The Gastrocast

I have been reading a book called Treasures of the Simple Life by James & Tyra Arraj. In the final part called Radical Simplicity and the Fourth Step he writes:



"Once we lose our living  contact with the earth and its fruits, we are less in control of our lives. Others often  step between us and the earth and dictate what we should do. Our lives, under the guise of  being bettered, are fragmented and taken out of our own hands. The homes of our ancestors,  sometimes crude and harsh, sometimes simple, beautiful and elegant, yield to our purchased houses built by other hands that we must pay for for long stretches of our lives. We have  traded access to earth and our skills to live in close relationship to it for the housing  problem, and the school problem and the unemployment problem. But the root of these  problems is not having our lives in our own hands. These problems are the direct result of  the institutionalization of life. As a society we hinder people from their connatural  activities of feeding and sheltering themselves, and then discover we are faced with  problems which we can’t seem to solve."



It seems to me that as we look at society and modernity spin out of control and the experiment of fossil fuel powered systems fail we need to take a deeper look at the wisdom behind this statement.  This has more to do with CSA’s, Farmer’s Markets, Organic Co-ops and supporting your local industries and producers than it would at first seem. Somewhere in history HumanKind took a turn from freemarket, freelance agrarianism to Surfdom and the class based society we still have not escaped. Certainly we cannot blame the industrial revolution for everything, but a certain amount of irreparable harm came from the agrarian vacuum it created and the exploitation which drove it into the early 20th Century. No wonder the Luddites reacted so strongly. William Blake’s poem Jerusalem, with it’s cry for a return to Humanity, is, perhaps, as pertinent today as it was in the 19th Century:

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