“Messages from Female Farmers Feeling the Climate Crisis” Series: Expand the Meaning of “We”
By Yeoneo
Published August 11, 2024
Translated by Marilyn Hook
It’s been three years since I started farming.
Every year, through trial and error, I’ve accumulated farming wisdom, and my
love and interest in the land and crops have deepened. In addition to the seeds
I collect myself, I also get seeds from my neighbors, so the types of crops I
grow have diversified. Before I started farming, I thought eggplants were just
purple and paht [usually translated as “red beans”] were just red. Now,
I’ve learned that ripe eggplants can be white or light green, and paht
come in a range of types with colors that include white, black, yellow, green,
brown, and mottled. I think that in the past, crops with a much wider variety
of colors, shapes, scents, and tastes were passed down from farmer to farmer.
Light green eggplant (shiromaru eggplant) and long
eggplant (string eggplant) harvested this year. (Photo provided by the author)
When I became skeptical of the city lifestyle
In a book that I read this
year, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, author Aílton Krenak says
that we need to look critically at the idea that humans come in only one type.
At some point, we have come to think of humans as all the same, denying the
pluralism of life forms and modes of existence. According to all mass media, a
“successful life” is proven by a good job and expensive possessions such as a
nice house and a nice car. Money defines success. We hear messages everywhere
that we should create more profit in our own lives by any means, even if it means
othering other beings.
I was born and raised in the
city, but from some point I came to feel that the lifestyle in the big city is
extremely human-centered and capital-centered. I began to doubt whether all
living things could coexist in the current system that promotes mass
production, mass consumption, and mass waste, with the land covered in asphalt,
skyscrapers that are like mountain ranges, and roads filled with cars.
I decided to live a different
life. If ours is a society where working as a wage laborer after finishing
school is taken for granted, I wanted to live not with wage labor but in
harmony with all living things, following the flow of the seasons, and free
from the shackles of a life of consumption. That is why I decided to become a
self-sufficient farmer.
When you are thinking about
taking up farming, the biggest concern is probably where to go. For me too,
where to become a farmer was my biggest concern. It’s a very risky thing to go
to a place where you have no connections. I needed a stepping stone to this new
way of life. While I was looking around for a place to take up farming, I
happened to see a notice on the website of Refarm [Korean name: National
Return-to-Farming Movement Headquarters] that was recruiting participants for the
Hangkune Cooperative’s Youth JaJaGong
Program. ‘JaJaGong’ is an acronym for [the Korean words for] ‘nature’,
‘self-reliance,’ and ‘sharing,’ and it is a farming settlement support program
where you learn self-sufficient farming and self-reliance techniques while
living in the countryside for a year.
This is an excerpt from the notice:
“Unfortunately, this society that only seeks a
consumption economy and capitalist growth has given rise to much
discrimination, inequality, environmental destruction, and climate crisis.
Young people who question the current social structure and flow and have
different standards for a ‘good life’ are completing the Youth JaJaGong Program
and living and farming in this village. We are waiting for the fourth Youth
JaJaGong cohort to join us in the transition to a life lived self-sufficiently
with nature, a life of coexistence with other beings.”
This was in step with the direction in life I
was looking for, so I applied for the Youth JaJaGong Program and moved to
Gokseong, South Jeolla Province.
 |
| Helping out on each other’s farms one day. (Photo provided by author) |
Shared vehicles, shared spaces, shared equipment… the sturdy fence that is the commons
After completing the program, I
settled down in an area near Kkumendul (a housing facility for those in the
Youth JaJaGong Program built with the fundraising and support of Hangkune
Cooperative members) where I had been staying.
The biggest advantage of living
here is that the informal economy is larger than the formal economy. The
reciprocal relationships of the tight-knit-but-loose community serve as a
strong fence, replacing the things that are usually resolved with money. We
gather in rice fields, and occasionally we gather and study, or exercise, or squabble, and we share our
lives over meals and over drinks.
We pursue agroecological values
and support each other, as well
as use shared spaces, shared vehicles, shared tools, and shared farm equipment.
Unlike the capitalist calculating that privatizes and commodifies resources,
the commons (resources shared by the community) enriches life without the need
for ownership.
It’s not only the relationships
with Hangkunea Cooperative members but also those with our area’s elders that
strengthen my life. When they make kimchi, they always come and give me some,
and they share with me on a daily basis, doing things like giving me green
peppers one day because they just harvested them. And the young farmers in the
area, including me, help the elders when their mobile phones, washing machines,
and refrigerators break down.
In fact, before the global
industrialization, urbanization, and turn to capitalism that led to land
expropriation and the destruction of communities, there were many non-economic
sectors that economic indicators could not capture. Though GDP, which we
usually consider as an indicator of national growth, must have been much lower
than it is today, I guess.
Rejoicing in the self-sufficient life. (Photo
provided by author)
The term ‘climate crisis’ is now heard
everywhere. However, it is questionable whether people, countries, and politics
truly consider the climate crisis to be a crisis. The current system and
political circles have come up with solutions such as carbon neutrality and
RE100 (100% renewable energy electricity), but they do not reflect on or
criticize the imperialist way of life that guarantees abundance at the expense
of other beings. Rather, they are trying to strengthen the current system that
prioritizes capital. The true response to the climate crisis should be
‘degrowth’—in other words, changing the existing order and way of life.
It seems like it would be difficult to recover
the pluralism of ways of life, something that had existed for a very long time
but has now been forgotten. However, it is especially in times like these that
more stories need to be told and the fact that more ways of life exist needs to
be shown.
Before I became interested in farming, I thought
that it had nothing to do with my life. I had never met anyone who farmed. But
when a teacher explained that the disappearance of so many farmers was not a
natural phenomenon but a kind of genocide, I was shocked and my thinking
changed. The most basic way to sustain ourselves is to live a life where we set
our feet on the ground, a life where we sow seeds in the land. Taking away the
means to sustain ourselves is an infringement on people’s subjectivity, and it
is a way to make them easily submissive to power and capital.
The change may seem small and slow, but the
number of people trying through the Youth JaJaGong Program and Small Farmer’s
School training to live the very farm life that is disappearing is increasing
little by little every year. Currently, 10 such people who have completed the
Youth JaJaGong Program are living as self-sufficient small farmers in
Gyeomyeon, Gokseong-gun, where Hangkune Cooperative is located. Our families
and friends visit the area to see us. Then, those visitors tell their
acquaintances about us. Although it may seem slow and small, it will definitely
be an opportunity for diverse stories to reach more people.
“Farming is Struggle” [“struggle” in the sense of
“resistance” or “protest”] (Photo provided by author)
In the book Ideas to
Postpone the End of the World introduced earlier, the author asks the
reader, “Are we really one human race?” This question has two meanings
depending on which word is emphasized. “Are we really one human race?”
(Can we reduce to just one the various ways in which humans form societies and
live in them?) Or “are we really one human race?” (Shouldn’t we view
ourselves as part of an interdependent network of humans and non-humans, not
just humanity?) As we search for answers to these questions, we come to ask
ourselves in turn: Who exactly are ‘we’?
The exact meaning of
‘we’ is probably different for everyone, but for some people it includes things
like rocks, mountains, and rivers. The most fundamental problem that is causing
the climate crisis is the division between humans and nature and all of the
fields of study, thinking, and policies that are built on that division. That
is why we need to change our way of thinking that regards the land, oceans,
atmosphere, and all life forms that live within them as beings inferior to
humans or as resources for humans.
This year, I rented two
new fields. One of them is surrounded by zelkova trees. This spring and summer
were extremely dry. Usually in that situation, if you have a well and
sprinklers nearby you might be fine, but if you don’t, it will take a lot of
work to keep the crops from withering. But this field surrounded by zelkova
trees has a trickling stream on one side, and the leaves that the trees have
shed are piled up around the field, and the trees provide shade at just the
right time, so the place has an easier time enduring drought than others. When
I’m there, I feel grateful. I feel grateful for the trickling stream, and I
feel grateful for the trees that drop their leaves every winter and cast
shadows in the midday heat.
Also, I’m now paying
close attention to the lives of wild grasses that I used to pass by without
much thought. I didn’t used to notice what kind of flowers bloomed from them,
but this year, even though I was not particularly interested in them, I
discovered a new side of the grasses. As the years go by, living with nature
like that, what I see and think about changes, and the word ‘we’ expands to
include the crops I plant and grow, the frogs jumping around in the field, the
bees that zip into the flowers and help pollinate them, and the deer and wild
boars that sometimes eat the crops I’ve planted in the field.
That is why, in this era
of climate crisis, we farmers who are at the forefront of its impact talk about
agroecology. (For more about agroecology, see the [Korean-language] article An Alternative to Climate Disaster: The Pioneers
of Agroecology who Have Suggested Another Way)
The author’s ‘Half-Moon-Zelkova Field’. (Photo
provided by author)
Capitalists and entrepreneurs who continue to
fill their bellies, and capitalism that continues to change into different
forms, have changed the way we live. They demand from us a single way of life
and a single form of humanity. Just as I plant the other varieties of crops
that I once considered to have only one form and gather their seeds to carry
forward, I hope that more and more people will open the path toward restoring
our fragmented relationship with nature through various forms and ways of
living. I think that is the story of how we (mountains, seas, rivers, plants, animals,
and humanity) delay climate disaster.
About the Author: In
search of an ecological and alternative way of life, Yeoneo became a farmer in
Gokseong, South Jeolla Province and is now in her third year of farming. She
spends her days working in the fields,
and she tries to live in an agroecological way beyond the current
capitalist/neo-capitalist system. She leads a loosely communal life as a member
of the Hangkune Cooperative, an everyday life of resistance and care that includes finding
time for activities with her neighbors and the local community.
-The “Messages from Female Farmers
Feeling the Climate Crisis” series is published with the support of the Beautiful Fund.
Original Article: https://ildaro.com/9975
No comments:
Post a Comment