The Failures of Farming and the Necessity of Wildtending
Kollibri terre Sonnenblume came through Saint Paul late last year and I will never forget his eye contact. It was steady and intimate. He was unafraid of what judgements lay on the other side. I tried my best to keep it, but rather sheepishly, turned away more times than I would have liked. It is dismaying when you find out how much distance you have created in your modern world, when even the child’s act of looking upon another while in conversation presents itself as a trying practice. Kollibri had the ease of someone close to himself—he was never retreating into his iPhone screen, but instead letting his thoughts flow from the inside-out. If all of this sounds elementary, I am happy for the reader, for they have found some connection that is uninterrupted.
I bring this up largely to tie it the larger theme of Kollibri’s book The Failures of Farming and the Necessity of Wildtending, both in its message and its tone. One glides through the cheerful prose with the ease of someone who has smoked the right amount of weed, even as Kollibri confronts the weed industry itself and its environmental impacts. The question the book begins with is a large one—and one much debated before. Are we happier, and better off now, then we ever have been? If we are, that is a little bit horrifying, and it should be no cause to celebrate our own dismal times, but to despair over the rest of time spent.
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