Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 3. Bleeding Earth

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle (both reviewed earlier); Bleeding Earth (reviewed here); The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

Robb is an environmentalist who works at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a federal agency which is friendly to farmers, not to the environment. Robb meets DoAnna, who owns a large farm and does everything environmentally wrong. But she knows it and asks Robb for advice. He gives her more advice (such as “Get rid of your cows”) than she wants. But he nearly convinces her to be an eco-farmer until she catches him trespassing on her land to get runoff water samples to identify her farm as a major source of pollution. They had just started to be friends…

Robb loses his job even before DoAnna files a complaint about his trespassing. Depressed and sleepy, he parks his car at a rest stop and falls asleep. He awakens during a severe dust storm and finds DoAnna has prepared him a picnic lunch. She is now convinced he is right—our farms are blowing away in the wind—and she hires him as a full-time advisor on how to make her farm into an eco-farm. They soon become lovers.

Running an eco-farm turns out to be nightmarishly difficult, especially the way Robb and DoAnna do it. The project (raising hemp) fails. They have to start over—but how? They blame each other for what has happened. A summer storm brings on a mud-fight, which leaves them laughing and loving once again.

This story is of particular interest to readers interested in science who may not realize how difficult it is to turn a conventional, pesticide-and-herbicide farm into a “green” farm. It also shows the NRCS is caught in a delicate spot: they have to enforce environmental laws without alienating farms whose cooperation with conservation programs is, after all, voluntary. If being “eco-friendly” were easy, all farmers would have done it already. Rice, far from being a raging environmentalist, seems to understand this.

We've Heard This Before: Agriculture

Modern agriculture, at least the kind that is subsidized by agribusiness corporations, is based on large monocultural fields. This form of agriculture can be traced back, at least, to Jethro Tull. No, not the rock band, but the British agriculturalist of the eighteenth century. His dream was to see every field composed of perfect rows of crops, planted by the seed drill he invented. His dream has become worldwide reality.

 

But at the same time as Tull, there was a different vision, of crop rotation and strip cropping with pasture. This form of agriculture has prehistoric roots but was defended in the eighteenth century by the Scottish agriculturalist James Anderson of Hermiston. His dream lives on in the form of agrarianism, which is almost the opposite of agribusiness. Agrarianism is built on polyculture and soil health, and on food security for people rather than profits for corporations. As long as I have been bouncing around in the world of environmentalism and alternative agriculture, I never heard of James Anderson until I encountered a reference in an essay, “All Flesh Is Grass,” by Gene Logsdon, in The Essential Agrarian Reader, edited by Norman Wirzba.

Jethro Tull’s vision correctly focused on the health of the soil, but he was completely wrong about how to attain it. The agriculture he championed caused the soil to break down and erode. But Tull thought this was good, not bad. He thought that crop plants obtained all of their material from eating soil—literally, with little mouths on their roots ingesting what he called pabulum. One might call his vision the Gerber’s Baby Food theory of soil. Soil that degraded into paste would, the thought, be easier for the plants to eat. In all fairness, this was a long time before the process of photosynthesis was figured out.

Even though we know so much more today about how plants grow, and how to grow plants, we still have roughly the same dichotomy of viewpoints that Jethro Tull and James Anderson espoused.