Category Archives: Resilience

The Lies We Tell

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The kitchen windows are steamed up from canning, the countertops covered with tidy jars of tomatoes. The deluge is under control, for now.

The table is piled with empty glass jars we had saved for future use. They are all that remains of the capers, pickles, fruit juice, jams, and sundry other commercial products we buy from the grocery, the kind of odd glassware every household accumulates. Cabinets overflowing, we finally made the inevitable decision to toss the collection into the garbage, which is to say we have consigned it to the local landfill, that collective midden we are all building.

It occurs to me that recycling is a comforting lie we tell ourselves. Like the greasy hamburger with fries we eat today while promising ourselves a healthier diet tomorrow, it’s a lie that allows us to perpetually defer the inconvenient truth. It’s a lie that allows us to paint our collective lack of will into a vivid palette colored in virtue and redden our backs with self-congratulatory patting, while accomplishing nothing.

There is really no effective glass recycling effort on this planet, and plastic recycling is the joke whose telling lasts a billion years. Should we recycle? Absolutely. (Although reuse might be the better option.) But, of course, the problem lies much deeper than in recycling.

“I don’t buy books; I read only on my computer.” “In my city of eight million, I don’t have a car. I always take mass transit.” “I plant basil for my local pollinators … can my own tomatoes … grow my own corn.” Well, not to squelch enthusiasm for any of these valiant efforts, but they are all piles of greasy comfort lies that weigh heavy on the promise of a better future.

We simply can’t recycle away the debris of our modern lives. It is an endless stream that we are incapable of seeing from start to finish. We stand on the banks and toss our rubbish into the river, wipe our hands on our shirts, and say, satisfied, “Well, that’s that sorted.” And as we turn to go, we glance dismissively at the neighbor who tosses his refuse on the bank.

We can’t single-stream recycle the burgeoning waste of our consumer civilization or dumpster our way to a healthy planet. Ours is a deluge that cannot be controlled. We are the lie we tell.

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Reading this weekend: A new work by David Kline: The Round of a Country Year, a farmer’s day book. Kline is a man who comes closer than most to not telling the lie.

Driving to New Castle

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the courthouse in New Castle, KY

The best journey always begins with, “I got off the interstate on a two-lane road….” On that road there is not a gas station or convenience store or Arby’s to clutter the view. Instead, the road is among the more hopeful of exits from our sameness. It takes us away from our desire to cut through and over, from our need to engineer our way from point A to point B with the greatest of efficiencies.

That there was nothing at this particular exit was something, an overlooked something. A lane that weaves among old trees, old homes, small towns, small and large farms, herds of cattle, and the ghosts of tobacco fields. A road that leads eventually to New Castle, county seat of Henry County, Kentucky.

Its rural roots still in evidence with its barns and tidy farmhouses, Henry County is threatened on the west by a consuming yellow growth on the map. The name doesn’t matter, but for our purposes we will call it the “true nothing.” There, a horde of our species exists, locust-like, devouring the land and its resources, imagining itself, as it navigates between Costco and Starbucks, to be the center of the universe.

That we have reconfigured the particles present at the creation into a geegaw landscape is our true sacrilege. Offered up now is an asylum for those fearful of the dirt. It’s a place where the inmates, swaddled and cocooned safely away from the open windows, are allowed to conceive that they were not fashioned from that very same soil that lies, bricked and paved over, under their feet. Where, in their cells at night, they conjure that their atomized consumer ways are the definition of culture and community. Where not knowing is confused with knowing. Where “nothing” is mislabeled as “something.”

In New Castle, I stopped at the diner around the corner from the courthouse. Over a plate of turnip greens, beans, country-fried steak, and cornbread, I felt that I was somewhere knowable. Somewhere small enough that you not only knew your neighbors, but that there was a good chance you’d gone to school with them years before and that you would attend their funeral years in the future. To me, that’s a hopeful way to live.

My turnip greens now polished off with the last crumbs of cornbread, I stepped outside. A group of farmers had set up produce tables on the courthouse lawn, in the shade of a colony of massive white oaks. A Walmart tractor-trailer nudged up to the intersection. From its open windows blared rap music, the sound of nothing in a vehicle containing nothing. The perfect summation for what we lose when we surrender our something, forget that we came from dirt and are dirt in the making.

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Reading this weekend: Tobacco Harvest: an elegy, by Wendell Berry

Thoughts of a Modern-day Slaveholder   

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For all intents and purposes, we are the beneficiaries of a slave economy. We may have exchanged human chattel for the energy slaves contained in a barrel of oil and the machines that consume it, but the economics work out the same and we can’t walk away without giving up status and wealth.

Thomas Jefferson well understood the conflict between the words “all men are created equal” and the reality of being part of a slaveholding economy. He called slavery a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot” on our country. He asserted that all had the right to personal freedom. And yet, he did not free his slaves.

This life we all live, powered by fossil fuel slaves, is certainly not a system based on the indentured misery of human slavery. It does, however, produce the same relationship between we the slaveholders and our property, a destruction of life, a high moral cost, and dependency on an unsustainable system. In this system, our slaves labor tirelessly to provide us with a level of grand living that would not be attainable if we relied on our own two hands. These units of stored sunlight, the busy hands of eons past, they slave away, providing comforts, doing the hard work, making clothes, shipping wine to the table, toiling in the fields, building us roads to leave by and planes to fly —at a resource cost that dooms ours, as all such slave empires, to the dusty midden of history.

Some think that in this established order there is no need to change: We are the rightful masters. God declared our right to make all subordinate to our needs. There is no moral depravity in looting this world. Our modern slaves exist to make our lives ones of comfort and ease, of mint juleps taken on the veranda. This is the “natural” world, the natural order.

Others (and I am one of them) sip on juleps and read, discuss, and try to understand the horrifying consequences of using up a limited resource. We are the self-styled enlightened. The knowledge that our privileged place is built on the lashed back of a ruined planet does not escape the grip of our soft thinking and our softer hands. We know the machines can’t keep working for us without being fed. We see the warning signs that the land is being worn out, the animals disappearing in a great new extinction, the endless offspring of our own species displacing the native flora and fauna, the waterways and the oceans soiled and empty of life.

And so we act as the planters of old acted. We make deals with our moral depravity. We use our blood money to buy “green” machinery that we hope exempts us from exploitation of the slave economy. We pledge not to buy more slaves. We put the old slaves on the block to be sold for new ones that, we tell ourselves, don’t need to be fed: sustainable slavery. All the while we conveniently ignore the huge numbers of the old order that will always be needed to build and maintain the new.

We think that if we use the profits of this hideous trade wisely, it will be for the betterment of the planet. But blood money is always blood money, and the game comes to the same end: a ruined planet. Meanwhile, wed to our Faustian bargain, we defer abolition for another generation, for our comfort is our birthright on this poor enslaved planet.

Someday, perhaps in our lifetime, the starving slaves will disappear in the middle of the night — the planet in revolt. Weeping, we will step out on the veranda of our mighty homes, calling out in vain for another julep, a sumptuous plate of food. Weak and alone, we will stumble into the fields and take unfamiliar tools into our hands, only to find the land bled dry, exhausted by our profligacy, refusing and unable to extend a hand of help.

We will then walk out the gates and begin a life of wandering through a shattered landscape. We will gather around a fire at night and tell stories to skinny offspring of the grand days when we lived in the big house.

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Reading this weekend:The Forgiveness of Nature, the story of grass by Graham Harvey.

Landfall

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Approaching storm

Growing up on the Gulf Coast, where life was measured by the big storms, your given name could serve as a handy marker of your age. Post-1957, Audrey disappeared from the lists of incoming elementary pupils almost entirely. After ’69, no one named their child Camille.

In the hallway of our home in Lake Charles, Louisiana, hung a map. On it we plotted the latitude and longitude of each new disturbance as it sprang to life off the African coast or in Mexico’s Gulf of Campeche. My older brother, always a bit of a weather nut, actively tracked the storms. He would often plot an apocalyptic path to our door, then erase the hoped-for trajectory with a “there is always next year” shrug when the storm petered out or went off to blight someone else’s life. It’s not that he ever wished harm on anyone. There’s just something seductive about the destructive power of a hurricane. It’s like watching a Powerball lottery grow, except that the payoff is something that no one really wishes to win.

This past week it was my extended family in Beaumont and Houston who won that lottery, and recipients of the winning tickets will still be dealing with the aftermath in years to come. Harvey is just one in a long list of tropical storms and hurricanes that have recently resulted in 500-to-1,000-year floods in the South: Houston (2010, 2015), Baton Rouge (2016), Columbia, South Carolina (2015), the Carolinas (2016). Sadly, epic floods account for only a handful of the extreme events now occurring with increasing frequency across the globe, and it looks as if this nasty-weather lottery will only keep building to a stronger payout with each daily contribution made to the fund of planetary climate change.

As the waves of Harvey hit the Texas shoreline, likewise a predictable wave of finger-pointing washed ashore. Seems that a certain segment of the population confused the larger community of devastated coastal residents with the lesser community that had voted for Donald Trump, and proceeded to say that they had gotten what they deserved —blaming the whole of Gomorrah on just its naughty residents.

This holier-than-thou attitude rankles me. Because, let’s face it, whether we fall into the camp of climate-change deniers, with their heads buried firmly in the sand, or climate-change acknowledgers, staring in awe as the storm approaches, virtually none of us is doing anything significant to change the planet’s trajectory of catastrophe or to prepare for its impact.

Both camps, by and large, are still active participants in the consumer-industrial machine. Unless we have gone Amish or medieval, we depend on the people of the Gulf Coast for our cushy life. Our great collective illusion of progress is that we can continue to enjoy our current lifestyle simply by making the correct purchasing choices or pulling a lever in the voting booth, that we can use magic or tweak our way out of this mess. We can’t. That life is no longer sustainable.

According to that map hanging in the world’s hallway, the potentially cataclysmic future — for earth and, consequently, for humanity — has now passed the Leeward Islands and is picking up speed and strength. No wiping the grease board when a fantasy destructive track changes its course.

We all have bought into this lottery, and we all are at risk of winning it. So, if there is to be finger-pointing, let’s do it facing the mirror. And in the meantime, fill your bathtub with water, stock your larder, and prepare for landfall.

The Good Tenant

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I look on as the last of our Red Poll herd clambers aboard the trailer, bound for a farm in Southern Illinois. One lone steer remains behind, with nothing but ewes and lambs for company. Around the corner, the Barred Rocks and Brown Leghorns scratch for bugs, totally indifferent to the leaving. The pigs in their paddocks, still sleeping off their dinner repast, are oblivious to all but dreams of breakfast.

To run a small diversified farm is to live within the wheel. It turns for the seasons, for the markets, for the climate. We have spent these many years planning, building, and repairing the infrastructure to support multiple endeavors, to make the farm resilient, to create and sustain a place where the absence of one species simply indicates another cycle, unremarked in the larger scheme.

Livestock live their lives out here, with their offspring raised, fattened, and slaughtered. Crops are planted, watered, and harvested. Dinners are planned, cooked, and enjoyed. The refuse is gathered, emptied, and composted. Wheels within wheels, seasons within seasons, years within years. Everything is done within a scale that is appropriate to our abilities, our infrastructure, our needs.

Some wondered, with the sale of the cattle, if we were scaling back, down, in retreat. They deconstructed the act, examined the entrails, to discover more than was presented. But if they had taken a closer look and a broader view, they would have seen a panorama painted over seventeen years, and one that continues to unfurl.

In that big picture, the beautiful snow in winter becomes a distant dream come the dry, hot summer and chicks in the spring lead to a convivial table in the fall. A herd of cattle is followed by a flock of sheep; a harvest of potatoes is replaced by manure and then a crop of beans. The one true constant in all is the turning wheel that brings the careful observer into active participation.

The small farm is itself a participant workshop of opportunities and dreams. It’s a place that, if we will read the cycles, does not scale up or down, but in a circle. A place where the new becomes the old becomes the new again, all within a framework of what is reusable, possible, and desirable.

Yet, as well as we live within the wheel, we are but fleeting stewards. The farm belongs not to us but to a much more demanding landlady, one who insists on her share of the successes and who is unforgiving of our failures. The panorama she paints is of billions of years, not a mere seventeen. And while capricious in her communications — railing one minute and calm the next — she is nonetheless predictable to a degree. Our challenge is to watch out for her moods and scale appropriate to what she will allow, knowing that when we are done the tenancy of our land reverts back to her.

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Reading this weekend: The Running Hare: the secret life of farmland, by John Lewis-Stempel.