The 13.8-Billion-Year Field Space:
Two Acres of Farmland Growing Wild
What better place to do field research?
Pamelia in The Field in July 2014. You never know what will grow in this natural installation site.
THE IMPORTANCE OF FIELDS, FARMLAND AND HOW WE GROW FOOD FOR A POPULATION OF 7.3 BILLION (ON ITS WAY TO 13.8 BILLION)
In 2011 we bought a field. It once had been part of the Pioneer Farm, which for years was run by Pamelia's mother's grandfather Samuel Scott Estey. Now the farm was gone, but we wanted to preserve at least one of the fields. This one was prime house-building land. We decided to leave it untouched to see what would happen to the landscape and how its ecosystem would naturally evolve. Fields are an underappreciated and widely endangered species of environment. We'll be providing field reports from The Field so you can see what happens here too.
People don't often think of farming and food-gathering as having reshaped the surface of the planet, but as Niles Eldredge notes, they have—and still do. Why is rainforest cut down? To plant crops or allow animals to graze. Why are oceans depleted of 90 percent of their large fish? To feed humans.
We've always included farms and food in The Naturalist's Notebook, usually with a room devoted to those topics in our Seal Harbor space. The connection between farming and the environment is strong; the former has long wreaked havoc on the latter. The need to eat drives the cycle of nature, and in an age dominated by 7.3 billion humans (a population projected by experts to hit 9.6 billion by 2050), demand for food is pushing nature toward its limits. At the Notebook we'll continue to discuss food-related problems and look for possible solutions.
We used magnetic paint to create a stand-up board game for kids that takes them through the 10,000-year history of farming. The game explains how agriculture has reshaped the planet.