Limits
In Wendell Berry's 1967 novel, A Place on Earth, Mat Feltner recounts the story of the first time his son Virgil planted a crop. In the hilly country around Port William, farmers must be very careful in how they go about breaking land and planting crops. If not done with a great deal of skill and care, one runs the risk of using up a great deal of top soil and permanently damaging the land. Mat's father had done a great deal of damage to their farm in the early days, and Mat had made his fair share of mistakes along the way as well, but now, it was Virgil's turn to learn. Mat gave Virgil a great deal of space to farm the way he best saw fit, but he also quietly prayed that Virgil would be spared the consequences of his mistakes. One night, after Virgil had planted his first crop - a small piece, no bigger than 2 acres - Mat heard it start to rain, and rain hard. He knew exactly what was going to happen to the field that Virgil had failed to prepare adequately. In the morning, Mat took Virgil out to the field to show him what he had wrought. He made sure Virgil understood that the damage that had been done was Virgil's fault and his alone. Virgil, overwhelmed by the shame of having wrought such great destruction on the earth, looked about to permanently give up on farming when Mat intervened and told him that though the damage was his failure to carry, it was not a reason to quit. Rather, having destroyed his first crop and washed off so much of the hillside, it was now his responsibility to see that this was not the only mark he left on the earth for future generations. It was now Virgil's work to improve that land and leave something good that would last.
The land has natural limits. We ignore those limits at both our peril and the earth's. Across the prairies we are using up the soil at an unbelievable rate - with some regions estimating that there will be nothing left by the middle of this century. Many believe that these limits can be overcome with the application of newer and better agri-technologies, but Berry warns us in The Gift of Good Land that agricultural problems require agricultural solutions, not technological ones. In fact it is the technological "solutions" that drive the radically increasing rates of destruction; technologies that also happen to be powered by fossil fuels that both pollute the countryside and waterways in their extraction and contribute to the climate conditions that magnify the agricultural problems that these solutions were designed to solve.
So what is the solution? It is not clear that a solution will be found on this blog, no matter how much ink I spill in the attempt. Perhaps, as Berry suggests, "it is in the presence of the problems that their solutions will be found. Solutions have perhaps the most furtive habits of any creatures; they reveal themselves very hesitantly in artificial light, and never enter air-conditioned rooms" (Berry, TGOGL, 49). The reason that solutions present themselves in the presence of problems is that particular problems have particular solutions. For Virgil, his particular problem was the washout of the hill that bore his first crop. My farm has its own set of problems in search of solutions. It is by closing with these problems and learning their particularities that they begin to teach us their solutions.
To learn the particularity of this language, the abstractions that are necessarily introduced by so much of what we call "cutting-edge technology" will probably need to be abandoned. A problem that can be solved by a half-million dollar machine is not really a problem solved, merely a new problem of finance. In addressing the climate-change problem today, much energy is being put into the future of electric vehicles or other technological advances that can get us away from the well established problems of the fossil fuel sector (see Suncor's admission that they are part of the problem here). While this work is interesting and may be helpful as a means of democratizing energy production (about a third of our farm is completely self-contained thanks to solar) it bears with it its own sphere of problems. Instead of exhausting ourselves in the debates over the direction of new technological innovation, the bulk of our focus should be returned to the land itself. The land is neglected and abused today because it is not seen; too many people live in cities. The re-population of our rural communities is the necessary starting point for creating a people who are sufficiently freed from the abstractions of our industrialized capital economy to be able to see and love the earth itself. For where your heart is, there too shall your treasure be (riff, Matt. 6.21).
The land has natural limits. We ignore those limits at both our peril and the earth's. Across the prairies we are using up the soil at an unbelievable rate - with some regions estimating that there will be nothing left by the middle of this century. Many believe that these limits can be overcome with the application of newer and better agri-technologies, but Berry warns us in The Gift of Good Land that agricultural problems require agricultural solutions, not technological ones. In fact it is the technological "solutions" that drive the radically increasing rates of destruction; technologies that also happen to be powered by fossil fuels that both pollute the countryside and waterways in their extraction and contribute to the climate conditions that magnify the agricultural problems that these solutions were designed to solve.
So what is the solution? It is not clear that a solution will be found on this blog, no matter how much ink I spill in the attempt. Perhaps, as Berry suggests, "it is in the presence of the problems that their solutions will be found. Solutions have perhaps the most furtive habits of any creatures; they reveal themselves very hesitantly in artificial light, and never enter air-conditioned rooms" (Berry, TGOGL, 49). The reason that solutions present themselves in the presence of problems is that particular problems have particular solutions. For Virgil, his particular problem was the washout of the hill that bore his first crop. My farm has its own set of problems in search of solutions. It is by closing with these problems and learning their particularities that they begin to teach us their solutions.
To learn the particularity of this language, the abstractions that are necessarily introduced by so much of what we call "cutting-edge technology" will probably need to be abandoned. A problem that can be solved by a half-million dollar machine is not really a problem solved, merely a new problem of finance. In addressing the climate-change problem today, much energy is being put into the future of electric vehicles or other technological advances that can get us away from the well established problems of the fossil fuel sector (see Suncor's admission that they are part of the problem here). While this work is interesting and may be helpful as a means of democratizing energy production (about a third of our farm is completely self-contained thanks to solar) it bears with it its own sphere of problems. Instead of exhausting ourselves in the debates over the direction of new technological innovation, the bulk of our focus should be returned to the land itself. The land is neglected and abused today because it is not seen; too many people live in cities. The re-population of our rural communities is the necessary starting point for creating a people who are sufficiently freed from the abstractions of our industrialized capital economy to be able to see and love the earth itself. For where your heart is, there too shall your treasure be (riff, Matt. 6.21).
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