A midsummer day’s reality check

It was celebrated as Bel or Tammuz by the Babylonians, as the Feast of Epona by the Gauls, as Alban Heruin by the Druids, and was adopted into the Christian calendar as the day of St. John the Baptist. It is the summer solstice, the longest day in the year, long celebrated as a day symbolizing the point of maximum fertility, and it’s coming up this week.

And who the heck cares any more?

After all, food nowadays comes from supermarkets, where we can wander the temperature-regulated aisles of windowless boxes 12 months a year, selecting strawberries in the winter, asparagus in the fall and winter squash in the spring.

The days are long gone when a superstitious population, most of them directly engaged in the production of food, lived in awe and fear of whatever powers were seen as governing the agricultural cycle.

Apart from the small and declining portion of the population that still lives and works on farms, we no longer experience the terror of a failed harvest or the wonder of a bountiful one. And up to a point, this is, of course, all to the good.

But there is a downside to our detachment from the natural cycles, which dominated human existence and culture at one time. Having annihilated forests, dammed rivers, paved over meadows, and fashioned for ourselves a lifestyle that occurs largely in man-made interiors, we have forgotten that we ourselves are part of nature and continue to survive only on her sufferance. This is especially dangerous, given the exponential growth of human population that is accelerating the impact of our activity on the planetary environment at such a rate that some of the damage we are causing is becoming irreversible.

We do get occasional reminders of our own connection to the natural cycles. In the Upper Delaware Valley, the increasing frequency and magnitude of flooding is telling us something about the impact of deforestation, construction activity and extensive paving. Most scientists now agree that increasingly volatile weather is related to global warming, partially or wholly caused by the human burning of hydrocarbons. And the hole in our pockets caused by prices at the gas pump reminds us that resources are not infinite and that humankind cannot persist indefinitely in lifestyles that involve taking out of the earth without putting back into it.

But while oddball weather and rising energy bills may produce a few qualms, the food supply remains a matter of complacency. The price of individual items spikes from time to time, but in the United State the percentage of total food expenditures in the average market basket dropped from 17.8 in 1986 to 15.8 in 2003.

Unfortunately, there is reason to believe this complacency will not be justified indefinitely. Global per-capita-grain production has been in decline since 1985. Meanwhile, supplies of vital agricultural inputs are shrinking. Millions of acres of arable land are being lost every year to urban and suburban development, salinization and erosion. Water tables are dropping precipitously all over the world—including in the Ogalalla aquifer, the primary source of irrigation in the U.S. breadbasket. And two other inputs vital to the “green revolution” of the 20th century—pesticides and nitrogen fertilizer—are dependent on fossil fuel stock and will therefore become scarce and expensive as reserves of oil and natural gas are depleted.

Thus, as quaint as it may seem to pay attention to something as primitive as the summer solstice, we might take this turning point in the cycle of the seasons as an opportunity to reflect on the wisdom of our stewardship policies. The abundance of food we have come to count on as a natural right is no such thing; rather it is something that we need to think about and plan for as our ancestors did for so many centuries before us.

Food doesn’t come from the supermarket. It comes from the sun, which exerts its maximum power on the earth at the summer solstice and which, fortunately, will continue to do so no matter what we do. It comes from the land, and the rain and the labor of farmers and farm workers. It comes from the energy it takes to drive the machines that work the land and transport the harvests from all over the world to our supermarket shelves.

Like it or not; believe it or not; we need to start taking care of each and every one of those inputs as though our lives depend on it.

Because truly, they do.

Dr. Punnybone

Take It!