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  • From: "E. E. Mitchamore Jr" <emitch@att.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] the ways that best sustain the farmer/ Efficiency
  • Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2007 11:50:45 -0600

The quote about the Frontier being "the meeting point between savagery and civilization" brought to mind my recent study of the potager or kitchen garden.  The ancient cloister gardens - forerunners of the potager - were always walled to emphasize the separation between (God's) cultivated area and Nature's wilderness beyond.
 
E. E. "Mitch" Mitchamore
www.hillcountrynatives.biz
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2007 11:08 AM
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] the ways that best sustain the farmer/ Efficiency


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



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