Canaries in the Coal Mine of Modernity

This photo is NOT from here. The image arrived in a correspondence from one of the folks to whom this week’s newsletter is dedicated.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Every so often, I receive a letter in the mail or the digital inbox from someone to say that this newsletter helps them feel less lonely in a world gone mad. Amen to that. The courage it’s taken them to say such a thing in writing does the same for me. I am immensely grateful to know that you are out there, daring to keep your eyes, your ears and your heart open. The risk is immense, the personal rewards minimal. I think of such sensitive beings as canaries in the coal mine of modernity. This week’s newsletter is dedicated to them.

I offer my thanks as well to all those who chipped in differed amounts of money to cover the Sand River Community Farm Summer 2025 Budget request of $10,400. You have entrusted this place with a bit of what you might have otherwise held onto. Your gifts rest heavily in our hands here at the Farm. We will busy ourselves planting those dollars in this real ground for a harvest that none of us are likely to see.

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I look up from my bowl of yogurt and meet the waiting gaze of my conversation partner, our bellies full of Farm food, our tongues stretching for words to make sense of the runaway consumer society to which we were born. “Addicts rarely propose a solution that doesn’t include continuing to use,” I say, quoting my teacher Stephen Jenkinson.

We are slated to give a talk in a few days’ time at an academic conference exploring democratic planning as an alternative to capitalism, for which Sam has drafted the slightly subversive title: The Unplanned Magic of Actually-Existing Non-Market Economies. As usual, our inquiry flows downhill toward the following question: What is gratitude anyway, and why does it remain so elusive within the thought-structures of modern life?

“The street addicts I know often talk about getting sober”, he replies, “but they are rarely able to do it”. By this, Sam means substance abuse rather than the ever-expanding reliance on material extraction that Vanessa Andreotti refers to as modernity/coloniality.¹ As you listen to Vanessa’s definition, consider the similarities:

This term underscores the fact that modernity cannot exist without expropriation, extraction, exploitation, militarization, dispossession, destitution, genocides, and ecocides. This is substantiated by economic, political, and historical data, but, like climate crisis data, is deemed “too hard to deal with,” and largely ignored or reframed as something else.

Early in the twelve-step program, recovering alcoholics set out to make amends with those they have harmed over the course of their addiction.² That alone offers a convincing reason not to begin. What happens if you’ve never met, and don’t even know how to find, the people and places where an apology might be in order? This might be as clear and indicator as any that we are a long way from home.

Here’s a rephrase that straddles both scenarios: it becomes nearly impossible for addicts to pursue a course of action that doesn’t include continuing to use when everyone around them is using as well.

If home is a place where we tend our relationships, this is a story of longing for home in a displaced time.

I didn’t make it up to Montreal for the talk on gift economics. The severity of the drought became apparent when one of the Farm’s two hand-dug wells ran dry. A farm in drought is like a child with a high fever; the caretaker doesn’t stray from the bedside until the illness breaks. My neighbors have been kind enough to share water from their drilled well, enough to keep the cows and sheep alive. So, I spend my days hauling water lines back and forth between various holding tanks that fill small water tubs out in the pastures. I double check all of the connections to be sure nothing is leaking. I line up five-gallon buckets beneath the eves.

Scarceness offers a potent reminder that Life is almost unbearably precious. Each time thunderstorms pass by to the north or south, I try to remember that someone else’s well is going to be filled today. That’s the kind of gratitude that seems to remain mostly out of reach. Often, I can only touch it for a minute or two before slipping back into more familiar patterns of thought.

The gardens will have to wait for rain. The humans who rely on their green bounty will have to hone their rain prayers. Last evening we did get one cloud break—darkening sky and sheets of water for a solid fifteen minutes. Afterwards, I walked to the garden, sure the drought was over. An inch down, the soil was still dust. If you have it in you, consider offering a prayer for this thirsty place.

Scythe School

I hadn’t yet come across Vanessa’s term modernity/coloniality when I set out to quit my dependence on machine-made hay as winter feed for the sheep and cows under my care. To my great luck, I met a group of recreational scythe enthusiasts in the town where I settled immediately after I decided to stop farming for business—read: on a scale that attempt to cover a mortgage payment. They offered to teach me how to mow grass effectively using the energy stored in this human body. A neighbor offered a grassy field for no rental fee and other neighbors offered space in their barn just across the road. It seemed unlikely that we would be able to collect all of the hay loose, so I lined up someone with a tractor to rake and bale for us. For now, the solution would include continuing to use. Tapering seemed reasonable. One drink a day is better than two, right?

When the weekend approached, I cooked lots of farm food for group meals and invited everyone I knew to join us for the labor of tedding: spreading the mowed grass with a pitchfork to facilitate drying. I had set fairly unreasonable expectations as to how much the six of us could mow in a few hours. Blistered and sore-backed, the volunteer crew decided to call it after lunch time. If swinging a scythe for hours was fairly sexy, pushing grass around with a pitch fork in a solar oven was decidedly less so. The busy-ness of our modern lives pulled us out of the field and back onto treadmill.

For me, this meant climbing into my car and racing off to catch the tail end of a funeral ceremony for a farmer about my same age. After struggling to find his footing for years, bouncing from farm to farm, Linus had finally committed suicide. As a profession—if you can even call it that—farming is a bit different from, say, being a tax accountant. Modern farmers carry a sense of comradery that comes from swimming upstream. You may not see the other farmers in your area very often, but you never forget for a second that they are out there, against the odds, pulling human food from the local ground. Preparing for the day the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves.

As I drove half an hour on the highway toward the place where the memorial was being held, the impossibility of the task I’d set out to accomplish came crashing into view. The effort of mowing a half-acre had just about broken us, and that would make feed for just a tiny fraction of the winter season. A few days later, a tractor would rake and bale, and a borrowed pickup truck would shuttle the bales to the barn ahead of the coming rain.

By the time I arrived at the funeral gathering, ceremony had already given way to reception. Grief of that sort has a way of deepening polite conversational norms, and so I dropped right in with an elder farmer for whom I carried a whole lot of respect. He runs an organic vegetable CSA program on twenty-plus acres of conserved land within city limits, providing weekly produce to nearly five-hundred households. Many of the members live or work within a few miles of the farm. Some walk or bike to pick up food. He and I hadn’t seen one another since I’d stopped farming for business a couple years prior. He was keen to hear what I’d learned since I quit chasing the dollar.

The humbling human-powered haymaking effort was fresh on my heart, and I watched this elder farmer nod along as I told the story. Vanessa Andreotti suggests that the term modernity/coloniality can help us remember “that the benefits we associate with modernity are created and maintained by historical, systemic, and ongoing processes that are inherently violent and unsustainable”. Outsourcing labor to other bodies and landscapes through mechanization and importation is one of the hallmarks of the project. I had just spent the morning in-sourcing labor. Yes, my body was a bit broken. But it was my heartbreak that drew the deepest resonance from this elder farmer.

He told me a story that will break your heart if you can let it in. An ecologically-minded graduate student at the nearby university undertook an extensive energy audit of the Farm he tends. The student found that the production system there requires seven calories of inputs to produce each one calorie of vegetable that leaves the Farm. Of those seven input calories, only a tiny fraction of one of them relates to human labor performed by the ten-person crew. The vast majority come in the form of purchased seeds and fertilizers, plastic start trays and greenhouse covers, diesel fuel and so on. Can you imagine estimating the embedded energy in just one of the farm’s tractors or the laptop required to make the crop-planning and membership spreadsheets? Pretty soon you get to a point where the data is “too hard to deal with”. It’s not that the numbers can’t be calculated; rather, their implication becomes emotionally untenable.

Many people I know people would point to this farmer and the CSA he oversees as an example of something that offers them hope in a time of ecological unravelling. In the presence of a mostly-unspoken grief, this elder farmer found the courage to admit to me that there isn’t much localness even in the food we proudly use the term to describe. It would be a couple of years still until I read Vanessa’s term modernity/coloniality.

This is a story of longing for home in a displaced time.

Thank you for reading,

Adam

1. Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism

2. Find fascinating writing on Alcoholics Anonymous in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift and

Dougald Hine

’s At Work in the Ruins.