It is a horrifically difficult time to be a small farmer in America - or anywhere for that matter. In a former life I was a Science Policy Fellow at the National Academies, examining climate geoengineering - because that’s what people do, right? Ralph Cicerone, an atmospheric scientist, was the head of the National Academy of Sciences at the time. I was dead-set on talking him up about my revolutionary ideas about how we could corral ethicists and scientists to have meaningful ethical discussions to avoid high-magnitude and high-probability risk. He just looked at me and said: “Yeah, well…we’re going to geoengineer this planet to overcome human-induced climate change, we’re going to do it in our lifetimes, and we’re going to do it under the veil of secrecy.” Then he walked away and I realized I was absolutely wasting my time.

People ask me what I think about climate change all the time. I’ve seen science suppressed, I’ve worked on environmental models, and even tried to support the search for “black swans” before they come over the event horizon for futurists. Most climate models are probably wrong because we don’t know what we’re doing. We are children - and we are just searching in the dark. More specifically, we are in a vast, dark universe of the unknown and we are careening through space and time at 72 kilometers per megaparsec while circling the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. That’s insane - so the fact that any of us are alive is just plain gravy, so that’s a total win.

So - back to the brilliant idea of being a farmer in an era of climate change.

Having studied and worked in the realm of geology, I am fully aware that this planet we inhabit has already seen some serious shit. It is moving internally like a bad case of food poisoning, plates sliding around on a bellyache of liquid metal cores and releasing incredible amounts of heat and force as it cools. Massive mountains, deep chasms, rivers, lakes, fault lines, caves, meteor impacts: they have all appeared under extreme force. Even the dinos got wiped out and they were serious badasses. In airplanes I find myself glued to the window for hours - soaking in the radiation and wondering what processes led to those forms below…and how many people are down there. I am amazed by the vast amount of terraforming we have done to create reams of crop circle fabric across plains, webs of roads, anthills of nightlights, vast pillows of steam from energy plants, boxes of shopping centers and serpents of suburban sprawl galore. I try to envision what it would look like if we had never been there at all…and what it could look like in another 100 years. I wonder why no one else is looking out the window because these views yield real truths. Real news.

This isn’t all a sad-sap story. In fact, I function as an optimist because there is another way to look at the unpredictable Anthropocene. The Earth is fundamentally a battery - it is a cathode full of stored organic chemical energy - and space is the anode of equilibrium. Without our stored biomass our world would be an inhospitable world. Unfortunately, our supply of biomass on this planet is dwindling. The race to the bottom led by invisible hands has had real and lasting effects on this planet. The human inclination to organize by tribes and resource grab is woven into our basic genetics. Our ultimate default is the eventual implosion of population when our civilization taxes the Earth’s resources too far. This is the intelligence of the genetics of us - consistent with the Gaia Principle. The Earth will go on with or without us - and it’s up for us to decide whether we want to get down to brass tacks and survive or kill ourselves off. Gaia doesn’t care either way what we do and but whenever we all go down it will be one hell of a fossil record.

Biomass is one thing we need to build and preserve to survive. So here we are at Bracken…trying to steward some land and build biomass on a hillside, hoping some brilliant Los Alamos geoengineering idea doesn’t send us careening into an ice age anytime soon. Unknown unknowns are a thing.

I realize I supposed to be talking about terroir and wine - but I dragged you through the 30k view to get you to a major personal tenet of the why one might grow wine. The ultimate why is a defiance of the human inclination to resource grab - replacing it instead with an expression of optimism, hope and sharing.