The author leans into his new job.
February 2006 | Journeys
Can You Dig It?
By Jason Mark
On our farm, the highlights of an ordinary week are modest accomplishments. My wheat came up, the bright green shoots appearing first in the furrows, where the rainwater gathers. We got the garlic weeded and mulched the bed tops with straw. The gopher trench around the strawberries is in, and the irrigation leak out by the pears is fixed. The rain came right when we needed it.
A year ago, my weekly excitements would have been different. I would have been pleased, say, by a campaign’s many media mentions, or great story in the Times. I would have been busy with conference calls to funders, strategy sessions, speechifying like any other professional activist. I likely would have been racing through an airport, hoping that the hotel had a good bar.
A year ago, I got voicemails from NPR and the Washington Post. Now I’m psyched if the seed company calls back.
Going from the fast-paced lifestyle of a political organizer — can you say 100 emails a day? — to the steadier rhythm of a farmer — wind up from the west — has been dizzying. At the same time, reminders of then-and-now keep me sharp with a new experience daily. When I wake before dawn to cook breakfast for a crew of 50 farm apprentices, I can imagine what it was like to be caught in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, a Beijing college professor, say, sent to harvest cabbages in the countryside. The change feels bizarre.
At first glance, the transition from urban professional to farm worker may appear labored. But, for me at least, the change had a clear arc. It is part of an intention to show how, by growing our own food, we can cultivate a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world.
For six years, I worked at the international human rights group Global Exchange. I was privileged to be there, and I took incredible satisfaction in knowing that I had done my small part to help sweatshop workers or to try to stop the war. But as I started to tackle one of the most intractable issues in our society — our reckless addiction to oil and the slow roasting of the planet — it became apparent that my energies would be best served actually making the transition off petroleum instead of merely talking about it.
The point is no less important for having been made before: It is long past time for the progressive movement to stop complaining about all that is wrong with this bloody world and get down to creating a vision for a better one. After all, people know the war is madness. They trust that global warming is happening. Many of them understand — at some level deep down — that the Party Lifestyle can’t go on forever. The problem is not that folks know too little, but that they know too much, and their knowledge has paralyzed them with fear because — age-old fact — change is always scary.
One of the best ways to prove that change isn’t so terrible is to show how it can be good for you. At least, it was for me. Sure, I worry about the weather and why the onions aren’t bigger, but living on a farm has left me the least stressed I’ve been in a decade. The psychic distance from city slicker to aspiring farmer may seem far, but my entrance into country life has had the unexpected effect of shrinking distance — I am closer to my food than I have ever been before, and it feels great. This is a journey that anyone can take. All you need is a good spade, a strong back, and a bit of ground.
So instead of all the gloom and doom, let’s illustrate how change can be positive. You know the drill: windmills instead of smokestacks, bike lanes in place of SUVs, and organic, local foods instead of packaged and processed crap. For me, working as a farmer is the best kind of activism I can imagine. It’s real and it’s tangible, the kind of progressive reform you can ask people to put right in their mouths. You want direct action? Dig a potato bed.
And in the digging, I bet you’ll find that there are more lessons in a spud than you ever imagined. Because farming, as I’ve come to realize, holds inside itself a certain ethic. Farming really is character building: You learn a lot when you struggle to earn your sustenance from the soil.
The farmer’s ethic is pretty simple, commonplace stuff. It’s about patience, for example, remembering that nature keeps her own counsel, and that you have to wait for ripeness. Humility also, because the best-laid plans are often waylaid by bad luck or bad weather, and the crop just might fail and the trees may not bear fruit. Which is why the farmer needs perseverance, to walk the fields on another cold morning. And why, with each new sunrise, I feel a sense of gratitude and tradition — the recognition that we inherited this earth from our parents, and are merely borrowing it from our children.
These values aren’t exclusive to country folks, of course. You can find them right where you live — in the lawn waiting to be planted over with tomatoes, in the weed patch behind your kitchen, in the cover of concrete dying to turn green. Growing your food, I have found, is not that hard. All you have to do is dig in.
Jason Mark is the co-author, with Kevin Danaher, of Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power (Routledge, 2003). He writes about agriculture issues for Common Ground.
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