The One-Straw Revolution_ An Introduction to Natural Farming - Masanobu Fukuoka [3]
When Mr. Fukuoka speaks of what he calls his "do-nothing" methods of farming, a Westerner might appropriately be reminded of St. Matthew 6:26: "Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them." The purpose in both instances, I take it, is to warn us of our proper place in the order of things: we did not make either the world or ourselves; we live by using life, not by creating it. But of course a farmer cannot farm without work any more than a bird can find food without searching for it, a fact that Mr. Fukuoka acknowledges with characteristic good humor: "I advocate `do-nothing' farming, and so many people come, thinking they will find a utopia where one can live without ever having to get out of bed. These people are in for a big surprise." The argument here is not against work; it is against unnecessary work. People sometimes work more than they need to for the things that they desire, and some things that they desire they do not need.
And "do-nothing" also refers to the stance that common sense is apt to take in response to expert authority: " `How about not doing this? How about not doing that?'—that was my way of thinking." This is the instructive contrariness of children and certain old people, who rightly distrust the "sophistication" that goes ahead without asking "What for?"
Mr. Fukuoka is a scientist who is suspicious of science—or of what too often passes for science. This does not mean that he is either impractical or contemptuous of knowledge. His suspicion, indeed, comes from his practicality and from what he knows. Like Sir Albert Howard, Mr. Fukuoka condemns the piecemealing of knowledge by specialization. Like Howard, he wishes to pursue his subject in its wholeness, and he never forgets that its wholeness includes both what he knows and what he does not know. What he fears in modern applied science is its disdain for mystery, its willingness to reduce life to what is known about it and to act on the assumption that what it does not know can safely be ignored. "Nature as grasped by scientific knowledge," he says, "is a nature which has been destroyed; it is a ghost possessing a skeleton, but no soul." Such a passage will recall the similar mistrust voiced in our own tradition in these lines by Wordsworth:
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things—
We murder to dissect.
Mr. Fukuoka's is a science that begins and ends in reverence—in awareness that the human grasp necessarily diminishes whatever it holds. It is not knowledge, he seems to say, that gives us the sense of the whole, but joy, which we may have only by not grasping. We find this corroborated in certain passages in the Gospels, and in William Blake:
He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise.
It is this grace that is the origin of Mr. Fukuoka's agricultural insights: "When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the effort to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized."
And this "natural" farming that has its source and end in reverence is everywhere human and humane. Humans work best when they work for human good, not for the "higher production" or "increased efficiency" which have been the nearly exclusive goals of industrial agriculture. "The ultimate goal of farming," Mr. Fukuoka says, "is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings." And he speaks