Teaching (or Cultivating) Sustainability (or Inhabitance), Ten Years On

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

For ten years now, I've been teaching one version or another of a class on personal simplicity and economic and environmental sustainability here at Friends University, a formerly Quaker, non-denominational Christian, small liberal arts college in Wichita, KS. Though I teach at a religious university, I don't teach religion myself--and for that reason, I at first doubted that Jennifer Ayres's Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education would much that would be pedagogically relevant to me, despite my strong sympathy with her subject matter. In this, I was partly wrong. While Ayres's book includes many intriguing (and a few borderline outrageous) educational suggestions, its greatest value to me as a teacher is the way it inspires me to take stock of what I've tried to do with with my sustainability class, and to perhaps rethink what my primary goals in that course should be.

My original aim in the design of this class--about which I've probably shared my thoughts about too many times already--was always primarily getting students out of the classroom and into the growing, producing, fecund Kansas ecosystems all around us, showing them that there are patterns of life that can keep people fed and housed and happy without committing oneself to the rat race. It shouldn't have been a shock to me, after I'd lived in Kansas for a few years, to realize how many of my students really had no connection with farming or food systems--but it was, nonetheless. Sometimes broad popular stereotypes about "living in the heartland" would be confirmed as I talked with the students taking the class, and some of them would end up taking the lead in teaching me about cattle ranching or winter wheat or regenerative agriculture. But more often than not, my own agricultural background, limited as it is, nonetheless greatly eclipsed theirs. And so I figured that, whatever else I might be able to communicate to my students about Wendell Berry or John Woolman, I should at the very least get them out of the city and take them to some farms--as well as urban farmers markets and community gardens and other kinds of local sustainable business operations, perhaps going so far as to work on one of our own.

In doing all of that, I'd like to think I've been fairly successful, at least insofar as the "getting them out of Wichita" part is concerned. Even in the midst of the worst of the pandemic last summer and fall, different butchers and ranchers and food producers were willing to sacrifice some of their busy days to let students--majors in Conservation Science, Health Science, History & Politics, and more--come and tour their land, their independent meatpacking processing operations, their homemade tomato and lettuce greenhouses, their cheese-making and milk processing facilities, and so much more. These kinds of experiences don't, I'll be the first to admit, necessarily provide the students with the sort of detailed know-how necessary for them to develop more sustainable practices in their own lives. But as Ayres herself insists, knowledge about one's ecological surroundings are only the tip of the iceberg; as she writes, "Cultivating [the] capacity for inhabitance"--which she defines as "seeking to know and love and particular place in some detail and honoring its [ecological] rhythms, limits, and possibilities"--"requires personal and social transformation at a level far deeper than that of figuring out ‘greener solutions'" (pp. 3, 17). Thus the aim of those who aspire to "educate for inhabitance"--which I realized, in reading this book, clearly describes me--has to involve figuring out ways to engage the affections of others, their bodies and appetites and emotions and creative imaginations. If that seems intuitively true, it may be simply because philosophers from Aristotle to Polanyi have consistently argued that nothing can so engage people as real tactile experience, and real practical work. So far as that goes...as I said, I think I've done fairly well on the first, though not so much on the second.

To be clear: any success I've had with the first has to be attributed, first and foremost, to having an exemplar to draw upon, and becoming friends with Leroy Hershberger--a mechanic, handy-man, cook, juggler, bicyclist, and born story-teller, all with a degree from Yale--a decade ago has made all the difference in my life and the life of so many of my students. Some of them from years before have told me that dinners at the Hershbergers were one of the highlights of their entire college education. They remember well Leroy's glorious beard (that he shaved it off during the pandemic came as profound shock of several of them!), the kind words of his mother Mary, the inquisitive questions of his father William (who passed away at the age of 80 during the pandemic; Leroy's tribute to his father was touching, kind, and wise), and most of all the joy the whole Hershberg family take in being able to introduce young people a life more focused on the land, on real material productivity, and in that way a whole ecosystem--both ecological and economic, to say nothing of also spiritual--that exists and enlivens the worldview of many outside the hustle and bustle of our urban college campus.

I've sometimes been challenged--or, indeed, given the vicissitudes of trying to do my part to not just educate students but also keep my tuition-driven college campus alive and functioning, sometimes I have challenged myself--as to the real "outcomes" of this class and these excursions. Am I trying to turn my students into farmers, into rural proprietors and local producers? If so, why, and am I at all successful at it anyway? Every educator in today's late capitalist world confronts those questions of metrics and assessments at one point or another, and it's hard for me to conceive of anyone serious about the teaching profession who doesn't recognize the harmful framing they introduce into the very idea of paideia--that is, of the formation of the human person which a proper education should involve.

That may not mean that such questions can--much less should--be simply dismissed as irrelevant; our students live in this late capitalist world too, and are looking to find ways to discover livelihoods, relationships, and most of all places of productive inhabitance within it. If we as teachers provide no bridge from the formation we hope to introduce to their affections to the challenges facing them upon the conclusion of their education, then we haven't served them well at all. Ayres reminds me of all this, with wise comments on matters of both paideia (which she presents as an acknowledgement of the communities within which we are formed, and the responsibility of constructive critique which community membership must entail--p. 62) and place (which she defines as any location which, through human inhabitation, "is imbued with meaning, with histories, and [most crucially] with contestations"--p. 88). Creating, through my classes, opportunities for my students to come face-to-face, and hand-to-hand, with people like the Hershbergers and dozens of others who have exemplified simpler and more sustainable forms of life hopefully also gives them 1) a model of the love of place, and 2) the incentive to recognize, come to know, and thereby carefully--but unsparingly--critique their own places. 

Do I imagine that such incentives and models will automatically transform my students into ecologically, environmentally, agriculturally informed inhabitants of wherever they live? Obviously not, especially since my own inhabitation still falls short in so many ways. But life is long, and beginning students along a path scattered with seeds for reflection, fits in, again, with the kind of trust in the slow pace of creation which Ayers speaks of eloquently:

[S]low knowledge is the kind of knowledge necessary for an ecologically conscious person or community. It is cultivated together and shared, is deeply related to the context in which it is nurtured, and acknowledges--indeed, embraces--human limitations....[M]ost importantly, it demands human patience and attentiveness. It will not be rushed. In the not rushing, in the attentiveness, wisdom is cultivated and inoculates human consciousness against the seductions of technological progress and the quick fix....

In formal education settings, the push toward more content coverage and measurable success makes the proposal of slowing down, reading less, and reflecting more somewhat of a pedagogical and institutional risk. In religious communities, "slow learning" meets other institutional pressures: in a season of anxiety about declining religious affiliations and lackluster participation in education programs, religious and educational leaders might be seduced by slick curriculum packets that promise effortless preparation and meaning engagement with learners. The principle of slow knowledge, however would suggest that efficiency and meaning are sometimes at cross-purposes. Meaning takes time (pp. 72-73).

The relevance of ecological language to the slow formation of ideas, in the lives of students or parishioners or anyone else, contrary to what Ayres calls--learning heavily on Berry, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Wes Jackon, David Orr, and many others--the "uncritical embrace of the efficiencies and networking capacities of technology" (p. 4) should be obvious. Equally obvious is how committing to the enacting of that slow formation--such as by growing a garden--can only strengthen that relevance. But that, of course, is where things get exponentially harder. It is one thing, in the midst of whirlwind of experiences that make up a college education, to get students to pause for an hour, or a day, or maybe even longer, and enable them to put their hands on the soil and the food and the people who can provide them with real models of belonging and critique. It is an entirely different thing to commit students to fill up that pause with the daily, weekly, monthly work of growing things in a garden, and to be able to see and, eventually, taste the results of their own re-orientation.

For close to a decade, many of us here at Friends have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to commit our students--and ourselves!--to projects requiring some genuine husbandry in a garden space on our campus. Sometimes there have been real successes, and sometimes the space has lain almost entirely forgotten for an academic year (or more). The space in general has much improved since the early conversations about it, and the first rush of enthusiasm to transform what was a vacant lot beside a student housing complex. But an entirely sustainable component of Wichita's local food system--much less even just Friend University's!--the garden is absolutely not. It remains, month in and month out, dependent upon the vision and determination of a few of us, and the occasional student or two or five who find ways to make the time spent working in the garden satisfy either their own personal commitments or their academic responsibilities or both. But even in those happy situations, we'll likely only have a season or two from the students in question: they are, after all, young people, seeking to gain the learning (and the certification of having received such) that will enable them to find their own place, and make their own commitments, on their own schedule, not necessarily Mother Nature's. So we make the most of the seasons we have, and continue to try our best to get the carrots and arugula and potatoes to grow, in the same way I try my best to make my classes spark agrarian and ecological ideas that might never have occurred to the students before. Sometimes, it all works. And when it doesn't, we trust in God's grace and the fecundity of both the Kansas soil and the college student's mind, and try again.

That kind of attitude is always going to be dispiriting to some. They might look at Ayres's book and note that she hardly ever addresses the complex structural forces which likely make it difficult for an education in inhabitance to translate into the creation care she considers imperative. The same criticism could made of the three-credit hour college class I teach once a year at a not-especially-notable Christian college in the middle of Kansas, of course: how is that really addressing the obstacles to inhabitance. But as utopian as "religious education" and "local food tours" it may seem, that doesn't mean we still can't approach them with a hope for real formation work in mind. Or at least I do--and I thank Ayres for reminding me of that ideal. She is a teacher speaking to other teachers, like me. She is urging, through her book, those of us who have grasped the imperative of seeking to cultivate a greater concern for ecological and economic and spiritual sustainability to “envision...a way of inhabitance that may not yet be entirely possible,” holding on to the faith that the communities we might be building through our teaching “can imagine and do and become that which one person cannot on their own” (p. 129). Perhaps "envisioning for inhabitation" isn't a bad goal for my class, as I take it into its next decade.

Grace Olmstead's Uprooted Idaho, and My Own

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Last summer my family and I drove right by Emmett, Idaho, the ancestral home of Grace Olmstead, author of the wonderful, if imperfect, Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind. Idaho's Gem County (Emmett is the county seat) is beautiful country, which it was good to reminded of. We were traveling from Spokane, Washington (where I was born and raised, and where my widowed mother--whom my children hadn't seen in years, and needed to visit--continues to live in a cabin atop what we call Fox Hill just over the Idaho border) to Gooding, Idaho (for a big family gathering which, out of pandemic-related concerns for our mother's health, we held someplace other than the old homestead). If we'd taken the interstate, we would have traveled faster, but missed the scenery, so instead we took state highways through the wheat fields of the Palouse, down into Hells Canyon, up again into the forested mountains around Payette Lake (we swam for a bit, but Sharlie, the legendary monster of Payette, made no appearance), and then down again towards Boise, before getting on the interstate and heading east across southern Idaho's Snake River Plain to our destination. If I'd known that reading Olmstead's book was in my future, I would have made sure we stopped for dinner in Emmett instead of later on.

I take the time to talk about the landscape around these places because it is the land of southwestern Idaho, and the people who built small farming towns like Emmett on that land, that Olmstead approaches in her book with great--though sometimes uneven--passion and grace. Uprooted is partly a memoir of her extended family (though mostly just her great-grandparents), partly a paean to a way of life that is both dying and which she never really understood while she grew up in the midst of it (and thus feels the loss of all the more deeply now), and partly a study of the causes of that dying, and how what has endured--the habits, the connections, the sense of place--has shaped her extended family nonetheless. She calls her book "an exercise in discernment" (pg. xiii, 206), and it was that element of the book which broke through my partial resistance to it. In presenting to the public her ongoing attempt to work through her own feelings about the decades-long decline of a town and the agrarian vocation which it served as a particular home for, all of which she has belated realized she loves, and moreover in doing so with such regional specificity, Olmstead forced a degree of reflection upon me--a person with his own family stories of Idaho and farms, stories which I, also, mostly now know only at a great distance, both physical and temporal.

For Olmstead, the heart of the story she wants to tell about Emmett, and about her own Howard family in that place, is her great-grandfather, Walter Allen Howard--or as Olmstead always refers to him, "Grandpa Dad," the marvelously inventive and hard-working (and, as the story unfolds, contrary and independent to a fault) patriarch of her clan. Born in 1911, and still driving a tractor and tending to his prized (and apparently somewhat secretly maintained) irrigation ditches until he passed away in 2008, Olmstead grounds her many ruminations about farming life and community attachment in near-constant references to Grandpa Dad's example. He was a man who embodied a certain kind of rootedness, to the land ("Grandpa Dad dug many of the ditches that still feed water to crops in north Emmett--all of them with a spade and his two hands"--pg. 5), to the community of Emmett ("He would often come in dirty from a long work day on the farm and head straight for the shower to clean up so he could attend a local meeting"--pg. 179), to his church ("To Grandpa Dad, some things mattered more than the price tag--and supporting his neighbor and Christian brother [who ran the only grocery store he was willing patronize] was one of those things"--pg. 141), and most of all to his family. Her portrait of this impressive man is a deeply loving one, and no wonder: to a great-granddaughter, shucking corn beside him, listening to him tell stories of his long-dead wife and recite poetry and spin tales of a land utterly transformed ("He was the first storyteller and historian I knew...overflowing with knowledge and narrative"--pgs. 5-6), he must have seemed an entirely lovable human being.

But Olmstead also thoughtfully makes use of such authors as Robert Nisbet, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke, Robert Wuthnow, and Wendell Berry to elaborate upon the beauty, social utility, and moral worthiness of that particular rural rootedness which she most centrally associates with the memory of that human being and of his farm in Emmett. In particular, she makes use of the distinction employed by Wallace Stegner (and frequented emphasized by Berry as well) between "boomers"--those who "come to extract value from a place and then leave"--and "stickers"--"those who settle down and invest." She trenchantly observes that "Since the mid-nineteenth century, there have been more boomers than stickers in Idaho history" (pg. 21), and provides the background to make her point clear. Grandpa Dad, in contrast, was a sticker, and that haunts her.

Haunts her, because she, and her whole extended family, didn't actually stick, at least not entirely. Though the Howards were all deeply shaped by the connections which Grandpa Dad's work and care for the land and the community had built all around him, his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren nonetheless never committed to that community or that work. They became bankers and pharmacists and engineers and, in Olmstead's case, a journalist in Washington DC. And here is where my internal reflection begins, because I could say something similar in regards to myself, and my own extended family. Our family's own Idaho farm, and the milk cows and alfalfa fields and vegetable gardens and calf pens and homemade fences and barns I grew up around and worked early mornings and late nights in, all through the 1970s and 1980s, have faded into an enduring set of Idaho-centric reminiscences, not something I--a college professor in Kansas, with siblings working in real estate and communications and investment and education--can really claim any rootedness in, especially not over the past fifteen years or so, as we have settled in Wichita and as our children have grown up.

There are differences, to be sure: my own great-grandfather, and grandfather (that's a photo of him there, standing in the crop fields along the Kootenai river north of Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, sometime in the early 1950s), and my father too, all mostly approached agriculture as a business endeavor--something lovely in its own right, to be sure, and something they studied well and worked hard at and thought important enough (or at least money-making enough) to impress upon us children. They weren't dilettantes when it came to growing wheat, driving combines, bailing hay, leveling ground, raising calves, breaking horses, and all the rest. But to them it was also, in the end, something to expand and outsource (a four generations of Amoths, a Mennonite family, have really done most of the daily work on that Idaho land) and trade upon and sell off (the Amoths now own the farm) as the situation warranted. This is very different from Olmstead's Grandpa Dad, who wouldn't take government subsidies and, as the decades went by, continually "refused to get big and refused to get out" (p. 64). Not that his impressive example at all affected the economic, cultural, and governmental realities which depressed his own community (and which my own ancestors recognized and, when they could, both profited and escaped from). Emment's agrarian community has suffered the same catastrophic decline in numbers of farms, in wealth, in population, and in environmental health that you see in rural areas all across the country. But either way, whether our family histories reach back through an engagement with farming as something to get into and get out of while the getting was good, or an engagement that was grounded in a true sense of vocation and community...it was something that didn't last.

Olmstead is very good at making the case that it might not have been this way; the viability of sticking with the farm and with the rural communities which long centered the lives of large numbers of Americans--include her family and mine--might have been preserved. If the centralizing logic of finance capitalism had been prevented from cheering on agribusinesses like Monsanto as they effectively robbed farmers of control of their own seed; if the global marketplace had been pushed away from prioritizing commodity crops which served international trade and put the burden on farmers to expand and homogenize and go into debt in order to do so; if government supports and subsidies had been directed at maintaining local networks of producers instead of ever larger and ever more costly farms that could maximize on production for the expansionist purposes of the Cold War-era American state; if, if, if...well, then maybe things would be different. As it is, though, they aren't. Olmstead details the lives of many contemporary farmers in the Emmett area who are sticking it out despite the obstacles all around them--people like Susan and Peter Dill of Saint John's Organic Farm, the Williams family at Waterwheel Gardens, or Terry and Ashley Walton who (thanks to a Farm Service Agency loan) purchased Grandpa Dad's farm after he passed away and no one in the family had any interest in preserving it. But her deep engagement with these topics--with America's broken food system, its exploitative farm labor practices, its consumer-mad economy, and its poisonous addiction to treating the land almost always as either a brute calorie resource or a recreational site for visiting elites, and almost never as respectful localities where people can build lives for themselves--all makes her doubtful that even a great many farmers like her great-grandfather could ever make enough of a difference:

Grandpa Dad emerged from the difficulties of poverty in this landscape by not moving--by staying in one spot for his entire life. But wealth is no longer build through allegiance to a community or a town; it is increasingly achieved in isolation by individuals and grown through rootlessness, not through loyalty....Without systemic change--without a revaluing of the soil, or all the land that depends on it, of the farmers to cultivate and steward it--I fear sticking might not even be enough. Too much has changed. Too much has been lost (pgs. 126, 175).

What kind of systemic change? In a word, an abandonment of the cranky individualism which is so central to the myth of the family farm in America. Olmstead documents how as early as 150 years ago perceptive writers and government leaders were already pointing out the economic and environmental necessity of farmers forming "cooperative communities" rather than "privately owned patchworks" (pg. 56); this vision of individual (rather than collective) and libertarian (rather than local) self-sufficiency has long endured, with arguably ruinous results--the real story behind of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books provides one example, and the separation of the extended Howard family from what Grandpa Dad had laboriously built provides another ("Grandpa Dad's fierce independence was likely part of the reason our family no longer belonged to Emmett, or to the farm....The farm was always his: something others helped with but were never integrated into"--pgs. 182-183). In place of such ferocious denials of the collective, Olmstead, repenting of her youthful attachment to "free-market capitalism and limited government," applauds federal programs designed to "get a younger, more diverse, and more sustainable population on the land," to use "public funds and efforts to undergird civil associations: not just investing in individuals, but also the groups and networks that support them," and to basically just use government policies to push back against the "reductive thinking that breaks down the farm's purpose to fit solely profit-focused ends," and to instead "strengthen local economic sovereignty" (pgs. 186-190). The change she'd want to see, in other words, is a populist one. Not the faux-populism of the Trump era, of course, but the kind of populism--that is, the kind of collective, inclusive, democratic action which economically empowers local places--which farmers like Wendell Berry have both striven to build and constantly emphasized for decades.

But would such systemic changes actually bring about a return to the land? That's a harder question, and one likely not much influenced by changes in politics. For her part, Olmstead sees her own political evolution ("I'm neither Republican nor libertarian these days....but...someone who cares deeply about...the issues of racial injustice, economic exploitation, and ecological abuse"--pgs. 202-203) as actually creating additional obstacles to her return to the red-state land she loves--though she suspects it will happen eventually, as her parents grow older and become more in need of her care. More important than any political disagreement or policy recommendation, though, is the difficulty of simply accepting the sacrifice that a return to the rural will involve for people who have organized their whole conception of the self, whether they realize it or not, in opposition to the kind of communal beauties which belonging to a small, land-based, productive community may (it's always a maybe; never a surety) involve. Our acceptance of community transience, consumer disposibility, and capitalist booming will not easily or quickly turn around--though trying to do so is a must. As Olmstead note's in her conclusion:

To choose rootedness, we must acknowledge the fact that, as Simone Weil points out, a desire for profit, unless tempered by other goods and goals, tends to destroy human roots. We have to seek out larger goals than financial fulfillment, than reaching the next rung on the social or economic ladder. We have to consider whether the perfect career or paycheck will offer us the fulfillment or happiness we lack--or whether the cost of transience is, in fact, too high a cost. It is true that providing for ourselves and our families and having solid employment are fundamental considerations. But we must also remember that they are not the only questions or goals worth considering (pg. 217).

I should note that Olmstead's book, in my judgment anyway, is not at its absolute best when it comes to those "fundamental considerations." While the impassioned case she makes for Emmett--or at least for the sort of local food and tight communities and productive land which can be found in a place like Emmett--is well-informed and wise, it doesn't hold together as tightly as it might have if she'd approached questions of cost, as they are born by those who actually live in the region, somewhat more consistently. She has a long profile of the Little family--part of "the state's agriculture royalty"--whose climb to the top of Idaho's state government and Republican party began in Emmett, but there is strangely little analysis or critique there (are we really supposed to believe that the Little's massive leased-out ranches and the Williams's "twenty-five dense acres of fruit and vegetables" both reflect the same "decision to invest in this community"?--pgs. 160-164). Another time she profiles a self-described "Emmett original," a young woman who only wanted to escape the town ("there aren't enough jobs in this valley, she told me, and she thinks the education system is rather poor"), and while her journey out of Idaho includes some intriguing bumps (she turned down the prospect of Oregon State University because "I just didn't . . . see no one in cowboy boots"--pgs. 116-119), she did up leaving to study journalism elsewhere--very much like Olmstead herself. What's her story, and what does it tell us readers, or Olmstead herself, about how we, or she, should total up the educational or economic costs of her, or our own, staying versus leaving? Again, by mostly skimping on the structural or ideological aspects of this act of investigation, the point is not clear.

But then, no book should be expected to clearly explain--or critique, for that matter--every consequence and cost of the story they aim to tell, and certainly not a book like Uprooted, whose overriding purpose, as Olmstead insisted, is just to discern something about her own story, and the story of a family and a town and a region and a vocation she loves and remembers and is still shaped by, however great the distance. And I wonder if any criticisms I have of the book aren't rooted (yes, I see what I did there) in how it pushed me to think through and discern better my own distant agrarian connections--ones that, I cannot deny, were never as strong as Olmstead's, nor ones that I have attended to with anything like her own dedication or insight or generosity. Grace Olmstead's book may not be the final masterpiece of all possible localist argument, but it is a set of very smart reflections on localism and rural life which are specific enough, and thoughtfully expressed enough, to bring up in my mind the Fox family's own private agrarian Idaho, and to reflect upon--and also mourn, if just a little--my distance from it's own beauty as well. As I wrote above, I wish I'd read this book before my family made our visit to my old home and our drive to southern Idaho last summer. But now that I've read it, I can at least remember it a little bit differently, and a little bit better too.

Wichita and the Road Ahead

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

In the midst of violent protests, police violence, and a pandemic, I'm thinking about a road.

It's not much of a road; just a short stretch of University St., directly west of Friends University, where I've taught since 2006. Over those 14 years, I have biked back and forth on that 1/10th of a mile stretch, which dead-ends 50 ft. short of Meridian Ave., probably over 7000 times. It's the final leg of my normal commute route; I bike from my home in west Wichita eastbound on Maple St., cutting south to University at West St. As this segment of University doesn't intersect Meridian, I just ride on the railroad crossing to pop back onto University when the road dead-ends, at which point it's a straight shot to campus. My westbound return follows the same route, which I've ridden so often I can navigate this part of University with my eyes closed. Except I can't right now, because the road is all torn up. (And yes, I have still biked regularly into the campus over the past two months, letting myself into my office while the whole campus stood almost entirely empty; the camera on my office computer is a lot better for recording lectures and conducting online classes than mine at home.)

Of course, the construction isn't any kind of real problem; I can just bike around the bulldozers and dump trucks, and besides the rear entrance to the parking lot for Friends's Garvey Art Center is right there if I can't get through the construction. There are a couple of single-family homes along the street, so it was presumably greater hassle for them--but since everything else which borders both sides of the road belongs to my university, it's mostly folks like me who use it. And while I have no right to or responsibility for the road in any kind of formal sense, I nonetheless found myself somewhat curious about it all. Maybe a little bothered, even.

Why bothered? Well, partly because in the midst of the present pandemic, every penny counts. The job losses which followed in the wake of the life-preserving shutdowns that COVID-19 made necessary have resulted in record unemployment claims, and that means both major declines in tax revenue and major strains on the budgets of the cities of Kansas. Wichita is looking at an $11 million dollar deficit in the coming fiscal year, and as Chase Billingham of Wichita State has noted, while a little of the CARES millions which the federal government has designated as aid for state and local governments has been made available to some targeted programs in the city (like transit), Wichita's general fund itself hasn't received a dime. That may change, and the economy may bounce back more quickly than most economists are predicting. Still, with the advice offered by Charles Marohn's Strong Towns very much on my mind, especially when it comes to what cities like Wichita can do to strengthen the neighborhoods which are crucial to getting us through this time of transition, I kept looking at that construction as I biked past it and wondered: did this road really need to be repaired? Was this the best use of the city's money at this time? Who asked for or decided upon this repair job, and how much does it cost, anyway?

So I started shooting out e-mails. It quickly became clear that this was a construction job that came from the city, not from any stakeholders along the road. (Both the university president and our director of maintenance first found out about the construction when they received a notification from Kansas Paving, a company contracted by the city, that work on the street was about to start.) With some help from Paul Gunzelman, the Assistant City Engineer for the city of Wichita, I was eventually put in contact with Aaron Henning, a maintenance engineer with the city's Public Works & Utilities department. They were able to supply me with city documents and answer all my questions--well, all except the one I consider to be most important, but that one isn't actually an engineering question: it's a political one.

I have nothing but compliments for Paul and Aaron; for every annoying query I put to them about the meaning of acronyms like "OP3" ("Outsourced Pavement Preservation Program"--it's been years, apparently, since the bulk of the routine maintenance of Wichita's more than 5100 miles of road has been handled by the city's own workers) or "PCI" ("Pavement Condition Index," a numerical rating determined in part by staff members who, over the course of 18 months, physically visit every single segment of the aforementioned 5100 miles of road), they had a thorough answer. Insofar as this little stretch of University beside Friends which I know so well goes, the story goes like this:

The PW&U Department has developed a computerized method of ranking various inputs regarding roads (called "DST," for Decision Support Tool), including not just the observed condition of the street, but its primary material (concrete or asphalt?), and whether repairs on the road would fall under the label "preservation" (acting to prevent further deterioration) or "mitigation" (acting to limit the extent of already progressing deterioration). It turns out that this little concrete stretch of University had a PCI of 35, the second lowest ranked concrete street segment in the whole city. And so when 2019's budget was set (in which the OP3 was given $9.5 million, $3 million from the city's General Fund, $6.5 million out of the mostly debt-financed Capital Improvement Plan, with a little over $1 million specifically earmarked for repairing concrete roads), it got prioritized within the funds allocated to District 4, in which Friends University and this street is found. Hence, come late spring of 2020 (and no, I didn't bother asking about the delay; I know how things can pile up), a contract was drawn up for about 55% of the segment's total paved area to be patched and replaced, at a cost of about $45,000, and off Kansas Paving went to do its job. All clear?

Well, sure. Again, I make no criticism of Aaron or Paul or any other city engineers or any of the PW&U staff, and I foresee no reason to criticize the professionalism or efficiency of Kansas Paving. A large number of people, all responding to one another, all passing information and decisions and money along, all getting a road in better shape. This is the way cities should work, right?

But here is where I say--maybe not? Especially, maybe not right now? I go back to my original point: this was a stretch of road I knew very, very well. Was it in great shape? Not at all. Was it in terrible shape? Again, not at all. (Just look at the Google Map photo of it above.) It was a perfectly serviceable 1/10th-mile-long access road use by 1) a couple of private homeowners, 2) those Friends staff, faculty, or students who found a need to drive the 530 feet to the back entrance of the Garvey Art Center, and 3) me, biking east and west on the road, morning and afternoon, year after year after year. As Aaron assured me, no one put in any kind of request to fix this road; it was the DST that determined its time had come, and once calculations were made about what kind of mitigation vs. preservation could be done, costs were tabulated and people were put to work. At the total estimated cost of, roughly speaking, an entire yearly salary of the average probation officer, carpet installer, librarian, title examiner, payroll clerk, or--hey!--civil engineering technician here in the state of Kansas.

Wait, it doesn't work that way!--that's what everyone who read the previous paragraph will say, and they'd be right; it's not like there is any easy way to all of a sudden stop some existing flow of money and divert it to someone or something else. But this is the important, political question I mentioned before: why? Especially during a pandemic, when our city--like cities all across the country--is facing an immediate, and potentially long-enduring, fiscal crisis, why is there no mechanism for people to look at the flows of money which course through our, or any, city's systems, and reconsider? Don't forget that money spent on roads is money that invariably sets up additional maintenance costs, costs that only increase as time goes by. That's not a criticism of those people like Aaron or Paul who have spent their whole professional careers trying to balance so many conflicting demands, and discover the most sustainable way to stretch the dollars they have. If anything, it's a suggestion that maybe they've haven't been supported in going far enough in their thinking about what really needs to be preserved, versus what can stand for just a little mitigation, versus what could really, honestly, just maybe, if only for right now, be allowed to be left alone.

I look around Wichita, and I see--just while walking our dog around our west Wichita neighborhood--more people gardening, more people fixing up their homes, more people setting out chairs and hanging out with one another in their driveways or on the sidewalks, just talking, than I can recall from any previous year. Obviously the fact that restaurants, bars, and other restaurants were closed, and many people were working from home, has been a primary cause of much of that--but perhaps not the only cause? The economic costs of the pandemic have been terrible, and are likely only to continue--and in response, people have been trying to find other, different ways of getting things done. One thing that many of them (that many of us) will need to continue exploring these new, perhaps more sustainable alternatives to work and food and shelter and entertainment is--as the Strong Towns Toolkit points out--cash, both local and immediate. Cities need to hang on to what the fiscal reserves they have, and think carefully and creatively about new ways to spend it.

Am I saying that the half-dozen or so workers I've seen out on University over the past couple of weeks couldn't use the money? Of course not! I'm completely open to the idea that generating road work for Kansas Paving is an entirely defensible act of Keynesian spending, of priming the pump. But then again, if you really want to see the money the city has going directly to the city's neighborhoods and residents, then why not just cancel all the orders for sand and 2x4s and concrete which the University repair job requires, and just deliver whatever portion of that $45,000 would have been dedicated to wages directly to the workers (and maybe with a little extra thrown in), and then keeping the rest on hand? It's not like there aren't problems aplenty which challenge Wichita's ability to move in a more sustainable way through this crisis.

For example, I think about local farmers and food producers I know--in Valley Center, Haysville, Andover--who have struggled to be part of a more sustainable food system here in Wichita; like perhaps a third of all small food operations across the country right now, the Covid Depression is threatening to wipe many of them out. Years ago, when drought threatened south-central Kansas, Wichita's government found the money to establish a rebate program (which still exists today!) incentivizing how people were spending money on sprinkling their lawns and washing their clothes. Surely some cutbacks on little-used roads could provide the city with the accounting flexibility to do something similar with one of our greatest assets: the fact that, unlike many comparable mid-sized cities, it's really quite easy here to grow food?

Well, eventually this little stretch of University will be done, and I won't see during my commute the sort of work which set my mind going on this long tangent. There are, absolutely, many more important topics to argue about right now than this one. But perhaps this small issue could be, should be, a way to get at a much larger one--namely, how to politically move our city to reconsider, or maybe just take further, the ways in which it seeks to prioritize and make more durable the decisions it makes and the money it spends. There will be, I am certain, perhaps 10 or so people that will be really happy with this fixed-up road. I may even be one of them! But I can think of other ways, more genuinely and democratically empowering ways, that the city leaders could spend money that might make even more people happy, in the long run. Here's hoping they can start seeing them (and that we will know how to help them do so!).

Hanging Out with, and Learning from, Some Thoroughly Material Benedictines

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

A few weeks ago I was able to, once again, do something that I enjoy doing immensely--take a group of students out on a local food tour, so they can learn firsthand about more sustainable approaches to building well-fed, healthy communities. Our hosts were the Elder family, and from them--or at least a portion of them: mother Becky, father Philip, son George, and daughter Alexis, to be specific--we were taught about the seasonal economics of blackberries, about some of the latest technological innovations in organic vegetable gardening, about the necessity of horses, about the political importance of small farms, and much more. Through it all, though, as we inquired about different types of lettuce, did some comparison tasting of goat's milk, and helped rescue a 4-month-old colt who'd gotten herself trapped under a fence, I kept thinking about something entirely different: Rod Dreher's "Benedict Option."

Amongst certain localist and conservative bloggers, Rod's arguments about the importance (sometimes he presents it as the necessity) of those who hold to traditional understandings of the Christian message to find ways to organize themselves separate from the usual--and what was at least for a long time nominally Christian--forms of civic and commercial and church life in America have sparked a great deal of debate in recent months. What would be involved in such separation, and what's the reason for it, and how will we know it when (or if) we ever see it? Rod, to his credit, hasn't presented himself as possessing any comprehensive answers to those questions--but it is pretty clear that his ideas are tending in a direction that Ken Myers described in an old lecture (which Rod extensively quoted from) as "moral and metaphysical." Or, to put in a slightly lengthier format, Rod seems to be coming around to seeing the argument for communities to root themselves in traditions and practices that keep them at least somewhat separate from the secular, commercial world as eschewing any kind of aspiration to a material permanence. As he wrote in response to Bruce Frohnen, who thoughtfully challenged Rod for relying, in his view, too much a kind of agrarian sentimentality, "I realize now that the best we can hope for in the world of America 2015 is to settle among people who love us, and whom we can love, and where we can worship God and do good work." Which is a beautiful vision, to be sure! But I wonder if in putting it that way, the argument for separateness is being undermined, however slightly.

Rod has visited the Elder's homestead--dubbed "Elderslie"--with me before. When he was here last year, Becky (who has been greatly impressed with Rod's work on behalf of explaining the importance of being rooted in one's place) showed off what she and her family have managed to build over the decades--farming properties, an independent school, a small milling business, a shared congregation, a sustainable network of local commercial producers of fruit, flowers, and more--and exclaimed "This is the Benedict Option!" I've no doubt he would still agree. But Elderslie is not centrally a congregational endeavor; their church life is a big part of what they have built, but the Elders and those who work with them and teach with them see themselves as attached to a much larger classical intellectual tradition, one that is clearly Christian but which is also just as clearly aimed at responding to matters of physical and environmental health, economic and educational independence, and fulfilling, socially contributing work. It is, in short, an act of resistance to that individualism which has, I would agree, warped our economic and environmental and social existence. To describe that kind of separateness as something which is motivated primarily by a congregational desire (to worship among like-minded folk, and preserve the attachments which make such worship meaningful!) would be reductive, I think.

Alan Jacobs refers to the Benedict Option as putting its priority on Christian "culture-making" and enabling those concerned about the values of the Christian tradition to be "fully shaped....by the Christian account of things." Again, for people like myself who care about tradition, that's a vital and inspiring point. But is thinking hard about how to build and preserve the roots of--and the socio-economic and legal space for--a culture mostly a (as Rod sometimes seems to suggest) liturgical phenomenon? Perhaps you could argue that Elderslie and other family and community operations like it really are "liturgical" in some sense, because their direct engagement in the practices that keep them going really do result in a kind of discipline and ritual to their lives. If so, then I suspect that the Benedict Option which has struck me as a needful way of helping to shape how we think about community in the 21st century will only grow more convincing in my mind. But if not--if Rod's Benedict Option really is, essentially, about protecting the "church of Jesus Christ," as Alan put it--then I think, at least right now, that it's allowing current arguments about religious liberty to narrow its focus too much (though Rod is, clearly, still thinking about this stuff, writing recently that "the Benedict Option is far more a response to pervasive consumerism, individualism, and atomism than anything to do with gay rights," which I think puts things right).


Rod has insisted, in response to Frohnen, that he's not an agrarian--and of course, that's true. But Frohnen has a point, I think--whether or not Rod's thinking about the Benedict Option currently points him this directly, I suspect (and I have written before) that it is very difficult to get to the kind lasting, sustainable separateness which he thinks (and I at least partly agree) is needed if those traditions supportive Christian virtues are to be fully lived and inculcated into one's children without at least some kind of anti-capitalist, agrarian mentality. Becky Elder took the time to preach to my students for a short time about Andrew Lytle, one of the Southern Agrarians, and his important essay "The Small Farm Secures the State"--one of the essential 20th-century Jeffersonian declarations against an economy based on distant specialization, monopolistic centralization, and all things big. If we don't, in our innumerable and diverse ways, seek to enable our families and communities and co-ops to become more capable of feeding themselves, then a pattern of dependency inevitably follows. Honestly, just how far could any church group go in building for itself a genuinely separate cultural track if the individuals who make up that group ultimately, fundamentally, have no real independence in their livelihood, in making the money to put food in their own and their children's mouths? Will liturgy suffice if your boss changes your shift to Sunday, religious liberty be damned? Will a strong pastor be enough to provide an education which reflects Christian priorities when all the families in the congregation are too busy to volunteer to help out in classes, because food costs and health care costs and mortgages require every family send both spouse out into the work force full-time?

I don't throw these out as gotcha questions, suggesting that there is something essential and obvious being overlooked here. On the contrary, smart conservatives and localists and radicals have looked exhaustively into these questions, struggling to find ways to respond to them as part of their pursuit of, or defense of, an at least partially Christian culture. The answers have ran the gamut, touching on all manner of technological, economic, ecclesiastical, and political constructs. Mediating institutions of various scales all potentially play a role in allowing this aim to be achieved, as are any number of different sorts of progressive compromises. (For the Elders, it's striking how sophisticated they've become in judging the ability of various markets to support their agricultural or material products so as to give them the resources they need, recognizing that there are some things that can be done very well organically--and profitably--here in south-central Kansas, and quickly seeking out alternative approaches, even international or high-end technological ones, when that isn't the case.) To the extent the Benedict Option is yet another engagement with these questions, perhaps one more particular to a time when traditional Christian cultural assumptions are fading away, it's a necessary addition to the communitarian and localist toolkit. But to rush past all this vital, practical, material work, and cast the Benedict Option as an imperative act of moral or metaphysical sanctuary in the face of the collapse of Christianity itself...that, I think, just misses the trees for the forest, if you know what I mean. (I should note that it's possible I can speak this way, wanting to push the particular and local mechanics rather than clutching at the biggest themes, because I simply don't see the "collapse of Christianity" happening at all, not one bit. Yes, strong protections of religious liberty and certain tax and legal privileges enjoyed by Christian institutions have been, I think, of tremendous civic benefit in American history, and deserve to be fought for--but it's not like their loss in a more secular America would equal some kind of Christian Armageddon, unless one happens to believe, as I presume the Francophile Rod does not, that France with its laïcité is a formally oppressive and persecuting anti-Christian society. As in many things, I agree with Damon Linker here.)

If it's not obvious, I need to say explicitly: this is a disagreement over how one formulates priorities, not about the end goal. So I'll continue to read Rod, because he's one of the best and most important public voices dealing with these matters. Who knows what he--or I--will decide as time and arguments continue? Perhaps he'll come to recognize what I see as the foremost need to explore specific and sustainable material and economic arrangements as part of following lead of St. Benedict, or perhaps I'll come to agree with him that, ultimately, building up liturgical defenses of various metaphysical truths is only separateness that really, fundamentally matters. Or maybe we'll both change our minds somewhat. It's not as though any of the long lines of discussion and social organization which have kept alive humane concerns with community and culture-building in the midst of modern, secular liberalism--and here we can think of the Catholic Worker movement, Amish congregations, classically-oriented independent schools, and many more--have ever come to an end, saying that they've worked out the One True Way to attend to permanent things. And of course, in the midst of all this intellectual debate, folks like the Elders keep on experimenting and working, building their own Benedictine path. I'm grateful that they're around so that I can learn from them, and share with those I teach their ideas....and, last but not least, enjoy the delicious material bounties that they produce as well.

What Cuba Teaches us About Equality, Sustainability--and Poverty

[Cross-posted to Political Context]

Every since President Obama announced that the U.S. would relax its travel and economic restrictions on and open up normal diplomatic relations with Cuba, the predictable people have been making the predictable denunciations, while the American people have seemed pretty clearly able to recognize--at least this once!--a pointless policy leftover from the Cold War for various partisan reasons when they see one. But the most interesting reactions I've heard have been those which have come from students and faculty I know here at Friends University, several of whom have been able, through our jazz and pre-med programs, to visit Cuba in recent years. Nearly all the comments that I've heard and read from them--everyone of which was otherwise supportive of the change in policy--included some statement along the lines of: "I'm grateful I was able to visit Cuba before it becomes commercialized." That is, opening up American markets to Cuba is going to bring to Cuban society American economic opportunities, and their many consequences--and these folks were happy to have been able to see the place before that happens.

I really don't think you can reduce that sentiment to some stereotypical liberal condescension towards the Cuban people and the "authentic" experience which visiting them and seeing their lives may offer to middle- and upper-class bourgeois Americans like myself. For one thing, the bare fact that Cuba really has, thanks to the double-whammy of the decades-long American embargo and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989, been forced to build, over a period of 25 years, a genuinely home-grown and isolated alternative to global capitalism--and has had remarkable success in doing so--has been noted by many. Without pharmaceuticals from the United States, Cuba nonetheless achieved higher levels of life expectancy and lower levels of infant mortality than any other comparable country. Without wheat and beef from the Soviet Union, Cuba--well, let Bill McKibben explain, as he did at length in this article, and then again in his book Deep Economy:

What happened was simple, if unexpected. Cuba had learned to stop exporting sugar and instead started growing its own food again, growing it on small private farms and thousands of pocket-sized urban market gardens--and, lacking chemicals and fertilizers, much of that food became de facto organic. Somehow, the combination worked. Cubans have as much food as they did before the Soviet Union collapsed. They're still short of meat, and the milk supply remains a real problem, but their caloric intake has returned to normal--they've gotten that lost meal back.

In so doing they have created what may be the world's largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn't rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth....Cuba has thousands of organoponicos--urban gardens--more than two hundred in the Havana area alone. The Vivera Organoponico Alamar is especially beautiful: a few acres of vegetables attached to a shady yard packed with potato plants for sale, birds in wicker cages, a cafeteria, and a small market where a steady stream of local people buys tomatoes, lettuce, oregano, and potatoes for their supper. (Twenty-five crops were listed on the blackboard the day I visited)....

What is happening at the Vivero Organoponico Alamar certainly isn't unfettered capitalism, but it's not exactly collective farming either. Mostly, it's productive: sixty-four people earn a reasonable living from this small site, and the surrounding neighbors get an awful lot of their food from its carefully tended rows. You see the same kind of production all over the city; every formerly vacant lot in Havana seems to be a small farm. The city grew three hundred thousands tons of food last year--nearly its entire vegetable supply, and more than a token amount of rice and meat, said Egidio Paez Medina, who oversees the organoponicos from a small office on a highway at the edge of town. "Tens of thousands of people are employed," he noted. "And they get good money, as much as a thousand pesos a month. When I'm done with this job I'm going to start farming myself--my pay will double" (pp. 73-75).

When I last taught my Simplicity and Sustainability class 18 months ago, we read what McKibben had to say about Cuba, and did some research on the organoponicos (like the one pictured above; see more information about them here and here). Urban farming has, of course, become a mainstay of conversations in the United States about building a more environmentally sustainable and decentralized (and therefore, hopefully, more egalitarian) economy, but what the Cuban experience teaches isn't simply about the possibility of an industrialized, urbanized, specialized modern society recovering genuinely popular--indeed, despite the fact that we're talking about a state with a tyrannical government, one might even be tempted to say "democratic"--control over its food supply. It is larger than that: it is the possibility that obtaining the basic resources sufficient for the maintenance of one's health and happiness (at least if one is thinking about doing so in an egalitarian context) might not depend upon, or perhaps even involve, economic growth. Rather, social equality and environmental sustainability might revolve around--at least in certain senses--developing a contentment with, well, poverty.

Not absolute poverty, obviously, or even--comparatively speaking--much serious deprivation. But nonetheless, yes: non-commercialized Cuba, through it's own resourcefulness, was able to produce many fine cultural and social goods, but none of those goods arose from economic luxury, or even plenty. This isn't surprising: in the overwhelming majority of capitalists societies today, the ability of a person to hold onto those goods necessary for a flourishing life involves at least some degree of economic increase: one must expand and transform and stretch one's productivity and desires and services in order to hold onto one's position in the economic flow of the marketplace. This principle thereby licenses all the multifaceted means by which we invest, advertise, leverage, diversify, monetize, and otherwise multiply that which we produce and that which we buy. It's an old (and, I think, socially blinkered, however historically accurate) classical liberal capitalist principle, expressed in a dozen different ways--creative destruction, rising tides, etc.--but always making the same claim: an economy which isn't expanding is an economy that is losing ground.

Well, Cuba--which was truly and profoundly isolated for more than a generation, and which faced hard limits in its ability of those who built it to engage in any kind of growth strategy--definitely lost ground. Yet within their partially-imposed-upon-them-by-necessity stagnation, they developed sustainable, "steady-state" alternatives. Part of this, surely, was an outgrowth of the socialist principles taught as Cuba's official state ideology, but the evidence of countries like Vietnam and China over the past 30 years is that state socialism is entirely capable of adapting itself to global trade and finance capitalism when it can be used to benefit party elites and pacify those who might threaten them. So there is strong reason to suspect that the degree to which Cuba reworked its collective strategies, its public ownership of property, and its economic planning  so as to achieve the egalitarian distribution of, and at the same time relatively high levels of, education, health, and nutrition was, on the whole, made possible exactly because there genuinely weren't any economic rewards available to ambitious individual Cubans. The limits which enabled Cuba to become a leader is sustainable agriculture, environmental stewardship, and health care equality arose from a situation that almost no individual, given the choice, would wish upon themselves and their families, if it could be avoided.

And the truth is that, despite the apparently broad acceptance of socialist principles amongst the Cuban population, most probably could choose to avoid it, if only because the sort of training and socialization which made possible the construction and maintenance of a no-growth, egalitarian, relatively poor economy in this case would have led, in a different situation--and quite likely will lead, once the remaining political obstacles to diplomatic and economic openness are overcome--to individual specialization and thus market rewards. As McKibben observed:

Castro, as even his fiercest opponents would admit, has almost from the day he took power spent lavishly on the country's educational system. Cuba's ratio of teachers to students is akin to Sweden's; people who want to go to college go to college. Which turns out to be important, because farming, especially organic urban farming, is no simple task. You don't just tear down the fence around a vacant lot and hand someone a hoe, quoting him some Maoist couplet about the inevitable victory of the worker. The soil's no good at first; the bugs can't wait to attack. You need information to make a go of it. Cuba's semi-organic agriculture is at least as much an invention of science and technology as the high-input tractor farming it replaced (p. 76).

The people which enabled Cuba to achieve so much in its isolated, non-commercialized way are people who could easily be--and might yet become--highly paid botanists and chemical engineers and agronomists at Monsanto or some over corporation which has built its power over the contemporary global food system on exactly those scientific insights and accomplishments (industrial fertilizers, GMOs, etc.) which enabled the Green Revolution to perform its miraculous, both liberating and devastating work. In a world where people live in cities and live their lives as individuals (which is the common rule of all modernity, whether socialist or capitalist), one cannot escape the appeal of specialization and the rewards which breaking out and pursuing growth along one's own chosen path potentially offers. There are strong environmental and moral arguments for working collectively towards genuine egalitarianism and sustainability--even for working towards holding steadily on to one's goods without relying too much on community-undermining, fossil-fuel-power empowered expansion--but there is little evidence that those arguments are entirely persuasive absent some acceptance of (or some unavoidable necessity to work in the context of) outright economic limits. Or, in other words, at least some degree of poverty.

The more I've thought how whole communities or even just individuals like myself can live in alignment with socialist, localist, environmentally sustainable, generally egalitarian principles, the more often I've run up against the simple truth that wealth is--at the sort of extremes which modern market economies regularly both make possible and, to a degree, rely upon--a problem. Locavores and foodies of many different stripes all basically agree that if you want to really be certain about the quality and fairness of one's food supply, one is almost certainly going to have to eat less--less steak, less sugar, less of all sorts of expensive and/or imported foods which are available to us primarily because of complex, specialized, and usually exploitative systems which those in a position to profit from efficiency have built on our behalf. The same really goes for ever kind of finite material good--energy use, health care, and more. Perhaps (and this is the hardest question of all) the same even goes for socially constructive political goods as well. Cuba was hardly paradise; it was, and is, a terribly poor country, not to mention a tyranny. Living under that regime of imposed and internal limits enabled the construction of something which those with eyes to see recognized as something of a non-commercialized wonder. But would any of us on the left actually want to accept the realities which enabled that accomplishment? I'm doubtful. And that, perhaps, is something very sad indeed.

"I Just Started the Paleo Diet Yesterday, and I’m Wondering If There’s a Way to Make This Without The Ingredients.”

Via Samuel Brown, via The Toast, comes "All The Comments on Every Recipe Blog." Enjoy.

“I didn’t have any eggs, so I replaced them with a banana-chia-flaxseed pulse. It turned out terrible; this recipe is terrible.”

“I don’t have any of these ingredients at home. Could you rewrite this based on the food I do have in my house? I’m not going to tell you what food I have. You have to guess.”

“I don’t eat white flour, so I tried making it with raw almonds that I’d activated by chewing them with my mouth open to receive direct sunlight, and it turned out terrible. This recipe is terrible.”

“Could you please give the metric weight measurements, and sometime in the next twenty minutes; I’m making this for a dinner party and my guests are already here.”

“i dont have an oven, can i still make this? please reply immediately”

“Does anyone know if you can make this ahead of time and freeze it?”

“Have you thought about making a sugar-free version of this?”

“Can you give us a calorie breakdown for this?”

“I followed this to the letter, except I substituted walnuts and tofu for the skirt steak, ditched the cheese entirely, and replaced the starch with a turnip salad. Turned out great. My seven-year-old boys have never seen a dessert and I’ve convinced them that walnut-and-turnip salad is 'cake.' Thanks for the recipe!”

“I’m having a lot of trouble signing up for your newsletter. Can you please assist?”

“a warning that if you cook this at 275°F for three hours instead of at 400°F for twenty-five minutes its completely ruined. do you have any suggestions?”

“I didn’t have buttermilk, so I just poured baking soda into a container of raspberry yogurt. It tasted terrible.”

“I love this recipe! I added garlic powder, Italian seasoning, a few flakes of nutritional yeast, half a bottle of kombucha, za’atar, dried onion, and biscuit mix to mine. Great idea!”

“Due to dietary restrictions, I am only able to eat Yatzhee dice. I made the necessary substitutions, and it turned out great.”

“If you use olive oil for any recipe that’s cooked over 450°F, the oil will denature and you will get cancer. This post is irresponsible. You should only use grapeseed oil you’ve pressed yourself in a very cold room.”

“[600-word description of what they ate today] so this will make a great addition!”

“I just started Paleo yesterday, and I’m wondering if there’s a way to make this without the ingredients.”

“I was all out of cake flour, so I transfigured my hands into puffer fish, which worked pretty well.”

“Have you considered making a version of this margherita pizza for your readers who are trying to avoid gluten, dairy and nightshades? What if I shoved a roll of basil leaves in my mouth, do you think that would taste good?”

“this was a very good post for your recipe you made, i made a similar recipe over at my blog last month, please consider linking back.”

“I’m actually a supertaster, so I can’t eat anything that isn’t licking the salt off the top of saltines; will this recipe work for me?”

“heal your body through food”

“If you don’t soak the seeds for at least fourteen hours before using, the phytic acid will give you cancer. Just thought you should know.”

Fresh Water (Now at a Special Discount Price)!

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Well, this is rather fascinating: here we have a video of the Austrian businessman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who from 1997 until 2008 was CEO of Nestlé Group, one of the largest and most profitable corporations on the planet, talking rather frankly about the "shibboleth" that "nature is good," about his frustration with his fellow Europeans who have this strange distaste for genetically modified foods (embracing the idea that "organic food is good," which he considers entirely false), and about his conviction that everything on the planet--especially something like water--would be managed much better if it could only be privately owned and have an appropriate price attached to it. The idea that access to water ought to be a human right he labels an "extreme" view.



This isn't anything new to those who spend time listening to claims of the Davos-attending masters of our corporate-dominated governments and our world capitalist system, of course. After all, these are the job creators who are fighting global poverty and fending off the takers, don't you know. And to be fair, probably any number of people will be quick to insist that he has a point, that efforts to protect natural resources through collective action or government policies have often failed, and so why not turn to the marketplace? After all, perhaps the massive explosion in the bottled water industry over the past 20 years doesn't teach us a lesson about the power of advertising and the manufacturing of tastes--instead, maybe it just shows us the plain truth that there aren't any truly public goods out there--only private ones which haven't yet been appropriately capitalized upon yet. (The air we breathe, like the water we drink, will no doubt be next; Mel Brooks told us so.)

Mark Mitchell's Politics of Gratitude (Theoretical and Otherwise)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Mark Mitchell's fine and thoughtful book is filled with excellent insights and challenges, which unfortunately do not, in my judgment, quite achieve what the author lays out as his aim. That is, the end result is less than the sum of its parts. So, because those insightful parts are important--and because I'm deeply indebted to Mark for the work that he has done to push diverse localist, communitarian, and conservative ideas into wider discussion via Front Porch Republic, which I'm honored to associate myself with--let's begin with them.

In the book's Introduction, Mark thoughtfully presents the argument--most usually associated with scholars like Louis Hartz or Alasdair MacIntyre (neither of which he ever directly cites, though references to MacIntyre appear in his "Further Reading" section)--that American political discourse is overwhelmingly liberal, in the sense of prioritizing individual liberty and choice in the way we frame both public policy options and broader philosophical disputes. As he sums it up: "partisans on both the left and the right express themselves primarily in terms of individual rights and think of politics in terms of an underlying and open-ended progress....They agree about the purpose of government (to protect individual rights) and the direction of history (progress). They may disagree about which individual rights to privilege and what specifically constitutes progress, but these are really in-house debates among liberals" (p. xiv). Mark wants to rescue "conservatism" from this ideological trap, by pointing in a different, non-liberal direction, one which emphasizes the idea of "stewardship" as its primary theme: that is, we should see ourselves as stewards of certain gifts, capacities, and properties, and our primary attitude towards such should be a one a humble, limited, and specific gratitude. This is fine evocation of the best which the idea of "conservatism" has to offer, and it's one which anyone who feels any affection for their family, their community, or their tradition (religious or otherwise) should hope to be open-minded enough to be able to turn away from their philosophical liberal blinders and appreciate for what it is. I wholeheartedly embrace this kind of rescue effort.

In breaking down what we are stewards of, and how we ought to responsibly show gratitude towards it, Mark discusses our "creatureliness," with its attendant limits in scale and its particularity in location. The arguments and observations he lays out in these first four chapters of the book are the best of the whole work, I believe. Mark thoughtfully articulates the claim that we are embodied creatures, who can only see and love so much or so far, and who logically must stand in only one place at a time. In weaving together these arguments, Mark artfully takes up modern secularism and materialism, technology and "scientism," all of which we use to make ourselves seem larger and more independent and sovereign than we actually are. Modern liberalism--by which he means the whole ideology of individualism which has grown up in modern America--has made us all a decidedly non-humble bunch, obsessed with accumulating and dominating, rather than tending to those good things in our life:

In a sense, all Americans are Texans, only the Texans are simply more noisy about their claims. We love words like "awesome" and "amazing." We favor Big Macs and Whoppers, pickup trucks with "the biggest payload," and sports cars with "more horsepower than any in its class." We want the fastest Internet, the clearest television, and the highest fidelity sound. We favor mega-churches, buffets, Costco, and in the number of plastic surgeries in recent years is any indication, we favor big breasts. Truly, America is a land of superlatives. Of course, this obsession with size isn't limited to America, but Americans do lead the way, for good or ill. (p. 55)

In contrast to this obsession with bigness, Mark wants us, instead, to care a little less about size and power, to be a little more humble and grateful--and that means learning to accept and appreciate our dependencies and responsibilities, the ways in which we are stewards who have an obligation to that which has been given to us and to that which we must ultimately pass along to those who come after us. This he counters against our tendency to become--here quoting Betrand de Jouvenal--"securitarians," people who prize above all material creations, and ways of organizing our lives, which we can master and measure, thus deluding ourselves into thinking that we can create a world stable and regular and predictable enough that life can become a kind of technology, "in which all uncertainties are removed...[and] from which mystery has been banished" (pp. 52-53). Along the way of working out these preliminary ideas, Mark makes numerous provocative, challenging claims, many of which border on what most modern Americans--particularly mainstream American conservatives--would probably consider greatly lacking in patriotism or practicality. For example, he rightly rails against the planned obsolescence of so much contemporary production, and the way it makes us--and the material and productive conditions of our lives--complicit in a way of seeing existence as merely a disposable treadmill: "We work to have disposable income so we can purchase goods to consume...Consumption has become a patriotic duty" (p. 51). And he denounces the easy abuse of the notion of community, insisting that it makes no sense outside of shared space where there are actual, tangible human interactions: "The very notion of a national community is stretching the idea of community beyond recognizable limits. There is no American community. There can never be" (p. 66). All of these and more could give rise to long and thoughtful arguments, and on some of them I'd be on Mark's side, while on others I'd take the opposite view (I think there is some actual sense the idea of "national community," for example). But overall, he expresses his philosophically "conservative" (not to mention romantic) attitude here persuasively and wisely. The modern capitalist obsession with growth and accomplishment, with safety and non-interference, and with surveillance and mastery and materiality, really all are connected in our lives with a refusal to accept responsibility and recognize our dependence on something other than ourselves.

In terms of putting some fleshing out the implications of his preferences for a culture characterized by greater humbleness and gratitude, Mark addresses politics, economics, the environment, the family, and education. Here, while the strong and passionate insights continue, I think his attempt to knit them together into a new political alternative to contemporary American liberalism and conservatism falters somewhat. This is no fault of Mark's arguments, which remain compelling even when I disagreed with them (and as someone whose localism and communitarianism is more left-leaning than his, the number of my disagreements mounted as I went along). It is, rather, a matter of the missing, common thread through his arguments, one which cannot possibly be supplied by mere political and philosophical argument.

Consider how his argument in the chapter on politics develops. Here his guiding light is Tocqueville, and his prescient observations about how self-government and democracy give rise to demands for equality, and how that demand will likely result in greater centralization, as people look for systems of government and economy capable of ensuring equal treatment across borders. Mark correctly observes that the real problem which Tocqueville's observations lead us to confront is the fact that perfect equality is impossible, at least so long as technology fails to completely overcome nature (which is the heart, as he sees it, of the technological scientistic project), and hence that when the desire for equality runs up against such natural differences, "vast energy will be expended to alleviate the incongruity," which obviously points towards the creation of a vast regulatory state (p. 85). I respect Mark for reluctantly acknowledging that America's federal arrangement was probably fated, "right from the beginning," to move power away from the states and towards the national government (p. 94), and his subsequent recommendation that the 17th Amendment--which provided for the direct election of senators--be reconsidered has merit. But in the end, as part of his consideration of subsidiarity, he confess that "a metaphysical account of human nature and human society is necessary for sustaining the independence of various spheres of authority" and that "the revitalization of religious belief may be a necessary long-term solution to the problem of centralization" (pp. 97-98). And while Mark's book never turns to outright proselytism, this becomes a recurring theme throughout the rest of the book: a politics of gratitude will likely be impossible until the American people return to taking as a baseline the fact that they are divinely created beings with a need to be grateful for their lives and livelihoods.

Now there is nothing wrong with this connection of religion and political reflection; Tocqueville, among others, does this expertly. But if it is to be done persuasively in our pluralistic, democratic, and individualistic society, it should not, I think, be so entwined with a specific worldview, as it is in this book, whether Mark intended to communicate that worldview or not. But communicate it he did: religious humility and gratitude, for Mark, is the obvious concomitant of an agrarian, land-center economy, and outside of that kind of economic environment, the rational appeal of religious faith and the persuasiveness of our need for such a revival is simply not much there. Though Mark insists that "many of the virtues" he praises can be "encouraged by owning a small business," he gives no convincing examples of how that might be so (p. 120). His discussion of neighborliness makes reference to barn raising (p. 122); his discussion of the natural world becomes most impassioned when talking about growing a garden (pp. 147-148); his discussion of the family revolves around personal examples of families escaping technological tools and engaging themselves with the land (pp. 164-166). Again and again, the grateful sensibility he urges upon his readers is connected to turning towards a more rural, more agricultural, less specialized and complex, more earthy and religious way of life. I do not point this out by way of criticism; as one who grew up around the business of agriculture (milking cows by hand) and who emphasizes as much involvement with the earth as my location permits (planting a large garden every spring), I completely agree with Mark here. I like this worldview. And indeed, his conviction that God in involved in the natural work concomitant with this kind of life-world gives his argument for humility and gratitude real depth. When he talks disparagingly of the limited freedom of "citizens without property, that is, citizens who work for a wage" (p. 124); when he talks sadly about how the artificial lights of the urban settings robs us of the inspiring and humbling power of the night sky and replaces it with "hurbis" (pp. 140-141); when he suggests that we have gotten too far away from sustaining handcrafts have become "too dependent on purchased goods" (p. 161)--all of it reflects a holistic vision of and context for his alternative politics, one that is summed up well in the following passages:

When we step back from all this, it seems clear that the life of the industrial family is a life tending toward self-absorbed consumption, and as such, is a life characterized by ingratitude. It is a life of unbounded appetites in which the propriety of scale has been lost....The first and most obvious step is to recover an orientation toward something above and beyond the self. An awareness and acknowledgment of God's providence reminds us simultaneously of our creatureliness along with the debts of gratitude we owe for our very lives and the good things we encounter each day, from the food we eat to the love we share and the beauty of the first tulips of the spring....

I have already spoken of gardens, and at the risk of belaboring an obvious point, I will return again to the backyard. Not so long ago, many Americans kept large gardens and dependent on them for a significant proportion of their food. They ate what they could and preserved the rest. They kept fruit trees and livestock even if they didn't live on a farm....Today, less than 1 percent of Americans live on farms, and suburbs are more notable for their wide swaths of yard than fruit trees, vegetable gardens, and chickens. But is not simply the absence of these that is a problem, for even if the homeowners associations stepped out of the picture, many Americans lack both the desire and the skills necessary to construct a viable garden....

The skill needed to produce the food is matched by the skill necessary to prepare it well. eating fast food on the run in the solitude of an automobile or before the glaring eye of the television teaches us to feed like animals rather than to dine like human beings. When we eat at a table together, when the food has been prepared with care and skill, when attention is paid to the setting and to the presentation of the food, the occasion is dignified in a way that the solitary or rushed consumption of calories never can be....If the family meal represents the culmination of many themes we have discussed, perhaps the saying of grace prior to the meal encapsulates, in the fullest way, the thrust of all I have been trying to express. When we say a prayers of thanksgiving to God as we sit around the table laden with food, as a family joins hands, bows together, and takes a moment to return thanks, they are acknowledging their creatureliness....As a family says grace around the table, there is an exclusive element, for the whole world cannot fit around that table....A family meal is necessarily located some place, and when that place is known and loved by those joined in prayer, gratitude, and feasting, it is enriched and becomes a home. (pp. 166-167, 169, 171-172)

That is a beautiful and powerful picture, one worthy of one of Mark's heroes, the agrarian writer Wendell Berry. But what it does not do is sketch out an alternative "conservative" political language which could move our modernized, pluralistic society away from an over-reliance upon individualism and towards a different kind of politics. Rather, it is a call for an alternative way of living, a return to a context where politics occupied an entirely different space in our lives--a less important, more participatory, more republican one. With his obvious sympathy for the ideas of Jefferson and Tocqueville, Mark is clearly moved by republicanism, especially in its classic form as a recipe for polities which were small, land-based, agrarian, and religiously (or at least morally) homogenous. But if that was his aim in this book of political theory, one which was obviously addressed to the America which presently exists, then the development of a better language of politics needs to wrestle with the applicability of republicanism and conservatism to our current moment, and there is not much evidence in this book that Mark is actually interested in addressing the arguments of Benjamin Barber, Richard Dagger, Philip Pettit, Michael Walzer, or really any other contemporary republican theorist (though he does briefly touch on the ideas of both Rousseau and Hannah Arendt). In short, this book, lacking an applicable comprehensive political theory, but containing instead a host of powerful and evocative arguments on behalf of a constellation of alternative "conservative" positions--mostly united through an emphasis on a return of farming and God--is really more about exploring and advocating on behalf an alternative attitude and lifestyle, rather than providing real, plausible answers to our contemporary ideological stalemates. The language of gratitude alone cannot create or sustain the agricultural or pious conditions by which its rightness will be understood; on the contrary, it is by being pulled by the power of Mark's language into a greater involvement with God or gardening that the rightness of Mark's points about gratitude become likely to be acknowledged.

Let me reiterate that, while Mark's many specific suggests and excellent arguments may not quite add up to the theoretical critique of modern individualism which contemporary America needs, that hardly makes the book a failure. On the contrary, it is a wonderful book, one that I'd love the opportunity to argue with Mark about at greater length (around a pleasant dinner table, especially!). To go back to Wendell Berry, note that this powerful writer has never imagined any of his many essays to amount to a "politics" of anything; he is a critic, and that is what this book should be taken as: a fine work of counter-culture "conservative" criticism, attacking the way we think about food and family and sexuality and technology and most of all the God and the land on which he thinks (and I mostly agree) we depend. Rod Dreher, the author of the counter-culture conservative manifesto which lays in the immediate background of all that Mark has accomplished through Front Porch Republic, called this book "plainspoken," and I agree. Mark here demonstrates his facility with political ideas--but ultimately his aim is to witness on behalf of an alternative way of life, not persuasively argue the American reading public away from our liberal theory of politics and towards another, more republican and local one. Take seriously the kind of life Mark advocates, and perhaps the theoretical problems will take care of themselves.