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

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  • From: Liz <liz@allslash.org>
  • 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 16:12:51 -0500

At 12:08 PM 12/27/2007, you wrote:

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.

No, I don't want to be romanticizing the past either. I live as much in the old ways as I can, so I know first hand that it is just plain harder to do many things. Harder and more time-consuming and sometimes no fun at all. But it means participating in life first hand. We've talked about people not knowing where their food comes from. Another thing most people have no idea of is the amount of work (mechanical or human) required to sustain them--not the amount of energy required to perform that work, though that's important too, but the work itself. They have no idea how much work their appliances do, because they never lived without them. No idea how much actual work their vehicles perform, because they never walk anywhere. No idea how much work is required to provide their clothing or their food or their water. If you asked most people to express the amount of work in equivalent hours of labor, they couldn't tell you. They have no personal concept of what is required to keep them alive. In our past, the only people who could live like that were kings and emperors and the most wealthy of the richest class. Even they probably had a better idea of how much manual labor was required to pamper and coddle them than the ordinary person does today. We live at a remove from the actual labor required to sustain us, and because of that, we don't value it and we don't know what it costs.

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." "

Yep, a lot of myths embodied in that description, starting with the underlying assumption that "savages" had no civilization.

Liz in SW VA
http://life-as-a-spectator-sport.com




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