Fukuoka's True Nature

After three years there, he developed a serious case of pneumonia and nearly died. Even after he recovered, he spent long hours wandering in the hills contemplating the meaning of life and death. After one of these solitary, all-night walks, he collapsed near a tree at the top of a bluff overlooking the harbor. He awoke to the cry of a heron, and had a revelation that changed his life forever. As he put it, In an instant all my doubts and the gloomy mist of my confusion vanished. Everything I had held in firm conviction, upon which I had ordinarily relied was swept away with the wind . . . I felt that this was truly heaven on earth and something one might call true nature stood revealed.

He saw that nature is in balance and perfectly abundant just as it is. People, with their limited understanding, try to improve on nature thinking the result will be better for human beings, but adverse side effects inevitably appear. Then people take measures to counteract these side effects, and larger side effects appear. By now, almost everything humanity is doing is mitigating problems caused by previous misguided actions.

Mr. Fukuoka tried to explain his ideas to his co-workers and even to people he met on the street, but he was dismissed as an eccentric. This was in the 1930s, when science and technology seemed poised to create a new world of abundance and leisure. And so he decided to leave his job and return to his family farm to apply his understanding to agriculture. His goal was to create a tangible example of his way of thinking and, in so doing, demonstrate its potential value to the world.

[...] Mr. Fukuoka moved into a small hut in the orchard and spent the next several years observing the condition of the soil and noting the interaction of the plants and animals that lived there. Recalling that time, Mr. Fukuoka said, I simply emptied my mind and tried to absorb what I could from nature.

[...]

Mr. Fukuoka's plan for halting desertification and his thoughts about such things as economics, politics, diet, formal education, the arts, health care, and science, which are all discussed in this book, proceed directly from his core philosophy, which came to him unexpectedly that morning in Yokohama when he was twenty-five years old. He saw nature as a single, interconnected reality with no intrinsic characteristics. He saw time as an uninterrupted moment of the present with past and future embedded within it.

In a futile effort to understand nature and establish a frame of reference, people overlay the reality of nature with notions like north and south, up and down, good and bad, distinguish the various creatures of the world as distinct entities, and create a human time based not on what they experience but on clocks and calendars. In doing so, people create and live in a world of human ideas, thereby separating themselves from nature. In the original, absolute world, according to Mr. Fukuoka, these human concepts and judgments do not exist.

For many years the basis of Mr. Fukuoka's worldview was difficult for me to understand, but one day it all became clear. I was walking in a redwood forest on the north coast of California. As I sat down to rest by a small creek, I looked up and saw something I had never seen before . . . the peace and beauty of nature itself. For some reason I was no longer separated from nature by the filter of my own thoughts. Instead of looking at nature, I was now within it. Nature had not changed, but my perception was different. I had to laugh. All this time I had been struggling with Mr. Fukuoka's philosophy when what he was getting at was actually so simple and right in front of me all that time.

When I traveled with Mr. Fukuoka on his trips to the United States, people would often ask him if natural farming could be mixed with conventional or organic practices. He was adamant that you could not do that. Now, finally, I understood why. One either lives in the absolute world of nature, or in the fantasy world of human thoughts. There is no middle ground.

Given Mr. Fukuoka's worldview, it is not surprising that his natural farming practices, and the plan he advocates for revegetating the deserts of the world, seem to go against conventional wisdom and current scientific thinking. It is a truly visionary, outside-the-box strategy that he believed would return humanity to its correct relationship with nature and heal the confusion and suffering of the human heart. His goal is no less than re-creating the Garden of Eden where people would live together in abundance, in freedom, and in peace.

(Larry Korn on Masanobu Fukuoka's Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security.