To an age of the healthy family farm

Christmas is come and gone. We face the start of a New Year, a New Decade, and, hopefully, a New Beginning? The headlines listed below weren't grabbed randomly, but they do represent many of the issues that have shown up in Minnesota's mainstream news media over the past year. Ask yourself if there are dots to be connected among these issues. Could we, as a state and a society, have placed too much emphasis on individualism and not enough on community? Have we become overly reliant on what's legal, or can be made to appear so, rather than focusing on what's right, what's ethical? Is making the most of something, at the least cost, for a maximum profit, really at the heart of Minnesota's, and America's, values? Should each township have only one or two farms? Isn't that a real economy of scale?

a built environment needs constant maintenance

Photo by J. Harrington

None of these issues listed below speak directly to Minnesota's opportunities and responsibilities created by the Anthropocene climate breakdown. None seem to be directly related to what's come to be known as the Sixth Extinction. And yet... John Muir noted years ago:

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

The point of today's posting is to encourage any who read it to consider whether solutions proposed for the following (or other) issues addresses a symptom, or a root cause. It seems to us that we're running out of time for treating only symptoms. There's less than two days left this year. How many years, if any, do we have left to get it right?

     Some current issues facing Minnesota:

• Minnesota’s workforce shortage


• A quiet crisis: Minnesota’s child care shortage


• ‘We need more housing’


• State lawmakers still stuck in efforts to reach solution to insulin crisis


• Mayo closes two more facilities, blames rural health care crisis


• Milk production is rising even as small dairy farms shut down

For a Coming Extinction

By W. S. Merwin

Gray whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god

Tell him 

That we who follow you invented forgiveness

And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand

And I could say it

One must always pretend something

Among the dying

When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks

Empty of you

Tell him that we were made

On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo

Winding along your inner mountains

Unheard by us

And find its way out

Leaving behind it the future

Dead

And ours

When you will not see again

The whale calves trying the light

Consider what you will find in the black garden

And its court

The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas

The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless

And fore-ordaining as stars

Our sacrifices

Join your word to theirs

Tell him

That it is we who are important

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