From New Agrarianism to Rewilding Agriculture in the Anthropocene: Syntropic Ecospirituality of Family Farming in California

Agriculture is hypothesized by climate scientists as being the earliest contributor to the emergence of the Anthropocene—the human-induced geological epoch—due to related greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental effects of industrial agriculture since the eighteenth century support this hypothesis; however, when agriculture is understood in the context of family- and community-based farming in culturally and geographically specific places around the world, many of its regenerative approaches can be seen as land stewardship rather than as a cause of Anthropocenic climate change. Writing as a scholar-farmer, the author discusses the typically Christian religiosity found in the new agrarianism spoken through the works of Wendell Berry but finding its root in the Jeffersonian agrarian movement. The center of the discussion is on whether this Christianity-based religiosity is related to regenerative family farming in contemporary California. Walking with the reader through the Anthropogenic conditions of industrial agriculture from Europe to California and through the current state of religion and ecology, this article presents this case of family syntropic farming as a co-creative process with nature. It demonstrates that, in the multicultural and multi-religious context of California, it is challenging to adopt a single religious ecological knowledge from a single religious tradition. It concludes that advancing the farmers’ literacy of nature’s animacy is rather the foundation of the agrarian ecospirituality in the ethnically and religiously diverse California in the Anthropocene.