Welcome to Friday Night at Carry. I'm Bill Slussinger, President of the Institute. It's good to see all of you back.
Beginning of winter and another one of our lectures tonight.
Tonight we have Janice Ray, a well-known author from the Southeastern U.S. to speak to us on her new book, The Seed Underground.
Janice grew up in Baxley, Georgia, which is a very small town close to Waycross, Georgia, which is at the north end of Okefenokee Swamp.
Has described her childhood very wonderfully in her first book, The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, which both reflects on Baxley and on the problems that long-leaf pine ecosystems are under threat down there.
Now, I have to admit, when I was growing up and went down to Florida, you know, my grandmother used the word cracker with some kind of the way my sister from Manhattan now refers to upstate New York.
It's kind of in the same category.
So here was The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, and Janice describes it here, the origin of the word cracker, and I now understand it, and it has a whole different feeling than what I was used to hearing when I was growing up.
So that was my first education on Janice. This book won the American Book Award, it won the Writers Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center, and has led to several other delightful books, the most recent of which you will talk to us about tonight, The Seed Underground,
in which Janice has looked very carefully at what we're losing in the heritage of agriculture in our culture with the rise of genetically modified crops and seeds and patented seeds and the replacement of natural seeds passed down from generations to generations by seeds that are owned from corporations.
And I found in reading The Seed Underground a real passion for seeds in all aspects. I remember collecting as a kid kind of thing. I can never understand why maple seeds didn't germinate until spring.
They had to go through a winter, and Janice has understood all of that in writing this book and has described passion for seeds. That is just wonderful in its pages.
So she's going to talk to us about the new book The Seed Underground tonight. It will be available outside along with the Ecology for Cracker Childhood, courtesy of Merritt Bookstore, our normal partner on the book signing evenings.
And I just have to say that in reading this, the part that I had to think of a single sentence that captured what this whole book said to me, take off my glasses at this age to read it, but seeds are the bridge between us and the sun, the hemiseries of the solar system, bundles of cosmic energy.
I think we'll feel that as tonight's talk progresses. Janice Red.
If you haven't heard what's happening with seeds, let me tell you, they're disappearing about like everything else. You know the story already. You know it better than I do. The forests and the songbirds, the Appalachian mountains, the fish in the ocean.
But I'm not going to talk about anything that will make us feel hopeless or despairing because there's no despair in a seed. There's only life waiting for the right conditions, sun and water, warmth and soil to be set free.
Every day, millions upon millions of seeds lift their two green wings.
What do a seed and a planet have in common? Both are rounded, smooth, multicolored. They hold life. They are alive. A cosmology of seeds.
Each a heavenly body sailing through the sky, except all the seed planet wants to do is find a patch of water, a cloud, and then start to germinate and keep sailing, looking for a patch of ground, which is simply a planet.
Imagine Venus turned into a morning glory seed, lying in a packet in its chill, and how, when you finally plant the strange jewel, it becomes of a dazzling flower with three moons of its own.
Imagine saving a world by saving its seeds.
Thank you all so much for having me to the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. I am so delighted to be in the Hudson, in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York, all the way from southern Georgia.
I've been on a little farm about an hour inland from Savannah, the nearest town is a little village called Greensville, Georgia. I'm extremely honored to be here.
As a nature rider, I followed the work of scientists at the Cary Institute, and I followed amazing people who live in this valley.
I'm especially grateful that you came out so few days before Thanksgiving to be together and to hear what I have to say and see your friends and further the conversation about what we're going to have to do about losing the world as we do it.
I have been a nature rider for the past 25 years. Like Bill told you, my first book was Ecology of a Cracker Child, trying to bring attention to this ecosystem of long-leaf pine.
I want to read you, mostly I'm not yacking at you tonight, I'm going to read from a couple of sections of the book, but let me just, even as I was becoming a nature rider, this is one paragraph,
thinking wildness and spending halcyon days walking through the remaining tracks of long-leaf pine flatwoods. I battled a piece of myself that was happiest, not on wilderness, but on farm. I had come to think of a societal continuum that begins with wildness on one end,
hunting and gathering for food, moving through agrarianism, settling down, attending a piece of land, then through industrialism, an urban life, into technologism, whatever that lifestyle is.
Attractive land could sustain a forest, or a farm, or a manufacturing plant, or a bank of computers operated by robots. If wildness was on the left, I wanted all movement in terms of land used to be from right to left, always toward wilderness.
But though my hope for land is that it tends toward wild, the truth is that I'm happiest somewhere in the middle. My friend Rick Bass once said to me, what I would want after working in the fields would be to step away from the plow
and enter an old forest where I could walk and rest at the end of a day of hard work. I wrote this book for two main reasons, and one was I had become extremely passionate about the loss, not just of biodiversity on the planet, but also
for agro-diversity. In 2004, two scientists at the University of Georgia did a study in which they compared varieties of vegetables available commercially in 1901 and 1902, the USDA had put out an inventory, with varieties and seed catalogs in 2004.
And they found that 94% of the varieties of 1901 and 1902 were no longer available in 2004. What happened to them? You know that for the past 100 years we've been moving toward industrial agriculture in this country.
With the so-called green revolution, we have moved toward mechanization of ag, standardization of our crops, shipability. We have bred varieties not for nutritional value or taste, but for beauty on the shelves, for how you put ag, and on and on and on.
This meant, so during the 1930s, we introduced hybrid seeds into this country. Farmers like my grandfather were very happy to have an answer to Stuart's bacterial wilt, which had plagued them.
And they stuck their open pollinated, standard, vintage, family heirloom, place-adapted seeds onto back shelves of garden sheds, went down to the feed stores and began to buy hybrid seeds.
If you're growers, you understand that if you plant an F1 hybrid, a first F1 standing for first filial cross, then if you plant those seeds, save the fruit, save its seeds, and then replant those.
What they produce is not the fruit that you originally planted. They revert back to any number of ancestral strains used in the breeding process.
And then in the 1990s, 1996, we introduced genetically modified organisms into the food supply, which led us even further toward the loss of food sovereignty. No longer are we the caretakers of seeds, but the renters and the leasers of seeds.
Now you have to remember that flowering plants first appeared on planet Earth about 100 million years ago. Humans, a couple hundred thousand.
For our entire tenure on the face of the Earth, we humans have been evolving with flowering plants.
We date agriculture usually back 12,000 years. Even in this country, in North America, we can easily date back back to 23,000 years.
And then in other parts of the world, and I know this is pretty radical thinking, 70,000 years, if you define agriculture as the manipulation of plant stuff so that they increase food for us.
70,000 years we have been caretaking these flowering plants that have given us through diversification and domestication and natural hybridization, and not so natural hybridization, a cornucopia of food.
We have more food available to us now than ever before, and yet we're losing food. So you have to ask, how can I say something that's so contradictory?
How could we be losing food? We are losing varieties of food.
Now E. L. Wilson in the future of life, he talks about what crops we actually depend on. There are about 250,000 plant species on Earth.
We, 90% of the food that humans eat come from about 100 of those plants. Three grains, three crops constitute 87% of all of our diets. That would be wheat, corn, and rice.
Wheat alone meets 23% of the world's food energy needs. So as Dr. Wilson said, a very small number of plants stand between us and starvation.
You know from conservation ecology that the more diverse any system is, the less chance of its collapse.
So look at what happened to Ireland in the mid-1800s. 90% of Irish families were growing the longer potato. One variety of potato, 90%. It was a very prolific potato. A planting one acre could feed an entire family for a year.
But then it began to suffer from late life. The tubers would rot in storage, not in the garden. And what that led to was widespread famine and the diaspora of an entire people.
So that's what we're facing. We're facing a loss of agro-diversity, a genetic erosion, 75% according to the UN of plants worldwide are lost.
We had thousands and thousands, you know, we've evolved with wheat. We have thousands and thousands of wheat varieties traditionally.
And right now, most of the wheat grown in this country is not in Grimes. There are, the man who wrote Wheat Belly, he says we're already in a famine.
And what he's talking about is the intense rise in the number of gluten intolerant people. Celiac disease is tied to the way we breed wheat.
We're breeding it to be higher in protein, which is actually more allergenic to humans.
And so a lot of people find that if they go to Italy and to visit and eat bread while they're there, they're not actually gluten intolerant.
Or if they return to eat some traditional wheat like Camelot or Spelt or Icon.
One interesting thing about wheat before I stop is there's a bakery in Chicago that will actually find traditional and ancient wheat from your homeland.
If you came from Russia or from Israel or Ethiopia and will bake bread for you from the ancient wheat from your homeland.
Isn't that a beautiful idea?
The other thing that really concerns me is the loss of taste. I love food and I love the amazing taste.
And we're losing agro-diversity. We surely are losing these tastes. Never imagined.
I have three kales growing in my garden right now.
A Losanado, a dinosaur kale. I see all these ends in my eyes and so I know I'm talking to a bunch of five people here.
Dwarf Blue Curl, the kind that you usually see as a garnish on salad bars.
And I'm growing an odd, open pollinated, heirloom variety called Greenpeace, which is a red Russian variety.
If I steamed all three varieties of kale and blindfolded you, they would taste, each one would taste very different.
The red Russian is actually the most tender and the sweetest. I mean the Greenpeace.
The USDA will give you a nutritional profile of kale that says it contains this much vitamin A, for example.
But what it doesn't say is that variety by variety, the nutritional profile of kale or any other food differs.
Don Davis, a scientist and professor at the University of Texas in Austin, he's been studying the decline of nutrients in food.
He looked at USDA figures from 50 years ago and now.
And he found reliable statistical declines in nutrients and minerals across the board.
38% decline in riboflavin, 20% decline in vitamin C, and on and on and on.
Now there are two reasons. One is the way we're breeding our varieties of vegetables.
And the second is the way we're growing food.
So when I decided to write a book about seeds, I was as much writing a book about agriculture and how we're going to feed ourselves as anything.
That we are living a bit of a broken agricultural system.
I was walking with Sylvia DeVos, a seed cybercrime partner in Vermont, through her gardens.
And she said something to me, so beautiful.
I'm going to just read it to you.
If I can find it quickly, it's here at the start.
She said, here, I'm not even going to try.
The system is so broken, she said, not only broken, but destructive and self-destructive.
By system, I figured she meant the agricultural or food system.
Maybe she meant the entire political system, but I didn't ask.
I just listened.
I see in activism a kind of futility, she said.
The real power is in doing.
The real power is in making the system irrelevant.
That means non-participation in the existing broken system.
Now, I want to tell you the second reason that I wrote this book.
Not just to bring attention to agro diversity.
There's three reasons.
So the second one is going to be very quick.
I thought that we had come to understand organic.
The food grown without chemicals is healthier for the human body and for the soil and water of our landscapes.
We've come to understand locally that food grown closer to home puts fossil fuels into the atmosphere.
Fuel emissions of fossil fuels.
But I think the time has come to understand seeds.
Three multinational corporations control over 50% of the global seed supply.
Monsanto, DuPont, two U.S. companies, and Singenta, a Swiss company.
We've lost sovereignty over seeds.
And the third reason is that as a nature writer, you and I both have seen a lot of travesty, a lot of degradation.
And it gets hard to watch that over a lifetime.
To see something decline and decline.
And the number of cerulean waters, warmlers, continues to decline.
That gets pretty dreadful.
I've been an author.
The ecology came out in 1999.
So for all that time, I've been traveling around speaking at universities.
And 10 years ago, when I was speaking to young people, they would be talking about reintroducing wolves to the Adirondacks.
And can we say why do you come to Yellowstone Wildlife Corridor?
Or are we going to be able to save the manatee, or the Florida panther, or the right whale, or the ivory-billed red-cockaded woodpecker?
Sorry.
Not going to be able to save the young one.
The conversation over time changed.
When I speak now to those students, they're talking about lobbying their cafeterias to go trailers.
So a kid has to pick up his plate and his glass of water and go to the table.
And then if he wants an apple and a salad, come back for it.
So trying to do something about a 40% of food in this country that just simply gets served and wasted.
They're talking about farmer's markets and community gardens.
I just spent this week at St. Lawrence University in Canton.
And on Monday night, they invited me to something called Campus Kitchen, where the students grew a garden.
And from that produce, as well as dishes that were extra and donated to them by stores, by their own dining hall,
they were feeding 70 people weekly at the UU Church.
I ate with them.
Man, I ate with them.
These donuts had been donated to them that week, and they put these donuts on the table.
I was sitting beside this gentleman who'd been unemployed for quite a while.
I watched him wolf buy donuts before the meal even arrived.
He was hungry.
I knocked him open donuts.
Let me read you one little piece here.
No, I think I'm going to just read you parts of two little chapters, and then we'll do some questions.
And I will hush, ridder.
Sometimes I dream a tree bird.
I came tumbling like an apple out of its limbs.
I came to a causeway and looked out across my father and mother's faces, which were shining in the sun.
I saw many beautiful things.
I saw love in the eyes of deer.
I saw the throats of lilies moving, and I wanted to farm.
I wanted to farm at the border of wilderness.
I could not escape the terrible yearning.
Once my son Silas left for college, every morning, soon after I woke, the longing accosted me.
My mind turned to thoughts of what my life would look like had on a place of my own.
How, if I had land, trees, fields, how different my decisions would be.
I think perhaps the feeling derived from the idea of cultus, that's the Latin for care for,
and the instinct to care for something.
I needed something to cultivate after my son left.
Every morning, my thoughts arrived ultimately at the same question, where is this place?
Part of the urgency my husband and I felt about finding a place was the growing body of evidence
substantiating collapse, especially at the climate, and not simply the knowledge, but the experience of it.
During the two years of our search for a farm, the South emerged from a severe drought.
The tornadoes in March ransacked towns, tearing down schools, killing 500 people in one day.
More and more, the statistics pointed to the need to be settled in a community,
and able to provide at least some of one's own basic needs.
During the second September of a long search, I had a gut wrenching dream.
A storm was coming.
Gathering of people, many of them friends, and worry had descended.
It was palpable.
I was leaving with silence, and suddenly he and I were standing on the edge of outer space,
on the perimeter of the very atmosphere.
All around us, the biosphere was blue, all shades of blue, swirling,
something you might see if you were doing psychedelic mushrooms.
I knew the blue mid-ice, the blue hues were eddying, dragged around by speeding global winds.
We could feel the cold wind all around.
It was a monolithic wind.
I felt amazed, and also helpless, and I remember thinking that at least Silas and I were together.
Where the colors were powder blue, I knew the ice had started to melt.
That was the catastrophe, but now the ice was beginning to solidify again,
and the whirling winds were turning all colors, rainbow colors, bright and vivid.
We made offerings, Silas and I, of what we had, which were strips of potatoes.
Then a man appeared.
I didn't know him, and neither did Silas, but the man was holding a baby.
That was the important fact.
That's all the dream I remember, and maybe that's all there was.
I've never studied dream interpretation, but I know it was both a dream of warning and of hope.
A millennia encapsulated, a collapse, and a rebuilding.
There was hope in the colors and in the baby.
The house was too sturdy and painted white with green trim.
Its metal roof was green.
It was built in 1850 by Lawrence Pearson, using native longleaf pine in the federal style.
Although during renovations, the front porch had been wrapped around like a Victorian.
The house sat on 46 acres to the south and north were pastures.
To the east to the mature pecan, is how I say it, orchard, where wild onions scented the fall air,
and beyond that ran a dirt road.
To the west, mature deciduous forests descended slowly to a cypress-lined blackwater stream named Slaughter,
because of a battle between Native Americans and white settlers.
From any window of the house, only nature was visible.
No neighbors, no streets, no electric lines, no gutters.
I'm skipping parts here.
In the fall of 1909, I would remember all the months of waiting,
all those harangued months filled with longing for a place I dreamed of where we could live the life we desire,
where we could build things that would stay, where we could stay, even where we could be buried,
and all those months of evenings when I searched newspapers and websites for the one ad that would call to us.
I remembered all that one morning teaching a riding class at Muhlenburg College in Pennsylvania,
while wind made the yellow trees sound like rain.
While back home, my husband was in a lawyer's office, signing for both of us.
Consider the possibility that I had been moving toward this land all my life.
Consider it was meant to me, I mean.
So I'm going to skip a little bit more here.
I go into a lot that's happening in the garden.
Actually, I'm going to just stop there.
And because I want to leave plenty of time for questions, let me read one whole chapter out of this book.
It's going to take about eight minutes, and then we'll do questions.
And this is a funny chapter and fun.
I'm through all the lecture part.
It's called Winning the Mustard Cropments, and anybody here who loves food is going to enjoy this, too.
I should tell you that if you grow certain varieties, or very easy to say, certain crops, beans and tangerines, for example,
mostly self-pollinate, meaning the pollen actually rubs across the stigma as the flower is opening.
Squash or pumpkins, anything in the curbit family, is insect pollinated.
Obvious from its large, showy flowers to attract insects.
And there are five main species of squash.
In each of those species are many varieties of things which are very different.
And if you want to plant two things that belong in one species,
I think I'm getting all this science right, you're going to have to either plant one thing from each species
or learn to hand pollinate, and this chapter is about hand pollinating.
Dusk has come and gone by the time I get to the pumpkins, and I would ignore them and go inside,
clean up and eat the times after nine, except I'm a seasoned opportunity.
A balloon will open in the morning.
I cannot let the bees get to or before I do.
I take a flashlight and masking tape to the garden and search the wildly sprawling vines for a flower.
This vine has many inflorescences in all stages, and I'm looking for a particular one,
a female, set to open in about ten hours.
I know a female because between the flower and the stem is a miniature fruit,
an immature pumpkin to be, up and down the vine beneath the rough, white-spotted leaves,
male flowers also prepared to open.
Then I spot the female, a kneel down beside her, angling the line,
mosquitoes zero in quickly in circles, snarling.
I slap at them as I tear a masking tape and fold it over the blossom, shutting the blossom tightly.
I mark it with a rip-length of blue cloth.
To tie a bag over the blossom would be easier, but I have no pollination bags.
I move among the vines and leaves and find a male blossom and repeat the procedure then another.
This pumpkin has a cool story.
I was introduced to it at a small festival in the tiny village of Wardsboro, Vermont.
I lived in Vermont for four years while my husband, while my son was in high school.
He's right now in his fifth year, undergraduate year of college at UMass Amherst.
I leave early in the morning to go. I get to spend the weekend with Silas.
The Gilfeather Turnip Festival celebrates the Gilfeather Turnip developed through hybridization
by John Gilfeather on a hillside farm in Wardsboro in the early 1900s.
This festival is sponsored by the Wardsboro Friends of the Library,
who sell packets of Gilfeather Turnip seed, Gilfeather cookbooks.
During the tasting outlet, the year I was there, I sampled caramelized turnips,
turnip cake, turnip bread pudding, turnip soup, turnips with cheddar cheese.
At the registration table, I noticed a large glass jar filled with chocolate kisses.
Whoever came closest to guessing how many kisses were in the jar, a sign said, would win a pumpkin.
Which pumpkin? I asked a library volunteer.
That one, she pointed one out of the pile.
The pumpkin was large and beautiful as a wheel of cheese.
It was smooth, deeply ridged, the color of apricots. It would easily make a dozen pies.
I decided I was going to win that pumpkin. I thought about it.
May I count the kisses that I can see through the glass? I asked the volunteer.
If you can see the candy through the glass, it's fair again, she said.
That would be allowed.
Without touching the jar, I counted the kisses lying across the top.
I counted approximate layers of kisses from top to bottom.
I did some figuring. Signs are going to love this.
The jar was not perfectly cylindrical.
The wider layers would have at least 12 extra kisses and nine layers, more or less, were wider.
I added 108 kisses for the wider layers and figured some more.
What I've noticed about the speculation is that guesses are usually too low.
I cringe to think what this says about humans that were chronic underestimators.
Knowing this, I added 100 kisses to my total, wrote my guess on a piece of paper,
stuck my vote in a cardboard box, and turned on my hope machine.
Did you see the pumpkin I'm going to win? I asked my husband.
When I talk like that, he believes me. He still thinks I'm magic.
No. Let's go see what he says.
I showed him the jar of kisses, really excited, and the pumpkin he reached for a slip of paper.
What was your guess? He said, huh, I'm not telling.
And there's no need for you to bother guessing. I've won already.
He scribbled on this paper, folded it, and slipped it through the slot of the box.
I want that pumpkin, I said. I'm going to save the seeds. Have you ever seen anything like it?
I can't say I have.
At the end of the day, when volunteers counted the kisses, there were 891 in the jar.
Sweet, I thought. I am so close.
The workers fidgeted through the entries while I watched more nervously than I was willing to admit,
even to myself, and they determined that the winning guess was 875.
They sent someone off looking for the winner. My guess was not 875.
The pumpkin would not be living at my house.
Then I did the math.
Excuse me, I said. I think you'll find another guess in the pile that's closer.
901. I was shocking myself at how greedy I'd become.
It was an unusual and enthralling pumpkin.
No, a volunteer said, 875 was the closest.
I think my accent may be a liability in situations such as this.
When I asked a man on a sickle, ask a street for directions once, he asked,
what, did you just fall off the turnip truck or something?
My guess was 901, I said.
I could see energy finally reach a light bulb behind the volunteer's eyes.
They had not thought of guesses exceeding the correct guess.
The rule is the closest, right?
If not closest, it's less than them. That's correct.
That was such a smart answer.
The library ladies reexamined the guesses and found the 901.
Let me just pause here and say, y'all know why I put that 1 on the 900, right?
Most people would give it an even figure.
But if you've over guessed, and anybody, so if the figure is anywhere over 900,
but everybody else is below 900, all you've got to do is get that one,
and you've got it, right?
So you guys remember this when you're winning something,
and remember, you've got to share part of it with me.
I'm telling you.
The library ladies reexamined the guesses and found the 901.
They confound.
By this time, someone had located the fabled winner among the crafts
on the second floor and brought it downstairs.
One of the women said, it looks as if we've made a mistake.
Hold on just a minute.
Is this you, she asked me? Did you guess the 901?
I did, I said. That's how I knew it was in the box.
I do have a chip on my shoulder.
Well, that's definitely closer, she said.
Yes, ma'am. The man who looked newly retired was so gracious.
It's not a problem, he said.
He had a friendly face, a very friendly face,
which is what signaled the angel in me to emerge.
You can have the prize, I said, if you really want it.
Young lady, what would I do with a pumpkin like that?
He said, hold on.
Oh, thank you, I said. Why was I thanking him?
I won the damn thing.
I'd love to have it, I said. I knew exactly what to do with it.
I planned to set it on the butcher block in my kitchen
and photograph it and wish that I had grown it.
I planned to tell the turnip festival story a hundred times.
I planned to wait until the last possible hour next spring to cook it.
Maybe wait even until a rotten spot appeared on it.
I was smitten with the whimsicality,
winning this incredible pumpkin by guessing 901 chocolate kisses in a jar.
What variety is it, I asked the aides.
Oh, the squash farmer told us we have a name written down somewhere here.
One said, Squash Bonner, all she grows are squashes.
Here's the name. Another said, Musta province.
The name made no sense.
And after I loved the pumpkin home, I probably forgot what it was called.
A few weeks later, I moved the pumpkin to our cool basement
where it lasted a year without spoilage before I baked it into fabulous pies.
I saved the seeds, but because its grower was a squash farmer,
I was doubtful they were pure, meaning true to time.
But how I wanted to grow such charismatic, long lasting and delectable pumpkins.
I needed three things. The name, I needed to know if it was an open source variety,
and if so, seeds.
It just so happened the next fall, I attended Comagram Fair,
a huge outdoor organic ag show in Maine.
By chance, I spotted a pumpkin of the same variety in the exhibit hall.
This is an exhibit hall where people literally bring,
like 100 years ago, they bring vegetables to be judged.
I got to follow these judges around this exhibit hall,
listen to them saying, this grower needs to check her turnip seed,
her rutabaga seed, or tomato seed.
This tomato is not true to any time.
They really knew what they were talking about.
This pumpkin was labeled musk in USQE, dead convolves.
Y'all know this pumpkin?
That was it. When I got home, I ordered seeds.
Now they've grown into an insouciance of vines,
and I am determined to produce purulins.
I finished taping shut the last male flower
to prevent a wayfaring insect from haplessly contaminating the musk
that provolves this pollen with some other kind.
That night, just before falling asleep,
I remind myself to pollinate the flower first thing next morning.
I sleep, and I dream that I'm taking care of a little girl.
It looks like I'm throating, doesn't it? All these dreams.
It's the last dream, I promise you.
I find a goose egg, and I'm showing it to her.
This little girl, when she drops it and it bursts,
spilling a curled yellow liquid that doesn't smell rotten.
Then a small mother bird falls out of the shell,
wet, unready for the world,
followed by a baby bird, very tight, swaddled, in disapay.
The two birds flounder on the floor.
I wail softly, oh, no, no,
attempting to gather up the birds
so that although more mature than both of them,
I might save their lives.
The mother bird tries desperately to escape,
and as I conquer against a wall,
she becomes a lunamal.
Somewhere during the dream,
my erratic breathing wakes my husband.
He says I've been holding my breath
for 10 to 15 seconds at a time.
Next morning, I gently strip off petals
and rub male and thirst full of pollen
onto the stigma of the female.
Then I retake the female and wait.
In a few days, I see that the pollination is successful.
The rest of the blossom withers and drops away,
and the fruit begins to enlarge.
Over the weeks and months to come,
I keep vigil, watching and turning the pumpkin.
I prop it on board to keep ants and beetles from chewing on it.
When it matures, I will scoop out its seeds and dry them.
I will give them to friends.
I will grow more.
I may even become a squash farmer myself.
Thank you.
Applause
Why am I reading that rice has arsenic?
I do not know the answer to that.
Does anybody?
Does anybody? Yes, go ahead.
I think it's because so much of this grows in the South
for the pumpkin farming, for decades,
for the Saturdays and the arts and the basics of society.
Is that it?
That is it.
Did y'all hear?
No.
Oh, oh, she said, okay, so the question is,
she's hearing that rice.
Okay, so it's not just the seeds.
It's the soil, she said,
and she's hearing that rice contains arsenic.
And she said that she thinks it's because
most rice is grown in the South
where cotton farming has contaminated the soil with arsenic.
Does that sound plausible to you?
Let me add a little.
Yes, let the scientists take over.
We don't know what you might want.
So a lot of arsenic was used,
the pesticides, in a lot of cases,
intended to run off into wetlands.
And in wetlands, there's a bunch of bacteria
called sulfate-producing bacteria
that normally convert sulfur, sulfate,
the hydrogen sulfide gas,
but they can also alternatively mobilize arsenic.
And of course, that's where people plant rice,
is in these wetlands where those bacteria are.
So the legacy of arsenic and rice that we're using today
goes back probably 150 years,
wherever you, as a pesticide,
now end up with a system for these bacteria
converted to a warm plant.
They got probably more than one.
No, I didn't know that.
But if you imagine tomorrow,
I may not be able to remember on that.
Just stay right here.
Yeah, there's a ton of questions.
Don't go away, Bill.
One more sentence or two about that
on NPR-existing performance
about this arsenic problem.
And they're testing various foods in fact.
One of the foods they're testing
and finding considerable increases
in oxygen-related foods
if they put one lot of arsenic.
This is, how do I miss this?
Has it just been on NPR the past few days?
Oh, my goodness.
Okay.
So I'm going to translate.
So she's saying that there are ethnic groups
that eat rice every day.
And as a nutritionist,
she's trying to tell them to bury their diet.
Right, and in fact,
when we talk about gluten,
many of the products are rice-based.
So some people are eating rice,
then they eat the rice-based mixtures.
And I can't really think that
because many of these are meat-eating
that are dangerous when you regularly
can't concentrate.
And I think that's the biggest problem
that I see.
It's like a chance that we know.
Yeah, so let me give them this so far.
So the biggest way that you can improve your health
is to bury your diet
so that we're not eating just concentrations.
So like the groups who might eat a lot of rice naturally
and then might be gluten intolerant
are eating gluten-free foods
that also contain large amounts of rice.
So the number one way to be healthier
would be to eat a very diverse diet.
Very helpful.
You just mentioned that they bring Chicago.
And I know that Chicago is kind of like
on the forefront of these indoor and vertical farms.
Do you have any opinions about indoor farming?
You know, I get asked this question a lot.
And I don't.
We were talking, I actually saw at St. Mark's
they have a model there of one of Will Allen's
aquaponics units which has fish in the bottom
and plants on top.
And this water is circulating
and then there are worms.
So it's an incredible system where
you're growing plants in water
where worms are.
Which doesn't make sense, but it was true.
The worms are living in rocks.
And below it are fish tanks with catfish.
But you know, I studied it pretty hard
this morning when I saw it.
And I just said to him,
what was wrong with cutting a hole in the ice
and ice fishing?
You know, there's a lot of energy
being used to pump that water.
I mean, to run the system, this is just one tiny tank.
They need a $17,000 solar panel,
a solar unit, a solar assay.
But is that not agreeable?
Yes, yes.
So let me just say this.
I tend to be all in my focus.
There are plenty of people who,
there are people in Brooklyn
who are putting good topsoil on the tops
of flat buildings right now
and growing things, you know, 14 storey side.
Bless them.
That's just not me.
What I saw was a hollowing out of rural America
as people left the rural countryside,
mostly after World War II,
where there was an absolute ad campaign
that asked people to leave the farms
and go to the factories and rebuild the country.
And so you have these ghost towns
like the one, Mattville Green,
that West Jackson re-bought
and is trying to re-inhabit.
So I'm, you know,
I'm in a place where
there's a tremendous amount of poverty,
Southern Georgia,
but also a cultural poverty
because we lost our best, brightest thinkers,
our creative young people.
They all, they grow up.
They're told, if you want to be anything,
you will leave here and never come back.
If you come home, you're a failure.
So I have very little sympathy, actually,
for the 80% of our population
that live in urban areas.
Just who I am.
You've got to remember that if New York City is this big,
it takes the surrounding land
that provides the ecosystem services
that that many people can live in that area.
Their water comes from someplace else,
their food comes from someplace else,
even their oxygen, their fresh air.
That's a good question.
Oh, no.
No, no, this is not you.
You have some full life,
the Life in Chapter R2
in the Seed Underground.
Describing how a one-time farmer
was basically put out of business
because he was saving seed in his seed
that had been tap-nated with Montana Seed, I guess.
And he basically didn't own his seed anymore.
And I just wondered if you could,
you know, get a summary of that for us,
because I thought that was one of the most striking parts.
You may have heard of Percy Schmeiser.
He was a canola farmer on the Saskatchewan Flames of Canada.
He had been growing canola for 50 years
and had, he had a place adapted canola,
adapted to his microclimate.
And the neighbors had begun to buy GM canola.
And the pollen, it's wind pollinated.
The pollen spread onto his property.
Mysanto came by and tested,
they tested plants that were growing on his side of the road,
found their gene and sent him a bill.
But he had never bought mysanto seeds,
never attended to, never wanted to.
That began a 10-year battle through the Canadian court system
that wound up all the way in the Supreme Court.
And all the way to the bitter end, he lost.
He lost.
I will say this.
In the final verdict, the Supreme Court said
that he did not owe mysanto any money
because he had not purposefully profited
off of the genetic material.
But don't get too wrapped up in Canada
because the same thing happens in the United States.
It's happened many, many, many times here.
It's a way, I mean,
there are mysanto executives that have admitted
that you make it tough enough for farmers
and you, we're going to force gym cubs down their throats.
Yeah.
I have read, I thought that there are groups
that are saving seeds, that they're in safe,
in a cave in Norway.
There are so many years they've changed
so that they are still viable seeds.
Are we still doing that?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a small bar and it's the doomsday ball
and it is in Norway, about 700 miles below the North Pole.
Look at that, right?
And it's in the permacross above, yeah, North Pole.
The meters with the reinforced concrete,
the temperatures, it's below zero.
It's naturally at something like 23 degrees
and with refrigeration units below zero.
And just countries from all over the world
have been putting seeds in there.
I want to just tell you, though,
I have a lot more faith in living gene banks,
which would be the garg, your garg.
This book is called The Seed Underground
because it really means the people
who have been keeping alive
heirloom varieties and seeds curating.
Sometimes like, I spoke to a gentleman before I came in
who knows Will Bonzel in Maine.
Will has hundreds and hundreds of varieties.
He simply keeps alive genetic resources.
And then sometimes there will be a family,
like one near me,
who that family has been growing a cantaloupe.
The great-grandparents grew it, the grandparents grew it.
That one family is simply keeping alive this one cantaloupe.
But all of those people are revolutionaries
because they are resisting the moncultures of thought.
Okay.
Did you use many things?
Thank you so much. Listen, Bill,
I want to thank the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies,
especially Dr. William Schlesinger,
and I'm so proud to meet his wife, Lisa Delbaugh.
Lori Quillen did amazing work to get me here.
Pamela Freeman, Leslie Tumblety,
and I thank the Merritt Bookstore.
And Bill, I never end without reading one paragraph
that's very hopeful.
I say, Rev up, you're awesome.
Look around, so many have put their shoulders into the load.
You, find a place to push.
Pick up a tool, a hole or a shovel.
Start turning the compost to make the soil
in which the seed will grow.
You will begin at the center of many concentric circles
that expand further and further.
You'll become a local hero and rock star.
And from there, your influence will wash outward,
even across the globe,
and so many people are rising up,
like germinating embryos to claim food sovereignty,
to rescue local seeds,
and to guard human civilizations or Nykopia.
Come home, have the courage to live the life you dream.
Many of our seeds have been lost forever,
but we can protect what's left.
And in our revolutionary gardens,
we can develop the heirlooms of the future.
Begin now.
Are you going to farm her up, or just lay there and bleed?
Thank you.
