The last time that food issues and edible landscaping swept the nation was in the seventies during the energy crisis. During that time many were traveling the world to learn from obscure agricultural practitioners and others were looking to the urban areas and what they could produce. Out of that time period came two food production classics: The One Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka and (Designing and Maintaining) Your Edible Landscape Naturally, by Robert Kourik. Both went out of print in the late eighties and early nineties, but have been recently republished for the benefit of the times we are in. In this two part post I will review two of the most influential books in my life and hope they inspire you as they did me.
Part 1: The One Straw Revolution
The ultimate goal of farming is not the cultivation of crops but the cultivation and perfection of human beings. – Masanobu Fukuoka
As a young twenty-five year old man working in disease and insect control Masanobu Fukuoka became fatally ill and nearly died. After gaining his health back he had a realization that lead him to re-examine the world around him. He, not knowing how to proceed, but knowing enough to know that there was nothing and everything to learn, returned to his father’s farm. Over the course of a few years he began farming rice and fruit in ways that betrayed conventional agricultural science and in the process produced the same if not more yield per acre than his neighboring conventional farmers. His Zen / Taoist like approach to food production caught the attention of many influential agriculturalists including Wendell Berry who wrote the introduction to Fukuoka first work of prose. The One Straw Revolution serves us one part agricultural and one and a smidge part philosophy text drawing from Fukuoka’s revelations and insights during his 30 years of “do-nothing” farming near Matsayuma, Japan. The book reads the way that I imagine Fukuoka reads the land. It acts as a guide to influence and inspire the reader. There is a little bit of how-to tucked in among Fukuoka’s philo-spiritual revelations leaving the reader refreshed and rejuvenated the way that you might feel after splashing your face with cold water at dawn before a day’s work in the field or floored by the weight and truth of his insights:
To the extent that people separate themselves from nature, they spin out further and further from the center. At the same time the centripetal effect asserts itself and the desire to return to nature arises. But if people merely get caught up in reacting, moving to the left or to the right, depending on the conditions, the result is only more activity. The non-moving point, the point of origin, which lies outside the realm of relativity, is passed over, unnoticed. I believe that even “returning-to-nature” and anti-pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out in reaction to the over-development of the present age. – M. Fukuoka
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