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When I first moved rural I thought I was losing my mind. As a Good Environmentalist I knew plant based diets were the best for the planet.
But here in front of my eyes: veg fields as ecological wastelands and animal fields (even continuously grazed) as functioning ecosystems.
https://twitter.com/howemill/status/1380405782005563394
But here in front of my eyes: veg fields as ecological wastelands and animal fields (even continuously grazed) as functioning ecosystems.
https://twitter.com/howemill/status/1380405782005563394
It made me think of the quote: "who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?"
I dove deep into the metrics because what I was seeing didn't match with the Good Word that came down from the Very Important and Smart People telling us what to eat.
I dove deep into the metrics because what I was seeing didn't match with the Good Word that came down from the Very Important and Smart People telling us what to eat.
I realized the metrics were all wrong: problems of both seeing like a state and hyper-rational measurements that don't capture the beautiful chaos of diverse ecosystems.
And as I looked around it was plainly obvious that this plant v animal ag thing was a joke. Any tilled plant field is a war zone. Nothing lives there but a monocropped plant. The farmer must kill everything else in order for it to survive.
But in a field with animals (even with worse practices like continuous grazing): perennial grasses hold the soil, which catches, retains and cleans water. There are bugs and bees, amphibians, rodents, reptiles and so many birds.
So when City People with Big Brains come in and pass judgments based on their Very Smart and Right data you can see why rural, small scale, family farmers would get resentful. The conclusions the scientists are drawing are ridiculous and they also impact rural people's lives.
Since getting radicalized into the ecosystem benefits of perennial + animal ag, I have since softened on tilling ag, but advocate for it only on the smallest of scales.
The point is that when we try to scale our understanding to something like global land use and agriculture we literally lose the plot so much we advocate for the *opposite* of what we should.
We need to center local, small scale, contextual and embedded knowledge and be *very skeptical* of datasets that claim to have measured the whole world and to have figured out causality.
Enough with the "but muh, muh, muh data!" https://twitter.com/RizomaSchool/status/1360557196426240004?s=19
One way to combat this is to require students spend time doing hands on work like on small farms, skilled trades. https://twitter.com/RizomaSchool/status/1372563230422409222?s=19
