Human Ecology - part two of a few

So at heart I will perhaps always be a ten-year-old boy. I love squatting down and turning over rocks to see what’s living under them; I love going down to streams and peering at the fish and snails and so on. This evening at the grocery store something moved by my foot, which was not too uncommon on the farm during grasshopper season, but in a store in December surprised me. Somehow a tiny frog, smaller than my thumb, was lost on an expanse of white linoleum – and worse, it was covered in pink glitter. I brought him (her?) home with me, figuring that at worst I could give it a quieter, less glittery death than the floor of a grocery store would offer. Poor dear.

Anyway - food chains. Perfect for ten-year-olds who like frogs. Hawk eats snake eats mouse eats seeds. They fancied it up in college with talk of food webs, but it always seemed fairly straight-forward in the classroom. It wasn’t until I was working outside, with plants and animals, day in day out, that the magnitude and universality of this simple concept came home. I watched and managed cattle (grass-fed), and I learned how much land it really takes to grow enough grass to feed an organism as big as a cow (close to an acre per animals on my most recent farm). I tried to grow vegetables on sub-par soil, and I learned how vitally important soil health and quality are to vegetable production. And I found myself hungry and exhausted from growing food for humans, and yet was surrounded only by unappetizing trees and weeds and bugs. I learned, with all the diversity of life that springs up, how miraculous it is that humans have any food to eat at all.

This is all more than a little Pollen-esque. Bear with me. I'm going somewhere with it.