The following is an adapted version of an article written by Réka Klementisz, originally published in Magyar Krónika.
Magyar Krónika asked Márta Tkacsik, founder of Patikakert (Pharmacy Garden) in Budajenő, about responsibility, adaptation, action, and rebuilding communities in times of ecological crisis.
Márta Tkacsik is a theoretical mathematician and digital expert. For 12 years she has been growing berries on five hectares of her own organic farm, Patikakert, a microcosmos in Budajenő.
***
Some no longer talk about climate panic, but much more about climate mourning. What can you say to today’s newcomers?
To get back to their survival instinct. Humans are the only living creatures on Earth that are not fighting for their lives. I also see this as a generational problem. I grew up with the idea that it’s the best to survive even against the odds. I can be anything I want, I can learn, but it’s essential that I take care of myself. My parents gave me a model for this, and I was also brought up to cope with my fate as a minority. It taught me to adapt with an upright attitude. We had everything we needed even in the reality of the shortage economy in Upper Hungary behind the iron curtain, but so did the traditional peasant culture of the past.
Have we lost our survival instinct?
Yes, as if we had given up. A generation has grown up in the last 30 years that is no longer socialized in this way. We have outsourced everything, and we pay someone else to do the basic tasks for us. We have taken away from masses of people the sense of responsibility that anything can depend on them. From the age of humanism, the focus gradually shifted from the community to the individual, but the shift was slow. More recently, however, individualization has accelerated; and not as a result of well-understood processes that are happening before our eyes. We have become a civilization of self-contained, vulnerable individuals.
According to Balázs Stumpf-Biró, a collapse researcher, climate change alone will have such a significant impact that our lives could change beyond recognition in the next 30 years. How does this prediction affect you?
I have long known that there is no other way but to adapt. My grandchildren will now live in a different world. I see the disproportionality of our lives as the biggest contradiction of our times. Technology dictates science because it is the way to keep pumping industry and consumption, which generates more profit. It is a well-controlled process. Meanwhile, we know nothing about the depths of nature, we are not interested in it, because it is outside the realm of money-making and it is not a humanly controllable domain. Absurdly, for example, we know very little about the dynamics of the living tissue of topsoil. What is valuable today is only what human reason has created. And this overvaluation creates tension reaching a breaking point in a system of which man is also a part, but the harmonious laws of which he is unable to live with. We will reach our limits before we come to our senses.
‘We have become a civilization of self-contained, vulnerable individuals’
From pessimistic panic to nihilistic optimism to relativization of the climate problem, there is a wide range of attitudes in the public discourse. What is the right attitude towards the near future from the perspective of Patikakert?
It conveys realist awareness and insight, and it encourages action. It is also mentally destructive to take responsibility away from the individual. We can always have an impact on our own lives and the climate situation, we can choose to rebuild communities and small circles of happiness instead of a global pseudo-community of individuals and consumerist alliances of interests. Not only has monoculture taken hold in agriculture, but the dimensions of modern man have also narrowed.
The Earth is likely to reach its physical, geological, and ecological limits in the near future, so the direction of the continuous human conquest of space will have to change. It must move inwards, towards a redistribution of proportions. I think it is the right attitude to be already working to recapture the human dimensions we have now lost.
For example?
Horticulture. Growing our own quality food. I mean banal things. These are the things we need to reclaim. The narrative still hasn’t caught up with how these are today outdated yet so essential dimensions.
Does your movement launched with the slogan ‘Your Garden Matters Too!’ also show that there is hope?
There is. It’s never too late. 500 trees were planted in two weeks last autumn. The idle acceptance of the situation is nihilism, but that’s not me. What we’ve done wrong can and must be put right. I can think of few more well-educated 20th-century Hungarian thinkers than Béla Hamvas. This is how he writes of the New Testament: ‘A holy sign written in the heart of every man.’ That is the sign that guides me.
What are the mathematical chances that humanity will come to its senses?
As long as money makes money, not much. But this human construct also seems to be reaching its limits already. In his book Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein proposes a radical change in the way money works, without a major catastrophe. He takes into account man’s innate need to create at all times and proposes cooperation rather than competition. This is what I trust and believe in.
Related articles:
Click here to read the original article.
