Life.

“Life—all life—is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.”

~ Frank Herbert, Dune, Appendix I: The Ecology of Dune

This statement above—this inarguable fact of planetary reality—is a wondrous thing. (Full disclosure, I discovered it on the bottom of a bag of coffee from Dune Coffee Roasters out of Santa Barbara.) It has the feel of something that will remain with me a long time, something to hold onto when my mind is shaken and my way feels unnavigable. As the old signposts and markers fall and I am searching for another cairn to guide me home, that quote contains an [uncontainable] truth. It takes the long view, an existential view even, where the focus is not on any particular life but on life as continual presence, life as Life.

It is the rain falling upon the land, the grass growing upon the land, the deer grazing upon the grass, the man hunting and killing and processing and cooking and eating the deer. It is the leftover carcass being broken down and consumed by innumerable organisms and microorganisms—“decomposing” is far too clinical and detached a term for this process—and it is the excrement passed by the hunter of the deer. It is the death of the hunter. And just because we modern people interrupt the natural order by sending our waste through sewers and burying our preserved corpses in caskets does not falsify its elegance.

This Dune quotation is a poetic rendering of the biogeochemical cycle: “the movement and transformation of chemical elements and compounds between living organisms, the atmosphere, and the Earth's crust” (yes, I copy/pasted that from Wikipedia). It describes the way the earth perpetuates itself, and through the description it offers us a way to participate in this continual, ongoing, transformational presence that we call Life.

Life is in the service of life. This is neither self-aggrandizing nor self-erasing. It recalls an old school ethos, an ancient wisdom even, that there is great value and meaning, a rightness or righteousness, in the submission of our efforts towards that which is outside of and greater than our own selves. This is a timeless (and I’m inclined to say religious) posture wherein through service we acknowledge our smallness and in gratitude offer our work. And yet simultaneously it keeps in check the corruptibility of ‘service,’ that mode in which service becomes servitude and its nobility becomes abused. This is not an easy balance to maintain. As anyone knows who’s been employed in the food & beverage or hospitality sector, there is always an incredibly fine line between offering great service and it beginning to feel demeaning. And if you’ve worked in churches or religious organizations or nonprofits, you know that humble service can curdle into a martyr complex or, alternately, those in the seats of power can take gross advantage of those serving willingly.

But if life—all life—is in the service of life, there is reciprocity and more than reciprocity. This idea maintains that there is an interconnectedness among all. There is a union. And I do not mean in a spiritual way. I mean it materially, concretely. ‘You reap what you sow’ should be taken first of all literally: if you plant a seed that has been modified to grow bigger and faster at the cost of flavor and in dependence upon chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides for its survival, you should not be surprised if it is deficient in nutrients and if in turn the organisms that consume it will be themselves deficient. Conversely, if what you plant is dependent upon organic compost and fertilizer, dependent upon living soil and upon its own strength and hardiness, and dependent upon your human capacity for attentiveness and labor, you will likely find the harvest to be nutritious, flavorful, enjoyable, and not damaging to the land. This is in a different sense than the ‘do no harm’ ethos - after all, you’re still killing a living thing; hard to argue it’s a harmless harvest. But if you as farmer take care of your farm, you’ve given yourself the greatest chance for your farm to take care of you and anyone who eats of your farm.

If we offer our lives in the service of life, a hope emerges that we ourselves have a capacity to receive life’s offerings; to bless is in some way to be blessed. To push beyond this dynamic, to strive to become master, not only disrupts life’s rhythm but in fact does oneself a disservice. It expands the nutrient-deficiency-problem on an ever-greater scale. If all life is in the service of life, and you say ‘No thanks, not for me, I’m gonna get mine, I’m looking out for number one,’ your very own life will be diminished, you will experience in some way an impoverished life. (Does anyone really think the most powerful man in the world is actually happy?) This is a comprehensible experience not only on an individual and personal level but also as a collective: can we deny that radical wealth inequality harms societies, and that to live in such a society is to experience a rot creeping through? If we steel ourselves enough to gaze upon the ruined landscapes of the industrial economy—the blasted mountaintops, the clearcuts, the endless acres of monocrops, the relentless metastasizing of the concrete and metal and glass of the built environment, even the great forests of wind turbines and solar panels—can we deny in our innermost thoughts the ‘covert despair’ of such a civilization, our great fear of the ‘void within’? I cannot. I feel the horror, the helplessness, the numbness and the retreat.

And so, in grief and in fearfulness of my cowardice, I return to the quotation. I must. It is a statement of faith, of hope: All life is in the service of life. To be clear, this is not a blissful utopian ideal—the lions still eat the antelope, parasitic wasps still lay their eggs inside other insects, weeds outcompete our crops if left alone, you and I will still one day die—but rather this is a stance that receives reality with both eyes open. It is honest. And because it is an honest accounting of existence in this world, it bestows a truth to which we can hold fast. In defiance of our distrusting, cynical, post-irony culture, here we are offered a way to trust and live sincerely. It foregrounds our immediate, embodied perception and our sensing, fleshly creatureliness—it reminds us how stupid and nonsensical the phrase “virtual reality” is. And it pays no heed to anything “after” life. It makes no guesses and ventures no propositions about heaven, or eternity, or karma, or reincarnation. Life is not in the service of any of that; life is in the service only of life. After life? Well, death. After death? Unimportant. Uninteresting.

But death in itself does occupy an interesting, albeit unspoken, place within life. We fear death because we intuit that life is precious - we don’t want it to end, but it always does, and so I think our ancestors pretty sensibly remade the moment of death from an absolute and unknowable end to more of a transitional point. Think of Charon ferrying the dead across the River Styx (I just learned Charon is a psychopomp: from the Greek, literally ‘the guide of souls,’ this is any religion’s spirit or deity whose responsibility is to escort newly deceased souls from Earth to the afterlife). Here on earth—pre-mythologically—death walks hand in hand with life; they’re old friends, original companions. Life needs death. A farm certainly needs death, as evidenced by the necessity of compost and fertilizer for the vigorous, productive growth of healthy plants. Death, we can say, makes room for more life.

Even that formulation obscures the vitality of life, however, which is why we need the second sentence of the quote: Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater richness as the diversity of life increases. Death makes way for life only to the extent that there are living creatures to make use of the dead, to make available the nutrients which the dead quite obviously no longer need. If you have ever had the good fortune to look attentively at a quality compost pile, particularly if it is in the middle stages of becoming itself, you will see just how much life is going on amongst the dead. It’s gross of course (roaches and centipedes and such) but it is active. Alive. And those gross little creatures that in another context I would annihilate with my boot heel, here they are doing good work, and I bless them. If you bring a great variety of dead things to your compost pile—many types of green waste, fish and seafood leftovers, animal carcasses, etc—you will find that “the diversity of life increases” within your compost. Naturally, these many living creatures will make necessary nutrients available “in greater richness.”

This creation of abundance may be formulated in its inverse as well, and to ominous effect: Necessary nutrients are made absent from life as the diversity of life decreases. This is one of the great dangers of monocropping, which has led to the use of absurd quantities of synthetic fertilizers on industrial farms and their inevitable runoff from dead soil into the world’s waters. Let me paraphrase an idea from Wendell Berry, himself paraphrasing Sir Albert Howard:

Imagine a healthy old-growth forest. Not only are there big grand trees, there are smaller and younger ones of all ages and sizes, with many varieties and species of tree to be seen. In the understory you find smaller shrubs and vines; on the forest floor, ferns, mosses, and the like. There are birds of all kinds, small mammals like foxes and squirrels, and of course veritable armies of insects. Fungi abound, and carpets of their mycelium spread just underground as a type of information network throughout the forest. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is waste: if a squirrel falls and dies, its body becomes part of the forest in a new way. Every fallen leaf and downed limb is something’s food or shelter, every raindrop is absorbed, every ray of sunshine is put to use.

A good farm should mimic a healthy forest. A thousand acres of corn or soy probably doesn’t qualify.

I have referenced before The Light Eaters, by Zoë Schlanger, a remarkable book about the emerging science on plant intelligence. In it she writes, “Complexity—the marriage of the extreme idiosyncrasy of species and the constant fluctuations of a zillion variables in their environment—may be the whole point.” A healthy forest is a complex place. It is always in flux, always changing and becoming while yet remaining itself; its life is greater than the mere sum of its constituent lives. Industrial farming, however, abhors complexity. Complexity does not allow for the callous treatment of land and life that the shareholders of industrial agriculture depend on. Complexity is indeed efficient, but it is a style of efficiency alien to industry: complexity lets no thing go to waste, not even the corpse of a fallen squirrel. Industrial efficiency, on the other hand, prizes above all the short-term profit. It cares neither for the living nor the dead because its style is that of the machine—neither living nor dead.

Possibly the most complicated, difficult, and urgent question of our current era is how to balance our human desires and nature’s needs. We are no longer in a world where natural and technical limits place actual hard constraints on the damage we can do to the planet’s places and species (including, in a cruel irony, ourselves). In prior centuries and millenia, we could and did go to war with each other, explore and plunder new locales, even probably hunt some species to extinction. We coveted and lusted and stockpiled. After all, modernity did not turn us into monsters—it’s pretty clear we’ve always had the capacity and will to be monstrous—but the damage was limited in scope because we were limited. Even the great kings of old that dreamed of immortality and limitless power still had to contend with such embarrassing possibilities like dying from, I dunno, a small cut that got infected. Now? Well, not a whole lot of constraints. I mean, I live on the most isolated archipelago on earth and I can order basically whatever I want from Amazon. Oh and we have Costco. Those two facts should tell us everything we need to know about our limits, or lack thereof.

And it should scare us more than it does.

This calls to my mind the witness of David Abram’s magical and perceptive book, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. He contends, “We’ve taken our primary truths from technologies that hold the world at a distance. Such tools can be mighty useful, and beneficial as well, as long as the insights that they yield are carried carefully back to the lived world, and placed in service to the more-than-human matrix of corporeal encounter and experience.” To counter the temptations of limitlessness, we must take time to see the world up close: in its beauty and fragility, yes, but also in our own vulnerabilities and dependency. Our modern technologies create an illusion of independence—they rupture our ability to perceive that we are fully of this earth, inseparable, in an indissolvable union. And so here we come to the final sentence of the Dune quote: The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.

The opposite of life, I’m beginning to think, may not be death but rather emptiness. Death is integral to life if there is to be any hope for life to continue. A barren landscape does not have much life or death in it; it is empty, formless and void. As a place fills up with life, death too has presence there, though it be a spectral and haunting one. In the natural world and to an extent on a farm, death is the context in which life is allowed to transform and become itself again and again. When I pull a carrot out of the ground, I kill it. And then I eat it (usually I do wash it first). Our farm’s living soil, plus water and sunlight, nourish the carrot seeds that I sow, providing them with necessary nutrients to grow and mature and in time become food—aka necessary nutrients—for me and for you. My life is sustained, and because I am alive I am able to continue our work: growing good food for people. Relationships and relationships within relationships.

No life exists in isolation; nothing sustains itself, nothing lives forever. Even the sun will burn itself up one day. We are with every breath reliant upon that which exceeds us, that which we cannot truly ever own or fully comprehend. Repurposing a phrase from Derrida, we live sans voir, sans avoir, sans savoir—that is, without seeing, without having, without knowing. We live within impossibly complicated webs of interdependence, and it is foolishness to think we have it all figured out. Foolish, too, to think we can launch ourselves out of these webs and escape their sticky claims upon our lives. We must still breathe and eat and sleep, still engage the material world—no matter how processed and mediated that engagement has become.

What, then, is the character of our relationships with other people, other species, the land and water and all that surrounds? Shall we be extractive and utilitarian, learning our lessons from the machines of industry with their singlemindedness and deeply impaired vision? Shall we remain intoxicated as ever with power in all its forms, self-certain in our consumer quests for comfort and perfectability?

Karin Bergquist, the primary vocalist for one of my favorite bands Over The Rhine, sings “we’re not curable, but we’re treatable” …and that feels about right. I don’t trust utopian schemes; I don’t think we’ll ever arrive at a Promised Land (and if we did we’d likely destroy it). Our current civilizational quest to save the planet without curbing our acquisitive appetites is like peace by way of war - probably ain’t gonna work. Probably we are too weak of will and short of sight to alter our lives enough; too accustomed to the conveniences of modern life, too much at the mercies of economies too big to fail. Probably our evolutionary history—seek resources, seek shelter, reproduce—stands in the way of it too, depressingly. It’s not a mystery to me why I work on a small farm on a small island in the middle of the largest ocean. I don’t really trust that things will get better, but I do want to do good work. I need a small place to live and work because the bigger this world seems, the worse it feels. I’m not necessarily proud of this stance - but I understand myself well enough. I’m no prophet. I’m no mover and shaker. I want to love my wife, love my friends and coworkers, love the small acreage of land that has become so dear to me. That is going to have to be enough.

If you’ve made it all the way through this essay, mahalo nui loa. I know it’s much longer than my prior posts, and I’m grateful you stuck it out. As I was writing, working the Dune quote around in my mind like rosary beads, I wondered whether we could substitute ‘love’ for ‘life’ in the quote and it would more or less continue to make sense. Allow me to try it out (with a couple other minor edits) as a way to conclude this piece:

“Love—all love—is in the service of love. Necessary nourishment is made available to love by love in greater richness as the diversity of love increases. The entire landscape comes into love, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.”