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Nature Abhors a Monoculture

The chickens are coming home to roost, and most of them have bird flu.

With the Spring Evenday coming up, it looks as if we may well be paying a dollar apiece for our Ostara eggs this year. Don't blame the avian flu, though.

Blame battery farming.

I heard an interview this morning with an egg farmer who was anguishing over the emotional toll of having to cull three million birds.

While I empathize with his pain, I really have to ask: when we raise poultry in flocks of a million-plus birds, why in the world would we be surprised that, when systemic failure strikes, it should strike on any but a massive scale?

The vast majority of American eggs and chicken are industrially-raised on an industrial scale. Short-term cheap food, maybe, but sustainable?

Talk about a disaster just pleading to happen.

Some things that every pagan knows: generally speaking, Small is better than Large, Local is better than Global, Particular is better than General.

As recent experience all too readily demonstrates, nature abhors a monoculture.

    Walking out of my office is like opening an oven. The heat is a wall, strong, searing; there is a scent similar to baking bread rising from the grass that is toasting under the sun's unrelenting rays. My drive home takes me past farms along Route 5 in Deerfield: potatoes, tobacco, and corn growing strong and green despite the heat. We are not experiencing a drought; in fact the other day a thunderstorm hit on the way home with wind and rain so strong visibility was brought down to just a few feet. I am sure the rain was welcome just the same. 

    I think often of the local farmers. I am grateful for the countless hours they spend at their vocation and I recognize that it is a life I could not live. My own grandparents were farmers and factory workers, supplementing a life of hard work and unpredictable yield with wages earned by working in a foundry. Hard work and luck seem to be the mantra for farmers. Hard work, luck, technology, and engineering, farmers rely on many factors to answer their calling to serve. How did my grandparents manage? And their grandparents, and theirs? Go back generations, centuries, eras, and eventually everyone's forebears were farmers of a sort. They had only their own hard work, luck, and the grace of the gods to ensure plenty. 

Around Lughnasadh or soon after, I saw my first mourning dove at our Appalachian farmhouse. We’ve lived here since March, and while I’ve seen blue jays, cardinals, chickadees, nuthatches, falcons, crows, and more, mourning doves were conspicuously absent. And then there it was on our white post-and-rail fence. The next day, I saw another, and then more appeared in the bushes and trees over the next weeks. This morning, there were five perched on the fence, observing me as I let out our dog.

I think of Frau Harke when I see them, thanks to Jacob Grimm, who wrote in Teutonic Mythology that "Harke flies through the air in the shape of a dove, making the fields fruitful” (Vol. 4, p.1364). Harke is a giantess of German folklore in the Brandenburg and Thuringia regions. Her name means “to rake,” calling to mind the harvest and care of the earth. While usually a dweller of wild mountain forests, she does travel about during her holy days, like other goddesses of her type. Folklorist Benjamin Thorpe wrote that "At Heteborn, when the flax was not housed at Bartholomew-tide [August 24], it was formerly the saying, 'Frau Harke will come'” (142).

Rare species on Easter Island face extinction. New fossils in China challenge assumptions about human evolution. And we talk about the economics of air pollution. It's Earthy Thursday, our weekly segment on science and Earth-related news! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

One of the greatest needs of industrial civilization is cheap and plentiful energy. Our search for such energy has often come at the cost of the environment. But need that be the case in the future? Several of our articles this week take a look at the relationship between our power sources and the environment as well as how new technological innovations may make green energy truly sustainable and practical very soon.

For our Earthy Thursday feed today, we have five stories (and one lovely photo) about Gaia, our lovely planet and Earth goddess. A double rainbow; a deadly garden; rooftop gardening; butterfly conservation; climate change evolution; and small farm families.

Had to share this great double rainbow photo from a sacred place of polytheist interest.

Happy Thursday! Today we have an Earthy Thursday feed with earthquakes (caused by human activity); changes to farming in a climate-changed world; a zero-waste supermarket experiment in Germany; a town in Vermont goes 100% renewable; and combating climate change might just be --- free?

Those earthquakes swarms in (normally earthquake free) Oklahoma. The USGS recently concluded the high-intensity injection wells (aka "fracking") were responsible after all.