Man and Nature (George Corrin).
There is a difference, George insisted, between logic and truth; there's a gap between them which has to be filled by observation and creative thought. The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries 1970 Soil Bulletin, drawn up after exhaustive tests and consultations with farmers and farming bodies, including the Soil Association, advises that there is nothing wrong with the soils in the UK; they are in good condition. What then were so many of us doing at Chelwood Gate, attending a conference on healing the earth?
His next example was a Farmers Weekly article (30 March 1984) on the ten year old Butser Hill Iron Age experiment, with a hint of ruefulness in the editorial comment. On the Hampshire Downs, as nearly as possible under Iron Age conditions, using a wooden plough and no fertilisers, winter wheat has been grown continuously for ten years, and the yield is now as good-30 eat to the acre as any modern farmer would expect on marginal arable land after continuous use of expensive fertilisers. Given a chance, the earth can itself produce the stimulants to growth that it needs. On Butser Hill nitrogen-fixing organisms such as blue-green algae have steadily increased, and control experiments have highlighted the fact that it is indeed these algae which are, in their unadulterated being, the active agents for feeding the soil with nitrogen. The interesting note struck in the Farmers Weekly editorial is the question, how could modern farmers possibly afford ten years without fertilisers and sprays in order to achieve this remarkable homoeostasis or self regulating process?
Willy nilly man alters nature and creates landscapes: what is important is the manner in which he does so, and what is proven is that the earth can be helped to become biologically richer. But artificially fed soil has a potential beyond which it cannot be pushed indefinitely. It is only through keen and loving observation and understanding that our soils can really be served well enough for healing to happen and for homoeostasis to apply. George drew in lemniscate form an appealing diagram of the cycle of compost as used on B.D.A.A. farms, explaining how this should be our basic method of helping the earth. But if pollution and fouling of the environment continue and animals and men are fed on artificial substitutes instead of on whole food, compost will lose its value and man his humanness. Of course farmers say money: we can't afford rotation of crops, we can't afford to let weeds take up space or to surround our fields with hedges as nourishment or shelter, and we certainly can't afford fallow years. But if the aim is growth in the economic sense rather than in the sense of quality, the answer to the money argument is that what grows bigger and bigger, including the economy, eventually bursts. We took an enlivening gallop along the history of thought from the multi-god-filled universe of classical Greece to present day utilitarianism, and a science of metaphysics was suggested as being what is now needed. Romantic ideas of allowing Nature to flourish unrestrained were contrasted with the early Benedictine rule of divine worship and work with the hands, and we took a sideway look at different presentations of the story of Odysseus a hero amusingly and aptly chosen by our speaker. Finally George stressed how much young B-D trained farmers need help with land and finance if the present scarcity of B-D produce is to be increased and the earth healed: and as a postscript he read us some Emerson: Emerson musing on his neighbour farmers: they farm their own land, they can do what they like with their own farms: but they don't own the landscape. The landscape is after all for all men to enjoy.