Expect/Accept or How to live on the Planet

I just wrote about how, in the context of the farm, yield represents stress, and perhaps there’s a different way to look at both consuming food and growing it.

Then again, this is certainly true for how we live on the planet, for everything we do. The desire to make more and more predictable, the idea of growth — only in what we value, the myths and imaginations we create, optmize to maximize for — this teaches us to expect an ever more limited, abstracted, precise and intolerant version of the world.

Our species is an evolutionary byproduct, really. All that we needed — food, energy, water, were byproducts in perpetual cycles since we evolved with and through them. Perhaps not by design, but as a default, we accepted them, the variability in them, and the abundance in them. Life not only thrived across the planet but expanded. And in its folds, we did too.

Then we chased, created and chased more — expectation.

No longer accepting of what it, we modified ecosystems, geography, aquifers, everything. Still dissatisfied, we mined ever deeper. And then accelerated it. We changed land use at a crazy scale, then accelerated it.

The predictability we sought became a moving target — a mrigtrishna if you will — ever further, ever more outside our grasp. With the larger chase came larger fears, and the need to change and destroy more of a world earlier in balance and a dynamic equilibrium.

The acceptance of the magic, the byproducts, the variability all disappeared. The expectation grew, exponentially.

So in the city, so in the farm, so of everything.

As we — somewhat — understand the price we’re starting to pay for this and realize the folly of our chase, acceptance has to find space deep in our imaginations again — individually, socially, structurally. We have to move a lot more towards our needs being built through and as byproducts rather than as products with poor end of life outcomes for life on the planet.

At the farm, in my personal life, I’m trying to incorporate acceptance a lot more. It’s a journey that I need, but we all need too.