Category Archives: Climate Change

Killing Rabbits While Reading Poetry

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All men kill the thing they love

By all let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

                                    —Oscar Wilde

 

I came around the corner in my farm truck and there it was. The rabbit ran almost all the way across the road, but an oncoming truck sent it back into my path. Then it was over — a couple of thrashes and it lay still, carrion for any nearby buzzard. Around the next corner I braked, stopped, and moved a box turtle to the other side of the road. Such is the state of small mercies on a small East Tennessee highway.

This particular trip, I was dashing into Sweetwater, after a nap, to pick up some diesel, in the truck, for my tractor. Because more fuel was needed to cut the hay, to feed our sheep over the next winter. While driving over rabbits I listened to “Crazy Town,” a new podcast from the Post Carbon Institute decrying the absurdity of our faith in a pro-growth, fossil fuel­­–dependent future on a planet of finite resources (even if partially powered by “sustainable” energy). I shook my head sagely in agreement as I listened, earning an indulgence against the sins of this life. Fortunately, these indulgences are for now only $2.49 each a gallon.

Earlier in the week a post on eating lamb fries resulted in a couple of vegetarians unfriending me on Facebook. They can handle my omnivorish ways but not my nose-to-tail (or should I say, cheek-to-balls) culinary choices. For in our modern hierarchy of privilege and separation from our sins against nature, consuming testicles apparently ranks as a much more serious crime than devouring steak.

Last weekend, after helping me replace the expansion bolts on the sickle bar mower, some friends stayed to dine with us. One of them defended the Green New Deal as we ate farm-raised catfish from Mississippi that had been conveniently delivered to our nearby Walmart. We all agreed that the plan and the deal were next to useless, having been predicated on the same notion that growth is both sustainable and desirable. “But still,” one of them said, “it is better than nothing.”

Last month one million-plus students around the world went on strike against our inability or unwillingness to do anything about climate change. They caught rides, drove, and used mass transit to attend rallies; they posted on social media and waved signs. Reporters jetted to far-flung locations to catch the latest soundbites of sincere Scandinavians and city dwellers in 125 countries in order to rebroadcast the urgent message to an aging and dwindling audience of people who still watch TV.

Between April 2017 and April 2018, Tennessee beekeepers lost 75 percent of their colonies.

We each kill rabbits.

All men kill the thing they love

By all let this be heard….

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Reading this weekend: Nathan Coulter (Berry), Rocket Men (Kurson)

Listening to this weekend: Crazy Town podcast

Earth Day 2019

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I wanted to write something clever about all that has been lost, about what a miserable hash we have made of this beautiful planet. Because, we have. And we should be ashamed.

But I spent too much time listening to a mockingbird last evening. He sat on a pole and sang an endless song, never repeating. I tried many times to get up and leave. Then he would start anew another verse I had yet to hear. That I needed to hear.

After his concert and my chores completed, I came inside and sat at my keyboard to begin to type. But no words came to mind, nothing typed out. An empty page.

How could this small feathered creature express with skill, such joy? What was his secret?

Because I really need to know.

I’m Sorry for Your Loss

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veteran of King’s Mountain, buried in a small nearby cemetery.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, we used to run, excited and laughing, through clouds of fluttering Eastern monarch butterflies. Thousands would float around our faces as we climbed the mimosa tree in my front yard or rode our bikes down Royal Street. It was awe-inspiring, something we sought out, immersing ourselves in those delicate migrations.

Today the monarchs are all but gone. That sad fact hit home this week as I read of the 97 percent collapse of the Western monarch population. No number of inspired “Ten Things You Can Do” articles, no amount of milkweed replanting, will revive a species once it falls into the past. No child ever again will have the heady experience of dancing with the monarchs (if today’s and tomorrow’s children were even inclined to venture outside their rooms).

It seems to me that how we grieve and how we learn to honor and acknowledge a passing are perhaps more important than ever, even as they become a lost practice.

Some years back, I was driving on a two-lane highway in North Georgia, my boss in the passenger seat. Rounding a curve, we came upon an oncoming funeral procession. I immediately pulled over onto the grass shoulder. My boss looked at me with a mixture of alarm and bemusement. “What in the hell are you doing?” she asked.

It was one of those moments of realization when two people of the same age and the same country realize they are vastly separated by different cultural norms. That she was raised in the larger cities of New Jersey might be an easy explanation. But for me, pulling over for a passing funeral seems a universal courtesy, a simple and powerful way to acknowledge a loss to an unknown family, an act of community. To her? It was a frivolous waste of time.

Over the years I have encountered an individual here and there who has never been to a funeral. As the years passed, this missing out on a collective rite began to weigh on their spirit, consciously or not. They never became members of this club that we all are a part of. Now they stand outside of community, noses pressed to the windows, spectators to one of life’s essential cycles. They have become afraid of being a participant in that oldest of rituals and, consequently, afraid of death itself.

In my childhood, there were many weekends and evenings when we boys put on our suits, polished our shoes, and went to a funeral or visitation. Learning to view a casket, stand in line, then walk up to a member of your community and say “I’m sorry for your loss” was expected. And it was important. We were not excused for being too young.

The practices of expressing loss and carrying out acts of solidarity with grieving neighbors are far older than our written memory. They are lessons, if learned, that expand the narrow community of friends and family. Maybe it is not too much to imagine honoring monarchs as our kith. They have certainly served as our canary, our token alarm bell, ringing amid the depressing catalog of all the other global declines in flora and fauna.

Are we now so afraid of being called out for acknowledging loss that we scorn the common decencies? Each tolling bell that greets the ear marks a procession that left a funeral home long days ago. That body it carries is now for the earth. We should stop and remove our hats as it passes. We should go to the bedroom, open the wardrobe, put on our best outfit, polish our shoes. Stand in a pasture or on a hilltop or climb among the spindly branches of a mimosa and practice saying, sincerely, in the open air, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Indeed, I’m sorry for our loss.

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Next week all smiles and sunshine, I promise.

Treading Water

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Life on the farm has always presented a comforting predictability. A seasonality of changes: winter’s arrival of lambs, marketing of the hogs come spring and fall, the early spring budding of fruits and vines, planting of the first cabbage beginning in late February or early March.

We have built our farming practices around that predictability, erring on the side of caution as suits the natural conservatism of the farmer. We know that September and October are the driest months and that lime can then be spread safely on our hills, and we act accordingly. We have learned to carry over enough hay from the previous year to bed the animals during the cold months. We reserve stores of firewood; we leave pastures fallow. We plan two timetables for the garden starts just in case one planting is lost to weather, disease, or pests. Virtually every decision we make is based on the recurrent rhythms that vary year to year, though always within a framework that is understood.

But now come the unpredictable droughts and deluges. The earth is changing right before our eyes, and we can no longer count on a time to every purpose. The changes cannot be ignored, yet there is only so much adaptability we can accommodate. True, as a small farm we’re able to shift course more easily, even as the smaller boat turns quicker on its keel than the barge. But in times of extreme and erratic turbulence, a different direction does not guarantee entry into a safe harbor. The history of our species teaches us that lesson, and the older geological record hammers the message home with humility.

Friends and family express amazement at our farm’s independence and productivity. Indeed, we do produce all of our meat, most of our vegetables, some of our fruit, and we’ve done so for nearly two decades. Yet this small diverse farm, like everything else on earth, is tied into a vast web of interlocking connections of history, climate, culture, politics, supply chains, and industrial growth. It is impossible to be otherwise. Each external connection impacts our decisions and limits us in ways we only pretend to fathom. Our independence and security are as illusory and elusive as a foothold in the barnyard slurry.

As a farmer, I tend to think in terms of fragility. The newborn lamb, chick, piglet, all need nourishment, water, and warmth to survive and grow. Those are the universal requirements of life. Remove one of the three and fragility is introduced into the equation: death becomes the inevitable outcome. A few days past, I entered the barn only to find a dead lamb, a two-week-old lamb that only half an hour earlier seemed to be flourishing, now unexplainably lifeless, now food for carrion. Fragility.

It is what that word “fragility” represents that most scares me, keeps me awake at night. Its implications ripple out and shake history, culture, and that larger unknown, our sheltering climate (which more and more seems to have been just a window in time). They augur an ocean, churning up waves that threaten to toss us off our little moored raft, into heaving waters, treading until we can tread no more.

A November Morning

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It’s 6 a.m., long before sunrise, and I’m dressing in the dark, moving quietly so as not to wake Cindy. Downstairs, two of the three dogs sleep inside at night. Max stays indoors because he’ll bark at any and all random night noises if left outside. Our newest addition, Buster, a rat terrier, stays in a crate because he is still a puppy. With his keen ears, he is already scratching at his kennel by the time I switch on a light.

I open the front door and both dogs barrel out into the darkness. I follow and, stepping off the porch, all three of us relieve ourselves in the front yard, sharing a companionable silence. Because, it must be said, taking a whizz outside whenever and mostly wherever the urge strikes is one of the great joys of rural life.

I leave them to their morning rounds and go back inside to fix some coffee. Once made and poured, I settle in with my mug and read a couple of essays in The New Yorker. Bill McKibben has written a well-crafted piece on climate chaos. But, in typical fashion, he closes by burying the doom and gloom in a ridiculous bit of “here is what we can do.” A little like being on the Titanic, when, with the frigid North Atlantic lapping at your feet, the bartender says, “Boys, the drinks are on the house.” It may make you feel better, but it isn’t going to change the way the day ends.

Footsteps sound on the floor overhead, and I hear the window blind in the bedroom being raised. “He’s back!” Cindy calls down to me. “He” is a regal 10-point buck warily making his way across the upper pasture. I get to the kitchen window in time to see him crest the hill just as the sun comes up, heading southeast to northwest, as he has most mornings since late summer.

Of course, now it is hunting season, and his usual morning constitutional, if continued, will take him into the November gun sights of the misters Strickland and Scarborough, neighboring farmers who are both avid deer hunters. It doesn’t bother me, since I do plenty of butchering myself, but our dogs catch sight and their barks cause him to slow and reverse course. Good choice, sir. Enjoy the rest of your day. The guns stay silent.

I pour out some feed for the three dogs. Becky, our English shepherd sentinel, has made an appearance after a night patrolling the barnyard. Buster, true to his breed, is afflicted with early-morning ADD. He grabs a bite of kibble, runs off the porch to look at a leaf, runs back up the steps and takes another morsel, runs off the porch to look at some goose poop…. Meanwhile, Cindy or I must stand guard to keep the other dogs, who remain laser-focused on the untended bowl of chow even as they wolf down their own breakfast, from inhaling his rations.

A similar pattern repeats itself in the woods with the feeding of the six hogs. Each is worried that the other is going to get more food, even though I’ve placed it in six separate piles. In a rustic game akin to musical chairs, they individually circle from pile to pile, pausing long enough to displace another hog, who in turns moves to the next pile, where it displaces another hog, who…. And round and round they go, snatching quick bites on the run.

I finish my feeding chores, then spend some time shoveling out the manure and bedding from the livestock trailer before returning to the house for breakfast. Cindy and I chat over oatmeal about our individual and collective to-do lists. Agreeing that weighing the market lambs will require both of our attention, we finish our breakfast, then grab our coats and head out to the barn.

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Reading this weekend: The Diary of a Bookseller (Bythell).