Earmarking the Future
Notes From the Edge of a Living World
There is a smell that rises from the earth in spring here in Vermont that no machine will ever replicate. Wet leaves thawing beneath the snowpack. Moss waking up on stone walls. Maple buds swelling red against gray skies. The sharpness of cedar after rain. The sweetness of black soil finally breathing again after a long winter underground. It smells like memory. It smells like belonging.
And every year, when the ground softens enough for the first shoots to push through, I am reminded of something that modern America seems determined to forget:
We do not live on the land. We live within it.
Nature is not scenery surrounding human life. Nature is the original infrastructure of human life. The first economy. The first pharmacy. The first teacher. The first cathedral.
And somewhere along the way, we stopped acting like we remembered that.
As another Farm Bill moves quietly through Washington, I cannot help but think about all the small decisions that slowly shape the future of the living world. Not dramatic decisions. Not headlines. Tiny line items. Earmarks. Subsidies. Quiet removals buried deep in thousand-page documents most Americans will never read.
Several years ago, during Organic Week in Washington, I sat in a room full of farmers, researchers, educators, and food advocates as then-Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced what was being celebrated as a historic investment in organic expansion — $75 million earmarked in the developing Farm Bill.
The room erupted in applause. And I remember doing the math in my head. Seventy-five million dollars. In a multi-trillion-dollar federal budget, it amounted to almost nothing. A rounding error. A fraction so small most people could barely conceptualize it.
And yet even that was apparently too much. Now much of that support has quietly disappeared from current proposals, alongside cuts to programs that helped schools purchase food directly from local farmers through Farm to School initiatives.
Programs that worked. Programs that fed children fresh food instead of ultra-processed substitutes shipped from across the continent. Programs that kept money circulating in rural communities instead of funneling endlessly upward into massive corporate supply chains. Programs that helped children understand that carrots come from soil instead of plastic packaging.
And now many of those programs are being dismantled or reduced under the current administration in the name of “efficiency,” while billions continue flowing toward industrial agricultural systems that are depleting topsoil, poisoning waterways, consolidating land ownership, and making it nearly impossible for small and midsized farmers to survive.
We are told this is modernization. But standing in a dying river is not progress. Watching family farms disappear is not efficiency. Raising children disconnected from the source of their nourishment is not advancement. It is amnesia.
When I was a boy, I did not realize I was growing up inside a worldview that was already disappearing. I thought everyone knew how to identify mushrooms after rain. I thought everyone had an uncle who could read weather in the trees. I thought everyone understood that if you cared for soil properly, it would care for you in return.
My family never called themselves environmentalists. They were simply people in relationship with land. They were farmers. There were gardens, chickens, pigs, root cellars, trout streams, canning jars stacked in basements, wood smoke in winter, mud season roads, and always some unfinished chore waiting at the edge of the day.
And there was dignity in that life. Not because it was easy. Farming is not romantic work. It is exhausting, uncertain, often heartbreaking labor. It demands your back, your hands, your time, your sleep, your faith.
But hidden inside that labor was another kind of wealth entirely. Attention. Humility. Patience. Reciprocity. The understanding that nature is not a warehouse of resources for human extraction, but a living conversation we are privileged to participate in.
Wendell Berry has spent a lifetime trying to remind us of this truth. He writes not about conquering the land but belonging to it. About stewardship over ownership. Community over consumption. And thinkers like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Diana Beresford-Kroeger continue carrying that same ancient understanding into modern language: that the living world functions through relationship, reciprocity, and mutual flourishing. Nature survives through cooperation far more often than conquest. And so, do we.
My aunt Rozo McLaughlin understood this deeply. Long before “local food” became fashionable branding for upscale grocery stores, she was helping develop Farm to School programs that connected local farms directly with school meal systems.
Simple ideas. Radical outcomes. Fresh food for children. Reliable income for farmers. Stronger regional economies. Kids learning what actual food tastes like. Kids learning that nourishment comes from soil, water, pollinators, sunlight, and human hands. That food is not manufactured. It is grown.
Those programs helped restore relationship — between children and land, between schools and communities, between farming and public health. And now many of those same initiatives are being cut, defunded, or quietly abandoned at the federal level precisely when we need them most.
At a time of skyrocketing chronic illness. At a time when farmers are disappearing. At a time when loneliness, ecological collapse, and food insecurity are all accelerating simultaneously.
We are starving in the middle of abundance because we have severed ourselves from source.
Filming Wild Foods across America only deepened this realization for me.
Everywhere we traveled, we met people trying to repair relationship with nature in deeply practical ways. Fishermen restoring damaged watersheds. Farmers rebuilding depleted soil. Indigenous seed keepers protecting biodiversity. Chefs reconnecting cuisine to place. Teachers growing gardens behind schools. Families learning how to forage. Young people planting orchards whose fruit they may never personally harvest.
The mainstream narrative would have you believe collapse is inevitable. That ordinary people are powerless against systems too large to challenge.
But nature teaches something very different. Nature teaches that small actions compound. A single seed cracks pavement. In fact, it has the genetic code of an entire garden, an entire field, and entire forest. A wetland filters an entire watershed. A mushroom quietly transforms decay into fertility.
One person plants milkweed and monarchs return. One family supports a local farm and that farm survives another season. One child tastes a fresh tomato and begins understanding the world differently forever. This is not naïve optimism. It is ecological reality.
People often ask what they can actually do. Yes, call your representatives. Pay attention to agricultural policy. Fight for local food systems. Support school meal programs. Protect clean water.
But also, plant something. Even if it’s only herbs in a window box. Learn the name of the trees where you live. Shop at your local co-op. Support a farmers market. Cook meals with people you love. Take your children into the woods. Go fishing. Go for a hike without headphones. Pick blueberries in August. Learn one edible wild plant. Sit quietly beside a river long enough to remember you are not separate from any of this.
Because the greatest lie modern society ever sold us is that we are disconnected from nature. We are nature. And when we restore relationship with the living world, we begin restoring relationship with ourselves, with each other, and with the future.
That is what Wild Foods has always been about for me. Not escapism. Not nostalgia. Remembrance.
The remembering that another way of living is still possible. That the wisdom is not gone. That the land is still speaking. And that hope, like mycelium beneath the forest floor, is already spreading quietly underneath our feet.