Human Beings are “Agents of Disturbance”

- Turns out ancient humans were bad for nature, too!

To understand what it means to change how species coexist, think of interspecies relationships as falling into three broad categories: aggregated, segregated, and random. Aggregated species are those that tend to live in the same habitat, indicating some kind of mutually beneficial interaction. Segregated species are those that actively don’t live in the same habitat, indicating maybe a competitive relationship or just a difference in habitat preference. And random species coexistence is exactly that — random. Now, for millions of years, life on Earth exhibited a strong tradition of species aggregation — a kind of love-filled hippie era, if you will (that’s a gross oversimplification, but you get the point). Then we came along, and suddenly, the world started to get a lot more segregated.

It's time to listen to the wisdom of Masanobu Fukuoka. And actually you can do so in a podcast at Levevei.no:

- Episode 122: Natural farming and the life and work of Masanobu Fukuoka

I point out that this way of thinking and seeing the world [natural farming] is probably highly provocative to a Western mindset. Larry agrees and explains how our values and thinking has been molded by modern society. Talking of modern, Larry is actually referring to the last 10 000 years, from the point in history when people for some reason decided that we were more important than other species. It was as if human beings no longer had any limits in regards to what they could do towards nature. Fukuoka’s thinking was very different and more in line with the mindset of the indigenous people of the world. - Larry Korn from Oregon, USA

"I guess “agents of disturbance” is a pretty apt nickname, then. It’s certainly not the most flattering, but then again, neither was Suzy Spit-up, and I’m willing to admit that I totally deserved it when I was a baby. So maybe we should just own it. Anyone wanna make t-shirts?"