I will leave this as another mash-up, as I find no conclusions coming to mind. Three articles from the New Yorker, three continents, three ways of looking at the land we all inhabit, and which we must continue to inhabit:
‘“How do we feed the nine billion?” Fiennes said. “We feed them through functioning ecosystems.”
“A forester is looking at trees, and he’s looking at income from trees,” Fiennes explained. “A woodman cares for the wood and maintains it, enhances it. . . . He knows the importance of the bats and the flora.”
“Nature is random, but it is wonderfully organized,” Fiennes said. “You start throwing any sort of regular management theme and it starts to react.” One of his greatest pleasures is to realign a field. Fiennes looks for wet patches, changes in soil, and corners where a combine harvester or a boom spray can’t reach—and turns the land over to plants that will benefit birds and insects. Raveningham’s fields came to contain triangles and rectangles of wildflowers where Fiennes ruled that crops would be unproductive. He did this by compulsive observation. “Why aren’t the cattle going here? And why is the crow sitting on that post but not that one? And the fox is walking up this path,” Fiennes said. “You can just feel how it is all working with one another.”’(all from here)
‘“Before you share your knowledge with people who don’t know how to read, and reinforce that you’re smarter or know more, the first thing is to get them to tell you about what they know, and what their experience is, and then you set up a relationship of exchanging, not dominance,” she explained. Once, she noticed that a farmer seemed to have extra oranges; she confidently instructed him to sell them at the local market. “If I have too many oranges, I give them to people who don’t have oranges. They’re a free gift from God,” he told her. This was a lesson for Bellini: she couldn’t just tell people how to fix their problems.’ (from here)
‘There are few happy meetings between black history and the romance of the American landscape. The Mississippi was slavery’s superhighway, Manifest Destiny was the original white flight, and the first recorded African-American to see the Pacific Ocean was William Clark’s slave, York. If the runaway endures, it might be as the first black citizen of our democratic sublime, seeker of a freedom that isn’t so much up North as somewhere within.’ (from here)
Shundo David Haye 