Agraria_Journal_Summer_2022

12 AGRARIA JOURNAL 2022 Plants and mushrooms have intelligence, and they want us to take care of the environment, and so they communicate that to us in a way we can understand…I think they have a consciousness and are constantly trying to direct our evolution by speaking out to us biochemically. We just need to be better listeners. —Mycologist Paul Stamets, Quoted in Michael Pollan’s Changing Your Mind In many spiritual and cultural traditions, the earth and its inhabitants form a sentient and symbiotic network, dependent on one another’s tending for health and wellbeing. The murmurs and whisperings of trees and plants, water and wildlife serve as warning signals when imbalance is detected. When these warnings go unheeded, they become louder and more persistent. Today’s firestorms, tornadoes, volcano bursts, floods and droughts are speaking an unmistakable language of planetary disruption that needs to be heeded if we are to survive. Nowhere is this clearer than in our collapsing food systems — systems built on practices that have decimated biodiversity, polluted waterways, contributed to global warming, and led to the decline of human health. Beyond the challenges of growing food where there is no — or too much — water, spikes in the cost of fertilizer and fuel, transport issues, trade policies, processing fires, and the culling of animals have contributed to food shortages everywhere and the highest- ever increase in global food costs. For our affluent culture this may result in cutting back or a shifting of priorities; for others whose local agroecological systems have been destroyed by the green revolution with its emphasis on chemical inputs and corporate-owned GMO seeds, famine and its attendant destabilization of people and places may result. Add in war and the effects of a global pandemic, and we are at a critical juncture: Humankind is teetering on the edge of a precipice. The solutions being proposed — fake meat, vaccine- carrying greens, GMO animals and plants, and growing vegetables in chemical soups — are more of the same technological tinkerings that have led us to an ever increasing consolidation of the food system and land into fewer hands and compromised human and planetary health. Yet there is another path forward, imbued with the understandings of our interconnectedness, and built on the legacy of Indigenous agricultural practices and pioneers like George Washington Carver. CARTER’S CONTRIBUTIONS, LEGACY I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in. —George Washington Carver Carver was born into slavery in 1864 and, following the abduction of his mother, was fostered by families that nurtured his knowledge of plants and herbs. He spent much of his youth in the woods, getting to know the flowers there intimately and becoming known as a plant doctor for his ability to tend ailing plants to health. In his four decades as director of the Experiment Station at Tuskegee University, Carver gave tools and hope to farmers who inherited at emancipation not 40 acres and a mule, but rather sharecropping fields of soils depleted by cotton monocropping. Carver was a practitioner and early proponent of organic and regenerative agriculture, though his pioneering work in this field has been overlooked, or worse, ignored. Through meticulous research, inspirational teaching and bulletins written in a readable prose, Carver showed southern farmers how to enrich soil, use natural fertilizer, rotate crops and cure fungal diseases. He encouraged the recycling and reuse of waste, including in BY SUSAN JENNINGS George Washington Carver/ Trading Cards NPS/Wikimedia Tuning in to the Future