‘Industrial wheatscapes have many ghosts’

One of the most interesting things I have been involved in over the last eighteen months or so has been a private discussion group on what might be called, broadly, the ‘more than human’ futures. I can’t say much more than this, because the group has quite strict rules on attribution, but I should acknowledge that it is hosted by the Sustainability Accelerator, and that the participants are a mix of futurists, academics and others interested in the area.

At a recent meeting, we invited Maya Marshak, who is an artist who works on themes relating to agro-ecology, to share something relating to her work. Maya has been a member of the group since coming to the Delfina Foundation (and supported by Chatham House) as an an artist in residence.

Sharing the text

With the permission of Maya and the group’s convener, I am sharing here the text she read to us to start the session off.

The opening instruction as we started the session was that we were to imagine ourselves standing in the middle of a wheatfield. I recommend reading it out loud to yourself, if you can.

——-

Industrial wheatscapes have many ghosts
these ghosts are;
the ancestor wheats,
their relationships with people and places and the weather and history
the movement across time and geography,
the grains and wild grasses that grew alongside and in-between,
the oats, barley, sorghum, and millet,
the places that were home,
the small farms
the thriving ecosystems
the wild flowers and wild edibles
the plants that weren’t ‘weeds’
the recipes for lost or rare grains
the memories of those recipes,
the animals, confined to hedgerows and the margins, the hares, and the hedgehogs,
the endangered ronosterveld, the spider orchid and riverine rabbit
the sounds, of the tree sparrow, the insects drowned out by the scale of industrial land use,
the balance in the soil,
the nutrients that are never replaced,
the tall wheats that would fall over in the wind and their long roots and their relationships with the soil minerals
the scythes and the hard work of harvesting
the tools and practices that were deemed inefficient or unwieldy or slow,
the oxen,
the mills,
the ideas and knowledges and things that mattered,
that were undermined,
regarded as useless,
and unproductive

These ghosts move among the now living things,
these are
the priorities of yield and profit,
the rational scientific decisions,
the straight lines,
the wheat organisms that match machines
the short straws that don’t lodge in the wind,
the short roots that match these short straws
that suck up nutrients in different ways,
that don’t know the soil organisms,
the pesticides,
the fungicides,
the herbicides,
of herbicide-resistant plants,
the alopecurus myosuroides casting its tall shadows
the breeding technologies,
the research stations,
the ownership of seeds,
the dispossession,
the seeds in seed banks,
in vaults,
the field trials,
the Chorleywood Baking Process,
the instant yeast,
the white bread,
the abundance,
the waste,
the fumigated silos,
the saved time,
the saved costs,
the costs
the silence of monocrops
and the noise,
the predictability,
the unpredictability,
the changing weather these days,
the fear of drought, of too much rain,
the rhetoric of seed companies,
the dialogue on food security,
the control,
the reclaimed seed,
the planting of it,
and sharing,
and finding patterns again,
and relationships
and reconnections.

(Maya Marshak)

——-

‘Hedgerows and margins’

I’m not going to share the discussion that followed here, other than to say two things. The first is that the line on “hedgerows and margins” sparked a conversation about what had been squeezed to the edges by modern agriculture, which is in its different ways a creature of enclosure and a pressure to produce food for a growing global population. People, animals, insects, birds, and so on.

This linked to a conversation about the 19th century English poet John Clare, whose work was about the land and who was, possibly, driven to madness by land enclosures.

Without being too heavy-handed, it was a reminder of the ways in which approaching subjects in a completely different way, with very different stimulus, can generate rich outcomes when handled carefully.

At the end of the conversation, we were invited to walk from the middle of the wheatfield and pick up an object from it as we went.

—-

A version of this article is also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.