Harvest moon
And we’re coming up for the autumn equinox. There will be a post about this soon under the Wheel of the Year section of this Substack. As an autumn equinox birthday person, this is just about my favourite day of the year, and hopefully we will be on the Ile de Batz in the Bay of Morlaix for the day.
Last night the harvest moon rose fat and yolk-yellow through the sweet chestnut trees and over the hill. This morning there was one of those stunningly beautiful golden sunrises, and I stood outside and watched mist glide up the hill from the stream. A pair of what I took to be gulls sculled gently overhead, and catching sight of their long black legs and feet held out behind them I realised they were in fact little egrets; birds that I love.
Veganic growing & animal husbandry
‘We can shape our relationship with the world so that it lines up with our ethics and aspirations.’ Charles Hervé-Gruyer
We revisit our idea of what we’re trying to do here frequently, to keep ourselves focused. On a personal level, we’re aiming towards a degree of self-sufficiency. In a wider sense, this is an experiment in living in as much harmony as we can with natural ecosystems, and allowing our other-than-human kin space, shelter and food.
Sometimes we ask whether what we are doing is not just self-serving, growing our own food to the extent that we can; but to know we are contributing a lifestyle that causes minimal harm to a wider movement reassures us that it’s not all in vain.
We can be politically-informed consumers: together we can begin to change the world.
We are part of a larger pilot movement in this way, as more and more people choose to turn their backs on the mindless cruelties and destruction of industrial materialism and industrial-scale agriculture with its toxins and exploitation of land, animals and humans.
‘...if we are talking about land use and the health of the earth, organic growing is non-negotiable in the long term.’ TM: The Man
We are organic, and by growing veganically want to demonstrate, if only to ourselves, that it is possible to feed people on much less land than is necessary with a meat-and-dairy-based diet, with much less water use, and no herbicides or pesticides, nor artificial or animal-derived fertilisers. This way, a great deal more land would be available for reforestation and biodiversity.
And/or, as someone on Substack has just written, to be able to feed ourselves and our immediate neighbours when there are food crises. (‘The day the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves’, by Adam Wilson of the Peasantry School.) How can I best share my plenty?
In addition, study after study shows that a good vegan diet brings with it a lower risk of cardiovascular issues including cholesterol, cancers (especially of breast and bowel), and Type 2 diabetes.
When we began the veg garden we used hay and old manure from the previous owners’ horse and donkeys, and a donation of strawy goose-shit from our neighbours’ goose shed. Generally, though, there’s no need to use animal products, given that we have compost, and mulch, and can sow green manures on dormant beds too (rye, vetch, phacelia which bees love).
We can operate a basically closed-loop system here, without buying anything in (though we did start with bought-in green-waste compost, tons of it). To the extent that we can, we practise no-dig by layering compost and mulch, as this is less intrusive to the helpful work of earthworms, soil bacteria and fungi. Our soil is rich and fertile, and so-called garden pests are taken care of by other members of the ecosystem, such as birds.
Animals...
A very big dilemma for me has been animals on the land. I’ve spent my life from a young age surrounded by animals: whether wild ones (and sometimes injured wild ones), or dogs, cats, chickens, ponies, and as a child tame mice, hamsters and the like. Without animals around my life lacks a very significant dimension.
But, at the moment, apart from the two companion dogs who share almost every aspect of our lives, we have chosen not to bring in animals, despite having quite a large acreage which would of course in some ways benefit from being grazed; or at least, we would benefit from having it grazed and wouldn’t have to use machinery to effect that. That’s another difficult choice.
There are many reasons for this, of which the simplest and most immediate is my current sense of utter exhaustion from too many years of family stresses and traumas, trying to earn a living freelance in the arts, being a single parent and, most relevant to this question, the distress of watching and tending much-loved animals, dogs and ponies, as they suffer and die, whether from illness and old age or unavoidable accidents or injuries. I have no spare capacity at the moment for being responsible for tending other beings. I miss horses and ponies in particular dreadfully, and a bit of me would love to employ working horses here on the land.
But that is a second reason. However good a life one gives them, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that we keep these work animals or food animals basically captive, non-consensually, for our own purposes. I’m vegan because I don’t want to add to the sum of suffering in the world, nor to exploit other beings. But yes, I miss the daily routine of tending to our ‘tame’ animals. (And there is an argument for offering refuge here to rescued or old animals. But see below.)
Another reason is, as I mentioned above, land use and loss of biodiversity. You could argue that our keeping a few animals here on a relatively small area of land is not even a drop in the ocean – blade of grass in the prairie – that is the over-grazed earth; but this is about consistency in what we’re trying to do here in our eco-project. Since it uses a great deal more land to feed people on a meat-and-dairy-based diet than on a vegan one, here we can free up land for biodiversity and crucial woodland regeneration.
There’s also the shocking fact that 82% of the world’s starving children live in countries where the major cash crops are maize and cereals for the intensively-farmed livestock in the affluent West. (Read that again.) And that is without taking into account the environmental savings in terms of water stress, fossil fuel use, and all the transportation and pollution of soil, air and water from animal agriculture, all of which together when farming animals make an immense contribution to our current ecological and climate-change problems. (It is said that animal agriculture is responsible for more pollution than the world’s transport systems combined.)
Which brings me on to the politics of it all
I’ve always been an activist. Not of the shouty dramatic and sometimes violent variety, but by literally standing up and being counted when it’s necessary. So road and nuclear protests, animal and environmental rights movements including anti-hunt measures, anti-war demos; all peaceful. I played an active part in campaigning against the dreadful and ineffective badger cull in the UK which, to my horror, continues for the moment.
The last twenty-odd years, I’ve become aware recently, has seen a big internal shift in the way I think, work and live. My life amongst the other-than-human, and bringing up my daughter in this way, to live in mostly wildish places with land, plants, trees, animals as kin, has always shaped my choice of (rented until recently) homes, how I lived in them, and my work. It’s been such an enormous part of my whole life that I’ve taken it for granted.
I have now realised that it has always been the major player in a life well lived, for me.
For the last 30-plus years I’ve made my living – such as it is – via my writing and writing-related activities. The content of my writing and my courses and retreats has been shifting more and more towards an ecocentric perspective.
I have highly valued the life of the mind, and come from a family who nourished that. So the things that stimulate me, apart from being out in the rest of the natural world, have been intellectual reflection and discussion around philosophy and spirituality, ecology, psychology, myth, literature of course, poetry especially, music, art, politics and on and on.
But none of this is possible for me, or of fundamental value for me, I have come to see, without that deep ground of being – the title, as it happens, of my quarterly outdoor daylong workshops for the solstices and equinoxes on Dartmoor for many years – rooted in a place, the land and its species. This enables my mind to manifest its thinking on a basic physical level. ‘Our life is the creation of our minds’, as I wrote in my post on karma.
So where I’m going with this is that I am now a quiet activist. I’ve admired for many decades now the work of Buddhist scholar and activist Joanna Macy; and such thinking has influenced my own view of how we live, and what it means to live right. These are my major preoccupations at this stage of my life; these and writing about them. (I have just finished my vegan cookbook with the recipes from our garden and a great deal of information too.)
What we consume is a political act
I laugh at myself to think that food has become such a major focus of my life; but of course it’s about more than that: it’s about how I/we live; about making choices that are ecocentric rather than human-centric – and being aware of the enormity of environmental and social injustices implicit in our consumption.
Here, I’m attempting to live in a way that stops seeing other species as either a useful resource, or a pest or nuisance. This whole project is about the wider community, and that is not just the human one.
There are few areas in which we can take control of our lives in this climate of globalised capitalism, material acquisition and neoliberal dog-eat-dog economics.
But we can take control of how and where we source our food, whether or not we grow it; and what that food is, how and where it is grown. Many of us can, as much as possible, cook our own – creating a fruitful pause in an overstressed life.
We may not all have time or space to grow our own, but we can choose to boycott supermarkets (where in any case, I don’t know about you, but I would tend to spend more than I’d intended on the offers, etc) and other multinationals. These control the supply chains, care little about sourcing, seasonality, foodmiles and pesticides, and drive small organic growers out of business.
All one can say of supermarkets is that their food seems cheap: someone, somewhere is paying the price for that.
And even in a city it’s possible to buy from local markets, farmers and growers, and organic veg box schemes. You might buy fewer foods for your euro, pound or dollar but it will be better food for you and the planet. You start to think differently. (And by the way it’s been calculated that a vegan diet will save you a few hundred pounds per year...)
In the UK, I would buy a weekly organic Riverford veg box (Riverford were local to us), certainly through the winter if we had little of our own produce, and I spent much less money than I otherwise would have done on food by making the contents, even ones I wouldn’t choose, the basis of each of our evening meals – all for, in those days, £12 (it’s not a great deal more now), with of course added grains, cereals, beans, pulses, nuts etc.
We can redefine what we think of as necessary to consume. And we can live well without great cost to ourselves or others. Yes, we need to open up space in our lives to think about shopping and to cook our own food – we could all benefit from that; and we need to redefine what’s important. We could champion the small, local, organic. We can be politically-informed consumers: together we can begin to change the world.
Thank you for reading, as always, my friends. I’d love your comments – and you don’t have to be vegan, not even an aspiring vegan.