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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] the ways that best sustain the farmer/ Efficiency
  • Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2007 10:08:06 -0700


That's a great quote, Liz:
>"Work" is what you have to do
>to make enough money to "live," as though life were some external
>activity that takes place when you aren't working.

Also I recall the old saying, a man works from dawn to dusk but a woman's
work is never done. Our past was hardly an ideal society, and I refuse to
fall into the nostalgia thing. And tools are great things. And there have
been many more idyllic rural and urban societies where life was easier and
more civilized as well. I hope we learn from the past and keep what works
and toss what doesn't. That's more for our other list, Living On The Land.
I once had a college class on frontier history that dispelled a lot of
myths, and it covered Turner's Thesis on the lasting cultural significance
of the American frontier which is still argued over by historians after a
century.

"Three years before Turner's pronouncement of the frontier thesis, the U.S.
Census Bureau had announced the disappearance of a contiguous frontier
line. Turner took this "closing of the frontier" as an opportunity to
reflect upon the influence it had exercised. He argued that the frontier
had meant that every American generation returned "to primitive conditions
on a continually advancing frontier line." Along this frontier -- which he
also described as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization" --
Americans again and again recapitulated the developmental stages of the
emerging industrial order of the 1890's. This development, in Turner's
description of the frontier, "begins with the Indian and the hunter; it
goes on with the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the
trader... the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by
the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farm
communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and
finally the manufacturing organization with the city and the factory
system." "
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/s_z/turner.htm
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/TURNER/


paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 12/27/2007 at 10:08 AM Liz wrote:

>At 11:36 PM 12/26/2007, you wrote:
>
>>Ah yes. The history of industrial farming shows you can take 1000 acres,
>>and minimize human labor and bankrupt yourself at the same time. And
>>bankrupt your local community in the process. Exactly how millions of
>>family farmers have been driven into the cesspools of cities - without
>>"employable skills".
>
>This whole idea of minimizing human labor is a bill of goods that
>we've been sold now for over a century. There are places where
>mechanical assistance is clearly important, where the job is too
>physically strenuous for people (or people assisted by animals), and
>where it's too dangerous. And I'd be the last person to say there
>was anything wrong with tools!
>
>But we've been brainwashed to think that work is a four letter word.
>This has nothing to do with people on public assistance. Many of them
>would be overjoyed to work if they could get any. It has to do with
>the notion that there is something demeaning about physical labor,
>that it's what you're stuck with doing if you're not smart enough or
>enterprising enough to get a college education, or not rich enough to
>simply pay someone else do it for you. "Work" is what you have to do
>to make enough money to "live," as though life were some external
>activity that takes place when you aren't working. But of course, if
>we can be made to think that life (i.e. spare time) is the only
>desirable state, we can be persuaded to buy things that appear to
>give us more of it.
>
>Let me say that as a woman, I am emphatically aware of how difficult
>women's lives were when they worked from dawn to dusk every single
>day just to provide the family's minimum needs. There is a happy
>medium between barely managing to survive, and living the inflated
>and artificial idea of life that most Westerners have.
>
>It's encouraging to see the numbers of younger people who do want to
>work with their hands, to be craftspeople, to make what they need
>instead of running out to the nearest discounter to buy a cheap
>low-quality version of the real thing. I just hope this trend
>persists, and that it isn't too little too late.
>
>Liz in SW VA
>http://life-as-a-spectator-sport.com
>
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>Livingontheland mailing list
>Livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
>http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/livingontheland








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