Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
personal communication, September 30, 2011). These emerging efforts echo the inte-
grative approaches of long-standing organizations like the Educational Concerns for
Hunger Organization (ECHO), which provides small-farm tropical agriculture devel-
opment help, appropriate technology, and forest stewardship assistance for workers
in 180 countries around the world,* based on core Christian values and scientifically
informed sustainability principles.
The examples highlighted in this section range from complex social traditions
evolved over millennia to emerging soil stewardship programs attempting to enhance
the care of soil in connection with religious and theological approaches. Two other
anecdotes are suggestive. The first is the case of Jewish farmers in the village of
Komemiyut during the 1952 Sabbath year. According to Jewish law and its biblical
sources, the principle of the Sabbath requires farmers to rest from their labors every
seventh day and every seventh year, leaving their fields fallow in the Sabbath year.
Komemiyut was one of the few villages that refrained from working the land that
year. At the end of the Sabbath season, the farmers could find only inferior seed to
plant. A Rabbi advised them to sow the seed anyway, even though it was 3 months
after neighboring villages had planted their fields. They did so, and that year, the fall
rains came late, the day after they sowed their poor seed. As a result, the neighboring
villages had a meager harvest, while their village had a bumper crop. This experi-
ence was seen as a fulfillment of the biblical promise of bounty (Kuber 2007).
A similar experience was observed among Tangier Island watermen in the
Chesapeake Bay in 1998. Following a religious revival wherein many crab fishermen
covenanted to respect the law and obey environmental regulations they had tradi-
tionally ignored, an unprecedented peel run (blue crabs soon to shed their hard shell)
supplied additional harvest that helped the watermen meet their quotas that year.
Their new observance of environmental guidelines had diminished their catch and
lost them money in the spring, but the unusually long run made up for it, and they
took their good fortune as a sign of divine affirmation of their faithfulness (Pohorski
1998; Emmerich 2009). These same watermen later traveled to visit Christian farm-
ers in Pennsylvania and invited them to make a similar covenant to be good stewards
of their land, which is within the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, in hopes that improved
farming practices in the watershed would help stabilize the health of the fishery and
the livelihoods of the watermen (Pohorski 2001). In both of these cases, stewardship
behavior was motivated directly by religious principles of restraint and an ethos of
obedience reinforced by the farmers' and watermens' religion.
Stories of indigenous cultures or of rural religious subcultures are sometimes set
aside as quaint anecdotes unfit for contemporary agricultural or land use practices.
But paying closer attention to examples like these and the principles that underlie
them may be precisely the sort of corrective to modern hubris that successful Earth
stewardship requires. The examples above of heroic or transformed stewardship eth-
ics were founded, spread, and reinforced through faith communities. Though these
* For more information, see http://www.echonet.org/.
As Tangier Island waterman James “Ooker” Eskridge says in the film: “I figure I made less money this
spring, but God more than made up for it by what He provided toward the end of the season” (Pohorski
1998).
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