Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Recently I have taken up the hobby of wildlife photography.

I was out practicing and crawling around to try and get a photo of some ducks when I got treated to an incredibly lucky moment….with a coyote. He looked right at me. I looked right back. We stared at each other.

The experience of tranquility and peace and intimacy with nature in this moment left a mark on me, and I’ve gone out every day since. And I’ve looked at this photograph every day since as well.

I can’t help but think and feel when I look at this photo that this is everything humans are not. A coyote in a forest, emerging from spring. That humans are but one species on this earth, and we as individuals have but one singular consciousness, but that many billions or trillions of individual consciousnesses are existing right now on this planet, and humans act and behave and govern as though we are above the reality that we are but one part of nature.

When I think about agriculture, I think of all the things that are missing from modern conventional agriculture….which is to say, everything that is in this photo. The trees, the grass, the log. The mixture of spaces and species. And the coyote, too.

Some crazy how, everything in this photo functions without chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides or fungicides. It is beyond my comprehension why we believe so many things to be external threats, unsightly, unorganized or messy.

Nature is more powerful and more biologically productive than even the best and most advanced synthetic chemically-induced and cultivated-by-machinery crops we have today. It does it all with zero inputs.

We would do well to observe, listen and learn the lessons that nature has already figured out, and is already playing out, right in front of our eyes. If we choose to look for it, we will find it. If we choose to be brave and embrace nature, agriculture can lead the world out of our self-induced ecological and climate crises.

Diversity is strength. And we are destroying it, intentionally.

We live in a closed system. We would do well to learn how it functions before we go about killing all the things we decide we don’t like.