weapons and promoting the
sanctuary movement for Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees. Thus, he
interacted with a variety of people with shared values, including
Mennonites, Quakers, Roman Catholics (especially Benedictine sisters),
and Disciples of Christ. They often discussed simple living as an expression
of the Christian gospel, and these discussions sometimes occurred during
potluck meals. Some of the dishes shared were made from More-with-Less
and Frances Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet. When he met his future wife,
Elizabeth, she shared these values, so the two have continued the struggle to
embrace simple living. Buying a farm and starting a cooperative to run it
were consistent with their long-held Christian values, and they easily found
support for their endeavors within their faith community.
Although most of the families involved in the cooperative are members
of First Mennonite Church, Bluffton, from the very beginning families from
other congregations have also been involved. The current group includes
families from three different Mennonite congregations as well as from a
Roman Catholic parish, a United Church of Christ congregation, and a
Quaker meeting. Many of the families include someone who has served
overseas in missions work, including some who had full-time positions with
MCC and/or have participated in Christian Peacemaker Teams. Many of the
families regularly use recipes from the three MCC cookbooks, and the farm
potlucks often feature dishes from these cookbooks.
Below we will reflect on how simple living has guided decisions on the
farm, taking into account the relationship of the farmers to (1) the water, air,
and soil; (2) the plants; (3) the nonhuman animals; and (4) the broader
human community, beginning with the Bluffton-Pandora area and extending
to the world at large.

The Water, Air, and Soil

Pesticide and fertilizer runoff from conventional agriculture remains a
serious source of water pollution. The organic practices on the farm do not
eliminate this problem, especially in relationship to manure; however, they
certainly reduce the problem significantly. Thus, the organic practices
minimize the agricultural contribution to water pollution. Furthermore, any
rain runoff from the garden must first pass through large grassy areas that
act as living filters, further reducing the possibility of runoff from the
garden contributing to pollution in the Maumee River watershed. Although
heavily dependent on rainfall, the farm includes three wells that provide
water for the house, garden, and livestock.
The farm families remain too dependent on gas-powered vehicles for
transportation and their farming still depends on them too—for example, a
pickup, tillers, and a large lawnmower with attachments. Thus, they
contribute to America’s burgeoning carbon footprint. However, this impact
is also lessened by the fact that some members of the cooperative ride their
bicycles on the three-mile trip from town, and others have been known to
walk or jog. For example, Steve and Monica with their three sons, Lucas,
Julian, and Christopher, recently rode out on their bikes together. Also,
relative to many other farms, many of the tasks are done with human labor
rather than large machinery—such as cleaning the manure out of the barn
using shovels and other hand tools rather than using, for example, a tractor
with a front-end loader. Although the farm uses considerable electricity—
for example, to keep the livestock’s water from freezing in the winter—this
is offset by the use of a hybrid solar/wind system that generates 33 percent
to 50 percent of the electricity needed.
The use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides negatively affects living
microorganisms in soil. The farm’s use of organic fertilizers—manure,
blood meal, bonemeal, greensand—not only adds the necessary nitrogen,
potash, potassium, and minerals but also encourages the living
microorganisms in the soil. Thus, the soil in the garden is richer and
healthier than it was ten years ago, as evidenced by a significant increase in
the number of earthworms, more organic material in the soil, and larger
harvests.

Plants
Plants on farms are generally divided into two groups, those whose growth
is encouraged and those whose growth is inhibited, and this is certainly the
case on this farm. Much time and energy is put into creating a good
environment in which vegetables, herbs, fruits, nuts, pasture grasses, and
hay can thrive. However, what might be considered a “weed” in the garden
can also be understood as beneficial elsewhere on the farm. Thistles remain
a thorny issue in the garden, but the goats prefer them in the pasture;
therefore, while we are weeding the garden, we are also harvesting food for
the goats. After garden plants have provided human food, the plants then
provide winter forage for the livestock—for example, sweet potato vines,
sweet corn stalks, and bean stalks are all put up in the hayloft only to return
to the garden in the spring in the form of manure. Certain “weeds” that are
pulled in the garden flourish elsewhere for the benefit of wildlife, which in
turn benefits the garden. Red-wing blackbirds nest in the thistles outside the
pasture fence, and praying mantises and other beneficial insects find their
home among Queen Anne’s lace, goldenrod, and other wildflowers along
the garden fence.

Nonhuman Animals
As is true of plants, nonhuman animals on farms are generally divided into
two groups: those that are beneficial, whose presence is encouraged, and
those that are problematic, whose presence is inhibited, and this is the case
on this farm as well. Much time and energy is put into creating a good
environment in which the livestock can thrive in a way that more closely
mimics their original natural environments—for example, the sheep and
goats are pastured without grain-based feeds, and the chickens are free
range. Some time and energy is also put into creating an environment to
attract beneficial wildlife—for example, a bat box was hung on the barn
wall. However, the farmers have learned that one of the easiest ways to
attract beneficial wildlife is simply to create a variety of microenvironments
—the garden, the pasture, and the orchard—that provide a welcoming
place. Thus, the creation of such microenvironments has meant that species
that did not thrive on the farm earlier now flourish, including toads, leopard
frogs, barn swallows, red-wing blackbirds, kingbirds, and various insects.
The barn houses not only the livestock but also bats, barn swallows and, for
a fifteen-month period, a screech owl. The bats and barn swallows are
welcomed to help reduce the fly, moth, and mosquito populations. The
screech owl was an important part of rodent control.
Similarly, time and energy is put into discouraging creatures that are
destructive to the agricultural processes on the farm, especially predators—
rats, hawks, foxes, mink, raccoons, and opossums—and the “bugs” and
other “pests”—rabbits, groundhogs, and deer—that damage the fruits and
vegetables. Fencing helps significantly, but other measures are sometimes
needed. The rodent-control plan includes old-fashioned spring-loaded traps,
homemade poisons that target only the rodents (for example, those that use
plaster of paris or baking soda as the active ingredients), and Earl, the barn
cat. Skillet, the experienced red-bone hound, stays on the job protecting the
livestock from predators. He has even learned the rooster’s crow warning
the hens of a distant hawk approaching and will run in the rooster’s
direction until he finds the hawk and chases it away. At times, the predator
problem must be resolved by the teamwork of Skillet and Ray with a small
rifle. Moreover, the free-range chickens are effective hunters of Japanese
beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, and even small mice and voles that can
damage the garden. Not only are the domesticated animals part of the team
to keep destructive animals in check, but some of the wildlife also are as
well—for example, Ray will always stop the tiller to move a toad or frog
out of harm’s way, since it can eat fifty to a hundred insects daily.
Because the domesticated animals have important jobs on the farm—
providing meat, eggs, and/or pest control—the farm families strive to give
them a good quality of life, even if their eventual fate is to provide meat.
However, it must be noted that some farm families who are vegetarian or
vegan choose not to participate in the livestock projects.33 Therefore, some
farm families, in the words of Wendy, choose to “get closer to [their] meat,”
while others choose to distance themselves from all meat. Ironically, similar
values underlie both decisions, especially opposition to meat produced in
concentrated animal-feeding operations.

The Broader Human Community

The farm is a place where friendships have been made and strengthened
among the farm families as they work, eat, and play together, but the farm
community extends far beyond nineteen families and twenty acres. Locally,
the farm community includes all the other people whose work directly
contributes to the food production—for example, nearby farmers who
produce the livestock feed and breeding stock; the local merchants from
whom they purchase minerals and bedding plants; the local butcher; and
contractors and volunteers who have contributed to larger projects, such as
the renovation of the house and barn or the building of fences. It includes
those who purchase eggs and meat and who have enjoyed the excess
produce and eggs donated to charities. It includes the various groups that
have visited the farm to learn more about organic food production—for
example, Girl Scouts, 4-H, church youth groups, and university classes—as
well as those groups to which Ray and others have been guest speakers—
for example, Sunday school classes and the 2011 Intercollegiate Peace
Fellowship conference.34
The farm community extends even further, beyond the local community
into the global community. Of course, organic practices and efforts to
reduce our dependence on fossil fuels have global consequences, however
insignificant such individual projects may appear. But the global farm
community has a more personal relationship as well. For example, Jo’s
family from New Zealand and Andy’s family from Canada have visited the
farm and helped with various chores. Furthermore, connections exist
between the farm and Menno Village, an organic CSA (community-
supported agriculture enterprise) in Naganuma, Hokkaido, Japan, founded
by Aki and Ray Epp. Wendy and Andy and their daughters, Hannah and
Sara, lived and worked at Menno Village for a year, and Ray and Elizabeth
have visited there.35 Thus, their experiences on an organic farm in Japan
have had some influence on practices on the farm in northwest Ohio.
Furthermore, the farm has hosted international visitors, such as peace
ambassadors from the World Friendship Center in Hiroshima, Japan; a
laywoman from the Lutheran church in Tanzania; and Tibetan monks from
the Gaden Shartse monastery in southern India, all of whom share similar
values. Furthermore, the global farm community consists of more than
human members—some wildlife migrates from distant lands, for example,
red-wing blackbirds, kingbirds, barn swallows, great blue herons, and
monarch butterflies.36

The Interconnections among the Various Members of the Farm

Community
Although the above discussion already hints at the interconnections among
all of these relationships—water, air, and soil; plants; nonhuman animals;
and the broader human community—there is a chance that these
relationships could be misread as somewhat disconnected. Therefore, we
will close with a description of two complex relationships that illustrate
their interconnectedness.
Living in the country often includes accepting more insects in one’s life
than one might have in town (or at least different kinds of insects), and this
farm is no exception. The flies were bad enough in the farm’s first year, and
in the second year when he purchased the first goats, that Ray feared that
the problem would worsen. Fortunately, the opposite was the case. Despite
the goats producing manure for the flies to breed in, there were fewer flies
that year and every year since. The explanation is actually quite simple.
When Ray opened the barn for the goats, the first barn swallows moved in.
The barn swallows, as well as taking advantage of the safe nesting sites in
the barn, were attracted to the open fields, especially the pasture, over
which they constantly hunted insects on the wing. Quite by accident, then,
the preparation of the pasture and barn for the goats was also a welcoming
environment for the barn swallows, which gladly helped out with the fly
problem. The chickens also contributed by scratching in the manure to feast
on the fly larvae. Thus, the creation of a more holistic microenvironment
helped remedy the fly problem. Of course, there are still flies on the farm,
as there should be—they have their place in the manure management
system of the farm—but the barn swallows and chickens help keep them in
check.
Because of the farmers’ commitment to organic practices, they rarely
use pesticides, even organically approved ones. Because of this, the
diversity of insects in the garden and elsewhere has increased significantly
from what it was earlier with monoculture crops and synthetic pesticides.
Recently, when Ray, Judy, and Jonah were digging potatoes, Jonah found a
large hornworm and said, “Oh, wow! Look at this disgusting thing!” His
outburst clearly communicated both fascination and revulsion. Judy and
Ray stopped their digging and walked over to see what he had found. This
led to a discussion about hornworms: they are destructive to potato and
tomato plants, but also they can carry the next generation of the parasitic
braconid wasp, a beneficial insect that preys on soft-bodied insects like the
hornworm. After carefully examining the hornworm to make sure that it
was not carrying braconid wasp larvae—because if it had been, he would
have gently put it in the tomato patch to nurture the braconid wasps—Ray
fed it to a nearby chicken, which enjoyed the snack. Once upon a time Ray
would have had a reaction very similar to Jonah’s. However, because over
twenty years ago Bill, a friend and veteran organic farmer in North
Carolina, taught him about the relationship between the hornworm and the
braconid wasp, Ray had knowledge about that relationship to share with
others.

Concluding Reflections
This episode also illustrates one of the ways in which simple living as a
movement develops and spreads—not through commercial processes but
through the experiences of those who have dedicated themselves to the
same vision. Simple living represents a “living history” in which ideas and
methods are shared, often through anecdotes. We have an obligation to
share our knowledge and blessings. No one has an exclusive claim to the
good; indeed, its nature requires that we teach and share it with others.
Thus, just as Ray learned from Bill in North Carolina and Wendy and Andy
learned from the Epps in Japan, the Ohio farm families understand the
farm’s mission to include reaching out to others, including groups visiting
the farm and cooperative members speaking to groups.
What we hope we have conveyed is that to live in the fullness of our
own being in the world is impossible in isolation. Being is a nexus that
encompasses communities within communities within communities, each
with inseparable connections to the others—connections ecological,
biological, social, philosophical, theological, and spiritual. To separate these
connections leads to violence and alienation. To lose our connection to the
earth, to each other, and to other creatures is to injure our own being in the
world. Although we ought to celebrate our differences, we nevertheless
experience a core commonality as participants in the great and grand design
of creation. This places certain obligations on us—to learn from the past, to
protect the present, and to conserve for the future. Heidegger provides a
philosophical explanation of the foundation of our very being, but
Heidegger’s notion requires that we live according to the Anabaptist virtues
of simple living and nonviolence within faith communities that express
gratitude and thanksgiving in acts of worship, in service to others, and in
dwelling in creation with awe and wonder. Although as creatures we must
take from creation in order to live, we must do so in a way that nevertheless
cherishes and preserves the earth. The model of simple living, as expressed
in the three MCC cookbooks and as embodied in the community that farms
a historical Swiss Mennonite homestead in northwest Ohio, cherishes the
good creation God has given us to preserve so that it can continue to be a
blessing to us and others (both human and nonhuman) for many
generations.

Study Questions
1. What is dwelling, and why is this important in evaluating human-
nature interactions via the intersection of farming/agriculture?
2. The authors claim, “To act in a manner that cherishes, protects, and
preserves the earth and therefore recognizes and acknowledges the
earth’s holiness would necessitate certain constraints on how we
live.” Do you agree with this? Why or why not? If their claim is
valid, what changes in lifestyle, especially in regard to food habits,
might we as a society or as individuals need to make?
3. What are implications, for the authors, and for you personally, of
shifting our concepts of self from being consumers to being
nurturers? What food-related practices might emerge from
undertaking such a shift?
4. How does “dwelling in holiness” influence ethics and spirituality in
regard to the earth, to nonhuman animals, and to other humans in
our communities, especially via the practice of agriculture?

Notes
We wish to acknowledge Forrest Clingerman and Elizabeth Kelly for their
valuable comments and editorial assistance during this chapter’s
preparation.
1. Stephanie Nelson, God and the Land: The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), v.
2. Heather Ann Ackley Bean, “Toward an Anabaptist/Mennonite Environmental Ethic,” in
Creation and the Environment: An Anabaptist Perspective on the Sustainable World, ed. Calvin
Redekop (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 183–86.
3. Ibid., 194. See also the other chapters in Redekop, Creation and the Environment.
4. Michael Yoder, “Mennonites, Economics, and the Care of Creation,” in Redekop, Creation and
the Environment, 71–77.
5. Bean, “Toward an Anabaptist/Mennonite Environmental Ethic,” 187–88. See also Yoder,
“Mennonites, Economics, and the Care of Creation,” 75–76.
6. Our description of these values as Anabaptist is not intended to claim that they are exclusively
Anabaptist, only that the Anabaptist tradition is often characterized as placing these values centrally
in its understanding of faith and practice.
7. For an excellent discussion of how the Old Testament is best interpreted from an agrarian
perspective, which also aids in the development of an environmental ethic, see Ellen Davis,
Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009).
8. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial
Classics, 1971), 145.
9. Ibid., 147.
10. Christine Swanton, “Heideggerian Environmental Virtue Ethics,” Journal of Agricultural and
Environmental Ethics 23 (2010): 148, 149.
11. It is essential to note here that while holiness has distinctive religious overtones, in the sense in
which Heidegger uses the concept it implies a mysteriousness, awesomeness, and wonderousness
(ibid., 160). In this respect it shares certain similarities with Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy.
12. Ibid., 150.
13. Ibid., 161.
14. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 149. In Heidegger, “to dwell” has a close connection to
“the fourfold,” a concept that further complicates the relations between human beings and nature.
Since the aim here is to use Heidegger as a springboard, rather than explicate Heidegger’s own ideas,
we shall leave the fourfold to a future discussion.
15. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:
Harper Perennial, 1962), 89.
16. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 148.
17. Heidegger explores this idea in depth in “The Question concerning Technology,” in Technology
and Values: Essential Readings, ed. Graig Hanks (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 99–
113.
18. Todd Lavin, “The Politics of Authentic Experience,” in Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics, ed.
Christine Daigle (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006), 54.
19. Ibid., 62.
20. Doris Janzen Longacre, More-with-Less, 25th anniversary ed. (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald, 2000);
Joetta Handrich Schlabach, Extending the Table (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald, 1991); Mary Beth Lind and
Cathleen Hockman-Wert, Simply in Season, rev. ed. (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald, 2009).
21. Schlabach, Extending the Table, title page; and Lind and Hockman-Wert, Simply in Season,
title page. A similar but fuller description of MCC is found in the author’s preface in Longacre,
More-with-Less, 4.
22. Matthew Bailey-Dick, “The Kitchenhood of All Believers: A Journey into the Discourse of
Mennonite Cookbooks,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 79 (2005): 163. Simply in Season was not
available when Bailey-Dick undertook his analysis, even though he was aware that it was
forthcoming (177n79).
23. http://www.mcc.org/purpose-vision-statements (accessed July 3, 2011).
 24. Longacre, More-with-Less, 13, 48.
25. Mary Emma Showalter Eby, foreword to Longacre, More-with-Less, 7.
26. Lind and Hockman-Wert, Simply in Season, 225, 128, 278.
27. Mary Beth Lind, “Foreword to the Anniversary Edition,” in Longacre, More-with-Less, viii.
28. Rebekah Trollinger, “Mennonite Cookbooks and the Pleasure of Habit,” Mennonite Quarterly
Review 81 (2007): 546.
29. Ibid., 547.
30. Longacre, More-with-Less, 43.
31. Lind and Hockman-Wert, Simply in Season, 296.
32. Ray is one of the present authors, Raymond F. Person Jr., who will hereafter be referred to in
the third person. When discussing the other members of the farm cooperative as well as other
community members, we will consistently refer to them simply by their first names, avoiding the
more formal academic use of last names. Furthermore, we will continue to use “we” for the collective
author of this essay, even when we are (self-)describing Ray.
33. Mark, the other present author, is not a member of the cooperative due to distance; however, he
purchases eggs from the farm because, even though he is a self-described vegan, he has met the
chickens and respects the conscientious treatment they are given, which ensures them a high quality
of life.
34. The Mennonite world sometimes can be small. For example, Bailey-Dick’s brother, Andy, and
his family are founding members of the cooperative. Moreover, Trollinger grew up in Bluffton and
helped with the house renovation. Thus, in some sense they too are members of the extended
community associated with the farm.
35. See Ray Epp, “Building a Farm with a Future,” 2002,
http://newfarm.rodaleinstitute.org/features/0802/japan1/print.html (accessed July 3, 2011).
36. For an excellent discussion of emplacement and migration as well as reflections on herons and
butterflies, see Forrest Clingerman, “The Intimate Distance of Herons: Theological Travels through
Nature, Place, and Migration,” Ethics, Place & Environment 11, no. 3 (2008): 313–25; and Forrest
Clingerman, “Butterflies Dwell betwixt and Between: Non-human Animals, Theology, and Dwelling
in Place,” in Animals as Religious Subjects: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Celia Deane-
Drummond, Rebecca Artinian-Kaiser, and David Clough (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 169–190.
Forrest, Gail, Sabina, and Asa are also members of the farm.
 13

Steward or Priest?

The Possibilities of a Christian Chicken

Farmer
Ragan Sutterfield

My task here is to articulate what difference Christian faith might make in

how we practice and understand eating and agriculture. This is a broad
undertaking since Christianity is broad, with a two-thousand-year history of
thinking that has not been unified. I will attempt here to describe some of
the different approaches to the creation taken within the faith and what
effects those have on agriculture. I articulate these ideas as a Christian
practitioner and will frequently use the personal “we,” though I hope to
make myself clear to those of all orientations of faith.
At the close of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he and a
group of friends gather for a feast. It is a meal of pure goodness, reflecting
all the values Pollan has discovered along his journey through the American
food system. Although a secular person, Pollan remarks that sitting there
with friends and family around this meal, he found himself “reaching
for . . . the words of grace.”1 This reach for a blessing is something a good
meal demands. A blessing is even what a good meal becomes, for as Pollan
goes on to say, “The meal itself had become . . . a wordless way of saying
grace”—the sacred intersection of world and body.2 That we so often don’t
say grace and bless a meal as a sacred thing might mean that we have lost
our ability to recognize the sacred in a world of speed and achievement.
 A few years ago the Washington Post did an experiment: the newspaper
had Joshua Bell, one of the world’s greatest violinists, play in a
Washington, D.C., metro station during rush hour. Here was a virtuoso
playing incredible music, and yet hundreds of people passed by with barely
a pause—a display of pearls before swine. We might argue that this same
rush past the sublime happens every day at our mealtimes.
Christianity, along with other faith traditions, offers a possible
corrective to this desacralized view of a meal. Holding onto the sacredness
of our food, there is a call within Christianity to bless a meal—to say
“grace.” This work is meant to recognize that we are a part of the whole of
the creation, dependent upon the creation, and participants within it. As the
early Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria (circa 200 CE) wrote, “It
is befitting, before partaking of food, that we should bless the Creator of all;
so also in drinking it is suitable to praise Him on partaking of His
creatures.”3
Such a blessing may seem simple at first, but in a time when our food
systems are not always good, when our meals represent sins against the
creation, how can Christians bless a meal that represents a desecration as
much as the blessings of God? Would Michael Pollan have reached for the
words of grace sitting down to a Big Mac, Coke, and fries?
One of the most memorable lines from the comedy movie Talladega
Nights comes when Ricky Bobby, a fictional NASCAR driver, sits with his
family at a table laden with fast food. He begins the blessing: “Dear lord
baby Jesus . . . we thank you so much for this bountiful harvest of
Domino’s, KFC, and the always delicious Taco Bell.”4 We find the idea of
blessing such a meal absurd, particularly with the phrase “bountiful
harvest” thrown in to draw the maximum comedic contrast. Does a blessing
at such a table even make sense given that it rests on so much exploitation
of people and earth?
The difference between Pollan’s meal and Ricky Bobby’s starts well
before the food reaches the table. Even if we should offer a word of grace at
both, the meaning and nature of that prayer will change according to what
comes earlier. The question that precedes grace is then a question of
agriculture, which is more fundamentally a question of the human role
within creation. We want to offer here two possibilities within the Christian
tradition for how we might see our relationship with the land. One is the
idea of “stewardship,” which orients our farming and use of creation toward
a management of creation. Creation here becomes a series of “resources”
whose primary value is determined according to human use and interaction.
This is the dominant view of creation within current Christian practice as
well as national understanding, even among many environmentalist
organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the
Christian college-based organization Earthkeepers.5
On the other side we have the idea of the human role as one of
“priesthood.” This view maintains a human exceptionalism within creation,
but places that emphasis not on a separate managerial role or ontological
status, but rather on a special “priestly role” for humankind. Stanley
Hauerwas and John Berkman have articulated this idea in reference to the
traditional Christian/Jewish view of the role of the Jewish people in the
world—that all nations will be “saved” through the Jewish people not
because of a special ontological status, but because they are the carriers of
the world’s story: “To put it most simply, the only significant theological
difference between humans and animals lies in God’s giving humans a
unique purpose. Herein lies what it means for God to create humans in
God’s image. A part of this unique purpose is God’s charge to humans to
tell animals who they are, and humans continue to do this by the very way
they relate to other animals. We think there is an analogous relationship
here; animals need humans to tell them their story, just as gentiles need
Jews to tell them their story.”6
In the priestly view, the role of humankind is not merely to be a passive
storyteller but to actively call the creation to its fullness within God’s very
being. The role of a priest is to perform sacramental rites that make the holy
visible. A priest is one who prays the prayer that turns common bread and
wine into the sacrament of the Eucharist, a sacrament many Christians take
to involve the actual flesh and blood of Christ. The human role of priest in
creation is to name, bless, and call forth the sacred nature of all created
things. As Wendell Berry once wrote in a poem, “There are no unsacred
places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.”7 It is the
naming of this reality that priests are called to speak. A priest does not view
the creation as a resource to be managed, but rather as a subject in
relationship with the divine.
 Two Kinds of Chicken Farming: Two Views of
Creation
Within agriculture there are correlates to these two views of creation. On
the one side there is agrarianism, or agriculture on a human scale, a form of
agriculture that sees the soil as a gift that has intrinsic value that we must
respect. This is a kind of priestly agriculture. On the other side there is
industrialism, or a form of agriculture that sees value purely on the side of
human economy—the soil made meaningful only in the context of human
interactions with it. Industrialism is agriculture as resource management,
the agriculture of the steward, managing for increased yields to benefit the
greatest number of humans and to increase economic profit at the same
time.
As a way to explore these two forms of agriculture and the possible
Christian views of human relationship to creation, we will use as a heuristic
two chicken farmers, both well known as Christians. Though both these
farmers proclaim allegiance to Christianity, their views of farming could not
be more different. Their views are so divergent, in fact, that one might
question whether they really do worship the same God, and this is a
question well worth entertaining. In other words, their two ways of farming
reveal two different theologies, two different ways of understanding the
human role in creation that cannot both end up being right. Are we priests
or stewards? What difference does it make to our mealtime blessings?

Type 1: John Tyson and the Industrial Mind

John Tyson is the current chairman of Tyson Foods, the world’s largest meat
producer.8 Tyson Foods, founded by John Tyson’s grandfather, is a pioneer
in a vertical model of farming and food processing, with every step from
the birth of a chick to the packaged chicken tenders in a grocery store
freezer aisle controlled by the company. The success of this vertical model
has made Tyson Foods one of the five largest food companies in the world
and the world’s largest “protein” company, as the business magazines like
to refer to the business of producing and selling animal flesh. The
company’s revolutionary approach was developed in large part by
rethinking what a farm is—no longer a place of husbandry, a way of raising
animals whose standards are built around the household economy, but
rather a factory using “animal science” for the production of a protein
product.
The entire system of Tyson’s food production is built around the
maximization of profit, which means growing chickens as cheaply as
possible, as quickly as possible, and producing as much meat as possible
from each bird. This starts with selectively breeding broiler chickens for
rapid growth. Tyson has been able to nearly halve the time it takes for a
chicken to reach butcher weight, from eighty-five days in 1950 to forty-five
days now. This rapid growth means that costs are cut significantly—farmers
can now raise nearly twice the number of chickens with the same amount of
feed, water, and electricity.
In addition to raising faster-growing chickens, Tyson pioneered methods
of growing large numbers of chickens in confinement. Using long row
houses, Tyson contract growers raise as many as twenty thousand birds in
one house.9 These birds are given only enough room to eat, drink, and
grow. Because of their rapid growth, most of these broilers develop leg
problems early and don’t move around as actively as more traditional
chicken breeds. Their lives are engineered around one purpose—to grow
meaty breasts as quickly and cheaply as possible.
The life of a Tyson chicken starts in a hatchery, where eggs from
breeding stock are hatched in large incubators. Since chickens are precocial
(animals that are able to live relatively independently of their parents from
birth) the chicks are able to eat and drink without the care of an adult. The
birds are then sorted according to sex, a difficult task often performed by
Hmong refugees living in northwest Arkansas. The male and female birds
are distributed differently, based on the particular end product in mind—a
big-breasted broiler, a smaller fryer, or a bird for a processed chicken
dinner. Once the chicks are sorted, they are packed in plastic crates that are
stacked on the back of a truck and driven to chicken farms.
Once the chicks arrive at the farm, they are released into a long row
house filled with heavy wood-shaving bedding (a whole industry of
bedding production is built around the forests of Arkansas). Low hanging
lamps provide necessary warmth, and the chicks are given as much food
and water as they can consume. They eat and eat, nonstop, with artificial
lighting creating the illusion of a never-ending day. The birds do sleep, but
their circadian rhythms are disrupted for the purpose of encouraging them
to eat as much as possible. The food they are given is a mix of corn and
soybeans, mixed with vitamins and arsenic or other antimicrobial agents
that are technically not “antibiotics,” allowing Tyson to make the claim that
their meat is antibiotic free (though this has been challenged).
The birds eat and eat until they reach butcher weight, but many of them,
an acceptable percentage on the accounting sheets, die. This method of
mass production involves a great susceptibility to disease and death,
sometimes on a large scale. Growers have freezer units outside of their
chicken houses where they collect dead chickens on a daily basis, but when
major disease outbreaks happen, large numbers of birds are buried, often
illegally. The work of collecting dead chickens is often performed by
immigrant workers, who must bear the heavy ammonia stench of chicken
manure as well as its dust, which can cause respiratory problems. The
manure itself is a major management concern. It is frequently used as
fertilizer on nearby fields, but because of the arsenic used as an
antimicrobial in many chicken feeds, the fertilizer is toxic, leading to heavy
levels of arsenic pollution in rivers and streams where the excess manure
runs off.
Once the birds are ready for slaughter, they are packed into cages so
tightly that they can barely move. The birds are then driven to a slaughter
facility, often many miles away, where they are killed either with a
beheading machine or a dip in an electrified bath. The skin is scalded, the
feathers plucked, and then the birds are eviscerated by hand by workers,
often illegal immigrants with few legal recourses in the case of abuse by
managers. This is how most chicken dinners get their start.
This way of raising chickens represents a major shift in agricultural
practice, but more so a shift in thinking about land and animals. In writing
about the demise of family-scale farming in America, the agrarian Wendell
Berry explains that the “principal reason for this failure is the universal
adoption, by our people and our leaders alike, of industrial values.” These
values, argues Berry, are based on three assumptions:

a) That value equals price—that the value of a farm, for example, is

whatever it would bring on sale, because both a place and its price
 are “assets.” There is no essential difference between farming and
selling a farm.
b) That all relations are mechanical. That a farm, for example, can be
used like a factory, because there is no essential difference between
a farm and a factory.
c) That the sufficient and definitive human motive is competitiveness
—that a community, for example, can be treated like a resource or a
market, because there is no difference between a community and a
resource or a market.10

These three assumptions are clearly at play in Tyson Foods’ approach to

farming. The value of a farm is purely locked up in its ability to produce
meat as cheaply as possible. The farm is obviously a factory, and the
chickens raised on a farm are treated, insofar as possible, like any
industrially produced widget. The fact that they create manure is an
inconvenient reminder of the biological beings they are. As Matthew Scully
wrote in the American Conservative, “All of factory farming proceeds from
a massive denial of reality—the reality that pigs and other animals are not
just production units to be endlessly exploited but living creatures with
natures and needs.”11
These natures and needs are, according to Christian theology, given by a
creator. Tyson did not create the chicken as Ford created the automobile.
Engaging with a chicken, raising it, is a matter of taking account of and
responsibility for its divinely appointed givens. Farming is what Aristotle
would have called a stochastic art, one that requires dynamic work,
discernment in relationship to the object (the Greek refers to divination). A
stochastic relationship with a chicken would be one in which one observes
the needs of the chicken and answers them with no preset conditions other
than an end toward flourishing.
But this is the exact opposite of the industrial mind. In the industrial
way of farming, the animal becomes subject to a system to which it must be
molded. Its suffering is a result of nonconformity to the factory, as are its
diseases, solved (but never permanently, of course) by engineering and
drugs. There are even researchers attempting to create animals without the
cognitive capacity for stress so that the conditions of the factory will no
longer be a source of pain and struggle—animals will be “happy” whatever
their conditions.12

It is critical to understand that John Tyson, the man who holds in his mind
this industrial approach to farming, is a Christian. It is common, of course,
for one’s religious beliefs to be relegated to the world of the private—that
has been the American way since John F. Kennedy told the nation that his
faith was private and not a factor in his role as president, and the
privatization of religion in America goes back much further. But Tyson, a
former drug addict who had a dramatic conversion to faith, does not hold
his faith and his business as separate things. In fact, he is one of the leading
advocates of bringing faith into the workplace, and Tyson employs the
largest number of business-based chaplains in the world.
Tyson has dedicated a great deal of his resources to founding the Tyson
Center for Faith and Spirituality in the Workplace at the Sam M. Walton
College of Business at the University of Arkansas. He also speaks
frequently on how to integrate faith into a multicultural workplace (Tyson’s
chaplains come from many faith backgrounds, though Tyson himself is a
Christian). John Tyson has also left his mark on Tyson Food’s “core
values,” which because of him include “We strive to be a faith-friendly
company” and “We strive to honor God and be respectful of each other, our
customers, and other stakeholders.” Among these core values we also find
this: “We serve as stewards of the animals, land, and environment entrusted
to us.”13
How do we make sense of Tyson’s clear interest in explicitly living his
faith in and through his business, and the reality of the factory farming upon
which his business is founded? We might argue that it begins with Tyson’s
theology of “stewardship” and how that concept mixes with a view of
creation that has served as the basis of the American economy since its
founding.
The understanding of creation most influential on the American mind
might be linked to John Locke, one of the Enlightenment’s foundational
thinkers, whose philosophy profoundly influenced the founding fathers of
the United States. Locke assumed, in step with the dominant Christian
theology of his time, that the creation was given to humankind. But the
creation that was given was not valuable in itself; rather, it was raw material
that could be made meaningful only through human management and
enterprise: “God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it for
their benefit, and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to
draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain
common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and
rational, (and labour as to be his title to it); not to the fancy or covetousness
of the quarrelsome and contentious.”14 The creation does not, then, belong
to all, but only to those who will make the best use of it—“the industrious
and rational.” To put this in modern terms and to broadly stereotype, God
gave the creation for entrepreneurial businesspeople, not lazy hippies.
A critical point to draw from this is that in Locke’s view, the goods of
creation are not value laden. It is our “stewardship” of those goods that
gives the raw materials value and makes them useful to human ends. In
such a view, a cheap package of chicken breasts can only be a good thing
because a chicken has no value in itself. It is interesting to note here that
some of the same logic was used by Christians to justify slavery: Africans
and their American descendants, judged to not be particularly “industrious”
in their tribal settings, might be made useful through labor in American
plantations and homes. In 1773 Richard Nisbet, a West Indian plantation
owner living in Philadelphia, argued that the slave trade was responsible for
“rescuing many millions of Africans, as brands from a fire, and even
compelling them to the enjoyment of a more refined state of happiness, than
the partiality of fate has assigned them in their native state.”15 Africans in
their native state, then, were the raw stuff of creation. It was only through
the intervention of “civilization” by the slave owner that the slave could be
made valuable. This same logic is at work, it seems, in John Tyson’s
“stewardship.”
Stewardship as a theological concept has been used to good effect in
articulating the Christian call to care for the creation by writers such as
Calvin Dewitt, but too often the model exhibits a mistaken theology. As
Kelly Johnson argues in her wonderful book The Fear of Beggars:
Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics, stewardship language,
relatively new on the theological scene, “shifts the center of gravity within
economic ethics, the daily disciplines and language of preaching, toward
the presumptions that the key moral agent, the model disciple, has
disposable wealth and that existing property rights are underwritten by
God.”16 In other words, the concept of stewardship shifts the ideal of the
Christian life away from one in which a person is completely dependent
upon the gifts and grace of God to one in which a person carefully manages
the “assets” of creation in order to gain wealth. The aphorism “God helps
those who help themselves,” a phrase so common that many Americans
mistakenly think it is in the Bible, captures the stewardship ethic.17 In the
context of Tyson, the ethic of stewardship shifts meaning and responsibility
from givens within the creation to the sphere of human use.
It was without irony, then, that Tyson Foods released a booklet titled
Giving Thanks at Mealtime in 2005. The booklet contains thanksgivings
from a variety of major faith traditions, mostly Christian but also some
Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish blessings. As John Tyson wrote in the
introduction, “This Giving Thanks at Mealtime booklet is designed to help
you discover (or rediscover!) the joy and power of saying a word of thanks
before mealtime.”18 The blessings all center on thanking God for the gifts
of food and family, and the many other blessings God bestows. Some of the
prayers are quite touching, such as this one from Mount St. Mary’s Abbey:
“Lord bless our shared meal, a sacrament to our shared unity.” But in
praying these thanks to a God who has delivered these gifts, should we not
as Christians be concerned with how they came to us?
The shift to stewardship enabled Christian ethicists to move the act of
blessing from the inevitable questions of right livelihood to an abstracted
use of wealth for good. As Johnson notes, stewardship “requires no
disruption of social structures . . . leaves the order of property rights largely
uncontested, and yet makes room within that order for a critique of
selfishness, for a stern demand for attention to the needs of others, for an
obligation for generosity.”19 Tyson Foods can thus proudly tout its work to
feed the hungry while at the same time building its profits from the abuse of
creation and the exploitation of low-wage migrant labor, all while
maintaining its role as “stewards of the animals, land, and environment
entrusted to us.”

While Tyson represents a common thread in Christianity practiced in and

synchronistic with Western capitalism, we are right to feel uneasy with this
theology and skeptical of its facile blessings. The scriptures and the best of
the Christian theological tradition would seem, on the whole, to indicate
that the kind of food system Tyson Foods fosters is more of an abomination
than a “sacred trust.” How can we know the fullness of a Tyson chicken’s
life and say with the psalmist that all creation looks to God “to give them
their food in due season” (Psalm 104:27)? Nowhere in the mealtime
blessings is there a confession for the food. That might be the most
appropriate prayer.

Type 2: Farming as if “the Earth is the Lord’s”

The most critical mistake in the view of property put forward by Locke is
that the world is made valuable only through human interactions with it.
This makes stewardship a matter not only of the proper use of gifts but of
making value from them, but this is not the biblical witness. In the Christian
and Jewish scriptures we find frequent references to a creation whose value
is found only in relation to the creator, not to the human “steward” within
the creation. Psalm 104 gives us a beautiful portrait of a creation that finds
its life in the breath and love of God. Even predators that pose a threat to
human economic well-being are given sustenance through God: “The young
lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God” (21). At the close of
this psalm we are told, “Let sinners be consumed from the earth and let the
wicked be no more” (35a). Walter Brueggemann has suggested that the
sinners and wicked here are those who abuse the land, seeking their own
ends rather than respecting the whole of the land.20 This psalm, which is
best read as an interpretation of Genesis 1, where human beings are told “to
fill the earth and subdue it” (1:28), should disabuse us of any notions that
human dominion means that we are taking the place of God in this creation
that God sustains with God’s own breath (29–30).
In the book of Job, as God explains to Job that Job is not the center of
the universe, God uses the example of the wild donkey and the wild ox,
both nondomesticated versions of beasts of burden that are, as Wendell
Berry points out, “said to be ‘free,’ precisely in the sense that they are not
subject or serviceable to human purposes”:21

Who has let the wild ass go free? Who has loosed the bonds of the swift
ass, to which I have given the steppe for its home, the salt land for its
dwelling place? It scorns the tumult of the city; it does not hear the
 shouts of the driver. It ranges the mountains as its pasture, and it
searches after every green thing. Is the wild ox willing to serve you?
Will it spend the night at your crib? Can you tie it in the furrow with
ropes, or will it harrow the valleys after you? Will you depend on it
because its strength is great, and will you hand over your labor to it?
Do you have faith in it that it will return, and bring your grain to your
threshing floor? (Job 39:5–12)

Even when land is given and promised to the Israelites, God makes
clear that at best the people are tenants: “The land shall not be sold in
perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants”
(Leviticus 25:23). We could be better described as shepherds on the
commons, raising our lambs on land we do not own, than as “stewards” of
the land, with the loftiness that position has come to represent.
Nevertheless, Wendell Berry uses the term stewardship, clearly employing
it differently than Tyson, asking, “If ‘the earth is the Lord’s’ and we are His
stewards, then obviously some livelihoods are ‘right’ and some are not. Is
there, for instance, any such thing as a Christian strip mine? . . . Is there not,
in Christian ethics, an implied requirement of practical separation from a
destructive or wasteful economy?”22 If we are honestly reflecting on the
biblical witness, we must answer yes, and we must also ask, “Is there such a
thing as a Christian factory farm?”
If John Tyson’s system of farming is based on a misunderstanding of the
nature of the creation and our role within it, then what would be a proper
view of creation? Who would be a proper role model of the Christian
farmer? We might look to another chicken farmer, Joel Salatin.

Joel Salatin’s farm in the rolling hills of north-central Virginia is a

masterpiece of integrated systems. On Polyface Farm, so named to reflect
the many faces present—pigs, chickens, cattle, rabbits, goats—Salatin
raises his animals in mixed systems meant to maximize natural patterns.
Birds once followed buffalo, eating the insects the larger animals would stir
up. Salatin imitates this pattern by bringing his laying hens to scavenge
where his cattle recently grazed. Everything in this system is meant to work
toward the long-term development of the farm’s soil and in turn its pasture,
which provides most of the food for the farm’s animals.
 The chickens Salatin raises are purchased from a nearby hatchery. They
come to his farm in boxes and are then turned out into a large brooding area
with bedding and heat lamps to keep the chicks warm. After a few weeks,
when the chicks have developed enough feathers to offer some protection
from the elements, they are moved out into the pasture. There they are
raised in mobile chicken pens that are moved daily, sometimes multiple
times a day, to fresh grass. The chickens eat the grass as well as a mix of
grains and protein Salatin makes specifically for his farm.
The manure from the chickens helps to fertilize the grass that cattle and
chickens will come back to eat once it has grown back fully, meaning that
Salatin’s farm is cultivating the future rather than mining resources.
Because the chickens are constantly moving at a pace that the surrounding
grassland can properly incorporate, Salatin has none of the runoff or water
pollution problems that Tyson growers generate. Manure is not a problem
for Salatin, it is an asset—an indication that his farm is working in the
pattern of nature rather than against it.
When the birds have reached slaughter weight, they are packed in crates
and moved a short distance across the field to the slaughter shed, which is
open air. The birds live and die in an area that can be measured by yards
rather than miles, which means, among other things, that the birds do not
experience the great stress of travel before their death. The birds are killed
individually with a cut to the jugular vein by a skilled butcher paid a living
wage, following in the pattern of humane killing that has long been a part of
the Kosher and Halal traditions.
Salatin is a Christian and he speaks in clearly moral terms about what
and how he farms: “We should at least be asking, Is there a righteous way to
farm and an unrighteous way to farm? . . . What is a moral farm? What is a
moral way to raise a chicken?”23 Salatin’s answer is farming in a way that
allows the animals he raises to express their given nature—a cow her
cowness, a chicken her chickenness, a pig her pigness. This means that
Salatin receives the animals he has on his farm as gifts that already have a
value that he did not determine, a reality he did not make. While he still
raises them as animals and ends their life to feed people just as Tyson does,
Salatin also believes that he has a responsibility to those animals by which
he will be judged.
 A New York Times profile of Salatin dubbed him the “High Priest of
Pasture.”24 Such a title is apt, not only because it names Salatin’s role
within the community of sustainable agriculture but because it most
properly names the role of human beings within creation that Salatin
represents. If we are not to be value-making stewards of a creation without
intrinsic worth, then our role might be better called priests of creation,
members of the community of creation with a special role—to call creation
to its life within God and to work toward its fullness.
Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas describes the priestly stance within
creation in this way: “The priest is the one who freely and, as himself an
organic part of it, takes the world in his hands to refer it to God, and who, in
return, brings God’s blessing to what he refers to God. Through this act,
creation is brought into communion with God himself. This is the essence
of priesthood, and it is only the human being who can do it, namely, unite
the world in his hands in order to refer it to God, so that it can be united
with God and thus saved and fulfilled.” As Zizioulas goes on to argue, this
priestly role transcends the instrumentalism of stewardship:

The human being is related to nature not functionally, as the idea of

stewardship would suggest, but ontologically: by being the steward of
creation the human being relates to nature by what he does, whereas by
being the priest of creation he relates to nature by what he is. The
implications of this distinction are very significant. In the case of
stewardship our attitude to nature is determined by ethics and morality:
if we destroy nature we disobey and transgress a certain law, we
become immoral and unethical. In the case of priesthood, in destroying
nature we simply cease to be, the consequences of ecological sin are
not moral but existential.25

In restoring the creation to communion with God, the priestly role of the
person does not leave nature alone. Instead, and this is a key aspect of the
agrarian vision, the human mediation in creation is meant to call creation to
its full flourishing. What is at stake isn’t simply our moral status, but our
very life. That is what “sustainable agriculture” means—a way of farming
that continues and draws forth the being of creation. This results in a way of
farming that is full of grace rather than a competition for ever-scarcer
resources.
As Norman Wirzba describes Salatin’s “forgiveness farming” in
contrast to industrial agriculture, this priestly role becomes clear:
“Industrial food production has no room for kindness or mercy. . . . But in
the dance that is Polyface Farm, the fields and the animals play off each
other’s strengths. There is room for failure and acceptance here because
each member of the dance can be itself, and each is in harmony with the
activity of the other. There is time for delight.”26
In the industrial vision all improvements are oriented to maximizing
profit. The priest, on the other hand, is oriented toward the fulfillment and
flourishing of the creation, which it is unable to achieve on its own: “In a
priestly approach to nature we develop it not in order to satisfy our needs as
human beings, but because nature itself stands in need of development
through us in order to fulfill its own being and acquire a meaning which it
would not otherwise have.”27 This is the difference between a farm and the
wild, a garden and a wilderness.
Gary Nabhan, an ethnobiologist who works with Native people in the
Sonoran Desert, has written about the desert oasis Quitobaquito. This oasis
was a traditional source of irrigation for the Tohono O’odham people and as
such was cultivated and cared for by them. But when the oasis was made a
“preserve” as a part of the Organ Pipe National Monument, the Tohono
O’odham stopped using the oasis so that it could return to its “natural”
ecosystem. However, just across the US-Mexico border from the national
monument, the Tohono O’odham still use a very similar oasis that they
actively cultivate. The amazing thing is that the biodiversity of the oasis at
the Organ Pipe National Monument has significantly declined, while the
oasis still used by the Tohono O’odham thrives with a greater variety of
native plants and wildlife.28 This is a view of the role of priesthood at work
developing the flourishing of the creation. No factory farm could fulfill
such a vocation because it is an exploitative monoculture—to flourish is an
impossible verb for a Tyson chicken house.

When we look at Joel Salatin’s farm, or the farms of many good farmers,
we see the flourishing of creation unleashed. There is an abundance not
only of food for human use but also of wildlife, native plants, and at the
base of it all, healthier soil. Joel Salatin’s work is the work of a priest—
blessing the creation through his work, which must always be work in
concert with his congregation.29 This is the kind of farming and the food
grown from it that Christians are called to bless in their prayers. This is the
intersection that is to come together at the table as every meal becomes a
Eucharist—a sacramental thanksgiving that shows forth God’s grace in the
world. Over such a meal, every human person is called to be a priest before
the holy elements of creation.
Such flourishing cannot come from a system of agriculture that treats
the members of creation as purely utilitarian elements—that denies their life
as creatures of intrinsic and independent value. John Tyson’s sin is not that
he has played the steward poorly, but that he has failed to name and call
forth the sacredness of the life of the creation. He has failed to “honor the
chickenness of a chicken,” as Joel Salatin would say. The vision of
stewardship is inadequate in describing the Christian’s view of the human
vocation within creation—it calls for management when we should be
blessing. Tyson, it would seem, has failed to honor the creatures God
declared as “good” and has instead entered into an economy of abstract
value where goodness is made rather than accepted or recognized. Such
stewardship results in difficult prayers, thanksgivings that fail to give
thanks for what is truly good and confess the ways in which we have
violated those givens.
The task of “saying grace” begins well before mealtime. Without such
grace calling forth the flourishing of the creation, we cannot thank God for
the “bountiful harvest” but only confess our abusive theft. Inevitably, many
of our meals will contain within them mixed blessings—some of the sacred
and some of the desecrated. The Christian tradition is familiar with such a
condition—it is the nature of our life in a fallen world. The Christian task is
to confess and return again to the work of blessing the flourishing of the
creation.

Study Questions
1. How does the way we grow food change the way we say thanks for
it?
 2. Do practices of penance and confession have a role in how we eat?
3. How does the role of steward differ from the role of priest?

Notes
1. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York:
Penguin, 2006), 407.
2. Ibid.
3. Clement of Alexandria, “The Instructor,” in Anti-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers
Down to A.D. 325, vol. 2, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994), 249.
4. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, dir. Adam McKay (Sony Pictures, 2006).
5. “We seek to establish sustainability and good stewardship of the Earth as central ethical
imperatives of human society.” Natural Resources Defense Council, “Mission Statement,”
http://www.nrdc.org/about/mission.asp (accessed May 20, 2012). See also the Earthkeepers website,
http://www.messiah.edu/offices/publications/the_bridge/fa1109/earthkeepers/index.html (accessed
May 20, 2012).
6. Stanley Hauerwas and John Berkman, “The Chief End of All Flesh,” Theology Today 49, no. 2
(1992): 199–200.
7. Wendell Berry, “How to Be a Poet,”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/41087 (accessed April 24, 2016).
8. http://www.tysonfoods.com/ (accessed June 3, 2012).
9. Tyson and other companies work with independent farmers who actually raise their chickens
for them. Tyson provides feed and chicks and stipulates the infrastructure needs, but the company
does not pay for them. This is a way for Tyson to remove itself from the actual risks of farming.
10. Wendell Berry, Home Economics: Fourteen Essays (New York: North Point, 1987), 168.
11. Matthew Scully, “Fear Factories,” American Conservative, May 23, 2005, 12.
12. Armelle Casau, “When Pigs Stress Out,” New York Times, October 7, 2003,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/07/science/when-pigs-stress-out.html (accessed May 28, 2012).
13. http://www.tysonfoods.com/About-Tyson/Company-Information/Core-Values.aspx (accessed
May 27, 2012).
14. John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (London: Whitmore and Fenn, and C. Brown,
1821), 214.
15. Quoted in Kelly Johnson, The Fear of Beggars: Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2007), 95.
16. Ibid., 98.
17. Barna Research Online, “Americans’ Bible Knowledge Is in the Ballpark, but Often off Base,”
July 12, 2000 (website no longer available).
18.
http://web.archive.org/web/20061111233246/http://www.tyson.com/Recipes/GivingThanks/Tyson_Pr
ayer.pdf (accessed October 23, 2012).
19. Johnson, The Fear of Beggars, 99.
 20. “Walter Brueggemann’s Guide to the Bible,” Christianity Podcast, November 10, 2012,
http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2012/11/10/brueggemanns-guide-to-the-bible/ (accessed
November 20, 2012).
21. Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York:
North Point, 1982), 273.
22. Ibid., 275.
23. David Grant, “Joel Salatin Advocates a Better Way to Raise Food,” Christian Science Monitor,
November 24, 2009, http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Living-Green/2009/1124/joel-salatin-
advocates-a-better-way-to-raise-food (accessed October 23, 2012).
24. “High Priest of Pasture,” New York Times, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?
res=9D0CE7DF173EF932A35756C0A9639C8B63&smid=goshare (accessed April 24, 2016).
25. John Zizioulas, “Proprietors or Priests of Creation?” (address delivered to the Religion,
Science, and the Environment Symposium, June 2, 2003), 5, 7–8,
http://www.rsesymposia.org/themedia/File/1151679350-Pergamon.pdf (accessed October 23, 2012).
26. Norman Wirzba, “Barnyard Dance,” Christian Century, January 23, 2007, 9.
27. Zizioulas, “Proprietors or Priests of Creation?” 8.
28. Gary Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O’odham Country (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 2002).
29. Gene Logsdon has suggested that farmers should follow a priestly model of income as well. He
notes that if growing food for profit doesn’t work, then perhaps “farmers should take a cue from
religious orders, form a service organization and take vows of poverty in return for producing free
food. The laity contribute generously for free spiritual services; they’d surely do the same for free
food.” “What if Farming for Profit Really Isn’t Possible,” n.d. (website no longer available).
 14

Religion and Agriculture

How Islam Forms the Moral Core of

SEKEM’s Holistic Development
Approach in Egypt
Maximilian Abouleish-Boes

In order to understand SEKEM (Egyptian for “vitality from the sun”) and
our approach to sustainable agriculture and holistic development, it is
necessary to first understand the history, and thus the vision, of SEKEM’s
founder, Dr. Ibrahim Abouleish. Born in Egypt in 1937, Dr. Abouleish
studied chemistry and medicine at the University of Graz, Austria, from
which he received his Ph.D. in 1969. In 1977 he decided, together with his
Austrian wife and two children, to return to Egypt and establish a
sustainable development initiative called SEKEM, which aims to set out a
blueprint for the healthy corporation of the twenty-first century.
SEKEM was the first entity to apply Rudolph Steiner-inspired
biodynamic farming methods in Egypt. Its strong commitment to innovative
development led to the nationwide application of biodynamic methods to
control pests and improve crop yields. Since its founding in 1977, SEKEM
has grown exponentially into a nationally renowned enterprise and market
leader of organic products and phyto-pharmaceuticals, which are now also
exported to Europe and elsewhere. The inspiration of this growth is seen in
Dr. Abouleish’s summary of his founding vision:
 We are often asked: “What is SEKEM?” When I say SEKEM is a
holistic development initiative, people think that it is about a few social
institutions that live on donations. When I say that SEKEM consists of
some successful enterprises, this is not wrong either, but again it is not
sufficient explanation. I could also say: SEKEM is a political initiative,
a research initiative, an education initiative. All of this is right, but still,
it does not fully explain what SEKEM really is. SEKEM is a
consonance; the interaction between all these different areas, similar to
a symphony, where everyone contributes to the whole, knowing that the
composer, conductor and the rest of the players are all together serving
a divinely inspired idea.1

The economic branch of the SEKEM initiative includes five main

companies: SEKEM for Land Reclamation, for farming and organic
seedlings, fertilization, and pest control; Isis, for fresh fruits and vegetables
as well as for organic foods and beverages (such as juice, dairy products,
oils, spices, and tea); Lotus, for herbs and spices; NatureTex, for organic
cotton and textiles (children’s clothing and home wear); and Atos, for
phyto-pharmaceutical products.
The societal challenges of the future—such as climate change, resource
scarcity, population growth, extreme poverty, and food security—will all
need innovative, problem-solving solutions. Since the beginning, the
SEKEM Development Foundation and later also the Heliopolis University
for Sustainable Development have contributed to solving these challenges.
This is born out of the holistic model for sustainable development that
SEKEM is founded on, which includes sustainably balancing the
dimensions of human economic, cultural, and societal life and embedding
these within the regenerative limits of local ecosystems.

The Egyptian Context and Challenges Related to

Agriculture
Egypt’s landmass comprises 1 million square kilometers (386.6 square
miles), with a population of about 80 million people, who live on 40,000
square kilometers. Only 3 percent of the Egyptian land is arable.
Agriculture takes up 3.3 million hectares (8.1 million acres), out of which
825,000 hectares (about 2 million acres) come from desert reclamation.2
Although the government is investing in land reclamation, the area
cultivated has not changed a lot, due to urban and industrial expansion at
the expense of agricultural land.3 The result is that agricultural land per
person has shrunk from 923 m2/person in 1960 to 456 m2/person in 2005.4
This implies that existing agricultural land must be preserved and protected
and new desert land needs to be reclaimed in order to have the basis for an
adequate food supply for the Egyptian population, which is growing
annually at a rate of around 1.5–2 percent.
According to the Egyptian National Competitiveness Council’s (ENCC)
Food Security and Safety Sub-council, increasing food prices coupled with
reduced effective earnings have increased the percentage of Egyptians
living below the poverty line (extreme poverty) from 16.7 percent in 1999
to 25.2 percent in 2010.5 The development of the agricultural sector is
recognized as a prime contributor to inclusive growth and poverty reduction
as well as to Egypt’s food safety, given that it relies on local goods and
services and as such indirectly stimulates the economy in rural areas. The
urgency of the need to improve the productivity of Egypt’s agricultural
sector has become greater since the January 25 revolution in 2011, when the
people expressed a few basic, simple demands: for bread, freedom, dignity,
and social justice. The demand for bread is a reflection of the pressing need
of the people to be able to provide decent food for their families, to be
assured, at minimum, of guaranteed food security or income. While the
January 25 uprising was a rather peaceful revolt of the people, political
analysts warn of a second “Revolution of the Hungry.”
The uprising materialized when the military overthrew former president
Mohamed El-Morsi, who was the first democratically elected president in
Egypt representing the Muslim Brotherhood. The disturbance was
inevitable, in the view of many, because politicians did not take immediate
concrete and significant steps to reform Egypt’s economy, in particular the
reformation of agricultural policies that impede Egypt’s ability to ensure its
own national food security. At the heart of this food security is the well-
being of the smaller farmers (those owning 4.8 acres or less) who cultivate
90 percent of Egypt’s agricultural land and therefore form the foundation of
this sector. Hence, moving the Egyptian small farmer from subsistence
levels to sustainability and then abundance is critical socially, economically,
and politically.6
It is important to recognize that the energy-water-food nexus represents
a huge challenge for sustainable development in Egypt, and agriculture is
strongly related to this nexus. Sustainable desert reclamation plays a key
role in addressing these issues and therefore contributing to political
stability and the related transition to an authentic form of democracy. This
is relevant not only for Egypt but for the whole region. Within this context
of food insecurity and social and environmental challenges, SEKEM
represents a viable alternative, one that builds upon a praxis of sustainable
agriculture that resonates strongly with Muslim insights and teachings.

SEKEM’s Holistic Development Approach

Introduction to SEKEM
To gain an appreciation for SEKEM, it is best to hear from its founder, so
his voice figures prominently in this chapter. Dr. Abouleish states:

The joy that I feel every morning, the enthusiasm for my work, the
boundless love which fills my heart for all around me, brings forth a
vision of the community: a community in which people of all nations
and cultures work and learn in peace, and resonate together in harmony
as a symphony; a community in which vocations from all walks of life,
from all age groups, from all levels of consciousness, acknowledge,
nurture and love the divine world and strive towards noble ideals; a
living, ever regenerating community maintaining its dynamism by
reaching towards the science of the spirit; a community pursuing truth
and tolerance, generously offering its understanding in service of earth
and man; a people where modesty and diligence prevails over vanity
and comfort, and all endeavors are blessed.7

After living for twenty-one years in Austria, Dr. Ibrahim Abouleish

decided to return to Egypt. Abouleish could not stop thinking about images
and events of his previous visits to his home country. “During my trip I had
become aware of the excessive use of artificial fertilizer, and I discovered
far worse things about Egypt’s economy, education and health situation and
agriculture and trade relations than I had already learned through my
discussions with Egyptians.”8 In an effort to help eradicate poverty and to
contribute to the advancement of the individual, society, and the earth, he
established the SEKEM initiative. The initiative began on seventy hectares
of virgin, arid soil located near Belbes, around sixty kilometers northeast of
Cairo.9
SEKEM’s mission is to achieve sustainable development while
assuming corporate social responsibility for human improvement. SEKEM
does this by capitalizing on information technology, research and
development, and active management of supply chains, quality, customer
relationships, and the natural environment.10

Company and Practice

SEKEM was the first organization to promote pesticide-free farming
techniques in Egypt, influenced by the idea that organic—specifically,
biodynamic—farming enhances soil fertility, develops biodiversity, and
eliminates waste.11 Biodynamic agriculture entails a self-containing and
self-sustaining ecosystem without any unnatural additions. Soil, plants,
animals, and humans together create a holistic living organism. The concept
developed out of eight lectures on agriculture given in 1924 by Rudolf
Steiner (1861–1925), an Austrian scientist and philosopher and the founder
of anthroposophy, to a group of farmers near Breslau (then located in the
eastern part of Germany, now Wroclaw in Poland). Most people will agree
that this is one method of sustainable agriculture. But is sustainable
agriculture grasping all aspects of SEKEM’s way of cultivation and
application of biodynamic agricultural methods?
Most agricultural experts understand “sustainable” as “self-sustaining.”
The verb to sustain itself means only “to endure” or “to last,” and
sustainable therefore became an expression for anything that has the
capacity to endure. A plastic bag that is buried in soil and does not decay is
thus also “sustainable,” at least linguistically speaking. SEKEM’s approach
to sustainable agriculture includes the regenerative powers of agriculture. In
regenerative agriculture lost ecological systems can ultimately begin
“regenerating” back into existence.12
The desert is such a lost ecosystem, at least from an agricultural
perspective. The soil has lost most of its nutrients and completely lacks any
organic matter and water-holding capacity. Under these conditions,
agriculture is not possible unless organic matter can serve as both a
foundation and a catalyst for growing plants and accommodating animals.
The very fact that SEKEM’s approach turns desert into living soils through
the application of compost and biodynamic methods shows that desert land
can be reclaimed, and thus regenerated. For more than thirty-five years,
SEKEM has been building up living soils in desert land and implementing
closed nutrient cycles with livestock integration and a diverse range of
crops, plants, and trees. By farming without chemicals, the health of the
farmers and the consumers who eat organic products regenerates. The
returning wildlife also benefits, which in turn gives back to the farm by
helping to keep down insect pests.
SEKEM’s approach to agriculture stands in direct contrast to business-
as-usual industrial agriculture. The latter relies heavily on external inputs,
spreads vast areas of monocultures over the planet, and even changes
plants’ genetic source codes to increase resistance to pests and aid
adaptation to climate change. Numerous scientific studies have shown,
however, that industrial agriculture and the application of genetically
modified organisms (GMOs) affects the ecosystems negatively and in fact
degrades rather than regenerates them.
In 1994, SEKEM helped form the Egyptian Biodynamic Association
(EBDA), which conducts research on sophisticated biodynamic cultivation
practices and increases awareness of biodynamic agriculture through
collaboration with other institutions. To date, the EBDA has supported the
transition of over 400 farms with more than 8,000 acres to organic farming
practices, including some 4,500 acres on 120 farms that were reclaimed
from arid land. The EDBA was also a global pioneer in growing and
producing biodynamic cotton. The presence of the EBDA helped in solving
many challenges SEKEM was facing. The training that EBDA provides to
farmers in international methods of biodynamic agriculture raised
awareness of this method of agriculture and facilitated the acquiring of
organic products certification in order to open up new market channels.13
Impact on Society
SEKEM has succeeded in informing public decision makers about the
advantages of its agricultural approach—with remarkable results. In cotton
production SEKEM has not only reduced synthetic pesticides in its own
operations but, in cooperation with the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture,
cut chemical use by more than 90 percent on Egyptian cotton farms in the
1990s.14 More recently, the leadership of SEKEM actively engaged in
policy advocacy at the ENCC, with the result that sustainable agriculture
was integrated into the Egypt National Competitiveness Strategy 2020,
which is currently being taken forward by the United Nation’s Environment
Programme’s Green Economy Initiative, launched in early 2013.15
Despite these achievements, the overall implementation of sustainable
agricultural practice remains marginal. Of the total cultivated land in Egypt,
only 1 percent is currently cultivated organically.16 This can be explained
by strong energy subsidies and the lack of adequate water-pricing
mechanisms, conditions that do not incentivize resource efficiency in
farming operations. On the contrary, huge amounts of social and
environmental externalities and costs are currently outsourced to nature or
future generations through unsustainable agricultural practices. Other
reasons for the slow upscaling of organic and/or biodynamic agriculture is
the lack of capacity of people and a missing long-term perspective of
farming businesses.
It can be concluded that in Egypt, SEKEM has a highly unconventional
business model that incorporates social and environmental externalities and
considers these the bases for increasing competitiveness in the future. While
it is a profit-making enterprise, it does not aim for profit maximization.
Through a profit-sharing methodology, it shares its returns with the
smallholder farmers in its network. The SEKEM Development Foundation
(SDF) has launched many beneficial community development initiatives
such as establishing schools and a medical center, celebrating culture and
diversity, and promoting peace, cooperation, and understanding among
human beings.17
 How Islam Informs the Concept of Sustainable
Development and the Moral Core of SEKEM
The Context and Role of SEKEM
For Ibrahim Abouleish, the development of SEKEM had to begin with the
development of himself. During his time in Austria he interacted with
European cultures and philosophies. He found a way to integrate this
influence with his own Islamic faith and Egyptian cultural background. As
he writes, “My spiritual inspiration came out of very different cultures: a
synthesis between the Islamic world and European spirituality. I moved
around freely in these different areas as if I was in a great garden, picking
the fruits of the different trees. I would have felt I was restricting myself if I
had had to limit myself to one way of thinking. But I felt there was enough
inner space for everything in me.”18 This passage reflects very well the
transcultural values that characterize SEKEM, also evident in the subtitle of
Abouleish’s book, The Sekem Vision—The Encounter of Orient and
Occident Changed Egypt.
Recent demographic studies suggest that out of Egypt’s population of
approximately 84 million, 90 percent are Muslim (mostly Sunni), 9 percent
are Coptic Christian, and the remaining 1 percent mostly includes other
forms of Christianity. Overall, Islam plays a major role in Egyptian society,
and most people are very religious, observing times of prayer and visiting
mosques regularly. Islam means “submission to God,” and this attitude is
deeply embedded in the Islamic-Muslim tradition. But often the deeply felt
religion is limited to the personal, private realm and does not radiate into
practical life.
Like everyone else in the world, most Egyptians are in general working
for financial and/or other egoistic reasons, not out of a deep connection to
religion or God. Hence, SEKEM employees do not always understand the
whole vision of the initiative or even fully appreciate its multifaceted
activities. When SEKEM was smaller, it was easier for Dr. Ibrahim and
other members of the core community to connect to each coworker and
convey the bigger picture and idea behind the organization. Nowadays, with
more than fifteen hundred employees, this is much more difficult. This lack
of understanding can translate into a loss of operational control and quality.
In an effort to convey SEKEM’s overarching vision, the founder and his
son, Helmy, meet weekly with different groups of employees to talk about
the initiative’s mission. They hope to overcome the gap between religion
and practical life and implement in the workplace Islamic values and
principles, while still being open to other spiritual sources. Given this
challenge, in the following discussion, the reader will explore how some of
the main principles of Islam are connected to SEKEM’s practices, and how
those at SEKEM try to bridge the gap between a personal commitment to
Allah and application of religious ethics to society and the environment.

Living Examples of Islamic Principles

For Ibrahim Abouleish, the qualities of the ninety-nine names of Allah were
very helpful in difficult situations he faced and provided much space for
meditation. Some of the names will be presented and elaborated below with
regard to key concepts and principles of Islam, taken from an inspiring
book, Islam and Sustainable Development, by Odeh Al-Jayyousi, former
vice president of science and research at the Jordanian Royal Scientific
Society.19

He Is the One and Only: The Concept of Tawhid (Unity) According to

Islamic belief, the universe was created by a supreme being who is one and
unique, whom Muslims call Allah. Everything created by Allah has a
purpose, which gives meaning and significance to the existence of the
universe, of which humans are a part. Allah is aware of and deeply
concerned with even the minutest details. The Qur’an states, “He is the First
and the Last, the Evident and the Immanent: and He has full knowledge of
all things” (057:003).
The concept of unity has different permutations, which are reflected in
different ways at SEKEM.
Unity of individual and community. True individual value and freedom
are found in doing what is good and beautiful for the community. This unity
is expressed by the people who continually build up the SEKEM
community. Here, the efforts of individuals gain in value as they add up in
synergy, all aligned to the same vision of sustainable community building.
 Unity of tradition and modernity. When Ibrahim Abouleish started to
build a garden in the desert, he was working with local peasants and
Bedouins who came from a very rural context and who had mastered the art
of living on the desert over thousands of years. But Bedouin knowledge is
based on their tribal culture; they have traditionally moved from place to
place according to the availability of food for their livestock, mainly sheep
and goats. This nomadic lifestyle of the old tribes did not require any
systematic long-term planning for cropping and caring for soil. These ideas
were introduced through settlements and traditional farming systems. So the
knowledge of the Bedouins had to be adapted and transferred to this new
context. Agriculture based on well water and artificial irrigation was
completely new to them, as were the ways of production and some crops
that SEKEM cultivated and exported. The first export crop was a local plant
called khella (Ammi visnaga), also called bishop’s weed, which was
originally cultivated by the ancient Egyptians, who used it to treat many
ailments, including urinary tract diseases and vitiligo (loss of skin
pigments). Traditionally, the plant has also been used to treat respiratory
system diseases such as asthma and bronchitis, and this knowledge is
retained among the elder people who live around the SEKEM community,
facilitating successful cultivation.
Ways of cultivating crops thus became a combination of old wisdom
about local crops and farmers’ time-honored manual techniques with an
increasing degree of mechanization and sophisticated research on organic
ways of fertilization and pest control. The melding of tradition and
modernity is often realized in business cooperation, like that exemplified by
MIZAN (part of SEKEM for Land Reclamation), founded in 2006 as a
fifty-fifty joint venture between Grow Group Holland and SEKEM Group
Egypt that offers grafting and plant cultivation services for fruit and
vegetable plants.
Unity of localism and globalism. SEKEM would never be what it is
today without its global network. Many friends and partners helped
SEKEM to build its infrastructure and capacities. Special emphasis must be
placed on the associations of SEKEM’s allies in Germany, Austria, the
Netherlands, Switzerland, and Scandinavia, which mainly support the
cultural work of the initiative. Biodynamic agriculture itself has its origin in
central Europe. The member organizations of Demeter-International work
together in the spirit of an international confederation with democratic
principles.20 Likewise, SEKEM shares its knowledge and strongly
advocates its approach to sustainable agriculture in other global networks,
such as IFOAM, Global Compact, and the World Future Council.21 In this
way SEKEM acts locally but creates value globally by being in contact with
the arts, civil society, science, the business world, and even the public
sphere. The idea is also to create more favorable or at least fair conditions
for organic agriculture in general, efforts often hampered by direct or
indirect subsidies for conventional agriculture.

SEKEM’s sustainable development flower. (Courtesy of SEKEM.)

 Unity of economic, societal, cultural and ecological life. SEKEM’s
model for sustainable development integrates different spheres of life into a
holistic whole of which all parts are at the same time independent and
interconnected.22

He Is the Giver of Life: The Concept of Fitra (Natural State) Allah’s

creation, or the natural state (fitra), can be referred to as the natural
equilibrium or balance (mizan) in which there exists full harmony of nature,
people, and the built environment. In the agricultural context, it is obvious
that there is a divine force that creates life. Growing plants or raising
animals is more than just transforming inputs into outputs. Ibrahim
Abouleish has often explained this approach to religious people who at first
distrusted SEKEM’s approach to agriculture, quoting the Qur’an: “It is
Allah Who causeth the seed-grain and the date-stone to split and sprout. He
causeth the living to issue from the dead, and He is the one to cause the
dead to issue from the living. That is Allah: then how are ye deluded away
from the truth?” (006:095).23
Ibrahim Abouleish explained about the millions of microorganisms and
their work in the earth and told people that the living earth is connected to
the heavens. He asked, “How can we assist this connection to the heavens?
What is the essence of a plant? Is it just a seed we place in the earth, or does
this seed receive life from Allah, so that out of it all the different types of
plants can grow? Because Allah says: it is not you who cultivates, but Allah
cultivates. He lets the plants grow!”24
Biodynamic farming, with its composting process and its preparations
adding vitality to the soil, acknowledges its context in the larger picture,
and hence is related to a divine idea. Moreover, waiting for specific star
constellations before planting can be interpreted as being inspired by Allah
to act correctly: “He has made subject to you the Night and the Day; the sun
and the moon; and the stars are in subjection by His Command: verily in
this are Signs for men who are wise” (016:012).25 For those at SEKEM, to
read and understand Allah’s signs in nature, people need wisdom and
knowledge.

He Is the All-Knowing One: The Concept of Ilm (Knowledge) The first

surah that the Prophet Muhammad received from Allah started with the
following imperative to all humans: “Proclaim! (or read!) in the name of
thy Lord and Cherisher, Who created” (096:001). This underlines the value
of knowledge in Islam. But according to Al-Jayyousi, the English term
knowledge falls short of expressing all the aspects of ilm. Knowledge in the
Western world means processed information, while ilm is an all-embracing
term covering theory, action, and education.26 Another surah also illustrates
that God wants people to gain knowledge: “He granteth wisdom to whom
He pleaseth; and he to whom wisdom is granted receiveth indeed a benefit
overflowing; but none will grasp the Message but men of understanding”
(002:269).
One example for a deeper meaning behind things we see in our daily
life is given in Ibrahim Abouleish’s book where he explains the relation
between the glucose cycle of plants, the course of the sun, and prayer times:

What had the Prophet seen?—A tree illuminated with light. He saw the
living form of the tree, the living processes occurring inside the tree.
These processes are reflected physiologically as follows in the plant:
when dawn nears, the plant produces glucose until the sun reaches its
zenith; this process then ends once the plant’s shadow is the same
length as the actual plant. This is in the afternoon. The exact time
changes depending on the time of the year. Between the afternoon and
sunset the plant transports the glucose it has previously produced to all
its organs. After sunset a third process begins, the plant starts
transforming the glucose into active substances. This process ends
when darkness sets in and during the night the plant starts to grow.
These processes correspond to the five positions of the sun, and allow
the internal life of the plant to appear. Prophet Mohammed
recommended we think about Allah and turn to the supersensory at
these five times throughout the day. Because of the relationship of the
five prayers with the sun’s course and the rhythms of the plant, around
the world the praying human connects to the cosmic processes.27

Harmonizing human action with cosmic processes and recognizing that

dealing with nature has a divine context are embedded in SEKEM’s
approach to agriculture. To grasp this demands a high consciousness and
deep human understanding. This is the reason why SEKEM puts so much
emphasis on education and cultural life in general. Moving arts or painting
does not directly result in the transfer of specific knowledge, but it makes
the human soul much more receptive and hence more open to nature and
knowledge (ilm). The aim of conducting artistic sessions with farmers and
agricultural engineers and workers is—besides the positive effect on
teamwork and group dynamics—to lead them to experience something new
and to develop their sense of openness and curiosity. The objective is to
transfer this experience to their work context, to view their world in a
different light. Islam refers to the process of consciousness development as
a form of beauty and excellence (ihsan).

Employees at SEKEM’s farm in Minya engaged in artistic activities. (Courtesy of SEKEM.)

He Is the Beautiful One: The Concept of Ihsan (Beauty and Excellence)

Ihsan refers to excellence and inner beauty in the form of the conscious
evolution of individuals, organizations, and society (ummah). It also entails
continual development as well as value and knowledge creation for all
humanity.28
This realization of beauty is embedded in the approach of SEKEM,
which aims to develop individuals, organizations, and societies at large.
Nature provides great inspiration for that. According to SEKEM’s vision
statement, “In nature, every organism is independent and at the same time
systemically inter-connected to other organisms. Inspired by ecological
principles, representing the wisdom of nature and the universe, we
continuously strive to gain and sustain a harmonious balance between [this
polarity] and to integrate [it] into our development.”29
The development model of SEKEM is holistic and rooted in sustainable
agriculture. Many challenges need to be overcome on the way to
excellence, and much time and many generations will be required to see the
completion of this work. Most people, on first hearing Ibrahim Abouleish’s
ideas before they bore fruit, thought it was an impossible mission, that
organic desert greening could never succeed. However, it did, and it still
does—but only because of the people who believe in it. It is that inner
transformation that must take place before the outer transformation can
succeed—the ability to see a vision and the will to bring a holistic and
divine idea “down to earth,” into reality. The importance lies in the way
toward that vision, not on the final achievement.

He Who Feels Responsibility: The Concept of Khalifa (Stewardship of

the Earth) In Islam, broadly speaking, the human is viewed as a trustee or
steward to ensure that all resources, physical and human, are utilized in a
reasonable, equitable, and sustainable manner in order to uphold and
develop the natural state. This is seen in the Qur’an: “We did indeed offer
the Trust to the Heavens and the Earth and the Mountains; but they refused
to undertake it, being afraid thereof: but man undertook it; He was indeed
unjust and foolish” (033:072).
The application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides is harming the
environment and destroying the fragile balance of the ecosystem. It
represents a mechanistic worldview that does not realize the bigger context
in which agriculture takes place. The perverse large-scale and destructive
forms of “modern” agricultural systems do not consider ecological and
ethical values. That is one of the reasons why SEKEM is convinced of the
importance of its sustainable approach to organic and biodynamic
agriculture, which excludes chemical fertilizers and pesticides and the use
of GMOs.
Stewardship (khalifa), moreover, implies the social equality and dignity
of all human beings—regardless of skin color, gender, or social status—a
cardinal element of the Islamic faith. Within such a worldview, the right
attitude toward others is not that “might is right,” the struggle to serve one’s
own self-interest, or “the struggle to survive,” but rather mutual
cooperation, in order to develop the entire human potential. Second,
resources are a trust (amanah), provided by Allah, whereby the human
being is not the primary owner but is just a trustee (amin). So resources are
for the benefit of all, for the well-being not just of oneself and one’s family
but of the community at large.30 This community encompasses the whole
web of life, from soil organisms to insects to plants to wildlife. This is
explained in the Qu’ran: “There is not an animal [that lives] on the earth,
nor a being that flies on its wings, but [forms part of] communities like you.
Nothing have We omitted from the Book, and they [all] shall be gathered to
their Lord in the end” (006:038).
Acting responsibly in the interest of communities implies also that
resources should not be wasted. This is also made clear several times in the
Qu’ran, such as here: “O children of Adam! Wear your beautiful apparel At
every time and place Of prayer: eat and drink: But waste not by excess, For
God loveth not the wasters” (007:031). Waste recycling is the underlying
principle of composting in general. At SEKEM organic waste produced by
all SEKEM firms and some additional green waste from the surrounding
farms is used to produce high-quality compost, some that is applied on the
organization’s own fields and some that is sold to external customers. This
and many other practices of organic and biodynamic agriculture represent
responsible human action and justice toward nature and society. Because
justice is such an important cornerstone in Islamic belief, it is presented
separately below even though it is strongly connected to the principle of
khalifa.

He Is the One Who Brings Justice: The Concept of Adl (Justice) Justice
(adl) corresponds to cosmic, ecological, and human justice as well as
harmony with the universe. Therefore, ethical governance is the cornerstone
for attaining and sustaining progress and thus a good life (hayat tayebah)
or, in other words, sustainable development.
Human brother- and sisterhood, regardless of faith, would be a hollow
concept without socioeconomic justice. There are no fewer than a hundred
different expressions in the Qur’an embodying the notion of justice, which
is placed nearest to piety. For example, “O ye who believe! Stand out firmly
for justice, as witnesses To God, even as against Yourselves, or your
parents, Or your kin, and whether It be [against] rich or poor: For God can
best protect both. Follow not the lusts [of your hearts], lest ye Swerve, and
if ye Distort [justice] or decline To do justice, verily God is well-acquainted
with all that ye do” (004:135).
The concept of adl has different dimensions and can have different
meanings. As well as social justice, which basically means upholding the
dignity and freedom of the individual, adl stands also for economic justice,
such as one can find in the Fairtrade practice in the context of agriculture.
All SEKEM operations are conducted according to Fairtrade principles,
even though the official logo does not appear on every product; because
accreditation is so expensive, it is sought only based on customer demand.
All SEKEM’s supplying farmers get a premium price for their organic or
biodynamic products and have long-term contracts with regulated pricing
mechanisms, constituting the basis for a fair relationship. In the Qu’ran
there are passages describing this: “O ye who believe! Eat not up your
property among yourselves in vanities: But let there be amongst you Traffic
and trade by mutual good-will: Nor kill [or destroy] yourselves: for verily
Allah hath been to you Most Merciful!” (004:049).
Then there is the principle of ecological justice, which refers back to the
responsibility of humans toward the earth and nature. Islam teaches that
species including plants and wildlife are in a state of prayer, referring to the
intrinsic value of nature and the ecosystem. Prayer in its wider meaning is
about fulfilling a task in the bigger context of God’s creation. The harm of
any species means that we are disrupting the symphony of life and silencing
worshipers.31 According to the Qu’ran, “Seest thou not that it is Allah
Whose praises all beings in the heavens and on earth do celebrate, and the
birds [of the air] with wings outspread? Each one knows its own [mode of]
prayer and praise. And Allah knows well all that they do” (024:041).

The reader was introduced to SEKEM as a holistic development initiative

based on the principles of organic and biodynamic agriculture. Islam is a
main pillar of the cultural context of SEKEM and its spiritual source of
inspiration. Another pillar is European culture and philosophy, which were
authentically integrated in the personality of Ibrahim Abouleish and
SEKEM in general.
 Islam offers a story of the origin of the universe and human beings.
Humans are trustees (khulafa) who must ensure that all resources are used
in a sustainable manner. Reading the Qur’an informs the mind and soul that
our natural and social capital are interconnected and interdependent.
SEKEM builds on that insight and provides a practical example of Islamic
values in agriculture, at the same time building communities, developing
humans, and conducting economic value creation.
SEKEM offers a role model for addressing burning societal issues, such
as the energy-water-food nexus, in an authentic way born and rooted in its
cultural context. It shows that a compatibility with religious values does not
mean following the stereotype of closed-mindedness and conservatism—
rather, embracing the ethics of Islam is to be future oriented and sustainably
competitive.

Study Questions
1. This chapter advocates “harmonizing human action with cosmic
processes and recognizing that dealing with nature has a divine
context.” What does this mean, and how does it relate to other
chapters in this book?
2. What is biodynamic agriculture?
3. What are the six living examples of Allah, and how do these inform
the sustainable agriculture undertaken by SEKEM?
4. Why might SEKEM be considered a highly unconventional
business model when compared to other businesses, including
agricultural ones, in Egypt?

Notes
1. Ibrahim Abouleish, Sekem: A Sustainable Community in the Egyptian Desert (Edinburgh:
Floris Books, 2005).
2. Lowell Lewis, “Egypt’s Future Depends on Agriculture and Wisdom,” 2011,
http://www.egyptianagriculture.com/ (accessed June 8, 2013).
3. Ibid.
 4. FAO, Egypt Country Profile, http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/index/en/?is03=EGY
(accessed June 14, 2013).
5. World Bank, Egypt Country Profile, http://data.worldbank.org/country/egypt-arab-republic
(accessed June 8, 2013).
6. “ENCC (2013): Improving Egypt’s Competitiveness through Policy Reform: A National
Campaign for an Integrated Solution for Food Security,” Egyptian National Competitiveness
Council, March 2013.
7. Abouleish, Sekem.
8. Ibid.
9. Tarek Hatem, “Sekem: A Holistic Egyptian Initiative,” UNDP, 2008,
http://growinginclusivemarkets.com/media/cases/Egypt_SEKEM_2008.pdf (accessed June 8, 2013).
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Regenerative agriculture dates back to the late 1970s and 1980s, when it was introduced by the
Rodale Institute in the United States.
13. Hatem, “Sekem.”
14. World Economic Forum, “Redefining the Future of Growth: The New Sustainability
Champions,” 2011,
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGC_SustainabilityChampions_Report_2011.pdf (accessed
June 5, 2013).
15. H. M. Abaza and P. M. Boes, “Sustainable and Green Growth for Egypt,” in The 8th Egyptian
Competitiveness Report: A Sustainable Competitiveness Strategy for Egypt (Cairo: Egyptian National
Competitiveness Council, 2012).
16. International Trade Center, Egypt Country Profile, http://www.intracen.org/trade-
support/organic-products/country-focus/country-profile-egypt/ (accessed June 20, 2013).
17. More information on all of these initiatives can be found on the websites of SEKEM
(www.sekem.com) and Heliopolis University (www.hu.edu.eg).
18. Abouleish, Sekem.
19. Odeh Al-Jayyousi, Islam and Sustainable Development: New Worldviews (Farnham, U.K.:
Ashgate/Gower, 2012).
20. www.demeter.net.
21. www.ifoam.org; www.unglobalcompact.org; www.worldfuturecouncil.org.
22. For a detailed discussion and explanation of these spheres, please refer to the annual report on
sustainable development from SEKEM at www.sekem.com/rsd.
23. Abouleish, Sekem.
24. Ibid.
25. Maria Thun and Matthias Thun, The Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar, 2013
(Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2013).
26. Al-Jayyousi, Islam and Sustainable Development.
27. Abouleish, Sekem.
28. Al-Jayyousi, Islam and Sustainable Development.
29. SEKEM Report on Sustainable Development, 2012, www.sekem.com/rsd (accessed June 17,
2013); SEKEM Report on Sustainable Development, 2011, www.sekem.com/rsd (accessed June 17,
2013).
30. Al-Jayyousi, Islam and Sustainable Development.
31. Ibid.
 15

Tohono O’odham Himdag and

Agri/Culture
Tristan Reader and Terrol Dew Johnson

Prelude: O’odham New Year, 2014

The soft swishing sound of a gourd rattle breaks the silence before dawn in
the Sonoran Desert. Resolving itself into a gentle beat, it is joined by the
powerful voice of Michael Enis as he sings:

Wañ ge s- They are ripening red

wepegim
o babahi
Wañ me:k Standing so visible in the distance
o s-
ma:masim
o kekiwa
Ia ñ-da:m Cloud rises over me
g ce:wagî
da’iwuñe
Heg o g And moistens the earth.
jewed
wa’usida
This traditional saguaro harvest song wakes—and blesses—more than one
hundred people camped at the Alexander Pancho Memorial Farm. Bleary-
eyed, people load themselves and their kukuipad—the fifteen-foot-long
harvesting sticks made from the inner ribs of the cactus itself—into the
backs of pickup trucks. As they bump and roll their way down a dusty dirt
road into the mountains, the dawn light creates a silhouette of Baboquivari
Peak, home of I’itoi (Elder Brother). So begins a new year for the Tohono
O’odham—the People of the Desert. So continues the himdag— their ways
and lifeways.
Each summer—under the blistering sun of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert—
Tohono O’odham families harvest bahidaj—ruby-red fruit atop the
towering saguaro cacti (Carnegiea gigantean). The fruit is cooked over
mesquite wood fires into sitol, a mahogany-colored syrup used to make the
sacred wine for the jujkida (rain ceremony). When families harvest fruit
with kukuipad, they are “pulling down the clouds.” When families sing,
dance, and pray during the jujkida, they are calling the rains to return to
their land. After everyone has become satiated with saguaro wine, they
“vomit up the clouds.” The rains begin the Tohono O’odham New Year and
make possible the lives of the plants, animals, and People of the Desert.

Come together!
You shall see this thing, which we have always done
And what must truly happen.
Because we have planned it thus and thus have done.
Right soon, indeed, it will happen.
It will rain.
The fields will be watered.
Therein we shall drop the seed.
Seed which bears corn of all colors;
Seed, which grows big.
Thus we shall do.
Thereby we shall feed ourselves;
Thereby our stomachs shall grow big;
Thereby we shall live.
 —Tohono O’odham call to the jujkida1

Tohono O’odham culture is truly an agri/culture. In the very first

sentence of her 1946 book Papago Indian Religion, anthropologist Ruth
Underhill noted that the Tohono O’odham are “an agricultural people,
thoroughly adapted to farming and food gathering in an arid country.”2
Songs, ceremonies, and legends all have their roots in the food system. So
too the roots of economic exchange, health and wellness, and social
relations are deeply embedded in that food system. Tohono O’odham—the
People of the Desert—have a profound understanding that “you are what
you eat.” Food is health. Food is culture. Food is community. Food is the
basis of a sacred economy of what you grow, what you harvest, and how
you share. Understanding the traditional Tohono O’odham food system is
essential to understanding the O’odham Himdag—the Desert People’s
lifeways. Moreover, there is an inextricable link between the living practice
of the himdag and the physical, spiritual, social, and economic well-being
of the Tohono O’odham.
We begin with an exploration of the traditional Tohono O’odham food
system. We then investigate how Tohono O’odham culture and spirituality
emerge from the people’s relationship with the food system. We describe
the devastation to the traditional food system and the resulting damage to
the cultural, spiritual, and physical well-being of the Tohono O’odham
community. Ending on a hopeful note, we describe recent efforts to
revitalize the himdag and Tohono O’odham foodways.

Economies of Abundance: The Traditional

Tohono O’odham Food System
The Tohono O’odham have lived in the heart of the Sonoran Desert—North
America’s largest and hottest—for countless generations. As Castetter and
Bell explain, “The Papago, living in a very arid area with meager
agricultural possibilities, had imposed upon them a seminomadic life,
planting and caring for their fields in the rainy period, and wandering about
exploiting to the utmost the wild animals and vegetable resources of the
land the rest of the year. For a period of at least three months, while hunting
was done by men, wild plants were gathered by women.”3 Traditionally,
they combined a series of well-adapted strategies for producing food in
such an arid land. This food system supported a local economy, maintained
the people’s physical well-being, and provided the material foundation for
Tohono O’odham culture—the O’odham Himdag. Four strategies drove the
annual semimigratory life of the Tohono O’odham: ak chin farming,
harvesting wild foods, hunting, and sharing.
Ak chin farming. With the arrival of the summer monsoon rains, Tohono
O’odham families would return to their “field” villages. “The run-off of the
mountain areas collected in streams with well-defined channels, which, on
reaching the large un-dissected alluvial basins, lost their momentum and
spread out in broad sheets over the level land for a square mile or more.
Places where this spreading occurred were known to the Papago as Akchin,
‘arroyo mouth.’”4 These oidag (field) villages were the summer homes of
families and communities as they nurtured a set of traditional crops
specifically adapted to the hot, arid conditions. Among these staples are
tepary beans—the most heat- and drought-tolerant legume in the world.
O’odham corn varieties included the fastest-maturing corn known—just
sixty days from germination to maturity. Desert-adapted varieties of squash,
amaranth, and fiber plants (for example, devil’s claw) took advantage of the
summer rains.
In 1919, the Tohono O’odham had more than sixteen thousand acres of
ak chin fields under cultivation, yielding more than 1.8 million pounds of
beans and three hundred thousand pounds of corn.5 With a population at the
time estimated at under six thousand people, indigenous agriculture
provided important nourishment for the Tohono O’odham community, as it
had for countless generations.
Harvesting wild foods. In 1933, Tohono O’odham elder Maria Chona
reflected on her life harvesting wild foods: “All the year round we were
watching where the wild things grew so we could pick them. Elder Brother
[I’itoi] planted those things for us. He told us where they are and how to
cook them. You would not know if it had not been Given. You would not
know you could eat cactus stems and shake the seeds out of weeds. Elder
Brother did not tell the Whites that. To them he gave peaches and grapes
and wheat, but to us he gave the wild seeds and cactus. These are good
foods.”6
 As Maria Chona and other Tohono O’odham women know, the desert
provides a wide variety of wild foods to be collected, preserved, and eaten.
Historically, the diversity of these foods provided for a varied and healthy
diet. Foods from cacti, agaves, and succulents included saguaro cactus fruit,
prickly pear fruit and pads, cholla flower buds, banana yucca fruit, and
agave hearts. The seedpods of mesquite, paloverde, and ironwood trees
were collected and ground into flours. Wild greens such as amaranth and
lamb’s quarter were an ephemeral but highly valued part of the diet.
“Whether superabundant and storable, or as rare and perishable as manna,
these plants helped shape and succor cultures within the Sonoran Desert.
They served as calories, cures, and characters in tribal legends.”7 Even salt
was harvested while on pilgrimage to the waters of the Sea of Cortez.
Historically, these wild foods made up as much as two-thirds of the annual
diet, especially in years when drought made ak chin farming even more
difficult than normal.8
Hunting. The animals of the desert also provided an important source of
nutrition. The hunting of rabbits, deer, packrats, quail, and many other
desert dwellers was a significant supplement to the foods grown in
O’odham fields and plants collected in the desert. From the communal
rabbit hunts that often accompanied the jujkida to the multiday deer hunts
in the mountains, hunting provided much-needed protein and variety to the
traditional Tohono O’odham diet.
Sharing and “trade.” The traditional food economy of the Tohono
O’odham was primarily based upon a system of gift giving and reciprocity.
“Poor as the Papago country was, its economics were those of abundance.
Papago did not hoard property; they did not quarrel about land boundaries;
they were constantly giving, as though from an inexhaustible supply.”9
Traditionally, there was nothing that capitalism would recognize as trade.
Instead, there was a system of gift giving, ceremonial exchanges, gambling,
and sharing. Through this process, “what available wealth there was [was
distributed] fairly evenly throughout the entire group. Human beings
invested in one another rather than in material goods. To do otherwise was
to invite isolation, and there is no place in the desert for islands.”10
 Himdag as Agri/Culture: Communal, Individual,
and Adaptable
Before the arrival of the Jesuit missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino in 1686
—and for many more generations for most Tohono O’odham—there was no
word for “religion” in the O’odham language. Instead, all aspects of
collective life and identity are expressed with the term himdag. Himdag has
no literal translation into English, nor does it have any official definition
among the Tohono O’odham. At its most basic level, himdag encompasses
the lifeways of the Tohono O’odham. It includes kinship and social
relationships, ceremonial and cultural expressions, foodways, and values
such as balance, industriousness, and obligation. “Himdag ultimately
involved all things, all people, and all action. It concerned the rights,
dignity, and propriety—as well as the potential power—of human being, of
ceremonies, of living things, and of such life-giving entities as salt, the sun,
and the ocean (from whence rains come).”11
As expressed through himdag, Tohono O’odham culture and religion are
—at their roots—an agri/culture. The symbolic culture of the Tohono
O’odham—ceremonies, legends, songs, dances, language—all grow out of
the fertile soil of the material culture—the food system. “Food ceremonies
form the more conspicuous part of Papago religious practices. They were
carried on according to a yearly schedule for the making of rain, the growth
of crops, the cleansing of food, the celebration of the harvest, and, once in
four years, ‘to keep the world in order.’”12 Ruth Underhill described three
related realms of Tohono O’odham religious expression—communal
ceremonies, ceremonies for individual power, and the use of power
(primarily for healing). Each of these communal ceremonies—and even
some of those for individual power—is a fundamental expression of Tohono
O’odham food culture.

Communal Ceremonies
As described above, perhaps the most sacred of Tohono O’odham cultural
practices is the jujkida. Designed to “sing down the rain” that makes
agriculture—and life itself—possible in the dry desert, the saguaro harvest
and wine ceremony served as a cornerstone of O’odham ceremonial life,
marking the beginning of the New Year. After four nights of singing sacred
song cycles, communal dancing, and prayers by mamakai (medicine men),
the people become satiated with the sacred saguaro wine and cleanse the
body by “vomiting up the clouds”; thus are the monsoon rains summoned
back to the parched land.

Drinking the [saguaro cactus] wine was a sacramental communion

bringing good and purification to the communicant. It brought a
supernatural presence and an ability for every Indian to call for rain.
Singing brought power and was a supplication to the supernatural for
rain. . . . Papago wine-drinking filled the participants with liquid from
the skyward reaches of the Saguaro which symbolically united with the
earth when vomiting occurred. . . . Vomiting wine on the ground
completed the cycle, returning moisture to the ground that had been
taken up by the roots of the Saguaro, and stored in its body during the
time of drought, incorporated into the fruit, and made into rain.13

Once the rain arrives, it is time for planting the ak chin fields with
traditional crops and engaging in ceremonies to promote growth. Blessing
songs—“song magic”—were sung by individuals, families, and whole
villages at virtually every stage of the farming process, including the Corn
Woman songs:

Songs begin.
At the west they begin.
Thereby the corn comes up.
Upward its heart [the ear] is stretching.
At the west they begin.
Hiro a’ áro!
Songs are ending.
At the east they are ending.
Thereby squash comes up.
In a row its heart [fruits] are standing
 At the east they are ending.
Hiro a’ áro!14

There were songs for planting corn: for when it sprouts, when it is one foot
high, when it is knee high, when it begins to tassel, when the tassel is fully
developed, and when the corn is ripe. There were songs for squash, beans,
and other crops.15 This song magic was a powerful and ubiquitous part of
daily O’odham agricultural life.
Just as there were songs and rituals for each part of the farming process,
so too were there hunting ceremonies—fasting and ritual oratory before the
deer hunt, songs before butchering and eating the animal, for cleansing the
hunter after the kill, and for the deer itself.

What man is it
who has killed the deer?
Oh, it is the wind man, the deer he has killed!
Yonder he struggles to carry it on his head.

Do you see, yonder coming toward us

The tail of the black deer?
Poor thing brought here;
Poor thing brought here;
Poor thing brought here;
Poor thing, walking yonder on the mountains
It nearly fell.16

“The intervillage athletic meet which was one of the most important
occasions of Papago life,” notes Underhill, “ranks fundamentally as a food
ceremony.”17 The event took place in the weeks following the harvest of ak
chin fields. Runners summoned people and challenged villages far and
wide. This celebration of the bounty of the new crop provided a mechanism
for gift giving and gambling (sharing of the harvest), and brought luck (in
the form of rain) to the winners. Athletic competitions such as toka (a
women’s game similar to field hockey) and songiwul (a men’s long-distance
kickball race) were accompanied by song cycles that told stories, including
wind songs, ocean songs, cloud songs, and crane songs. At the end of the
competition, as the people headed back home and into the dry winter, they
sang:

Then we, having sung,

Go back whence we came.
Watch! It will not be long
Till the earth grows very green.18

The wikida ceremony renews and cleanses the world. Symbolic

representations of each village’s fields were blessed by corn dancers and
singers:

Hí híanai hu!
Here on my field
Corn comes forth.
My child takes it and runs,
Happy.
Here on my field
Squash comes forth.
My wife takes it and runs,
Singing.19

A final communal cultural event—not mentioned by Underhill and not

precisely a ceremony—is storytelling, including the sharing of legends,
during the winter. Whether it be the tale of the Milky Way made up of white
tepary beans scattered across the sky by coyote, the emergence of the first
saguaro cactus, the hunter captured by a deer, or countless other stories,
these legends serve many functions. They teach ethical behavior and
cultural norms, reinforce ecological and agricultural practices, build group
identity, and entertain.
Ceremonies for Individual Power
Expressions of himdag include several ceremonial practices that were less
communal and more related to the powers—spiritual and physical—of the
individual. Rituals and/or purification related to warfare, the pilgrimage to
the Sea of Cortez to collect salt and seek the power of the ocean, the killing
of an eagle, and the puberty dance for girls are among these central parts of
himdag. Although they do not as directly affect foodways, the ways in
which they manifest themselves nevertheless reflect their importance to
concerns related to food. The sea—an incredible source of power for a
desert people—not only bestowed strength and blessings upon the young
men brave enough to seek its power; it also provided salt to season the food
of the entire community. Fasting was an important part of puberty rites.
Even the experience of warfare was related to that necessary ingredient for
growing food, rain:

Papago war ritual never mentions the glory of war. . . . War is

conceived as an onerous duty. The descriptions are not of battles but of
the visions which precede and follow them. Actual fighting is
expressed by metaphor and disposed of in one hurried sentence.
Emphasis is all on the obligation to the community, the steps taken to
work the fighters up to action, and the final reward. This last is neither
prestige, booty, nor satisfied vengeance, but that sine qua non of a
desert people—rain. This is the attitude of busy agriculturalists who
fought, as the Papagos say they did fight, only in self-defense.20

Thus, even the most private expressions of ceremonial life—the

emergence of a girl into womanhood, healing from the trauma of war,
finding one’s power and place in the world—were expressed and
experienced in the context of foodways.

Disease and the Use of Power for Healing

Singers, herbalists, and mamakai (medicine men) had distinct powers and
roles in the diagnosis and healing of disease. Although the causes of disease
were varied—ceremonial lapses, disrespect to an animal, intrusion of a
foreign object into the body (often by sorcery)—each reflected a central
premise: disease was the result of veering away from himdag. “The Piman
Way [himdag] was reinforced among its followers by the threat of diseases
which could befall one who transgressed against it—the principal role of
the shaman [or medicine man] being to diagnose and direct cures for such
illnesses.”21
As we shall come to see, this concept of disease being the result of the
move away from himdag returns with devastating consequences for the
Tohono O’odham community.

Himdag and Christianity

Since the arrival of Padre Kino and other Catholic missionaries—and the
later arrival of Protestant ones—Christianity has played a significant role in
the life of the Tohono O’odham community. From the references to saints in
the Spanish names for villages (for example, San Pedro, Santa Cruz, San
Miguel, and Santa Rosa) to the roadside crosses that mark the location of
fatal traffic accidents, from the Catholic chapels in almost every village to
the shrines to the saints in the homes of elders, the Christian influence is
evident. Each autumn, many Tohono O’odham make the pilgrimage to the
shrine of Saint Francis Xavier in Magdalena, Mexico.
Yet for the majority of Tohono O’odham, there is no contradiction
between Christianity and himdag. They are able—quite literally—to hold
both. Alexander Pancho, the grandfather of coauthor Terrol Dew Johnson—
was a makai, a medicine man. During his blessings, he would hold a
crucifix in one hand and an eagle feather in the other. The blending is not a
form of syncretism in which the two worldviews are merged; rather, many
O’odham are simply able to embrace them as a duality with separate truths
and meanings. This ability to simultaneously adhere to two distinct
worldviews plays out in more than the religious realm. Today, young
Tohono O’odham speak of walking in two worlds: the world of mainstream
American culture—formal education, hip-hop music, shopping at Walmart
—and traditional Tohono O’odham culture—legends as a form of
pedagogy, singing for rain, harvesting saguaro fruit. The two worlds are not
separate; they are simply peoples’ reality.
 This ability to walk in two worlds emerges from an approach to himdag
that is nondogmatic. In contrast to the Roman Catholic faith, “there is no
one authorized version of Papago culture. Each of the more than 20,000
Papagos is a carrier of it although some people certainly are better versed or
more interested in the Native traditions than others. The culture thrives
through variations. This is a strength for its survival for it is not dependent
on a few individuals.”22
In addition, there is a plasticity in himdag that responds to context. A
legend told in one village today may emphasize certain themes, with the
storyteller well aware of how it relates to the recent experiences of listeners;
elsewhere, on a different day, the story may differ in focus and tone,
responding to that social context. Himdag is more like a river—flowing and
changing, yet maintaining its integrity and identity—than a desert pond—
stagnant and eventually drying up in the heat.
In contrast to Christianity—particularly its Protestant forms—himdag is
less about faith and belief and more about ways of living. In discussing
traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), Deborah McGregor (Anishnabeg)
identifies this approach as based on action rather than belief:

TEK is a “way of life”; rather than being just about knowledge of how
to live, it is the actual living of that life. One way of looking at the
differences between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal views of TEK
is to state that Aboriginal views of TEK are “verb-based”—that is,
action-oriented. TEK is not limited, in the Aboriginal view, to a “body
of knowledge.” It is expressed as a “way of life”; it is conceived of as
being something you do. Non-Aboriginal views of TEK are “noun-” or
“product-based.” . . . TEK is viewed as a thing rather than something
you do.23

Similarly, himdag is something you live rather than something you believe.
Himdag is enacted in daily life.

Damage to the Traditional Food System

According to a Tohono O’odham origin story, “The reason Elder Brother
planned this was that some day in the future . . . the rains would not come
down all over the earth very often, only once in a while, and the crops that
the people raised wouldn’t be irrigated anymore by rain water.”24 Eighty-
year-old Dolores Lewis carried a bucket of water from his adobe home to
the squash, tepary beans, and black-eyed peas growing in his field a few
hundred meters away. In the traditional farming village Ge Oidag (Big
Fields), the floodwaters no longer arrived in the fields. Years before, the US
Army Corps of Engineers had built an earthen dam to prevent flooding in
the village. Yet those floodwaters were the entire reason for the village’s
existence; without them, farming was impossible. In 1997, Mr. Lewis was
the only person in the village—perhaps on the entire Tohono O’odham
Nation—still growing traditional crops on family land. When he died a few
years later, all such production ceased.
How could such devastation to the traditional Tohono O’odham food
system have come to pass? After all, within Mr. Lewis’s lifetime, the
Tohono O’odham had been almost entirely food self-sufficient. As late as
the 1920s, the community utilized traditional methods to cultivate over
twenty thousand acres in the floodplain of the Sonoran lowlands. By 1949,
that number had declined to twenty-five hundred acres. By 2000, that
number was certainly less than five. In 1919, the Tohono O’odham
produced 1.8 million pounds of tepary beans; in 2001, fewer than one
hundred pounds were produced. At the same time the once common
practice of collecting and storing wild foods declined in an equally dramatic
way.25
The causes of this loss of food sovereignty are complex and
multifaceted. They include (but are not limited to):

1. Federal work and assimilation policies. US governmental policies

removed families from their own lands to work as migrant laborers
in commercial cotton fields. Entire families would leave their
communities for several months each year, during which it became
impossible for many families to plant, tend, and maintain their own
fields or to collect wild foods.
2. World War II. During the war, most young Tohono O’odham men—
those responsible for much of the farming and many parts of
 ceremonial life—served in the military, leaving many fields empty
of crops and ceremonies unperformed.
3. Commodity food programs. In order to keep market prices high,
surplus commodity programs and price supports became federal
policy. For reasons ranging from ignorance to charity, commodity
foods were imported to Native communities. Most of these foods
were processed. In fact, the prevalence of commodity lard and
white flour across American Indian reservations resulted in the pan-
Indian “food” known as fry bread. The introduction of and easy
access to processed foods led many people to alter their diets and
decrease the amount of traditional foods produced and consumed.
These same social programs—although well intentioned—often
created dependency relationships where self-sufficiency had
previously existed. Over the course of a few short decades, the
Tohono O’odham community went from being almost entirely food
self-sufficient to being almost entirely food dependent.
4. Termination and relocation programs. In the mid-twentieth century,
the American Indian relocation program, which moved Native
people off reservations and into urban areas, had a devastating
effect upon Tohono O’odham culture and food systems.
5. Boarding schools. Large numbers of Tohono O’odham children
were forcibly placed in boarding schools, where they were
prohibited from speaking their language and practicing their
culture. This meant that they did not learn the skills necessary to
farm in the desert or how to collect, process, and cook wild foods.
6. Drought and climate change. As the Tohono O’odham origin story
warned, environmental factors (such as a lowering of the water
table due to nearby development) combined with misguided
governmental flood-control efforts to make water sources for
traditional agriculture even more scarce than normal in the arid
Sonoran Desert. Drought has only accelerated in this era of climate
change.26

It must be noted that virtually none of these causes of the decline in

Tohono O’odham agriculture were the result of malice. As Bernard Fontana
has observed: “The Papago Reservation is in many ways a graveyard of
good intentions, an enclosure of mutual misunderstandings. The all too
pervasive habitual drunkenness, violence, suicide, incarceration, and
economic dependency [to which we add diabetes and disease] among the
reservation’s Indian people are not there because anyone wanted it that way.
They are partially the result of terrible mistakes made by people who have
been well meaning: federal bureaucracies, school teachers, missionaries,
and others whose job it has been to ‘improve’ the lot of Papagos.”27
The problems are also the product of the Papagos’ own miscalculations
concerning their long-range interests. Time and again, Papagos have traded
away the self-respect that comes with economic and social independence,
sacrificing control of family and community affairs for short-term gains.
Too frequently they have relinquished their right to make significant
decisions on their own behalf. Rather than formulating their own plans and
setting their own goals, Papagos often find themselves in the position of
having to respond with a “yes” or “no” to plans formulated for them. These
involve healthcare, housing, community food programs, educational
programs, and economic development. When individuals or communities
can no longer devise and carry out their own schemes, the collective
psychological and sociological impacts are devastating.28
The Army Corps of Engineers did not set out to make it impossible for
Dolores Lewis and others in Ge Oidag to continue farming as they and their
ancestors had for countless generations. The government saw a village that
was flooded on a regular basis and set out to help. Yet today, standing on
top of the earthen dam the Army Corps of Engineers built on the eastern
edge of the village looking upstream, one sees lush, wild greenery that has
been watered and nourished by monsoon floodwaters. Turning around, one
faces many hundreds of acres of abandoned fields—empty of beans, corn,
and squash, empty of dancing feet, and empty of song.

Agricultural Decline, Damage to Himdag, and

Disease
Himdag in Decline
Given the nature of Tohono O’odham agri/culture, it should come as no
surprise that the near-total destruction of the Tohono O’odham food system
led to dramatic damage to the vitality of himdag.29 We have described the
ways in which public ceremonies for making rain, growing crops, hunting,
and celebrating the harvest were the central communal expressions of
himdag. By the time Delores Lewis dropped the last seed in the ground,
only a tiny portion of the O’odham community participated in any of these
sacred rites. In 1994, the most central of these—the jujkida—was held in
only two villages, and many elders complained that it had stopped being
sacred and had simply become another reason to drink heavily. There were
no communal ceremonies for the growth of plants or hunting. Although a
few women played toka during the annual rodeo and fair, there was no
athletic competition or harvest feast.
The reason for this decline is relatively simple: almost no Tohono
O’odham produced their own food. Grocery stores and federal commodity
programs—rather than the desert—had become the source of food. The
endangerment of Tohono O’odham symbolic culture followed directly the
decline in material culture. People did not stop planting the fields because
the ceremonies were dying out; the ceremonies began to die out when
people stopped planting their fields. After all, if you never plant crops, the
importance of rain is diminished. And as we have seen, the bringing of rain,
growth of crops, and relationships with animals were the heart of the
himdag.
Given the connections between the Tohono O’odham food system and
cultural traditions, it is virtually impossible to imagine a scenario in which
the O’odham language, songs, ceremonies, stories, dances—the O’odham
Himdag (Desert People’s Way) itself—can remain a vital and living
tradition without the rejuvenation of the food system. However, as cultural
practices are reconnected with their material foundation, they once again
take on their central role in the community. Putting ceremonies, songs,
stories, and other cultural traditions back into their original context
strengthens them.

Disease
“Wheat flour makes me sick! I think it has no strength. But when I am
weak, when I am tired, my grandchildren make me gruel out of the wild
seeds. That is food.”30 When ninety-year-old Maria Chona spoke these
words seventy-five years ago, she provided an accurate assessment of the
effects of nontraditional foods on the health of the Tohono O’odham. The
near-total destruction of the Tohono O’odham food system has proven
himdag’s concept of disease to be accurate within the Tohono O’odham
community. For centuries, traditional desert foods—and the physical effort
it took to produce them—kept the Tohono O’odham healthy. The
introduction of processed foods, however, changed all of that, leading to
unprecedented rates of adult-onset diabetes. As recently as the early 1960s,
type 2 diabetes was virtually unknown among the Tohono O’odham. Today,
more than 60 percent of the adult population develops the disease, the
highest rate in the world. Diabetes has even begun to appear in children as
young as seven.
Several scientific studies have confirmed what Maria Chona already
knew: traditional Tohono O’odham foods help regulate blood sugar and
significantly reduce both the incidence and effects of diabetes. Two primary
attributes of traditional Tohono O’odham foods are thought to contribute to
reductions in both the incidence and severity of diabetes. First, the soluble
fiber, tannins, and inulin in one group of traditional foods (which includes
mesquite bean pods, acorns, and tepary beans) help reduce blood sugar
levels, slow sugar absorption rates, and improve insulin production and
sensitivity. Second, a complementary group of traditional foods (including
prickly pear fruits and pads, cholla cactus buds, chia seeds, and mesquite
bean pods) contains mucilaginous polysaccharides gums that slow the
digestion and absorption of sugary foods. Combined, these two categories
of desert foods provide a low-glycemic diet that can help prevent and
reduce the effects of diabetes. When this diet is further supported by
increased physical activity, the positive health outcomes can be quite
dramatic.
The Tohono O’odham understanding that it is divergence from himdag
that leads to disease has been proved correct on more than a metaphorical
level. The move away from himdag—Tohono O’odham agri/culture—has
indeed brought disease and devastated the health of the community.
 For twenty years, there has been a growing movement within the
community—supported by Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA)
—to revitalize all aspects of himdag, including kinship and social
relationships, ceremonial and cultural expressions, foodways, and values
such as balance, industriousness, and obligation. It is only through this
return to himdag that the Tohono O’odham community once again can
achieve cultural vitality, abundance, and wellness.

Seeds of Change: Efforts to Revitalize Tohono

O’odham Food Systems
According to Christine Johnson, an elder from Nolic Village, “Every year, I
sang the songs that called down the summer rains. But this year, I had a
garden filled with devil’s claw and corn, melons and squash. This year, I
sang for them. This year, I sang like I really meant it.”31
Since 1996, Tohono O’odham Community Action has worked with
hundreds of community members like Christine Johnson to revitalize
himdag.32 Taking a holistic approach, these efforts have been built on the
premise that himdag is “wisdom from the past creating solutions for the
future.” The goal has been to revitalize Tohono O’odham symbolic culture
(such as songs, ceremonies, and legends), values (like balance,
industriousness, and mutual obligation), physical and spiritual wellness, and
the food system in which they are rooted.
Working with community members, tribal programs, health providers,
and others, TOCA has accomplished much, including (but hardly limited
to):

• Since 1996, TOCA has sponsored over 150 events to harvest

traditional wild foods (saguaro fruit, cholla buds, prickly pear, wild
greens, and mesquite beans). The three-day Saguaro Harvest Camp
has been held for eighteen years in a row, attracting over two hundred
attendees annually.
• Starting with a half-acre community garden in 1996, TOCA’s farming
efforts have grown to include a 3-acre traditional ak chin farm and a
 120-acre production farm. TOCA’s farms now produce over one
hundred thousand pounds of traditional crops annually.
• In 2009, TOCA opened Desert Rain Cafe to serve healthy, delicious,
traditional Tohono O’odham foods to the community.
• TOCA has worked with local schools to introduce traditional foods to
the school lunch program and to provide nutrition education to over
one thousand students.
• The annual Harvest Feast and Traditional Games Festival brings over
four hundred community members together to celebrate food
traditions.
• Each winter, TOCA sponsors several Storytelling Nights in which the
legends and oral history of the Tohono O’odham are once again
shared. Today young adults as well as elders are telling the people’s
stories.

TOCA’s work, however, is about more than what is done; it is also about
values and principles:

• O’odham Himdag: “Wisdom from our past creating solutions for our
future”—The O’odham Himdag (Desert People’s Way) guides TOCA
as it seeks to develop culturally appropriate solutions to the challenges
that confront our community. By drawing upon our heritage and
cultural traditions we are able to create lasting solutions and a stronger
community.
• Community Assets: “See our resources, not just our needs”—The
Tohono O’odham community already possesses many of the assets
that are necessary to create a healthy and sustainable community.
TOCA encourages people to take stock of these community assets in
order to develop indigenous solutions, rather than focus on the
problems while importing “solutions” from the outside. The wisdom
of elders, the enthusiasm of young people, the richness of the land, the
centrality of extended families, and a desire to create a healthier
community all contribute to the capacity to create solutions that will
be culturally based and sustainable.
 • Encourage Community Self-Sufficiency: Social programs on the
Tohono O’odham Nation have too often created dependency
relationships that destroy the sustainable structures that have
previously supported the people. In response, TOCA attempts to re-
empower the community to become increasingly self-sufficient,
utilizing and promoting an empowerment model of organizing, rather
than the service model so prevalent in most social service programs.
• Context is Crucial: Strengthening the material roots of O’odham
culture—It is not enough to simply preserve cultural activities, such as
ceremonies, songs, and stories. The material basis out of which these
cultural practices grew must also be maintained. A ground blessing
dance loses much of its power when only ever performed for an
audience in an auditorium rather than in the fields where the O’odham
have planted for generations. TOCA works to redevelop the material
foundation of Tohono O’odham culture.33

Afterword: A Year at the Farm

The Saguaro Harvest Camp—the New Year—at TOCA’s Alexander Pancho
Memorial Farm is just the beginning of a cycle of events that mark the
Tohono O’odham calendar, the life of the people, and himdag. Shortly after
the harvest, the first rains arrive. A week later, as the monsoon rain clouds
gather strength over Baboquivari Peak, a small group—farmers and singers,
elders and youth—gathers to bless the ground, seeds, and people who will
bring a bountiful crop to this land. In the coming weeks of toil under the
desert sun, seeds will be planted, water will flow, and plants will be
nurtured. Throughout the summer, the farm grows more than food; it grows
a new generation of Tohono O’odham farmers in an agricultural training
program. The produce provides local schools with traditional foods for their
lunch programs.
In the fall, the farm hosts the O’odham Haicu Ha-Cicwidag, a harvest
feast and traditional games festival. Before the dusty, rough-and-tumble
toka competition, the women gather to sing the toka songs taught to them
by elder Ena Lopez. Boys remove their shoes to run through the fields,
kicking the wooden ball, in the songiwul race. Gins sticks—made of the
inner wood of the saguaro cactus—fly through the air as men gamble on the
outcome. The soft, rhythmic thumping of hundreds of feet accompanies
song after song in a traditional round dance. And in the traditional
“economics of abundance,” food from the farm—more than one thousand
pounds of squash, tepary beans, corn, and melons—is given as a gift to all
in attendance.
Months later, on a winter’s night, a fire crackles and sends sparks
floating into the sky to join the countless stars. At first, the children are cold
and look for warmth in those flames. Soon enough, however, they forget the
cold, captivated by the legends, told as they have been since the beginning.
They are frightened by Ho’ok, the child-eating witch who lived and died in
a cave south of the farm. They laugh at the antics of Ban (Coyote). And
they learn about how it was children who saved their people from a terrible
flood. In the morning, they will return to school, eat tepary beans at lunch,
and tend the school garden.
Himdag is not something you believe. Himdag is not something you
know. Himdag is a life that you live, a life that continues for Tohono
O’odham—the People of the Desert.

Study Questions
1. What do the authors mean when they write, “There is an
inextricable link between the living practice of the himdag and the
physical, spiritual, social, and economic well-being of the Tohono
O’odham”?
2. What is himdag, and how are the material and “religious”
interrelated for the Tohono O’odham? How does this influence their
foodways, past and present?
3. What are key foodway ceremonies for the Tohono O’odham, and
what ethics are encoded in ceremonial rituals, myths, and songs?
How do these relate to contemporary goals of sustainable
agriculture?
4. What traditional crops were grown where you currently live, by
whom, and what rituals, ethics, and ceremonies were involved? Is it
 possible to return to this type of agriculture where you live? Why or
why not?
5. What has caused the loss of traditional Tohono O’odham foodways,
and what has been the impact physically, culturally, and
environmentally? What movements have emerged to ameliorate
these conditions, and what role does religion play in this?

Notes
1. Ruth Underhill, Papago Indian Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), 45–46.
Here we present most songs and ritual oratory translated into English. Until the revival of the jujkida
and other ceremonies in the late 1990s, many of these songs had fallen from regular use. Over the
past twenty years, the coauthors have been active in Tohono O’odham Community Action, a
community-based group that has been instrumental in reintegrating the Tohono O’odham Himdag
into daily life.
2. Ibid. The name Papago was used by almost all non-Tohono O’odham until the 1980s. Most
sources claim it to be a seventeenth-century Spanish name meaning “bean eaters.” Any Spanish
speaker, however, would be puzzled by this explanation. This linguistic mystery was resolved when
Dr. Karen Smith Wyndham identified that the word was actually of Basque, not Spanish, origin. In
Mark Kurlansky’s Basque History of the World (New York: Penguin, 2001), he notes that the Basque
pejorative babazorra means “bean eater.” The Basques were actually the first Europeans to eat maize
imported from the Americas; other Europeans fed corn to livestock. Perhaps these food alliances
contributed to the naming of this part of the New World as Nueva Vizcaya, or New Basquelands, on
many maps of the time. In this chapter, we use Tohono O’odham; however, when referencing the
writings of others, we have chosen to keep their use of Papago. This serves as a reminder of the ways
in which the views of the community by “outsiders” may have differed from those of the people
themselves.
3. Edward Franklin Castetter and Willis Harvey Bell, Pima and Papago Indian Agriculture
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1942), 40.
4. Ibid., 168. Despite Castetter’s recognition that the Tohono O’odham continued to farm in this
way, he referred to the Papago in the past tense. Castetter, Underhill, and many other non-Native
writers of that and subsequent generations based their writings on information provided by living
people in living communities still engaging in these practices, yet they succumbed to the cultural bias
of seeing Natives as a dead—or at least dying—people. As we shall see, in the case of the Tohono
O’odham, this is far from the truth.
5. Ibid., 78.
6. Ruth Underhill, Papago Woman (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 1979), 39.
7. Gary Paul Nabhan, Gathering the Desert (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986), 5.
8. Castetter and Bell, Pima and Papago Indian Agriculture, 56.
9. Ruth Underhill, Social Organization of the Papago Indians (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1939), 90.
10. Bernard L. Fontana and John Paul Schaefer, Of Earth and Little Rain: The Papago Indians
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), 50.
 11. Ibid.
12. Underhill, Papago Indian Religion, 18.
13. Frank S. Crosswhite, “The Annual Saguaro Harvest and Crop Cycle of the Papago, with
Reference to Ecology and Symbolism,” Desert Plants 2, no. 1 (1980).
14. Ruth Underhill, Singing for Power: The Song Magic of the Papago Indians of Southern
Arizona (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993).
15. Underhill, Papago Indian Religion, 78.
16. Ibid., 109.
17. Ibid., 116.
18. Ibid., 124.
19. Ibid., 147.
20. Ibid., 165.
21. Fontana and Schaefer, Of Earth and Little Rain, 50–51.
22. Ruth Underhill, Rainhouse & Ocean: Speeches for the Papago Year (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1997), 7–8.
23. Deborah McGregor, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Sustainable Development:
Towards Coexistence,” In In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and
Globalization, ed. Mario Blaser, Harvey Feit, and Glenn McRae (London: Zed/IDRC, 2004), 79.
24. Gary Paul Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O’Odham Country (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 2002), 41.
25. The 2000 and 2001 numbers are estimates by the authors based on field observations made at
the time.
26. This analysis is based on Tohono O’odham Community Action reports found in the archives of
the organization. An earlier version of this analysis also appears in Daniel Lopez, Tristan Reader, and
Paul Buseck, “Community Attitudes toward Traditional Tohono O’Odham Foods” (2002), 9.
27. Fontana and Schaefer, Of Earth and Little Rain.
28. Ibid., 117–18.
29. The analysis in this section is based on field work/participatory research conducted by the
authors between 1996 and the present.
30. Underhill, Papago Woman, 37.
31. Personal communication with the authors.
32. This section is based on the founding documents, various reports, and other items found in the
archives of TOCA. More information can be found at www.tocaonline.org.
33. http://www.guidestar.org/profile/86-0883222 (accessed May 10, 2016).
 Conclusion

Searching for Annapurna; or,

Cultivating Earthbound Regenerative
Abundance in the Anthropocene
Pramod Parajuli

I’d like to begin the conclusion to this book by quoting the leading agrarian
essayist and champion of sustainable agriculture, Wendell Berry. “Wherever
they live, if they eat, people have agricultural responsibilities just as they
have cultural responsibilities. Eating without knowledge is the same as
eating without gratitude. What’s the use of thanking God for food that has
come at an unbearable expense to the world and other people? Every eater
has a responsibility to find out where food comes from and what its real
costs are, and then to do something to reduce the costs.”1 Within the rubric
of searching for Annapurna—a mountain range in the Nepalese Himalayas
in whose shadow the author grew up—this chapter invites readers to
imagine how we could create an abundant and resilient food system.
Because climate disruption has already affected the current functioning of
agriculture and food systems and its impact will only increase in the future,
my urging in this concluding chapter is to all religious traditions and
worldviews covered in this volume as well as those that lie outside it. The
chapter also situates the discussion in a context in which we have
overstepped planetary boundaries in some crucial areas of earthly
processes. The earth is already feverish due to the rise in temperature. We
have lost biodiversity to an extent that is affecting agriculture and food
systems as well as the viability of regenerating life on earth. High levels of
carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous are floating in the wrong places in our
environment. This has been proved to be detrimental to the well-being of
the biosphere—the thin membrane that is our homeplace, our habitat.
Warning signals also abound in global freshwater supply/use as well as the
extent of changes in land use.2 Equally serious is the collapse of the aquatic
food chain due to ocean acidification, which is having a ripple effect,
bringing pressures to terrestrial agriculture.
Yet I urge readers to consider how by practicing agriculture and
growing our food in particular ways, we can not only feed ourselves and the
world but also significantly address the issues of greenhouse gases, carbon
dioxide emissions, carbon sequestration, soil depletion, and nitrogen runoff.
I refer to those particular ways as “earthbounding.” If we follow principles
of earthbounding (more on this concept later), we can grow healthier food
in smaller land areas, sequester carbon and other greenhouse gases, and also
save water. In order to bring these new opportunities and priorities into
practice, human social systems (which I refer to here as the ethnosphere)
and natural systems (the biosphere) have to work in close collaboration and
in mutually beneficial ways. As Wendell Berry urges us in the quote with
which I opened, I am seeking to enhance mutualistic synergies between
three spheres—biosphere, ethnosphere, and what I call the learningsphere.
Although modern life has created tremendous negative ecological
footprints to support itself, through reimagination and redesign of our
agriculture and food systems, could we make our food footprint beneficial
to the biosphere as well as the ethnosphere? One way is by earthbounding
carbon in soils, where it should be. By not letting carbon (and other
greenhouse gases) get skybound, where it should not be, and bringing it to
soil, forests, and water bodies, we could make our food and agricultural
economy serve as a “sink” rather than a “source” of greenhouse gases. Yet
this is not just a technical fix between carbon and soil; it requires shifts and
transitions in the very equation between the human household and the earth
household. This also requires that we pay close attention to some of the
salient features of indigenous and peasant households, and some 570
million smallholder farmers and their agrarian practices that are based on
“regenerative reciprocity.”3

Remaking the Human Household within the Earth

Household
Over twenty years ago, in 1994, I asked my mother, Parvati Parajuli (1923–
2008), what “environment” meant to her. The official word used in Nepali
development lingo for environment, prayabaran, did not resonate with her.
She did not accept that there was environment as such but, she said, as a
kisan (peasant) householder, she interacted with what is around her in three
ways. First, she was supposed to use (chalaam) nature; it was the right and
obvious thing to do. The second verb she used was bachaam, by which she
meant to use nature prudently, carefully, and thoughtfully. As there was no
refrigerator or electricity at her farm in a village in Chitwan District, my
mother harvested her vegetables, fruits, and even some grains three times a
day, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The idea was not to harvest from the
fields and gardens unless it was necessary to meet her family’s immediate
needs. This way, she said, she could allow the plants and fruits to grow and
ripen until the last minute. The third verb she used was jogaam, which to
her meant that there are certain things that should never be harvested by
humans—other species should have them. Examples are the sacred groves
around water sources, or sacred trees such as tulsi (basil), which used to be
planted in front of each house, and other trees, peepal, bar, and swami,
which are planted in public places. In the ripe season, all these trees are
visited by numerous birds, bats, and other pollinators. All these were
outside the purview of her chalaam and bachaam.
Accordingly, my parents built at least five chautaris (resting
places/platforms in public pathways) and planted peepal, bar, and swami
trees on them. Except for rituals and celebrations, even in emergencies,
these trees were spared being cut for fodder or harvested for timber. Such
trees were the peasant householder’s contribution to the well-being of the
larger cosmos, including birds, insects, and a host of pollinators. However,
collecting dry wood and fallen branches and leaves from these trees was
allowed. For my mother, humans had to be beneficial to nature while
actively interacting with it every day and every moment.
It is with some hesitation that I attempt to make sense of what aspects of
my mother’s culture and life informed such practices. I should mention that
my mother’s views represent and resonate with most of the Hindu peasants
of the Himalayan foothills of Nepal. However, I do not want to universalize
these as Hindu views, nor do I want to characterize them as merely Hindu
views. I propose that they emanate from the particular situatedness of my
mother: in a subsistence peasant economy. As several chapters in this
volume also suggest, irrespective of what religions they espouse,
subsistence peasant economies are deeply embedded in local ecologies.
As I closely observed my mother’s daily life over eighteen months
during 1993–1994, I found that she was not a silent witness of /to what
unfolded in nature but an active partner in its living and reliving, life as well
as death. She did not consider her acts of chalaam, bachaam, and jogaam as
transgression into nature’s domain but embraced them as her essential
dharma to behave according to the right conduct. My mother was not acting
alone in this peasant universe; in the Nepali peasant calendar, rituals were
performed, festivities were organized, or celebrations were held at least
one-third of the days in a year. The life cycle of trees was celebrated as
much as the human life cycle of birth, coming of age, maturing, and death.
As mentioned by Dr. Adhikari in chapter 5, family members of the dead
disbursed hundreds of different kinds of seeds in a forest, on temple
grounds, or around remote lakes in the Himalayas. Known as satbeej
charne, this act allowed living family members to repay nature for
providing all the requirements for the life of their dead kin. My parents had
done satbeej charne four times in their lives, one dedicated to each of their
parents. In what I call my mother’s mode of “dharmic right livelihood,”
humans were not entitled to take more than they needed from nature. At the
least, we must give back as much as we take. Better, we give back more
than we take from nature. Yet this was not a gesture of Hindu
nonmateriality or otherworldliness, as it is often understood or interpreted
in Euro-American academia. I suggest, for lack of other words, that it was a
sort of utilitarian outlook but one with an ethic of mutualistic reciprocity
embedded in it. My mother believed such acts would pile up her punya
(merit) and thus balance the potential paap (misconduct) she might have
done due to negligence or ignorance. In other words, it was her way of
negotiating with nature as well as an indication of how she considered
herself a partner in the making and unmaking of life.
I am at a loss to accurately name such a practice, this delicate balancing
act of my mother. I can simply say that in her peasant
worldview/cosmovision, both humans and nature were alive, co-players in
the cycle of life and death, rebirth and renewal. Both sides, nature and
culture, were considered sacred in a continuum. Nature was not a given or
inert but an equal—and often more powerful—entity with which we have to
negotiate the terms of exchange. My mother once told me: “We were
children of nature, for sure, but Mother Nature needed our caring and
nurturing, too. It was not a one-way but a two-way process.” As she said,
“You cannot clap with one hand; it requires both hands.” She added: “And
both hands need to be willing to clap.” In the Andes, they express it as criar
y criar (nurture and be nurtured). I equate such worldviews and practices
with what we would call in the present lingo being “regenerative.”

What Is My Dharma in the Anthropocene

Household?
Fast-forward to 2015 and let us look at the life of one of my mother’s sons,
Pramod, the author of this chapter. In the title of this chapter, I mean to
evoke the notion of Annapurna to imagine an abundant and
resilient/regenerative food system. As I remember it clearly, during my
childhood, I was given the impression that the Annapurna mountain range
was already saving and would save my life, when needed. Now, after the
April 25, 2015, earthquake in the Nepal/Himalayas, I am also open to
accepting that Annapurna’s well-being is simultaneously dependent upon
me—my conduct and my dharma. The melting of the mountain range’s
snow cover now depends on how I live my life, whether my life’s
ecological footprint is beneficial or harmful to the mountain.
My ecological footprint is pretty heavy. A professor at Prescott College
in Prescott, Arizona, I live on a ten-acre mini-ranch where I raise one dozen
Churro-Navajo sheep and half a dozen goats. I eat on the high end of mostly
organic and locally grown foods. I identify myself as a locavore—a person
who prefers to eat local food as much as possible. I drive a car, traveling on
average nine thousand miles a year. I also travel by air. I use a laptop
computer more than eight hours a day.
Such a lifestyle is a phenomenon of the Anthropocene epoch. Perhaps in
my mother’s lifetime, Annapurna was abundant while her modest needs
only lightly impacted the life of Annapurna. But as for her son, as a result
of participating in carbon-intensive lifeways, my presence is mostly
harmful. I then ponder: compared to my mother, have not my duties as a
householder increased in volume and intensity? Thus, it would not be
enough for me to do just what my mother used to do; my responsibilities
are multiplied several times in scope and scale. To what extent have they
multiplied? I question myself and my readers: at this juncture of the
Anthropocene epoch, will regenerating the traits of ancient religious
traditions such as Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism suffice, or do we have
additional thinking to do? Do we have additional responsibilities and
obligations to uphold? In short, what does a dharmic life look like in the
Anthropocene epoch?
Opinions vary widely about whether the human species is capable of
changing the destructive course we are on, whether we can make the U-turn
needed to again become resilient and abundant, as I am suggesting here.
Some, including my coeditors of this volume, believe that overall, the
human species would rather jump off a cliff than change its present course.
Many estimate, perhaps accurately, that we have about thirty to fifty years
left to make that fateful turn—or collapse. I tend to trust that as a species,
humans are hardwired to learn, unlearn, and relearn. If that is the case, to
borrow an apt term from Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart, I should
be capable of “upcycling” my beneficial aspects while downsizing my
harmful aspects vis-à-vis the well-being of Annapurna.4 In this chapter, I
am seeking to find some direction for myself and my fellow members of the
Anthropocene epoch. What could be our dharma at this juncture,
irrespective of the religion we may have been born into? We did not have a
choice of what religious tradition we inherited, but should we not have the
choice to find appropriate spiritual (or even secular) pathways suitable to
the Anthropocene reality in which we live?
Whatever our religious origins might be, one crucial aspect of this new
dharma for me is to deeply rethink the very idea of what food is, where it
comes from, how it should be grown, how it should be consumed, and by
whom, where, and in what ways. I call this a rethinking of every step in the
continuum of “soil to supper and back to soil.” As author Michael Pollan
suggests, “What would happen, if we were to start thinking about food as
less of a thing and more of a relationship?”5 I would like to add that food
constitutes a relationship not only between humans as food growers and
eaters but also among all other species and entities that join us in this drama
—the earthworms, the pollinators, the sun, the moon, the water cycles, the
biogeochemical cycles, the soils, the seeds, and other numerous actors. It is
time to bring along our companion species, which garden and farm
themselves and help us humans do our farming and gardening.
 Given how seriously planetary boundaries are already compromised,
our designs for finding solutions must match the amount of damage we
have done. If that means to create room for multiple theologies and even
new theosophies, the author is ready to welcome them. As William
McDonough and Michael Braungart suggest in their recent book, The
Upcycle, humans do not have an energy problem. Energy is abundant. What
we have is a “materials in the wrong place” problem. Could this be
pertinent in assessing current dilemmas in agriculture and food systems as
well? In other words, let me propose: we do not have a food problem; what
we have is elements of our food systems in the wrong places. For example,
the world currently produces sufficient calories per head to feed 12–14
billion people. Yet around 1 billion people suffer from chronic starvation;
and another 2 billion plus are malnourished, poorly fed, or obese. Globally,
now there are two and a half times more overweight people than
undernourished ones. More than one in three adults are overweight.
Ironically, some 70 percent of these starving and malnourished people are
small farmers or agricultural laborers. But these same people still grow
some 70 percent of the global food supply. This tragedy is largely due to the
preference given to industrial agriculture, whose main tenets are
monocultures; the significant use of external inputs in the form of
industrially grown seeds, chemicals, and pesticides; biofuels; concentrated
animal feed and feedlots; and excessively meat-based diets. Furthermore,
some 40 percent of the food grown goes to waste between the farm and the
dinner plate. This wasted food alone could feed people who lack the money
to buy food. It has also been proposed that if people were to embrace a
vegan diet, the impact on lands, soil, water, and human health would be
immediate and far-reaching.6 Changing to a vegan diet would entail a huge
stretch in my own thinking about what I eat and how. Although the idea is
tempting, I do not anticipate a majority of people switching to a vegan diet
anytime soon.
Whatever path we take—vegan, vegetarian, or omnivore—I argue that
we urgently need a system in which the top 10 percent is not able to hold
the planet and the rest of humanity hostage. Just 11 percent of the global
population (also the eaters at the top of the food chain) generate around 50
percent of carbon emissions, while the 50 percent at the bottom of the
economic pyramid create only 11 percent. Nitrogen use and abuse is one
example. Currently, humanity is using nitrogen at four times the globally
sustainable rate. Nitrogen is overused to produce fertilizers for crops and
animal feed, to manage manure and human sewage, and in the burning of
fossil fuels and biomass. Not each of the 7 billion humans on earth is
contributing equally to this. For example, the European Union—home to
just 7 percent of the world’s population—uses 33 percent of the globally
sustainable nitrogen budget simply to grow and import animal feed.7 High-
income countries, comprising 16 percent of the global population, account
for 64 percent of the world’s spending on consumer products and use 57
percent of the world’s electricity, while the people in the bottom one-third
of the economic pyramid are hungry, live in the dark due to lack of
electricity, and do not have access to goods and services. They are not the
priority of the present global order. Most of the 7 billion people on our
planet are denied opportunities to meaningfully participate in either the
ethnosphere (human-made economic and social systems/institutions) or the
biosphere (earthly assets and processes, ecosystem services).
As I will elaborate later, another irony is we are releasing greenhouse
gases into the air, whereas these should be earthbound, sequestered in soils.
Rather than building soil health and wealth by enriching carbon and organic
matter, we have been eroding topsoil at an alarming rate. By some accounts,
the United States has lost 75 percent of its topsoil. Global trends are not
better. In one estimate, the world’s cultivated soils have lost 50–70 percent
of their carbon stock.8
It seems pertinent to note that we must rethink not only the science of
agriculture and food but also our deeply held beliefs, worldviews, and
religions. What if the new guiding principles for a sustainable, resilient, and
abundant food system were a mix of the secular and sacred? What if we
were to cultivate ritualistic agriculture in which there is regenerativity,
reciprocity, mutuality, and reverential attitudes at every step in what I call
the “soil to supper/sustenance and back to soil” continuum? What if, rather
than decrying the overwhelming human influence on the biosphere, we turn
that influence into a beneficial engagement, one that enhances instead of
depleting it? What if we turn the presence of 7.2 billion (and growing)
humans into a blessing rather than a curse? Could we imagine a scenario in
which 10 billion humans (estimated for 2050), while feeding themselves,
will also feed their fellow species through a food system that is efficient and
ecologically effective? In such a system, everybody eats and everybody
feeds. A significant share of humans will grow food suitable to local and
regional environments. The system could be abundant, one that upcycles.
The system could be permanent and regenerative, one in which there is no
waste because the so-called waste becomes nutrients for the next cycle. As
discussed below, in this system soil and carbon are earthbound and are
enhanced to create abundance. Rather than relying on machines and
petrochemicals to grow our food, the new system could be labor intensive
and knowledge intensive for the primary food growers and eaters, such that
everybody has meaningful work. This would be the most effective way to
address rural poverty, unemployment, and the trend of small-scale peasants
and farmers migrating to cities. Could we imagine a food system in which
peasants, farmers, and a new generation of food growers have the means,
resources, and needed support to practice beneficial agriculture? What if
these primary food growers earned enough income from beneficial
agriculture that they did not go hungry but could afford to eat nutritious and
healthy foods? Why not? This can be assured if they eat what is grown on
their own farms or locally. If there is surplus, they could sell and/or
exchange it in the regional food markets. What incentives might young
people need to embrace the idea that a labor-intensive and a knowledge-
intensive agriculture is their way forward?
One encouraging trend is that the idea of who may be earthbound, who
may live on and from the land, is moving to the city. I will refer to this
development as the making of the urban chacareros. Chacareros are
peasants in the Andes and the Amazon region who work on their
agricultural plots, known as chacras. Imagine a scenario in which at least
one-third of the food consumed in urban centers will be grown within the
city limits. By some estimates, some 200 million city dwellers produce food
for themselves and for the urban market, accounting for 15–20 percent of
total global food production. What if the rest of the needed food could come
from surrounding agricultural areas, forests, and water bodies? A recent
report by Landscapes for People, Food and Nature, City Regions as
Landscapes for People, Food and Nature, profiles over fifty initiatives that
are trying to erase the traditional urban-rural divide. Instead, they are
creating food and a land-based urban-rural continuum with mutually
reinforcing, reciprocal relationships, characterized by flows of resources,
people, and information.9
Additionally, imagine that in such a system soils are rich, dancing with
life, while abundant pollinators go about their business. Building on the
various religious and spiritual traditions of the food growers, a sacred
thread could bind all elements of life in such a system. As we can see from
the features mentioned, in such a system nature and culture are coupled and
co-constitutive in the drama of food and agriculture. Moreover, with careful
design, such a food system could achieve not only abundance but beauty
and elegance as well.10
Definitely, what I have proposed is a tall order. There are valid reasons
to proceed carefully, accepting such a vision with a degree of caution. Yet
without a vision, we will be motionless, remaining stuck in a dysfunctional
system that has proven to be unworkable.

From Unitary Dogmas to Pluriversity

As we recognize that the earth has become feverish due to increasing
temperature and that we have entered the Anthropocene epoch, unitary
notions of development or modernity are being challenged worldwide. So is
the notion that markets are the only way to circulate food. Trying to
articulate what my mother’s cosmovision might have been, I prefer to talk
about the human economy as an equation between two households—the
earth household and the human household. How Wendell Berry, farmer,
poet, and philosopher, defines economy resonates with me. He does not
mean economics but economy, “the making of the human household upon
the earth; the arts of adapting kindly the many, many human households to
the earth’s many eco-systems and human neighborhoods.”11 He adds:

Of course, everything needed locally cannot be produced locally. But a

viable neighborhood is a community; and a viable community is made
up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.
This is the principle of subsistence. A viable community, like a viable
farm, protects its own production capacities. It does not import products
that it can produce for itself. And it does not export local products until
local needs have been met. The economic products of a viable
community are understood either as belonging to the community’s
subsistence or as surplus, and only the surplus is considered to be
marketable abroad.12
 South American indigenous peoples and peasantry have also proposed
the notion of buen vivir instead of development. The Spanish idea has many
roots; to consider its expression a unitary voice would be another way of
doing violence to the very plural ways this view has emerged among
indigenous nations of the Amazon. While for the Aymara this means suma
qamaña, for the Quechua sumak kawsay approximates it. For the Guarani
ñandereco could be the word for an ideal life. There are fundamental
differences between various indigenous languages, but it is interesting to
note that they all share a concept of an ideal life.13

Realigning the Biosphere, Ethnosphere, and

Learningsphere
My rather upbeat proposal to create a resilient and abundant food system is
predicated upon the human species having the capacity to learn. But what
kind of learning is required? I propose an idea of pluriversity, a pluriversity
for resilience and abundance. For example, the Annapurna that I grew up
looking at during my childhood refers to a mountain range in the Nepalese
Himalayas that protected my village. As I was told by my elders in the
Himalayan foothills of Nepal, the meaning of the word Annapurna is “Full
Harvest of Grain/Food.” I was also told that although a mountain is usually
considered a male being in the Nepali cosmovision, Annapurna is thought
of as a goddess. This goddess is especially endowed with qualities to ensure
a full harvest of food and crops. I remember my father, a precise astrologer,
looking up to the snow on the southern face of Annapurna to predict
whether and what kind of harvest we would have that year. He could
forecast a dry year or if there would be excessive rain or hailstorms.
Accordingly, he also advised what kind of seeds to plant and where, when,
and in what elevations.
I regret that I did not take the opportunity to learn from my father how
he made these predictions. This is part of the loss my generation of
Nepalese suffered in our pursuit of modern education. In my case, I
detoured from my ancestors’ vernacular knowledge to obtain a Ph.D. from
Stanford University and seek a life in US academia. The time seems ripe for
me to embark on an inquiry, asking not only what my fellow South Asians
think about the Annapurna mountain range but what and how does
Annapurna herself think? Do the snows and mountain also feel, think, and
communicate? How can humans learn to listen to them? Is the recent
earthquake in Nepal just a geological event in a preset cycle or is it the
Himalayas’ response to the stresses of the Anthropocene? What can the
subjectivities and voices of the mountains, rocks, and glaciers tell us? I will
be searching for answers to these questions in the years to come.
For my peasant community, the goddess Annapurna embodied the
entanglement of the natural world, here the mountain, and the human
collectivity living around it. The goddess Annapurna partakes both of the
mountain and of the human ability to speak, act, feel, and reciprocate. Both
goddess and mountain, Annapurna exemplifies the intraspecies
entanglement of the biosphere and the ethnosphere. For Wade Davis, who
proposed this term, ethnosphere is “the sum total of all thoughts, dreams,
ideas, beliefs, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the
human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. It’s a symbol of all
that we’ve accomplished and all that we can accomplish. The ethnosphere
is humanity’s great legacy.”14 No wonder that Annapurna is worshiped
throughout the South Asian subcontinent. Yet please notice the
bioculturality of Annapurna as both a mountain and also as the commonly
held notion of abundance in food and harvest. In such biocultural spaces, I
imagine a new birthing of knowledge democracy that is circular, not
hierarchical. Such a sphere of knowledge, learning, and leading is ever
evolving, not fixed, or frozen. It has pluriverses and pluri-epicenters, not
one.

Learningsphere for Earthbound Religiosity

In his 2013 Gifford Lecture, Bruno Latour indicates a deeper shift possible
in our religious worldviews in the Anthropocene epoch. He asks: have we
been misreading the Christian gospel “What good would it be to possess the
world, if you forfeit your soul?” Now, ironically, perhaps the better question
is “What use is it to save your soul, if you forfeit the earth?”15 A new
dilemma emerges in the Anthropocene epoch for humans, the dominant
species of the biosphere. We have become too successful in our own
mission—indeed, we have possessed the world. What new ethic of land,
food, and agriculture do we need now that nourishes our bodies and souls
but does not forfeit the earth? Would Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic or Sir
Albert Howard’s New Agricultural Testament suffice, or do we need another
version more attuned to the current Anthropocene reality? Do Vandana
Shiva’s Earth Democracy (2005) or Francis Moore Lappe’s Ecomind
(2013) approximate what we are looking for?
What role could current religious traditions play in this new epoch of
food growing, food making, food learning, and eating? Will there be
resilient and abundant Hindu food systems, Buddhist food systems,
Christian food systems, Islamic food systems, indigenous peoples food
systems, or nomadic food systems in the future? Will these religious
traditions rise to the occasion and give prescriptions for sustainable and
plentiful food systems? This is difficult to guess. Perhaps there will be
many different configurations. How will each religion integrate as well as
renew its traditions to embrace the new reality? As demonstrated amply in
this volume, although each religious tradition demonstrates some deeply
ecological roots, most have acquiesced in the emergence of an industrial
epoch. From the Peruvian Andes to the Nepalese Himalayan foothills, the
motions of markets and modernity have overwhelmed the local
agroecological systems. Globally, a significant part of the land is under
monoculture, aimed at exporting food. We have to admit that we entered the
Anthropocene epoch despite the religious wisdoms espoused in churches,
mosques, synagogues, and Hindu temples. For instance, in the Bible, the
word wilderness appears three hundred times, and usually its meaning is
derogatory.16 As Jagannath Adhikari’s chapter 5 and Pankaj Jain’s chapter 6
in this volume suggest, the Hindu ethos and textual instructions that could
inform current agroecological practices on the ground are few and far
between. I am wondering if the time is ripe for writing new agricultural
testaments. Indeed, people like Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Vandana
Shiva, Bill Mollison, Janine Benyus, Gary Nabhan, and Masanoba Fukuoka
have explored such new terrains.
Bruno Latour, in the same 2013 lecture, commented, “Earth should be
understood as a historical, or better, as a geostorical adventure.” Geostorical
is a term he proposes to express what it means to live at the epoch of the
Anthropocene.17 In other words, the next phase of human imagination,
choices, and designs will have to be a mix of the anthropohistorical and the
geostorical because we will be able to observe and feel the immediate
impact of our actions on the earth: impacts on soil, water, carbon, climate,
and/or food. The earth is no longer indifferent to our actions; it reacts—
quickly and often furiously, through excessive and irregular rainfalls,
floods, droughts, earthquakes, or hurricanes. Could these immediate
feedback loops from nature be blessings in disguise? One of the brighter
sides of us being in the Anthropocene epoch could be that the human
species will become more cognizant of these reactions to our own actions.
Will such feedback loops lead to correcting our harmful ways and seeking
beneficial relationships and paths?
Obviously, the task ahead is overwhelming, requiring tremendous effort
and strength of conviction. We have accumulated a mountain of “systems of
problems.” Will humanity rise to the occasion and find “systems of
solutions” instead? For example, can we keep these planetary boundaries to
where they should be and not exceed them? Through over 250,000 years of
the history of Homo sapiens, we have shown maximum resiliency in
learning, relearning, and unlearning the way we have imagined and lived
our lives. We are always seeking to find more satisfying lives. In many
cases, humans have played a role as the keystone species in enriching and
enhancing the workings of the biosphere. Could playing such a role be even
more pertinent now, when two-thirds of the earth is already somehow
altered and dominated by humans? Or, as Wes Jackson asks, is settled and
annual agriculture itself the root of the problem? Should we abandon annual
monocultural agriculture as we know it? Would “perennial polyculture,”
with which they are experimenting at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas,
be a better substitute?
There is some bright news amid the dark reality of growing and eating
food during the Anthropocene. A near-global consensus has been reached
that a massive paradigm shift is needed in agriculture and food systems.
This is evident even in current reports from the World Bank and the United
Nations Conference in Trade and Development (UNCTAD), both of which
were previously promoters of large-scale industrial food production and
consumption. A recent UNCTAD report concludes that the world needs a
paradigm shift in agriculture from a “green revolution” to an “ecological
intensification” approach. The report recommends a shift “towards a mosaic
of sustainable, regenerative production systems that also considerably
improves the productivity of the small-scale farmers.” The report further
makes a significant proposal to “move from a linear to a holistic approach
in agricultural management, which recognizes that a farmer is not only a
producer of agricultural goods but also a manager of an agroecological
system that provides quite a number of public goods and services (e.g.
water, soil, landscape, energy, biodiversity and recreation).”18 These
findings are similar to those reached by an earlier United Nations
Environmental Program report.19 That report, based on nine hundred
participants from 110 countries, also noted the urgent need to build local
and national capacity for biodiverse, ecologically resilient farming to cope
with increasing environmental stresses, including the rise in global
temperature. The general tenor and recommendations of these reports are
welcome. I would like to take such a corrective from dominant institutions
as an opportunity to dig deeper directly into the emergent practices of
peasants, farmers, gardeners and fisherfolk, nomadic herders, and desert
dwellers.
In the middle of the realignment between the well-being of the
biosphere and the ethnosphere, a crucial role is played by the
learningsphere. As the world is turning serious attention to issues of food
and agriculture, a new science and knowledge base of/for food systems is in
the making. Knowing one’s own food system from soil to
supper/sustenance and back to soil, which I call the SOSuS loop, is already
becoming a priority area for teaching and learning. This author was one of
the pioneers who designed and developed learning gardens in Portland,
Oregon, from 2003 to 2008. Unexpected places, such as asphalt areas in
schools, are turning into ecosystems and gardens. I predict an increased
connection between pedology (the science of soil) and pedagogy (the way
we learn and teach). In the new learningsphere, peasants and farmers as
well as children and youth will be co-learners, co-gardeners, and prosumers
(both producers and consumers).
One of the most promising aspects of the learningsphere is that
embedded within it are new designs to create abundance while benefiting
the biosphere. Examples of humans aiding the earth can still be traced
among indigenous peoples, nomads, forest dwellers, fishing folk, and as
exemplified by my mother’s story, even some peasant communities. I have
referred to them as “ecological ethnicities”—today, these might comprise at
least 40 percent of humanity.20 Interestingly, new initiatives, such as Janine
Benyus’s “biomimicry” and “permaculture” design, have joined the ancient
wisdom of how to live on the land, grow food, and support livelihoods
while not depleting the earth but enriching it.21 This author’s own small
experiment (since 1993) in creating a permaculture household in Chitwan,
Nepal, precisely tries to blend the age-old peasant traditions of food and
agriculture with principles of agroecology, bio-intensive agriculture, and
permaculture.22
These very diverse, dynamic, and versatile emergent initiatives are
worth mentioning, although they have yet to reach enough critical mass to
alter the dominant food system. While some use the term agroecology,
others call themselves proponents of diversified agriculture. Some
champion the term ecological agriculture, while others think of what they
are doing as climate-friendly, climate-smart agriculture. Some identify
themselves as permaculturists, while others are agroforesters who also
create edible forest gardens. Some call their efforts small-scale agriculture,
while others pin their hopes on biodynamic agriculture. One among many,
the Rodale Institute in the United States has a long history of promoting
what it calls regenerative agriculture, while the Land Institute in Kansas is
experimenting in growing perennial polyculture.23 Joel Salatin’s Polyface
Farm in Virginia has taken the new agrarian community by storm with its
closed-loop system of agro-animal-pastoral efficiency (see chapter 13 by
Ragan Sutterfield in this volume).
The acequia system in the US Southwest shows promise in how to use
gravity to regulate water and nutrients. Professor Devon Pena and a team
have shown that the ecological services provided by acequias can be
classified into five major categories: biological, hydrological, geochemical,
topographical, and cultural. These services are not only important to the
acequia agroecosystem but also yield benefits for the larger regional
economy as well.24 In Detroit, even while the city is experiencing
bankruptcy, abandoned lots are turned into community gardens. As Wes
Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, has aptly warned us: “If we don’t get
sustainability in agriculture first, sustainability will not happen.” The time
seems ripe to raise our goal: to achieve not only a sustainable food system
but one that is abundant and resilient. Can diverse religious traditions
embrace this idea?
 Earthbounding Soil and Carbon
This author proposes that we can reach the goal of creating a regenerative,
resilient, abundant agrarian order. Let us look at “earthbounding” soil and
carbon as one of the ways to achieve that. As author Charles Mann and soil
scientist Rattan Lal have pointed out, the future of food and agriculture lies
under our feet. Our hopes of surviving and thriving on this earth depend on
the soil and what we do with the soil—whether we use or abuse it, nourish
or deplete it, enhance or degrade it.25 The properties of soil in relation to
food and climate are still a hidden secret. If we knew how to properly work
with soil, carbon, water, and biodiversity, we could abundantly feed the
world while retaining resiliency in the overall system. But we might have to
first recognize that our initial step is to feed and grow the soil, not crops and
vegetables. The good news is that this is also the way to design and practice
a climate-friendly, climate-smart ecological-agricultural path. But how do
we change the prevailing mindset, persuade people that we should shift our
attention from growing crops, vegetables, and fruits to growing soil? Once
we grow healthy soils, the soils will in turn grow all the crops, vegetables,
and fruits we need. Notions about how to increase productivity in
agriculture also need to be reexamined.
It is rather ironic that climate change luminaries like Al Gore and the
Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change present
the facts as if humans and other species are better off in a “low-carbon” or
even “carbon-free” world. Carbon has been vilified unfairly. In reality,
carbon is the fifteenth most abundant element in the earth’s crust, and the
fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass, after hydrogen,
helium, and oxygen. Carbon is present is all life forms, and in the human
body it is the second most abundant element after oxygen.26 The problem is
not carbon, it is excess carbon in the atmosphere, which is beyond a
threshold of 350 parts per million.
Peasants and indigenous economies around the world, including in the
Andes, the Amazon, and the Himalayan region, show that carbon is as
essential to life as soil, water, or oxygen. The problem is not the presence of
carbon in our environment—soil or forest—but how the carbon is contained
or used, stored or released. Global warming is not caused by having carbon
in soil, vegetation cover, or forests as such; it is caused by the ways we are
releasing four hundred years’ worth (in one estimate) of naturally stored
carbon (coal and petroleum, also known as ancient sunlight) into the
atmosphere by burning it in a short period. However, when carbon is in its
proper place—earthbound, forestbound, and soilbound—it becomes the
source of life.
Among others, Rattan Lal, a prominent soil scientist at Ohio State
University, shows that even devastated soils can be restored. And a restored
soil, according to Professor Lal, is our chance to address not only world
hunger but also problems like water scarcity and even global warming.27
One question not yet fully explored is: could global warming be
significantly slowed by using vast stores of carbon to reengineer the world’s
bad soils? This would be a smart strategy to pursue, argues Charles Mann.28
First sequester carbon and restore soils. “Political stability, environmental
quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root,” Lal notes. “In the long
run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the
soil.”29
In other words, our future squarely depends on what we do with soil.
And the vitality of soil rests on what happens with its carbon content. The
amount of carbon in the soil is a function of the historical vegetative cover
and productivity, which in turn are dependent in part upon climatic
variables. Albert Bates calculates that before people began to use plows on
soil and graze goats, there was perhaps 20 percent carbon in soils. Today,
that has been reduced to 0.5 to 5 percent. Soil scientist Rattan Lal estimates
that the ultimate soil carbon uptake is 1 gigaton (1 billion tons) per year.30
Among others, Vandana Shiva, Charles Mann, Rattan Lal, Gary Paul
Nabhan, and Michael Pollan have shown we can actually create a “carbon-
rich” world that can give us organic food and sustainable livelihoods.
Evidence abounds demonstrating that through sustainable agroecological
and regenerative agrarian technologies we can systematically build organic
matter into the soil, capturing carbon from the atmosphere rather than
releasing it into the air. In her foreword to Albert Bates’s Biochar Solution,
Vandana Shiva writes:

Soil is a major store of carbon, containing three times as much carbon

as the atmosphere and five times as much as forests. About 60% of this
is in the form of organic matter in the soil. The principal component of
 soil carbon is humus, a stable form of organic carbon with the average
lifetime of hundreds to thousands of years. We need to grow living soils
because they are the very source of life. Living soils provide multiple
ecological services, including conservation of water and maintenance
of hydrological cycle. They are the basis of food security and climate
resilience.31

Addressing the latest drought in the US Southwest, Gary Paul Nabhan

suggests a similar soil-building tactic: “One strategy would be to promote
the use of locally produced compost to increase the moisture-holding
capacity of fields, orchards and vineyards. In addition to locking carbon in
the soil, composting buffers crop roots from heat and drought while
increasing forage and food-crop yields. By simply increasing organic matter
in their fields from 1 percent to 5 percent, farmers can increase water
storage in the root zones from 33 pounds per cubic meter to 195 pounds.”32
One of the promising stories of soil building comes from the Amazon
region. Dating as far back as five thousand years, indigenous peoples seem
to have created a very fertile soil, known as the terra preta do Indio, or
Amazonian dark earth (ADE). The soil scientist Wim Sombroek had
wondered if modern farmers might create their own terra preta, which he
called terra preta nova. Now this technology is researched and championed
by, among others, William Woods, soil scientist at the University of Kansas,
and Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University. As elaborated in chapter 2 of
this volume, Dr. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, founder of the Sachamama
Center for Biocultural Regeneration at Lamas, Peru, has begun to prepare
and use terra preta in peasant fields, which she calls the Chacra-Huerto
project. This author is involved in helping Sachamama Center to create
school gardens where ADE is made and used. In this pedagogical project,
the idea is to enable children and youth to “learn to garden” while they also
“garden to learn.”
Charles Mann describes the promise of terra preta not only in improving
soils but also in sequestering carbon: “Key to terra preta is charcoal, made
by burning plants and refuse at low temperatures. Adding and mixing terra
preta in tropical soils seems to enhance fertility because such soils quickly
lose microbial richness when converted to agriculture. Soil combined with
Charcoal seems to provide habitat for microbes—making a kind of artificial
soil within the soil—partly because nutrients bind to the charcoal rather
than being washed away. Tests by a U.S.-Brazilian team in 2006 found that
terra preta had a far greater number and variety of microorganisms than
typical tropical soils—it was literally more alive.”33
Wim Sombroek has argued that creating terra preta around the world
would use so much carbon-rich charcoal that it could more than offset the
release of soil carbon into the atmosphere. As Charles Mann comments,
“Terra preta could unleash what the scientific journal Nature has called a
‘black revolution’ across the broad arc of impoverished soil from Southeast
Asia to Africa. A black revolution might even help combat global
warming.”34 William McDonough and Michael Braungart suggest that we
do not burn the valuable carbon and make it a source of pollution but
instead “create a high-carbon diet for the planet.” Carbon should be
considered not a waste to be minimized but an asset to be enhanced and
multiplied. Responding to carbon-trading regimes, McDonough and
Braungart also caution that carbon’s real value is not in trade but in
capturing in soil—because it is a nutrient, not merely a numerical asset to
be turned into a derivative and exchanged by traders in an abstract
numerical universe.35

Concluding Food for Thought

I am not suggesting that the new economy of soil and carbon is all about
science, or about just fixing cycles of technical nutrients. Religious
traditions have very significant and deep roles to play. Some religious
traditions, such as those of peasants and indigenous communities, already
embrace these rules of regenerative reciprocities such as giving thanks to
soils and other natural elements. For example, peanuts were planted January
8–10, 2014, at the Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration because
these three days happened to be right after the first five days of the new
moon. As powerful as Amazonian dark earth is, the planting also has to be
aligned with the cycle of the moon. Similar lunar cycles were observed
when harvesting the peanuts.
Another aspect I want to stress is that any solutions proposed will have
to connect both sides of the coin: the biosphere and social justice/equity in
the ethnosphere. There can be no abundant and resilient food system
without social justice, and nor will social justice be achievable without
making healthy and nourishing food available to everyone. Thus, creating
fairness and equity at the local, regional, and global scale will be the test of
our new ventures and the new knowledge and science associated with
achieving sustainable agriculture. In essence, what I call the new earth-
bound secular religiosity also needs to be pro-justice, in favor of those who
actually work on the land and grow food.
It is important to revisit, rethink, and even regenerate our religious
traditions at this juncture because planetary boundaries and climate
disruption are not merely natural events; they are equally the product of
human-made social institutions and arrangements that reflect our
worldviews and our cosmovisions.
Despite looming and potential ecological threats, this author is
confident humanity will embark on a journey of transformation to find a
more satisfying food system. As many examples above suggest, the need to
shift to a more permanent and abundant agriculture and food system is now
fully recognized. We have the requisite ideas, skills, and technologies
among farmers, peasants, and scholars/activists. They are learning,
unlearning, and relearning every day. The reasons for hope are personal as
well as systemic: personal because Homo sapiens is hardwired to learn,
unlearn, and relearn; systemic because food has entered the nervous system
of the global economy through markets and nutritional networks. The issue
is of deep concern because food directly impacts our health and well-being.
Thus I have been speculating that our renewed engagement with soil, farms,
forests, gardens, and food might be the gateway to larger transformations
that are not only “deep” but also “delicious.”
One insight that arises from the interplay of biosphere, ethnosphere, and
learingsphere is that the whole is almost always more than the sum of its
parts. How the whole will form and emerge will involve pleasant surprises,
because living systems like the soils, carbon, plants, forests, and water
bodies are not machines—living systems make and unmake themselves.36
Welcome to pleasant surprises!

Study Questions
 1. Why is it important to rethink/revisit what we eat and how we grow
food in the context of the Anthropocene epoch?
2. Will humanity rise to the occasion and create a resilient and
abundant food system?
3. What other examples of regenerative agrarian food systems are you
aware of?
4. How useful are the notions of the biosphere, ethnosphere, and
learningsphere in reimagining a resilient and abundant food
system?
5. Will existing religious traditions find a way to reform/update
themselves so that, as Bruno Latour suggests, they do not “forfeit
the earth?”
6. What new forms of religiosities can you imagine in the continuum
of the sacred and secular by 2030 or 2050?

Notes
1. Wendell Berry, Conversations with Wendell Berry (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2007), 116.
2. For the planetary boundaries, see Paul Crutzen, “Can We Survive the Anthropocene Period?”
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/crutzen1/English (accessed December 4, 2012); and
Johan Rockstrom et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,”
http://www.stockholmresilience.org/download/18.8615c78125078c8d3380002197/ES-2009–
3180.pdf (accessed December 4, 2012).
3. For example, see chapter 1 by Leonor Hurtado Paz y Paz and Cristóbal Cojti Garcia, chapter 5
by Jagannath Adhikari, chapter 8 by Alexander Kaufman, and chapter 15 by Tristan Reader and
Terrol Dew Johnson in this volume.
4. William McDonough and Michael Braungart, The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability, Designing
for Abundance (New York: North Point, 2013).
5. Michael Pollan’s prolific work on food and culinary traditions has been an inspiration to me. I
have derived many insights in this chapter from his two recent books: Cooked: A History of
Ecological Transformation (New York: Penguin, 2013) and In Defense of Food (New York: Penguin,
2008).
6. Among others, this argument is elaborated by Richard Oppenlander, Comfortably Unaware:
Global Depletion and Food Responsibility (New York: Beaufort Books, 2012). See also
Oppenlander’s website, Global Depletion and Food Responsibility,
http://www.comfortablyunaware.com (accessed August 20, 2014).
7. Kate Raworth, “A Safe and Just Space for Humanity,”
http://www.oxfam.org/en/grow/video/2012/introducing-doughnut-safe-and-just-space-humanity
(accessed March 5, 2013).
8. Judith Schwartz, “Soil as Carbon Storehouse: New Weapons in the Climate Fight,”
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/soil_as_carbon_storehouse_new_weapon_in_climate_fight/2744/
(accessed April 7, 2014).
9. Thomas Forster and Arthur Getz Escudero, City Regions as Landscapes for People, Food and
Nature (Washington, D.C.: Ecoagriculture Partners, 2014),
http://landscapes.ecoagriculture.org/global_review/city_regions (accessed September 13, 2014).
10. McDonough and Braungart, The Upcycle.
11. Wendell Berry, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth (Berkeley, Calif.:
Counterpoint, 2010).
12. Wendell Berry, “The Idea of a Local Economy”
http://home2.btconnect.com/tipiglen/localecon.html (accessed October 12, 2012).
13. M. Lang and D. Mokrani, Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America,
http://rosalux-europa.info/userfiles/file/Beyond_Development_RLS_TNI_2013.pdf (accessed
January 2, 2014).
14. Wade Davis, Light at the Edge of the World (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society,
2007).
15. Bruno Latour, “Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature,” Gifford
Lecture, 2013, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/GIFFORD-SIX-
LECTURES_1.pdf (accessed November 4, 2013).
16. Rene Dubos, “Wooing of the Earth,” in McDonough and Braungart, The Upcycle, 27.
17. Latour, “Facing Gaia.”
18. UNCTAD, Wake Up before It Is Too Late (United Nations, 2013).
19. United Nations Environmental Program, International Assessment of Agricultural
Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, 2009,
http://www.unep.org/dewa/agassessment/reports/IAASTD/EN/Agriculture%20at%20a%20Crossroad
s_Synthesis%20Report%20(English).pdf (accessed November 4, 2013).
20. Pramod Parajuli, “How Can Four Trees Make a Jungle?” in The World and the Wild (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 2002), 3–20.
21. David Holmgren, Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate
Change (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2009).
22. The Ajamvari Permaculture Farm is designed to meet a Nepali peasant household’s needs of
food, fiber, fertilizer, fodder, and pharmaceuticals. See www.ajamvarifarm.org.
23. Rodale Institute has been pioneering organic and regenerative methods of agriculture and soil
improvement for the last several decades. Its recent white paper, “Regenerative Agriculture and
Climate Change,” summarizes many years of research and can be found at
http://rodaleinstitute.org/assets/WhitePaper.pdf (accessed September 3, 2014).
24. The prolific writings of Devon Pena on food justice and the acequia system can be found at
www.ejfood.blogspot.com. I also recommend his book, Mexican Americans and the Environment
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005).
25. Charles Mann, “Our Good Earth: The Future Rests on the Soil beneath Our Feet,”
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/09/soil/mann-text/1 (accessed November 2, 2013); Rattan
Lal, “Carbon Sequestration,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/363/1492/815.full.pdf (accessed March 5, 2014).
26. Albert Bates, The Biochar Solution (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society, 2011).
27. Lal, “Carbon Sequestration.”
28. Mann, “Our Good Earth.”
 29. Lal, “Carbon Sequestration.”
30. Ibid.
31. Vandana Shiva, foreword to Bates, The Biochar Solution.
32. Gary Paul Nabhan, “Our Coming Food Crisis,” New York Times, July 21, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/opinion/our-coming-food-crisis.html?_r=1& (accessed
September 5, 2013).
33. Mann, “Our Good Earth,” 8.
34. Ibid.
35. McDonough and Braungart, The Upcycle, 39.
36. Peter Senge et al., “Awakening Faith in an Alternative Future,” Reflections: The SOL Journal
on Knowledge, Learning and Change, http://www.ai.wu.ac.at/~kaiser/birgit/awakening-faith-
scharmer-et-al.pdf (accessed November 15, 2014).
 Acknowledgments

The editors would like to express their heartfelt thanks to all the
contributors. The insights and knowledge the chapters contain make this a
unique contribution to the human understanding of agriculture. We
appreciate the contributors’ hard work as well as their patience with this
project. The editors also thank the staff at the University Press of Kentucky
for help with the life history of this book, and extend special thanks to
Allison Webster and Ila McEntire. They also would like to thank Vandana
Shiva for taking time from her busy schedule to write a very rich foreword.
Lastly, each editor expresses sincere thanks to all the sustainable,
regenerative, and ethical farmers, peasants, and indigenous peoples on our
planet who are working on creating a resilient, equitable (for both human
and nonhuman organisms), sustainable agriculture. It is from the roots of
their humble, sacred actions that a healthy future will grow.
 Contributors

Maximilian Abouleish-Boes is responsible for SEKEM’s Department for

Sustainable Development, which fosters research, development, and
innovation in the company’s economic, cultural, societal, and ecological
life. Abouleish-Boes is also involved in the Social Innovation Center of
Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development, an integrated part of
SEKEM’s innovation ecosystem.

Jagannath Adhikari is a social scientist, scholar, and consultant who

works and writes extensively on issues of ecoagriculture, food systems, and
food security in South Asia. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Curtin
University of Technology, Perth, Australia. He has authored several books
on the political ecology, agriculture, and food systems of Nepal, including
Land Reform in Nepal, Pokhara: Biography of a Town, Food Crisis in
Nepal, and Farm Management Strategies in Midhills of Nepal.

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin is professor emerita in the Department of

Anthropology at Smith College in Massachusetts. She is the founder and
director of the Sachamama Center in Lamas, San Martin, Peru.

Cristóbal Cojtí García is recognized as the day keeper of the Mayan

calendar and cosmology. The sacred calendars kept by the Mayans have
long predicted the shifts that we are experiencing in modern times. As
depicted in the prophecy of sacred birds, the nawales Eagle, Quetzal, and
Condor, Mayan people foresaw a time when the North and South would
come together, combining the higher knowledge of both in an opportunity
to create a better life for all, honoring Mother Earth, our community, and
ourselves.
Yigal Deutscher is an educator, farmer, and permaculture designer. He has
participated in the Adamah Fellowship and trained with the Center for
Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems (University of California, Santa
Cruz) as well as the Permaculture Research Institute in Australia. From
2006 to 2010 he was the farm manager and permaculture educator at the
Chava v’Adam Farm in Israel, where he also founded the Shorashim/Eco-
Israel apprenticeship program. He currently runs 7Seeds, an educational
project weaving together Jewish wisdom traditions and permaculture design
strategies, activating the foundations for sacred Jewish agriculture. He
writes and teaches regularly on the subjects of Jewish spirituality, ecology,
and culture. He is the author of Envisioning Sabbatical Culture: A Shmita
Manifesto.

Mark H. Dixon is an associate professor of philosophy at Ohio Northern

University. He is coeditor, with Forrest Clingerman, of Placing Nature on
the Borders of Religion, Philosophy and Ethics. His research interests are
Asian philosophies and environmental philosophy and ethics.

Leonor Hurtado Paz y Paz, Gutemalan by birth, earned her Ph.D. from
the Universidad LaSalle, Costa Rica. She serves as senior advisor to the
Oakland, California-based Food First/Institute for Food and Development
Policy. Over the last fifteen years she has worked extensively with local and
international service organizations and social movements in Guatemala in
the areas of human rights, indigenous rights, community health, anti-
mining, and cultural survival. During the 1980s, she worked in Nicaragua
on adult literacy, farmworker training, and international solidarity and
information campaigns. As both a scholar and an educator, Dr. Hurtado is
involved in issues of food sovereignty, social movements, action research,
and community education.

Pankaj Jain is the author of Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities:

Sustenance and Sustainability, which won the 2012 DANAM Book Award
and the 2011 Uberoi Book Award. He is an assistant professor in the
Department of Anthropology and the Department of Philosophy and
Religion at the University of North Texas, where he teaches courses on
religions, cultures, ecologies, and films of India and Asia. He received the
Fulbright-Nehru Environmental Leadership Fellowship in 2012 and the
Wenner-Gren Grant in 2014. He is also director of the Eco-Dharma and
Bhumi-Seva Project and is working with the Hindu and Jain temples in
North America on their “greening” efforts. Currently, he is editing a volume
on Indian philosophical theories and writing books on Jain philosophy and
dharma and science in India.

Terrol Dew Johnson is an award-winning Tohono O’odham basket weaver

whose work appears in a variety of permanent collections. He provides
consultations to museums and is an active organizer within his community.

Alexander Harrow Kaufman grew up in the United States and lived in

Spain, Brazil, and Japan before settling in Thailand in 1996. Through his
consultancy work, Kaufman has carried out social audits of factories in
Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Macau, Mongolia, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand,
and Vietnam. His research focuses on the use of organic agriculture as a
rural development strategy in northeast Thailand. He serves as an advisor to
the Moral Rice Network at the Dharma Garden Temple in Yasothon
Province, Thailand.

Michael Lemons received his Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology

at the University of Florida. He is a lecturer in anthropology at Hawaii
Community College in Hilo, Hawaii, where he researches permaculture,
theories of deviance, and cultural and ecological anthropology.

Todd LeVasseur is a visiting assistant professor at the College of

Charleston, where he works in the religious studies department and is also
program director of the environmental and sustainability studies program.

Pramod Parajuli serves as the core faculty for the Ph.D. program in
sustainability education at Prescott College, Prescott, Arizona. At Prescott,
Pramod was also active in designing new graduate programs and
bioregional and international studies, including developing learning gardens
for Masaai schools in Masaailand, Kenya, and in his homeland of
Nepal/Himalayas. An interdisciplinary/applied scholar from Stanford
University (1983–1990), Parajuli has thirty years of teaching experience in
US higher education. At Stanford, Syracuse University, Portland State
University, and currently at Prescott College, he has designed and
developed award-winning graduate programs in sustainability studies,
sustainable food systems, farm- and garden-based ecological literacy, and
learning gardens.

Eston Dickson Pembamoyo, a reverend of the Anglican Church, is from

Malindi in Mangochi in Malawi, where he is active in a variety of
permaculture-based initiatives.

Raymond F. Person Jr. is professor of religion at Ohio Northern

University. He has authored numerous books, articles, and chapters,
including Deuteronomy and Environmental Amnesia. He and his wife,
Elizabeth, live on a twenty-acre organic farm operated by a cooperative he
founded of nineteen families.

Anna Peterson is professor in the Department of Religion at the University

of Florida, where she teaches social, environmental, and animal ethics,
researches sustainability and social change, and is a leading scholar in
religion and nature theory.

Tristan Reader is a practitioner of community-based systems change,

specializing in the theory and practice of food systems development, Native
American community regeneration, health and wellness promotion, cultural
revitalization, and grassroots community organizing. He earned his Ph.D. in
agroecology and food security from Coventry University, England.

A. Whitney Sanford is associate professor of religion in the Department of

Religion at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she researches
and teaches about religion and nature, South Asian religions, South Asian
and Global South environmentalisms, and issues of food sustainability. Her
books include Growing Stories from India: Religion and the Fate of
Agriculture.
Elaine Solowey is director of the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the
Arava Institute in Israel. Her Ph.D. work focused on land reclamation, and
her current research explores crop suitability for both arid and saline lands.

Ragan Sutterfield is a writer, ordained minister in the Episcopal Church,

and onetime livestock farmer. His books include a theology of agriculture,
Cultivating Reality, and a spiritual memoir, This Is My Body.

Norman Wirzba is professor of theology, ecology, and rural life at Duke

Divinity School. His research and teaching interests reside at the
intersections of theology, philosophy, ecology, and agrarian and
environmental studies. His current research is centered on a recovery of the
doctrine of creation and a restatement of humanity in terms of its creaturely
life. Professor Wirzba’s most recent books are Food and Faith: A Theology
of Eating and (with Fred Bahnson) Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call
to Reconcile with Creation. He also has edited several books, including The
Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the
Land and The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell
Berry. Professor Wirzba serves as general editor for the book series Culture
of the Land: A Series in the New Agrarianism, published by the University
Press of Kentucky, and is cofounder and executive committee member of
the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology.
 Index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook.
Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the
terms that appear in the print index are listed below

Ab’
Abouleish, Dr. Ibrahim
Agarwal, Anil
agency of nonhuman others
agrarianism
Agricultural Revolution, environmental critique of
agricultural sustainability
and religion
attributes of
Gary Fick
gift exchange
holistic
Mayan/Guatemalan practice of
new agrarianism
peasant farming
regenerative
resilience
traditional ecological knowledge
agriculture
critiques of Green Revolution/industrial agriculture
food ecology
formation of/Fertile Crescent
Green Revolution, start of
industrial
organic
perennial
sustainable
three levels of relations involved with
agroecology
Alexander Pancho Memorial Farm
Amazon
 agriculture in
deforestation of
Peruvian, history of. See also Lamas, Peru
Amazonian dark earth
biochar
Terra Preta
Nova project
Amish. See Old Order Amish
Anabaptist(s)
animism
Annapurna
Anthropocene, the
dharmic life of
environmental metrics of
geostorical
greenhouse gasses
nitrogen
anthropocentrism
Christian dualism
Asiatic water buffalo
Su Khwan Kwai ritual
Athavale, Guru Pandurang Shastri
axis mundi

back-to-the-land
Bailey-Dick, Matthew
being/Dasein
Berry, Wendell
and economy
biblical/traditional agriculture
adam
agricultural celebrations/calendar
Cain and Abel
the Diaspora and end of in Israel
eved
Garden of Eden
Hebrew Bible and passages about agriculture
Kil-i-yim
la’avod/avodah
migrash
Speaking Place/Midbar
biochar
biosphere
Bhagavad Gita
Bhave, Vinoba
ashrams
Brahma Vidya
Brahma Vidya Mandir (BVM)
critiques of the Green Revolution/industrial agriculture
Gandhian values of
Gita Pravachan
karma yogi
Nilayam Nivedita
Paramdham Ashram
Paunar, Maharashtra
Samvad Farm
social workers
sustainable agricultural practices and Gandhian/religious influences on
Boonserng, Wijit
Buddhism
environmental values of
Pali canon
precepts
Thailand, history of
Theravada Buddhism
“Buddhist agriculture”
Buddhadasa
dhammachart
Khwan Khao (Rice Soul)
Mae Khongka (River Goddess/Mother)
Mae Phosop (Rice Mother)
Mae Thoranee (Earth Mother)
pong khao
religious significance of
rice
rituals of
singwaedlom
Suanmokkh Temple
traditional farming practices
Prawes Wasi

carbon
Catholicism. See Roman Catholicism
Chachapoyas cultural area, map of
Chacra-Huerto project
Chol q’ij
Christianity
blessing/grace
views of creation
colonialism
Columbian Exchange
communitarian
Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research
Cooperation for Rural Development in the Western Region of Guatemala
cosmocentric economy
cosmocentrism
cosmovision
Creoles

Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Deshpande, Mohan Shankar
dharma. See under Hinduism
Dharma Garden Community and Temple
Dharma Garden Foundation
ecocentric values of
Khun Grasehboon
marketing of Moral Rice
Monk Khammak/Luang Poh Thammachart
Poh Nikom
Poh Songkran
dharmic ecology
dramaturgy

earthbounding
ecological and agricultural benefits of
religiosity of
synergies between bio-, ethno-, and learningsphere
ecological ethnicities
egalitarianism
Egypt
agriculture in
Bedouins
Belbes
religion in
“Revolution of the Hungry”
Egyptian Biodynamic Association
El Salvador
Catholicism
civil war
 postwar
Ethnic Council of the Kichwa People of Amazonia
ethnosphere

Fick, Gary
food justice
food security
food sovereignty
food system
human-caused stresses on
SOSuS loop (soil to supper/sustenance back to soil)
fossil fuels in agriculture
free trade agreements and neoliberal economics
Central American Free Trade Agreement
criticisms of
Fukuoka, Masanoba

Gandhi, Mahatma
ahimsa (nonviolence)
aparigraha
appropriate technologies
food democracy
Gandhism
Hind Swaraj
Jain influences
karma yoga
sarvodaya
Sevagram
swadeshi
village India
Wardha
Garifuna
Gaud, William
genetically modified organisms (GMOs)
gift economy
globalization
trade agreements, criticisms of
Global North
Global South
environmental concerns
green economy
Green Revolution
chemicals used
 Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research
Food and Agriculture Organization
William Gaud
US Agency for International Development
Guatemala
colonial history
contemporary political history
experience with the Green Revolution
Latifundio-minifundio agricultural system
map of
race relations in

Haberman, David
Hawaii
Big Island
Puna
health: animals in agriculture
environmental
human
religious
social
Heidegger, Martin
being/Dasein
building
dwelling
environmental and spiritual ethics derived from
Christine Swanton
himdag
agri/culture
decline of
revitalization of
songs
Tohono O’odham Community Action
Himalayas
Hindu epics
Hinduism
ashrams
Bhagavad Gita
Brahmanic rituals
dharma
karma
Krisi-Parashar
Mahabharata
 paap
religion and farming
Vedas
Vedic
Vedic model of agriculture
Howard, Sir Albert

India
map of
Indwelling God
International Federation of Organic Agriculture
definition of “organic”
International Labor Organization
International Monetary Fund
Islam
adl
Allah
amanah
amin
fitra
ihsan
ilm
khalifa/khulafa
mizan
Prophet Muhammad
Qur’an and passages from
tawhid
ummah
Israel
Canaan
renewal of agriculture
Tsena

Jackson, Wes
Land Institute, the
Jewish social health
hefker
leket
peah
Judaism
Hebrew Bible
jubilee/yovel
Middle East
 Mishnah
shabbat/Sabbath
shmita
siach
Torah
Kichwa-Lamista(s)
agricultural practices
chakra
colonization and history of
Ethnic Council of the Kichwa People of Amazonia
gift economy and exchange
Mama Allpa
Mama Qilla
mestizos
Native communities

Quechua
reform of
religion/spirituality
Tayta Inti
Yakumama
kisan dharma
Kumar, Satish

Lamas, Peru
Land Institute, the
learningsphere
liberation theology
Locke, John: influence on stewardship views in America

Malawi
and the Anglican Church
Chichewa
Christianity/Genesis
colonialism/postcolonialism, and agriculture
food sovereignty
indigenous farming knowledge and practices
Islam
Malawi Association for Christian Support
Malimidwe a makalo
map of
mwanaalirenji
permaculture
Permaculture Network in
 religion and sustainable agriculture
westernization of
women
Malawi Association for Christian Support
materialist/materialism
Mayans (Quiché)
calendars and calendrical system
colonialism/colonization of
ethnocide of
experience with the Green Revolution
Kaqchikel
missionization of
religious principles and spirituality
Mennonites
embodied theology
farm-social environment relation
First Mennonite Church, Bluffton
Mennonite homestead (Ohio) and farming as an example of
simple living
Mennonite Central Committee
Matthew Bailey-Dick
cookbooks
Extending the Table
More-with-Less
relationship to the Christian gospel
Simply in Season
Rebekah Trollinger
millenarianism
milpa
missionization
monoculture
Monsanto Quit India
Moral Rice Network
Agri-Nature Foundation
Wijit Boonserng
civil society organizations (CSOs)
Green Net Cooperative/Earth Net Foundation
Luang Poh Supatto
New Theory Agriculture (NTA)
Poh Suvit
religion and/seven vows of
Santi Asoke Group
“Sufficiency Economy”
mysticism

natural resources
nature/culture dualism
dwelling in holiness
in Nepal
Ultimate Sacred Postulate
nature spirituality
Nepal
Baidam, Pokhara Valley
Himalayas
impacts of Green Revolution/industrial farming
prayabaran
traditional farming practices
Nepalese/Hindu peasants
bachaam
chalaam
jogaam
paap
punya
regenerative farming practices of
satbeej charne
Network for Security and Sovereignty for Food in Guatemala

Old Order Amish

farming methods
North American agricultural history
social organization/religion
values

patents
Paunar, Maharashtra
peasants
ecological ethnicities
El Salvador
chacareros
Guatemalan/Mayan
regenerative reciprocity of
relation with local ecologies. See also Nepalese/Hindu peasants
permaculture
Ajamvari
Permaculture Farm, Nepal
Big Island, Hawaii
ethics of
 Global North vs. Global South varieties of
growth of
indigenous
Malawi
principles of
Permaculture Network in Malawi
phenomenology
Pokhara Valley
Polyface Farm
postcolonialism
postmaterialism
priesthood
Promised Land

Quiché Maya people. See Mayans (Quiché)

Qur’an, the

religion
Mayan
religious values
religious agrarianism
repopulators
farming practices
religion and social organization
Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology (RFSTE)
Rodale Institute
Roman Catholicism
Second Vatican Council

Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration

Chacra-Huerto project
yana allpa
Salatin, Joel
farming practices of
Polyface Farm
saguaro cacti
Save, Bhaskar
Kalpavriksha
seeds
seed democracy
SEKEM
Dr. Ibrahim Abouleish
business and development model of
Demeter
 Egyptian Biodynamic Association
Fairtrade
Islamic and Muslim influences on
mission of
regenerative/sustainable agriculture
SEKEM Development Foundation
Seven Species (Shivat Minim)
barley
date palm
Emmer wheat
olive
pomegranate
vine (grape)
shamanism
Shiva, Vandana
earth democracy
Gandhian influence on
Monsanto Quit India
Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology (RFSTE)
seed democracy
soil
health and fertility
Sonoran Desert
stewardship
industrialism
structural adjustment programs
Guatemalan critiques of
Suanmokkh Temple
subsidies
Su Khwan Kwai ritual
sustainability
Swadhyaya (Swadhyayis)
Anil Agarwal
Guru Pandurang Shastri Athavale
Mohan Shankar Deshpande
dharma
earth dharma
ethnosociological
environmental activism
Masanoba Fukuoka
Gujarat/Gujarati
David Haberman
Hindu epics
 Indwelling God
karma
Kriśipārāśara
krtibhakti
Mahābhārata
Maharashtra
moksa
Muslims
prasāda
prayog
rainwater/water ethic
rural Swadhyayis’ religious devotional and agriculture/environment interactions
Śridarśanam
sustainability
vermiculture
Yogeśvara Krsi
Swanton, Christine
Steiner, Rudolph
biodynamics and farming
practices of

Terra Preta Nova project

Thai Alternative Agriculture Network (AAN). See Moral Rice Network
Thailand
history of
map of
theocentric/ism
theocentric
ecological ethic
Tohono O’odham
Alexander Pancho Memorial Farm
bahidaj
damage to traditional food system of
I’itoi
impact of Christianity
jujkida
kukuipad
mamakai
rituals of
and relation to agriculture
saguaro cacti
sitol
Sonoran Desert
 traditional food system of
Tohono O’odham Community Action
Torah
Trollinger, Rebekah
Tyson, John
religious views of
Tyson Foods: chicken farming practices

United Nations
Food and Agricultural Organization
US Agency for International Development

Wasi, Prawes
water buffalo, Asiatic
World Bank

Xinca

Yasothon Province
map of
“you are my other self” principle

Zizioulas, John
CULTURE OF THE LAND: A SERIES IN THE NEW AGRARIANISM

This series is devoted to the exploration and articulation of a new agrarianism that considers the
health of habitats and human communities together. It demonstrates how agrarian insights and
responsibilities can be worked out in diverse fields of learning and living: history, science, art,
politics, economics, literature, philosophy, religion, urban planning, education, and public policy.
Agrarianism is a comprehensive worldview that appreciates the intimate and practical connections
that exist between humans and the earth. It stands as our most promising alternative to the
unsustainable and destructive ways of current global, industrial, and consumer culture.

SERIES EDITOR
Norman Wirzba, Duke University, North Carolina

ADVISORY BOARD
Wendell Berry, Port Royal, Kentucky
Ellen Davis, Duke University, North Carolina
Patrick Holden, Soil Association, United Kingdom
Wes Jackson, Land Institute, Kansas
Gene Logsdon, Upper Sandusky, Ohio
Bill McKibben, Middlebury College, Vermont
David Orr, Oberlin College, Ohio
Michael Pollan, University of California at Berkeley, California
Jennifer Sahn, Orion magazine, Massachusetts
Vandana Shiva, Research Foundation for Science, Technology & Ecology,
India
Bill Vitek, Clarkson University, New York