Sharing Our Food With the Multiplicity of Life

Learning to live with those creatures we call pests and weeds

Here in the south UK, we are in a period of drought and relentless hot weather. This (coupled with the fallout from last year’s two days of 40 degrees and the ongoing perfect storm of climate change, agricultural intensification, and habitat loss) has had an effect it seems on our insect numbers — which have plummeted. A walk I took around one of the UK’s premier nature reserves recently was eerily quiet; a place that should have been teaming with dragonflies and butterflies was dead still for the first hour, and even when the sun graced us with its presence only a few dragonflies came out to play. Closer to home, butterflies and bees, the staple insects of British summer gardens are few and far between. I have not seen a single Cabbage White in my garden — last year they descended on my Kohl Rabi in their droves (and decimated them I should add).

Thinking back to it, last year was a particularly intense year in terms of pests for the crops I grow in my tiny suburban garden. The heritage varieties of tomato (Chocolate Cherry, Galinia, Purple Ukrainian, Green Zebra, and Costoluto Fiorentino), kohl rabi, French beans, and cucumber all suffered under relentless attack from black bean aphids, cabbage white, and slugs. My strategy was all-out war — the elimination of the pests and “accept no loss”. A surprising and perhaps hypocritical stance I must confess for someone who otherwise delights in Creation, and who argues for an ecologically-friendly way of living (although I did I draw the line at using insecticides).

This year I have taken a wholly different (and much wiser and more ecological) stance. I realise that my crops not only provide me with plentiful food but also the creatures whom I share my garden with. God has given me these crops to steward for the whole of creation and in a time of acute need for the little creatures (not pests — for God does not call them ‘pests’) around me, that means leaving some plants to become more infested than I would otherwise have liked. If harvesting fewer Kohl rabi is the price I have to pay to see the butterflies again next year then it is a price worth paying, especially as I am not the only one who enjoys watching the dance of mating cabbage whites in the evening light. The butterflies that grace my garden also grace the garden of my neighbours and their neighbours too. The actions I take in my garden do not stay confined to the place that is under my control. This I must remember.

This truth amplifies in importance when I consider my garden as just one small part of the wider ‘ecosystem’ that is my neighbourhood. At the back of our garden is an old non-conformist’s cemetery where young fox cubs frolic and sweet-sounding birds make their nests. These birds — the wrens, blue tits, and blackbirds which I and my neighbours enjoy watching — prey upon the very same insects which feed and grow upon my crops. They depend on those creatures that I last year destroyed.

Thus I enter into a tension: the crops I grow are food for many creatures and not just for myself. They have a God-given right to feed upon plants¹ — and that includes the ones growing in my garden. They are unaware that their gouging themselves on my prized tomatoes is causing me loss. They are not at fault. My garden is as much their home as it is mine. The right I thus claim to defend my crops from these creatures (again they are not pests — for they are not doing anything wrong), and thus deprive them of their food source — or even their very lives — must be excised with care, wisdom, and restraint. This is not only because they are precious creatures in their own right, a unique masterpiece from their Maker’s hand², but because in killing them I am also depriving other more cherished creatures further up the food chain of their sources of sustenance.

Actions and their effects reverberate and cascade through the webs of life. Untold numbers of species are affected by our everyday actions no matter how seemingly insignificant they may seem. The simple choice to drive your car to the shop instead of walking will result in the death of many tiny winged beasts which splatter across your car’s paintwork. The choice to irresponsibly dispose of household chemicals will affect distant aquatic life just as the warning label on the bottle tells you. The effects of our everyday actions can also maintain life too. The decision to let the lawn grow wild for a season provides a home for creatures great and small who would otherwise have perished or remained homeless in the ecological desert that is a mowed lawn.

This all leads to a further truth — one I must remind myself of when I am tempted to kill the competing insects in my garden. No action is merely linear in its effect. The ramifications of each action I take will continue to cascade and branch out well beyond the confines of my limited and myopic comprehension and observation. Likewise, my responsibilities to my garden and my crops are not linear. The mere production of healthy good food or the maintenance and propagation of endangered heritage varieties are not my only responsibilities. Alongside these duties are the responsibilities of stewarding life in the ecosystem I am part of which entails protecting, nurturing, and enjoying all the creatures of our God and King — even those which compete with me for my delicious tomatoes.