Crossing the Internal Frontiers - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 171

food as commodities. This industrialization of a basic human connection
has undermined many things.
So, for 350,000 generations, we care and hunt, use and overuse, harvest
and replant, cut and re-seed, and from all this emerges the human condition.
The state of the world is an outcome of this relationship. For generations,
our effects were globally benign, though not necessarily locally benign.
Today, however, we are largely disconnected, and because of that we are
less likely to notice when the environment is further degraded, or when
valued resources are captured and damaged by others. We are satisfied
to know (or, at least we believe we are) that more and more food is being
produced. But if we lack the innate connections, we no longer question
when environmental and social problems emerge. We do not notice that the
extrinsic is damaged at the same time as the intrinsic withers away. Although
these breakdowns are symptoms of systemic disarray, there is still hope.
There is a great hero in landscape and community regeneration, and
he is the fictional creation of author Jean Giono, resident of Manosque
in France for most of his life. In Giono's The Man Who Planted Trees , Elzéard
Bouffier, shepherd and silent roamer of the hills and valleys of Provence,
helps to transform a whole rural system. Giono stands alongside all of the
'greats' of nature and wilderness writing, perhaps surpassing many since
his concerns are centred on the connection between land and its people,
and on what each can do for the other. According to translator Norma
Goodrich, Giono termed his confidence in the future espérance , the word
describing the condition of living in hopeful tranquillity. 1
In the fiction, the narrator comes upon Elzéard, who is planting acorns
amidst a desert landscape. There are no trees or rivers, houses are in ruin,
and a few solitary people eke out a meagre living. 'In 1913, this hamlet of
10 or 12 houses had three inhabitants. . . hating one another. . . all about, the nettles were
feeding upon the remains of abandoned houses. Their condition had been beyond hope.' The
unnamed narrator returns 5 years later, then again in 12 years, and finally
32 years after the original visit. During this time, Elzéard continues to
plant acorns, and seedlings of beech and birch, and the landscape is
steadily transformed. When the forest emerges, then the wildlife returns,
the rivers run freely, and the community is regenerated.
Everything had changed. Even the air. Instead of the harsh dry winds that used to
attack me, a gentle breeze was blowing, laden with scents. A sound like water came
from the mountains: it was the wind in the forest. . . Ruins had been cleared away,
dilapidated walls torn down. . . The new houses, freshly plastered, were surrounded
by gardens where vegetables and flowers grew in orderly confusion, cabbages and
roses, leeks and snapdragons, celery and anemones. It was now a village where one
would like to live. 2