Fall 2004
MLT Newsletter
“Think globally, act locally” has always formed an ethical framework for many MLT activities. It seems to me that America in this last election spoke to a different drummer. After recovering from post election depression for a week or so and facing November bleakness, its comforting I suppose, to know that “the other half” would have suffered a similar depression had the results gone the other way. It also speaks to this country's credit that our rock solid democratic system doesn't fall apart from this polarization. What Garrison Keilor sang post 9-11, “We're all Republicans now”, was really only a temporary thing, since the already huge rift in ideas and values became the “Grand Canyon” with the Iraq war. Fortunately the rapid acceptance of the election results spoke to a deeper truth that “We're Americans” first. If only our burgeoning (and excessive) patriotism encompassed the planet Earth and served to cherish and protect its inhabitants with its cultural and biological diversity.
While there is much to be dismayed about with America's attitude to the rest of the world (this editor's opinion of course!), we must take the bad with the good, be aware of our shortfalls, accept them and strive to be better. Words to live by! Jon Towne
The three articles in this newsletter, start off with one person's complaint about American foreign policy.. Wayne Roberts is the Coordinator of the Toronto Food Policy Council.
By Wayne Roberts
To my surprise, I found myself getting more angry, not less angry, the more I heard senior U.S. officials and politicians denounce the humiliating treatment of Iraqi prisoners by their own soldiers as inhuman and fundamentally unAmerican.
"This is probably one of the least immoral things U.S. government agents have done to the people of Iraq over a 50 year history of backing Saddam's coup, invading the country twice, and denying crucial medicines and water treatment during the embargo between invasions," my cynical side lectured me.
What was bugging me about the senior U.S. defense officials' self criticism, I started to realize, was that the U.S self criticism was just old fashioned military ethics, flowing from the gentlemanly tradition of professional warriors who respected the brave and gentlemanly professional warriors of the same class, even if they were on the other side. U.S. troops got caught violating warrior ethics, and the politicians were going to keep the debate from moving into the realm of civilian, human or political ethics.
"They" were going to pull that hegemonic trick off because "we" humans lack the internal radar to distinguish between first order and second order moral failures, I started to worry.
I should explain my vested interest here. I spend a lot of time trying to arouse public interest in issues related to child poverty and hunger. For a year or two, I tried to put those issues into perspective with a comparison to 9/11. Five times more children, 15,000 human beings around the world, die every day from illnesses directly related to hunger, I'd say. That's five times more innocent people dying every day than on the one day of 9/11, yet we have no religious memorials, no media fanfare, and no government policy in response.
So when the Iraq scandal hit, I started to figure out how to update that speech. Everyone thinks it's disgusting to force prisoners to be humiliated in the nude, so governments are going to have to answer for that. So why isn't it just as disgusting that the parents of 15,000 families are humiliated every day because their children are dying from starvation and the parents cannot feed them? And why don't governments have to answer for that shame?
You can see why no one invites me to parties.
I tried to be philosophical, historical and detached about this issue of the need for a moral compass that goes beyond specific horrific events.
There was no evolutionary advantage for early humans who went hunting and gathering with the needs of the world's many beings as top of mind issues.
To this day, most of us learn about morals the same way we learn about manners. It's personal, about how we act toward other people that we know or might know.
That's one reason why the Iraqi prison scandal seems scandalous. Most people can understand that what those guards did was rude and mean, bad manners, no matter what the politics of the situation.
Not to put too fine a point on it, what that army woman did, taking cheap shots at a man's moral compass, gave a whole new meaning to "offensive," at a level that NASCAR dads and rugged North American men could grab hold of.
The scandal even shook up limousine liberals such as Harvard's Michael Ignatieff, who until this scandal was lecturing the world's flaky liberals about the importance of backing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, including the bombing of innocents, on the grounds that the defense of freedom is not a matter for "herbivores." Praise human rights and pass the ammunition. But the prison scandal was a meaty issue even he found troubling. Testosterone and morality converge more easily with photos of humiliated men than with pictures of mothers comforting their dying babies.
Geopolitically, the rudeness and personal violation in Iraqi prisons exposed an American perversion of justice to the entire world, and threatened stability in the Muslim world if apologies were not forthcoming immediately. U.S. military and political leaders had the cojones to know what was at stake, and what had to be said.
Since many issues that have to do with ethical politics do not dovetail so perfectly with good or bad manners or mistreatment of individuals, we need to face up to some problems.
Humans probably survived because they were sociable enough to hunt together or fend off predators together, and because they had the wit to develop tools a nice way of saying weapons, really that allowed them to kill big animals from a safe distance. First rocks, then spears, then bows and arrows, then rifles, all the way up to missiles from space. And with each increase in distance came in increase in unintended or collateral damage, and a decrease in the up close and personal sense of responsibility for killing.
The warrior ethic made this trend more hazardous partly because of the way it used humiliation to rev up the adrenalin of battle and create a sense of belonging. For soldiers, humiliation, including sexual humiliation, is perfectly acceptable, as long as it's imposed by people on your own side. That's what boot camp is all about. The training is designed to erode individual conscience so trainees feel comfortable killing people who never did them any harm.
Warrior ethics have always accepted the need to kill and the need to break conscience and will about murder through humiliation during basic training. What's not been accepted is the other side doing that to troops who have been captured and who can't be used to kill anymore. Then it's unethical and shameful.
That's the code that was broken in Iraq's prisons. The violation of that specific code makes the specific apology possible.
To
paraphrase William James, we need to find a moral equivalent of
warrior ethics if we're to make the disgrace of hunger front
page news and cause for corrective action.
Maynard has always been a proponent of the agrarian values that permeate the writings of Wendell Berry. Maybe these values are what many really mean when thinking moral values. With a rock solid sustainable agriculture based on small family farms, the world can take care of itself. By the way, Maynard is the keynote speaker for the 2005 Organic Agriculture Conference at Michigan State University on March 5 sponsored by MOFFA. See www.moffa.org for details in January.
WENDELL BERRY AND AGRARIAN ESSAYS
Maynard Kaufman
It has been many years since Wendell Berry was heralded as the foremost agrarian
philosopher of our time. Although there are a few other excellent agrarian writers (Gene Logsdon
and Wes Jackson come to mind), no one has produced the variety of literary, ethical and practical
writings that Berry has blessed us with. And he is a prolific writer. As of 2002 Berry has
published at least twelve volumes of fiction, fifteen volumes of poetry and thirteen volumes of
essays.
The agrarian concerns which came to dominate in Berry's writing emerged slowly. Between
1957, when he had finished with graduate school and been married, and 1963, Berry traveled
widely and lived on the West Coast, in Europe, and in New York, where he taught for three years
at New York University. In 1963 he returned to teach at the University of Kentucky and gradually
found his way from Lexington back to the farm near Port Royal, Kentucky. Berry was finding
himself during those years. These autobiographical details are scattered throughout the title essay
in The Long-Legged House, (1969). The variety of topics in this early collection is a literary
reflection of this search: against strip mining, against the war in Vietnam, in favor of a draft
resistor, a report on rebuilding a house along the river, essays on environmental pollution, a
critique of the industrial way of life and nature writing with constant awareness of birds. The
writing is excellent, and already Berry had mastered the art of the pithy statement: "It must be a
sort of natural law that any increase in man's strength must involve a lengthening of his shadow; as
we grow in power we are pursued by an ever-growing darkness." Agrarian issues may have been
implicit but were not yet explicit in this early book except for a few pages in praise of a
homesteading way of life.
Two new collections of agrarian essays have been published recently. Both were edited by
Norman Wirzba. In 2002 he published The Art of the Common-Place: The Agrarian Essays of
Wendell Berry. and in 2003 he published The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture,
Community, and the Land. The essays in this second book, by various writers, grew out of a
symposium recognizing the twentieth-fifth anniversary of the publication of Berry's The Unsettling
of America.
It makes sense for a review of the book of Berry's agrarian essays to begin with an essay, "The
Whole Horse," in which Berry clarifies the agrarian idea. To begin with, the agrarian is the
opposite of or alternative to the industrial way of life with its separation of production and
consumption. A crucial aspect of the agrarian economy is that "it is always a subsistence economy
before it is a market economy" (p. 239). The importance of this is seen as Berry contrasts the way
the conservation movements and the agrarian movement oppose the industrial economy in its
destruction of nature. Conservation movements, which grew out of nineteenth century nature-
romanticism, have no economy and thus cannot function as a genuine alternative to industrialism.
Berry explains that agrarianism is both an economy and a culture. Industrialism is primarily an
economy which has spawned only a counterfeit culture of consumerism; even as people within it
protest against industrial pollution, they are part of the problem. This is a difficult situation in
which to place people, and it can help to explain why Berry, and local food agrarians like him, are
not well accepted by environmentalists. Although Berry is right, it is not always tactful to be right.
Other exceptional essays in this volume of Berry's agrarian essays include "A Native Hill," a
very early essay in which Berry celebrates his native place as he explains why he left the urban
literary world for his native Kentucky. It is more beautifully written than other essays. Also
included is the great essay, "The Body and the Earth," from The Unsettling of America. Another
essay I found of interest, "Feminism, The Body, and The Machine," is a defense of Berry's refusal
to use a word processor. Even more scandalous to his readers was the fact that his wife typed
what he wrote. Here Berry had to defend their joint cottage industry against the prestige given to
women who work outside the home. He did this very well, but he was certainly swimming against
the cultural stream. Another "unpopular" theme is expressed in the essay, "Economy and
Pleasure." This is Berry's celebration of physical work: "We have removed pleasure from our
work in order to remove 'drudgery' from our lives (216)."
Although dissent is prominent in Berry's essays, I was more impressed in this reading and
rereading of Berry by how conservative his outlook is. He is a good conservative and seems more
comfortable in the moral and religious traditions of the West as he grows older. The book
concludes with a section on agrarian religion which, while including much explicit criticism of the
Christian tradition, still shows Berry's thinking permeated with religion: "The agrarian mind
begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking, good eating, and
gratitude to God" (241). I would place him among those who, like another Berry, Thomas Berry,
are loyal to "creation spirituality."
Turning now to the second collection of essays, The Essential Agrarian Reader, it is
noteworthy that at least three essays raise questions about the private ownership of land. In "The
Resettling of America," Brian Donahue discusses ways in which the commons can be reclaimed.
Susan Witt, in "New Agrarians," discusses the legal structure of the community land trust as a
means of making land accessible to those without capital. And Eric Freyfogel, in "Private Property
Rights in Land: An Agrarian View," cites some court cases in which private property rights have
been curtailed and then explores contexts in which the public responsibility for land is reasonable.
These are important essays because the agrarian possibility, and access to land, is frustrated in a
world where corporate control of land is unlimited.
Other powerful essays in the book include one by Vandana Shiva which is summarized in its
title: "Globalization and the War against Farmers and the Land." David Orr, in "The Uses of
Prophecy," most directly and appreciatively reviews Berry's work and recognizes that even as
Wendell Berry is much admired for his literary gifts, his agrarian message is generally dismissed.
We have already seen why environmentalists might do so. Another reason for dismissing what
Berry says is that an agrarian voice in an industrial age will inevitably be a complaining voice.
This can get tiresome.
Even more tiresome is the hortatory tone of moral urgency that pervades so many of these
agrarian essays. David Orr concludes his essay by arguing that "there is serious work to do"
(187). And an essay by Wendell Berry concludes the book as a whole. It is entitled "Going to
Work." I want to yell out "Come on, guys, lighten up! All work and no play make Jack a dull
boy." When I read articles or letters in homesteading magazines like Countryside I hear people tell
how they enjoy their agrarian lifestyle. They are not working to make the agrarian vision a reality.
If agrarian life is not celebrated as inherently enjoyable and satisfying, people will continue
heading for the city. Agrarian writers should not preach to us about what we ought to do; they
should encourage us to do what we want to do.
The interesting thing is that Wendell Berry does celebrate agrarian values and life in some
essays, and in his fiction and poetry. These books of essays might have been more effective if
they had included some of those wonderful poems, poems of a kind that, as Wendell once
explained, he would feel comfortable reading to another farmer. I am thinking of some of the
Mad Farmer poems, of "Horses," "The Peace of Wild Things," "Enriching the Earth", "The
Current," and "Work Song."
Suburbia is full of people who desperately want to enjoy farming their grounds, however
debased their desire may sometimes be. The pastoral ideal is alive and well. The love of good
food, and growing it, or having it grown locally, may eventually be a cultural tide that drowns out
the global supermarket and the convenience of fast food. As this happens we can give some credit
to Wendell Berry
The issue of Berry's cultural influence as a writer is a thorny one. Once the industrial way of
life loses its prestige, and it will, Berry's vision and his writing will be enormously useful even
though it is now dismissed by a culture in denial about food. Compare the struggle of Michigan
Land Trustees with its agrarian mission to the success of Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy
with its emphasis on the preservation of natural places. MLT has no paid staff; SWMLC has a paid
staff of five. It may seem as if the agrarian effort is one of the great lost causes in American
history. But once the sea of cheap oil in which we float recedes, and it is receding, the agrarian
vision will be relevant. The exquisite question of just how agrarian values and strategies will
dovetail with the "end of oil" should have been the topic in some of these essays. It was touched
on, indirectly, as authors such as Fred Kirschenmann and Gene Logsdon and Wes Jackson
discussed possibilities such as emerging local markets, grass farming, and perennial crop plants.
But sharper attention to this issue is required.
Berry's agrarian message may be dismissed by urban literary critics, but his writing has been
influential among farmers and in the agricultural community generally. About twenty five years
ago I gave a copy of The Unsettling of America to a nephew as a graduation gift. By now both he
and his father are organic farmers raising livestock on grass rather than grain. And they are
producing for local markets in their community, promoting the innovations needed in changing
circumstances.
I've always regretted not attending the first meeting of the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy, which I think was about 1990. Hopefully SWMLC and MLT with their different focus and (I might add) different level of success, can learn from each other, and maybe collaborate.
Summary and Reflections on a Meeting with the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy
by Ken Dahlberg
Summary: On October 13, 2004, Lisa Phillips, Maynard Kaufman, and I met with Peter Ter Louw, Executive Director of the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy(www.swmlc.org) to explore mutual interests. Pete began by asking us for an overview of what MLT has done over the years. After we gave a summary, Lisa then asked Pete to describe where they are at. He gave an extensive general review, plus how he had gotten involved in Van Buren County because of the many easements that the Land Conservancy has there (~ 30). Many of these involve a tangential agricultural component, but only one is primarily agricultural – Fenn Valley Vineyards (160 acres, of which 10 are natural). Under their by-laws, the Conservancy can do agricultural and historic preservation easements as well as natural lands – their primary focus. There is support from most of their Board members for agricultural easements, with a particular interest in the fruit belt – given its relative uniqueness. The are also beginning to look more at coastal riversheds. They and the Nature Conservancy may go to the DEQ to develop some watershed management plans. They are also looking at the Black River watershed.
In Van Buren and Barry Counties, they would be interested in working on agriculture and open space projects through the “purchase of development rights (PDR)” if either county passes a millage to fund this. Their work in Barry County would be primarily environmental, however.
In addition to their current work on prairie restoration, they also want to start doing some larger-scale landscape analysis and planning.
In terms of the possibility of working with MLT on county PDR projects, he noted that while county financial support would be very helpful, MLT might offer some of its own money to become eligible to participate in state and/or federal grant-funded projects. At some point he would like the Land Conservancy to be able to have a half time person to work on agriculture and open space issues. This is because he feels that over the next 5-10 years PDRs will become much more visible and attractive to local officials and planners – and not just because there is some state money available and counties can also have their own millages.
In terms of specific projects, he mentioned a Mattawan vintner that is concerned about the village’s expansion plans and who might be interested in an easement.
Beyond these specific points, both Maynard and Ken stressed the need for the Land Conservancy to embrace and more visibly talk about sustainability as a key criteria for projects involving natural areas, watersheds, and agricultural lands. He was open to this. So, it was a useful meeting in terms of finding out what they are doing and letting them know what we have done and what we are interested in exploring.
Reflections: A number of questions emerge for Board discussion and consideration as a result of this meeting and our last Board meeting. We need to sort out both our priorities and our capabilities (which as has been noted, we might be able to expand if we identify projects that engage people). Below are some of the questions that have occurred to the three of us:
Given that there will be many possibilities if we seek to work on PDR related easements, how do we sort out which we want to be involve with ? By targeting a particular region or county? By targeting certain types of farmland (vineyards, orchards, diversified small farms)? Or?
Should we take a pro-active approach? That is, talking to farmers, county officials, media people? Seeking out grant possibilities?
Should we focus primarily upon enforcing PDR easements as counties create them?
Should we seek to become local “consultants” on smart growth planning as it relates to agriculture and open space planning requirements?
How much time and effort is each of us willing to put into such activities/projects?
Can we really expand our membership/Board – and thus our capabilities by identifying new projects and/or approaches?
Our
next Board meeting – where we will discuss these and other
matters is Sunday, January 16th, potluck and 5:00 PM with
the Board meeting following. Meetings are open to interested members
and others. It will be held at Ken and Barbara Dahlberg’s
home, 2427 Kensington Dr. in Kalamazoo. Call 343-4748 for
directions. __________________________
There you have it. Please come to our next meeting as above. From myself and from the MLT Board, wishing you and yours a ...... MERRY CHRISTMAS!