Бывший фермер-атеист объяснил, почему природа и растения, а не человек, являются главными в сельском хозяйстве

Over the years, well-meaning religious people have wondered, with reasonable curiosity, how I could be a farmer and an atheist. To their reckoning, farmers work closely with the earth and nature where evidence of a god is abundant and overwhelming. While it’s true that nature is elegant, it is also ugly; nature is rewarding, it is also capricious; nature appears to have an orderly design, it also appears random and messy. When I walk through any natural environment I see both order and chaos. Many extraordinary things happened in the 50-some years I farmed, but none of them persuaded me that there was a god involved. A hail storm stopped just short of my ripe wheat crop in 1974. I remember it clearly because it was after the first OPEC oil embargo and the wheat market was over $6 a bushel, a price it has yet to reach this year when input costs are about 10 times higher. Go figure. In those early days of getting started as a farmer, I needed that wheat crop. There was no crop insurance, and there were loans to pay. Failure might mean I would have to get a job in town. Watching the storm advance, I was not praying: I was repeatedly violating the third commandment, shaking my fist at the sky and swerving my whole body at the storm cloud, the way baseball players use their arms and body to push a possible home run ball from foul to fair. The 1974 hail storm came within a yardstick of the wheat, and I can make the unusual claim that in all my subsequent years farming, I never got hailed out and never got ruined by bad weather, though there were times when the weather reduced a crop, like when windrowed hay or grain got rained on. Or when temperatures got ahead of irrigation capacity, or weed control didn’t work right. Now that I’m too infirm to farm and probably too old to take on the weather (though I still protect my garden from the vagaries of the sky with my fist), I now understand that I was just extremely lucky, that correlation is not causation, and things which seem improbable are not impossible. A god is not necessary for the extraordinary to manifest itself, both as beauty and deformity. I also understand that I had it all backwards. The plants are in charge, not the farmer. The plants are the growers, humans are the crop. We imagine being in control of the process – in part because of that dubious directive in Genesis that gave humans dominion over the plants and animals of the Earth, only to condemn them to agriculture for eating an apple. The God of Genesis obviously never farmed: It’s the plants that have dominion. They grow humans by giving us oxygen, without which we wouldn’t exist; then plants give us their compressed carcasses as fossil fuels, without which we couldn’t power our food production systems, resulting in starvation; and finally, when we die, plants feast on our remains. Ken Lambertson, in “Pajama Birdwatchers” newsletter, put it perfectly: “We are only food for plants. They feed us oxygen until we ripen, then eat us when we’re dead.” In “Botany of Desire,” Michael Pollen noted that all plants – poppies, wheat, barley, coffee and corn especially – have done a great job of seducing humans to spread their genes over parts of the globe that were otherwise inaccessible to them. When you realize that plants have a vested interest in an abundant harvest, you begin to understand why farming is basically so easy. Seed heads produce an average of 70 multiples of themselves for later germination, the sun provides 99% of the horsepower and calories. The farmer’s labor is a rounding error in the chart of accounts. Plants understand the importance of keeping humans focused on making up for the fact that they, the plants, eat through photosynthesis, which it turns out is extremely reliable, but very, very inefficient, sitting at 1-2%. Without humans busting their butts to provide a 98-99% subsidy in the form of fossil solar energy from those compressed plants-turned-to-oil, plants would have to settle for very, very modest expansion opportunities. If there is a god organizing things, that god is rooting for the plants, not the humans. John Mattingly is a retired farmer, cancer kicker and declared atheist. He lives in Moffat.