The cheap, commercial luridness of October 31 here in the United States almost totally obscures an event of immense proportions, an event that quite literally changed the world – an event that should never go unnoticed on its anniversary because it marked the beginning, both for better and for worse, of the individual consciousness.

It was on this day in 1517 that Martin Luther, a German priest of the Catholic Church and a professor at the University of Wittenberg , nailed to the door of the church his 95 Theses.  Physically, it was a small act and not at all unusual.  Apparently, nailing a work to the door of the church in those days simply represented the potential beginning of a debate.  Indeed, the English translation of the short preface to his Theses states that, ìout of love and concern for the truth, and with the object of eliciting it, the following heads will be the subject of a public discussion at Wittenberg under the presidency of the reverend father, Martin Luther, Augustinian, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology, and duly appointed Lecturer on these subjects in that place. He requests that whoever cannot be present personally to debate the matter orally will do so in absence in writing.

Intellectually, however, and, perhaps more importantly, morally, this was an enormous act.  A single man had, in essence, come forward all alone, with nothing to defend him but his words and those of a book in which he had faith, to challenge the Power that had ruled the entire world for hundreds of years.  He knew as he pounded that nail into the door that this act could very well end his life.  And yet, for the sake of his own conscience, he was willing to take that chance.  For Luther, exposing his ideas to that world had more value than his one small life.

His Theses systematically laid out why he had come to a major and fundamental disagreement with the Church concerning its practice of selling ìindulgences.”  Simply put, for the right price, you could spring a dead loved one out of purgatory and get them straight into heaven.

Now on one hand, you could make the case that this was simply the free market at work: one group with money, power, and intellectual influence profiting off those without those things.  The Church, certainly, did not force anyone to buy indulgences.  The churchmen merely advertised their wares and marketed them extremely well (after all, what better marketing can you imagine than a trusted spiritual leader convincing his flock that, for the small sum of just $10, Grandpa will get into heaven – especially when the one who takes the money can also officially certify that it´s been done?).

Luther, if he had wanted, could easily have participated in this profiteering.  He was, after all, one of the select few – he was a priest of the greatest Power the world had ever known.  But his conscience wouldn´t let him.  He couldn´t participate in this because of what he saw, what he knew, and what he believed.

On a journey to Rome in 1510, Luther had been shocked at what he had experienced there.  Heiko Oberman writes in his 1982 biography of Luther that ìThe indulgences for sale in Germany were only poor imitations of what could be purchased in Rome ” (p. 146).  He says that Luther, in order to free his grandfather from purgatory, had ìscaled the Santa Scala on his knees, with an Our Father on each step, for by praying this way it was said one could save a soul.  When he had arrived at the top, however, skepticism overtook him,” a skepticism that ìarose from the conviction that God would not allow Himself to be pinned down this way” (p. 147).

Oberman also mentions ìthe shock and horror (Luther) had felt in Rome at hearing for the first time in his life flagrant blasphemies uttered in public.  He was deeply shocked by the casual mockery of saints and everything he held sacred.  He could not laugh when he heard priests joking about the sacrament of the Eucharist.  In Erfurt, his first mass had him shivering with awe; now in Rome he had to stand by while servants of God thought it funny to blaspheme the most sacred words of institution” (p. 149).

A few years later, at home in Wittenberg, he learned of a priest named Johannes Tetzel, who was especially enthusiastic about collecting funds for St. Peter’s Basilica (one of the major efforts of the Pope at that time – and what better way to raise money than by selling indulgences?).  According to the Wittenberg website, Tetzel ìwent from being a simple Dominican priest to Papal Commissioner for Indulgence. People streamed to him wherever he went . . . . Tetzel’s activity brought about fatal consequences for Wittenberg . . . as indulgences were bought, traditions and customs started falling apart. The spiritual problem with the sale of indulgence was that the inner struggle between the burden and the sin became meaningless; all one had to do was buy indulgence and everything was fine. Repentance was no longer a sign of remorse.  Martin Luther read the instruction manual for indulgence merchants in October of 1517. The things he read in this manual made it clear to him that as a theologian, he couldn’t keep silent any longer.

Luther knew that this selling of indulgences, particularly to fund the building of St. Peter´s, was, quite simply, immoral – and that this immorality was perpetrated for profit by the Church.  That some people felt better because of buying them and that others felt better because of the profiteering did not mitigate things in the least for Luther, who believed that the sinful person ought to spend his life filled with remorse and in humility towards God’s majesty rather than by simply buying his way out.  Finally, in October 1517, he began writing his thoughts and concerns down.

We must keep in mind here how relatively recent the very notion of a literate man, of one who could both read and write, really was in 1517.  Gutenberg had only invented the printing press about 80 years before.  Before then, what books there were – mostly Bibles – were handmade and thus quite rare and expensive.  The people took the priests´ readings and interpretations of the Bible on faith.  After all, the priests were learned men.

And then, suddenly, one of these learned men, one of these priests, a professor at the university, had the audacity, the boldness, the courage – had the unshakable conviction – that the Church, this most powerful and holy of human institutions, was wrong.  ìThose who preach indulgences,” he wrote, ìare in error when they say that a man is absolved and saved from every penalty by the pope’s indulgences . . . . the major part of the people are deceived by that indiscriminate and high-sounding promise of relief from penalty . . . . There is no divine authority for preaching that the soul flies out of the purgatory immediately the money clinks in the bottom of the chest.  It is certainly possible that when the money clinks in the bottom of the chest avarice and greed increase . . . .

Word of Luther´s challenge to the Church spread immediately, partly due to the political climate in Germany at the time, which, as luck would have it, was extremely favorable to Luther.  Depending upon to whom you spoke, Luther had become either ìfamous” or ìinfamous.”  In 1521, the Pope excommunicated him and, condemned as a heretic, he was summoned to the diet (a formal general assembly of the princes or estates of the Holy Roman Empire ) at Worms , where he was to face questioning by the empire and the emperor.  According to Oberman, Luther ìcould no longer be treated as just any case to be tried in a papal, imperial, or local court and thereby be nipped in the bud.  So many people had become familiar with his theology and recognized their own criticisms of pope and Church in his writings that the name Luther had taken on an unmistakably pupil profile all the way down to the so-called common man” (p. 36).

On April 17, 1521 , before the emperor, the electors, and the princes, Luther was asked two questions: ìDo you, Martin Luther, recognize the books published under your name as your own?” and ìAre you prepared to recant what you have written in these books?

He confirmed the books as his own.  But he asked for and was granted an extra day to answer the second question.  And on the 18th of April, he said this to his questioners:

ìUnless I am convinced by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures or by evident reason – for I can believe neither pope nor councils alone, as it is clear that they have erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves – I consider myself convicted by the testimony of the Holy Scripture, which is my basis; my conscience is captive to the Word of God.  Thus I cannot and will not recant, because acting against one´s conscience is neither safe nor sound.  God help me.  Amen” (Oberman, p. 39).  The mass media of the time – pamphlets and supposedly ìprivate” letters actually intended for publication – made sure Luther´s speech spread throughout Germany .  ìIn fact,” adds Oberman, ìthe nation heard even more than its rulers – namely the impressive final statement that can only be found in the published version of Luther´s confession: ‘Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.  God help me.  Amen.´

One man, alone, facing possible death, stood up to the most powerful institution the world had ever seen, aided, certainly, by luck and by politics, but armed only with his ability to read, to write, to think, and to speak.  It represented one of the greatest, bravest, and most important acts of liberation that any individual has ever made in human history.  It broke the mental chains that the Church had placed on people´s minds and set them on the way to becoming free to think on their own.  And yet, here in the United States , the significance of the great event that occurred on this day is sadly lost amid candy, fakery, fantasy, and trick or treat.

It would be fitting then, on this 486th anniversary of the event, to take just a moment to think about Martin Luther walking up to the door of that church and nailing to its door his 95 theses.  Take just a moment to celebrate him and to thank him for what he did. Because without his intelligence, without his integrity, without his courage, our world would today be a very, very different place indeed.

Sometimes our very words help to confound and thus to enslave us.

Take, for example, the word ìrenaissance,” which we use to refer to a particular time in human history.  It means ìrebirth” or ìrevival,” and we capitalize it to make it a proper name – the proper name – of that time in human existence when mankind ìemerged” from ìthe dark ages” into the ìenlightenment.”  But as S. I. Hayakawa points out in Language in Thought and Action, ìWhat we call things . . . depend(s) upon the interests we have” (p. 121).  ìClassification,” he says, ìis not a matter of identifying ‘essences.´  It is simply a reflection of social convenience or necessity” (p. 124).

Because of that word, we accept as a fact that during ìthe Renaissance,” mankind ìawoke” from their long medieval ìsleep” into the ìlight” of ìmodern” thought.

But perhaps this word reflects a social convenience or necessity we haven´t thought about – that in telling us we´ve become awake, it simply masks our essential slumber.

L. T. C. Rolt deals with our understanding of the Renaissance and its repercussions at some length in his excellent (and much too hard-to-find) 1947 book High Horse Riderless.  An engineer, he thought deeply about the effects of his beloved machines on the land in which he grew up and the people who lived there.  His book points out how the changes in human thought that occurred during the Renaissance have affected both our approach to work and our understanding of freedom in a very negative and damaging way.

He begins by considering the ruins of Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx and asking three simple questions:  ìWhat manner of men were these who built to such high purpose?  What brought about their downfall, and why should that purpose which could produce so glorious a flowering have perished from the earth?”   The Cistercians, he says, represented:

ì. . . perhaps the noblest attempt ever made to live in accordance with the basic principles of the Christian faith.  The ruins they have left to us as witness are thus not merely the symbol of a religious sect, but of a way of life.  The great church was the central symbol of faith about which all the manifold activities of a self-supporting community revolved.  The Cistercian lay-brother was neither a slave nor an anchorite, but a skilled craftsman who wrought in metal, wood and stone, who built roads, wove cloth, bred stock and planted trees, and who tilled the soil of field and garden to make barren wastes fruitful.  Yet all these manifold and highly individualistic activities were undertaken, not for personal enrichment, but for the benefit of the community and as an article of faith which was summed up in the precept of Stephen Harding: ‘Laborare est Orare´” (p. 26-7).

Laborare est Orare: to work is to pray.  What an extraordinary statement!  What a revolutionary concept, to consider work itself, and not its product, as prayer, and to equate it with conversing with nature, with life, with god!

Rolt discusses Cistercian manorial records from the 1500s which reveal that ìso far from being the abject serfs of an autocratic petty dictator as is so often popularly supposed, the villagers, free and copy holders, governed themselves.  They possessed a delicate and highly organized system of government which was, in the most literal sense, ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people,´ and which makes our modern conception of democratic government appear to be the political abstraction which in fact it is.”  They based their government on the law of Frankpledge, which meant that ìthe village community were themselves responsible for keeping the peace and maintaining law and order within their own boundaries.  Frankpledge was thus the essence of self-government as opposed to a form of control from without such as our modern forms of government represent” (p. 28-9).

Faith in nature, in life, in god, had given these individuals not only a sense of responsibility toward one another but also a sense of responsibility toward themselves through their faith in and love of nature, of god, of the source of all life.  Their work was itself an offering to this god.  It showed their love, their trust, their faithfulness.  Their belief in god – their belief in something higher and more noble than the mere atomistic human – was ìnot confined to four walls on one day of the week.”  Instead it informed ìevery aspect of the life and work of the village community in a manner so intimate and inseparable as to be almost beyond the conception of the modern mind.  A wealth of custom and ceremony . . . gave point to this intimacy by illustrating and acknowledging man´s dependence upon the eternal mysteries of the natural world for his daily bread, and so sanctifying the work of the fields.  They were thus the grace and crown of labor” (p. 33).

The Cistercians lived much closer to nature than we do today.  They knew where the food that sustained them came from because either they or their neighbors grew the crops or raised the animals that they consumed.  They knew intimately the effort, the toil, the sacrifice, the work, that went into producing this food.  They knew, too, what happened to their wastes because that effort fell upon them as well.  The mysterious life-giving heat and light of the sun came from the heavens above – life came from god – and in their work, through this work, they prayed and honored and worshipped this giver of life.

ìThey lived so close to natural reality,” says Rolt, ìthat they never lost that humility which recognizes man´s creaturehood, nor that sense of wonder which perceives, in the order and beauty of the natural world, the handwriting of a creator.  From this vision sprang the conception of a natural world which demonstrated a divine order, and of man as part of that order” (p. 34).  But as the church grew in power and influence, as it became more intolerant and dogmatic, it began to reject the natural world and its order ìas a source of vanity and illusion,” a rejection which ìleads readily to an absorption in human knowledge and the worship of man.  By rejecting the world man forgets his creaturehood to become arrogant and proud” and he ìfalls prey to . . . the will-to-power and the idolatry of man” (p. 35).

Certainly modern man has become arrogant and forgotten his creaturehood.  Most of us have almost no connection to the natural world, to the land or the sun, to the very source of our lives.  We neither know nor care either where the food that sustains us comes from or where our physical wastes go.  And this separation from God and from nature also separates us from one another.  As humans we no longer see ourselves as all in this together, for we no longer believe in a god, in a nature, through which we are all connected and interrelated, not only to one another but to the world in which we live.  Separated from the wells-springs of life, we see ourselves as atomistic individuals, each out for himself, looking out for #1, hungry only for money and for power.

This change of thought which we praise as a ìrenaissance” brought a wholly different conception of man and his relation to others and to the world.  Rolt writes that ìthe seeds of independence and skepticism which the intolerant dogmatism of the church had sown inspired the Renaissance nobleman with a new, cynical and profoundly materialistic ideology of which Machiavelli was not so much the author as the acute observer and recorder . . . . By representing the conduct of government in human affairs as a battle of wits without rules, by thus fixing a gulf between the governors and the governed and breaking the ties of mutual responsibility between them, the Machiavellians at one stroke set at naught the Christian goal of the brotherhood of man.  At first confined to a small hierarchy or princes and nobility, its influence accompanied the growth of commercialism and knowledge . . . while the spiritual discipline of the church receded before it” (p. 37-38).

Spiritually empty and increasingly disconnected from the sources of life, people began reaching for more and more material things, for more and more money, more and more power, in a sad and futile effort to fulfill the growing emptiness of their souls.  ìExpressed in the monetary terms of an increasingly commercialized world, these (Machiavellian) principles became the merchant´s conception of freedom: freedom of acquisition and absolute ownership, freedom ‘to do what one would with one´s own,´ to buy in the lowest and sell in the highest market, the freedom of the individual at the expense of the community.  Obviously this glorification of selfish ambition and self-interest, masquerading as ‘liberty´ or ‘self-determination,´ is the precise opposite of that which it claims to be since it results in the exploitation of the poor by the rich, of the weak by the strong.  It explains the apparent paradox that every ‘reform´ carried out in the name of this ‘liberty,´ from the period of the Renaissance to the present day, has actually resulted in a loss of liberty for the majority” (p. 39-40).

Rolt writes that ìbecause the spirit of the new age was fundamentally materialistic, and obsessed with relative rather than absolute values, newly-won knowledge was used, not for the betterment of mankind as was frequently claimed, but to satisfy individual ambition in the pursuit of power which wealth represented” (p. 43).  Agriculture, he says, became the servant of industry as the country became subservient to the city.  In the struggle for more, the strong pushed the weak off the land, which they saw not as a source of life but as a source of wealth.  While ìthe Cistercian lay brother found his freedom in individual responsibility for the perfection of his work to the benefit of the community, the modern worker has lost his freedom together with his right of self-expression in the pursuit of individual gain” (p. 61).

In sum, mankind rejected the so-called medieval view of the universe ìas an ordered and harmonious creation and of man as an organic part” of that creation and replaced it with ìthe purely materialist view of the universe as mechanism” which has resulted in ìan arrogant and predatory individualism, a conception of freedom that destroys freedom” (p. 81).  Modern life has thus become ìthe antithesis of the medieval conception of wholeness and self-sufficiency,” and ìour concern to extract the maximum monetary reward for the minimum of effort and responsibility isolates us from our fellows to make us insignificant units of a herd instead of responsible members of a community” (p. 82). Rolt cautions that ìso long as our outlook continues to be materialistic and predatory, so long will our lives be governed and determined by forces beyond our personal control.  We shall continue to perform work whose purpose and ultimate effect upon humanity we do not know and are powerless to influence, and we shall be controlled in every walk of life by complicated machinery the construction and operation of which we are ignorant . . . . We are therefore faced with the choice between chaos and the slave State unless we are prepared to acknowledge our error with due humility and, by re-discovering spiritual principles as the only sound basis of living, restore the lost dignity of individual responsibility and self-sufficiency” (p. 83).

If we can believe Rolt´s analysis – why can´t we? – we will never have freedom as long as we think and live the way we do now.  Many of us believe we can, to use the old clichÈ, have our cake and eat it, too.  But we cannot.  We will not and cannot become free until we rethink our lives, until we rethink and reconceptualize our understanding of and our relationship to work, to money, and to god.  We will not and cannot become free until we rethink our understanding of and our relationship to one another and to life itself.  We will not and cannot become free people until we, at the very least, begin to recognize the conceptual causes of our modern enslavement.

The arrest last month of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the principal owner of Russia’s biggest oil company, Yukos, and the richest of the country’s seventeen state-anointed billionaire oligarchs, on charges of fraud and tax evasion has put Russia back in the forefront of US media attention. But is the story being reported the full, or essential, one?

It’s being told as follows. Although Khodorkovsky, like all of Russia’s “wealthy businessmen,” acquired his company (currently valued at roughly $45 billion) at little if any cost to himself through “murky” insider dealings in the 1990s, when the enormous natural resources of the former Soviet state were being privatized under then-President Boris Yeltsin, he has since transformed Yukos into a model for a new capitalist, democratic Russia–”transparent,” exceedingly profitable, even philanthropic. So much so that it has helped fuel a Russian “economic rebound” while becoming a potential source of oil for the United States.

Unlike other, less “clean” oligarchs, the story continues, Khodorkovsky is being persecuted by President Vladimir Putin chiefly because the oil baron became active in Russia’s democratic politics, funding opposition parties in next month’s parliamentary elections and even aspiring to the presidency. To crush Khodorkovsky and make an example of him, Putin is relying on a Kremlin faction he has recruited largely from the KGB, where he began his own career, which wants Yukos’s wealth for itself. The result will therefore be a grievous blow to Russia’s “booming economy” and democracy, replacing free-market-oriented “liberal oligarchs” with much worse and less efficient ones and driving away needed foreign investment.

Some elements of this story, which relies very heavily on Moscow sources associated with the “liberal oligarchs,” are plausible, but others are not. Democracy in Russia has been failing ever since Yeltsin made oligarchical privatization possible by destroying an elected parliament in 1993, and neither side is interested in truly reviving it; the oligarchs are zealous monopolists, not free-market reformers, and Western investors interested in Russia’s huge oil reserves have already indicated that they care about official guarantees of the contracts, not who signs them; Putin now controls elections sufficiently to get substantially the legislature he wants; and no one of Jewish origin, as are Khodorkovsky and most of the other oligarchs, can be elected president of Russia. Above all, however, the prevailing media account omits the essential background and context.

Privatization–or “piratization,” as it is often called in Russia–did not take place in an economic or social vacuum. It was accompanied in the 1990s by the worst economic depression of modern times and the impoverishment of a great many Russians, probably the majority of them. In the process, it created the oligarchical economic system that exists today. In 2000, Yeltsin-era oligarchs, fearfully aware that they were loathed by most Russians–they still refer to them contemptuously as a “Communist populace”–and that they lacked any real legal legitimacy, put Putin in the Kremlin to be a praetorian president safeguarding the system, its creators and its beneficiaries in business, politics, the media and even intellectual circles.

Various motives are behind the Khodorkovsky affair, but none would matter if that system had not failed to alleviate Russia’s most profound problems. After a decade, and despite a purported “economic boom”–really little more than a bubble inflated by high world oil prices–most of the country’s essential industrial, agricultural and social infrastructure is still starved for investment and disintegrating. The human toll continues to grow in the form of more poverty, disease, crime, premature deaths and homeless children. From the vast provinces beyond “booming” Moscow, one hears persistent reports that “Russia is dying.” And indeed, the population is shrinking by nearly a million people a year.

That ongoing human tragedy is what is mainly missing from the US media story, where poverty and the plight of most Russians are hardly ever mentioned. Even if some accounts of Russia’s crisis are overstated, the only solution is a new economic course that uses the oligarchs’ enormous profits from the country’s natural resources to rescue and develop the rest of the nation, though not even its advocates agree on how to do it. Some suggest deprivatization and state direction; others advocate redistribution of assets to new owners; and still others call for a punitive compensatory tax on today’s oligarchs followed by amnesty. For now, however, most of those profits–hundreds of billions of dollars after minimal tax payments and modest investment in the Soviet-built energy sector–are not “transparent,” having fled or been left abroad.

Though Khodorkovsky does not deserve to be singled out for such severe treatment, and may even gain some public sympathy, his arrest makes clear that the struggle over the oligarchical system, and thus once again the future of post-Soviet Russia, is under way. Putin has already deposed one of the two highest-ranking political representatives of the Yeltsin-era oligarchs, Kremlin chief of staff Aleksandr Voloshin, and Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov may follow. Agents of the oligarchs are striking back, threatening to use kompromat–personally damaging information–against Putin himself and trying to frighten the Russian people into believing that he will also deprivatize the apartments they were given in the 1990s.

It is impossible to foresee the outcome of the unfolding struggle. The result may be, in the tradition of Russian leadership succession, a far-reaching de-Yeltsinization of the post-Soviet system. And, of course, it may be an even worse system, also a Russian tradition. But for the majority of Russians, as opinion surveys outside Moscow seem to indicate, there is the hope, realistic or not, that Putin is finally turning against his creators and preparing to become, as even a KGB general remarked privately, “Vladimir the Savior.”

Whatever the case, it is a struggle that Russia must decide, not the United States, which is already too deeply involved. Many Russians remember the Clinton Administration’s complicity in the formation of the oligarchical system, when it applauded Yeltsin’s privatization deals as “reform,” and they understand that today’s self-interested oligarchs stand behind the uncritical pro-United States faction in Kremlin politics. They also know about Khodorkovsky’s personal relations with the Bush White House, which is intervening on his behalf. Indeed, his arrest and the freezing of his shares may have been precipitated by his intention to sell a large equity share of Yukos to an American oil giant, thereby putting a significant portion of Russia’s present and future wealth beyond the country’s control.

The widespread impression that America is a leading supporter of the hated oligarchical system cannot be good for future US-Russian relations. Nor can it be good for international security. The world’s largest territorial country and still its other nuclear super-repository will never be truly stable, as we are witnessing again today, until a system based on plunder and poverty is replaced by one capable of producing real economic development and more social justice.

©2003 The Nation

Google Mikhail Khodorkovsky

ìOf all the things we have done to the earth, agriculture has caused the most devastation.” It´s a controversial statement, to say the least, but there´s no debate on the edge of this onion field. Before anyone questions it, Reiji Murota begins making his point–not as an argument, but as instruction.

In his opinion the most unnatural state for upland soil is to be bare. And yet this is an integral stage of modern agriculture´s standard process: plant a whole field, harvest a whole field, leave it bare until the time comes to plant again. Taking crops off the land inevitably extracts some life from the field, even in Murota´s plots. But that stripping off a layer of life to leave the ground uncovered spoils the soil´s natural ability to heal itself. Without this vital element, the fields become dependent on additives–it´s a tale familiar enough to Western ears.

But now Murota veers from the beaten path. In nature, he says, the soil always has a layer of something growing on top, which is what allows it to recuperate. To emulate this, he keeps his fields in constant production. This doesn´t mean back-to-back monocrops–even a half-acre in a single crop means the ground must sometimes be entirely bare. Instead he keeps the soil covered by planting in tandem. ìWhenever I plant one thing,” he says, ìI´m always thinking what I´ll plant with it.”

Cultivating chaos within limits

The combinations are imaginative. Instead of the classic tomatoes-and-basil, he has tomatoes and asparagus, head lettuce and peppers. Under a misted green net, pea vines climb over the brown stalks and shriveled fruit of last year´s eggplant, which have inhabited this ground all winter. It looks like the product of neglect, but that´s the thing that makes Murota a genius: his laissez-faire is highly calculated.

For instance, this field is strictly onions and pumpkins. As he harvests a row of onions–one of few crops whose whole plant is removed–the squash spread from adjacent rows to fill in the empty space. In fall, onions are planted again among the dying vines, which fade back into the earth over winter. Year after year, this field is planted the same: two rows of onions, one row of squash, the interaction between them ebbing and flowing with the seasons.

It makes sense, even if it is odd to see a farmer plan his fields around a technique normally associated with home gardens. What doesn´t add up is the third companion plant in this field, a vestige of the backyard that seems inherently incompatible with commercial agriculture. After every 11 rows of the squash-onion rotation, the dirt fades into a strip of shaggy grass and a line of arakashi or konara trees, trees of the oak family.

Even after a short time on Kishima Island I have realized that Natural Agriculture doesn´t follow the same rules as farming where I come from. (Quite frankly, because financial gain is almost an afterthought, it doesn´t have to.) Yet aren´t trees fundamentally opposed to row-crop farming? They suck up water, eliminate sunlight, and (mostly) yield no crop themselves.

Murota, always looking at the macrocosm, sees it differently. Kishima Island´s greatest problem is the climate: there is very little rain, and the near constant winds blow away what moisture does come through. The effects were devastating during the time of his predecessors, who razed the island´s forests to make room for fields, leaving the ground totally exposed. So when Murota took over, the first thing he did was plant trees.

New trees buffer harshness

Even growing in the middle of his onions, the trees are seen not as competition for precious water but as vital protection, even building blocks. He recalls how farmers deal with aridity by just dumping more water on, a solution whose myopia visibly offends him. ìIn dry land, you just pull water from a river and pour it on your land,” he says. ìBut because it´s so dry it filters through the dirt, then rises back up and brings minerals with it. Then the water evaporates and leaves the minerals on top, and ultimately it does more harm than good.”

His solution is to work from the ground up–or down–by building the soil, knowing that the more fertile it is, the more water it retains. Trees are integral to that process. They cushion against the severe climate by providing windbreak and shade, and by holding moisture deep within the ground. Over the years, they add to the soil´s complexity by pulling up nutrients with their deep roots and creating leaves for compost. And, as he says fondly, ìTrees and weeds help each other.” Without shade, weeds cannot grow on this parched land; without weeds Murota can´t make compost.

Trees also contribute to the eco-system´s overall complexity. Recognizing and seizing this interconnectedness is the thing that makes Murota´s system work, but it requires commitment on a deep level; simply adding a tree doesn´t solve things.

Case in point: As we walk uphill from the onions and squash, we pass a fat trunk sliced near the ground. ìThis is an akashiya tree,” Murota says. ìIt´s popular in Australia and Africa, places that are truly arid. I planted it in the beginning, thinking it would be good because it grew fast.”

The prediction proved too true, and as the akashiya shot up and out it did exactly what I had assumed a tree would: it sucked up the water and shaded out the young fruit trees. Murota had to cut it down years ago, and then question how he could refine the system.

Random trees tempt plant disorder

Past the stump, through the rain of blossoms now sprinkling down from the surrounding trees, we walk farther uphill and find the island´s best field. Murota — whose hands remain in his pockets unless they are demonstrating something, whose voice is always cool and slow — now beams through his thin cheeks. The field is a riot of vegetable plants, each with such vigor it threatens to overcome the straight rows in which it´s planted.

Rising among them are trees: a tall, bushy mountain cherry, a feathery young enoki (hackberry), and a spindly paulownia with globe-shaped buds ready to explode into purple flowers. They follow no plan. In fact it almost seems they are the ones encouraging the peas and peppers to shirk the field´s careful order.

Each tree arrived as a seed on the wind, and since then Murota has let them grow just to see what might happen. They are scattered and few, maybe 10 in the whole quarter-acre field, and Murota admits he´s still figuring out which types and how many are optimal. He does know, however, that these trees–native, local–are the best suited to this climate, and therefore the most likely to offer his vegetables symbiosis, not competition.

That he will experiment like this is testament to this field´s fertility. Among the squash and onions, he must use the regimented oak trees for their predictable results. Likewise, the variety of foods grown here demonstrates excellence, while the lower field is relegated to growing only the two crops it can reliably support.

But it won´t always be that way. Murota believes any soil can evolve to greatness. A field´s worth is not a fixed sum predetermined by its location or original composition. Maybe the hillside plot of onions and squash gets more wind than this protected area, but that difference is at most an obstacle to be overcome. He sees soil as the result of a building process, its future determined by what kind of building is done. Just as Shumei at large believes this troubled world can become heaven on earth, his vision of soil´s possibility is unlimited.

On the way to reaching nirvana, a field is ranked in terms of ìmaturity,” meaning how long it has been cultivated in Natural Agriculture and how successful the transformation has been. Soil is judged by its ecological complexity, and therefore the variety of life it can support.

Strengthening soil through production

While American organic farmers swear by crop rotation as a way to care for land, Murota and other Natural Agriculture farmers determine what crops are suited to a field and stick with them, year after year. New fields, for instance, normally grow root vegetables until they are ìstrong” enough to move on to what are deemed more demanding plants. Even after almost two decades of healing Kishima Island, Murota feels the soil isn´t ready to do a good job of growing tomatoes and other challenging crops. ìTo humans, ten years is a long time,” he says. ìBut in terms of reviving the soil, it´s nothing.”

Once the system is moving, however, it grows exponentially. Healthier trees make more leaves and better weeds for compost. Those in turn help the soil retain moisture, which means faster decomposition, which enlarges the community of life supported underground, which in turn enlarges the community supported above ground.

To prove that soil complexity builds on itself, Murota has applied his compost to other Natural Agriculture farmers´ poor soil–again, not as fertilizer, but as sheer life force. The results were exactly as he predicted, but it´s still just proof, not a solution in itself. After all, he can´t forget the disaster that ensued when Kishima Island tried importing compost rather than raising soil that could support itself.

ìWhen I put the compost on the poor soil on the mainland, it got much better,” he says. ìBut it only helped the appearance and the vitality. The vegetables´ taste, that´s another thing. Taste takes a lot more work than that.”

©2003 The Rodale Institute