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The Horn of Plenty
Remember this symbol? The cornucopia or horn of plenty? When I was a kid, I remember this symbol being very culturally significant in a way that I don’t see it as being anymore. We seem to be rapidly losing things to be thankful for at Thanksgiving. We feel like the “days of plenty” are behind us, but I have reason to argue that’s not the case at all.
My inspiration for this belief comes from Michael Pollan’s excellent book on gardening, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. Around page 142 he begins talking about a 30 pound Sibley squash which he grew, a so-called heirloom vegetable, passed from the Native Americans to the early settlers, the type of which is no longer grown commercially due most likely to its peculiarly ugly appearance.
I found what I think is that chapter of his book reproduced online (though only in cached form), which I will quote from here. In it, he is describing how he was marveling that this thirty pound behemoth vegetable could ever come from the earth:
Where did this thing, this great quantity of squash flesh, come from? The earth, we say, but not really; there’s no less earth here now than there was in May when I planted it; none’s been used up in its making. By all rights creating something this fat should require so great an expense of matter that you’d expect to find Sibley squashes perched on the lips of fresh craters. That they’re not, it seems to me, should be counted something of a miracle.
The first person to verify that indeed this is a miracle was a 17th-century scientist by the name of Van Helmont. He planted a willow sapling in a container that held 200 pounds of soil and, for five years, gave it nothing but water. At the end of that time, the tree was found to weigh 169 pounds, and the soil 199 pounds, 14 ounces—from just two ounces of soil had come 169 pounds of tree. Rich increase, indeed.
Before I harvested my Sibley and stopped to consider its provenance (and read about Van Helmont’s experiment), I had always thought of gardening as a zero-sum enterprise—that it was necessary to add as much to the garden (in the form of nutrients) as the produce I harvested removed from it. I assumed that I’d have to replace whatever my giant squash took from the soil or eventually nothing would grow in it. And though it is true that a monster squash like mine does deplete the soil of certain elements, their quantity is negligible; a small handful of compost could easily cover the deficit. But that deficit is much smaller than the sum total of matter my squash represents. Were I to leave it to rot on the vine, there would actually be a surplus in the garden’s accounts; the soil would be both richer in nutrients and greater in total mass than it was before I planted it. Much of the increase is water, of course. But the remarkable fact is: My Sibley, considered from the vantage of the entire planet’s economy of matter, represents a net gain. It is, in other words, a gift.
This is not exactly news, I know; Van Helmont could have told you as much 300 years ago, Shakespeare evidently sensed it, and so did all those Renaissance painters of cornucopia. But it’s something we seem to have lost sight of in recent years, as our concerns about the depletion of the Earth’s resources have mounted. We take it as an article of faith today that the Earth is running down, that we are using up its finite supplies of energy, fertility, and resources of all kinds. We’ve come to think of the Earth as a closed system; one of the age’s presiding metaphors is “spaceship Earth.”? Conceived as such, it’s easy to imagine the ship’s provisions gradually being exhausted; as more and more matter is converted into energy, we must eventually run out.
Entropy is the great faith of our time. Those who are most awed by it preach “limits to growth”—that we should consume our fixed, unreplenishable stores as slowly as possible. On a spaceship, this makes good sense. But the second law of thermodynamics, under which entropy increases as matter converts to energy, applies only to closed systems, and, as the environmentalist Barry Commoner points out, the global ecosystem is not a closed system. The Earth in fact is nothing like a spaceship, because new energy is continually pouring down on it, in the form of sunlight—free, boundless, virtually infinite sunlight. And sunlight come down to earth is used by the process of photosynthesis to create new plant matter. Plants, in other words, represent energy returned to matter—entropy undone, at least here on earth.
The lesson in this is not that we should feel free to waste our resources; it’s that our environmental problems may have more to do with our technologies and habits and economic arrangements than with the planet’s inherent limits or the burden of our numbers. All we could ever possibly need is given.
Entropy undone. I love that. Pollan’s simple piece blows away so many preconceived notions I have held. Plants are turning energy into matter all day, every day, all over the globe and they are offering it to us free, no strings attached - beyond that we continue to cultivate it, or to at the very least create conditions for it to continue growing. The horn of plenty has not disappeared. It is the essential mechanism of life on our planet!
- Prev: Sentimental Depopulation
- Next: Anti-Civilization Flame War
September 14th, 2006 at 8:20 pm
That was a really tremendous quote. I’m getting that book this weekend. Thanks for making me aware of this book - you’ve no idea how this just lifted my spirits!
September 14th, 2006 at 9:01 pm
interesting experiment van helmont performed………scientific heresy of course. do you find the celebration of abundance to be on the wane tim? the choice is yours you know. now that your hands are firmly in and of the soil once again you are waking up to that possiblity…………
September 14th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
Just stumbled across this wonderful place. And I’m a gardener from way back. I am at my happiest with dirt under my fingernails.
I post at a little out of the way forum that’s filled with a nice bunch of odd ball types. And we recently were discussing plants and their psychedelic qualities.
Here’s a little of some strange information that I ran across
And a quote from the Essene Gospel of Peace
THE GIFT OF LIFE IN THE HUMBLE GRASS
Sorry if I am totally off base, out of whack, but your post filled me with hope and the mystery of “life”.
September 15th, 2006 at 5:06 am
Connie, very nice.
September 15th, 2006 at 8:39 am
All of this great plant stuff is reminding me of “The Plants Respond,” a chapter title from Derrick Jensen’s A Language Older Than Words. This chapter tells the story of Clive Backster, creator of the Backster Zone Comparison Test, aka the Polygraph (Lie Detector) machine.
Backster was in his office one day and, on a hunch, decided to attach the polygraph censors to a nearby plant. His goal (at the time) was to see if watering a plant would get a reaction (from the polygraph machine). With no luck at first, he thought hard about how a polygraph works — “on the principle that when people perceive a threat to their well-being, they physiologically respond in predictable ways”
That is just the beginning. Aside from Jensen’s book (which spends an entire chapter talking about this), you can read an interview between Jensen and Backster here. Backster continued his research with plants in this regard, discovering some fascinating things. I cannot recommend this story enough!
September 15th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
-Principia Discordia
Boltzmann, who developed statistical mechanics and the ‘heat death’ vision of a world degenerating into ultimate randomness committed suicide.
A horror of entropy is based in mistaking probabilities for real things. A probablity is a quantitative description of a state of knowledge, nothing more.
“Randomness” is always present, but always relative. Given any transcendental number and some integer offset of digits, read out the digits to a genius, they will appear completely random to him. Not just due to lack of computational power, but fundamentally, he cannot reverse-engineer the very simple formula which produces these numbers.
If you mistake abstractions for reality, then you will be forced to a pessimistic conclusion, you have placed faith in non-existence. There are no atoms, forces, mass, energy, these are all recipricolly defined and have no meaning outside of statistical prediction. A wonderful technical book that can be found online is by ET Jaynes, “Probability Theory: The Logic of Science”. It proves definitively that probabilities (and therefore entropy) cannot be given the ontological status that entropy-pessimists believe.
So why does randomness increase as time increases? All that means is that Nature escapes our predictive abilities, simply because something is random to you does not mean it is random to any possible observer. The order that underlies creation is a transcendental order that escapes description or capture, it is the same order that underlies our being, how can we continue to ignore it?
Nevertheless, I am very interested in many crash-bloggers’ efforts to redefine their lives: the world is not outside of us, the world is inside of us, and tending to it tends to our selves.
September 15th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
[…] Tim Boucher, another new member of Scribe, has posted an incredibly interesting article re: Michael Pollan’s book on gardening: “Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education.” Tim’s post, titled “Horn of Plenty is about Pollan’s idea of “Entropy Undone” as can be seen in the transformation of energy into matter by plants everywhere. It is incredibly interesting. Do give it a read! […]
September 15th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
Prunes: that comment was amazing. Totally blew me away!
Bingo!
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/09/10/suicide-genocide
Exactly! And this is one of my main points of contention against primitivism, Peak Oil, etc: they are mistaking their own extrapolations of what will happen for actual reality. They are ignoring the purpose of prophecy and of extrapolation: to warn people about what will happen if they don’t heed God’s word, and to encougare them to avoid the wrath of God. The purpose of prophecy is warning and a resultant change of action, not to plunge headlong into destruction
PS. Connie, thanks so much for bringing this back home to gnosticism! Awesome
September 17th, 2006 at 11:32 am
chlorophyll=137 atoms=numerical equivalent of the word Kabala in Hebrew:)
December 31st, 2006 at 3:31 am
[…] Posted by whig on December 31st, 2006 Let me show you a miracle. It was in the month of Thebt, when the earth was covered with shoots of young grass after the rains, and the covering of emerald green was tender as the fine down of a baby chick. And it was on a bright sun-filled morning that Jesus gathered the new Brothers of the Elect round about him, that they might hear with their ears and understand with their hearts the teachings of their fathers, even as it was taught to Enoch of old. […]
April 14th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
[…] (See also the Horn of Plenty) […]
August 2nd, 2007 at 4:31 pm
[…] This is good too. Remember this symbol? The cornucopia or horn of plenty? When I was a kid, I remember this symbol being very culturally significant in a way that I don’t see it as being anymore. We seem to be rapidly losing things to be thankful for at Thanksgiving. We feel like the “days of plenty” are behind us, but I have reason to argue that’s not the case at all. […]
November 29th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
[…] Gift economies are based on abundance, wherein there are more than enough resources for all members of one’s tribe or social group, and sharing is the norm. Hunter-gatherer societies generally share(d) food as “a safeguard against failure of any individual’s daily foraging.” As another site explains: “More generally, in hunter-gatherer societies the hunter’s status was not determined by how much of the kill he ate, but rather by what he brought back for others.” […]