Extreme Apple Picking

This past weekend, I went up to Ridgefield, CT, the hometown of my boyfriend, Jesse. I’ve always loved his town, house, and the property on which his house sits. As I said in class, his house is a barn built sometime in the late 1700’s in upstate NY which was picked up piece by piece and moved to Ridgefield, CT by some guy who eventually sold it to Jesse’s parents in the early ’90’s. Although his house includes all modern conveniences, it reminds me a bit of Thoreau’s house. Jesse’s house is also made entirely from wood, near a pond, a few miles from the nearest town (there aren’t really even any neighborhoods in this area, just a house every few acres), and is surrounded a thriving ecosystem which can truly breathe life into whomever lets it.

Less Extreme Apple Picking

I had the unique and wonderful opportunity this past weekend to take part in the most bountiful harvest of the two massive apple trees that sit behind Jesse’s house yet. According to Jesse’s parents, this fall has yielded the most amount of apples with the highest quality (large, round, without wormholes). We climbed up on ladders to pick the apples, but then Jesse’s dad brought his backhoe around to the tree, put Jesse up in the bucket, thus increasing the range of apple picking. Throughout the rest of the day, we grinned apples into pulp and pressed them to make cider, we cut them into slivers to bake into apple crisp, and we cooked them down and used a device to create apple sauce. It’s a truly amazing experience when you can follow a food from harvest to processing to consumption all in one day.

There was something truly special and refreshing about yesterday. I don’t think it was solely from the apples. It was because I got to roll around in the grass unbothered by a bustling campus around me. It was because I was energized by the change of the seasons which was far more present there than here in Easton. Thoreau may have been whispering in my ear while I was imbibing the crisp air, apple smells, and gnats around me: “There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still” (141). It’s true. A lot of things could have bothered me yesterday. I could have easily felt an urgency to get back on campus to get ahead on homework. I could have mourned the end of summer and all of my summer goals left unaccomplished. Although sometimes Thoreau is contradictory or purposefully abrasive, a lot of the times, he’s simply and honestly correct. Many of my friends have pointed down at “Walden” while I have it out in the library or elsewhere and said something along the lines of “Ah, Walden. Great isn’t it?” Not as many people would say that if the key thing they took from it was his prickles and irony. People say that because this work of art has spoken serious truth to them that they cannot dispute and, hopefully, try to fold into their everyday lives. I know that’s how I feel about “Walden” thus far and I cannot wait to get to the point where a piece of “Walden” is relevant to every day of my life. Guess I have to read the rest of it!

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/05/wyoming_law_against_data_collection_protecting_ranchers_by_ignoring_the.html

My google search was “critique’s of citizen science.” I hypothesized that some professional scientists may have issues with the trustworthiness of numbers gathered by people who have nothing to lose, no tenure to gain, or no reputation to build. However, I discovered something much more frustrating and disappointing: Wyoming has made it illegal for anyone to “collect resource data” from any federal, state, or privately owned land with the intention of sharing it with the state or federal government.

The article further explains the implications of this law. It makes photography of natural spaces illegal, it makes pointing out an environmental disaster illegal, and it makes citizen science illegal. The article also quickly points to the E. coli outbreak in the water in many places in Wyoming as the reason for this law. It mentions that the abundance of E. coli is from ranching, a politically powerful industry in the state.

I routinely point to money in politics as the number one thing that needs to change to allow environmentally minded legislation take place. Big-ag lobbying within states has enacted laws such as this one in Wyoming, Ag-gag laws which make it a crime to video or photograph the inside of a factory farming operation, and has prevented California from enforcing water restrictions on Agriculture, the biggest water consumer in the state. Many people don’t realize how much of a chokehold industrial farming has on this country due to the fact that they can get these seemingly small laws passed within states without many people noticing.

If we don’t allow citizens to have a voice when it comes to the cleanliness of their own land, we’ve surely eliminated democracy. Furthermore, if a citizen cannot ask their government for help when their land has been ruined, or their water polluted, we’ve now allowed the interests of a few to jeopardize the health and happiness of the majority over generations. We cannot allow states to enact laws which only shove problems under the rug rather than addressing them.

“Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on.”

Upon reading this sentence in “The Loss of the Creature”, I felt overwhelmingly compelled to exclaim “THIS IS THE MOST FRUSTRATING THING ABOUT TRAVELING!” Of course everyone gets annoyed by tourists who are so clearly touring for superficial reasons, but some attractions, which may have incredible value to visit, are only available if you abide by “approved circumstances.” Additionally, many travelers may not know enough or feel comfortable enough to bypass said approved circumstances. While in Prague, I became frustrated by visitors who essentially thought Prague was a quarter of the size it really is because that quarter is the most photographed, historical, and symbolic place that people think of when someone says “Prague.” I would try to coax visiting friends out of this bubble, but the first question they always had was “is it safe that far away from the city center?” I found this misconception that the place less photographed and less present in the collective world mind is somehow unsafe and unfit for visitors. I feel that Percy would agree in that assertion since he discusses that learning the theory of or how an individual or thing should be can so significantly detract from ones experience of said thing.

Although this phenomenon rings true with visitors to Prague, I found that the most painful to watch obliviousness to true experience happens in Amsterdam. The common tourist thinks of two things when they hear the name “Amsterdam”: prostitutes and marijuana. For that reason, the red light district of Amsterdam has become a vile cesspool for shallow tourists who spend a ton of time and money without experiencing one bit of the true meaning of Amsterdam. On my one walk through the red light district, I kept hearing people saying they were going to have the time of their life because they were going to experience the only two things that could possibly be valuable to do in Amsterdam: seeing naked women through windows and legally (kinda) getting stoned.

I agree wholeheartedly with Percy’s critique of tourists, but in a way, I’m glad this is the case. If every tourist was trying to experience the true essence of a place by spontaneously exploring and leaving expectations behind, they wouldn’t be so conveniently quarantined to the most recognizable places and I wouldn’t be able to avoid them so successfully.

http://https://www.ted.com/talks/birke_baehr_what_s_wrong_with_our_food_system?language=en

Birke Baehr was 11 years old when he delivered this TED talk. Notice how fantastic of a speaker he is. Notice how inspired he is and how much he inspires the audience. Notice his youthful humor alongside his mature wisdom. Is he a prodigy? Was he born with an uncanny ability to understand the world around him and concern himself with its massive problems? Perhaps. I would like to point out, however, that he is road schooled (in the video he says home-schooled, but his TED biography uses the more accurate term).

Birke has been traveling the country for the past 5 years visiting organic farms. He’s broadened his classroom to an entire nation and has become incredibly successful in his activism because of it. I also get the sense that he feels fulfilled by what he does. I thought of him and his unschooling/roadschooling a lot while reading “The Wilderness of Childhood”, “Outside Lies Magic”, and “There Was A Child Went Forth.” In the video, Birke immediately points out that he feels children in his generation are easily manipulated by cooperations via TV ads and public school. Maybe if we raised children with the principles highlighted in the two essays such as enhancing ones awareness of the world around them and abandoning structure and supervision, they would be less susceptible to the influences of advertisement. If society was more in tune with children’s impressionability, as is highlighted in the Whitman poem, would we still send kids out into the world with no tools to see past the veil of colorful advertisement? Even if it meant we could save our food system and prevent those children from developing health issues early on?

I do believe there is a strong correlation between Birke’s ability to see past the structure and marketing of our society and his schooling. By being roadschooled, Birke saw the farms of the country. He stepped in the mud shared by pigs. He breathed in the air full of pollution, in some areas, and totally void of it in others. He got to experience what real people are doing all over the world to try to fix our food system. What I’m saying, and what I think the authors of these three pieces would agree with, is that it doesn’t take a genius kid to understand the problems of the world and begin to work towards solving them. It takes the ability for that kid to go out into the world and experience it instead of seeing it on a screen.

I personally remember how much I hated the structure of public schooling. I felt that I had more to do with what interested me, but my time was taken up by a bunch of formalities and requirements. If I had been unschooled, what could I have done? Would I have accomplished more by now? Would I now be less jaded about society if I had been exposed to a more free kind of learning? Perhaps if I have children one day, I’ll school them on the road, in the world, with self-guided structure and spontaneity. Then maybe they wont have to be told that the food system is unsustainable, they’ll discover it for themselves.

I’ve often found it funny that as an Environmental Studies major and an avid reader of environmental philosophy and thought, I had not yet read Walden. Perhaps it is because its length scared me away, or I wanted to find lesser known works to study. I’ve always known that Walden was essentially the starting point of “society is doing it wrong, nature is doing it right” literature, but, halfway into the assigned reading, I’ve discovered that the above quote just scratches the surface.

“Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn was the first book I read that truly enlightened me to the cruel contradictions of human history and society. I still cite it as the reason for choosing my major and becoming involved in environmental activism. After reading this bit of “Walden”, however, I’m looking back on Ishmael as much more of a softer introduction into “everything you’ve been taught is wrong” thinking. This gives me the suspicion that this specific genre of environmental writing has become more accessible over time. Could that accessibility have caused increased concern about the environment? Could increased concern about the environment have caused more people to write about their belief that “we’re doing it wrong” in a more accessible fashion as to reach those with lower levels of literary comprehension?

I’m also noticing the bits of “Walden” that later environmental writers certainly found inspiration from. I can almost picture Wendell Berry being overwhelmed and inspired by Thoreau’s assertion that we should abandon society’s valuation system as I was by Quinn’s suggestion that we’re destroying the world and the only way to save it is to oppose what history has deemed “human progress.” I also have personally known people to experience a similar feeling of empowerment after encountering these types of literature. I often wonder if this feeling motivates others in the way it motivated me.

But has humanity learned from these writers who are so certain that the only way to avoid doom is to flip around almost everything society has come to value? Does “Walden”‘s fame suggest that one day we’ll turn this ship around? Or just that some of us will forever be condemned to looking at the society around us and shaking our heads?