THE ONE-STRAW REVOLUTION

Those who envision a possible future planet where we live by the green and the sun, have no choice but to bring whatever science, imagination, strength, and political finesse they have to the support of the inhabitory people – natives and peasants of the world.
Entering such paths, we begin to learn a little of the Old Ways, which are outside of history, and forever new.
Gary Snyder (The Old Ways, City Lights Books, 1977).

My name is Michelangelo, and I live in Italy in Castell’Anselmo, a rural village where thirteen inhabitants are hanging on from the hundred or so before them. The houses are empty or inhabited by strangers, with their minds and eyes far away in the cities and television sets. I live in a traditional house lovingly restored by my father. The house has a vegetable garden and a garden, where I spend a lot of my time.
The vineyard near my home no longer bears fruit, after decades of intensive farming (with the use of hydrocarbons and pesticides) it has been abandoned.
Castell’Anselmo is the symbol of nature let free, of lost human power.
I moved to the countryside twenty-five years ago in order to escape the city and have more contact with the land; my artistic experimentation started here.
Through my research I have always turned to those personalities that the ruling political power has pushed to the sidelines as they are deemed “inconvenient” for the system; two of whom in particular I’d like to mention: Ivan Illich (1926-2002), an Austrian philosopher and theorist of degrowth, and Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008), a Japanese microbiologist specialised in phytopathology.
The two figures, one western and the other eastern, have some shared opinions on which I am focusing my research; however, I don’t want to delve further into this, I’d rather talk about the reasons why I’ve been working on the figure of Masanobu for the last ten years.

I met Fukuoka-San through the writer Pia Pera who was very close to him. She wrote several fiction books and essays, and during her final years also on gardening, an art that she was passionate about. Through her stories I learned about Fukuoka’s fist Italian trip in July 1981, to Ontignano, a small town in the province of Florence.
The seminar in Ontignano began with participants introducing themselves. When it was Fukuoka’s turn he said: “My name is Masanobu Fukuoka. My name means: masa = straight forward, nobu = faith, fuku = happy, oka = mountain.
I don’t think I am any different to you but I have found a small difference between you and me. The small difference is that you want to learn, while I came to forget about what I learned in Japan, in other words, I am free from worry. Since you do not understand Japanese and I do not understand Italian, it is as if we were talking in an empty space. That’s wonderful, because an empty space bears no weight on our shoulders.
I am happy to feel the kindness that I can sense here among you. There is an ancient Japanese song that says we’re fine because the moon is round just for us”.
Masanobu was an extraordinary character; at the age of 25 he decided to leave behind his research laboratory in Yokohama after having a flash of inspiration. Physically weakened by acute pneumonia and deeply depressed by the life he was leading, he realised that everything he had dedicated his life to was worthless. For some time he had been asking himself an apparently simple question: what am I doing?
Realising that nature extended far beyond laboratory research, his knowledge was nothing. He concluded that man cannot know nature, at best we can only “return” to nature. So, he began to believe that going back to natural farming was not knowing and doing nothing.
At this point he chose to return to his island homeland, Shikoku, where his father entrusted him with a citrus grove. However, caught up in his new ideas and his inexperience being so young, the citrus grove grew dry. He believed nature would take care of everything but it failed to do so. The years that followed were a time of great experimentation. Over the years, his lands became more fertile and his harvests so fruitful that they would have been the envy of multinationals in industrial agriculture.
The idea of ​​failure as a potential result of work. The idea of ​​“empty space” and “of doing nothing” are elements that I aspire to achieve through practice in my artistic research. They are elements in harmony with nature, with life. Let me explain better; being an artist in this period of history means coming to terms with the huge global transformations taking place. The overriding political drive is still for a model of unlimited profit; a model that is now more or less exhausted. It is certainly not easy to describe the current global situation, with 2020 on the horizon. There are many problems faced by society and any solutions appear far in the distance. For years we have lived in the pursuit of growth and economic development; nowadays this seems to be a model that is no longer attainable. Castoriadis actually warned us of the need for change back in the 1970s. “We need to make profound changes in the psychosocial structure of people in the Western world, in their attitude toward life, in short, in their imaginary. The capitalist imaginary of a pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery of the world must be abandoned”.

The scenario we are faced with today might actually resemble the degrowth society theorised by many scholars, from Serge Latouche to Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Alain De Benoist and Maurizio Pallante. The era of growth and unrestrained consumption now seems to be heading for an inexorable decline. In this context we have to get to grips with nature: rich countries are devouring nature. Agriculture is in the hands of large multinational companies driven by maximum profit and control through seed patents. Fukuoka takes a resilient stance towards an industrial system and his work takes us back to a broader discourse, referring to a god, one which we find in the stones, in the mountains and in the flowers, a god who is nature. Everything that grows is in harmony with God.
This is why no hydrocarbon agricultural machinery is used in his activity. “The soil is worked on its own naturally through the penetration of plant roots and the activity of microorganisms, small animals and earthworms”, no chemical fertiliser, no weedkiller, no reliance on chemicals.
When we change the way we grow our food, we change our food, we change society, we change our values. We must pay attention to the relationships between everything, to causes and effects, and how to be accountable for what we know.
As Giannozzo Pucci, publisher of Fukuoka’s books in Italy, writes: “Nature is an organism: it is everywhere. Westerners try to represent it by dividing it and spreading it on a line to examine it bit by bit. Open yourself to nature, let yourself go, melt, flow and remould yourself with it. This is the way we create our identity without creating anything. Many people do not understand that the natural world is not a free world in the Western sense of freedom. The natural world works according to the laws of nature and there are many cycles of the natural world with which one must live in harmony. What we need to look for is freedom within these cycles and these laws. It is a freedom that is hard to imagine and that is much greater than that many people have experienced so far”.

Another aspect that has always fascinated me about Fukuoka is his way of dealing with and seeing the world, reaffirming the importance of laying claim to everything that deviates from pre-established canons, from one power; and his way of putting creativity into practice. Let me give you a pertinent example for what has been said. After The One-Straw Revolution was released, Fukuoka went to the United States. Before leaving, he imagined to find a verdant country. In reality, the earth he found resembled a dead land. This led to him proposing the idea of sowing in the deserts utilising American aerospace engineering. A simple and creative idea that would have contributed, according to Fukuoka, to many deserts across the world becoming green once again. This idea was never explored.

Finally, I would like to make reference to another aspect, that of Masanobu’s drawings that are the subject of my current studies, as well as an analysis of the logo on the cover in the first edition of The One-Straw Revolution, where we see a sickle and an ear of wheat. The sickle and the ear of wheat aim to represent a humble and discreet, dialectic overcoming of the Marxist symbol of revolution, the hammer and sickle. The sickle and the ear of wheat have a more organic and tangible relationship, less theoretical and abstract than that of the hammer and sickle. And indeed, without fail, every traditional revolution ends with farmers sacrificed at the hands of industry and political interest.
In essence, these are the reasons why Masanobu Fukuoka is part of my work.