Book Club discussion excerpt

The Usual Suspects: Man/Bull/Lion/Eagle JackaLupe 4/14/2006
So, Candy, what do you make of the latest notions of Amazon quasi-farmers who widely 'managed' if not exactly cultivated those fragile thin (often lateritic when not riverine floodplain or highland, that being a relative term there) soils? Still Hunter Gatherer, but 'husbanding' all those chewy nuts and such; endless combos of medicinals.

I met Nicole Maxwell, author of a book on the latter, when she was in her 70s, back in 1968 when a few of us from Stanford spent the Summer in Iquitos, Peru, highest navigable port:; Grace Line ships carted whatever the latest 'boom' was producing: after Rubber came Barbasco, the source of that insecticide still used to paralyze insect breathing (natives still use it on fish, casting the powder over the water), Jute, then some hardwoods.

Now there's another 'export' that's flown out from the upper reaches of the Amazon basin;~) Reminds me of Somoza's little sideline: a few keys of "product" would be packed in with the frozen shrimp and lobster produced on Corn Island, near the Miskito Keys (not to be confused with the Arlo G. 'keys', and that's not Key of G, ether;~)

The Usual Suspects: Man/Bull/Lion/Eagle Candy Minx 4/14/2006
How would you like me to say this so it is understood? Fuck farming. Do I have your attention now?

I think the ideas of "stewardship" and "managing" and "husbandry" are some of the highest orders of pretentions known to humans.

Nature never needed us to babysit it. We now need a Supernatural Nanny reality tv program to come in and put us all on our naughty mats.

Stewardship. Its embarrassing. Conceited.

Totalitarian farming is embarrassing and the source of slavery, prostiution, scalping, war, fox hunting, corporate corruption, government, bleedingheart liberalism, racism, education systems that fail, intolerance and class struggle just off the top of my head.

Unfortunately, farmers just can't see the link. It's a case of observing the experiment and then affecting it. One has to get out side the mindset of farming to recognize the pattern. Denial. Accountability. Farmers have some need to glorify themselves and the silly notion of civilization while dismissing other ways of making a living.

I'm tired of their justifications. Hollow and money grabbing. All the greatest literature of civilization and preliterate cultures has warned of this kind of conceit and lifestyle.

I believe everybody in the world deserves food and should be able to eat. I am not so ignorant to understand that we have painted ourselves into a corner...and now we might have to rely completely on farming to feed everybody. I understand.

I suggest there are different ways to have food.

But am I going to boast about "stewardship"? God no.

We are slaves to growing food and locking it up now.

This act chains us to an economy that puts a price on sex and scalps.

But, I also believe old school IS the new school.

I believe we need to look at subsistence farming and hunting and gatherering life styles for the answers on how to feed us all. On how to run corporations, schools and food factories or as y'll in denial like to call them "farms".

We may have to reject the romantic notion of farming that helps maintain the totalitarian agriculture religion that clouds us from understanding other ways to live. Countryside is not wilderness.

I realize it is against the law to hunt and gather. But for those FEW AND ENDANGERED hunter/gatherers left that we haven't killed off or reprogrammed, people who have seen outside the matrix of farm thinking...we can look to them for lessons.

We can look to them and subsistent farming communities for how to save the human world.