Trauma Farm

I first met Brian Brett back in 1993 when he and Bill Deverell co-organized a brilliant fundraising event for Clayoquot Sound.   It was in Vancouver and was MC’d by Pierre Berton with literary offerings from Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat and a list as long as your arm.  Brian had a solid reputation as a poet and novelist even then and Bill was best known as a lawyer turned author, with book-turned into TV series, Street Legal.
 
One of the most wonderful things about the move to Saanich Gulf Islands is being in the same area as wonderful friends whom I had only briefly met and who now are so very supportive.  In fact, Bill Deverell is turning the launch of his new book Snow Job into a cross-country fundraiser for the Green Party. (but that’s another story).
 
I love books. I am always reading three or four at any given time. (one for travel and ferries and flights, one for bedside (Sidney), another (less read) for bedside Ottawa, and so on…)    And I don’t think I have ever written a blog to say “BUY THIS BOOK!”  so this is a first.
 
Brian Brett has written a combination memoir, thesis, and eviscerating critique of modern globalized agriculture.  It is called Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life (Greystone Books, Vancouver, 2009).   In it he lays claim to being Canada’s answer to Wendell Berry… OK, less an “answer” than a strand of music in harmony.
 
The book is funny.  Rural misadventures of rampaging chickens and recalcitrant horses, battered and bruised farmers and a keen sense of the absurdity of the universe, or at least of one’s own existence.  It runs on like a free range feast, and then suddenly you are aware of method in the madness.  Here’s a treatise on seed saving versus GMOs.  Now an analysis of the “progress trap” of modern farming. The dangers and self-defeating nature of pesticides. 
 
The whole book serves as a clear warning that the mania for over-regulation threatens to kill the small farm -- and replace it with what?   A GMO feast of such narrowed genetic diversity and mono-culture that the whole food system is vulnerable.  Eggs imported from China? 
 
Whenever I meet with farmers and ranchers the complaint is the same.  Local food production, healthy food, whether certified organic or just more local and fresh, is under threat from globalized agri-business.  Systematically, over-regulation with a bias toward globalized agriculture, is shutting down the infrastructure that underpins local agriculture.  We are losing canneries, slaughter houses, dairies and creameries and all the mechanics of local food production.  
 
Brian Brett writes in a way that delivers all this news through the rapture of the awe-inspired:
 
“Our minds can’t encompass the multiplying intersections of a farm’s diverse interactions: it’s a mystic star map whose interconnections are larger than the human imagination and certainly beyond the reductionist mind trap of the logic that led to the thrills of globalization.”
 
Or more simply: “If you have a goal in a garden, you are doomed.”
 
Brett refuses to romanticize life on a farm, “We are living amid modern myths, whether they’re the free enterprise propaganda of agribusiness products basking in the glowing fields, or the sunshine vision of small farms extolled by eco-urbanite enthusiasts blind to the dirt, mindless labour, gore, and dangers of a real mixed farm.”
 
For a healthy dose of sanity marinated in the absurd, read Trauma Farm.
 
(I think I heard CBC Radio announce that Shelagh Rogers will be talking to Brian about this book next Saturday.)