Reconception: The Fall by Deborah Greenspan Read Free Book Online Page B

greeted them was like nothing they
had ever imagined. Eye of Eagle signaled for them to get out of the
van and they did.
    "This is our farm," he said, sweeping his arm across
the scene. "From here, we feed our people and our animals." It did
not look like any 20th century farm. There were no orderly rows of
grains and vegetables, all alike, but clusters of many varieties of
useable plants, including small trees and bushes.
    "It doesn't look like a farm," Evie said
doubtfully.
    "It's what's known as sustainable agriculture,"
Teller explained. "Different varieties of foodstuffs grown together
support the soil and eliminate the need for artificial fertilizers
and pesticides."
    "But how?" Garret wanted to know. "How is it
possible? It looks more like a garden or a forest than a farm!"
    "It is more like a garden. We've encouraged the
growth of a great variety of plants, trying to get it as close to a
natural system as we could."
    "But what about the ultraviolet radiation? What about
water?"
    "Most of the monocultures they used to cultivate at
the end of the industrial era were too weak to withstand excessive
UVB, but these plants were not. Our people have been here for a
very long time, you see—over a hundred years. They chose their seed
carefully. Many of these crops were originally weeds. They're
strong and adaptable.
    Like here, this is dandelion. It has many uses. The
leaves are delicious as a salad green. The roots can be made into a
kind of coffee. It also has medicinal uses. Or here," Eye of Eagle
continued, "these are blackberries, and this is a hazel nut tree.
That stand of grasses over there is a kind of wild wheat." He
stopped talking for a while.
    "It's beautiful," Evie whispered to no one in
particular.
    "These are legumes aren't they?" Garret asked,
stooping to touch a drooping pod.
    "Right," Eye of Eagle replied. Pulling a pod off the
vine and splitting it with a fingernail, he offered a pea to Garret
who tasted it carefully and one to Evie, who chewed with
relish.
    "But what about water? We thought this area was
pretty much desert."
    "Come on," Eye of Eagle said, "We'll show you."
    They walked through the farm, past flowering vines
and confusions of berry brambles, stands of wheat and rye, patches
of beet and dandelion, and under fruit and nut bearing trees. A
squirrel scurried across their path, startling Evie into an
exclamation half fright, half delight. Laughing, she leaned
momentarily against Eye of Eagle. Emerging from under the trees, he
pointed out the foods that needed full sunlight and grew in the
meadows. Beyond the meadow, the hills dropped away to the river.
"We get our water from this river ... "
    "But isn't the water polluted?" Garret
interjected.
    "Actually it's a lot cleaner than it used to be.
It's also a lot bigger. It used to be just under 1000 feet across,
now it's more than a mile. Part of the Greenhouse Effect, you know,
more evaporation, more rainfall. We get some really serious storms;
that's why we picked this place; it's high ground. The river seems
to have stopped rising in the last few years, and it seems to be
slowly cleansing itself as heavy metals get washed out to sea and
clean water is recycled up to the mountaintops, but we still
distill it."
    "But doesn't that take an enormous expenditure of
energy?"
    "No," the mountain man replied. "When we came here
in 2010, we knew that things were going to get worse, not better,
so we planned for that eventuality. We built solar distillers to
clean the water, you can see them over there." He pointed to a wide
swath of land, at the edge of the palisade, which was covered with
long lines of metal and glass rectangles, catching the sun's light
and heat. "We think that in another fifty years or so, the water
will be clean enough to drink again, but we know that irrigation
can ruin the land, leaving salts behind, so we will probably always
distill our irrigation water."
    "How do you get the water up here?" Garret wanted to
know.
    "The pumps are