Gerard promotes farming on the island through public advocacy, and through sharing his land, machinery, and know-how with other local farmers. While collecting data for a graduate program in Strathcona Provincial Park in 1970, I met an elderly native Canadian who helped set me on what has become one of my life's themes. He told me how sorry he was that I could only be a visitor living on Vancouver Island rather than being of Vancouver Island as he was. He explained how his father and his father's father are part of the earth around him. Everything he eats or drinks comes from that earth and the rivers that ran through it.
Every meal is an act of communion.
The food I ate came from distant fields, as did his children's food and his grandchildren's. Our bodies were made of California or Mexico or Illinois or Chile. His words brought me back to a conversation I had with a brew master in southeastern Germany in the early '60s. During my first, army-subsidized time in Europe, I hung around farms to learn about European agriculture. As we sat eating at an outdoor table or a hilltop gasthaus, the brew master told me of his journey to America and how he could not comprehend the contrast of the unspoiled beauty of the natural landscape against the ugly sprawl that Americans lived in.