From
afar on this mellow morning, the field of flowering buckwheat is a single mass.
Getting up close, concentrating the mind, attuning the ears, and focusing the
eyes, the plants are lush, their flowers intricate and colourful, imbued with
yellow and pink. And they are thrumming with insect activity. Butterflies,
bees, wasps, flies, gnats - all wild and busy - are gathering a food that is
transitory, delectable, and nourishing. There are no honey bees to speak of,
just their less glamorous wild cousins who have been around the planet for
eons, hummingly going about their business of collecting what nature offers.
They do not stray too much into the mega-fields of corn and soy, which are drenched
in danger for their digestive system. They survive on wild food; annual
plantings of organic buckwheat are but a tasty supplement to their regular
diet, as are clover, peas and vetch.
When
I pause for a few minutes to listen, watch and smell, it is akin to soaking up
the desert at dawn on a dewy morning, when miniscule flowers materialize for a
short time before the heat of the day takes hold and shrinks them away. These are
worlds which normally remain hidden, with nature going about its business of
flowering, feeding, providing, and reproducing, as it ever was.
As
William Blake mused in Auguries of
Innocence:
To
see a World in a Grain of Sand
And
a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold
Infinity in the palm of your hand
And
Eternity in an hour.
This
buckwheat was planted not only as food for live creatures above ground, but
also for the subterranean microbiota. In the coming days I will hitch up the
plow to the tractor and turn under the juicy stems and flowering tops, just
before they go to seed. This green manure will ameliorate the soil and suppress
at least some weeds, but the process also cheats the bees from further foraging
as they desperately collect their last feed of it.
Industrial
agriculture has truck-transported honey bees all over the continent to mass-pollinate
our cherished fruits like almonds, apples, cherries, oranges, lemons for our
mass consumption. In domesticating them so, they have been opened up to
ingestion of a number of lethal toxins, and now their numbers are plummeting,
their health terminally compromised. Is it hubris that prevents some from
believing that human health is not likewise affected? To offset the biocide
that is occurring in industrial and agricultural systems in our time, we need
to make sustained effort to protect the complex and rich diversity of life in
the wild by setting aside sanctuary wherever we can - in our backyards, in our
gardens, on our farms, across the landscape, in our rivers, lakes, and oceans. Survivors
of the onslaught so far, an untold
multitude of wild birds, insects, fish and amphibians still depend on us for
their very survival. Once forests are cleared, land is paved over and soils,
air and waterways poisoned and depopulated, we just have to go back and start
over by rewilding swathes of land and sea, trusting that some animal and plant
life remains to re-populate them after the shameful decimation we have perpetrated.
Nature has proven to be resilient in the past and will be so again, long after
we’re gone.
