Call of the Reed Warbler

June 25, 2018
Massy (Breaking the Sheep’s Back), a veteran Australian sheep farmer, provides a thorough and illuminating exploration of the movement for sustainable and regenerative farming gaining popularity in his country. The process, he writes, eschews pesticides and other chemicals, and aims to restore carbon back to the Earth (instead of the atmosphere). Its major practices include “holistic grazing,” water-cycle management to prevent erosion, and soil maintenance to enhance nutrient retention. Massy takes readers through a history of Australian agricultural developments, highlighting in particular the wisdom of Aboriginal practices and the increasingly harmful evolution of industrial farming. The regenerative system also stresses an essentially hands-off approach to wildlife and other organisms, with an overall awareness of “the complexity of interrelationships in a coevolved landscape”; it requires an overall shift in human thinking from the “Mechanical mind” (dependence on machines) to the holistic. While the subject may be relevant to everyone on Earth, Massy’s account is geared to readers unintimidated by, for instance, a discussion of the microbial intricacies of soil. Massy’s root message, however, that farmers should “work with, and not against, natural ecosystem function,” is well articulated, and his evidence for this message is irrefutable.

July 18, 2017
Farmer and author Charles Massy has been thinking intensely about the environment and our relationship to it for most of his life. Brought up in the industrial farming tradition, with its heavy use of chemicals, he eventually turned to alternative, holistic methods of working the land. In Call of the Reed Warbler, Massy argues for five regenerative landscape functions to restore health to the land: solar, water, soil, dynamic eco-systems and the human-social. The last point is perhaps the most important: we humans need to change our attitude to the land. Western thinking, what Massy calls the ‘mechanical mind’, seeks to brutally dominate the land. Instead we need to embrace the ‘emergent mind’, one that uses technology and science judiciously, but also stands back and allows nature a space to find its own expression. Massy persuades the reader with a beautifully integrated mix of research, farmer interviews, personal story and a passionate reading of natural history literature. Call of the Reed Warbler has echoes of Thoreau’s Walden, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Jared Diamond’s Collapse, and will appeal to anyone interested in issues of sustainability and environment. Its gentle yet compelling voice, its depth of feeling and honesty, its sense of purpose and vision, is sure to make it an Australian classic. Chris Saliba is co-owner of North Melbourne Books and a freelance reviewer