MLT Newsletter
Thanksgiving 1986
THANKSGIVING/LEFTOVER HALLOWEEN
-Lucy Loud
A season when a traditional turkey
trots on the hollow heels
of a ghost from Christmas past,
whose footprint yawns in the center
of a festive dish of mashed potato dressing.
...When the urge to stuff stockings or sacks with candy
is superceded by the act of stuffing birds and bellies...
when one need not bob for apples in a pie.
When who's left of the family
--with first names at least, still the same--
comes together again, wearing masks of congeniality.
--Except judging from Aunt Linda's look of disapproval,
she could use a paper sack over her head.--
Filing through the front door at will,
greeted by a fruit basket from Brazil
that graces the coffee table near the foyer,
--a modern day cornucopia,
a witch's crooked wicker bonnet,
a caldron of fruity cuisine--
Aunt Linda couldn't wait,
so she bears Christmas cookies
to contribute Co the table decor.
Uncle Steve, the family "ham", couldn't come,
so the humor in this year's feast
will probably be cut and dried enough
to kindle a bonfire of dead leaves.
The rumor is: Aunt Linda cooked his goose.--
And everyone will be too "chicken"
to discuss religion or politics,
save Aunt Linda, of course.
And all will notice when young Nephew Charles
has a spot of cranberry sauce on his chin.
And anyone descended from an American native or a Pilgrim
will be duly sanctioned to gobble up the turkey.
Then at meal's end
a wedge of pie shaped like the eye of a Jack-0-Lantern
will bring a wink of satisfaction from most
--a "trick" in Mom's kitchen, and a "treat" for us all,
Apple...or pumpkin...a la mode--
a perfect prerequisite for "Gravy Bowl" hysteria.
And after all that, someone will
probably still drink a bottle of beer
or nibble on one of Nephew Charles' popcorn balls,
or Tootsie Rolls left over from Halloween!
The winter Newsletter offers you a potlatch ... a few chuckles, some
issue serious thought, plus reports from MLT's annual meeting.
The focus is on an article by Paul Gilk of Merrill, Wisconsin. Paul
once lived in Michigan, and has had a number of articles in the
Newsletter. He was the guest speaker at the annual meeting. Paul
is a member of the Wisconsin Labor-Farm party, and has just completed a
campaign for assemblyman in the Wisconsin legislature. Anvil Press,
Millville, Minnesota, will soon be releasing Paul's book. Nature's Unruly Mob which "...calls for the re-creation of rural culture."
Roger Ulrich's writings are new to the MLT Newsletter, but as past
Chairperson and present Professor in the Psychology Department at
Western Michigan University, he is known to many of us.
To round out the issue is another piece by Greg Smith, and a poem of
Wendell Berry's to celebrate his visit to Kalamazoo and his side-trip
to Bangor this fall.
We welcome two new MLT directors: Lucy Loud, author of
"Thanksgiving/Leftover Halloween", and a homesteader from the Bangor
area. Rhonda Sherman is a graduate student at WMU, and is Assistant
Director, Adviser, and generally an indispensable woman in the
Environmental Studies Program.
To all who have sent their donations to Michigan Land Trustees, our
thanks. And to you who have meant to, now is the time to take pen
in hand - - - -
Happy Holidays to you all.
-Sally Kaufman, Editor
DECLINE AND DISSOLUTION
-Paul Gilk
There are all manner of useful tasks I could be attending
to--like cutting wood or working on the unfinished woodshed—but,
as usual, I prefer to take a journey in my journal.
I've just finished writing out and typing up responses to questions
sent by the League of Women voters. These questions go to all
candidates running for state offices, even to obscure woods hippies in
the 35th Assembly District. The League asks three questions about the
"maintenance of state funding," the state's "role in economic
development and job creation," and the "role of the state in assisting
children and families in financial distress." Four hundred words, max,
for all three answers. With surgical editing I squeaked under the wire.
What I tried to say, in three hundred ninety-one words, is that the
state's real function is to think ahead to the seventh generation and
remember back to the seventieth. Its task is to work out a long-term
ecology/energy/economy plan which strives to fit economic activity
within sustainable energy and ecological limits, and to enact this plan
carefully, steadily, and firmly. It's amazingly difficult to actually
recall to people that we really do live in a natural
world, and that our job as human beings is to refrain from messing
nature over and to enjoy the earthy satisfaction of living in a real
community with actual culture.
It's interesting, too, how this concentrated writing—squeezing
ink out of my old R.C.Turnip-once again makes me feel inadequate to the
task of articulating the value and function of folk culture: how,
without it, we are doomed to glow in the dark with civilized
immortality. Star Wars or no Star Wars. Plastic Jesus or no plastic
Jesus.
Somehow or other my fascination with folk culture dovetails with a
ragged attraction to Zen and Taoism. And since I'm currently reading Tao: The Watercourse Way, by Alan Watts, I'll take this opportunity to stick my tao in the same river once.
Watts says that "Tao cannot be understood as 'God' in the sense of the
ruler, monarch, commander, architect, and maker of the universe. The
image of the military and political overlord, or of a creator external
to nature, has no place in the idea of Tao." That's on page forty. On
page forty-one, he says "The imagery associated with the Tao is
maternal, not paternal," and he cites a poem by Lao-tzu to demonstrate
the point:
There is something obscure which is complete
before heaven and earth arose;
tranquil, quiet,
standing alone without change,
moving around without peril.
It could be the mother of everything.
I don't know its name,
I call it Tao.
The Tao, writes Watts, is "the course, the flow, the drift, or the
process of nature, and I call it the Watercourse Way because both
Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu use the flow of water as its principal
metaphor."
'If Tao signifies the order and course of nature," Watts says, "the question is, then, what kind of order?" And here we begin to see how non-Hobbesian, how uncivilized, Taoism really is; "Lao-tzu does indeed use the term hun--obscure,
chaotic, turgid-for the state of the Tao before heaven and earth arose,
but I do not think that this can mean chaos in the sense of mess and
disorder such as we see when things formerly organized are broken up.
The sense of mess and disorder such as we see when things formerly organized are broken up!
This is exactly the kind of chaos which the breakdown of civilization,
of excessive artificial order, engenders. For Thomas Hobbes, the
seventeenth century philosopher of civilized tyranny, it was the State,
civilization, which kept chaos. contained by the rigor of its
power—and by outright terror, if necesarry. Hobbes failed to
understand that there is natural order in nature, including human
nature, and that the artificial order of the civilized state will, in
its eventual and inevitable breakdown, result in outrageous chaos. Why?
Because artificial order destroys natural order, and when artificial
order collapses, as it's bound to do, there is no natural order left to
soften the blow. All pieces and no patterns.
Watts also recognizes that the "political analogy" to natural stability
"is Kropotkin's anarchism--the theory that if people are left alone to
do as they please, to follow their nature and discover what truly
pleases them, a social order will emerge of itself. Individuality is
inseparable from community. In other words, the order of nature
is not a forced order; it is not the result of laws and commandments
which beings are compelled to obey by external violence, for in the
Taoist view there really is no obdurately external world."
Well, Peter Kropotkin's anarchism was more cooperative and less
individualistic than Watts suggests: Kropotkin admired folk cultures
and clearly felt that they were closer to natural values than civilized
states. And to some significant degree the issue of folk culture
correlated to the question of whether "human nature" is to be trusted.
"It is fundamental to both Taoist and Confusian thought," writes Watts
in The Way of Zen, "that the natural man is
to be trusted, and from their standpoint it appears that the Western
mistrust of human nature--whether theological or technological--is a
kind of schizophrenia."
In his Zen book. Watts
says that an important difference between the Tao and "the usual idea
of God" is that where "God produces the world by making (wei), the Tao produces it by 'not-making' (wu-wei)--which
is approximately what we mean by 'growing.' For things made are
separate parts put together, like machines, or things fashioned from
without inwards, like sculptures. . . . Because the natural
universe works mainly according to the principles of growth, it would
seem quite odd to the Chinese mind to ask how it was made."
So, what's the point of all this fuss? I'm trying to understand why
folk culture, rural culture, has taken such a beating in the modern
industrial world. Watts says, of course, that in the West God has stood
outside of nature and that the working out of this notion has weighted
"the social order with excessive authority." This excessive authority,
needless to say, has been both paternal and civilized. That is, it
congeals in the civilized state and in the civilized religion.
Therefore the state rails against the backward peasants while the
religion rails against the backsliding pagans. And, etymologically,
these are the same people--peasants and pagans--pagani, country dwellers.
So it should come as no surprise to learn that Taoism is a religion of
the countryside and that Christianity, certainly since its early
marriage to the Roman state, has been a religion of the city. The goal
of Christendom was the creation of Christian civilization on a global
scale. Aside from a handful of people like the Catholic Workers and the
Amish, America's civil religion is composed mainly of
standard-of-living Christians for whom folk culture might have
something to do (God knows what) with backward people in the
Underdeveloped Third World, but nothing whatever to do with us at home
waiting in comfort for the Second Coming or the Final Mortgage,
whichever comes first.
Bitter humor, yes, but also remarkably close to the bone. And it is
this cultural sterility, this historical amnesia, that Green politics
is up against. The First World lives fat on expropriated largesse
and is disinclined to be ethically humble in regard to its appetites.
This leads us back, with Alan Watts, to ask "what kind of order" we need and what happens to civilized order when "things formerly organized are broken up"?
Far from being subversive or stupid, Green politics is the only
politics which offers a reasonably smooth transition from the
chaos-in-waiting "excessive authority" of the
military-industrial-civilized state to the eco-cultural reconstruction
of rural life and culture. Green politics "in power" has two major
obligations: to bring vital services (like railroads) into democratic
ownership and to encourage, by practical policy, the resurrection of
folk culture. But no politics--Green, Rainbow, Red, Brown, or
Black-is worth its weight in radioactive waste unless it comes to grips
with the inherently classed and capitalist underpinnings of civilization as a whole. Without Chat critical understanding, "alternative" politics has no future worth commenting on.
MLT ANNUAL MEETING: November 15, 1985 -Michael Phillips. Secretary
Farm Report : Discussion
arose concerning equipment sales (there were none). Jon will act as
agent to facilitate any and all equipment sales. In his annual report,
Jon stated that the quality of the soils on the LTF have improved.
Also, both the house and the shop have been painted and repaired...the
farmhouse needs a new roof and the kitchen needs reflooring. He
prepared a budget which includes $100 for wire fencing and $200 for
manure and tree painting. There are also plans for a greenhouse. The
total for the upcoming year...$1490. Maynard next asked for a specific
breakdown of proposed expenses and the discussion intensitied....Jon
agreed to prepare a breakdown of proposed expenses, and Maynard moved
to approve $100 to pay for wooden fencing for the LTF.
Annual Business: Swan
pointed out that nomination for the board can and should be made from
the floor. Rhonda, Lucy, and Mike Murphy were nominated to the board.
Mike declined and Lucy and Rhonda were approved. Swan then nominated
all members whose two year terms were expiring,... Jan declined
renomination. All previous board members with expired terms were
reappointed...Mike Phillips then moved that the standing board
committees be examined and staffed throughout the upcoming year as
needed, and in relative accordance with the by-laws.
Newsletter Report:
Maynard announced that Sally is working on the next newsletter,...As
always, contributions are welcome but subject to editorial scrutiny.
Lease Committee Report: Swan
informed the membership that the lease changes include the following:
that the form will be for a five-year lease period, subject to yearly
review; that LTF farming practices will from now on be based upon MLT
guidelines; that the lessees shall allow reasonable access to members
and guests; and that there shall be an annual farm report. The Trustees
present reviewed and approved the lease. Swan then moved to approve the
lowered $125 per month lease fee in light of the inventory purchases by
the lessees. Finally a motion was passed directing the Managing
Director and the lessees to sign and implement the new lease.
The next regular board meeting was set for January 18, 1987, at 3 p.m.
followed by a pot luck. It will be at the home of Ken Dahlberg,
4326 Bronson Blvd., Kalamazoo. As always, all are welcome. With no
further business, the annual meeting was adjourned.
THE RITES OF LIFE
-Roger Ulrich
The Animal Rights movement is justifiably gaining strength
around the world. It needs however to focus its energy and avoid
needless hostility toward individuals who share concern for other life
forms albeit via different methods of expression.
For example: In a recent letter to the Editor of an Animal Rights
Journal one young lady wrote: "I am convinced that true enlightenment
regarding animal rights cannot be achieved while one is still
carnivorous. The eating of meat is both a sign of halted moral
evolution and a contribution to the stagnation of personal evolution."
The editor's replied: "We agreed that vegetarianism is essential to the
practice of a sane animal rights ethic."
Like animals, I consume foods that were once alive. I eat squirrels,
rabbits, deer, etc. that cars have hit. Deteriorated road kills go
directly to our farm's pigs, dogs and chickens who seem less fussy
about what they eat than do most humans. Last winter, Phyllis, an old
cow, slipped on the ice. When we determined she would never rise again,
I shot her, and nature's recycling continued. My favorite horse,
obtained years back from the Upjohn Company after they were through
experimenting on him, killed himself on a sharp board in our corral.
Black was 25 and had been living on the Commune for 24 years. I liked
him better than a lot of Humans I've met. After he died I lay my head
on his and prayed that humans might better understand we are not
superior to other life forms. Later, I skinned and put some of Black
into a freezer and time to time took sustenance from his remains. The
rest of him lay beyond the pines where the dogs and wildlife ate from
him all winter. We drink milk from our goats and use it also to
make cheese. We eat the eggs from our fowl and if one dies we feed it
to the pigs. Sometimes we eat bacon with the eggs. We put manure from
rabbits, chickens, cows, pigs, horses, goats, etc. and other dead
remains back on the earth to help things grow. Countless creatures are
right now making a meal of me and I, like you, will one day die and the
process will continue.
Life is a question of balance of which we are all a part. We are a maze
of tubes, filaments, cells, etc. that we call human and almost all the
substance of this maze was once other living bodies of plants and
animals obtained by something first causing death. All of us are other
life forms rearranged. After seeing the The Animals Film at
the Chicago Film Festival, I was invited to a vegetarian meal. There on
along table, high above the city lay once living things, grown from the
labor of humans and animals; carried, carted, trucked, railroaded,
shipped and flown, from all over the globe to Chicago, so that a small
portion of the 5% of the world's population that yearly devours 45% or
more of all the earth's produce could eat in vegetarian style.
Humans, regardless of what they consume to keep themselves alive are
probably the most unabashed over-consuming wasters that have ever
lived. We are fouling the surface of the planet as we burn the fuels to
grow and bring us special foods. We are destroying animals, birds,
fish, insects, fresh water, air and earth. We seem to convert
everything we touch into cities, suburbs, sewage, smog, roads, rust and
ever enlarging fields upon which big tractors inefficiently roam to
grow more things to eat. Meanwhile at schools, churches, scientific and
other conventions we insanely preach of our enlightened sanity and
ascendency over other life forms while simultaneously researching to
prepare our young to use the deadly weaponry and the medical technology
designed by humans out of their unnatural fear of death.
Certainly many people greedily consume far too much animal flesh. Name
calling by "Animal Rightists" whose persistant, self righteous
promotion of the exclusive killing and eating of plants may simply
be another form of insanity which tends to mute the screams that
accompany the vegetables' trip to richly laden human tables. Most
certainly it does not constitute an answer to the very real suffering
of laboratory and other animals. There is no way to avoid the fact that
life feeds on death. Let us look to our total life style as we
repair our human faults. Would it not be better to eat more from that
which has been husbanded, mothered, cherished, and sacrificed within
the context of love, be it flesh or vegetable, than to feed exclusively
from the stuff purchased in many modern stores, killed, canned, boxed,
and sacked within the embalming materials listed in chemical jargon on
their paper labels.
We are what we take in and put out and nothing seems to change as fast
in nature as can the computer type these words. The problems of humans
are those faced by all life. Greater temperance in our eating habits is
a good step for us to take and also to realize that we are all hunters
engaged in stalking and stocking our food. Some people hunt with guns
in places where nature is more similar to times past. Others hunt
through the ads on T.V. and in the newspapers and listen to the sounds
of voices over the radio, which tell them where to drive to bag the
best bargain and how one car with a certain type tire, oil, and gas, is
better to hunt from if one wishes to look sexy and cool while in fast
pursuit of health and happiness. Human hunters should be careful when
pointing their fingers at other human hunters.
In closing I address another topic that in addition to hunting is
little understood by most people who write about the Rights of Animals.
I dislike immensely the leg hold trap and argue heatedly with my
neighbor who maintains a 40 acre wild life preserve so he can run a
trap line. However I find his behavior far less disgusting and
destructive than that of the people in my home town who poured concrete
over another 140 acres of mother earth in order to build still another
shopping mall with lots of parking around it to trap greedy humans into
spending more money so that other greedy humans might continue unabated
the human style of life. Too often forgotten by the anti-trappers are
the countless creatures trapped under the asphalt of our roads, driven
from their homes to be killed by folks speeding to and from the
shopping centers, trapped into hunting still another supposed
bargain. There are many traps in the Ritual of Life. An important
one to consider is that of looking at ourselves as an enlightened
species while simultaneously contributing so profoundly to the day by
day destruction of the total earth.
FOODING
-Greg Smith
Came in late and saw signs the cat was out of catfood. A banana
skin was legged into the silverware drawer. My fresh stick of butter on
the counter was tongued. Things looked defeated. Years ago, in Arizona,
I had carrots and honey for dinner. That's all there was.
Arranged on a nice paper plate, carrots here, honey there. Proper, and
with a nice glass of water. I felt morose about it. Didn't know
enough, back then to be glad I wasn't my cat eating a goddamn banana
skin/butter sandwich. I've come along some, since.
A BOOK REVIEW: ECOTOPIAN VISIONS
-Maynard Kaufman
Two books with the title of Deep Ecology
have been published recently. The essays by Bill Devall and George
Sessions (Peregrine Smith Books, 1985) aim at providing a definitive
statement of the deep ecology movement. A second collection of essays,
edited by Michael Tobias and published by Avant Books, reflect the
diversity of interests which contribute to the movement, but are not
reviewed here.
According to Devall and Sessions, the principles of deep ecology are
based on two normative intuitions: "self-realization" and "biocentric
equality." Much of the emphasis on self-realization can be credited to
Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher who coined the term "deep
ecology" in 1973. In his contribution to Michael Tobias' edition
of Deep Ecology,
Naess describes self-realization as the identification of the self with
non-human forms of life. This wider sense of self is said to evolve
only in and through the process of spiritual growth, and Naess cites as
related ideas both the concept of "atman" in Indian philosophy and the
Christian ideal of finding one's life by losing it in selfless
action. But deep ecology is not based on any particular religious
tradition, Devall and Sessions say; rather, articulates spiritual
values which are inherent in ecological awareness.
While environmental ethics generally evaluate our attitudes and behavior toward nature, a special contribution of Deep Ecology
is its inquiry into the nature of humans as ethical agents. The book
begins with a review of our cultural dilemma: although increasing
concern over pollution and the impact of industrial activities had has
led to considerable environmental legislation, the worldview which
legits-mates the domination of nature by humans has not been
challenged. In fact, the authors argue, environmentalism has become the
conservation and development of resources for sustained industrial
production. Humans, in this view, think of themselves as having (owning
or possessing) an environment which they may use.
In contrast to such "shallow environmentalism," the deep ecology
movement promotes a deeper awareness of our involvement in and
dependence on natural systems. Humans are one form of life among
others, all with intrinsic value. This is the norm of "biocentric
equality" and it reinforces the wider sense of self-realization. In a
key chapter of the book, "Natural Resource Conservation or Protection
of the Integrity of Nature: Contrasting Views of Management," the
authors demonstrate, how "biocentric equality" leads to a critique of
all versions of a stewardship ethic which emphasize responsibility for
nature because stewardship is the ethic of those who "have' an
environment but are not "in" it. Deep ecology, with its emphasis on
self-realization through spiritual growth, presents an alternative to
the acquisitiveness so common in commercial society.
But the practical strength of the deep-ecology alternative is not so
clear. Although the movement grew out of a broadly based critique of
urban-industrial civilization, it is weak in its attempt to clarify
alternatives to it. For example, Devall and Sessions emphasize
the value of wilderness areas as habitats for the continuing evolution
of natural life forms and argue that human population must decrease in
order for nonhuman life to flourish. They are also very critical of
land use for agriculture as they, following Paul Shephard, idealize
hunting and gathering cultures. Thus they are ambivalent about such
writers as Wendell Berry. They like his critique of industrial
agriculture but reject his emphasis on subsistence farming because,
they feel, he has underemphasized the need for wilderness preservation
and thus "falls short of deep ecological awareness."
This is a serious error in judgment, not: only because it is unjust to
Wendell Berry but because it illustrates that Devall and Sessions
simply have not given enough thought to how we should live if we are to
put the principles of deep ecology into practice. Environmental ethics
must indeed address the issue of how we can live on the land in ways
which respect the value of other forms of life, but more ethical
options are open to us in land use than in the decrease of human
population. Berry's neo-agrarian emphasis on kindly use is surely
one such way, and probably more honest than the backpacking and
mountain climbing enjoyed by Devall and Sessions with the leisure
provided by the industrial technology they deplore.
Also neglected by Devall and Sessions are the practical ethics inherent
in various proposals for appropriate technology, the emphasis on self
reliance and on growth in the household or informal economy as
alternatives to the market economy in urban industrial civilization.
The subtitle of the book, "Living as if Nature Mattered" is not quite
accurate. It is a book about ecotopian visions, about a spiritual
reorientation aided by philosophical inquiry. Deep Ecology
is focused on how we should think as if nature mattered, but vague
about how we should live. To paraphrase Reinhold Neibuhr's remark about
pacifism, such thinking may yield an impossible ethical ideal.
[This book review also appeared in American Land Forum, Fall 1986.]
THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS
-Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
from The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry
North Point Press, San Francisco, 1985
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