Trauma Farm by Brian Brett Page A

realize this frenzy of energy and labour is merely a dangerous, complicated replacement for old-fashioned livestock manure and good garden management.
    During the early days of the garden our species needed only human energy and common-sense husbandry to grow food. In what we think of as the small farm’s historic garden, it’s been estimated that 100 calories of food were returned for every energy calorie that went into producing it. Now in the globalized greenhouse production of plants such as iceberg lettuce, the process has been reversed, and it takes as much as 127 calories of energy to produce a single food calorie. The system has become so insane that lettuce produced thousands of miles away can be sold in our local market for less than it costs Sharon and me to grow lettuce four miles from the market. The purchaser pays for the real, hidden costs with government subsidies to factory farms, increasingly toxic environments, and less nutritious and often unhealthy food.
    Now that we have become oil consumers, or necro-phages— eaters of the dead, our civilization based on the fossilized lives of earth’s history—we have lost our knowledge of the local. Oil, in an odd way, has made transportation too easy, and its child, globalization, has separated us from contact with the soil and moved us at an accelerating rate into cities. And city people no longer understand rural life, speeding up its rush toward extinction.
    Though it can be difficult in this absurd era, I am relearning how to live and act locally. When the Oil Age inevitably ends we are going to see the failure of globalization, as the transportation system collapses under escalating costs. The captains of industry, along with the rest of us, will be forced to discover a unique formula for earning our keep—creating the kind of land where a child can drive his fist into soil up to his elbow. If we don’t—well, then we’re facing a big collapse back into a hunter-gatherer civilization. Long, long ago, a woman emerged out of the forest with a digging stick, and we could meet her again.

7

RUNNING DOGS AND
FELLOW TRAVELLERS
    B ACK IN THE house, the dogs loll on their cushions as I make tea. Three dogs, two of them border collies, are too many. I regret the day we decided to keep Bella, though she’s a beauty and I love her—she’s a born troublemaker. Jen, the older collie, is a control freak and keeps everyone in line. Olive—the gentle, bullheaded Labrador-Rottweiler— is in rough, arthritic shape these days, since she broke her back climbing up a tree after a raccoon.
    It’s thought that the first domesticated animals were dogs. A tiny puppy skeleton was discovered in the hand of an elderly woman in a 12,300-year-old burial site in Israel, so we can assume our relationship goes back further. Skeletons of domesticated dogs in North America date back to 8500 bc , suggesting that they moved around the world quickly, probably alongside us.
    Domestic dogs were soon used for hunting—sight hounds for spotting distant prey, scent hounds for tracking, and “catch dogs for the kill”—though they probably began their domestic careers as alarms against predators and for comfort in the cold. A North American Native description for very cold weather is a “three-dog night.” In the Arctic and a few other regions they found a place as sled or pack animals. When agriculture appeared, people became less nomadic, and dogs were relegated to more specialized uses—herd dogs and fighting dogs, retrievers, guard dogs and lap pets. When we consider the varieties of domesticated dog, from the wolf hound to the chihuahua, our evolutionary manipulation over maybe fifteen thousand years is impressive indeed. Dogs have been bred for both useful and distinctly non-useful purposes. For example, Pekingese were bred to resemble miniature lions (until the bored ladies of the Chinese court reputedly discovered an alternative use for that flattened nose and little