The annual Heirloom Expo has been a destination for us since we moved to Shasta County, in 2011 - conveniently, the year they began the Expo, as well! It is a mad celebration of heirloom seeds, heritage-breed livestock, and traditional - for all cultures, over millennia - food preparation methods. It's a unique and valuable opportunity for us to learn about "new" (usually newly-discovered!) vegetable and fruit strains, hear about food and agricultural policy changes, and meet people who are trying to do similar things with building community around food and earth. It's a blast of exciting-exhausting-inspirational-challenging-limitess-beautiful work and passion.
One of the things we look forward to some years is hearing Vandana Shiva speak. She comes to the Expo just about every year, and seems to be close friends with the main organizers, the owners of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. This year she spoke to the incredible and brilliant self-organization of nature ("autopoiesis"), the concept of scarcity and its impossibility in nature (one seed becoming 1,000, the 200,000 varieties of rice in India - amazing!), and the unity of all living things. As we always do, we truly enjoyed the 40 minutes she spent with us, speaking with many hundreds of people crammed into one of the largest - echoey! - buildings at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds.
One of the stories woven through her theme was the concept of violence against life in the form of genetic seed modification and the use of single-purpose chemicals. This is violence against nature through modification of seeds with toxins embedded, terminator technology (they don't self-propagate), and death of all "weeds" but the objective crop. This is violence against human communities through the dependance of farmers and consumers on multi-national corporations for something that should be free: the abundance of nature, and associated food crops ("a byproduct of seed", and Dr. Shiva reminds us!). The violence of patenting seeds, even non-genetically engineered versions, in order to gain control over the genetic material. What she didn't say, but was embedded in her lecture and in the core values of the Heirloom Expo, is that we, as consumers, participate in this cycle of violence. What choices do we make at the grocery store? Where do we go to celebrate with our families? How do we landscape our yards?
She extended her lecture to cover the actions that we choose to take, independently. The world is interconnected, and divisions that we see do not, in fact, exist. Connections exist between all of us, between us and nature, and between and within natural systems. We, as humans, are part of the system, and co-creators with the seed, with the pollinators, and with the consumer - an essential component of this system! As we always are reminded here on Oliview Farm (as if we could forget!), we are not in control of the system in which we operate, we don't understand how the system is organized, and we can only make an effort to be a productive and positive part of the system - our small role in it - through gentle growing practices, emphasizing diversity in all things, and trying to weave empathy and affection - Wendell Berry's word - in all of our actions.
All of this beauty and diversity naturally, through a single strain of "wild" tomatoes in Central/South America!