God’s green earth

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/10/2016 (3267 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By day, he’s a bookish history professor, but on evenings and weekends Royden Loewen ditches academia and get his hands dirty.

“I like being close to the soil, and soil is sacred in its own way,” says the University of Winnipeg professor who farms a half-section of land just north of Steinbach with his son Sasha.

“It is linked to the indigenous past, and it is linked to a global citizenship.”

Loewen examines those links in an international research project examining Mennonite farming practices in seven communities. He says Mennonites are well-known for their agrarian communities, rootedness to the land and simple lifestyles.

Inspired by the idea of Mennonites as a global people, Loewen hired researchers to live and work for six months in communities as far afield as Siberia, Zimbabwe and Bolivia to study how people of one faith negotiated the challenge of staying on the land in different contexts.

“There is no issue that is more ordinary than farming,” says Loewen, chairman of Mennonite studies at the University of Winnipeg.

“So this is Mennonite history from the ground up, literally.”

Loewen and his researchers present their findings at a free public conference titled Mennonites, Land and the Environment, which runs Oct. 28 and Oct. 29 at the University of Winnipeg.

Historians who study Mennonites often focus on institutional or church history and don’t usually consider the broader environmental history, says Loewen, who plans to release a book on the research, which was funded by a $235,000 grant.

“It is about the earth that gives us food. Farmland is the thing that people who care about the environment should care about the most,” he explains.

“It’s about how the farmer deals with a global economy, fossil fuels, multinational corporations and their offerings of fertilizers and chemicals.”

For Mennonite farmers in Washington County, Iowa, one of the seven sites studied in the project, the introduction of agricultural chemicals resulted in larger farms, a more global outlook and a break between the farmers’ Christian beliefs and their farming operations, says researcher John Eicher.

“The more successful the operation, the more inclined they are to disengage their occupation from their faith,” says Eicher, who now works at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.

In Manitoba, Mennonites assume land is a gift of God and it is theirs to care for, whether on farm fields or in vegetable and flower gardens, says Susie Fisher, a researcher based in Neubergthal, a traditional Mennonite village near Altona.

“Looking at plants rather than a farm gives women a new role in Mennonite history,” says Fisher, whose doctoral dissertation is based on seeds, flowers, weeds and herbs — plants usually tended by women.

The project points out disparities between the seven Mennonite communities involved, as well as common values, says Winnipeg-based filmmaker Paul Plett, who visited five communities for a 60-minute documentary he is producing on the research. Due to logistical issues, Plett hired crews to film in Siberia and Zimbabwe, while he travelled to Bolivia, Iowa, southern Manitoba, the Netherlands and Indonesia in the space of six weeks.

“It’s going to be an interesting introduction to the diversity of the groups,” he says.

“It connects to the earth and how we’re treating the earth and how the earth connects with something bigger than ourselves.”

That connection with the earth keeps Loewen working the land once tilled by his great-grandfather, who came to Manitoba in 1874. Although environmental history may be a unique way of looking at the past, he says it is critical for moving forward sustainably.

“We all live within nature, and our relationship with nature forms us and tells other people who we are,” says Loewen, 61.

“We are often separated from the very earth that gives us sustenance, and figuring out our relationship to the earth is important for us and for future generations.”

brenda@suderman.com

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