“Instead of complaining that the rose bush is full of thorns, be happy the thorn bush has roses.”
– Buddhist Proverb

A view of sunset over Mount Mitchell in the Blue Ridge Appalachian Mountains in rural North Carolina: Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS, N.C. — The polar vortex swooped down into the Southland this Mother’s Day weekend and not only froze the ground in the Appalachians. The winds that came with it cleared the air of pollutants and made for spectacular views of the blue ridges backed by a clear, cobalt blue sky.

It seems that the older I get, and the higher above sea level, the more clearly I see the past and the future, which seem to merge into a present tense of awareness that surpasses historical understanding.

As a child of the suburbs who grew up into a city dwelling tough guy with a gruff newspaperman demeanor, there was a time when pretentious writing harkening back to a bygone past made me either laugh out loud or cringe and scoff. The newspapers and magazines I grew up reading covered agricultural life and the economy of farming in utterly unrealistic and romantic ways.

Those publications are long gone now for the most part. They began to die about the time people began learning to read on a computer screen through an internet connection.

At the same time, the romanticism of rural life in America and the family farm also died, replaced by mega industrial farms and Monsanto chemicals and that company’s insidious seed monopoly.

After a couple of very stressful months of finding places to escape exposure to the novel coronavirus, which continues to change our world in unprecedented ways, I can sit here comfortably in these mountains and finally think clearly about life and death, living and dying.

“Get busy living, or get busy dying,” someone once said.

I choose to get busy living, but not in the same way as yesterday.

Even the Greek philosopher Heraclitus recognized thousands of years ago that, “Change is the only constant in life.”

The only question now is: Will we be smart enough to change in the right ways that make our survival not only possible, but as enjoyable and rewarding as our previous lives before the Big C shattered our world?

We need to stop talking about “getting back to normal,” or going back to “business as usual.”

How will we use this moment to seize the opportunity to change the world we live in to make it a more survivable and sustainable place?

My epiphany for the day is this: While we can’t unlearn everything we’ve done in developing this modern, urban world, we can learn from the rural values of the past to create a more livable future by getting back closer to nature and the food we eat.

To do this will require massive amounts of altruism and a drastic reduction in selfishness, which humans may not be able to sustain. Our instincts have developed to hoard toilet paper and meat when the first stories break hinting of a shortage.

But we also possess a powerful instinct to help our neighbors when they are in trouble.

If only we had enough real leaders in government and business who could personify altruism and make selfishness socially unacceptable. If only we had a media system that could do the same. We could save the world.

Unfortunately we do not have that leadership in the White House, and the press in this country is still competing for clickbait and money. Capitalism trumps democracy at every turn.

In trying to figure out a way to do my own humble part in all of this, I am basically going into semi-retirement — just as I wrote that I would last year when figuring out ways to run from the worst impacts of climate change. Since we can’t seem to get enough people to realize the importance of this mission to create a better media and social media system by fully funding it, I am imparting on another kind of altruistic mission: To find farmers to help grow the healthy food we need to survive in the future.

We are not out of the woods yet from the health and economic affects of the coronavirus. More calamities are sure to follow. Even if the federal government keeps printing money and giving it out to people and corporations to keep mass grocery store chains and big banks afloat, there will be other unforeseen consequences.

There are already shortages of meat and prices are going up as the big industrial farms become coronavirus hot spots and the workers all get sick, drastically slowing production.

People who had already switched to a plant-based diet are ahead of the curve now. But we don’t all have to completely stop eating meat. This situation is also creating an opportunity for small family farms to get back into the marketplace and be able to compete again. The rise in prices will help them too.

So just as said I would last year, I am helping to set up one organic farm in rural North Carolina as part of a project to help build a network across the region from New York state to the Gulf Coast.

If you are part of such a network too, we are looking to tell your stories. So please get in touch and let’s talk about it.

Meanwhile, there are a few helpful stories being produced related to this by the mass media. Here are a few I found in doing my online reading this week.

Meat-free future? Coronavirus exposes America’s fragile food system

Pork Chops vs. People: Battling Coronavirus in an Iowa Meat Plant

Tyson Foods closes Wilkes County plant for deep cleaning amid coronavirus outbreak

Going Local: The Case For Bringing America’s Meat Supply Closer To Home

Maria Lettini, executive director of FAIRR, which bills itself as a global network of investors addressing Environmental, Social and Governance issues in protein supply chains, say the crisis is building to at least make a crack in formidable big ag defenses.

“Like the financial system of just over a decade ago, the consolidation of the meat sector in a few enormous corporations means that they are probably now being seen as ‘too big to fail’,” she says. “Evidence suggests that other options such as a more localized food systems could thrive and deliver the nutrition required if empowered to prosper. Covid-19 is truly a wake up call.”

Let’s get busy living better together.