Another Look at Cain and Abel
The farmer and the herdsman. Why was one so much more favored than the other in their father’s eyes? Didn’t it seem capricious and unfair that Cain’s offering of wheat (or whatever agricultural product it was) was scorned by the father,while Abel’s offering of a lamb or goat (or whatever animal it was) brought him such praise? What on earth was that all about? Why is an animal gift so much worthier than a plant gift? Was it because the elderly nomadic Jews (who were herders) looked down their noses at their neighbors who were farmers?
Whatever the biblical rationale for the dichotomy, it has become a very important distinction in terms of our relationship to nature. In California, and everywhere else that agriculture is practice, it is unquestionably the greatest single destroyer of native vegetation and natural landscapes that we humans have devised. As heretical as it sounds, the farmer is the real serpent in the garden. Livestock ranching, on the other hand, although it has at times been vilified and blamed for “overgrazing”, soil compaction, erosion, fouling of streams and what not, has been and in fact remains the single greatest protector of natural vegetation, certainly in California and probably in many other parts of the world (some desert areas etc. excepted).
This is abundantly demonstrated everywhere in California (except deserts, north slopes, serpentine and sand outcrops, and wetlands) where grazing has been discontinued—something happening more and more often as grasslands become too fragmented to be economically grazed, or are “protected” by being put into public ownership—WEEDS immediately take over. European and other alien plants, in fact eat up more native grasslands and flower fields each year than all the various kinds of “development” put together. It can be argued, with some truth, that many of those very weeds arrived with imported livestock, but it is only that same livestock that is able to keep the weeds at bay.
And the whole lifestyle and relationship to land is totally different between the two. It is probably no coincidence that several notable self-taught botanists (Twisselman, Ahart, and others) came from the ranks of cattle ranchers, while few if any were farmers. After all, ranchers have a natural interest in the vegetation covering their rangelands, if only in terms of its nutritional or deleterious properties to their livestock, whereas “natural” vegetation to a farmer is only something to be plowed under and replaced by whatever crop(s) he plans to grow.
Ranchers live with their land and care very much about its vegetation; farmers are basically at war with it. To him, anything other than what he plants, native or not, common or rare, is just a weed, to be hoed, plowed, or most often these days, sprayed.
Farming uses more water and poisons more land (and water) than any other human activity; it lowers water tables, depletes precious “fossil” groundwater, causes widespread ruination of land by alkali/salinization, causes eutrophication of wetlands with its profligate use of chemical fertilizers, and totally erases most wildlife from vast areas. Agriculture has totally ruined the Central Valley, converting it from a vast tapestry of multicolored flowers dotted with grazing animals and teeming with all sorts of birds and small critters to the boring, deadly toxic wasteland it is today.
It has become “politically correct” to live “low on the food chain”, the argument being that it takes more grain to fatten a cow than to feed a small army; but who says that cows have to be fattened on grain? They do fine on grass/a.k.a. weeds. No curious botanist would waste his time looking in agricultural fields; rangelands, on the other hand, are often treasure-troves.
Even now, new marginal land is being scraped clean of its nature-made gardens, laser-leveled and converted to ruinous, short-term agricultural production until it dies of alkali poisoning. These activities are generally euphemized with slogans like “making the desert bloom”.
Farming practices that are actually good for the land, which recycle mulch and manure and build up rather than deplete soil fertility have become a thing of the past, a quaint anachronism followed by a few nutty backyard gardeners but laughed to ridicule by big corporate agribiz, which is in the business of mining the soil rather than building it. Small “family” farms, the kind I grew up on and Thomas Jefferson espoused as the ideal for this country, have nearly all been eaten by suburbia or gobbled up by corporate mega-farms. Food is cheap. The price to nature is astronomical. I’ll vote for Abel any day. In the story, Cain slew Abel. Is he doing it again?
