Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
possible by engaging the spirit. Here I explore how this can be achieved from two
approaches. The first is to consider what spirituality and deep ecology can teach us
about soil management. The second is to discover what we can learn from using the
networking function of the soil as a metaphor of human activity and how these com-
bine to improve our approaches to sustainability through soil management.
11.2 SPIRITUALITY AND DEEP ECOLOGY
My first spiritual experience occurred at home, somewhat bored in the summer
holidays, at the age of 10. I was sitting on the path alongside the cabbage patch at
the furthest end of our extended garden in the brilliant sunshine of early summer.
Everything was still and quiet, and the fields around the garden were silent. The
walls surrounding the garden were low, broken down, and made up of the rounded
granite boulders typical of the North East of Scotland. These boulders attracted
lichens, which could give them a crusty, golden, dappled appearance. I looked at one
of these and then started to stare at it. I felt a growing sense of affinity with this stone,
as if it and I were as one. The feeling grew intense and then slowly faded. It was a
pleasant, warm feeling that I remember to this day.
Later, as a student, I had a similar experience over a longer time scale. During
the summer vacation, I would clear the weeds between ridges of turnip seedlings
using a tractor-operated mechanical weeder, for several days at a time. A pair of
discs guided by cutaway rollers straddled the rows of turnips and cut the soil and
weeds away from the sides of the ridges. Nobody seemed to like this job, as you had
to drive slowly and the rollers needed adjustment from the tractor seat to follow any
crop sown off center. But I loved it. The dark, moist soil carved away from the ridge,
leaving a sharp edge between it and the dry soil around the crop. I could never tire of
it, the smell of fresh earth, cut vegetation, and well-combusted diesel. And the sound
of the gritty swoosh of the cleaved earth and the purring of the untaxed engine.
I later realized that my feeling of being as one with stone in the garden and with
the soil during tillage resulted from my being fully aware of the present. I was liv-
ing in the now and experiencing “presence.” This is the basis of spiritual awareness
and is what is aimed for during meditation. It also shows the fundamental difference
between spirituality and religion. Spirituality is discovery by oneself, whereas reli-
gion is learning from the experience of others (Walsch 1999).
The memory of the “presence” never went away, though. I had established a
connection with the “spirit” in the landscape. The property of spirit being not just
within you and me but within everything and yet transcendent is called panentheism
(Macintosh 2008b). Communities and places also have this spirit. The spirit of a
place comes from the location, the presence of curves, the topography, the presence
of water, the remoteness, and the size. Moreover, if we accept Lovelock's description
of the Earth as a living superorganism, Gaia, it too has its own spirit. We are part of
this spirit and are held within the biological system of the Earth rather than being
on it. Boff (1997) believes that this results in everything being interconnected inex-
tricably to every other particle of matter in the cosmos in a common consciousness,
which includes the relationships between persons, continents, and cultures. Thus,
the entire cosmos can be seen as a superorganism. The astrophysicist Haisch (2006)
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