Wildflower Stew

by Dennis Fritzinger
A review

I fell in love with this book when I read the first three poems. The first poem, Ambassador Frog, really sounds like a frog.

he’s got important business,
down there in the bog –
he’s practicing speeches,
ambassador frog.

The second one, Angry Red Squirrel, sounds just like a chattering squirrel: he’s red. he’s angry. he’s a squirrel.

And the meandering, searching way a beetle goes along is reflected in the short stop and start lines of Beetle:

he rode the conveyor
belt along,
tumbling, getting up,
tumbling again,

I knew I was hearing the voice of a poet who had taken the time to sit down and listen and watch.

The poetry is many-faceted – the sadness of Intelligence, about agents from the future looking back at us and Invasion from a Friendly Planet, about invasive species: when they win everything else loses. The beautiful poem, Of Course which begins:

as we moved
further into their kingdom
of course we encountered them;
raccoon, possum,
red-tailed hawk, turkey vulture;

and ends:

it was then we longed for
our own place in the world,
and turned
to go back home:
it was no longer there!

And then there are the very funny poems – Support Your Right:

If I knew how to do it
I’d arm all the bears
so there’d be bear militias
in the mountains somewheres.

And the funny, bouncy The Prawn Speaks:

I used to be a kid prawn
now I am a big prawn

There is This is Your Planet Talking which comes off as poignantly true and Rivets Popping about the global airlines going down which sounds terrifyingly true. The poet expresses the natural world not as some ethereal romantic Eden but as the place where we live, the place we encounter in the natural world right now, as it is.

The book has delightful cover art of the earth as national park and sketches at the beginning of each section by Joye Chizek. The poems are in alphabetical order and the book itself is nicely put together by publisher Poetry Vortex Publishing

Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
By Rebecca Solnit
A Review

So now everyone wants change! But the question is what kind of change? In “Hope in the Dark” Rebecca Solnit looks at activism and what constitutes real change in the world we live in. She says she was moved to write this book by the despair that followed the failure of the peace movement to stop the war in Iraq. First she points out what the peace movement did achieve. It created a community of people many of whom had never marched, joined a group, signed a petition or donated to a cause. Those networks and websites and coalitions still exist.

“By living out our hope and resistance in public together with strangers of all kinds, we overcame the catechism of fear; we trusted each other; we forged a community that bridged the differences among the peace-loving as we demonstrated our commitment to the people of Iraq.” An estimated 30 million people demonstrated for peace on February 15, 2003, from the scientists at McMurdo Station in the Antarctic to the Inuit in the Arctic and everywhere in between. That has never happened before.

Solnit reminds us of how much has changed already as the new millenium has unfolded in stages: the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the students in Tiananmen Square challenging the Chinese authority, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela released after 26 years in prison and becoming the president of his country, the dismantling of the Soviet Union. A poet becoming president of Czechoslovakia and a labor union organizer the leader of Poland. Miracles and wonder.

She describes the Zapatista’s first appearance on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect because they recognized that NAFTA “was an economic death sentence for hundreds of thousands of small-scale Mexican farmers.”

The Fourth Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle that was issued two years later by the Zapatistas proclaimed: “A new lie is being sold to us as history. The lie of the defeat of hope, the lie of the defeat of dignity, the lie of the defeat of humanity . . . In place of humanity, they offer us the stock market index. In place of dignity, they offer us the globalization of misery. In place of hope, they offer us emptiness. In place of life, they offer us an International of Terror. Against the International of Terror that neoliberalism represents, we must raise the International of Hope. Unity, beyond borders, languages, colors, cultures, sexes, strategies and thoughts, of all those who prefer a living humanity. The International of Hope. Not the bureaucracy of hope, not an image inverse to, and thus similar to, what is annihilating us. Not power with a new sign or new clothes. A flower, yes, that flower of hope.”

Then there was the defining moment in 1999 in Seattle that made the global justice movement impossible to ignore. Fifty thousand people marched and ten thousand activists blockaded the downtown streets and forced the cancellation of that day’s meeting of the WTO, changing the whole dialogue of corporate globalization. “We are winning,” said the graffiti in Seattle.

And then, sadly, there was 9/11. Solnit points out that at first “there was a long moment when almost everyone seemed to pause, an opening when the nation might have taken another path.” Instead we were asked to go shopping and spy on our neighbors. Now we know they used 9/11 as justification to carry out a hidden agenda that had been there all along.

And through it all, sometimes feeling like a parallel world, the movement keeps building on what has come before. The wildlife are coming back in many places. The sock-eye salmon have returned in the hundreds of thousands to Lake Washington in Seattle, hawks and herons are sighted in Central Park; there are more buffalo on the plains now than at any time since the late 19th century. Bioremediation is not just a theory but a widely used practice and rivers are being reborn.

And consider this – the Internet was originally developed for use by the US military and now it is the greatest tool we have to transform the energy of conflict and domination into one of peace and justice. We are no longer stuck in an either/or world.

John Jordan, a Reclaim the Streets, global justice activist, wrote, “Taking power has been the goal at the end of the very straight and narrow road of most political movements of the past. Taking control of the future lies at the root of nearly every historical social change strategy, and yet we are building movements which believe that to ‘let go’ is the most powerful thing we can do – to let go, walk away from power and find freedom. Giving people back their creative agency, reactivating their potential for a direct intervention into the world is at the heart of the process.”

People ask me if I don’t get discouraged after all these years of being an activist, seeing how things are going. They say – what if it all goes to hell anyway? But I tell them that the game’s not over and even if we lose in the end, I want to live my life by what I believe. That’s why I appreciate books like “Hope in the Dark.” It’s like sitting around a campfire with old friends, sharing our stories and feeding our souls so we can stay strong and keep on keepin’ on.
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Rebecca Solnit has also written Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA Fellowship for Literature. Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco.

I think a lot about where our food is coming from and how it’s grown these days. Things like genetically modified organisms, mad cows, e coli spinach, tainted food from China, and monocultured organic crops grown by agribiz giants and delivered thousands of global-warming miles to a WalMart near you. Oh, and how about the mercury content in that fish. What to do?

Many people are turning to local farms. For everything. Not just some nice veggies but for meat, eggs, milk, cheese, grains and fish, too. I recently read Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about living for a year consuming nothing but locally grown and produced food. It was a really funny, interesting book; part cookbook, part gardening book and partly a study in sustainable community-based agriculture. So I was delighted to find Michael Abelman’s book, Fields of Plenty, subtitled “a farmer’s journey in search of real food and the people who grow it.”

It seems obvious that if we are to survive the catastrophic consequences of global warming one of the most important things we need to do is secure our food supply. We have to be able to feed ourselves without transporting food thousands of miles using fossil fuels. And this is something we can actually do.

Fields of Plenty is about a summer’s journey all over the United States visiting small farms. We are introduced to the people who work these family farms, how their personal lives are inseparable from the food they produce, their hands, hearts and creativity evident in each tomato, each plum and each round of cheese. It is a delightful book.

The farmers are as different as the Vietnam vet with the PhD in organic chemistry who brews a microbial wine to nurture his fig trees; the family farm that has been passed down through the generations in a little village in northern New Mexico with it’s crops of chilies and tomatoes and the traditional adobe oven in the yard; the Four Season farm in Maine that transformed itself from a hippie farm in the 70s to a successful year round supplier of produce (with the help of large greenhouses) and the chicken farmer in Virginia who describes himself as a Christian Libertarian capitalist environmentalist.

Then there’s the Falks, the cheese makers in Wisconsin, who “have built a national reputation with virtually no funds, a flock of sheep of their own chance breeding, a 1950 Allis-Chalmers tractor, and a milking barn built for stabling horses.”

Some of the farms he visits are small and sell only to local farmer’s markets, some are much larger like Harmony Farms in Wisconsin with a 440 member CSA (Community supported agriculture is a plan where members receive weekly boxes of produce in return for dues paid once a year. You can find your nearest CSA by going to http://localharvest.org). The farmers sell to local restaurants in many areas. There is a farm on Long Island owned by a famous chef and several greenhouses of produce growing on rooftops in Manhattan owned by the restaurant below.

The tour of farms is interlaced with an ongoing discussion of the political and philosophical realities of farming and rural living. Sitting in a mayor’s office in a small black farming community in Illinois listening to the mayor say, “We can’t separate the land and the people. We have to get these kids to appreciate the art of agriculture . . .” the author wonders . . . “there is so much good intention and insight here, I am struggling to understand how conviction will prevail in this battle to preserve alternatives for the next generation. I want some simple answers, some explanation as to the huge gap between insight and reality, between the inspiration I am hearing and the poverty and discouragement I see.”

The farmer in Maine, who is producing $100,000 a year on an acre and a half, says ” . . . the best land preservation, food-security and farm-ecology strategies lie in getting young people involved. . . . How is anyone going to take us seriously and how can we do what we want to do if we can’t make it financially?”

Fortunately, many of these farms are surviving because people in the local community appreciate the fruit of their labors and support them. As individuals we vote for either healthy, locally grown food or big box food from who knows where everytime we shop. Not everyone can have a garden but most of us can shop at farmer’s markets or join a CSA for at least part of our food. And we can encourage local grocery stores and restaurants to buy locally, too. Our future is up to us.

The people in this book are at the leading edge of the future of human life on this planet in my opinion. Unless we learn to feed ourselves simply and sustainably, not much else is going to work. Nothing gives me more hope than seeing what these farmers are up to these days. And did I mention there’s an abundance of really interesting looking recipes I’ll bet you can’t find anywhere else interspersed through the book? Enjoy!