that grassfed food is better for you, for a variety of reasons. So, 'recovering' grassfed food means regaining an important part of ourselves.
It means, I believe, recovering what is "normal" about being human - what worked for millennia and therefore is hard-wired into our essence. What we’re experiencing right now is not "normal" in many respects, as I think we’re beginning to discover, thanks principally to the amazing infusion of fossil fuel energy into our lives over the last century. Our notions of "normal" - including the idea of Progress - have been turned on its ear in very short order. That’s why some folks, such as organic farmers, have been "opting out" of the system for years, to use Joel Salatin’s term, preferring to 'recover' what worked before, only different.
I like to think of it as a new agrarianism, but with laptops and cell phones.
James Kunstler, author of 'The Long Emergency' describes this issue in starker terms, when he warns us that when the contraction of society hits we’ll be rooting around in the dustbin of history in an attempt to recover things we need - such as railroads and a sustainable agriculture. And he thinks we need to move quickly - he declared 2007 to be officially the start of the Long Emergency.
Restraint. Resilience. Recovery.
I think these Three R’s will dominate our lives in the 21st century. I could be wrong, however. Perhaps nanotechnology will save our hides, but I’m not betting on it. Nobody knows what’s coming precisely. That’s why I’ve decided to start a Chronicle: to track this important moment in human history – and to leave a
record behind for my children, and their children, about what happened.
In the meantime, I’ll borrow the poem that Wes Jackson used to close his "The Next 49 Years" essay. It captures this moment in time perfectly - as Wes no doubt had in mind:
For the Children, by Gary Synder (from his collection Turtle Island):
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
The steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children: stay together
learn the flowers
go light
