Kingsolver Reading

“We [humans] are management; they [plants] are labor.” This relationship of humans to crops that Kingsolver exclaims sums up the very thing that society, especially American society, seems to have forgotten—that we are only to oversee, not control, a natural process. Evolution has fine-tuned a system in which “plants, insects, birds, mammals, and microbes interact in such complicated ways” in order to produce the very resource that allows our survival—food. Conventional farming methods have artificially imitated this process, meaning to increase production, but in fact only worsening it. The paradox between David’s two cornfields proves this. As Kingsolver proclaims, organic farming enhances the soil’s living and nonliving components, thereby enhancing the productivity of the land, whereas conventional farming basically poisons the land in order to allow growth. This concept is counterintuitive. Shouldn’t we focus more on nurturing and cultivating the land than feeding it unnatural chemicals that not only harm the land and food we eat, but us ourselves?