He said one day he got up the nerve to ask a Mennonite bishop why rubber tires were forbidden. The bishop answered Klaas’s question with a question: “When do you start raising a child?” According to the bishop, Klaas told us, child rearing begins not at birth, or even conception, but one hundred years before a child is born, “because that’s when you start building the environment they’re going to live in.” Mennonites, he went on, believe that if you look at the history of tractors with rubber tires, you see failure within a generation. Rubber tires enable easy movement, and easy movement means that, inevitably, the farm will grow, which means more profit. More profit, in turn, leads to the acquisition of even more land, which usually means less crop diversity, more large machinery, and so on. Pretty soon the farmer becomes less intimate with his farm. It’s that lack of intimacy that leads to ignorance, and eventually to loss.
– Dan Barber, The Third Plate Field Notes on the Future of Food
As I write this S’ABBA is many many years from being a place for people to make art, break bread and be together. But even within that uncertain future there are questions of scale and of the kind of place we imagine it being many many years from now, long after are we gone.
Image by Moreno Solinas, January 2025