Time, Poetry and Good Work
A conversation with rewilder Daniel Firth Griffith
While preparing for me interview with Daniel Firth Griffith, a rewilding pioneer and deep thinker about farming, wildness and regeneration, I listened to him describe how, at a point of doubt and uncertainty about their work, he and his wife abruptly went to their woodshop and began sharpening axes, returning to their roots and grounding themselves in relationship with things. I immediately thought of Gary Snyder’s poem “Axe Handles,” with its closing lines “craft of culture/how we go on.” This person, I realized, is not only thinking deeply, but living deeply, pinned to nature by deep physical interaction. “This is going to be a really interesting conversation,” I thought.
And it was. Daniel began with the observation by Japanese Farmer, Masanobu Fukuoka, author of The One-straw Revolution, that the problem with modern farming is that a farmer has no time to write a poem. This brought me to thinking about my years as a housepainter in the trades, how rushed it became, with it getting increasingly difficult to do good work. What happened to time? And how are we to do anything well without it? And how do we reclaim it?
We went on to discuss the hidden poetics inside the everyday workings of life and climate, how life is always speaking to us, through pattern and metaphor, shaping our relationship with the world. George Monbiot, and his recent campaign against farming in favor of industrial protein production, came up, as well as an examination of how climate became so technologically oriented. We need to address Mother Earth on her own terms, and we need to take the time to hear what she is saying.
I highly suggest you check out Daniel’s Substack page and learn more about his remarkable discoveries around working with land. And give our conversation a listen. I think you’ll like it.
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This may be of interest:
Excepted from https://theproudholobionts.substack.com/p/are-the-worlds-forest-dying-bad-news
"As typical of complex systems, it is not clear what causes what, but a series of changes are occurring. Because of the higher temperatures, or perhaps because of the higher CO2 concentration (or both at the same time), plants are keeping their stomata close longer. More than they did before the start of the VPD increase. Hence, they evapotranspirate less -- I think what's happening is a negative loop. It was already predicted in 1977 by Rawson et al. (cited in the paper).
A smaller VPD means less evapotranspiration, and less evapotranspiration means less rain, also in terms of the water transported inland by the biotic pump. The land is becoming drier, with rainfall concentrated in short bursts. The consequence is the current "global browning" that's replacing the earlier "global greening." It is not a small thing: forests risk disappearing. The whole ecosystem is at risk. In the meantime, those silly naked monkeys find nothing better to do than kill each other in large numbers. What to say?"
I'm sure you must be aware of this, Rob Lewis, but my research today has brought it to my attention.
"Alexander von Humboldt visited the lake [Lake Venencia, Venezuela] in 1800. He documented the negative impact of the surrounding population's land cultivation on the ecosystem. Deforestation and water diversion for irrigation led to the desiccation of Lake Valencia by dramatically reducing water levels. Lake Valencia is where Humboldt developed his conception of anthropogenic climate change.[2] He later wrote:
When forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by the European planters, with an imprudent precipitation, the springs are entirely dried up, or become less abundant, The beds of the rivers remaining dry during a part of the year, are converted into torrents, whenever great rains fall on the heights. The sward and moss disappearing from the brush-wood on the sides of the mountains, the waters falling in rain are no longer impeded in their course: and instead of slowly augmenting the level of the rivers by progressive filtrations, they furrow during heavy showers the sides of the hills, bear down the loose soil, and form those sudden inundations that devastate the country.[3]"
From Wikipedia, Lake Valencia (Venezuela) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Valencia_(Venezuela)