Fred Provenza on My Latest Book, Stagtine
Fred's thoughts to my book on kincentric rewilding, called Stagtine.
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Attached audio is recording of Fred Provenza reading the below. You can read Fred's Foreword and the ENTIRE book, Stagtine, here! Or, you can purchase a paperback copy from us here or from Amazon.
“Once a species reliant on nature for food, medicine, clothing, and shelter, Homo sapiens is in the process of being consumed by the fossil fuel-based agricultural and technological economies that enabled our separation from the natural world that nourishes and sustains all life, including us humans. Fossil fuel-based economies, which are grounded in competition for manufactured scarcity, rather than cooperation around natural abundance, are causing man-made shortages of unpolluted air, clean water, fertile soil, biodiversity, and wholesome foods. It is not hyperbole to state that we may end up among the many species now facing their final days on Earth, no different from the over ninety-nine percent of species who visited this planet and are now extinct.
Fossil fuels enabled human populations to rise precipitously from two million people in 10,000 BCE to a little less than a billion in 1800 to nearly eight billion people today. Our populations expanded exponentially during the twentieth century in no small part due to fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. Humans and the animals in our care now utterly dominate the planet.
Humans (thirty-six percent) and our livestock (sixty percent) make up an astounding ninety-six percent of all the mammals on Earth. Domestic chickens account for seventy percent of all the birds on this planet. Nearly half (forty-four percent) of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, in total 48 million square kilometers (18.5 million square miles). Croplands make up one-third of agricultural land, and grazing land makes up the remaining two-thirds.
It is easy to understand why we embraced fossil fuels. The energy in a barrel of oil is equivalent to ten to twelve years of hard labor by a fit human. Fossil fuels enabled people in agriculture to evolve from long days of back-breaking work into an industry where machines do most of the work. Globally, we now consume 100 million barrels of oil each day across all human activities. The United States population of nearly 330 million used 20 million barrels of oil daily in 2022.
Fossil fuel-based food production systems have come at great costs ecologically, socially, and economically. To produce one calorie of food now requires two calories of fossil fuels for machinery, fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides. We use another eight to twelve calories to process, package, deliver, store and cook modern food. No species can survive by expending ten to fourteen calories to obtain a single calorie of energy and neither can we. With the uncertain availability and prices of fossil fuels a concern and the transition to clean energy a necessity, we have an opportunity to grow nutritious foods in ways that nurture our ties with life on Earth.
These changes are a defining moment for humans, one that may lead to mankind’s demise or that may catalyze the rebirth of an ecological economy wherein communities benefit from locally sourced plants and animal products, produced in ways that nurture relationships among soil, water, plants, animals, and people to sustain our collective wellbeing. Farming, ranching, and pastoral ways of life can once again be at the heart of our communities, but we humans will need to relearn what it means to be locally co-evolving with nature’s communities. In the process, we will need to transition our relationships with landscapes from ego-logical to eco-logical.
Western culture and the Enlightenment taught us to think in linear, hierarchical, and competitive ways about our relationships with one another and the stressed-out communities we now inhabit. Monetized economic systems based on scarcity do not link plants, animals, and people with gratitude and reciprocity for the bounty of nature. Conversely, Eastern and Indigenous cultures, traditionally based on harmonious interdependence, teach of mutually supporting relationships with all life. People are members, not masters, of nature’s communities. What we do to Earth, we do to ourselves. Only through nurturing our relationships with Earth, can we nurture ourselves.
In Stagtine, Firth shifts the focus from human creativity in nurturing modern “ecological resiliency” to the lived and shared experiences of our two and four legged cousins who inhabit Earth with us. In place of human-centered systems, the book speaks of Earth-centered systems, where co-creation crescendos into a great symphony of kinship from the ground up. This is not another book about humans regenerating Earth. This is a book about Earthlings rising together.
Stagtine is a beautifully written account of becoming for Firth, his wife Morgan, their three children, and the plants and animals who become their lives. The story begins in Firth’s younger days, a time of memory and magical meditations, of pain and disease.
As a young man, with dreams and great promise of athletic scholarships in college, Firth never imagined what was about to happen. That change began on the first day of August of his last year in high school when he collapsed during a warmup lap around the athletic field in football practice. A genetic timebomb, ticking slowly and silently inside of him, suddenly exploded.
During the ensuing decade, following numerous failed surgeries and Firth losing the ability to walk for a time, his mother ultimately suggested, “What if we forget passivity and become active participants in life itself?” What if we let go? She was right.
Yet, despite attempts to embrace advice from well-intended health and regenerative agricultural authorities, he did not find respite from either his illness or the surrounding agrarian storms, which only intensified. Relief came when Firth let go of expectations and illusions of control and he and Morgan learned to follow their hearts with wisdom gained through their experiences—through letting the land speak and learning how to listen. That journey of discovery leads to what they call kincentric rewilding: a relational land ethic of letting go, but not stepping back, of rewilding themselves with the land, an energetic and increasingly singular body.
Along the way, they contemplate the role of food in the genesis of health across generations, as food transforms into the very substance of their life. They eat raw, whole foods. They purchase fresher, tastier, and more nutritious foods locally. Ultimately, they nurture their own foods. In the process, they come to realize that the lives of plants and animals are intimately linked with their health and well-being, not only during their life but at the time of death as well.
The diets and lifestyles of livestock influence the phytochemical and biochemical characteristics of meat and dairy. Stress influences phytochemical richness and nutrient density in both plants and animals. Stress also effects the emotional state and well-being of animals, so the way “food feels” during life (and at the time of death) is likely as important as what “food eats” when it comes to nourishing people. All of that is illustrated with studies of bison.
Compared with the meat from bison who are restricted in pens and offered only corn, meadow hay, and alfalfa hay, the meat from bison finished on phytochemically rich rangelands has higher levels of compounds that benefit bison and humans, including polyphenols, tocopherols, carotene, and omega-3 fatty acids. While meadow hay and alfalfa hay add beneficial phytochemicals to their diet, pen-fed bison still have higher levels of less desirable compounds, including advanced glycation end-products, triglycerides, and short-chain acylcarnitines.
Due to their phytochemically rich diets and higher levels of physical activity, bison on rangelands have improved markers of metabolic health. Muscle from range-fed bison is like that of a healthy athlete, while that from pen-fed bison is like that of a “couch potato,” characterized by enhanced mitochondrial, glucose, and fatty acid metabolism. Greater mitochondrial oxidative enzyme levels in animals eating phytochemically rich diets are analogous to those in fit athletes. Equally important, bison experience less stress when they forage on rangelands as opposed to living in pens, which further substantiates findings regarding their metabolic health.
Currently, in the United States only four percent of beef calves spend their entire lives eating phytochemically rich mixes of plants on pastures and rangelands where they were born and reared. The other ninety-six percent of calves are weaned at seven to eight months of age and fattened in feedlots, often under conditions that violate freedoms of animal welfare: freedom from fear, distress, discomfort, pain, injury, and disease. They are moved from familiar (mother, peers, home pastures) to unfamiliar (feedlots) locations, which causes fear and distress. They dislike any food eaten too often or in excess, yet they are fed daily the same ration so high in grain they experience nausea which causes food aversions, discomfort, stress, and distress. Though individuals differ in food preferences, they cannot self-select their diets, which violates their freedom to express normal behavior, maintain health, and avert discomfort and disease.
An attuned palate, which enables herbivores to meet needs for nutrients and self-medicate to rectify maladies, occurs when wild or domestic herbivores forage on phytochemically rich landscapes, is less common when domestic herbivores forage on monoculture pastures, is close to zero for herbivores in feedlots, and is increasingly rare for people who forage in modern food outlets.The high-grain diets and lack of choice of nutritious foods for livestock in feedlots is akin to what’s occurring with ultra-processed foods in people nowadays—in homes, schools, nursing homes, and prisons. These practices cause livestock to suffer various maladies, including chronic acidosis, liver abscesses, oxidative and physiological stress, and other metabolic diseases similar to people with metabolic syndrome, characterized by muscle mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, and elevated levels of blood glucose, insulin, and cortisol. Animals are sustained on antibiotics to counter the effects of phytochemically poor diets, lack of exercise, and stress.
The influence of environment plus genes plus chance on the behavior, health, and well-being of individuals became real for Firth and Morgan courtesy of Gertrude, a chicken who hatched early and was always a mess: feathers askew and missing, a head too small for her increasingly featherless body. When Firth and Morgan came near her, she ran for the woods. When they left, she stayed there, all alone. Rather than roosters, it was Gertrude’s squawks that awoke the farm early each morning. By all appearances, Gertrude was one stressed-out individual.
After a meal that featured Gertrude, Firth became quite ill. Following nearly a year of improved health, his old pains and sores erupted. He once again became bedridden, and he spiraled into a deep depression. In the coming months he was yet again hospitalized, suffered a thirty-day bout of constipation, lost the ability to walk, lost fifty pounds, and spent the next twelve months doing nothing but getting back on his feet. Another year lost.
Our bonds with the plants and animals we eat reveal the nature of our relationships with the places where we live. After years of observing relationships among plants and animals as a foundation, over the course of 45 years, my colleagues and I pioneered research that led to the understanding of how the “taste of a place,” or terroir, reveals how palates link plants with animals, including humans, with landscapes. That occurs through three interrelated processes.
First, to meet needs for nutrients and medicines, animals must have access to a variety of wholesome foods. This occurs when herbivores learn to eat phytochemically rich mixtures of plant species. Phytochemicals bolster health and protect against diseases and pathogens in herbivores and humans through their antimicrobial, antiparasitic, anti-inflammatory, and immunomodulatory properties. The plant kingdom contains an estimated 105 to 106 chemically unique structures, dwarfing all other taxonomic groups for specialized metabolites. Complex relationships among this diverse pool of compounds and cells and organs are increasingly recognized as a way plants promote the health of life on earth.
Second, mother is a transgenerational link to landscapes. Her knowledge of what and what not to eat, where and where not to forage, is essential for her offspring. Her influence begins in the womb (through flavors in her amniotic fluid of foods she eats) and continues after birth (through flavors in her milk of foods she eats) and when her offspring begin to forage (as a model for what to and not to eat). Her influence is expressed epigenetically through changes in form (morphology), function (physiologically), and behavior (food and habitat selection), and chance plays a role during the development of organ systems. The combination of genes plus ever-changing environments plus chance ensures no two individuals are ever alike.
When not forcibly weaned and separated from mother and their relatives, goats, sheep, and cattle live in extended families. Most species of wild herbivores live in extended families who once played a central role in the structure and function of ecosystems. There is an opportunity for species such as bison, horses, goats, sheep, and cattle to play a similar role today in kincentric rewilding.
To best realize this prospect, we must understand not only how behavior is influenced by grazing management techniques, such as strategic placement of water, salt, and fences. More importantly, we must understand how social organization and culture influence the interrelationships of herbivores with landscapes. With livestock, we’ve come to rely on fences and grazing systems, rather than culture, to influence diet and habitat selection. Do extended families and culture in wild and domesticated herbivores lead to wide dispersion across landscapes without fences? Do “regenerative” approaches to mobbing, mowing, and moving herbivores mimic natural systems or is this yet another example of humanity’s modern penchant to attempt to control?
Third, food preferences are mediated metabolically by feedback from cells and organ systems, including the gut microbiome, in response to nutritional and medicinal needs. During a meal of diverse foods, herbivores and humans introduce thousands of phytochemicals and biochemicals into the body in the forms of primary compounds (nutrients such as energy, protein, minerals, and vitamins) and the thousands of so-called secondary compounds (phytochemicals such as phenolics, terpenes, and alkaloids) that plants produce. Changes in preference for foods due to post-ingestive feedback occur automatically (noncognitively) each time food is eaten.
The nature of feedback (satiety or malaise) depends on the match between a food’s chemical characteristics and its ability to meet an animal’s needs. These relationships—mediated by nerves, neurotransmitters, peptides, and hormones—are the basis for the wisdom of the body which enables animals to meet their needs for energy, protein, amino acids, minerals, and vitamins, and to self-medicate for maladies such as acidosis, toxicosis, and parasites.
During the past century, the food industry learned how to produce ultra-processed “foods” that hijack our food preferences by linking known and liked flavors with feedback from cells and organs in response to refined carbohydrates that make “foods” irresistible, and with time, render their hapless victims in tatters morphologically (obese), physiologically (metabolic syndrome), and neurologically (many modern neurological diseases). At the same time, the flavors of meat, dairy, and produce became bland as farmers and ranchers emphasized yield and transportability over flavor and phytochemical/biochemical richness. We thus disincentivized real foods, because they lack flavor and nutrient richness, and we made ultra-processed foods irresistible.
Flavors imparted by nutritional and phytochemical richness depend on complex interactions between plant variety and the environment—weather, temperature, sunlight, soil moisture, and nutrients. That is why different farming systems influence nutrients and health-promoting phytochemicals in fruits and vegetables, but no management practice—conventional, organic, biodynamic, no-till, regenerative—has a monopoly on flavor, nutrient, and phytochemical richness. Each gardener, farmer, or rancher must discover how to enhance nutrient richness and flavor with the varieties of plants and conditions under which they nourish plants and livestock.
The act of nurturing plants and animals, which few do, as well as the act of eating, which we do thoughtlessly, is participating in endless transformation as plants and animals give their lives to sustain our lives. As “I” eat, the energy and matter in someone becomes this being “I” call “me”—which will, in the flicker of a cosmic eye, return to Earth as plants and animals. In pondering this mystery, as Firth and Morgan do, we come to realize that all life is sacred.
In the process, we begin to co-evolve as members of the biophysical environments we inhabit. Rather than life as competition for scarce resources, we come to value the importance of kinship, extended plant and animal families, and cooperative relationships. Ecologists and economists are finally coming to appreciate that ecosystems with high biodiversity create mutualisms where all species can thrive better, with fewer resources, than low biodiversity environments.
Today, we face unprecedented ecological, economic, and social challenges and opportunities. Changing climates, massive declines in wild plant and animal species, economic and social inequities, political upheaval, and endless wars are all signs we’ve broken our linkages with one another and this planet whose air, water, soil, plants, and animals sustain us. No surprise, those who think they are in control resist change right up to the moment when they go bust.
Yet, if we first grasp and then embrace the notion that all things change, there is nothing we will attempt to cling to. Ironically, if we aren’t afraid of transforming, of abandoning expectations and attempts to control outcomes, there is nothing we can’t achieve. As Lao-tzu writes in the Tao Te Ching, “Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place. When you handle the master carpenter’s tools, chances are that you’ll cut yourself.”
How can we best understand and nurture relationships among complex, poorly understood, ever changing ecological, social, and economic systems, given a future not knowable or predictable?
In the arena of constant transformation, anything is possible if we engage one another and the landscapes we inhabit in ways that nurture creativity. Creativity comes from transcending boundaries we create. Suspending assumptions—speaking and listening from our hearts—liberates scientists and managers from the arbitrary boundaries of prevailing theories and best management practices. People with different knowledge and values, working together, can best nurture landscapes to create diverse arrays of plants and animals below and above ground, enhance the health of soils and climate, and improve the health of human communities.
In the end, the challenges we face in addressing the “critical issues” have little to do with the issues and everything to do with healing the divides that polarize and isolate us from one another and disconnect us from our oneness with Earth. The irony is working together to transcend the boundaries that we create is addressing the “really big issue.” And we do that by declaring love—not war—on one another and the landscapes we inhabit.
Firth invites us to join in The Wildland’s evolution from a struggling regenerative farm to a flourishing kincentric rewilding community of ever evolving thoughtscapes, heartscapes, and landscapes. Rather than the modern story that humans must “save the world,” Stagtine circles inward to a simpler, more ancient proposal: we can enliven our visit to this ever-evolving orb of impermanence we call Earth by relinquishing control and stepping into right relationship with one another and the landscapes we inhabit. This is not about regeneration, but about humans becoming mammals who are part of nature’s communities. To anyone longing to rediscover a world of wisdom, wonder, nuance, and life, welcome. Your journey has just begun.”
Dr. Fred Provenza, Professor Emeritus, Behavioral Ecology, Department of Wildland Resources, Utah State University. Author of Nourishment.
SOLD OUT!
Our August 23-25, Kincentric Table: A Sacred Beef and Goat Harvest Workshop has SOLD OUT! What an unbelievable blessing and honor it is to host this class, while simultaneously receiving such an exciting response from our community. Stay tuned in the coming months, as our scheduled courses open for 2025—there will be a number of these classes / workshops for you to select from!
About this workshop:
What if the husbandman became the hunter? What if the field harvest erupted as a ceremonial and kincentric art? What if becoming a 'student of your survival' emerged as a hope-filled and 'sacred reawakening' of our human form, as Earthlings?
Grief and glitter: together we will become Earthlings. Together, we will work to unbind and untether ourselves from the uncreative sciences of today and learn our humanity through the sacred gift of the field harvest.
No corrals, no cages, no fear. Using nothing but our hands and simple, human-scale tools, we will track the herd in over 100-acres of the Wildland and then harvest a Wildland bull and bucks while they are yet with their herds, letting go of our control and allowing the herd's ceremony to rise and walk with us, amongst us, unabated. We will cry together. We will light fires and eat while we work, honoring and learning what we honor.
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If you enjoy this content, if you find it meaningful to you, we encourage you to become a paid member for $3/mo! With a paid subscription, you get access to all of my previously published and award-winning books (digital and audiobook versions) and so, so much more! It may be a cup of coffee for you, but it is the nourishment that keeps up alive, and we are so very thankful!
it is a great forward - I love his honesty and deep commitment to the words that came through you - as well his support for all that you reveal. also - hows the event selling out!!!! amazing - i love this 'commitment pool' of people willing to walk into kincentric rewilding