M is for Mercy

Mr. Blake says that “mercy has a human heart.” As a quality based on compassion for those in one’s care, mercy on a farm gets a lot of experience. It is frequently exercised in dispatching an animal when butchering, mercifully killing an injured duck whose leg has been pulled off by a turtle or any of the other seemingly endless ways of dying or being injured on a farm. Farming expands with a clear-eyed view the means and ways of compassion, strips the sentiment and leaves you with choices that cannot be put off on anyone else.

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Reading this weekend: Along the Enchanted Way: a story of love and life in Romania by William Blacker. It is a beautiful and ultimately heartbreaking story of so-called global progress that is worth picking up. And I just started Dimitry Orlov’s new book, The Five Stages of Collapse.