The blessing and the curse of the straight line

or how I split a rock to make tilling easier

The last week, I spent some ten hours getting rid of a giant rock. I borrowed a stone drill, wedges and shims (feathers) from a neighbour and drilled and drilled, split, drilled again and again etc. Why I did it? The rock was in the middle of a smaller field of around 2,000 square meters, which is our main vegetable plot. In smaller plots and inside our greenhouse we manage things manually, but this plot is so big that we use the tractor.* This year we decided to invest in subsurface drainage in the field which has a very heavy and dense clay where water often stays far too long. I will now sow a green manure mixture and make the field ready for a transformation to permanent raised beds next year.

Rock splitting at Sunnansjö farm, photo: Gunnar Rundgren

Anyone that has ever been working with farm machinery knows how much extra work it is to have various obstacles in a field, be it a tree, a boulder, a pond, a shack or whatever. Even if the actual surface area of the visible rock was less than a square meter, I had to drive around it on both sides and get back into the rows so I lost more than fifty square meters. I also had to adjust the hoe or whatever tilling equipment again and had extra work with keeping the area around the rock free from weeds. So when I am “restructuring” the field I thought it was timely to take away that obstacle which had annoyed me for ten years. Now it is gone.

This was just one trivial step towards making things a bit easier. As so many other things humans do and have done. It is linked to the Machine both literally (i.e the tractor) and figuratively (i.e. the industrial civilization). In the plots we manage manually, there is no problem with a boulder or a tree. On the contrary, there can be merits with them, the rock stores warmth, and I can sit and rest on it or put things to dry there. A tree can give nice shade, be support for a climbing plant, provide leaf for compost or fix nitrogen – although in our cold climate, trees and vegetables are not particularly good companions. It is use of the tractor that necessitates the removal of the rock, mind you it will also be the same with horse or oxen pulled machinery. It is the blessing and the curse of the straight line.

The blessing is that the job is made easier.

The curse? Well, it really doesn’t matter much if I take away a rock or two from my fields. But humanity has been taking out rocks for centuries, even millennia, already. And we have taken down trees, we straightened streams and converted them to ditches, we levelled fields, we drained the swamps (now called wetlands) all in efforts to make farming easier and simpler. Of course, this all comes with damage of the rest of the living, of biodiversity, of nature, of Earth. Even if the rock is “dead” its presence created a microhabitat and refuge from the arable field, at least when I let the weeds grow.

It is certainly not only farming that is the culprit. Cities and housing are even worse when it comes to radical transformation of the landscape, but they take up less space. The transportation infrastructure is another example where things are straightened and flattened in order to make transportation quicker. Rivers have been canalized, rails and roads criss-cross the landscape, the earth is paved over and even whole continents are dug through in order to make shipping quicker - I am thinking on the Panama and Suez channels. Still I haven’t talked about mines, factories and dams. The Machine is literally eating the earth.

When I split the rock I used only manual power and some smart tools. But all our splitting, digging and paving have been amplified hundred times with the use of fossil fuels and explosives. Eight billion people in a fossil-fuelled civilization certainly have a lot more impact than eight billion relying on muscle power. In this context it is worth noting that the application of renewable energy has no less environmental footprint than fossil fuels, apart from the emissions of greenhouse gases.**  

The earth is flat and humans are the centre of the universe

Despite the mocking of former generations belief that the earth was flat (even though that doesn’t really seems to have been the case), the current civilization strives to make the earth as flat as possible. That isn’t just expressed by paving over nature and levelling of fields but also in more abstract ways. To “create a level playing field” is the supposed goal of global standardization as well as most of the legislation within the European Union. We also mock former generations for believing that the Earth is the centre of the solar system. But honestly, are we not managing a civilization based on the idea that Homo Sapiens is the centre, not only of the solar system, but of the universe?

A main purpose for the straight lines and flat earth is to make things more rational, which mostly means quicker and with less energy. The saving of time is through a series of abstractions made into money and profit. I save some minutes of work each time I don’t have to manoeuvre around the rock and I will use slightly less diesel per produced unit of carrots or cabbage. Therefore I could proudly announce my action as a step towards sustainability. This is utter nonsense, of course, but so are most claims of sustainability: the time and diesel saved may very well be used for ploughing a new field, chopping down more trees or taking out yet another rock (one of many cases of Jevon’s paradox). We know that in the end we haven’t saved time at all as people are as busy as ever before in history.

Almost all that we cover in the word development, or civilization, are based on straight lines, flat earth and shortage of time. The effects are not only limited to the rest of the living, it also affects us.

The boring straight line

“Why is it so hard to live in a civilization that is based on the straight line” asks Tor Nörretranders in The User Illusion and supplies the answer: “because it has so little information”. We have all the time striven to increase accessibility and predictability in our relationship with nature and other people. That is why we build roads and why we make laws. That is also why I wanted to get rid of that rock. With industrialism we can create a very predictable world, a world where we can sleep well in a comfortable bed in warm houses without fearing the wolves and where we don't have to look down where to put our foot, because we know that the pavement is even. This world also easily becomes a very boring world, exactly because it is so predictable.

And in no way, is the information-society giving us a less predictable world. Despite its name, information technology convey much less information than the technologies it replaces. “Humans that have the capacity to meaningfully process millions of bits per second are now processing a few bits on a computer screen”, Nörretranders says.  

It is of course a bit too easy (or rather not at all easy!) to just reject all technology and say that we should live in and with nature as foragers. I don’t think that it is really desirable and certainly not possible for a global population of eight billion. We should also acknowledge that many efforts have contributed to a huge increase in food availability, better hygiene and longer life spans even if most of the technosphere is developed primarily to increase profit and not to make our life better or happier.  

Many animals and other living organisms also change the environment in which they live. Not only humans farm or mines the soil in search of minerals. Life itself in all its wonderful expressions is also a result of life forms eating the earth during eons. Humans and other animals would not exist at all unless microbes and plants had freed minerals from gravel, sand and rocks. In a wider perspective, the line between the organic and living on the one hand and the mineral and dead on the other hand is just one of our many misleading abstractions. Many minerals are made up of dead life and life can’t exist without the minerals.

To tell humans that they should not change the environment and abolish their efforts to make life easier or simpler is as futile as telling beavers not to chop down trees or build dams. Still, we really need to find ways towards some other balance than the present. In Swedish there is the word lagom which simultaneously be translated into just right, fair, and enough. I don’t know how much or how lagom is. What I do know is that the main drivers in today’s word are not getting us there, capitalism, modernism and consumerism do not like limits or restrictions. I have some ideas about how to move towards lagom, which I will elaborate on in the next article.

* In total we have nine hectares of arable land of which 8 hectares are in grass, half a hectare in fruits and nuts and just less than half a hectare for vegetables and berries. If had only the vegetables, we wouldn’t have a tractor at all or just a small 2-wheel tractor.  

** I am here referring to the use of the energy for various processes such as mining, forestry, farming, fishing, construction, transportation etc. All of them has huge environmental impacts which are not going away just because energy is renewable. One can also discuss if it is at all possible to replace fossil fuels with a renewable energy system on a global scale. In my view it might be possible but with increasing costs which will, in turn, reduce energy use, so till well be another system.