THIS LAND IS OUR LAND

I watched a movie last night that was based on the true story about two Napa Valley wineries beating out French wines in the first Franco-American wine tasting in 1976. Very interesting stuff to know that Napa wineries have been in operation for many, many years even though they were considered poor quality wines by the entire wine snob world.


To the point...the movie illustrated the passion of vitners, the symbiotic relationship that man has with the earth and nature to produce a quality wine. There was a passionate dialogue between an "up-start" vitner and an Hispanic employee who has guided the vitner along with his knowledge. The Hispanic was a third or fourth generation Napa Valley winery employee. He spoke of his heritage of migrant workers, laborers and how the only way to know wine-making was to have the juice of the grape and the grit of the soil under one's fingernails. One needed to know the sense of toil in one's muscles, calluses on the hands, the breathing in of the air of the seasons during growing and cultivation to truly be a vitner.


It reminded me of how as technology moves us along, we rely less and less on our knowledge of the earth to accomplish what we need to do to live. Even as briefly as 100 years ago, most of the world worked the earth to make a living--farming, raising animals, forestry, fishing, and building things from the natural elements of soil, wood, water, fire, and stone. How far away we have traveled from our Earth! Products are synthetic, "man-made". Chemists, machinists, industrialists, carmakers, engineers develop new and improved products that have literally transformed even those vocations that have relied on the Earth. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides; and gasoline, electrical, coal, steam powered machines pollute the very water we drink and the food we produce for human consumption. Theories abound (with some truth) that children reach puberty at younger ages now due to the prolification and popularity of the chicken nugget. Chickens are raised by huge chicken farms that utilize hormones and antibiotics to produce a better, cheaper chicken.


If you concentrate on this and think it through, you may be concerned...where are we headed? If we cover more and more soil with concrete, the earth doesn't absorb and filter rain efficently. It goes on and on.


Point is....we need to get MUCH greener. Our great-grandfathers are gone, there are fewer and fewer teachers of the Earth available. Experience/failure IS the best teacher, but I wonder
why we have to be dire situations before we learn.

"We humans must come again to a moral comprehension of the earth and air. We must live according to the principle of a land ethic. The alternative is that we shall not live at all."
~N. Scott Momaday, Kiowa~