care

Ellen Davis, biblical scholar, ponders what it might mean for this generation to “work the garden and serve it, to observe and thus preserve it.” This matter is critical for our survival on earth. Now we have the productionists in control. Quantity rules. The matter of land care/food production is drastically simplified. The agriculturalists are outside looking in.

It would seem we have more pressing matters. The coronavirus decimates our elderly and infirm, as well as our working population. The police too often carelessly use and even murder our black fellow citizens. Our attention is, as always scattered among a multitude of urgencies. We have not yet considered the possibility that this might be one big question.

Greed brought black Africans in chains to our shores because southern planters could not make enough money by actually hiring the poor whites they were surrounded by. Land hunger wrenched black people violently from their homes and enslaved them.

Of course land hunger must have land. The land was taken violently from the native population, which was corralled up and starved on a tiny portion of what they once were at home on.

Human populations push relentlessly into wild areas. Agriculture is often the point of the spear. Viruses then jump from wild populations across specie lines and infect us with one pandemic after another.

This was brought to a head by my sudden realization that the farming business I had found so pleasing-livestock on the land-depends upon people poorer than I taking large risks with their own health to work in slaughterhouses, while our government structure does nothing to protect them, rather choosing to protect their employers from lawsuits over poor labor practices.

What would be the endlessly ramifying results if we began to see ourselves as keepers of the garden rather than as entrepreneurs? Can we push greed down and bring care and a sense of belonging up? Do we have a choice?