To produce food requires that you live at once in the past, present, and future. Almost every task on a farm is focused on achieving a future goal or managing a future risk based on past experience. A cultivator will clear land, prepare soils, plow, dig irrigation ditches, sow seeds, weed, prune, and nurture their crop so that, all being well, when the seasons change they will at the very least bring in a harvest adequate to support them through the next seasonal cycle, and provide sufficient seed stock for them to plant the following year.

Where foragers stoically accepted occasional hardships, farmers persuaded themselves that things could always be better if they worked a little harder. Farmers who put in the extra hours would, over time, usually do better than lazier ones who only ever made contingency for the one or two risks they considered to be the most likely. Thus among the Ju/’hoansi’s farming neighbors along the Kavango River the wealthiest ones were usually the most risk-averse—those who worked hardest to build good enclosures to protect their cattle and goats from predators at night; who spent long summer days diligently chasing birds, monkeys, and others drawn to their fields; who planted their seeds a little deeper; who went to the trouble of dragging bucketloads of water from the river to irrigate their crops just in case, as occasionally happened, the rains arrived late.

“I’d slip into the chicken coop and pick up as many eggs as I could carry. I can still hear those chickens complaining about me. The more we went out, the more skillful I became. It felt good to come home from a long day in the bush carrying meat for my family. Hunting was about sustenance, yes, but it was also a bonding. An ancestral inheritance that strengthened our ties to each other and to the land. The bush was a dangerous place. The things out there could easily kill us. We took care of each other, and you had to trust the next person with your life. Those of us who hunted together—related by blood or not—feel connected to this day even though time has separated us.

Introduction:

“First and foremost, thank you for opening this book. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed living, learning, and gathering it.

b) ‘A Muslim is like a date palm tree whose leaves do not fall, always beneficial and never harmful.’

“This influences my organizing by reminding me that my core responsibility is to be a benefit to whatever I’m engaged in. I may not always know HOW that will happen but it has to be my aim. I want peoples’ lives to have been better (even in very tiny ways) from having participated with me in this work. This means to me that I bring beautiful words, actions, ideas, and behaviors into spaces. At the end of it all even if we don’t see the fruits of our labor, shouldn’t we be able to say we loved and enjoyed each other? That’s why I want to act and be like a palm tree, providing shade, covering my comrades (instead of throwing shade lol). I want to provide food (dates). I want to be what they can lean on. I want to be a resource, sustaining our work.”

—Aisha Shillingford