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Been re-reading Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac.”
Leopold was, of course, along with John Muir, one of the founding fathers of the modern conservation movement. And, like Muir, he was an avid hunter and fisherman, which drives a lot of people in the “movement” bonkers.
Anyway, here’s a quote from Leopold that really is germane to the idea of land stewardship:
“The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, but He is no longer the only one to do so. When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver; he could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker; he could chop it down. Whoever owns the land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.”
We are, in other words, stewards, with the responsibility of maintaining the land, and the plants upon it, for future generations. Leopold makes it simple to understand. When you use an axe to fell a tree, you use a shovel to replace it with a seedling.
One could apply this specifically to the preservation of heirlooms. Each time one of us plants an heirloom variety, and preserves it by saving pure seed, we assure that somebody else (i.e., Monsanto and its ilk) does not destroy it in the rush to create new ones. We are stewards of the gene pool, and it is our responsibility to assure that the germplasm of that plant perseveres.
We have all sorts of rationales for growing heirloom crops. We say we grow them, for instance, because they taste better than hybrids. This is true. But so what? Should we not be growing varieties whose taste we don’t care for? Many of us do, to conserve the germplasm they represent.
There are so many more heirlooms to choose from, we insist. Maybe so. And maybe not. Has anybody counted the number of hybrids that have been introduced since the 1940s? There are a lot of them, for sure. And (although I hate to admit it), if the new-plant developers choose to do so, they could select for flavor instead of the needs of the food distribution system.
Heirlooms do not lock us into the whims and moods of the seed giants, we smugly point out. And this is true. And again, I say, so what? Short of a Malthusian catastrophe that wipes out the agri-giants, what can possible happen in the overall crop situation? For those feeding the world, the giant factory farms, this can, indeed, be a problem---as it was with the corn crop of the early 1970s. But does it really touch us as home gardeners? Yes, a favorite hybrid variety might disappear. But we’d quickly find another we liked just as well.
And so it goes. Every argument we offer in favor of heirlooms can be countered by those who grow hybrids. And they can offer some strong arguments against heirlooms. For many people, uniformity of size, color, and shape are important issues. Doesn’t matter that they’ve been socialized to feel that way. The reality is that they do think those things are important. Pest and disease resistance are better in most hybrids. They’ve been selected for those properties. Sure, we can glibly point out that all of those resistant genes came from heirlooms in the first place. But most heirlooms to not have the strength (if that’s the word) of resistance that resistant hybrids offer.
The over-riding fact is that we are stewards. We owe it to the future to preserve what has come to us from the past. It is our responsibility to be shovels to Monsanto’s axe. That, alone, is reason enough to grow heirlooms.
Just some thoughts on a rainy, icy morning.
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