"Hocus Pocus"
Where did it all go wrong? Were we not, after all, children of the enlightenment? Undoubtedly science and empiricism have yielded some great achievements in our brief history, but yet I can’t quite shake the feeling that we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line. The pursuit of empirically verifiable truth as the sole foundation stone of our epistemology has yielded a hollowed out culture; all knowledge but no wisdom. It is like a bird trying to fly with just one wing. Knowledge unhinged from purpose and understanding is just as bad as the absence of knowledge itself.
The problems of this approach in agriculture are steadily becoming harder to ignore. Monocrops sprayed with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides simultaneously underpin and undermine our civilization. Within the last century we have built a system so reliant on this method that we are unable to conceive how to move beyond it. Indeed, most farmers don’t even see the problem. Yields are good, for a time, and the plants grow well above ground, but the soil is dead and the food provides no nourishment. As time goes on this method of ‘conventional’ cultivation becomes further entrenched. Plants become reliant on synthetic inputs, eventually they begin to operate with the same level of dependency as a drug addict.
It is nothing new to say the earth is dying. Humans have caused a rupture of the natural rhythms and cycles that have sustained us from pre-history. A key part of the problem is that, in an effort to understand the world, we reduced it to just its empirically verifiable parts and used this to determine every course of action thereafter. This was a mistake. Like accelerating a car to 100km/h towards a cliff, don’t confuse faster movement for progress.
Thus, we need to find a way to bring depth to what we are doing and the only way this can happen is to embrace a method that makes room for the unknown and sometimes unverifiable. It is an approach that forces one attempt an understanding of life beyond the technocratic, the utilitarian, or the conventional. This is not to say we need eschew the benefits of systematic empiricism for a blind faith in the super-sensible or the supernatural. On the contrary, they have a roll to play, but we also need methods that are humbling in the sense that they specifically acknowledge and address the fundamental gaps we have in understanding the world around us.
In our case, biodynamics is less a method of dogmatic religiosity (although for many adherents that is exactly what it is), but rather a practice in cultivating life in a broader sense. It is a method which attempts to find those deeper connections beyond conventional approaches to agriculture. In treating the farm as something greater than the sum of its parts, and as something integrated into a much broader context at the macro and micro levels, we proceed by virtue of expanding the life forces around us. The ultimate aim is to create a flourishing ecosystem that expresses a diversity of plant, animal, insect, and microbial life that is mutually reinforcing.
Rudolf Steiner, father of the biodynamic method, has been accused too often of indulging in pseudoscience and quackery. This is not entirely incorrect, but the critique is beside the point. It misses the fundamental concern behind the intention as to what the system is trying to achieve and incorrectly emphasizes the mechanism the system uses instead. We must always keep in mind where we ought to go and what we really ought to value. Only then can we see beyond the hocus pocus and realise a little bit of the magic still left in the world.
The problems of this approach in agriculture are steadily becoming harder to ignore. Monocrops sprayed with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides simultaneously underpin and undermine our civilization. Within the last century we have built a system so reliant on this method that we are unable to conceive how to move beyond it. Indeed, most farmers don’t even see the problem. Yields are good, for a time, and the plants grow well above ground, but the soil is dead and the food provides no nourishment. As time goes on this method of ‘conventional’ cultivation becomes further entrenched. Plants become reliant on synthetic inputs, eventually they begin to operate with the same level of dependency as a drug addict.
It is nothing new to say the earth is dying. Humans have caused a rupture of the natural rhythms and cycles that have sustained us from pre-history. A key part of the problem is that, in an effort to understand the world, we reduced it to just its empirically verifiable parts and used this to determine every course of action thereafter. This was a mistake. Like accelerating a car to 100km/h towards a cliff, don’t confuse faster movement for progress.
Thus, we need to find a way to bring depth to what we are doing and the only way this can happen is to embrace a method that makes room for the unknown and sometimes unverifiable. It is an approach that forces one attempt an understanding of life beyond the technocratic, the utilitarian, or the conventional. This is not to say we need eschew the benefits of systematic empiricism for a blind faith in the super-sensible or the supernatural. On the contrary, they have a roll to play, but we also need methods that are humbling in the sense that they specifically acknowledge and address the fundamental gaps we have in understanding the world around us.
In our case, biodynamics is less a method of dogmatic religiosity (although for many adherents that is exactly what it is), but rather a practice in cultivating life in a broader sense. It is a method which attempts to find those deeper connections beyond conventional approaches to agriculture. In treating the farm as something greater than the sum of its parts, and as something integrated into a much broader context at the macro and micro levels, we proceed by virtue of expanding the life forces around us. The ultimate aim is to create a flourishing ecosystem that expresses a diversity of plant, animal, insect, and microbial life that is mutually reinforcing.
Rudolf Steiner, father of the biodynamic method, has been accused too often of indulging in pseudoscience and quackery. This is not entirely incorrect, but the critique is beside the point. It misses the fundamental concern behind the intention as to what the system is trying to achieve and incorrectly emphasizes the mechanism the system uses instead. We must always keep in mind where we ought to go and what we really ought to value. Only then can we see beyond the hocus pocus and realise a little bit of the magic still left in the world.