Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] Soils and Souls: The Promise of the Land

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Soils and Souls: The Promise of the Land
  • Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:15:28 -0600



Soils and Souls: The Promise of the Land
http://www.texasobserver.org/oped/soils-and-souls-the-promise-of-the-land
by Robert Jensen Published on Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A poet, an economist, and a biologist walk
into a barn in Kansas and start talking. What do you get when you cross their
ideas?

Answer: Hybrid vigor.

OK, the joke might not quite work unless you’re an agronomist (and maybe even
the agronomists aren’t laughing), but it captures the importance of the
conversations at The Land Institute’s annual gathering in Salina, KS. In the
search for alternatives to our dead-end industrial agriculture system, Land
Institute researchers are pursuing plant breeding programs that just may be
the key to post-oil farming. But beyond the science, “The Land” -- that’s how
everyone there refers to the Institute in conversation -- provides a fertile
space for mixing the ideas of people as well as the genes of plants. In both
cases, the hybrid vigor -- the superior qualities that result from
crossbreeding -- is exciting.

With the rain providing an intermittent backbeat on the barn roof throughout
a Saturday in late September, the 2010 Prairie Festival began with three
talks -- by poet/novelist Wendell Berry, economist Josh Farley, and biologist
Sandra Steingraber -- that were insightful on their own, but even more
intriguing as an intellectual mash-up. The three were telling the story of
how sin brought us to this place, how we must redefine success if we are to
atone, and how essential that change is for our own safety. I had come
expecting those kinds of insights and analyses, but surprisingly I left the
barn that day with one revelation burning in my brain: While evil lurks in
many places, it is most concentrated in fossil fuels.

On Sunday morning, Wes Jackson, The Land’s co-founder and president, played
the role of ecologically evangelical preacher. We do indeed face challenges,
Jackson testifies, but there is a better way to be found in Natural Systems
Agriculture. Perennial polycultures can deliver us from that evil.

But before getting to the solutions, we have to understand the problem, which
starts with sin.



Sin

Wendell Berry, who farms in his native Henry County, Kentucky, has become a
kind of poet laureate of the sustainable agriculture movement, exploring
culture and agriculture in verse, short stories, and novels. Establishing
himself as a leading critic of industrial farming with his 1977 non-fiction
book The Unsettling of America, he has been relentless in his analysis of the
disastrous consequences of a consumption-obsessed, profit-driven society on
both the human and the natural world.

The lanky Kentuckian began his talk by noting that he is not from Kansas, and
therefore would speak about his home state, the place he knows and loves.
That reflects one of Berry’s core themes, that the universal principles we
articulate must be lived in intensely local fashion; one of his most
well-known sayings is, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who
you are.”

Wherever we are living, Berry argues, we’re in trouble as a consequence of a
“land-destroying economy” that pursues “production-by-exhaustion.” That’s
most clearly visible in the rapacious destruction of the land’s biotic
communities in mountaintop-removal coal mining in his part of the world,
Berry says, but also true of agriculture most everywhere. Extracting fossil
fuels from the ground is dangerous, and so is the way those fuels are used to
work the ground in farming.

The mining of the forests and soil, along with the extraction of fossil
fuels, may have started innocently, but since the European conquest of the
Americas, “It took us only a little more than 200 years to pass from
intentions sometimes approximately good to this horrible result, in which our
education, our religion, our politics, and our daily lives all are
implicated,” Berry tells the packed house in The Land’s barn.

“This is original sin, round two.”

The sin comes not just in the greed that drives exploitation but the lack of
attention we pay to “what is not obvious” -- the way we so often ignore the
complexity of the world beyond our powers of observation and our failure to
recognize the consequences of our inattention. Berry argues that when it
takes 1,000 years for nature to produce one inch of topsoil, human farming
practices that erode that soil are not simply bad practices but an act of
desecration.

While Berry doesn’t hesitate to condemn the corporate henchmen who direct
much of this destruction and the politicians who enable them, his point is
that “the carelessness of our economic life” means we all play a part in that
desecration. We are, in fact, all sinners against the integrity of the
ecosystem.

Despite the severity of the critique, Berry articulates “authentic reasons
for hope” that sound simple but require much of us.

“We can learn where we are, we can look around us and see,” he suggests. We
also can rely on land health, “the capacity of the land for self-renewal,”
and work at conservation, “our effort to understand and preserve that
capacity.”

Berry doesn’t look to educational, political, or corporate institutions for
much help in those efforts, suggesting that we instead look to “leadership
from the bottom” that can be provided by groups and individuals “who without
official permission or support or knowledge are seeing what needs to be done
and doing it.”

As a writer, Berry thinks not just about our actions but about our words. He
argues that slogans such as “think globally, act locally” are of little value
and that terms such as “green,” which are too easily exploited by
corporations for marketing, are downright dangerous.

“What gives hope is actual conversation, actual discourse, in which people
say to one another in good faith, fully and exactly, what they know, and
acknowledge honestly the limits of their knowledge,” he advises.



Success

Josh Farley found that saying exactly what he knows has rarely helped his
career as an economist. Walking the grounds of The Land before his talk, he
told me that the more he studied neoclassical economics, the more he realized
that free-market ideology couldn’t account for ecological realities. Most of
his advisers counseled him to stick to the dogma of the discipline, but
Farley managed to finish a Ph.D. and stay true to his calling. Seeking out
other mentors, he hooked up with Herman Daly, a central figure in “ecological
economics” and ended up co-writing with Daly the 2003 text Ecological
Economics: Principles and Applications.

Now teaching at the University of Vermont, Farley is part of a small but
growing group of economists who don’t simply treat the “environment” as a
component of the economy but instead ask how we can construct an economy that
can balance what is biologically and physically possible with what is
socially and ethically desirable.

The first step in that, Farley told the Prairie Festival audience, is to
dispense with some of the mythologies and mistakes of neoclassical economics.

High on the list of mythologies is the notion that our affluence is the
product of the wonders of the capitalist market economy. Farley reminds us
that capitalism developed alongside the exploitation of fossil fuels, first
coal and then oil and natural gas. Our productivity is the result not of the
magic of the market so much as the magic of fossil fuels. Given that a barrel
of oil can do the work of 20,000 hours of human labor, Farley says, such
dramatic expansion of productivity is not so magical after all.

Markets also make mistakes. Humans use all that energy to transform our
ecosystems faster than they can recharge or be restored. Resources are mined
and waste is spewed according to the dictates of the market, not the limits
of the natural world. Farley points out that there’s no feedback loop in the
market economy that stops us from destroying the planet, nothing that resets
the prices of goods to reflect that destruction. That’s a problem, Farley
says, in his trademark understated fashion.

As a result, we get confused about terms such as efficiency, Farley says.
Before fossil fuels, when humans lived almost exclusively on the energy of
contemporary sunlight, one calorie burned by a worker could create 10
calories of food, but now we use 10 calories from oil to create one calorie
of food. And remember that the market has no way to account for the
disastrous consequences of burning all those fossil fuels. And we’re
increasingly dependent on non-renewable resources for the food we need to
live. That’s efficiency?

But perhaps most dangerous is the story capitalism tells us not about the
natural world but about us. Glorifying greed, capitalism tells us we are
nothing more than “atomic globules of desire” and that “we’re individuals,
apart from community, and all we want is more and more and more.” We need,
Farley explains, a different conception of success.

To cope with these problems, Farley sets a modest goal: “A fundamental
redesign of our economy.” Sounds naïve, but if we don’t find a way to do
that, well, remember that the economy is based not on the “laws of economics”
dreamed up by free-market ideologues but on “laws of nature” that we can’t
dream away.



Safety

As a biologist, Sandra Steingraber has long studied the negative consequences
of our inattention to human intervention into the natural world for
individuals and ecosystems. She describes those two different trunks of the
environmental movement: The focus on toxins’ effects on organisms, which
first hit the public radar with the publication of Rachel Carson’s 1962
classic Silent Spring; and the focus on larger ecosystem effects, of which
global warming/climate disruption are the gravest threat and which hit the
public consciousness first with Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature in
1989.

Steingraber is best known for her inquiry into the effects of those toxins,
an investigation that has been intensely personal; she is a cancer survivor,
and her 1997 book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the
Environment, examined the lines of evidence that establish connections
between cancer and chemical contamination. Recognizing that both trunks
amount to a “de-creation of life,” Steingraber has decided to turn to what
she believes is the source of the problems.

Says Steingraber: The two trunks -- “the toxification of all life” and “the
dissolution of the whole life support system on which the planet rests” --
have one root, fossil fuels.

“When you light [fossil fuels] on fire, you destroy our life-support system
through the creation of heat-trapping gases,” she explains. “When you turn
them into synthetic chemicals with the power to break chromosomes and tinker
with brain cells and hormones, you destroy children.”

This realization has led Steingraber, a visiting scholar at Ithaca College
living in upstate New York, to get involved with the movement to stop
hydrofracking, a controversial method of getting at natural gas in shale that
involves blasting millions of gallons water, sand and chemicals deep into the
ground to force gas out of the rock. That process, she says, is another
version of mountaintop-removal and deep-water drilling, another desperate
attempt to extend a fossil-fuel economy that is fundamentally unsustainable.
In such a world, no one is safe. We all live downstream.



Nature as measure

In the talks of Berry, Farley, and Steingraber -- three very different people
with very different backgrounds and training -- the common thread is the
recognition of the centrality of fossil fuels: to the desecration of land and
communities, to the economy’s distortion of our sense of success, to the
threats to the health of each of us and the ecosystem.

In that Kansas barn, friends of The Land gathered out of a belief that there
are alternatives, and that nowhere is the pursuit of those alternatives more
important than in agriculture, the way in which we feed ourselves. For many
at Prairie Festival, the research being conducted at The Land is a key to our
hopes, and those hopes are bolstered in Wes Jackson’s talk, which
traditionally closes out the festival.

Jackson, who grew up on a Kansas farm before earning a Ph.D. in plant
genetics, gave up a comfortable university teaching position to start The
Land in 1976. His talk reflects both his roots on the farm and his
specialized training, but there also are strains of the preacher in his
presentation, as he speaks of both sin and redemption.

That redemption in agriculture can come, Jackson preaches, from recognizing
that industrial farming -- annual plants cultivated in monocultures,
dependent on fossil fuel-based fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides -- has
greatly expanded yields but at the cost of increased soil erosion and
decreased soil fertility. That “failure of success” as Jackson calls it,
leaves us no choice but to look to nature for guidance. Rather than mimicking
industrial processes, farmers have to ask how natural ecosystems hold soil
and ensure fertility. Wheat farmers in Kansas should be looking at the
prairie for inspiration not a factory assembly line.

That is the core of Natural Systems Agriculture, taking nature as measure.
The key to The Land’s research program is breeding perennial grains -- whose
deeper roots help hold the soil in place -- that can produce adequate yields
to feed us. Those perennials would ideally be planted in polycultures --
mixtures of plants that to help control pathogens and weeds without
petrochemicals.

While this research is the heart of The Land, Jackson speaks as much about
solidarity as he does about science, about the commitment it will take to see
this through. Prairie Festival is in part about an exchange of information
between the invited speakers, The Land’s staff, and guests. But equally
important is the role of this annual gathering in creating what Jackson calls
“a consecrated community” that is committed over the long haul to the project
of an agriculture that can reverse the erosion and depletion of the soil and
provide a model for reversing the larger degradation of the planetary
ecosystem.

If that project is to succeed, it will have to combine the traditional wisdom
that farmers acquire in the fields with the specialized knowledge that
scientists develop in the laboratory. But Jackson knows it also requires
faith, and he ends with a preacher’s charge to the congregation.

Our task, he says, is to “save the soils as we save our souls.”

For more information on the work of The Land Institute, visit
http://www.landinstitute.org/.
© 2000-2010 The Texas Observer

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin
and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is
the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic
Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of
Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting
Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire:
The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent:
Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002).
Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film "Abe Osheroff: One Foot in
the Grave, the Other Still Dancing," which chronicles the life and philosophy
of the longtime radical activist. Information about the film, distributed by
the Media Education Foundation, and an extended interview Jensen conducted
with Osheroff are online at http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html.

Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be
found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html. To join an
email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to
http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html.





  • [Livingontheland] Soils and Souls: The Promise of the Land, Tradingpost, 10/12/2010

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page