 | Folks, This Ain’t Normal
Joel Salatin - Polyface Farm
Based on his book by the same title, this whimsical performance is filled with history, satire and prophecy. While most Americans seem to think our techno-glitzy, disconnected, celebrity-worshipping culture will be the first to sail off into a Star Trek future unencumbered by ecological umbilicals, Salatin bets that the future will instead incorporate more tried-and-true realities from the past.
Ours is the first culture with no chores for children, cheap energy, heavy mechanization, computers, supermarkets, TV dinners and unpronounceable food. Although he doesn’t believe that we will return to horses and buggies, washboards, and hoop skirts, Salatin believes we will go back in order to go forward, using technology to re-establish historical normalcy.
That normalcy will include edible landscapes, domestic larders, pastured livestock, solar-driven carbon cycling for fertility, and a visceral relationship with life’s fundamentals: food, energy, water, air, soil, fabric, shelter. We may as well get started enthusiastically, instead of being dragged reluctantly into this more normal existence. Rather than being an abstract, cerebral, academic look at ecology, food systems, and soil development, this talk is based firmly on a lifetime spent communing with ecology, economic, and emotion in their full reality, as a farmer.
Both sobering and inspiring, this performance empowers people to tackle the seemingly impossibly large tasks that confront our generation. Historical contexts create jump-off points for the future–a future as bright as our imagination and as sure as the past.
Visit www.polyfacefarms.com for more information.
Speaker bio:
Click here to show speaker bio.| Joel Salatin is a self-described environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic farmer, or as The New York Times calls him, “the high priest of the pasture.” Profiled in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Salatin employs an innovative farming system that has gained attention from around the country. He’s penned more than a half dozen books, including Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal and The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer. |
View the Puyallup workshop schedule here.
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