Issue 15: Letter from the Director

There is a division that runs through agriculture, and so to, our lives. Not between organic and conventional, or small and large, or even past and future. The division is older than that. It runs between those who believe the act itself carries meaning, and those who believe only the outcome does.

On one hand: yield, efficiency, margin, crops. A logic that treats ‘the how’ as incidental.

On the other hand: a man shooting on 35mm film as he travels with sheep and alpacas across the heartland. A seed keeper who holds a diversity in his palm like a word that must not be forgotten. Queer farmers in three states growing vegetables as painters would make art. A woman on the Pacific coast who says, simply, that a deer saved her life. And me, right now, planting 10 varieties of tobacco tracing back to, and widely, from the Aztec, Huichol, Rapa Nui, Hopi and other cultures, each one, a reckoning with what it means to understand seed and be in right relationship, or wrong relationship, with a plant. Yes, I’ve begun talking to plants. 

This journal is not simply an outcome. It is a disposition. A belief that the simplest choices — how a seed is saved, how a hide is tanned, how a photograph is made, how a vine is tended — are themselves the revolution. Not metaphors for it. The thing itself.

Read on.

Phil