Our Future Environment

I just ordered this book, The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka. It was published in an English edition in 1978 and is considered influential to various ‘back to nature’ farming and gardening movements.

Fukuoka worked as a research scientist in Japan specializing in plant pathology but he eventually left his career in pursuit of understanding ‘nature’ without scientific structure. After moving to his family farm in southern Japan, he developed what some call “do nothing farming”. In essence he tried to reproduce natural conditions as much as possible.

 ”All the wheat, corn, and other crops that are produced on big American farms may be alive and growing, but they’re not products of real nature or real agriculture. They’re manufactured rather than grown.”- Fukuoka

My interest in this ‘manual’ lies less in Fukuoka’s claim that we are separate from ‘nature’ because of our various practices and use of technologies and more in reading an East Asian account of what we typically conceive to be a Thoreau (and now Pollan) line of thought.  I’m looking forward to reading this classic and comparing it the dizzying array of other ‘back to the land’ accounts.

 

Filed under: farm, future, natural landscape on September 29th, 2009