Michigan Land Trustees will meet Sunday, July 11, at the Land Trust Homesteading Farm one mile north of the blinker light at Center Street and M-43 in Bangor.
There will be a potluck dinner at 6:30. The meeting will follow at 7:30. Bring a dish to pass and join us.
The first article is by Tom Breznau, Chairperson of the Board of Dirctors. Following are comments on the Journal project and a letter from Ernest Callenbach. Sally Kaufman, Editor.
Territorial wars continue, unemployment seems out of control, human need and development take a back seat to nuclear submarines, natural resources are threatened by attacks on many sides, and the world in general seems in turmoil. While we are greeted day in and day out with these and other problems too numerous to list, I think it's important to maintain some sort of perspective or long range view. I hope to give some basis for a rather optimistic view of the world now in 1962 without underestimating or diminishing the size or complexityof the problems that face us.
In the past decade, as a direct result of a peoples' movement in this country, enough pressure was brought to bear and enough consciousness raising we went on to force the government to back out of Viet Nam. This was an incredible accomplishment that a few years earlier seemed impossible.
Another issue that disturbed many people about seven years ago was the "proliferation of nuclear power plants. Today many are being abandoned in record numbers as a result of people demanding stricter safety standards which has led to longer and more costly construction costs. This combined with higher interest rates has made nuclear power plants uneconomic.
A third remarkable event which happened during the Carter administration was, the passing of the "excess profits tax" on the oil industry. The passage of this bill in the US was an action worth contemplating. The bill in practice meant that the government was admitting that there is such a thing as "excess profits" and that these profits should be used for the common good rather than being "owned" by a corporation. I believe historians will note this event as of historic significance.
Many of us came "back to the land" because the way of life we were living (unconnected with the land) was not satisfactory; because we couldn't find good, fresh, chemically-free food for our families; because we enjoyed working physically as well as mentally. The level of awareness in society as a whole regarding whole, natural, fresh; additive-free food in our diets has risen immensely in the last five years. Sugar and salt and many preservatives, colorings, etc., have been removed from a lot of foods that routinely contained them in the past.
Pollution control is another area where we usually only concentrate on the many, many problems that face us. For a moment let's think about some of the successes we've had. In many industries, pollution control has become a reality whore it was nonexistent before. People are much more aware of chemicals in the food chain, in drinking water, and in the environment. Recycling is still in its infancy but is becoming more acceptable to more people in more communities all the time. Pollution of some resources (such as Lake Erie) has decreased dramatically.
Finally, in the area of energy efficiency there are many examples of attitude changes. In the Kalamazoo area, passive solar homes are more and more visible each year. The US appetite for energy has not only failed to rise each of the last two years but has actually decreased each of those years. When I graduated from college In 1968 it was difficult to find a car that would deliver 20 miles per gallon--now I drive one that gets 50!
Change is a fact of life, and those of us who find ourselves ahead of most of society (some would say behind) in our concern for permanent agriculture, land use consistent with all the values previously mentioned, resource depletion, environmental pollution, nutritious and wholesome food, the risk of nuclear power, etc., are many times overwhelmed with the amount of awareness raising there is left to do and the short time there is to do it in. I do not in any way minimize the problems facing us, but t think some perspective on them is important. We have had an impact on our world and that impact is visible and beneficial. And let's not forget to factor in the awesome rejuvenative powers of nature in the doom and gloom studies that we read.
Tom Breznau
Readers of this Newsletter will recall that several members of MLT are planning for the publication of a scholarly journal which would provide a forum for the articulation of visions of post-industrial agrarian culture in the context of emerging socio-economic trends and ecological constraints. Several persons of national prominence have agreed to serve as editorial advisers. Among them is Ernest Callenbach, author of Ecotopia and, more recently, Ecotopia Emerging. Here are comments from one of his letters to us with good advice for our proposed Journal as an expression of MLT aims and purposes.
Dear Mr. Kaufman (and friends!):
Thanks for your letter, and its accompanying information, and your invitation to be a sponsor of the journal. I'm willing but I also have some reservations about what I gather to be your approach, which I thought I had better express.....
My basic feeling is that it is useless to try to think about country living without also and equally thinking about city living. The problems of the two are inextricably intertwined, and so will be any possible solutions. Moreover, the political "troops" for a reform of abuses in the countryside must come from the popular and more politically volatile and mobilizable cities; and indeed most of the ideas of the back-to-the-land movement, and most of the money which has propelled people back, are from the cities. We need never to lose sight of the symbiosis- deformed and problematic though it has become--between the urban and the rural.
So, while like yourselves I am a country boy (from rural central Pennsylvania-my father taught poultry husbandry at Penn State, and we lived on a 10-acre place in Boalsburg) I don't think we should simply try to replace "urban bias" by rural bias. We need an integrative bias. On the most elementary level, for an example, this would mean that you might want to spend some energy imagining what a satisfactorily Ecotopian sewage/fertilizer/food/sewage/ etc. recycling relationship might look like in real conrete detail. Or what a relationship between country communes and city communes could do to prevent residents in both from ossifying in their ways (exchange work arrangements? weekend house exchanges? economic "trade" in food/products/services?). Or what country people's transportation needs have to do with their city counterparts.
If Jane Jacobs is right, and I suspect she is, cities have been implicated in agriculture since the absolute beginnings. So it is probably not only practically impossible, but theoretically improper, to try to attack "agrarian reconstruction" by itself. Our agriculture has, for better or worse, been created and controlled by our cities. The problem-since the only way cities will go away is if the bombs fall-is how to create a better agriculture. As Huey Johnson, our Secretary of Resources here, and a man devoted to the land, has often said, it is city votes that can and must save the land. But to make that happen requires education of city dwellers (as well as the enlightenment of many country people). And that, I submit, must be a major task of your journal if it is to have any significant effect.
Best Wishes,
(Signed) Ernest Callenbach
Does the fact that our homesteading program has been oriented toward urban young people help to integrate urban and rural values? Would our sponsorship of a workshop on land use, with its emphasis on metropolitan farming" for rural residents on the urban fringe, help in this integration process? Should it?Let's hear what you think!
Readers of this Newsletter may be interested in a new quartery review of radical anarchist thought put out by Albert "Swan" Huntoon (recently elected to the Board of Directors of MLT) and friends in the Kalamazoo area: The Peaceful Revolutionist.
Finally Michigan Land Trustees is a public land trust with a tax-exempt IRS status and continues to seek donations of land and money. If you know of land that might be donated or bequeathed to MLT, please contact one of ourDirectors. --Maynard Kaufman, Managing Director.