The Farming Revolution and The New Spirituality

The Contemplative Column by Theodore Richards

Just as we are all nature, we are all, essentially, farmers. Very few of us would survive for very long without farms. Our lives and, indeed, civilization itself, are completely dependent upon the existence of farms. But one of the deep paradoxes of Modernity is that, at the same time, none of us is a farmer, either—or at least very few of us. We are completely alienated from the one process that we all depend on more than any other, the growing of food.

Because it is so integral to human culture, we cannot entirely separate our consciousness from farming. For example, methods we use in farming today influence and are influenced by our culture. Specifically, I would suggest that one cannot have a factory farm system without also having a factory school system. They co-create one another; they co-arise. In the past, as we shall see, the way that human beings farmed and fed themselves was integrated inextricably with human culture and spirituality.

What cannot be avoided, however, is the …