The Miracle of Farming: Toward a Bio-Abundant Future

Farmers have a close relationship with nature, seeing life cycles happen right in front of their eyes marvel in what the earth can produce. We wouldn’t survive without their help. Appreciating farming in the natural world, giving what it needs in order to flourish and providing the essentials to survive is an important process. There’s beauty in the relationship between farmers and what they farm.

The following is an excerpt from Miraculous Abundance by Perrine Hervé-Gruyer & Charles Hervé-Gruyer. It has been adapted for the web.

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We are organic farmers and proud of it. We find our joy in an intimate and daily companionship with plants and animals. Like mothers, farmers bear life. The body of our customers is formed from the body of the fruits and vegetables that we grow with tenderness and respect.

Our deepest desire is to understand, from within, the dynamics of life, at work in the soil and roots, stems and leaves, legs and wings, rain and wind. By what miracle are minerals from the bedrock assembled to form, mixed with sun and water, the soft, warm body of our donkey, the blue or brown eyes of our children?

“The grain of life and the grain of thought, successors to the material,” wrote Teilhard de Chardin. Our job is simply to serve this movement of life, with infinite gratitude.

In the School of the Sea and of the Land

For many years, I have been trying to understand the connection between what I discovered about the dynamics of life in the heart of tropical forests and coral reefs visited in my youth, and what takes place, what is exchanged, in that which is growing in our gardens. Can we expect to approach, in our Normandy valley, something like the flamboyance found in the jungle, the exuberance of the coral reefs?

I also think about how we as humans interact with nature to draw our sustenance. Is it possible to invent a post-oil society that combines the harmony of the first peoples with the cognitive and technical advances of the modern era?

I’m not rushing to any conclusions. It took me thirty years to understand that a simple and powerful principle is at work in nature, a dynamic that inspired the first peoples. We could name this dynamic bio-abundance. Bio-abundance is the art of doing a lot with very little. Only what’s alive can achieve this.

Little Fish Become Big

Biological processes—and they alone—have the power to increase resources: The little fish becomes a big fish, the seedling gives way to a mighty tree, fruit produces a thousand seeds that become almost as many new plants.

The first peoples intuitively understood that they could play a role in these living resources that accrue to, without weakening, the surrounding environment—especially if they contribute to its aggradation with good practices—replanting pits, for example. They have limited their harvest to an acceptable threshold, imposing on themselves forms of self-regulation similar to those governing plants and animals.

As long as the balance is respected, plants, animals, and humans can take the resources they need, while the surrounding environment continues to evolve, slowly but surely, toward more complexity and fertility.

In other words, bio-abundance gives plant, animal, and human communities a chance to sustainably meet all their needs, as long as the harvest is in balance with the biological processes that are capable of regenerating.

The resources produced by biological processes are organic: plants and animals. Since the appearance of the first humans, these plants and animals have supported our existence, giving us enough to feed us, clothe us, warm us, move us, heal us, build our habitats, our musical instruments, our ritual objects. Over the ages and until the entry into modernity, organic resources have made almost all of the necessary resources for human communities.

Only a few minerals complemented them, mostly superfluous ones—stones and iron.

But biological processes also provide us with other services—immense services—because they can strongly modify the physical environment: They exert influence on climate (rainfall, temperature) and geology (soil formation, limestone), purify water, enhance the oxygen content of the atmosphere, and sequester carbon.

Taking the resources that we need by simply tapping into the natural processes expanding in the biosphere is akin to drawing upon the interest of capital without reducing the capital itself. It is wise. It is also possible to take abundant mineral resources—stones and base metals, which form the earth’s crust—without significantly eroding the integrity of the planet.

We humans, like other living organisms, can take, but also give. Enjoy natural resources but also encourage a dynamic enrichment of the surrounding environment. Take part in the cycle of fertility. In other words, we can cooperate with other life-forms to increase capital, and therefore the share of interest we can use. In this respect, we should favor cooperative relationships rather than predation, commit to limiting our consumption, creating closed-loop cycles to convert all of our waste into new resources.

This is what is taught by permaculture and biomimicry.

In view of the above, we could well describe bio-abundance this way: the creation of recyclable goods based on a bio-inspired use of renewable natural resources. These goods are available in quantity and sustainably.

They do not produce waste, do not damage the health of ecosystems, and may eventually contribute to their amelioration.

Bio-abundance is a concept that is new without actually being new, of course. It seemed to us an important thing to describe because most of us underestimate the potential productivity of a healthy ecosystem and the possibility for humans to contribute to the growth of biological resources with careful and thorough observation of the dynamics at play, and interacting with restraint and respect within these dynamics.

The first peoples live in what ethnologists describe as societies of abundance—we could say bio-abundance. We mentioned the Wayana people: They do not store food (except in very rare circumstances), have no fear of going hungry because they know that their needs will still be covered by the surrounding nature. Respect for life is at the heart of their culture and spirituality. Their detailed knowledge of their natural environment allows them to take full advantage of bio-abundance. Modern society has turned its back on a nature that it artificializes, in turn harming biological processes and undermining the ability of ecosystems to generate bio-abundance.

This transgression was made possible by the use of fossil fuels, which have helped to generate another form of plenty, very different in its essence. The current glut of consumer goods comes from an extractive economy that preys on nonrenewable mineral resources, consuming organic resources without any awareness of acceptable levels, without returning anything to the cycle of fertility. This form of abundance could be called technoabundance.

It digs holes in the earth and quickly exhausts its capital. “The biosphere is a set of geochemical cycles that connects stocks of material with energy, between which exchange flows. The flow allows stocks to recover. What does the economy do? It draws from natural resources, that which has no economic value in its natural state, without worrying about its reproduction,” writes René Passet.

We propose the following definition of technoabundance: creating goods with little or no recyclable value based on a predatory utilization of natural resources, renewable and nonrenewable. These goods are available in quantity, but for a limited time only, and not for all. They produce waste and contribute to the destruction of the biosphere.

Living on Earth as a Poet or Murderer?

The industrial agriculture generated by our consumer society is a profound perversion of the farm profession: Rather than a supporter of life, it becomes a sower of death. Farmers are the first victims, and awareness is emerging within the profession. Industrial agriculture is only a reflection of our biocidal society: It kills living beings in quantities that exceed comprehension, it stinks of death. It is important to stop it as soon as possible, before it definitively degrades the only known living planet. Yet like a compost heap, our society carries within it the seeds of tomorrow’s world.

Let us remember those countercurrents that Pupoli artfully mastered. Have confidence: The earth has the power to transform what dies into new forms of life.

The postmodern society that we will create together will operate in the mode of bio-abundance. A new form of abundance.

The news is good. Most of our contemporaries do not suspect the potential of biological processes. To abandon the technoabundance model is, they believe, to sink into penury. But no! This can lead to bio-abundance.

How do we get there? We explored agricultural themes in this book: developing the greatest possible understanding of biological processes, and analyzing our interactions with the biosphere using the logic of life. It’s a 180-degree change from what we have done over the past centuries in our so-called developed societies. But we have learned a lot from our mistakes, and learned much about the workings of nature. We are better equipped than ever to enter an era of respect and fulfillment of life. We just have to develop our conscience.

A Future Green Society

The green society described in [this book] is a society founded on bio-abundance. By surrounding every house, every village, every city in an intensely alive natural cocoon, giving back to the earth the covering of trees that humans have greedily stripped from it, taking great care to limit our harvest to only the resources created each year by the biological process, we can—like Japan during the Edo civilization—provide for our needs with biological rather than mineral resources. We can live sustainably on earth.

We will give up our gadgets and waste, but we will be rich with the essential goods—tangible and intangible—that make for a really good life.

This is what permaculture offers, which is both a science and an art of living. We are only at the very beginning of the adventure; the rest of the story remains to be written, and each of us can contribute.

Once again, the main obstacle is not technical, it is inside us—just as the solutions are. We all have a tendency to subscribe to limiting beliefs: The past is past, progress is always good, the West is better than the rest of the world, working the land is for the serfs, an intellectual job is better than a manual job, my car and my iPhone make me happy. Step back from the mental formatting that we all experience to consider the question of our common future with greater perspective. Dare to imagine the new. Take the best of the many traditions of humanity, and the best of modernity, to shape a world that has never existed. Become explorers of the future.

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