Brian Miller

We have spent many years planning, building, and repairing the infrastructure to support multiple endeavors, to make the farm resilient, to create and sustain a place where the absence of one species simply indicates another cycle, unremarked in the larger scheme.

Somewhere—the gravel road I grew up on, the wharf I fished from, the woods at the end of the road where we roamed, the edge of the bayou where we fought off pirates to keep them from landing—is no longer. It is now an anywhere of pavement, sidewalks, a Walmart, hotels, casinos, and housing developments. Anywhere is nowhere.

Farming livestock involves a daily exertion of power over life and death.

Maybe we are just Irish monks in a new dark age emerging, copying texts for a future generation to decipher. Yet involvement in where we live is the tapestry of who we are.

That we have begun to confuse understanding with outsourced expertise is not a surprise. The apps are merely the latest indicator of our disconnect from the natural world.

Nothing is duller than a prepackaged seed packet. What started in January with the hopeful perusal of vegetable catalogs ends in February with the arrival of parsimonious clutches of lonely seeds, each variety sprinkled into the bottom of a small envelope. Like the childhood prize in a box of Cracker Jacks, the reward is always less than one had hoped for.