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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, 13 Mar 2009 11:04:50 -0700


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 unkn
own 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 f
irst 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. A
nd 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.






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