It’s been a slow day on the farm: it’s overcast and drizzly, and there isn’t much work yet to do. We’re very much at the mercy of the seasons, and until we properly turn the corner into spring, we hold tight. The cattle stay in their winter field, the hogs wait for the pastures to dry out. Until the grass returns, until the muddy ground firms up, we wait, and watch the hay supply shrink and manure pile grow. Nature is very much in charge of when and how I get to farm.
I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few weeks about the catastrophic flooding in the Midwest, and particularly about the toll that’s been taken on the farmers of the region. Crop land that would soon be planted is still under water, and calving season has been tragically interrupted. Some estimates put the number of dead or displaced cattle in the millions, and what land they have to return to will likely be saturated and covered in sediment for some time. It’s the sort of disaster that keeps anyone who’s life is even remotely tied to land awake at night. My heart breaks for livestock caught in the rising waters, and for the farmers who will return to pens full of dead hogs and fields full of drowned calves.
When I see an event like the recent flooding unfold, I’m reminded again of the true callousness of nature. It’s a mistake to think that nature is harmonious, or picturesque: life is instead comprised of a billion daily atrocities that amount to a sort of balance only through attrition. Life has no purpose beyond it’s own propagation, and it clings to an often forbidding planet through chance and trial. For every organism that lives to multiply, a vast multitude fail and perish. Howling blizzards, tectonic upheaval, and bomb cyclones are the global norm, and, despite whatever malice we might imbue them with, these events are utterly indifferent to the cost. In nature, there is no weeping and there are no cheers, there is only inevitability and hunger.
When the callousness of the natural world changes from unfortunate to tragic is when human hubris tries to exert itself. The moment mankind began to think and act as a species outside and above the natural order was the moment we sealed our fate, not because we stand to lose more than any other species, but because we value what is lost more dearly. And we also have a bad habit of repeating our mistakes.
This isn’t the first time the Missouri and the Mississippi have broken their banks. The rivers flood chronically, perhaps not in such disastrous fashion, but often enough for anyone with an eye for history to have predicted this. But when they flooded two hundred or three hundred years ago, life along the banks would have responded with more flexibility. Bison would have scattered before the rising waters and even whatever plains tribes called those regions home could have broken camp and made for higher ground. There would be death, there would be loss, but without the permanence wrought by modernity, loss would be less devastating. Timber frame prairie houses and barb wire fences brought that sense of permanence, but they also tend to act as a trap when the floods approach.
Of course now we all too often pretend that our ingenuity will save us. We build dams and levees, we divert and drain and dredge the channels and think that the next storm won’t be any worse than the last one. But hoping that something will be ok is no guarantee. I remember in the wake of Hurricane Katrina how doubt about New Orleans’ long term survival was met with anger and scorn. It was as if the mere presence of history and bonhomie and jazz and oyster po’boys would be proof against any future storm surge. But even if the world weren’t warming and the oceans weren’t rising, the idea of a large city built on a spit of land jutting into the sea, half built below sea level, must be acknowledged as folly. It’s absolutely a fine place to visit, to live, to love, but don’t pretend that something so extravagantly at odds with the nature world will be around forever.
The farmers along the Midwest waterways will return to their land and fix their fencing and buy in new stock and press on. If they were lucky, they may have had insurance, but with those companies insure those farms again? Will levees that failed this time be rebuilt stronger? The only guarantee is that the rivers will once again flood. And the true tragedy in the end isn’t the dead cattle or the lost homes or the ruined lively-hoods, it’s the dull sense of inevitability around the whole thing. This will happen again. It’ll be new cows and new homes and a new generation of farmers with no good options, but we’ve fenced ourselves in as a society. We could no sooner abandon those floodplains as we could abandon a city. To do so would be to admit that our dominance over the natural world is a lie. Better to drown and rebuild and drown again. Nature, for its part, doesn’t care. The waters roll on regardless.
The Edible Complex 