The Bean-Field

[literaryartist]

At the end of the last ice age, a global warming thawed the glaciers and enriched landmasses with freshwater-enabling agriculture to be the defining human mark upon the Holocene period. In claiming property to cultivate, humans took community land from each other and had food surpluses to guard, leading to early forms of governance. Large-scale

Comments

[anonymous]

Impressive focus on Thoreau and farming. I can see you take this into the first essay, comparing to Berry--Throeau's notion of husbandry as sacred certainly resonates with Berry. I can also see the beginnings of a larger work, if interested, that takes up the issue from more recent interests, but connects back to Thoreau. Do you think Thoreau's solution (or Berry's) is as simple as farm your own food?

[literaryartist]

Thanks! After the anthology excerpts I'm intrigued to read more by Berry, and see a thread (more like a giant rope) leading back to Thoreau. Berry is writing in the problematic hyper-industrialized future that Thoreau envisioned... Excellent food for thought :)

[anonymous]

A great example of how and why we need, as readers, to dig deeply into Thoreau and his language. You do a great job noticing and thinking through the ways he figures husbandry vs. contemporary forms of farming. If you stay with this for the essay, you could connect to someone like Leopold or Berry and use that to interrogate Thoreau a bit. Is his vision of the garden shared by others, updated, challenged? Is it consistent with other views he espouses in Walden?
By the way, I love the idea of the Thoreau code--a great title for a book.