Only Reconnect - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 110

inspired by nature. When there's no one left out there except people whose days in
the land are spent twenty feet off the ground in air-conditioned cabs of tractors. . .
who will remember how to be on the land? Who will remember how to listen to the
land? 23
With the increasing scale and centralization of modern agriculture have
come the standardization and simplification of whole landscapes. Land-
scapes with diversity have many functions and niches, but monoscapes are
poor performers. 24 They have lost vital ecological functions, and therefore
are less resilient. Put simply, monoscapes do one thing well, and that is
produce abundant food. But they are fundamentally unhealthy and
disconnected systems of food production. They arise because certain
individuals are able to claim the common benefits of landscape for
themselves, with few checks and balances. Diverscapes do so much more -
they jointly produce food, support people's livelihoods, and preserve
nature as a result of economic activity, not as a sideline. Diverscapes are
multifunctional and polycultural, full of uncertainty, mysteries and differ-
ence. As farmer and writer David Kline has put it: 'I believe we need some
unconcreted mysteries. We need the delight of the unknown and the unexplainable in
nature.' 25 The only mystery in modern farming is that we have failed to
understand the associated environmental and health costs.
One sad result of the modernist project is increasing place neutrality. This
is a beguiling vision, as it appears to offer independence, the ability to
come and go as you please, without reference to the cloying and parochial
ties of places and localities. At the same time, though, such place neutrality
implies all the facilities but none of the heart, none of the natural connect-
edness between people, and between people and land. 26 In this modern
world, should we bother about those who say they have important con-
nections to a place? Why not just let market forces dictate, and gather up
our belongings and move whenever necessary? Today, it takes the same
amount of time to fly half way around the world as it did a century ago
to travel 50 kilometres. So why not pull up these roots and make the best
of opportunity?
There is one simple reason, and that is because of our desire to have
a place we can call home. Home, as Deborah Tall puts it, 'is where we know
- and are known - through accumulated experience' . 27 It is not something that
happens quickly. It gives us stability and meaning. It is where we have best
established connections with people and with place. It is where we return
after long journeys. It is where the food on our plate has some local
identity. For all these reasons, it is not a commodity to be traded easily.
People relocated from condemned slums often suffer badly because
they feel that they have lost their real home. Each year, one fifth of all