Underpinnings of Health
In harmony with the Tao,
the sky is clear and spacious,
the earth is solid and full,
all creatures flourish together,
endlessly repeating themselves,
endlessly renewed.
When man interferes with the Tao,
the sky becomes filthy,
the earth becomes depleted,
the equilibrium crumbles,
creatures become extinct.
The Master views the parts with compassion,
because he understands the whole.
His constant practice is humility.
He doesn’t glitter like a jewel
but lets himself be shaped by the Tao,
as rugged and common as a stone.
Tao Te Ching, chapter 39
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
IN THE SUMMER of 2006, I visited the Agriculture and Land-Based Training program (ALBA) in Salinas, CA during an educational program I was directing through Stanford University. ALBA is a one hundred-acre farm and educational facility that trains people, primarily migrant workers, how to produce and market organic fruits and vegetables. Dina Izzo, ALBA’s marketing director at the time, gave us a walking tour around the farm’s lush and diverse fields. We came to the easternmost extent of ALBA’s property, which abuts a large conventional farm that was planted entirely in lettuce. She pointed towards ALBA’s fields and said, If you want to know the difference between sustainable farming and industrial agriculture, here it is. Life… then gesturing towards the neighboring farm, …and death.
Since that day, I have learned how much truth was contained in that simple, blunt statement. Conventional farms are shockingly dead and sterile places. Crops are essentially kept on life support systems of petroleum-based fertilizers. Insect life is fought off with chemical pesticides (some of which are now genetically engineered into the plant itself), other plant life is killed with herbicides, and the trillions of life forms normally present in soils are decimated by compaction, erosion, and the aforementioned chemicals. Seemingly so vibrant, today’s industrial farms are inhospitable places for life, except for the select few cash crops grown throughout the world.
The destruction of life is not confined to the farms themselves. Chemical runoff enters water tables, streams, and rivers, leaving a long trail of devastation in riparian zones and river deltas. In the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone”, a seven thousand square mile swath in which fertilizer runoff gives rise to massive algal blooms, oxygen levels are driven so low that virtually no life is supported. The pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Clearly, the way in which our society produces the majority of our food does not fare well under Leopold’s litmus test. That should give us pause.
A truly sustainable farm, by stark contrast, pulsates with life. The topsoil is home to an incredibly complex and dynamic community of bacteria, fungi, macro- and microorganisms, all of which cycle and recycle the nutrients taken up by plant roots. Insects, birds, worms, and small animals prey and are preyed upon, keeping one another’s populations in check. Farmers employ nature’s own insurance strategy, guarding against pests and disease by planting a large diversity of crops, both in terms of variety and species. The soil’s healthy biotic community, judicious cultivation, and the use of off-season cover crops help mitigate erosion. On the sustainable farm, just like on its industrial brethren, man alters his natural surroundings to serve his own interest of producing food. Yet the resulting systems could not be more disparate.
I start with this tale of two farms because what is happening in the world of agriculture surely mirrors what is happening in the world at large. Looking at those two farms in Salinas several years ago, the lush diversity of the one and the ruthless monotony of the other, I thought to myself, How does this happen? What gives rise to abundant health on the one hand and a wasteland on the other? These pieces of land represent manifestations of two very different worldviews. Neither farm would exist as it does without a complete set of values, assumptions, systems, and technologies underlying it. My hunch has been that the worldview that leads logically to the industrial farm is the same worldview that is sending us careening into climate change, global economic instability, and what is being called the “sixth great extinction” of species. I also suspect that the worldview behind the sustainable agriculture movement is one that holds great hope and promise as we grapple with the monumental ecological, cultural, and economic challenges of our day.
This is not an issue of personal morality. What I would like to try to examine are attitudes and assumptions so deeply embedded in our culture that they are difficult to identify, let alone question, because they are like the very air we breathe. The worldview that gives rise to the industrial farm is troubling precisely because it is so ubiquitous, so deeply rooted, and (from a certain and narrow perspective) so spectacularly successful. Looking exclusively at yield per acre, the agricultural Green Revolution in chemicals and technology of the past several decades has led to a fourfold increase in productivity since the days of my grandfather. As one environmentalist put it, industrial agriculture succeeds brilliantly… “Until it doesn’t.”
This and other writings in this book are part of my personal ongoing tussle with the question that confronted me so baldly at ALBA; what gives rise to health and what is antagonistic to it? By health, I am referring to a system that functions with vitality, solidity, and resilience. My hypothesis has been that there are certain commonalities wherever you find health, be it healthy soil, healthy people, healthy societies, or healthy ecosystems. Gaining a deeper understanding of the principles that are preconditions for health and learning how to cultivate them, therefore, should help us build health in our lives, communities, and institutions.
In subsequent writings, I will share some thoughts on broad topics including technology, community, and agriculture in terms of what does and what does not contribute to health. First, however, I would like to posit three “underpinnings of health” as tools to understanding healthy individuals, groups, and ecosystems: holistic worldview, reverence for life, and receptivity to feedback.
Holistic Worldview
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to
everything else in the universe.” – John Muir
IT IS NOT coincidental that the word holistic derives from the same Greek root, holos, as the word health. To view the world holistically is to recognize that any given person, thing, system, or phenomenon is more than the sum of its parts. To understand an individual, therefore, is to understand her in relation to her physical environment, her cultural context, her personal connections, and so forth. As John Muir noted in the preceding quote, anyone seeking a holistic understanding of even the simplest of things is soon plunged into the rabbit hole, encountering the limits of their capacity to understand.
Developing a holistic orientation towards the world is essential if we are to build upon health in our society. Challenges such as climate change and global poverty are too vast and too complex to grasp in any other way. An unfortunate legacy of the brilliant French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes is the idea that we can understand the whole by separating and knowing its parts. Our educational system largely reflects this, as many students are educated in an ever more specialized and narrow manner. This fragmentation and compartmentalization of knowledge has enabled mankind to behave in such a way that, viewed holistically, is clearly inconsistent and destructive. It is a narrow and compartmentalized worldview that gives rise to corporations that pursue profit at the expense of human rights and the natural world, and farms that produce incredible yield even as they poison the land.
To build health in our lives calls us to relax our tendency to compartmentalize, to make the connections between ecology and economy, science and art, food and community, heart and mind. A healthy society also requires institutions that reflect and encourage a holistic worldview and that do not pit profit against responsibility or the short-term against the long-term.
Reverence for Life
YEARS AGO, I started taking slow walks in the hills to decompress after work. I stop to watch ants going about their business, or to examine the delicate patterns of wildflowers. On occasion I become so absorbed in observation that I simply forget myself, forget time, forget place. These moments bring with them a deep sense of peace and connection, awareness that all life is inextricably linked. In these moments, I am reverent.
Perhaps the most fundamental precondition for health is a deep and abiding reverence for life in the particular and in its totality. I cannot think of a better planetary survival strategy than if human beings were to decide tomorrow via referendum to make reverence for life our number one priority as a species.
I will try to articulate what I am referring to when I use the term reverence for life. I am certainly no authority on the subject, but I think reverence is both an orientation and a practice encompassing the following:
To seek to understand life and embrace it on its own mysterious terms
Any attempt to comprehend life gradually reveals a dynamic and intricately interconnected web. The deeper we internalize the reality of this interconnectedness, the more likely we are to behave in such a way that embodies respect for and gratitude towards lives and species other than our own. To seek to understand life is also to come face to face with the reality that suffering and death are all part of the package and, indeed, make new life possible. As the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran wrote:
Could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy / And you would accept the seasons of your life, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
To favor the living over the manufactured
We live increasingly in a built as opposed to a natural environment. More and more people live in cities and suburbs, work indoors in factories or in front of computer screens with precious little contact with the natural world. The danger is that we never gain a familiarity with and appreciation for the natural world, even as the built environment becomes more comfortable and “natural” to us. We see this clearly in children who spend hours playing video games but have no desire to visit their local park. I believe that to revere life we need to find ways to surround ourselves with life so as to become acquainted with its manifold forms, and not to surround ourselves with dead things or simulations of life. Without meaningful contact with the natural world, humans are in danger of becoming alienated from it. This alienation is what makes possible the destructive stance our society has developed towards the very community of life that makes our existence possible.
To attempt to live our lives to the fullest potential
To revere ones own life is to live it fully, to be alive and awake in every moment. It is also to honor and develop the natural gifts we have been given that bring our selves and our community joy. We all live with various societal expectations and responsibilities, so our challenge is to find a way to balance those expectations and responsibilities with what we feel called to do in the world. Theologian Frederick Buechner once wrote that our vocation is “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Receptivity to Feedback
ANOTHER HALLMARK OF health is the capacity to receive feedback, both positive and negative, and respond or adapt accordingly and quickly. A healthy person’s nervous system informs them if their tea is too hot to drink and they respond by letting it cool. A healthy society will similarly recognize if it is behaving in a destructive manner and alter its laws, institutions, or habits to remedy the situation.
It is important and interesting to note that societies that are less responsive to negative feedback most often have a wider gap between the rich and the poor. It is the poor and underserved that usually feel the brunt of negative feedback, be it pollution, lack of access to resources, or crumbling public infrastructure. Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath offer us a tragic example of this fact. Those with means had some degree of self-determination of whether or not to leave the city, whether to go to a private hospital instead of a public hospital, and whether to relocate after the devastation. The poor, by contrast, suffered the failure of nearly every public support mechanism, from transportation to health care to emergency response.
If those in decision-making positions are insulated, by virtue of their wealth and privilege, from the negative effects of their decisions, they are operating as if their nerve endings have gone numb. Thus when the book of Proverbs warns that those who close their eyes to the poor will suffer, it is not just a call to moral behavior but also a pragmatic cautionary tale to those who would try to maintain a healthy society.
THIS FOCUS ON health and its preconditions, while perhaps a bit homespun in my particular approach, can nonetheless be very practical, useful, and hopeful. By training ourselves to become more fluent in the “language” of the positive and negative indicators of health, we can more quickly discern systems and behaviors that logically result in the equivalents of either industrial or sustainable farms. This is not an abstract concept. The sustainable farmer, for example, becomes fluent in the language of health of her land. She can read incredibly subtle signs that indicate the soil is lacking phosphorus or the crops could benefit from an extra five minutes of irrigation. A skilled teacher constantly monitors the health of the learning environment in his classroom and adjusts accordingly. I believe all of us are designed to recognize and intuit health. It is a matter of attention, intention, and focused application.
Perhaps most enlivening to me about the emphasis on the mindful cultivation of health as opposed to primarily reacting to our many problems is that everyone is uniquely capable of participating. The immensity of climate change and other modern challenges can make us feel paralyzed, overwhelmed, and helpless. We may believe it is out of our realm of expertise to try to address, let alone grasp, the problem, forgetting that such problems transcend the very idea of expertise.
Cultivating health in our families, our communities, our ecosystems, and ourselves is, I believe, what each of us is called to do at this moment. We can pursue this objective in small ways and large, subtle ways and formal. In doing so, we can find ourselves empowered, drawing upon and leveraging our unique skills and passions. We can actively engage in the world, even in this time of crisis, and witness the sphere of our life, health, and influence gradually spread.
