Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] the ways that best sustain the farmer/ Efficiency

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "McBride & Putnam" <dragonhill2@netzero.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 13:40:43 -0600

Here, here! There's nothing wrong with performing physical labor--even hard, physical labor. And nothing demeaning about it either. Some of my best philosophical reflections occur while I'm engaged in hard physical work. I'll bet more farmers have been philosopers than have been office workers. As you say, Liz, there's nothing wrong with using tools to help lighten the load or to help make a job less hazardess. But we've lost touch with ourselves in giving up the satisfaction of a physical job well done, that leaves us tired but satisfied at the end of the day.

Claudia


----- Original Message ----- From: "Liz" <liz@allslash.org>
To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2007 9:08 AM
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] the ways that best sustain the farmer/ Efficiency


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

_______________________________________________
Livingontheland mailing list
Livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/livingontheland







Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page