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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Most Radical Thing You Can Do
  • Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 08:22:37 -0600

The Most Radical Thing You Can Do

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3628
Staying home as a necessity and a right

BY REBECCA SOLNIT

Published in the November/December 2008 issue of Orion magazine

LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, “The most
radical thing you can do is stay home,” a phrase that has itself
stayed with me for the many years since I first heard it. Some or all
of its meaning was present then, in the bioregional 1970s, when going
back to the land and consuming less was how the task was framed. The
task has only become more urgent as climate change in particular
underscores that we need to consume a lot less. It’s curious, in the
chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world,
how seldom sheer modesty comes up—living smaller, staying closer,
having less—especially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not
just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and
taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or
not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions
nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people.

We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. For us
that’s about giving things up. But the situation looks quite
different from the other side of all our divides. The indigenous
central Mexicans who are driven by poverty to migrate have begun to
insist that among the human rights that matter is the right to stay
home. So reports David Bacon, who through photographs and words has
become one of the great chroniclers of the plight of migrant labor in
our time. “Today the right to travel to seek work is a matter of
survival,” he writes. “But this June in Juxtlahuaca, in the heart of
Oaxaca’s Mixteca region, dozens of farmers left their fields, and
women weavers their looms, to talk about another right, the right to
stay home. . . . In Spanish, Mixteco, and Triqui, people repeated one
phrase over and over: the derecho de no migrar—the right to not
migrate. Asserting this right challenges not just inequality and
exploitation facing migrants, but the very reasons why people have to
migrate to begin with.” Seldom mentioned in all the furor over
undocumented immigrants in this country is the fact that most of
these indigenous and mestizo people would be quite happy not to
emigrate if they could earn a decent living at home; many of them are
just working until they earn enough to lay the foundations for a
decent life in their place of origin, or to support the rest of a
family that remains behind.

From outer space, the privileged of this world must look like ants
in an anthill that’s been stirred with a stick: everyone constantly
rushing around in cars and planes for work and pleasure, for
meetings, jobs, conferences, vacations, and more. This is bad for the
planet, but it’s not so good for us either. Most of the people I know
regard with bemusement or even chagrin the harried, scattered lives
they lead. Last summer I found myself having the same conversation
with many different people, about our craving for a life with daily
rites; with a sense of time like a well-appointed landscape with its
landmarks and harmonies; and with a sense of measure and proportion,
as opposed to a formless and unending scramble to go places and get
things and do more. I think of my mother’s lower-middle-class
childhood vacations, which consisted of going to a lake somewhere not
far from Queens and sitting still for a few weeks—a lot different
from jetting off to heli-ski in the great unknown and all the other
models of hectic and exotic travel urged upon us now.

For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited
with, or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make
the beloved place that home can and should be, and it means getting
out of the limbo of nowheres that transnational corporate products
and their natural habitats—malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands
—occupy. It means reclaiming home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of
time. Which seems to be what Bacon’s Oaxacans want as well, although
their version of being uprooted and out of place is much grimmer than
ours.

At some point last summer I started to feel as if the future had
arrived, the future I’ve always expected, the one where conventional
expectations start to crack and fall apart—kind of like arctic ice
nowadays, maybe—and we rush toward an uncertain, unstable world. Of
course the old vision of the future was of all hell breaking loose,
but what’s breaking loose now is a strange mix of blessings and
hardships. Petroleum prices have begun doing what climate-change
alarms haven’t: pushing Americans to alter their habits. For people
in the Northeast who heat with oil, the crisis had already arrived a
few years back, but for a lot of Americans across the country, it
wasn’t until filling up the tank cost three times as much as it had
less than a decade ago that all the rushing around began to seem
questionable, unaffordable, and maybe unnecessary. Petroleum
consumption actually went down 4 percent in the first quarter of the
year, and miles driven nationally also declined for the first time in
decades. These were small things in themselves, but they are a sign
of big changes coming. The strange postwar bubble of affluence with
its frenzy of building, destroying, shipping, and traveling seems to
be deflating at last. The price of petroleum even put a dent in
globalization; a piece headlined “Shipping Costs Start to Crimp
Globalization” in the New York Times mentioned several manufacturers
who decided that cheaper labor no longer outweighed long-distance
shipping rates. The localized world, the one we need to embrace to
survive, seems to be on the horizon.

But a localized world must address the unwilling and exploited
emigrés as well as the joy riders and their gratuitously mobile
goods. For the Oaxacans, the right to stay home will involve social
and economic change in Mexico. Other factors pushing them to migrate
come from our side of the border, though—notably the cheap corn
emigrating south to bankrupt farm families and communities. The
changing petroleum economy could reduce the economic advantage to
midwestern corporate farmers growing corn and maybe make shipping it
more expensive too. What’s really needed, of course, is a change of
the policy that makes Mexico a dumping ground for this stuff, whether
that means canceling NAFTA or some other insurrection against “free
trade.” Another thing rarely mentioned in the conversations about
immigration is what American agriculture would look like without
below-minimum-wage immigrant workers, because we have gotten used to
food whose cheapness comes in part from appalling labor conditions.
It is because we have broken out of the frame of our own civility
that undocumented immigrants are forced out of theirs.

Will the world reorganize for the better? Will Oaxaca’s farmers get
to stay home and practice their traditional agriculture and culture?
Will we stay home and grow more of our own food with dignity,
humanity, a little sweat off our own brows, and far fewer container
ships and refrigerated trucks zooming across the planet? Will we
recover a more stately, settled, secure way of living as the logic of
ricocheting like free electrons withers in the shifting climate? Some
of these changes must come out of the necessity to reduce carbon
emissions, the unaffordability of endlessly moving people and things
around. But some of it will have to come by choice. To choose it we
will have to desire it—desire to stay home, own less, do less getting
and spending, to see a richness that lies not in goods and powers but
in the depth of connections. The Oaxacans are ahead of us in this
regard. They know what is gained by staying home, and most of them
have deeper roots in home to begin with. And they know what to do
outside the global economy, how to return to a local realm that is
extraordinarily rich in food and agriculture and culture.

The word radical comes from the Latin word for root. Perhaps the most
radical thing you can do in our time is to start turning over the
soil, loosening it up for the crops to settle in, and then stay home
to tend them.





  • [Livingontheland] The Most Radical Thing You Can Do, Tradingpost, 10/31/2008

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