In the world today, I would say that gardens are more part of nature than farms. Gardens are commonly used for enjoyment. The flowers, fruit and vegetables are planted, and then left to grow with very little control from the owner. Farms are used to grow crops and rear animals under the control of a manager. Many farms, especially today, are being manipulated. The difference Pollan saw in the genetically altered potato farm and the organic farm is just one example. If you look at the food industry you can tell a difference between chemically enhanced meat and free-range meat. The fact that a farm has an owner to invade on the plants and animals life proves that it is no longer just nature but humanly controlled. "Agriculture is, by its very nature, brutally reductive, simplifying nature's incomprehensible complexity to something humanly manageable; it begin, after all, with the simple act of banishing all but a tiny handful of chosen species"(Pollan 185). The key word in this quote is “humanly manageable.” Humans, not all, have taken the nature out of farms and turned it into a man made experiment. The origin of farms was a way for humans to create a society and not live like savages (i.e. animals dietary ways.) It has now turned away from natures hand and become a science experiment. If farms were to go back to being about the plants and not the money, I believe that farms could join nature once again.
Monday, September 29, 2008
The Old Farm Ways
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The consultation of gardens, farms and their relationship with nature can be debated on several levels. First, I believe that we would have to define gardens, farms and then distinguish their differences. In sense, a farm may be a large garden. But then again, enormous ‘gardens’ are definitely in existence, such as the botanical gardens around the country. I do agree, it appears that gardens are more sporadically grown than the typical farm that many of us in America seem to envision with the widespread existence and support of monocropping. However, I have been fortunate to experience farms that support more life than just the product we are looking for. Even with large monocropping farms, insects, worms, birds, weeds and other types of plants inhabit and depend on these farms to live. I have also seen farms that are completely dictated by the revolutions of the moon and sun, and those that intricately examine the process of the replacement of nutrients in the soil to create a more economical and ecologically profitable development. How could we say that nature doesn’t take place in a farm as much as somewhere else? I think it also depends on our definition of nature. I am conflicted to understand what Pollan defines as nature. He says on page xxiv, “This is simply another failure of imagination; nature is not only to be found ‘out there’; it is also ‘in here,’ in the apple and in the potato, in the garden and in the kitchen, even in the brain of a man beholding the beauty of a tulip or inhaling the smoke from a burning cannabis flower.” Then again, he tells on page 193, “Yet the Andean potato farm represented an intricate ordering of nature that, unlike Versailles in 1999, say, or Ireland in 1845, can withstand virtually anything nature is apt to throw at it.” So is nature a force, something other than what we are and what we create, control? What do people mean when they say nature is so much stronger than we are? And what does it mean when Pollan describes the way that we attempt to control nature through agriculture, genetic engineering, organization of species? Isn’t what we do so-called ‘human nature’ and isn’t it still relating ‘natural’ processes? I believe that there is a lot to discover and define in order to answer these questions and explore what the ‘natural world’ is all about.
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