The Israeli agricultural landscape faces the most severe multi-front crisis on record in recent history, covered online with media buzz words by urban-based journalists lacking personal agricultural expertise, to “delve” into the Central Coastal Plain “tapestry” of  Tel Aviv having faced repeated, heavy missile and drone attacks from Iran, causing damage, injury, loss of life, and city sirens. The coverage “underscores” the Iran war, while expressing a feedback loop that reshapes language repeatedly with AI tools favoring the high-brow, formal, and academic vocabulary informing journalistic text of sterile content creators to ad nauseam.

Jack London’s challenging war reporting from Asia in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War was hard-hitting, detailed, and used simple wording to create gritty, straightforward war coverage for the San Francisco Examiner and other newspapers in his era’s war-torn day.

The message for people from all walks of life was more important than the messenger having walked the Yukon snows on an empty belly, trying not to impress upon his readers his vast self-taught knowledge of the English vocabulary, that just happened to be the author of the world’s runaway best-seller The Call of the Wild (1903).

He serialized The Sea-Wolf  in The Century Magazine in January 1904 to leave that month for the war with another novel under his belt; only to have an immediate best-seller with it late in 1904, when it was published as a blockbuster book. London was already a renowned literary figure and the highest-paid writer in the United States, ahead of releasing White Fang (1906), To Build a Fire (1908), The Iron Heel (1908), and Martin Eden (1909), to cite a few classics.

As with the case of prolific writers such as he, London experienced a few commercial “dud” book releases or critical failures, but really only when departing from successful adventure stories to explore other writing styles, such as political diatribes and social commentaries.

The National Library of Israel holds a collection of London’s works, along with libraries and  bookstores in Iran, Turkey, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, as his tombs are the treasure of humanity, especially male youths, and a potent resource when times get tough for young and old alike.

My late Centenary College of Shreveport English professor and personal friend, Dr. Earle Labor, wrote Jack London: An American Life (2013), which is considered the “definitive” modern biography of Jack London. As a renowned scholar and founder of the Jack London Research Center, he spent decades researching and studying London to render the account.

Offering life lessons from a writer that delivered newspapers for “scratch” as a kid,  London worked for “peanuts” in a bowling alley, worked for less than peanuts in a cannery, heaved coal as a “work beast” 10-12 hours a day for $1’s pay seven days a week, served as a lowly oyster pirate, sailed on a seal-hunting ship, rode the American rails as a wanderlust hobo to serve time as a vagrant, and searched for gold in the Klondike Gold Rush to only develop scurvy and lose some teeth, but earned his literary rite of passage to share his expressions.

Having a tough time across the board? Jack London’s “been there” and understands fully.

London’s works fosters international connection, through themes of rugged individualism paired with human solidarity, resilience, and naturalism, often translated with mutual love  across nations and barriers. His exploration of shared humanity and its survival in harsh environments resonate globally, with President Putin and President Xi each proclaiming personal admiration for Jack London, bridging divided human populations, wounded by confounded actions and confused by empty rhetoric, through shared profound readership.

It is well-documented that Vladimir Lenin requested that Jack London’s tales be read to him on his deathbed. According to his spouse, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin was deeply moved by the gold rush short stories “To Build a Fire” and particularly “Love of Life,” also praised in China by President Xi, but Lenin dismissed another London story “The Seed of McCoy.”

Those on their deathbeds can be tough critics, especially the Premier of the Soviet Union with Lenin’s brutal reputation, but overall Vlad was soothed by London’s Klondike tales.

But Jack London was a farmer in his heart of hearts, particularly in the latter years of life. While a whiskey-forward author and adventurer, London considered his “Beauty Ranch,” still beautiful today, in Glen Ellen, California to be his ahavah, spending his money like water on innovative and sustainable farming practices, like his “Pig Palace,” the world’s “holy grail” of piggeries, due to its revolutionary circular design, sanitary standards, and stonemason’s construction chiseled with firm exactness from London’s ripe imagination.

Inspired by soil techniques he observed in the Orient as a war correspondent, and informed by Franklin Hiram King’s Farmers Of Centuries recounting with examination the ingenuity and diligence of how the Chinese people over centuries have employed resources, London applied ancient methods for retaining moisture and preventing hillside soil erosion through grading and terracing to reshape the worn-out hillsides in Sonoma Valley into “stair-steps.” .

Ol’ Jack graded the steeper hills on his property into gentle rolling, stair-stepped contours and abrupt, stone-reinforced terraces to create long furrows, which trapped rainwater, reducing run-off and preventing moisture from evaporating, but this effort ahead of its time added expense and contributed to financial strain, yet he was as stubborn as an old pack mule.

London described his 1,400 acre scenic “Ranch of Good intentions,” that at times drove him to drink, “the dearest thing in the world to me” second only to his “scenic” second wife and fellow adventurer in Charmiane, described by Jack affectionately as his “Mate-Woman.”

He claimed he spent 10 hours a day farming, and 2 hours a day writing, attempting to run a modern, scientific agricultural operation. For he was an early pioneer of sustainable farming, using Far East-born, eco-friendly methods and building innovative, durable farm structures, raising the first concrete block silos, standing 40 feet tall each, west of the Mississippi River.

Jack London specifically said about stewarding his sustainable estate in his “Valley of the Moon” (Sonoma Valley): I believe the soil is our one indestructible asset, and by green manures, nitrogen-gathering cover crops, animal manure, rotation of crops, proper tillage and drainage, I am getting results which the Chinese have demonstrated for forty centuries.”

London advocated for avoiding deep, destructive plowing to prevent soil erosion and nutrient depletion from the top soil. And London’s “farm of the future” philosophy– focused on soil conservation can inform Israel’s wartime agricultural rehabilitation by promoting restorative rather than “get by with urea ” productive farming, now tied up in the Strait of Hormuz with uncertainty, in alignment with Torah principles for earth stewardship to honor the Almighty.

By utilizing London’s use of composted and broken down cow manure, pig manure, green manure, and other composted organic waste for high-yield crops, that included barley, oats (for oat hay), grapes, plums (for prunes), eucalyptus, shredded corn for silage stored in his silos, and spineless cactus for his livestock feed, long-term soil health is made #1 priority.

While Jack London championed organic methods, modern Israeli AgTech is highly advanced  and considered by this U.S.author more resourceful and efficient regarding water and land  resources management compared to London’s homeland today. But the heavy practice of sustainable farming by Israeli framers, who may not know Jack London was a pioneer of sustainable “pigsty” farming using liquid waste-to-fertilizer conversion, or what he called “model farming,” in the early 20th century, provides further merit to London’s view of the soil as humanity’s “one indestructible asset.”

London, whose biological father never truly acknowledged him, considered the distinct possibility of having Jewish blood, while perhaps Anglo-Saxon in heritage. He also had favored intellectual relationships with Jewish individuals, such as poet Anna Strunsky, a Russian-born Jew, who he collaborated with as a kindred spirit on the little-known novel titled The Kempton-Wace Letters, tilling the fertile soil of love, sex, and romance (1903).

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)