#PassionPlayers Aaron von Frank

No, I didn't choose this image just cuz their duck Margaret (aka Marge) is featured. Nope! — No, I didn’t choose this image just cuz their duck Margaret (aka Marge) is featured. Nope!

Aaron and his wife Susan are two of the coolest people I know. The amount of passion they have for several things is transparently not only in their work but also just in conversing with them. Also they are disgustingly smart. I highly encourage you to check out Grow Journey – I have been a member for about a year now, I think, and I am overwhelmed with how much I have learned, how much I need to learn, and how much work goes into the project. I am hoping Susan agrees to be featured in this series as well, but in the meantime, enjoy Aaron’s responses!

1. How do you define “passion”?

Passion is what anchors your ship. My life trajectory hasn’t been linear because I’ve sampled a lot of things in search of something I cared deeply about; something meaningful that could capture my imagination and my interest for a lifetime. Once I found that thing, I no longer felt the need to keep “sailing.” (I’m not literally a sailor, I just think that’s a useful analogy.)

2. What is your passion?

I guess to the outside world, that “thing” is known under a few different terms: organic agriculture, agroecology, permaculture, etc.. Basically, transitioning human society from extractive models to regenerative models (ecologically, economically, socially). That starts at the foundation of a civilization, and food production is the foundation of every civilization. It helps define our relationship with the planet and with each other.

As an example of that: hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and horticultural societies perceive themselves as part of nature, not separate/removed from it. They tend to be much more decentralized in their social hierarchies and inclusive of women. Their spiritual worlds are comprised of human and animal gods, male and female gods. Nature is sacred, the provider of life.

If you look at agricultural societies, particularly those with origins in the Middle East and Europe, you see a different cultural narrative. For instance, the word “lord” means “keeper of the grains.” This was the local strongman who hoarded and doled out food and/or protection to his subjects. As such, it makes sense for those societies to create a male king God that mirrors their male-dominated, hierarchical societies. What’s interesting to note is how often throughout history agricultural societies have collapsed as a result of over-exploitation of their local environmental resources. Due to thousands of years of extractive agricultural practices, the Middle East is largely a barren desert now; whereas it used to be one of the most fertile, verdant regions on earth.

Throughout the history of agriculture, when the soil was ruined and food could not be produced or local populations expanded beyond the land’s carrying capacity, there were two options: 1) expand/conquer, or 2) collapse. If you’ve studied history, you know that’s why agricultural societies are inherently expansionary, militant, male-dominated and hierarchical. Our religions mirror that reality.

So, IMO, food is much more than a cheap pile of calories on your plate. Given that there are 7+ billion of us inhabiting a planet that experts say has about 60 years of productive topsoil left, our food production models are rather important. We can’t afford to be extractive with that model: we’re destroying our oceans, our atmosphere, our soil, causing the anthropocene extinction, etc. in the process. The sand is running out of our hourglass. Up until a few hundred years ago, there were only a few hundred million people on earth, so these patterns weren’t that big of a problem. We’d just move somewhere else or there would be a local population collapse that didn’t really impact another society living on the other side of the world. Now, we’ve run out of planet and we’re still pretty far away from being able to hop to the next rock in our solar system, terraform it, and make it habitable for life as we know it. NASA is working on that problem though.

The important point is that it doesn’t have to be this way; these are choices. Societies change; culture is malleable. As Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” So when more and more research is piling up showing that we can grow all the food the world needs without using pesticides, herbicides, etc. while also building soil health, species biodiversity, and without removing the carbon from our soil and dumping it into the atmosphere—that’s a demonstrably better model on multiple levels. We know how to do it. People are doing it. Researchers are proving the efficacy. It just takes a while for a transformation as big as this one to work its way through, and these aren’t notions that many people on the outside understand or care about. It’s hard to boil it down to a bumper sticker slogan.

3. How did you know that this was a passion and not just a passing interest?

When it consumed me. When I obsessively read about it and experiment with it on our own tiny piece of earth. When I unconsciously steer conversations in that direction. I guess I’m an organic food evangelist.

4. How do you make sure you follow your passion and nurture it?

Thankfully, my wife and I have found a way to turn our passion into a business via www.GrowJourney.com. We’re close to being able to do that full-time now, and it will be really nice to have our passion be our work. You know the saying, “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I think that’s fairly accurate, although building a business inevitably involves very hard work and doing things you don’t necessarily love (or know anything about when you’re getting started).

5. What is your advice to other people who are trying to find or follow their passion?

Hmm, I try not to give blanket advice because everybody’s path is different. So, I guess my advice would be try not to take any single person’s advice as the one way of doing something. You know yourself better than anyone else. Keep learning and exposing yourself to interesting things and interesting people until you find something that consumes you. Hopefully, it’s something you can make a career in, but if not, you can still do lots of good work in a hobby, your spare time, or as a volunteer.

6. Anything else you want to say?

Yes, when you’re done reading this, take a few minutes out of your day to read this 30 year study by Rodale Institute (done in coordination with the USDA and University of Pennsylvania): http://66.147.244.123/~rodalein/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/FSTbookletFINAL.pdf. Then start voting with your dollars and forks three times each day.

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