Restorative justice.

I wonder if the farmers around here are intuitive enough to take this as a hint ..

The farmland here is rolling, gentle hills. A little rocky here, sandy there, and clay-ey closer to the river. The farms are small, traditionally it's been all about cattle, with fields sown in hay, alfalfa & corn for winter feed. Some rotation, of course; oats do well here. Barley is iffy thanks to summer storms.

It's only in the last decade or so that we're seeing more and more soy, and only in the last few years that we're seeing 'modern' farming techniques being used. Massive, computerized machinery. Fields 'burned down' with chemicals to get rid of the weeds, hedgerows and sugar-maple bushes taken out to make room, and vast fields of that soy, year after year, crop rotation be damned.

Remember how I told you about our excessively snowy winter and the ensuing spring rains resulting in a whole lot of moisture? That was early May, and it's still raining. Now going on July and the fields haven't recovered; an awful lot of them remain unplanted. Boggy, that's what they are, especially (of course) those fields where the hedgerows and maple-bushes that surrounded them have been removed - that modernization greed has left the water table fucked. Fields that may have been just a bit damp are likely to now be unsalvageable for years to come.

"Meat space"

meat·space
ˈmētspās/Submit
noun informal
the physical world, as opposed to cyberspace or a virtual environment.

I can't think of a more vile term, or one more expressive of the disdain those who use it must hold for reality.

Thoughts on the 'intelligence' of creaturehood.

The 'intelligence', or 'innate wisdom' of the body.

Hmmm.

We refer to 'instinct' when we speak of how animals know how to be animals.  A robin, for instance, knows how to build a robin-style nest, which differs from a grackle's or a crow's. The robin isn't taught, it just 'knows', on 'instinct' how to build its nest.. or at least this is the vague and non-committal way that science explains it.

potential pears

We humans have to be taught most of our human-ness (supposedly). We have a few instincts that we retain into adulthood, but not many, and most of those involve responses to danger. We've managed, just in the last several of generations, to quell even our most basic instincts, like the need for water or certain foods. Now we're told how much water to drink. There was a time we drank only when thirsty; the human race didn't die out from dehydration.

At the most basic of levels, the care of our newborns, once instinctive, has been so profoundly influenced by 'authorities' (social mores, baby formula makers) that many women have lost the instinct to breastfeed their babies. What was once an absolute necessity for the infant's survival is now a choice, and we've come to the point where there are many women who simply cannot produce milk.