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La rivoluzione del filo di paglia: Un'introduzione all'agricoltura naturale by Masanobu Fukuoka
maggiematela's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
5.0
bananabell's review against another edition
3.0
Read for class.
Very eye-opening and simple, with practical application and evidence, and an appeal to common sense.
However, the foundation that undergirds Fukuoka's agricultural revolution is one that is deeply philosophical (although he would argue that it runs deeper than a 'relative philosophical stance'), and a philosophy that I find flawed. His philosophy bends strongly toward Buddhist/zen/ascetic tendencies, where one's ultimate goal is to detach from the Self and its intentions and become one with nature. At one point he even says that "The forms of the material world, concepts of life and death, health and disease, joy and sorrow, all originate in the human mind…human emotions are illusions" (163). This makes me wonder if he ever read Descartes, who gave a solid argument for the reality of our existence and the reality of our thoughts.
Fukuoka also disparages science a lot in this book; although I find his perspective refreshing and truthful at some points, I feel that it is a narrow evaluation. Science can be used to increase greater wonder. I think his criticism applies to those for whom science is their all, and is their meaning to life, but for those that apply science to go deeper into the complexities of the created world, science does not have to be a reductionistic discipline.
I am a bit troubled by his evaluation of Einstein as well: "It is said that Einstein was given the Nobel Prize in physics in deference to the incomprehensibility of his theory of relativity. If his theory had explained clearly the phenomenon of relativity in the world and thus released humanity from the confines of time and space, bringing about a more pleasant and peaceful world, it would have been commendable. His explanation is bewildering, however, and it caused people to think that the world is complex beyond all possible understanding. A citation for 'disturbing the peace of the human spirit' should have been awarded instead" (170). Isn't it a bit naïve to expect scientific discoveries to always be bettering humankind in a clear way? Sometimes discoveries will lead to more questions or baffling concepts, but that doesn't mean that it is utterly worthless. It can lead to more dynamic discussion and engagement. And anyway, isn't an understanding of nature as complex what Fukuoka wanted in the first place? Let me add also that Fukuoka mentions all human frames of thinking as relative throughout his book; so shouldn't he be in direct alignment with Einstein's theory? Plus, I feel like Fukuoka would love some of Einstein's philosophies if he heard him out, it not for this tiny discrepancy (eg. Einstein: "Imagination is more important than knowledge", "A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?"). On second thought, maybe another issue Fukuoka may have with Einstein is his ambition for searching for answers in nature with intentionality. Fukuoka is against any discriminating knowledge-- according to him, this is an analytical or willful intellect that attempts to organize experience into a logical framework (124). He prefers non-discriminating knowledge, which "arises without conscious effort on the part of the individual. Experience is accepted as is, without interpretation by the intellect" (124). Maybe I am just not clever enough to grasp Fukuoka's concept (what an irony), but it seems to me that he is creating a false dichotomy here. He describes nature as grasped by scientific knowledge as a "ghost possessing a skeleton, without a soul" (125). Yet, he presumes that all scientists just take their interpretations and perceives it as complete. There are many scientists that organize the world into a logical framework, but do so understanding that they are only accumulating a certain aspect of the world around them. I think that Mr. Fukuoka gives too high a regard for the natural human instinct/intuition.
Very eye-opening and simple, with practical application and evidence, and an appeal to common sense.
However, the foundation that undergirds Fukuoka's agricultural revolution is one that is deeply philosophical (although he would argue that it runs deeper than a 'relative philosophical stance'), and a philosophy that I find flawed. His philosophy bends strongly toward Buddhist/zen/ascetic tendencies, where one's ultimate goal is to detach from the Self and its intentions and become one with nature. At one point he even says that "The forms of the material world, concepts of life and death, health and disease, joy and sorrow, all originate in the human mind…human emotions are illusions" (163). This makes me wonder if he ever read Descartes, who gave a solid argument for the reality of our existence and the reality of our thoughts.
Fukuoka also disparages science a lot in this book; although I find his perspective refreshing and truthful at some points, I feel that it is a narrow evaluation. Science can be used to increase greater wonder. I think his criticism applies to those for whom science is their all, and is their meaning to life, but for those that apply science to go deeper into the complexities of the created world, science does not have to be a reductionistic discipline.
I am a bit troubled by his evaluation of Einstein as well: "It is said that Einstein was given the Nobel Prize in physics in deference to the incomprehensibility of his theory of relativity. If his theory had explained clearly the phenomenon of relativity in the world and thus released humanity from the confines of time and space, bringing about a more pleasant and peaceful world, it would have been commendable. His explanation is bewildering, however, and it caused people to think that the world is complex beyond all possible understanding. A citation for 'disturbing the peace of the human spirit' should have been awarded instead" (170). Isn't it a bit naïve to expect scientific discoveries to always be bettering humankind in a clear way? Sometimes discoveries will lead to more questions or baffling concepts, but that doesn't mean that it is utterly worthless. It can lead to more dynamic discussion and engagement. And anyway, isn't an understanding of nature as complex what Fukuoka wanted in the first place? Let me add also that Fukuoka mentions all human frames of thinking as relative throughout his book; so shouldn't he be in direct alignment with Einstein's theory? Plus, I feel like Fukuoka would love some of Einstein's philosophies if he heard him out, it not for this tiny discrepancy (eg. Einstein: "Imagination is more important than knowledge", "A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?"). On second thought, maybe another issue Fukuoka may have with Einstein is his ambition for searching for answers in nature with intentionality. Fukuoka is against any discriminating knowledge-- according to him, this is an analytical or willful intellect that attempts to organize experience into a logical framework (124). He prefers non-discriminating knowledge, which "arises without conscious effort on the part of the individual. Experience is accepted as is, without interpretation by the intellect" (124). Maybe I am just not clever enough to grasp Fukuoka's concept (what an irony), but it seems to me that he is creating a false dichotomy here. He describes nature as grasped by scientific knowledge as a "ghost possessing a skeleton, without a soul" (125). Yet, he presumes that all scientists just take their interpretations and perceives it as complete. There are many scientists that organize the world into a logical framework, but do so understanding that they are only accumulating a certain aspect of the world around them. I think that Mr. Fukuoka gives too high a regard for the natural human instinct/intuition.
minguyen's review against another edition
4.0
Khó rate ghê ta. Là 1 đứa thích trồng cây và yêu môi trường, mình rất thích quan điểm làm nông nghiệp "tự nhiên" như tác giả đã nghiên cứu. Giá mà những Bộ trưởng Bộ Nông nghiệp các nước đều đọc được cuốn này để định hướng cho nông dân.
Xong lại đọc xong cuốn Cảm ơn tất cả, cũng mong anh nông dân trong truyện - một người trồng rau hữu cơ, cũng đọc được cuốn này để ảnh đỡ vất vả.
Nhưng phần sau khi bác suy ngẫm các triết lý về ăn uống, dinh dưỡng, tôn giáo thì mình lại k có nhiều connect như phần trước...
3.75
Xong lại đọc xong cuốn Cảm ơn tất cả, cũng mong anh nông dân trong truyện - một người trồng rau hữu cơ, cũng đọc được cuốn này để ảnh đỡ vất vả.
Nhưng phần sau khi bác suy ngẫm các triết lý về ăn uống, dinh dưỡng, tôn giáo thì mình lại k có nhiều connect như phần trước...
3.75
couuboy's review against another edition
4.0
A friend gave me this book to read for a book-swap (I gave him capitalist realism), this is not something I'd normally read despite my interest in the subject and so I'm glad I was somewhat obligated to read it by virtue of book-swapping, because I did find it rewarding in parts. Below is the essay I wrote which I sent to him (I think maybe I was a little too critical in the essay but am sure I'll have a good discussion when I see him next).
There’s a well-known Frank Gilbreth quote about how ‘one should employ lazy people for hard jobs because they’ll find the easiest way to complete it’ that succinctly introduces Fukuoka’s contention in “The One-Straw Revolution”. Advocating a “do-nothing” approach to farming, Fukuoka believes that natural methods are already optimal, that the conditions which existed prior to modern agriculture (i.e. before human eco-engineering) allowed for nature to regulate itself in accordance to the myriad of interconnected ecological factors and forces, perceptible or otherwise. Human over-interference in this process, Fukuoka contends, is rooted in naivety and ignorance, stemming from our skewed representational knowledge of what should augment farming practices rather than what does (e.g. using pesticides should increase the harvest of rice by killing off leaf-hoppers, however this also inadvertently unbalances the spider and frog population) resulting in a farmer having to fix further problems they unintentionally brought about. Fukuoka connects this issue to a more ontological one; he posits how farming has fallen from grace in parallel conjunction with a broader societal decline, that blind-faith in scientific solutions to our problems perpetually fails to acknowledge the root of the issue in favour of band aid solutions to localised problems (and again, with the solutions resulting in by-product problems of their own) and our fixation on ostensible notions of “progress” through the appearance of technological novelties (e.g. a tractor seems to sow/reap faster than by hand but we don’t see how it also negatively affects the soil for future seasons). While Fukuoka manages to demonstrate his awareness of some of the social factors that have, perforce, contributed to his perceived depreciated legacy of farming, he often defaults to superficial generalisations alongside a particularly naïve lapsarian conception of nature.
Fukuoka begins this text with the path he was pursuing before farming, an agricultural researcher spending his days alone in a lab, he noted the lacuna between his work and the environment – studying agriculture all day and never venturing beyond the lab is self-evidently foolish – and the hyper-specialised requirement of science. Ultimately dissatisfied by the myopic ignorance of science he left and took up farming on his father’s land with intentions to have a farm that effectively regulated itself, the foundations of this he drew from his qualms against certain scientific practices, namely his belief that often the pursuit of solutions sprung from an ignorant and superficial framing of the problem (Q.v. the quip about how the scientist strains his eyes studying books all day searching how to create better lens for his glasses). The rationale behind his application of this do-nothing approach to farming he links to the idea that nature can take care of itself better than man can – and while this makes sense and he has some convincing arguments, it also contains its own ignorance. “Nature, left alone,” he writes, “is in perfect balance.”, “If nature is left to itself, fertility increases” these type of remarks are frequently punctuated in this text and only serve to diminish credibility. This is Fukuoka’s predominant blindness, an unwillingness to critique or present nature as anything other than an Edenesque stasis; a lapsarian belief that nature once was perfect and now is not. His mythic rosier era conception is notably cherry-picked when read with the intention of trying to identify a concrete definition of what he takes “nature” to be. He states that technology goes against nature and harms fertility but he permits scythes for harvesting and fire for cooking, he claims that the natural method of farming revolves around how nature would grow without interference while simultaneously clearing the land to make arable pasture (and this pejorative connotation of interference also highlights his inability to see man as part of nature, another prominent fault. Likewise, not only does he fail to connect man as part of nature, he also fails to connect technology/tools with natural evolution). It is clear in a colloquial sense what he means by technology and nature, and most readers will evidently still be able to comprehend his contention, but his conceptual arbitrariness presents a notable crack in the foundations.
Fukuoka does redeem himself in part by demonstrating that many technological advancements do have ulterior motives and that he does understand them to a certain extent. This is shown in a particularly acute passage around the social mechanisms that presently influence farming techniques. His examples include how hardware stores wouldn’t buy his sowing invention because it would make the expensive tractors less desirable (and decrease profit for the store), or how herbicides maintain a foothold in farming largely on the back of a racketeering industry supported by the government. In this part, Fukuoka begins a penetrating analysis but it seems to stop short before anything substantial can be shown, instead falling back upon generalisations of why farmers are no longer connected to nature and are instead reliant on technology. What he fails to assess is how contemporary commercial farming practices are no longer determined by ecological desires but instead subordinated under economic efficiency, the one-straw revolution ignores how the social mechanisms of our present socio-economic position have perforce restructured the mode of farming around a business ontology, nolens volens, and that the luxury of experimentation in farming methods which he had is inaccessible or unsustainable for the majority; not merely because they are ignorant or set in their ways as he suggests, but because they are beholden to forces beyond their control (i.e. capitalism). In the post-Dust Bowl world of which this was written practically all farmers understand that monoculture methods of farming and a dependence on ecology-diminishing technology is not sustainable as a long-term method of farming. What Fukuoka fails to do throughout his text is empathise; what is a farmer supposed to do when they’re required to harvest a certain amount of produce in order to pay the mortgage on their land and the only way to do so is by continuing deep-plowing methods that in the long run will slowly result in diminished returns and ecological aridity? – they already don’t have the capacity to “do-nothing” which Fukuoka himself acknowledges results in an initial steep decline in performance, before correcting itself – a band aid approach is sometimes forced even when the farmer knows better. He similarly writes that he didn’t have to buy the land on which he farmed, with some of it coming from his father and some of it merely being appropriated by him because it wasn’t being used by anyone else – an exceptionally rare and unlikely situation for any readers in the present age of private property.
While Fukuoka accurately considers some of the influence that human ignorance has had upon farming methods, including our superficial and representationally biased knowledge of the myriad interconnected processes at work in nature, he himself fails to acknowledge the social processes that are similarly responsible for restructuring nature and farming, that the capitalist mode of production has also restructured farming rather than technology and increasingly lavish desires alone. With this in mind, it is hard to suggest that the One-Straw Revolution is capable of being the initial catalyst that will overcome the present day approach to farming. The One-Straw Revolution is perhaps possible and a “Do Nothing” philosophy may very well be the future of farming and life, but it is not the first step; it’s more likely this will be the result rather than the cause.
There’s a well-known Frank Gilbreth quote about how ‘one should employ lazy people for hard jobs because they’ll find the easiest way to complete it’ that succinctly introduces Fukuoka’s contention in “The One-Straw Revolution”. Advocating a “do-nothing” approach to farming, Fukuoka believes that natural methods are already optimal, that the conditions which existed prior to modern agriculture (i.e. before human eco-engineering) allowed for nature to regulate itself in accordance to the myriad of interconnected ecological factors and forces, perceptible or otherwise. Human over-interference in this process, Fukuoka contends, is rooted in naivety and ignorance, stemming from our skewed representational knowledge of what should augment farming practices rather than what does (e.g. using pesticides should increase the harvest of rice by killing off leaf-hoppers, however this also inadvertently unbalances the spider and frog population) resulting in a farmer having to fix further problems they unintentionally brought about. Fukuoka connects this issue to a more ontological one; he posits how farming has fallen from grace in parallel conjunction with a broader societal decline, that blind-faith in scientific solutions to our problems perpetually fails to acknowledge the root of the issue in favour of band aid solutions to localised problems (and again, with the solutions resulting in by-product problems of their own) and our fixation on ostensible notions of “progress” through the appearance of technological novelties (e.g. a tractor seems to sow/reap faster than by hand but we don’t see how it also negatively affects the soil for future seasons). While Fukuoka manages to demonstrate his awareness of some of the social factors that have, perforce, contributed to his perceived depreciated legacy of farming, he often defaults to superficial generalisations alongside a particularly naïve lapsarian conception of nature.
Fukuoka begins this text with the path he was pursuing before farming, an agricultural researcher spending his days alone in a lab, he noted the lacuna between his work and the environment – studying agriculture all day and never venturing beyond the lab is self-evidently foolish – and the hyper-specialised requirement of science. Ultimately dissatisfied by the myopic ignorance of science he left and took up farming on his father’s land with intentions to have a farm that effectively regulated itself, the foundations of this he drew from his qualms against certain scientific practices, namely his belief that often the pursuit of solutions sprung from an ignorant and superficial framing of the problem (Q.v. the quip about how the scientist strains his eyes studying books all day searching how to create better lens for his glasses). The rationale behind his application of this do-nothing approach to farming he links to the idea that nature can take care of itself better than man can – and while this makes sense and he has some convincing arguments, it also contains its own ignorance. “Nature, left alone,” he writes, “is in perfect balance.”, “If nature is left to itself, fertility increases” these type of remarks are frequently punctuated in this text and only serve to diminish credibility. This is Fukuoka’s predominant blindness, an unwillingness to critique or present nature as anything other than an Edenesque stasis; a lapsarian belief that nature once was perfect and now is not. His mythic rosier era conception is notably cherry-picked when read with the intention of trying to identify a concrete definition of what he takes “nature” to be. He states that technology goes against nature and harms fertility but he permits scythes for harvesting and fire for cooking, he claims that the natural method of farming revolves around how nature would grow without interference while simultaneously clearing the land to make arable pasture (and this pejorative connotation of interference also highlights his inability to see man as part of nature, another prominent fault. Likewise, not only does he fail to connect man as part of nature, he also fails to connect technology/tools with natural evolution). It is clear in a colloquial sense what he means by technology and nature, and most readers will evidently still be able to comprehend his contention, but his conceptual arbitrariness presents a notable crack in the foundations.
Fukuoka does redeem himself in part by demonstrating that many technological advancements do have ulterior motives and that he does understand them to a certain extent. This is shown in a particularly acute passage around the social mechanisms that presently influence farming techniques. His examples include how hardware stores wouldn’t buy his sowing invention because it would make the expensive tractors less desirable (and decrease profit for the store), or how herbicides maintain a foothold in farming largely on the back of a racketeering industry supported by the government. In this part, Fukuoka begins a penetrating analysis but it seems to stop short before anything substantial can be shown, instead falling back upon generalisations of why farmers are no longer connected to nature and are instead reliant on technology. What he fails to assess is how contemporary commercial farming practices are no longer determined by ecological desires but instead subordinated under economic efficiency, the one-straw revolution ignores how the social mechanisms of our present socio-economic position have perforce restructured the mode of farming around a business ontology, nolens volens, and that the luxury of experimentation in farming methods which he had is inaccessible or unsustainable for the majority; not merely because they are ignorant or set in their ways as he suggests, but because they are beholden to forces beyond their control (i.e. capitalism). In the post-Dust Bowl world of which this was written practically all farmers understand that monoculture methods of farming and a dependence on ecology-diminishing technology is not sustainable as a long-term method of farming. What Fukuoka fails to do throughout his text is empathise; what is a farmer supposed to do when they’re required to harvest a certain amount of produce in order to pay the mortgage on their land and the only way to do so is by continuing deep-plowing methods that in the long run will slowly result in diminished returns and ecological aridity? – they already don’t have the capacity to “do-nothing” which Fukuoka himself acknowledges results in an initial steep decline in performance, before correcting itself – a band aid approach is sometimes forced even when the farmer knows better. He similarly writes that he didn’t have to buy the land on which he farmed, with some of it coming from his father and some of it merely being appropriated by him because it wasn’t being used by anyone else – an exceptionally rare and unlikely situation for any readers in the present age of private property.
While Fukuoka accurately considers some of the influence that human ignorance has had upon farming methods, including our superficial and representationally biased knowledge of the myriad interconnected processes at work in nature, he himself fails to acknowledge the social processes that are similarly responsible for restructuring nature and farming, that the capitalist mode of production has also restructured farming rather than technology and increasingly lavish desires alone. With this in mind, it is hard to suggest that the One-Straw Revolution is capable of being the initial catalyst that will overcome the present day approach to farming. The One-Straw Revolution is perhaps possible and a “Do Nothing” philosophy may very well be the future of farming and life, but it is not the first step; it’s more likely this will be the result rather than the cause.