Over the next few weeks, the New Resilient will be featuring several articles penned by Jonathan Wright, a Calgary area farmer and co-founder of one of the city’s first community supported agriculture programs. Jon operates a zero-emission farm called Thompson Small Farm near Carbon, Alberta with his partner Andrea.
I used to be a conservationist. I was involved in a number of wildlife studies over the years for provincial, federal, and private concerns. I published scientific papers about the creatures I studied, and for awhile there I was feeling pretty important, in my own way. It took me a long time, but I finally came to see the truth that if ours were the kind of civilization where wildlife could be “saved,” conservation studies would not be needed, whereas given the kind of world we actually are, conservation studies are ultimately futile. Consumerism is, after-all, the antithesis of conservationism. The two things are mutually exclusive. You can’t suck and blow – consume and conserve – at the same time.
Currently, we are experiencing an escalation of the gradual collapse of industrial society, a process that really began sometime in the 1970’s. We are not suffering a “financial crisis” as some believe, nor are we in a simple “recession.” We are hitting the wall that is the inevitable terminus of any unsustainable way. We’re seeing the part of “unsustainable” I think people have the most trouble really internalizing. Unsustainable is not, for instance, synonymous with “undesirable” as I believe many secretly hold it. It’s a terminal condition. I expect this past year has given us the first big glimpse for many of what this truly means for us. It is being said that 45% of the world’s wealth was destroyed since last September. I think this statement is misleading. The wealth being cited is largely imaginary, ultimately trivial even, a figment of imaginations within the so-called financial industry. I strongly believe the figures representing our true wealth – our soils, our fresh water, our fish – are actually far more grim than this.
Systemic change is our only hope of salvation. And there is hope. If we can reform agriculture, if we can rediscover “Right Agriculture” – agriculture as it was practiced for millennia and as it was meant to be practiced – and in so doing return to being a fundamentally agrarian culture as opposed to an urban one, we will continue, and on a much healthier planet. Agriculture is, after-all, the foundation of civilization. It is what makes civilization possible at all. So it follows that we will not have a healthy civilization without healthy agriculture. With this in mind, my partner Andrea and I embarked on a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) venture serving Calgary.
Thompson Small Farm was launched in 2008 out of the belief that a return to a healthy, localized system of mixed farming using natural inputs and conducted on a human scale is one of the fundamental steps we must take if we are to restore the health of human and natural communities on this planet and live sustainably.
We are attempting nothing new here on our small farm. We don’t believe there is wisdom in embarking upon another risky and prohibitively expensive technological fix to solve the mistakes of previous ones. Alternatively, we believe there were moments on this planet when humankind had reached the ideal equations for comfortable sustainability of our species and others, but that we passed through these moments of endeavor mostly without notice. We now have the knowledge gained by hindsight, and with this knowledge lies the power re-adopt the abandoned elements that worked. To re-embrace and to put back into practice the simple yet elegant systems with their track records of centuries. In essence, Thompson Small Farm is an attempt to return to the days when farming was conducted for the benefit of the immediate community and the farmer himself, with as little reliance as possible on financial or industrial institutions.
To be continued…
