Culture and Nature

The content of the article linked below is, ultimately, distressing. By using harvest records from 664 years of grape-growing in the Bourgogne region of France, these researchers were able to determine that there has been a significant increase in temperature in the region - harvests are now happening 13 days earlier than the average for the previous 664 years. The most significant change has happened since the late 80's.

That is nearly half a month difference, and reflects some noteworthy warming.

And that is distressing. At some point, if unchecked, getting grapes to harvest in the Bourgogne is going to start becoming more and more difficult. 

But on the other hand, this study surprised me by also making me feel quite tender-hearted about the history of wine-growing and growers in this region. 664 years of families growing grapes and making wine is a long time. 664 years of knowing a landscape, working with the sun and seasons, predicting rainfalls. 664 years of integration between the economics, the politics, the culture, and the nature of this region.  The simple fact that grapes can still grow there at all is testament to conscientious farming practices - considering that the history of large-scale farming in the United States goes back only a couple hundred years - and the result has been massive top soil loss, mineral depletion, and post-war, with the full-scale implementation of corporate farming - ultimately the loss of small farms and the cultures that they created.

Too often we humans think of ourselves as separate. Different from the rest of nature in some essential way. Whether it is Biblical "dominion" or Cartesian "Dualism"--from the vantage of our cars or desks, it can be hard to feel anything but alienation from our planet. After all, our busy, frenetic, increasingly internet-and-media-focused lives even leave us alienated from each other and from our own bodies.

I've never been to the Bourgogne, but did visit Toulouse once for a Eco-Criticism conference at the university. After our first day, the whole group went out to eat at a local restaurant, where the chef was frustrated trying to find me (a vegan) something to eat, even commenting that the diet was "not very practical ..." (And by the way, the resulting pyramid of rice with sautéed vegetables was absolutely gorgeous). But the first thing we were served was a local liqueur mixed with a local sparkling wine. A traditional aperitif in Toulouse. It was golden and tasted like sunshine and earth fused on the tongue. It tasted like what I had imagined wine must be like when I was a kid. And there was a centuries long history to its production.  

Whatever concepts or devices may block the way - we are all made of Earth. Quite literally. 

This article (below) had the amazing effect of making me both hate and love human beings at the same time ... 664 years of harvest records for one wine-growing town in France ... and what they mean.

https://climatenewsnetwork.net/french-wines-show-hot-dry-years-are-now-normal/?fbclid=IwAR2bU9DRpZ1ui9liHGPNL5FTsmSfnXghxvw8GNLGn4BkA7_uYmrGt_e5MYo

Horses

Horses

It does get to the point where you just don’t want to click to the news or open your email – all those horrors in the headlines and the inbox. This morning, no different. A campaign by Avaaz (a great online activism organization leading campaigns on so many different fronts around the world) popped up about trying to end the practice of bleeding pregnant horses. What, you say, could that possibly be about?

Well, with the demand for meat products high, factory farms producing the cows and pigs that become beef and pork (sealed in nice hygienic packages in the supermarket) speed up production by injecting their animals with the blood of pregnant horses … it helps trigger them to come into heat, thus meaning that breeding cows and sows can be impregnated more often. More cows. More pigs. More bacon. More hamburgers. The pregnant horses are kept hooked up to machines, bled to the point of anemia, and are repeatedly impregnated to keep the cycle going. Pharmaceutical companies sell the blood to farmers.

So much goes into the production of our food that we often fail to recognize. From the patented genetic modifications in our corn that kill monarch butterflies, to the diesel used to truck produce thousands of miles, to the chicken-offal fed to chickens, to the blood of horses.

I signed the petition, of course, and thought I’d post this poem about some horses in Taos, New Mexico where there is (still) a sage-brushy pasture area right next to the public parking lot, just behind downtown. Below the poem is a link to sign the Avaaz petition to EU lawmakers who have a chance to ban this horse-bleeding practice in Europe.

Horses – A Cairn

Three horses draw letters

into the thin crust of snow.

Ginger-color against blue sage, cinnamon

in the wash-green chamisa,

and a salt-flecked roan

near the byre.

Winter-coated, they are haloed

in silver light.

The horses circle --

three horses in a

decahedron night.

They lean into each other,

heads bent to the murmur of water

from the acequia.

When it begins to snow again

they nod, tossing fetlocks,

turn, nod again, beat a hoof-edge

to the ground.

The runes they’ve drawn across the snow

are gone before morning.

And the link. Please sign: https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/stop_horse_blood_farms_55/?fb