Trees as a corrective history

What is a corrective history?

In a recent New Yorker book review, critic Adam Gopnik assesses the literature published about coffee, and traces its evolution in three waves. First there were books musing on about this particular caffeinated bean that ended up everywhere, then there were obsessive epicurean investigations into coffee as craft, where one man searches the world for the. best. cup. of. coffee, and finally he introduces readers to a new genre of “corrective history.” The latter is exemplified in Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick. Sedgewick’s book explores the historical legacy of coffee as a commodity which runs along the unequal power imbalances between the Global North and Global South. He sees the relationship between consumer and producer not just as exploiter and exploited but as a “manufactured co-dependence between two groups both exploited by capitalism.” A ubiquitous caffeine craving, something I’ve always understood as “normal”, was in fact carefully manufactured for an industrial agenda. The idea of relentless productivity was pushed on American proletariats in the form of caffeine, at the expense of Central American peasant farmers. Sedgewick goes on to imagine movements of community food sovereignty as the necessary disruption to the tangled, violent web of coffee supply chains.

Though Gopnik is impressed with Sedgewick’s research, he is unsatisfied with the implications of the corrective history narrative. He writes, “the way to reconcile the buyer’s appetite and the marker’s welfare is to raise prices, to make the pleasure costlier. But it’s one thing to ask people to pay more–whether for pastured beef or shade-grown coffee–and quite another to tell people the pleasure they experience is not actually a pleasure but an insidious production of a conspiracy of taste. The second is unlikely to sustain social reform.”

Yet I would add that the first, raising prices, is proven to make social reform inaccessible for those who need it the most. The container of Gopnik’s criticism is disheartening. He reads the problem of coffee as a predicament with only two solutions: abstinence from coffee or higher prices to accommodate efforts to “humanize” coffee growing (labels like Equal Exchange, Fair Trade..etc). He understands Sedgewick’s hope for local food sovereignty in coffee growing regions as a fantasy of pre-colonial Latin America, a call to go back in time and reverse the past. As I have yet to completely read Coffeeland I don’t know if this is a fair assessment. My assumption is that this is probably not what Sedgewick is offering. Instead, corrective histories that hinge of a critique of capitalism often look at new possibilities of life that don’t attempt to erase history, but instead, acknowledge the complexities of violent legacies and work within the ruins. Where capitalism seems to thrive on a choice between the bad and the less bad, the real resistance comes from understanding the truth of what is, and choosing to manifest something else entirely.

 Unlearning “good” farming at Place Corps

As I’ve watched the world crumble down around me, experienced myself implicated in the forces which act as the wrecking ball, I’ve begun to feel a deep mistrust for anything that I might have taken for granted, thought of as normal, successful, or the way things are. The isms (such as racism, sexism, colonialism, capitalism) are impressive in their ability to infect every layer of reality. The driving forces of settler colonialism and enslavement, muscled with primitive accumulation and appropriation have built the precarious world I depend on…and find myself complicit in. I wrote an essay in college about how even a fork in a table setting can be understood as an agent of colonization. I use a fork almost three times a day! Yet, in researching this corrective history on a dining utensil, I came to understand it as a tool that supports a specific organization of human etiquette, and not something inevitable or permanent. Corrective histories offer this liberation in impermanence. They make visible the fluctuations, the pushes and pulls which form power dynamics, transactions, and cultural practices. Joshua Sprecht’s book, Red Meat Republic, is a corrective history on the meat-industrial complex. Humans don’t just “crave” red meat. It was a coerced demand, something that served the intentions of those in power. In the case of cattle, the goal was indigenous land dispossession. After pushing tribes onto reservations and hunting out most of the buffalo, settlers were able to make a living replacing the meat supply they’d decimated and use ranching as justification to claim land that was never really empty.

When it comes to food, and how humans feed themselves, I feel like I had the chance to move through some waves of understanding too. First, in high school I learned about the industrial food system, and understood it to fundamentally disregard human health for profit. And then I discovered the alternative as it was presented in popular books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I began the work of immersing myself within what I thought was sustainable agriculture, seasonal cooking, and local food systems. Good: Organic. Grassfed. Small scale.  Probably more expensive. Bad: Conventional. CAFO. Largescale. Cheap. But by the time “sustainable” became a passé (I learned to say “regenerative” instead) I started to wonder if maybe the world I’d run so hard towards might not actually have all the answers. About a year ago, I started asking myself what was missing. What are the holes within this particular formation of sedentary agriculture that had plenty of labels and certifications, but not that much in the way of big picture change. And at Place Corps, I’ve had the chance to think about this, unlearn agriculture as a morality problem of good versus bad, and relearn it as an expression of intentions.

The “alternative” as it was presented to me by a very particular subset of white men began with Michael Pollan and moved on to Wendell Berry, Joel Salatin, Dan Barber, Elliot Coleman, and Jean-Martin Fortier, to name a few. I read their books (and still reference them). They illustrate an agricultural movement that positions itself in contrast to the industrial model, yet it also fundamentally depends on its existence. The niche of heritage pastured pork is economically viable because it can command a higher price at market. This is a strategy that is not set up to replace the system it claims to alternate, rather it is set up to provide an alternative for those who can afford to do so. Farmers are reduced to figuring out a way to survive in a market landscape that does not prioritize whole solutions, and ends up compromising things like living wages, work-life balance, and accessibility for consumers. The variables it shifts are surface level. The small family farm vision (articulated clearly by Conor Crickmore at Neversink Farm where he “sees a future where the current agricultural landscape is replaced completely by tiny, yet successful family farms”) has given way to an industry that has made sustainable agriculture into what is essentially a righteous office job (thanks @Lila for that phrasing). The new wave small family farm is all about maximizing productivity and efficiency with the right tools, making the most money per square foot, landing the best restaurant accounts, all of it not quite bad, but raises some red flags. This type of farm is able to identify the symptoms of a broken food system, and treat them with a delicious luxurious alternative, but makes no attempt to question where this is all coming from and where it’s going.

And so corrective histories exist for agriculture too. Anna Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruin finds hope in the maitake mushroom, a species of fungi that thrives in disturbed forests. It recasts human induced environmental damage as an event that offers not just tragedy, but hope in the possibility of response. Yes, damage has been done, harm has been caused. And yes, there is still life worth living.

Some of Tsing’s other writings also attempt to deconstruct agriculture and offer tools for reconstruction. She points to domestication. Where it is generally understood as the human control over another species, she frames it as an exchange. Domestication, she writes, goes hand in hand with a move towards sedentary agriculture. Key in this historical realization is her dismissal of sedentary agriculture as “more efficient” than other modes of existence such as hunting and gathering. Intensive sedentary grain production, for example is maintained and extended by social hierarchies. She writes, “intensive cereal agriculture can do one thing better than other forms of subsistence: support elites.” She uses this as a platform to connect the rise of the state with a coercive move towards patriarchal heterogeneous family run farms which relied on the confinement of women as a means of reproducing labor. Furthermore, this homogenization of people reflected itself in the homogenization of agriculture. As Tsing unravels history, readers see how the modern farming system as it exists today is linked to specifically to capital investment and state control. 

Intention and deforestation

Understanding the intentions behind sedentary agriculture allowed me to think about what might be missing. As I began to understand more and more what the “classic” organic farm means for the ecosystem it exists in, the forces of nature that farmers are constantly fighting against in order to maintain straight lines, weed free soil surfaces, and consistent pristine, market-ready crops, I started to wonder if there was a way to loosen the knot a bit. I wanted to investigate the strategies we pursue when growing food, wonder why, and imagine another way.

At Place Corps this year, that is what I’ve had the chance to do. As I’ve tried to dig deep into soil and create the conditions for roots–my own roots–to thrive, I’ve had the chance to think about how the foods I eat might encourage the opposite.  I started thinking hard about annuals: plants that are seeded, grown, and harvested within one growing season. They live and die quickly. They inform farming practices mapped out in days to germination, days to transplant and days to harvest. Turnover is fast, and part of my job in cultivating them is to reduce any potential competition for this quick spurt of a lifecycle. I eat a lot of annuals, and love them too. Gem lettuces, great shiny tomatoes, crunchy radishes. But every time I dig them up at the end of the season, I notice how shallow their root systems are, how breakable their linkage with the Earth can be. It’s not unlike my own relationship to place. How quickly I can hop from location to location, start up a life and move away when the conditions prove undesirable. This is a fragile state of being. The quickness, the anxieties, the disposability. What other possibilities exist?

In The Nature of Place by Conrad Vispo, he traces the transformation of Columbia County’s landscape from the time of glaciers 15,000 years ago. The plant successions which followed gave way to forests. The majority of this Northeastern landscape was once forest, in constant flux between disturbances like wind, fire, ice, and flood. Columbia County’s particular location is a tension zone, a combination of northern and southern topographical and climate conditions which overlap, giving way to oaks and hickories in the lower parts of the County, and Beech, Hemlock, and Sugar Maple in the higher parts. Vispo mentions large gaps in his research and understanding of what forests looked like prior to European settlement. This is both due to the loss of indigenous records, and the fact many of the first colonizers did not know what they were looking at. In addition, an agenda to sell the “discovered” land to potential investors back in Europe also clouded the first surveying records. The land now known as Columbia County had been maintained and stewarded by Mahican peoples until the 1700s. Then, Vispo writes, European impact would have been visible during a “hypothetical fly-over” due to the large scale land clearing that took place.

Early European farmers looked for the best soils as they were indicated by the tree species that grew there. “In America, they judge the value of land, 1st from the species, 2nd from the size of the trees which grow upon it. Large oaks are always preferred, because the oak never attains an immense size, except upon a strong and deep soil.” And then of course, upon finding these immense oaks, they were cut down to make way for pastures and intensive annual crop farming. It also happened that land clearing was the most profitable stage of agriculture, given all the resources felled trees can provide (wood, charcoal, fuel, potash, tannins).  

What followed colonization in America was the Europeanization of agriculture. This did not happen haphazardly or randomly. The erasure of complex webbed relationships between indigenous peoples and other nations of beings was purposeful. The knowledge and muscle in attempting to replace this food system was stolen, enslaved and unceremoniously appropriated. And as pre-colonial America’s robust bioregional food systems disintegrated, pieces of it were shipped off and absorbed into international culinary traditions, the styles of cookery that I’ve come to understand as “classical.” An indigenous farmer in Virginia, Chris Newman, pointed this out on his Instagram the other day. Tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, chocolate, beans, corn, so many of the foods that are understood as staples were brought forth from cultures that understood these plants as ancestors, goddesses, and siblings.  They were reapplied as commodity crops within a European style agriculture. Tomatoes grown in fields all by themselves, corn lined up in one dimensional fields for miles and miles.   

As David Graeber discusses in Debt: the First 5000 Years, systemization happens when certain repeated actions become customary, and as a result they come to define the actor(s)’ essential nature. He is referencing the myth of reciprocity within a hierarchy–how transactional exchanges within hierarchal social structures often serve to maintain inequality, rather than manifest any equality. When peasants gave loaves of bread or bushels of wheat to a feudal overlords in medieval Europe, it was meant in exchange for military protection. The exchange became precedent, and the question was never “should you give to a feudal overlord” but rather “how much bread compared to last year should you give.” By this he shows that within aristocratic societies, hierarchy is meant as a tool of wealth accumulation (he makes an exception for societies, such as in Papa New Guinea, where hierarchy can be a way of wealth redistribution). Those in power often masquerade with the responsibility of providing protection and support to those in need, demanding allegiance to a social contract that never seems to question this need in the first place. Like the feudal lords of medieval Europe, he writes that “the genealogy of the modern redistributive state–with its notorious tendency to foster identity politics–­can be traced back […] to violence and war.”

Understanding that much of the farmland in Columbia County is a result of intense land dispossession and deforestation could be disorienting. And it also helped me realize that this formation of agriculture did not just happen as the timeline of progress so often suggests, rather, it happened because the people who arrived were focused on recreating the conditions they were familiar with back home. The same hierarchies, the same formations of “civilization” that could stand in contrast to “wilderness.” It kind of worked, but it also kind of didn’t.

Fields and pastures, rows and hay, fences and tractors. Despite what didn’t work with this Europeanized agriculture, the people it trampled and enslaved, those mouths–human and otherwise–it refused to feed, it was systematized. I’ve come to wonder if it’s how I want to be fed, or how I want to feed others. If my food system must be predicated on private property, and hierarchal state systems, the constant disregard of plant and animal relationships for the sake of something (profit, supply, demand, deadlines, managers) being upheld as more important than how we relate to other life, how do I understand myself?

Silvopasture as a corrective history:

I’m not the first person to point out that the way some humans have come to depend on a food system which threatens the very life we depend on is cause for alarm. And I’m not going to spend time outlining all the ways modern farming systems have contributed to biodiversity loss, soil erosion, greenhouse gas emissions, and disease outbreaks. It’s happening though, and people are trying to change it. I’ve heard people attribute the problems of our food system to disconnection. Disconnection between our bodies, each other, between species, between nature and wilderness. Disconnection from where our food comes from, disconnection from the skills and handwork it takes to support ourselves.  I’ve also heard people recommend an antidote of reconnection. But how? In looking for a way to reconcile the disconnect which underpins modern food production, the binaries it produces (large scale, small scale, vegetable, animal, weed, crop…etc), I found hope in perennials. Perennials are plants that root down in place, and continue living year after year. They offer contrast to the quick, intensive annual production that characterizes most organic vegetable, but they don’t claim opposition. Particularly, I found hope in trees. Trees are single trunked perennials with a strong legacy in the Northeastern region of America I call home. The way they communicate to one another is not quite mammalian, but it’s deeper on some level than carrots in a raised bed. Their wisdom is vaster than we can comprehend in our tiny sterile laboratories, their history is an expression of resilience.

Vispo chronicles the historical forests of this region, and I can see the pastures around me constantly trying to live out a succession towards forest. I watch the cows congregate under the few trees still left in their pastures. In other parts of the world, grazing practices that include trees are much more common. One of these practices is called silvopasture which is defined by Steve Gabriel in Silvopasture is:

“The intentional combination of trees, domesticated animals, and forages as a multilayered system where each benefits from its relationship to the others, with multiple yields harvested from the same piece of land.”

Livestock can be some of the most environmentally destructive components of our diet, and with the addition of trees, raising livestock can also be some of the most healing. This is true because of silvopasture’s potential to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and various other ecological benefits. And it is also true, I think, because silvopasture itself manifests as a corrective history.

The reason there are so few trees left in American pastures is not because it’s a bad idea. As people have begun unraveling the histories of deforestation and the intentions behind our agricultural landscapes, they were not and are not just about feeding people. As settlers wrangled unfamiliar land into a reductive duplication of what they knew back home, they were also able to uphold the hierarchal social structures which went along with it. The accumulation of wealth which governs modern society can be tied all way back to the settlers who profited off land clearing. The food production strategies which followed have maintained these power dynamics expertly.

The pillars of American food production are grain and livestock. Grain is an annual, and though livestock could be loosely understood as a perennial given their multi-year lifecycles and capacity for reproduction, what does it mean when we start feeding our cows and chickens grain? In the disconnection between these two food production enterprises, the food system seems to superficially reconnect them in an annual food web.

Here, at Hawthorne Valley Farm, the animals live on pasture, hay, byproducts, and some grain. The food web here has deeper roots than most farms in America. The relationships between humans and non-human life are reciprocal as the farmers provide food, shelter, and care for the manure, meat or milk, and reproductive capabilities of the animals. And also, this reciprocity is maintained within an imposed hierarchy, so this exchange serves to maintain the status quo and does not allow for liberation on either side. Both the livestock and farmers are stuck within an uncompromising schedule. I don’t have any answers when it comes to this dynamic. It’s something that I think about often, especially as I ask a cow to lock into a milking stanchion she clearly does not want to lock into. What do I do with that resistance?

Are there structures in place preventing me from actually listening and responding to what other beings are communicating? My own relationship with domesticated animals, what my diet asks of them and the sustenance their life gives me, is something I confront daily. And I often feel limited by the possibilities offered by even the most “regenerative” livestock systems. It seems the economic viability of most livestock operations hinge on product yield (i.e. how many pounds of milk does the herd produce, hanging weight of the animal), not necessarily on the successful relationship between farmers and animals (perhaps that’s a bonus).

And so I started looking at trees, and thinking about what it might mean to incorporate them into a pasture which wants to be a forest anyway. As I thought about what silvopasture could mean, I was asking myself what possibilities trees might offer the landscape and the cows. Trees are a multidimensional disruptor. They expand the life cycles happening on a given piece of land, increase biodiversity, they encourage interspecies communication, they grow tall, taller than humans. They play a long game, and ask those who care for them to consider the future. There are methods of agricultural production which attempt to integrate crops and livestock with the use of trees.

My hope is that integrating trees might disrupt the binary between sedentary annual agricultural production and whatever sits in opposition (Hunter-gatherer societies? Proto-agriculture? Foraging?). Incorporating perennials onto the landscape and into our diets acknowledges what has been, and creates the conditions for what is now to thrive.  

Pieces of a whole