How Then Shall We Live?

How then shall we live? - a short story of old roots and new shoots in Transylvania

“Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there”
- Gary Snyder

“The place will tell us what to do.” Robyn made this prediction more than 20 years ago. Now we understand more what she meant, but back then we wanted a palpable plan. In our early days we spent long hours discussing how we could weave our disparate life situations together; the lives of an American music and transpersonal therapist working from within the belly of a large women’s prison in a ghetto of Atlanta and a Dutch veterinarian caring for farmers and their animals in the picturesque French countryside. Through our story, we want to show how projects may form and be informed by the needs of a particular time and place and how context is foundational. We want to tell the story of how we have been informed by the place that chose us, and where we, in turn, chose to “dig in.”

“Why Romania?” Countless times this question has come to us during the 16 years we have lived here. We might mention our search for a place where we could live a simple and self-sustaining lifestyle, connected to the soil, nature, each other and ourselves. A culture that was close enough to our own ancestry and ancestral lifestyles that might welcome and accept our strangenesses (as wherever we went, at least one of us would always be a “stranger”). We could recount how we already felt that, since humanity was heading for a precipice, we wanted to find a place to live closer to the ground. We wanted to practice being responsible (“response-able”) to cultivating and collecting our own food and medicines, while also making continuous efforts with natural-building and fiberarts. We were looking to become more familiar with primary pleasures, seasons and elements of life. We were looking for a way, if not to escape, then at least to distance ourselves from the death economy.

Robyn with Marioara, a village elder

We wanted to focus on and contribute to life! And like so many other humans, we were dreaming of fruit and nut trees in the orchard, a well in the courtyard, and a community of people with whom we might share some common vision and common ground. We visited as many “eco”villages as we could, talking with people who are connected to the land, the sowing and reaping of life-sustaining harvests. Yet, after experiencing firsthand some of the seemingly insurmountable challenges within such “intentional” communities, we landed on a concept we called a “loose community”. And then we realised that this was a concept that had already been invented a long time ago, so we began to look for a “village”. A village where we might live alongside and within the context of an established, living peasant culture (as many of our own ancestors did, and also in relatively close proximity to where their bones fed the earth).

Might we learn from the wisdom and skills of our neighbors, while supporting their efforts? Might we manage to become implicated in the social fabric of mutual responsibility? We could not yet know how living in a place where the ecological biodiversity is still so present that it evokes tears of mourning and celebration from ecologists from less ecologically fortunate countries (like most in Western Europe) would influence us. We also could not know what changes would need to occur to bring about our own village-mindedness, nor how painful some of these learning and unlearning processes would continue to be.

Rural Transylvania

Before finding our way home to this small Transylvanian mountain village, we were traveling and exploring on several continents - if not physically with our bodies, then through the recounting of stories of friends or through books. We sought wisdom and inspiration both from within our own families and places as well as those dissimilar to the ones we were born into. We traveled, also in our imaginations to other times and distant lands, trying to follow the traces of all that has been lost, trying to feel into the “phantom limbs” of our own cultures. It was during these searching times that we found Helena Norberg-Hodge’s book ‘Ancient Futures’ which has had a powerful effect on us. Her description of the Ladakhi people and their ways of living led us to see and understand ever clearer the preciousness of rural village life, to appreciate the wisdom of traditions, of how people can maintain a basic lifestyle woven in togetherness. ‘Ancient Futures’ became a crucial piece in our contemplations, one which contributed inspiration to choose the life we currently live.

Transylvania, in the Northwest of Romania offers much of what Helena describes in her book. Though demonstrably under threat (alongside the rest of our precious planet, by what Charles Eisenstein calls “the world-devouring machine”), this bioregion still contains more than traces of possibility for living life connected through time with place. Many of the pathways and architectures of peasant life are still intact. In fact, most European peas-ants live in this region, right alongside the epochal changes brought about by modernity and globalisation. Having joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007, Romania found her doors opened widely to intense geopolitics and global market economics, with all the dazzle and devastations inherent therein. Living these changes, as we have, in this place during these years has been, at times, unbearable. We have practiced bearing faithful witness. The circumstances also create an opportunity to discern what is truly precious, to foster and sequester seeds of what is life-serving, and to do what we can to help steward our local community into a potential, more beautiful future.

Carsten on Provision farm Transylvania

After seven years learning and creating our own inner pathways for the skills we needed for our newly chosen lifestyle, we started to open up our small farm to visitors who also wanted to learn, unlearn and grow alongside us. We attract many visitors who hear a call to ready themselves for a way of life that is unfamiliar to what they were told to expect. To serve as a landing place “at the crossroads,” Provision Transylvania was born. It has been 13 years now that we have committed ourselves to hosting guests, volunteers and participants for visits, conferences, immersive weeks in self sufficient living skills, soil food web courses, nonviolent communication trainings or deep dives into the global polycrises. Our farm turned itself into Provision, a project in which we are “creating living and learning opportunities which contribute to the wellbeing of planet and people”. We and this village chose one another, and this created a space for Provision, alongside our son Carsten, herd of goats and many other beings to be born.

We continue to plant fruit and nut tree saplings in our orchard, replacing some of the old ones sprouted almost a century earlier. In 1936, a peasant family built our current home with rocks and trees carried by oxcart from the mountains above the village. As the roots of our orchards and gardens were growing stronger and deeper every year, so too were our own connections with the land, the people, and the local cultures. The place kept providing us with an abundance of nutrition, learning, inspiration as well as heartache. We were witness, for example, to the water system (built by the villagers) becoming privatised. When we first entered the village, water ran free. As the high costs of water as well as the first incursions of capitalist/industrial agriculture were wreaking havoc in the countryside of Romania, we got involved in local activism to support peasants to be able to continue their lifestyles. Small farmers are struggling to survive amidst the rapidly growing and intensification of farm holdings. Large-scale land-grabbing has come to dominate the scene, with most of Romania’s farmland being privately owned (96%), of which up to 30% is held by foreign capitalist investors. Half of the farmland is controlled by only 12.000 large scale industrial enterprises, i.e. 1% of farms control 50% of arable land, while half of Europe’s small scale farmers – currently 3.2 million with farms under 5 hectares – live in Romania. Family farm succession rates are very low with only 7.5% of the farmers being younger than 35 years old. All of these numbers mean that five small farms disappear every hour. This raises questions and concerns around who will be farming in Romania in 10 years, and on which land.

Once again the call from place invoked a next project into becoming and together with several neighbors and friends, we have helped to bring into existence another project, of and for the land: ALPA, which stands for ‘Access to Land for Agroecology’ and focuses on how we can support local food systems, biodiversity enhancement and bioregional regen-eration. Through ALPA, we are considering the crises and opportunities that can be seen amidst the complexity of the many interrelated systems of our current global life: What if land was not privately owned but commonly stewarded? What if human beings, while producing our own food, could also support the more-than-human life on our planet? What if young people were better supported and rewarded to become regenerative farmers? These are some of the many questions we are wanting to address.

Hayfield with high wild flower biodiversity in Transylvania

Transylvania is (still) a European biodiversity “hotspot”. Traditional family farms have played a crucial role to these nature-inclusive landscapes through their small scale, diver-sified production and non-polluting way of farming. In particular, the hay meadows in this region are among the most species-rich habitats of Europe. Yet land is being treated like a commodity item. Prices are skyrocketing through speculation and large-scale land grabbing by some local and mostly international entities: industrial farmers, companies, banks, pension funds, etc. The consequence is that very little land remains available to local young farmers, land which most of them cannot afford to buy. And thus family farms are being replaced by large, mostly corporate-driven, industrial agricultural holdings, with high chemical and petrol inputs. This has devastating consequences for large swaths of diverse ecosystems, putting thousands of species at risk of extinction. Soil, water and air are be-ing exploited and polluted, thus threatening the foundation of life. Furthermore, social structures in rural areas are falling apart and we have lived this firsthand. Just as in Ladakh, our European land-based cultural traditions are also disappearing. All the while, financial resources are draining away from local people to far-away corporations. Our village used to be self-sustaining. We can still see, literally, the possibilities to hold this fabric intact, even as the undoing is well-underway.

We believe that these crises are avoidable and that a different future is possible. A future in which nature and agriculture could again collaborate instead of compete, in which diverse ecosystems might be safeguarded instead of dulled into monocultures and monochro-matic wastelands. We are working to support local food systems with the wish that the children of all species will be able to eat healthy food and connect with a thriving natural world.

Provision and ALPA emerged by the calls of place and time. They want and need to thrive, be active and alive to serve life. These two small projects are part of many movements which correspond with the ‘Local Futures’ ethos. We sense that we are helping to hold a place which plays many roles in the local ecosystem. We work and play alongside many others in the bioregion toward nurturing a small, and we hope not too fleeting, “island of sanity” within this sea of global madness.

Watch the 23-minute documentary 'Land for Life' here and the trailer here.

Photos by Lars Veraart.

Browse Local Futures blog here.