WAR OF EMPTY

            After yesterday's post on loneliness, I have this follow-up with an idea I received from a Canadian farmer.  He offered a fascinating phrase:  we have a war of empty.

             It certainly relates to loneliness.  In 1900, our block here in Swoope had a school and about 70 people living on it.  For the record, this is not a city block; it's 5 miles around.  Today, it has 25 people and the old historic school has been remodeled into part of a house.  At least the cows aren't running through it anymore.

             But it's not just people.  The people emptiness follows from agricultural emptiness.  Instead of farms being multi-speciated with lots going on, they're mono-speciated with only one thing.  That takes fewer diversified skills and fewer people.

             Hand work has been replaced with chemicals.  I can remember as a child watching all the old-timers chop thistles and tidy up fencerows with mattocks.  I'm the only one that does that any more.  Now all the farmers ride around on tractors or 4-wheelers with an herbicide wand in their hand.  So farmers aren't even exercising any more and they just get fat riding around on machines.

             The land is empty of people; empty of skills; empty of hand work; empty of diversity.  Overgrazing and cropping combine to destroy habitat that once was home to countless varieties of birds, mice, insects and pollinators.  The blooms are gone, either herbicided or overgrazed.

             The communal labor like threshing rings, shearing parties, hay making and hog killin's in the fall--what used to fill the land with laughter, love, and life is gone.  In yesteryear the community would designate a patch of forest and burn 2 acres annually to bring on blueberries and blackberries for everyone to pick.  A multi-year rotation provided these succulents for the community and a mosaic of succession and diversity, filling the landscape with variety and abundance.  No more.

            Now the government owns the forest and except for the occasional subsidized logging operation deprives the county of taxes generated from the property and any use except recreational.  And nobody even comes to the woods anymore; they're at Starbucks or the arcade--you can't walk through the woods carrying coffee and staring blankly into your smartphone. Post-civil-war subsistence homesteads scattered over the mountains are gone, the people moved to town and are often on government assistance.

            I'm going to Santa Cruz tomorrow to speak at CrossFit headquarters to a gathering of doctors and health coaches.  My topic is going to be "Building a CrossFit Landscape."  Indeed, our culture's campaign toward empty includes our own homes, which are now just pit stops between real life rather than havens of rest and the nexus of life's foundations.  Our food is empty of nutrition, full of empty calories eaten by people whose emptiness  is expressed by voyeurism on the internet or celebrity addiction on the TV. 

             Our kitchens are empty of activity.  The average American now spends only 15 minutes in the kitchen, which used to be the heart of the home.  The bustling heartland of our nation is now called flyover country, with rural towns losing population each year, often dramatically.  Although the internet was supposed to bring us closer, due to limited access in rural America we country folks now are even empty of the high speed service our urban neighbors enjoy.  Accessing markets, participating in podcasts, researching topics--all of this is difficult in rural America.  This pushes the opportunity gauge toward empty.  Our home receives no cell phone coverage.

             I'm not a pessimist; I'm a consummate optimist.  But it breaks my heart to see the emptiness in our farmscape, our foodscape, our familyscape.  The home kitchen has largely been abandoned for the take out package; home brew is replaced with Starbucks.   Conversations at home have been replaced with video games. The average American male between 25 and 35 spends 20 hours per week playing video games.  Our national life expectancy has been dropping now for 3 years, fueled by white male suicides among 30-45 year olds.  If your only friend is a video game, you'll soon be depressed, lonely, and on opiods.

             Folks, it's time for a filling.  We need to fill our kitchens and dining rooms with home cooked food and laughter.   We need to fill our hands with hoes, mattocks and spades and get our exercise from interacting with landscape massage and stewardship rather than riding around on spray rigs.  We need to fill our fields with mosaics of vegetation and abundant animal life of all kinds.  We need a filling.

             What's filling for you?