Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

This is the end of an essay called The Ecology of Work
Published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/267

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Spiritual rebirth will mean the rediscovery of true human work. Much of
this work will not be new but recovered from our own rich traditions. It
will be useful knowledge that we will have to remember. Fishing as a family
and community tradition, not the business of factory trawlers. Agriculture
as a local and seasonal activity, not a carbon-based scheme of synthetic
production and international shipping. Home- and community-building as
common skills and not merely the contracted specialization of construction
companies and urban planners. Even “intellectual workers” (professors
and scholars) have something to relearn: their own honored place in the
middle of the community and not in isolated, jargon-ridden professional
enclaves.

Such knowledge was once the heart of our lives, and not that long ago.
Before 1945, survival meant that most families would have all of these
skills to some degree. These families were certainly materially poorer and
perhaps more naïve, but they were richer in human relations, less bored,
less depressed, less isolated, less addicted to food and drugs, physically
healthier, and they had the rich human pleasure of knowing how to make
things. It’s clear that we haven’t forgotten these skills and their
pleasures entirely, but their presence for us is strange and a little
unreal. What used to be life is now “fine living”: an array of
expensive hobbies for the affluent that are taught through magazines, cable
and PBS programs, and local guilds dedicated to gardening, basket weaving,
cooking, home remodeling, quilting, and woodworking. Although we rarely
recognize it in this way, through these “hobbies” we express a desire
for a world that is now lost to us.

My argument is not, I assure you, a longing look back to the wonderful
world of pre-war rural America. But it is to say that in the course of the
last century of global capital triumphant we have been further isolated
from what Ruskin called “valuable human things.” In exchange, we have
been offered only the cold comfort of the television and computer monitor,
and the GPS device that can locate you but only at the cost of being
located in a place that is not worth knowing and certainly not worth caring
about.

The turn away from this ugly, destructive, and unequal world is not
something that can be accomplished by boycotting corporations when
they’re bad or through the powerful work of the most concerned
scientists. It will not be delivered with glossy brochures by the
President’s Council on Sustainable Development, and it will certainly not
be sold to you by Martha Stewart. A return to the valuable human things of
the beautiful and the useful will only be accomplished, if it is ever to be
accomplished, by the humans among us.