Messenger

Just back from Slow Food's Terra Madre in Torino, after the Organic World Congress in Istanbul, after the GlobE in Witzenhausen, after the Tropentag in Prague... phew! ...  All the work there is to do and all the inspiring people there are to do that work with!

Tom, Roberto, and Jim said it best "It's a sad and beautiful world".

Helping to settle back into Kleve, I listened to Wes Nisker, a teacher at the Insight Meditation Center, open his talk with this poem 'Messenger' by Mary Oliver and wanted to share it again, even if you've read it a hundred times, enjoy it slowly and may it inspire gratitude as a central theme.

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My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam, deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth
and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all,
over and over, how it is that we live forever.

--------

The teacher repeated that line again for emphasis "over and over, how it is that we live forever"

Hmong ethnobotany and conservation in Laos

A participatory ethnobotany study with indigenous Hmong elders on spiritual-cultural practices and livelihood uses of plants and their conservation suggests that the traditional cultural uses for plants may be a mechanism for the conservation of biodiversity in the rapidly deteriorating forests of Luang Prabang in the Lao People's Democratic Republic. Results offer an overview of traditional Hmong cultural uses and conservation of biodiversity in the rapidly deteriorating forests of Luang Prabang in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.

Read 'Hmong ethnobotany and conservation in Laos' in Ethnobotany Research and Applications (Whitney et al. 2014; 2015)

Tshawb nrhiav nroj tsuag tau muaj kev koom tes nrog cov kws tshuaj ntsuab Hmoob nyob rau zos Long Lan, Xeev Luang prabang, Los Tsuas Teb chaws tau pib tshawb los rau ntawm lub xyoo 2012 thiab 2013. Nrhiav txog lub laj lim thiab tswv yim ntawm cov laus neeg nyob zos Long Lan thiab cov zos nyob ib puag ncig twb yog ib qhov sij hawm muaj txiaj ntsig tau paub txog txoj kev cai coj siv nroj tsuag thiab pov hwm nyob nrog lub neej. Tau paub txog ntawm 74 hom tau muaj 49 yam (nroj tsuag) twb tau muab sau zoo, qhov nov muaj 25 yam tshuaj ntsuab (17 yam yog cov muaj hnub nyooj ntev thiab 8 yam yog cov muaj hnub nyooj luv), 20 yam yog cov ua ntoo, 17 yam yog cov nroj, 10 yam yog cov hmab, thiab 2 yam yog suab. Muab xam tau pom txog nroj tsuag muaj txiaj ntsig zoo heev rau ntawm txoj kev siv yoom thiab pov hwm nyob nrog lub neej. Qhov tshawb rhiav no tau ceeb toom txog tias txoj kev siv yoom nroj tsuag raws li txoj cai Hmoob coj yog ib txoj cai zoo rau ntawm kev pov hwm hav zoov hav tsuag rau qhov hav zoov niaj hnub no raug luaj ntov nyob rau xeev Luang prabang, los Tsuas Teb. 

Check out the related iNaturalist collection (still growing).

References

Whitney, Cory, Min (Meej Vaj) Vang Sin, Giang Le Hong, Can Vu Van, Keith Barber, and Lanh Tran Thi. “Conservation and Ethnobotanical Knowledge of a Hmong Community in Long Lan, Luang Prabang, Lao People’s Democratic Republic.” Ethnobotany Research and Applications 12 (2014): 643–58. https://doi.org/10.17348/era.12.0.643-658.
———. “Hmong Conservation: Lessons in Ethnobotany from the Elders of Long Lan, Luang Prabang, Lao People’s Democratic Republic.” In 38th Annual Conference of the Society of Ethnobiology “The Many Faces of Ethnobiology,” 70–71. May 6-9: Society of Ethnobiology, 2015.

Autobiography by Nanao Sakaki

Autobiography

Born of a humble & poor family,
Received minimum education,
Learnt how to live by himself at fourteen,
Survived storms, one after another.
Bullets, starvation & concrete wastelands.

A day's fare - a cup of brown rice, vegetables,
Small fish, a little water, & a lot of wind.
Delighted by children and women,
Sharing beads of sweat with farmers,
Fishermen, carpenters & blacksmiths,
Paying no attention to soap, shampoo,
Toilet paper & newspapers.

Now & again
Loves to suck the nectar of honeysuckle,
To flutter with dragonflies & butterflies,
To chatter with winter wrens,
To sing song with coyotes,
To swim with humpback whales,
And to hug a rock in which dinosaurs sleep.

Feels at home in Alaskan glaciers,
Mexican desert, virgin forest of Tanzania,
Valley of Danube, grasslands of Mongolia,
Vulcanoes in Hokkaido & Okinawan coral reeds.

And - one sunny summer morning
He will disappear on foot.
Leaving no shadow behind.

Love is the beginning of loneliness

A poem by Shuji Tereyama.

(The original kanji is included in the translation to make the wordplay apparent)

I wrote down the word tree (木)

but it looked so pitiful all alone

so I added another tree (木)

and the trees became a forest (林)

When I look at the word lonely (淋)

I know why the trees are crying (涙)

It's just because when love begins

loneliness comes in

Slow Science

When the Slow Movement started in 1989 with the creation of the Slow Food organization — to combat the loss of traditional foods — its objectives were to promote quality over speed, to defend cultural diversity and to challenge the ever-increasing pace of our lives. Since then, the concept has spread and expanded to such fields as traveling, designing ... and science.

Worldcrunch.com / LE TEMPS

Slow science supporters criticize the pressure to publish as many studies as possible in scientific journals. Instead, they demand more time to carry out their research and publish their work says a 2010 one-page document entitled "The Slow Science Manifesto," published online by a group of anonymous Berlin-based researchers.

"We do need time to think," it reads. "We do need time to digest. We cannot continuously tell you what our science means, what it will be good for, because we simply don't know yet. Science needs time. Bear with us, while we think."

Isabelle Stengers, philosopher at the Free University of Brussels and co-author of the book Another Science is Possible! Manifesto for a Slowing Down of Sciences, explained at a recent lecture that the manifesto ideas are relatively simple. "But they offer the advantage of creating a consensus in which scientists who find their working conditions painful recognize themselves," she said. 

"The slowness demanded by supporters of slow science is also necessary to what I call 'friction' — that is to say, exchanges with other fields and, more generally, with society," Isabelle Stengers says. She says that researchers are increasingly cut off from the rest of the world, and they have become so ultra-specialized that there is now a lack of imagination.

"The golden age during which scientists could think at leisure, without worrying about anything other than their work has in fact never existed, because they always had to look for funding," sas Alain Kaufman, who leads the Science-Society Interface at the University of Lausanne. "So there's no point in being nostalgic. We must nonetheless denounce the speed pathologies and especially the tyranny of the impact factor."

Song of the Rolling Earth - Science Forum

Gustav Stresemann Institut (GSI)

Sitting in a friends kitchen and preparing for the Science Forum in Bonn at the Gustav Stresemann Institut “Nutrition and health outcomes: targets for agricultural research” Science Forum (CGIAR). 23.09. – 25.09.2013. 

I came across these words in Leaves of Grass. It inspires a kind of divine, deeply contented laziness and contentedness. Content to sit here and drink tea and feel confident that the benefit to the world will be greater than that of my effort to head out into the chilly streets and off to the conference...

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, BOOK XVI, A Song of the Rolling Earth, Part 3

Whoever you are! motion and reflection are especially for you,
The divine ship sails the divine sea for you.

Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid and liquid,
You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,
For none more than you are the present and the past,
For none more than you is immortality.

Each man to himself and each woman to herself, is the word of the
past and present, and the true word of immortality;
No one can acquire for another—not one,
Not one can grow for another—not one.

The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him,
The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him,
The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him,
The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him,
The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him,
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail,
The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the actor and actress
not to the audience,
And no man understands any greatness or goodness but his own, or
the indication of his own.

Read more about the what is happening at GSI and related work (Lee et al. 2011; Witney 2008; 2011ab; 2012; Whitney et al. 2012).

Further reading

Lee, Jeung Hyoung, Hyun Sun DiMatteo Jo, Susanne Padel, Robert Anderson, Marco Schlüter, Francis Blake, Katsushige Murayama, et al. “Government Policies for the Promotion of Organic Agriculture with a Focus on the Asian Pacific Region.” In Special Workshop; Government Policies for the Promotion of Organic Agriculture with a Focus on the Asian Pacific Region, 17th IFOAM OWC, South Korea, edited by Cory Whitney, 97. Seoul, South Korea: Ministry of Food Agriculture, Forestry & Fisheries, Republic of Korea, 2011.

Whitney, Cory. “A Survey of Wild Collection and Cultivation of Indigenous Species in Iceland and the Faroe Islands.” MSc, University of Kassel, 2011. Kobra (University of Kassel’s Repository und Archive).

———. “Conservation Ethnobotany in the North Atlantic.” Non-Wood News; NWFP Digest, 2011. Food and Agriculture Organization.

———. “Nordic Ethnobotany and Conservation.” NWFP News: Non-Wood Forest Products, 2012. Food and Agriculture Organization.

———. “Small Is Beautiful; How Local Organic Can Steer Us Away From Catastrophe.” Ecology & Farming, 2008. Ecology & Farming.

Whitney, Cory, J. Gebauer, and M. Anderson. “A Survey of Wild Collection and Cultivation of Indigenous Species in Iceland.” Human Ecology 40, no. 5 (2012): 781–87. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-012-9517-0.

 

Organic Farm Poetry from Japan

Preparing for Tokyo I just visited the translated web page of Mr. Kaneko Yoshinori's Shimosato Farm in Ogawa cho town, Saitama prefecture.

While looking around the farm's webpages I picked this poem out of the jumbled automated translation of a farm trainees story. - It is about the trainees plan to make a book of the farming experiences and life experiences to share with farmers in Cambodia. - It is not clear who the author is so I cannot give proper credit but in the original text the author thanks the farmers Kaneko Noboru, Tomoko, Ishikawa, and Chigusa, as well as the fellow farm trainees learned together, and the people of Shimosato farm and Ogawa cho town. Perhaps forwarding this appreciation on is enough.

Farm Stare Future; Farm Frost 

Organic farming, intuition, the way to live life,

Became me in the farm frost.

The thing clasped about, 

Blood smears from this hand.  

In youth, traveling through India, 

Watching cremations, much until night fall. 

Three days, from fall to rise on the Ganges, 

Continue to burn hours after catching fire in the body, 

Smoke aims up to heaven, 

Ash, flow and hover to the river.

Meat and bone remaining burnt, 

Dog food and cow lick. 

Among those who have seen such a sight, 

Consciousness 

In me, all life that I have led was born. 

Later, learning from local people in Cambodia. 

The important thing in life, without, at all, 

such a thing as power, 

such as position, 

such as honor, 

such as money. 

To value life, 

To live bright with the family, 

The people of the village, 

To live richly together,

To know such things 

Commonplace. 

The philosophy more than anything else, 

Is to cherish life. 

Agriculture, 

That there is only that day in and day out, 

To keep the stack small and steady. 

Agriculture, 

Bad things in themselves are also getting better, 

As the villagers say, 

The land is no good in spirit unless it is rich. 

And it is to the agriculture taken for granted, 

That will live on for granted. 

This village, 

Farmers, 

Children, 

Beauty, 

The living land and soil, 

And all the live beautiful strong richness of farming 

We light a lamp in one corner.