“Our natural passions are few in number; they are the means to freedom, they tend to self-preservation. All those which enslave and destroy us have another source; nature does not bestow them on us; we seize on them despite her.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (via philosophybits)
“Vivien Sansour was working as a writer and photographer in the northern West Bank when she began to hear stories about Jadu’I, a succulent watermelon once abundant in Jenin, Palestine, from the farmers and families she was documenting.
“Everybody was talking about how they gave birth to their kids in the watermelon fields, how in the war they used to hide in the watermelon fields, [how] they exported Jadu’I on trucks when the borders were open before ’48 to Turkey, to Syria, everywhere,” she tells Broadly. “[But] whenever I asked about it, they would say, ‘Oh, you’re asking about the dinosaur.’”
Under Israeli occupation, Palestinian farming has suffered greatly. A 2015 study by the United Nations documented the devastating effects of the occupation on Palestinian agriculture due to “restrictions on access to land, water and markets; loss of land to settlements and the separation barrier; demolition of structures and infrastructure and the uprooting of trees; restrictions on access to essential agricultural inputs; dearth of credit for agricultural production; flooding of Palestinian markets with agricultural imports from Israel and settlements; and environmental damage.”
For years, Jadu’I was considered among the occupation’s agricultural casualties—but this narrative of Jenin’s beloved watermelon didn’t sit well with Sansour. “I couldn’t accept that it was lost,” she says. “I fell in love with the story of this watermelon.” Convinced that the seeds of the fruit had to still exist somewhere, Sansour went looking for them, mostly among farmers in Jenin.
Inside The Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library. Image courtesy of Vivien Sansour
In 2014, amidst her search, Sansour founded The Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library, which serves to “find and preserve ancient seed varieties and traditional farming practices.” With the library, Sansour’s goal was to essentially recreate her hunt for the Jadu’I seed with other varieties, then find farmers across Palestine willing to bring the seeds to life. “The main function of the library isn’t for the seeds to stay in one place,” she says. “The main function of the library is for the seeds to stay alive in the fields of farmers.”
Logistically, Sansour explains, the library works like this:
We reach out to farmers, we don’t wait for farmers to come to us. I go to farmers that I hear about, or that I meet while I am in a village; I have a huge network of farmers that we go to and say, “Would you like to try to grow this?” Or, they tell us about how they used to grow something but it has disappeared, and we say, “OK, we can bring that back.”
The other side of the library is a physical space called Art and Seeds, which Sansour is moving from Beit Sahour back to its original location in Battir this week. There, seeds are preserved in jars surrounded by agricultural and cultural art, and doors are open to members of the public looking to learn more about traditional Palestinian farming and indigenous varieties.
In 2016, six years after she learned of the elusive Jadu’I watermelon, Sansour finally found its seeds in a farmer’s drawer among his screwdrivers and hammers. The man told Sansour that he’d had the seeds for seven years, but that no one seemed to want them. “It was a bittersweet moment, because of course I was happy I found them, but I also was so sad that that is where we’ve reached in terms of rejecting who we are,” Sansour remembers.
In Palestine, agriculture has served as more than a means to making a living or getting dinner on the table; it’s come to represent a national history and identity with pride in its soil and its capacity for self-sufficiency. (The olive tree, for example, has long been regarded as a symbol of Palestinian resilience.) However, in the decades since 1967, due to permit restrictions, settler attacks, water supply limitations, and more agricultural consequences of Israel’s occupation, Palestine has become increasingly dependent on Israeli agricultural imports. As a result, many young Palestinians today have replaced farming and traditional foods with Israeli supermarkets and chains like KFC. Sansour credits the latter’s popularity over Palestinian food to “the violence of self hatred that we have been fed.
In addition to environmental concerns, the idea that Palestinian society was losing its agricultural traditions was in part what led Sansour to start the library. As a child in Beit Jala, Sansour recalls one such tradition. “We had a very big fig tree, so, throughout the summer, my mom put them in bowls and sent me to the neighbors to give them figs,” she says. “The neighbors, in return, filled the pot with something else that they have—maybe they have a special kind of grape or pomegranate—and send it back to us. It was this exchange of the abundance of our earth together.”
Eight years ago, Sansour was back at her family home when she noticed they had grown extra grapes. She filled up a bucket and left it in front of her neighbor’s door. Weeks went by, and Sansour never received the bowl back or heard anything from her neighbor, so she decided to ask her if she had enjoyed them.
“She said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know what that was, so I threw it away,’” remembers Sansour. “It told me that not only was the tradition completely gone, but that we have become so disconnected with the idea that we share our fruits and vegetables. She was so far removed from this beautiful tradition that she thought there was some kind of mistake. I guess it was that moment—one of many moments—that I was reminded that I don’t want to forget who I come from. I don’t want to forget to be faithful and trusting; that nature will provide; that people will continue to be generous.”
Next on Sansour’s seed revival list is the white cucumber, a variety that was once commonly grown in the south of Palestine. “Only like two, three families grow it still,” she says. “This last year, we were able to engage 20 farmers in growing it again. What we’re doing is bringing it back to our fields and bringing it back to our market. This is how the library truly works—the farms are the library.””
“The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.” – Utah Phillips
Just 100 companies are responsible for more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. The guys who run those companies – and they are mostly guys – have gotten rich on the backs of literally all life on Earth. Their business model relies on the destruction of the only home humanity has ever known. Meanwhile, we misdirect our outrage at our neighbors, friends, and family for using plastic straws or not recycling. If there is anyone who deserves the outrage of all 7.5 billion of us, it’s these 100 people right here.
It sounds fun and all, but you do realize that it’s not actually that simple, right? Some ppl in the notes are like “kill those people, problem solved” but you do realize that these companies are vital to survival of milions of people, the way things stand now? Let’s take the Russian company Gazprom as an example. They deliver fossil gas to Russia and Central and Eastern Europe (for example 2/3 of Polish fossil gas is imported, mainly from them). Fossil gas is currently an important source of heat for houses. If the company stops functioning overnight you’ll have an international energetic crisis, and if it happens in winter it would pose a risk of a lot of people simply freezing to death. What we need to do is render them obsolete (and fast), fight for alternative energy sources to be used by countries worldwide. Sure, I can get angry at Gazprom’s ceo, but it won’t actually change anything - the whole country is running on this product. You treat them like companies like amazon, which is an error and it won’t get anyone anywhere.
It has been shown again and again that individual consumption choices can’t fix the problem. You switch to green energy, but the company you get it from gets it’s ‘bio fuel’ by cutting down forests and shipping them to bio fuel plants on coal ships. You buy local food but it’s still packed in plastics made in the most unethical ways. The chain of production is not transparent at all, incredibly complex and far out of our control. Most CO2 emission is entirely beyond the reach of your consumer choices. I won’t go into every single detail, that conversation has already been had a thousand times.
Let’s go to the more interesting question:
If you could somehow kill these 100 people, would it change anything?
Well, it probably wouldn’t bring about a revolution. The change we need, both the destruction of the systems in place and the creation of a new world in which everyone is provided for without destroying the planet, requires much more change than that.
But that’s not the only way to look at this question. All these companies, every single one of them, has consistently made objectively evil choices to make a little more profit. From oil spills and pipe lines through sacred lands to kill squads to polluted drinking water, each of these companies ruin lives for profit. They could provide us with energy in far far more ethical ways, but they consistently ruthlessly choose the most profitable option.
This doesn’t happen because the 100 people running them are evil, but because the capitalist system is designed in such a way that the profit motive always wins.
Capitalism is what is driving us to the edge of extinction. Capitalism pushes politicians and corporate rulers into power who are willing to ruthlessly follow the profit motive.
Now, let’s ask (without recommending any course of action, considering every practical barrier or starting a whole debate) the question:
if people can’t bring the whole capitalist system down in one go, what would happen if you struck a blow at the rule of the profit motive and added the survival motive?
Right now, the only consequence these companies face for pursuing the profit motive at all cost is, well, profit. What if the people who make the decision to pollute, evict and pillage for profit suddenly found that that was an extremely dangerous job to be in? Would that have an impact on how these companies behaved in the world?
