Heat Stress
by Maren Preiß
I have an appointment with Mathias von Mirbach, the 63 year old master farmer at the CSA farm Kattendorfer Hof. We meet in Neverstaven, the extension farm of one of Europe’s biggest CSA farms near Hamburg in Germany. Our plan is to visit some fields to check if the grains are ripe enough to harvest.
When I got into the car in Hamburg at 3.30 pm I could hardly touch the steering wheel. Outside it was almost 40 degrees Celsius, inside the car even more. I am sweating. “Pling!” A message arrives. I look at the display of my iPhone – and see this:
It’s a message from David, the Mexican biologist who was one of my travel companions in Mexico this spring, when I did my research for a CSA coffee story. He forwarded me the message – “Greetings from rainy Mixteca” – together with a picture of coffee farmer Eliceo. David works with him and other coffee farmers for the German CSA Teikei Coffee.
It’s rain season in Mexico right now. The picture of Eliceo in his rain cover brings back sweet memories. The villagers of the Mexican village Santiago Nuyoo are called “people of the rain”. It was beautiful to see how connected these farmers are to the earth, to the sun, to the rain.
While driving to Neverstaven, with the air condition on full blast, I keep thinking of Eliceo. When, early morning, he leaves his house and goes to the field, he never uses a car, to avoid pollution. Eliceo walks an hour to reach his coffee plantation up in the mountains. He uses a walkie-talkie instead of a mobile phone. While the cool breeze of the airconditioning begins to take effect, I ask myself: are we, societies of the west, spoiled by affluence, ready to act more like Eliceo? Are we prepared to think differently and act according to our knowledge? Are we willing to avoid actions which cause harm to our environment?
When I arrive in Neverstaven one hour later it’s still 38°C. After taking the first shots in the grain field my camera sents an SOS message: “The camera has reached its temperature limits.” In a way this sentence describes aptly the self-inflicted mess in which humankind finds itself, including my reaction to the warning: I ignore it and continue shooting, assuming that someone else will solve the problem for me. I know that the security mechanism will switch off my camera to prevent it from overheating.
The earth has no such safety mechanism. It cannot stop people from doing harm to it. Or can it? The earth shows its precarious condition in many forms: forest fires are just one of them. Earth has already exceeded its temperature limits. And ignorance doesn’t pay off.
After the camera’s heat warning pops up again, I ignore it once more, climb a perch and make a wide-angle shot: farmer Mathias von Mirbach in the middle of a rye field, trying to escape the heat in the protective shade of an old oak. Greetings from tropical Neverstaven.
