…fi­nally I drew a pic­ture of Don Quixote’s don­key. On its back were a blind Bill and a deaf Wes both rid­ing back­ward, and me hang­ing des­per­ately on to the don­key’s swish­ing tail. The three Don Quixotes, hop­ing to re­turn to na­ture, were try­ing to stop the don­key from rush­ing wildly to­ward the brink of dis­as­ter, but it seemed hope­less. Some­one asked what was go­ing to hap­pen, so I drew Pres­i­dent Rea­gan sit­ting front­ward on the don­key’s back dan­gling a car­rot in front of the don­key’s nose. When I asked, “What do sup­pose the car­rot is?” some­one cor­rectly an­swered, “Money.”
  Czytaj dalej →

On the ideal nat­u­ral farm or ur­ban home­stead, there would be a mix­ture of fruit and nut trees, and be­neath them veg­eta­bles, grains, and berries. Chick­ens would run around in the weeds and clover. When I talked about such things in Japan, I was con­sid­ered un­re­al­is­tic, but in the United States this idea is eas­ier to un­der­stand for most peo­ple, and eas­ier to carry out. When I sug­gested that it would be a good idea to plant fruit trees to line the streets in towns and cities and to grow veg­eta­bles in­stead of lawns and an­nual flow­ers, so that when the towns­peo­ple were tak­ing a walk, they could pick and eat the fruit from the road­side, peo­ple were sur­pris­ingly en­thu­si­as­tic.
 Masanobu Fukuoka, „Sawing Seeds in the Desert”

This draw­ing was in­spired by Mr. Fukuoka’s ex­pe­ri­ence at the sum­mer camp at French Mead­ows in the Sierra Nevada Moun­tains. It shows peo­ple camp­ing out, de­light­ing in the for­est, the river, and the fresh moun­tain air. The cook­ing pot over the fire pit is sus­pended by the moon.
 In the place where there is noth­ing, ev­ery­thing ex­ists.

We can­not sim­ply put things back the way they once were. Too much has hap­pened. Con­di­tions are far dif­fer­ent to­day from what they were just one hun­dred years ago. Soil has eroded and be­come drier due to agri­cul­ture, over­graz­ing, and cut­ting too many trees. Plant com­mu­ni­ties and the bal­ance of micro­organ­isms have been al­tered be­yond recog­ni­tion by plow­ing and agri­cul­tural chem­i­cals. An­i­mals and plants are be­com­ing ex­tinct from the elim­i­na­tion of their habi­tat. The seas are be­com­ing more acidic, and even the cli­mate is chang­ing. Even if we did go to the trou­ble of putting back the plants that were na­tive to a cer­tain place, there is no guar­an­tee that they would thrive there any­more.
 My idea is en­tirely dif­fer­ent. I think we should mix all the species to­gether and scat­ter them world­wide ^1)↓, com­pletely do­ing away with their un­even dis­tri­bu­tion. This would give na­ture a full pal­ette to work with as it es­tab­lishes a new bal­ance given the cur­rent con­di­tions. I call this the Sec­ond Gen­e­sis.
 Masanobu Fukuoka, „Sawing Seeds in the Desert”

Here, peo­ple are car­ry­ing out var­i­ous forms of hu­man ac­tiv­ity with the idea that they are ac­com­plish­ing some­thing. The last line refers to the fig­ure on the left who is on his own mis­sion to re­pair the dam­age of that ac­tiv­ity.