Put down that butter knife
It’s time for the chainsaw
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I love my chainsaw – from pouring the honey-colored bar oil into the little tank to smelling the fresh sawdust, from the audacious sound to its ability to slice through dense wood. Mostly I love the confidence I gained as a woman in my 40’s when I learned how to use one from a pro.
But I never realized the wisdom of chainsaws…until now. Wielded with respect and knowledge, they have the power to take down giants and reshape a landscape. It’s time we do a little of both. We can’t do it with anything less.
The Basics
When you start a chainsaw, place it on the ground and put your foot on the handle. (Some people don’t do this. God bless them and their trauma surgeons.) That’s because you pull the cord hard to get the engine started. If you’re not holding the saw down, the entire machine can lift off the ground and take off a limb.
Once it starts, you pick it up and rev the throttle to clear out the gunk. This is as satisfying as it is deafening. For 5 seconds you feel like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator.
When approaching your target tree, clear the area for two paths of escape. There is much to felling a tree that is under our control – the size and location, the straightness or crookedness, the notch cut that helps direct it. There is also a moment when the tree begins to fall that is completely out of our control.
Every time I cut down a tree, I volunteer for span of time in my life when everything is out of my control.
As you bring the chainsaw bar to waist height or just below and parallel to the ground, maintain full throttle. If you go at it tentatively, negotiating with the tree that you’re not really going to hurt it so please don’t hurt back, the tree will grip those teeth and pull that chain right off. You’ll be left staring at a flat metal bar with an industrial-grade necklace hanging off of it.
Giants don’t negotiate. And they don’t fell easily.
Anything going full throttle can cause injury, so chaps are required. If I slip up, the chaps won’t keep the chainsaw from slicing into my leg, but they will probably keep it from taking off my leg. Tiny threads in the chaps catch the blades of the saw and tangle themselves up in it to gum up the works. Kevlar is ingenious and extra bonus, invented by a woman.
Trees tend to drop dead branches when you start cutting into them. This makes helmets an added requirement. A helmet won’t keep my neck from breaking if a tree falls on me, but it has already saved me from some pretty bad headaches.
Some people are terrified of chainsaws. Some think they’re too destructive. I think they make the change I need to make at the time and in the place I need to make it.
The Alternative: Butter Knives
Butter knives, on the other hand, are safe. They stay inside. They know their place in the utensil tray. They’re inoffensive. They’re also ineffective on anything but butter.
I was talking to a young farm and food activist at the Iowa Farmers Union convention the other day. He had helped gather about 100 activists from around the state. They were refreshingly diverse in age.
I watched from the back of the room as he moderated a panel of legislators. I stood in awe at the potential in the room. Young people jarred and disrupted by 2008, Covid and George Floyd were asking tough questions of the elected officials at the front of the room.
I doubt they heard the answers they had hoped for. The panel ended with polite applause and a request to come to Lobby Day at the Capitol in January.
I approached my young friend afterwards.
“I have one word for you.” He looked at me quizzically. “Disrupt.”
His lips tightened. His eyes dropped down and then into the distance about 20 degrees off my left shoulder. He took a breath and began to speak what I’ve come to recognize as Iowish.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. I’m paraphrasing the rest because it was the verbal equivalent of overcooked noodles. “We don’t want the local food movement to get marginalized. We want to partner with policymakers. We can’t do that if we’re disruptive.”
Pass the dinner rolls and get me some butter.
The Republican legislator had just said - for the second year in a row mind you - how the Iowa Department of Ag and Land Stewardship (IDALS) budget is so small ($60 million) we couldn’t count on more funding for the Choose Iowa program ($650,000) that brands and promotes local food, a program so popular among farmers that they’d applied for nearly twice that much in its first year.
Did you get that? The total Choose Iowa request comes to .01 percent of the ag budget in a state where agriculture generates $221 BILLION each year, according to Big Ag itself. If they raised this marketing program budget to a measly $1 million, the request would represent a 1/100ths of a point increase but help dozens of more farmers.
Even Cargill-Bayer.edu (aka Iowa State University) has published research on the multiplier effects of local food farmers:
Their money circulates in the local economy.
Their “labor intensive” industry means more jobs.
They tend to use their farms for agritourism much more than corporate farms (because requiring a Ty-vek suit to go see the little piggies in their big house isn’t very tourist-friendly.)
They attract young people to our aging state.
As we saw during COVID when Big Ag broke, they make Iowa more resilient.
Local food farming provides alternative economic, social and cultural values to our vertically-integrated commodity crop system.
And that’s the problem. To the Farm Bureau and the Big Ag interests it represents, local food farming is a face fly, an annoyance. In a bad year (like 2020), it rises to a minor threat. They’d rather it didn’t exist at all.
Elected policymakers have an interest in limiting their number of motivated enemies, so instead of taking it out back and shooting it, they just starve it to death. Some $650,000 per year should do it, especially if it’s enough to get the troublemakers to roll over and play nice.
And it’s working. A coalition that took years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to create proclaimed we have much to celebrate. We did it! We got this program in place! And, added bonus, IDALS under the Kim Reynolds administration of all things, is asking to fund it again! Yay! (Full disclosure - I’m a member of the board of the Iowa Farmers Union which is a leader in the coalition.)
I celebrate with them. In this environment, it’s a miracle to get a single victory for independent farms. I believe local food farms are the only future for independent farms. This particular victory took a LOT of organizing by many smart, dedicated people over a long time.
But then that’s part of Big Ag’s plan, right? Get us to expend all our resources on one small victory at a time so we can never reshape the whole landscape, like taking a butter knife to a tree.
What do we say to the rest of the folks trying to take down giants?
Do we tell them that when our giants take less than we expected from our public schools or deport fewer people, when not as many books are banned or fewer women die from illegal abortions, we’ll still come to the capitol every year - as we’ve done for decades - and politely wait for them outside the Senate and House chambers in the off chance they deign to meet with us?
A time for chainsaws
I’m not advocating violence. I don’t think we should use chainsaws on anyone. (Though bringing thousands of chainsaws to the state capital and starting them up on the front steps would make a statement…)
But it is time to act like a chainsaw: Put everything we can into our democracy, pull with all we’ve got, provide counterbalance then go full throttle and let small things work together to tangle up a forceful reaction we can’t foresee but can anticipate. And the big one: Accept that sometimes, once events are put in motion, they may be beyond our control.
It’s risky, yes. Yet when it’s over and the tree is down, the firewood laid in, the new habitat for wildlife established and the canopy opened up for a new ecology below, we’ll have ourselves a new day. We’ll enjoy a new relationship with power.
You can stick with the butter knife if you choose. It’s safe. Inoffensive. Polite. Predictable. But it’ll never take down a giant.
Use the comment space below to offer ideas for how to disrupt power in the coming times. Let’s get the brainstorm going!
Winter photos from Draco Hill and want a rooster? See below.
I’m spreading my disruption beyond Iowa in 2025 - community refrigerators wherever people are. Once we remind people how easy it is to pass along their extra food, an amazing community is connected.
Brilliant analogy, Suzan!