Simply Mad About Rotoscope Animation

A random find on YouTube, one too good not to share. Some blessed soul remembered the glory which was Disney's early 90s awakening from its long slumber, and its first forays into MTV-era pop hipness, and managed to put up videos to most of the songs from this cd (which I still own, of course).













The poster also put up the Michael Bolton and LL Cool J videos of songs from the album, but Bolton and I don't get along, and the platinum-blond wigs worn by Mr. J's back-up singers frighten me. Also, tragically, En Vogue never made a video for "Someday My Prince Will Come/One Song," which is, I think, the best track on the whole recording. Still, I'm very happy to have made this find today.

Alan Jacobs Gets Wallace Stegner Right, Dammit

First, Wallace Stegner:

I have used four-letter words familiarly all my life, and have put them into books with some sense that I was insisting on the proper freedom of the artist. I have applauded the extinction of those d——d emasculations of the Genteel Tradition and the intrusion into serious fiction of honest words with honest meanings and emphasis. I have wished, with D. H. Lawrence, for the courage to say shit before a lady, and have sometimes had my wish. Words are not obscene: naming things is a legitimate verbal act. And “frank” does not mean “vulgar,” any more than “improper” means “dirty.” What vulgar does mean is “common”; what improper means is “unsuitable.” Under the right circumstances, any word is proper. But when any sort of word, especially a word hitherto taboo and therefore noticeable, is scattered across a page like chocolate chips through a Tollhouse cookie, a real impropriety occurs. The sin is not the use of an “obscene” word; it is the use of a loaded word in the wrong place or in the wrong quantity. It is the sin of false emphasis, which is not a moral but a literary lapse, related to sentimentality. It is the sin of advertisers who so plaster a highway with neon signs that you can’t find the bar or liquor store you’re looking for.

Alan Jacobs adds:

The key to successful cursing is restraint: saving the most powerful words for the occasion when they are needed. As Stegner comments elsewhere in the essay, if you “say shit before a lady,” what do you say when your car breaks down at rush hour on the Santa Monica Freeway? Presumably, in those days, you would take that opportunity to drop the f-bomb, but to judge by my Twitter feed, many people now use that word fifty times a day, which leaves them with absolutely nothing in reserve when something genuinely bad happens. Not only is it not the f-bomb any more, it’s not even the f-sparkler. The word has been eviscerated. I am not speaking in moral terms here, just linguistic ones: the spread of cursing into more and more situations where it once would have been forbidden has been one more form of linguistic inflation, like calling everything that’s even mildly pleasant “awesome.” It betokens a lack of judgment, a failure of assessment, and it leaves us with limited or no linguistic resources in the hour of need. We need to clean up our language, if for no other reason than to have room to make it dirty when dirty is really called for.

Damn straight.

Getting the Garden Going, One Baby-Step at a Time

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

This academic year Friends University found itself wondering what to do with a plot of land, directly beside and behind some student dormitories. Through a fortuitous combination of variables (the discovery of some left-over money in an otherwise cash-strapped university, the arrival of new university president and spouse who are fans of gardening and Wendell Berry, and some hard work by various students and faculty to get the Friends community to start thinking more about recycling, sustainability, and local economy), we are now embarked on the project of slowly, bit by bit, creating a community garden. And I seem to be the one in charge. Lucky me! Not that I don't have our own family garden to care for. (Just put our tomatoes, peppers, string beans, and cucumbers in on Saturday.)

This week, I'm occupied with finding out just which student, staff, and faculty individuals and groups are committed to maintaining a garden plot over the summer months. There's no money for a full-time gardener, so this is going to be run solely on a volunteer basis, and it was decided at an earlier meeting that, at this point, the best way to get the garden going would be to appeal to entrepreneurial opportunities and individual stewardships; to use the land as a space where anyone here at Friends interested in raising some tomatoes, onions, lettuce, herbs, or anything else could set up some rain gutters or raised beds or just put stuff directly in the ground and take ownership what whatever they raise, to eat or sell at one of our local Wichita farmers markets or donate to The Lord's Diner or another local homeless shelter, or just give it away (give it back, in a sense) to the Friends community. We've got some big hopes for this garden: that perhaps we'll find a way to integrate what we're doing with the Delano neighborhood (where the university is located) and their already thriving community garden; that we'll be able to get more classes involved, with students seeing tending the garden as an opportunity to further their own studies in plant biology or health science or social work; that maybe someday Friends own garden will be supplier--perhaps even the primary supplier--of our university's cafeteria. But for now, I have to get those volunteers, and find some time to get us together with the soil and the basic supplies. There's already been some sharp discussions over how "green" we want the garden to be (imagine: professional groundskeepers and interested-but-inexperienced students and faculty activists may all see things differently!), and I'm sure there will be a lot more negotiating to come. But getting something in the ground is the first step, and a baby-step at that.

Moving into a more local, more sustainable, more simple way of living and spending one's time is always a matter of baby-steps, or so it seems to me. For the third time, I've recently taken a group of students out to meet with some local Amish and Mennonite farmers and meatpackers, and like the previous two trips, it's an eye-opening experience to be confronted with people who have embraced a level of intentionality towards, and collective responsibility for, the practical necessities of their lives which is mostly absent from the environments of your typical American university student. We spent a while at Yoder Meats, where Kenneth (the bearded gent on the right) explained to us at length about what they do with the cattle, hogs, and other game which they slaughter, and about all their efforts to stay on the good side of state and federal inspectors and keep their "Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point" forms up to date. He made no bones about what a pain it all often is, but neither did he criticize the system; it's all a necessary part of enabling his customers to be able to eat the meat they procure themselves, or at least be able to be secure in the "point-of-origin" knowledge which locally processed and packaged meat can provide. He didn't even weigh in on the great "pink slime"debate of recent months; to him, the question wasn't at all what part of an animal one eats, but simply whether one can say with confidence where it came from and what happened to it on it's way to your stomach.

Over at Glass Springs Dairy, we similarly saw lots of baby-steps, lots of struggling to make this practice or that one both a practical success as well. Jacob (the fellow with the hat on the left) has been working to expand his Jersey herd, but he wants to keep them all grass-fed too, and so that means questions about access to pasture land and feeding them during the winter months. He has a thriving business in raw milk, and can wax eloquently (and at length!) about what he sees as the myths of pasteurization and the various restrictions which Kansas dairies operate under in comparison to other states. But he also wants to diversify, moving into cheese and other dairy products, as well as setting up a rotational grazing system with his cows, so he can expand his chicken operation and get more out his current land holdings. More questions about what he can sell, and to who, and for how much, and under what conditions: Jacob, like Kenneth, like us here at Friends, are part of an ongoing effort to figure out how to make something counter-cultural truly work, to contribute to our own lives and those around us, all while satisfying our practical needs (or at least as many as possible).

I see more and more of this, all around me, and it is simultaneously hopeful and frustrating. Hopeful because more and more people are recognizing the need to free themselves from those systems which supposedly were going to make things (what they eat, how they traveled, who they vote for, etc.) so clear and clean and easy; what they've done instead is debilitate us, make us weak and unhealthy and unpracticed in the arts of living and government, desperate for good economic news to be handed down to us and unwilling to interrogate those who benefit from these unequal, environmentally destructive distributions of wealth and work, privilege and power. But also frustrating, because the appeal of those systems--specialize, individualize, streamline, outsource!--remains huge, especially in a world where technology (falsely) promises us all the entertainment and insight we can handle, assuming we can find the time (and the money to upgrade all our smart phones to 4G), and thus almost all of us (save only the Wendell Berrys and other similar sustainability saints we have in this world) are similarly engaged in tentative, experimental baby-steps, just half-steps, compromises which often conflict and crash into one another. Not a reason not to keep trying of course, but it's sobering all the same.

This semester I was invited to speak a couple of times at a local private academy, a somewhat ramshackle school operating out of a warehouse, but one which showed tremendous devotion to educating their students in both religion and the practical arts; their motto of "Tradition--Community--Joy" summarized it all. They had me (and my reliable local food tour guide, Leroy Hershberger) talk in our different ways about stories, attachment, and how knowledge is passed on from one person to another in a community. They're taking their baby-steps too, I think--and doing well at it. (One of their graduates is now a Friends student who went on this most recent local food tour with us, and the questions she asked were engaged and intelligent to an impressive degree.) With all of these baby-steps, maybe some of will get through this times of transition yet.

Maurice Sendak, RIP

Via Crooked Timber, comes the news that Maurice Sendak, arguably the greatest, and certainly the most influential, living picture-book author has died. I can think of no equal to Sendak in his contribution to building--visually, verbally, lyrically--an entire vocabulary to the relationship between small children and the wider world, and most crucially small children and their parents. Possibly Dr. Seuss was his equal, and then of course there are those who operated in other media besides books. But we're a book family, us Foxes, and so alongside Seuss and many others as our children grew up, there was Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are, of course, and his fabulous, funny, subversive illustrations for What Can You Do With a Shoe?, and my favorite, and I think his best work: In the Night Kitchen. Check it out here, with the incomparable Peter Schickele doing the narration:



RIP, Maurice Sendak. Hope there are wild things where you've gone.

Summer's Here

Well, maybe not quite, but with my final grades submitted at last, it's close enough for me and JT anyway. I actually have my tape of Dad Loves His Work on right now, and it's kind of bittersweet. The truth is, I do love my work, I love it here at Friends, I'm a lucky man to be able to teach and work with and learn from and build a community with such a fine, funny, often smart, always motley bunch of students, colleagues, and friends. But you know--I'm really glad that this academic year has come to an end. Bring on the season of rejuvination!

Summer's here
That suits me fine
It may rain today
But I don't mind

In the past I've occasionally put up on the blog lists of what I plan to accomplish over the summer. I'm not going to do that this year. For one thing, as you may have noticed, I've gotten out of the blogging habit. I think I might try to get back into it this summer...maybe. But not right now. And for another thing, I've never been very good at actually accomplishing anything I put out here for public consumption, so this year, I think I'll keep my likely eventual embarrassment at what I don't manage to read or write or build this summer to myself. Instead, how about a favorite summertime pop video hit?



I listen to this, and immediately I'm driving down the freeway in a crazy, half-way broken-down pickup truck, which neither my older brother nor older sister wanted to drive, in the summer of 1985, between my sophomore and junior year of high school. This song comes on and I crank the radio all the way up, push the speedometer up over 80mph, making the whole truck rattle like mad as a cloud of dust and straw fly out of the back, and I sail past my exit, because the song is going and I don't want to stop. Good times. Hope the family and I can have some this year too.

"What Think Ye of Christ?"

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Twice in the past week, I have been asked, in essence, this very question, though not exactly as it is recorded in Matthew 22:42. Once the question came from a student of mine, a young person, unfamiliar with the Mormon church but filled with questions, a person generally uninterested in Christianity; the other came from a fellow Mormon blogger, an academic like myself, trying to make sense of certain statements I'd made in response to some of the temple-related controversies which the Mormon Moment has thrust upon us. I found myself responding as I did in both cases, I suppose, because I'm mostly unconcerned with, and admittedly sometimes outright dismissive of, many of the doctrines in question: the point of the church, for me at least, is to get close to God, and experience the condescension, love, and grace of Jesus, and I often find the need to justify or make sense of much of the rest of our teachings a distraction, at best. What follows is my attempt to recreate the answers I gave to those two questioners, with some help from Elders Holland and Uchtdorf (general leaders of the Mormon church) along the way.

What does Jesus do for me? I should be clear first on what He doesn't do for me. I don't find Him to be the answer to all my questions, a readily available sanctifying gloss on everything that troubles me, a smiling friendly source of Truth and Happiness watching over my shoulder. Truth is, I find a great deal of American Christian culture (Protestant, Catholic, and Mormon too) fundamentally stupid, and to the degree to which that culture involves what I consider to be an irrational devotion to Jesus-as-totem, I find that devotion to be stupid (to say nothing of borderline blasphemous) as well. I’m not the sort of person to nods his head in sympathy when I run across yet another claim, whether within the church or without, of Jesus having found someone’s lost dog/fixed someone’s toothache/appeared in a dream or in the steam in the bathroom mirror/etc.

So why do I say what I do about Him? Because I think the Jesus freaks at least have something right, maybe the most important thing right: the basic Christian insight which I sometimes fear part of the 19th-century history of our church occasionally took many of us Mormons away from, and which we are only belatedly, thankfully, getting back to--namely, the consciousness of sin. This is, I think, my most foundational spiritual conviction: that I am a pathetic, sinful screw-up, and so is everybody else. Not just "imperfect," whatever that means, but a bad person, "an enemy to God" as some prophet once said. I could break this conviction down developmentally, and acknowledge the degree to which it isn’t a principled, but rather a historically contingent, conviction: I could look at my own upbringing, the addictions and sins I struggled with as a young man, many of which I still struggle with today, and conclude that my own appreciation of sinfulness is a result of particular, embarrassing, traumatic events and their psychological consequences. But then, it also seems apparent to me that the same could be said for just about anyone’s views about probably just about anything, especially religion.

Besides, such a breakdown wouldn’t fully explain why I find, not just an experience of relief and joy, but real intellectual persuasion in messages of forgiveness, of redemption from my own mortal condition, of grace. Original sin, or at least some version of the doctrine, just makes sense to me, to say nothing of accounting for what I observe around me. The world is filled, to be sure, with happiness and beauty and pleasure and kindness and fun, all in the very best sense of those words, and I seek after such good things as much as anyone. But when I try to take the whole thing in, mostly what I see is brokenness and fallenness and wickedness. People--in particular this person, myself, the one I know best--know to do right, but don't do it; we hate sin, and embrace it anyway, no matter what the learning or talents or intentions mixed in with that striving may be. Paul was right, I think, and so was Augustine, and so was Luther. I really just don’t believe that, fundamentally, we can do any damn thing at all on our own, not in the eternal sense anyway.

And so I turn to Jesus, because His strange and astonishing story in the New Testament (and, to a lesser but still very real degree, the Book of Mormon, the writings of Jacob and King Benjamin in particular) is the way I’ve been able to see and feel and believe in and make good intellectual sense out of God’s response to our shattered reality. I want there to have been, through Jesus's suffering and death and resurrection, to have been some unfathomable, magical event which redeems me. I am a member of the Mormon Christian community, who comes before the mercy seat and pleads for God’s grace through partaking of the sacrament, the symbol (but also more than that; I’m thinking of Jim Faulconer's wonderful essays on incarnation and remembrance here) of His body and blood, and through serving and being served by my fellow citizens in the household of God. I'll freely grant that much official Mormon rhetoric about sin and grace comes off to me as flat and rote, or addicted to a kind of legalism, constantly talking about the need to "pay our debts" (a model which I strongly dislike, because I suspect that notion hides the presumption of an original, balanced, individual baseline from which our spiritual journey began and to which we must return, and I don’t think that’s our actual relationship with God at all), or covenant-happy, which to my mind often theologically undermines and breaks down the holistic, redemptive power of Jesus-as-God, replacing it with some nominally grander cosmological operation, in which Jesus and I are, in some very distant but still real sense, partners in building something. I frankly don’t want to worship a God that I can partner with, that I can “relate” to. I don’t want my God to be really anything like me at all, complete loser that I am, except and to the extent that He marvelously chooses to love me. This takes me back to my most central belief, a conviction that I realized as my own when I read C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce while in the mission field, a conviction that has recurred to me at times of crisis again and again in my life. I don’t embrace anything like all of Lewis’s Christian dogma, but his fundamental argument in that text--that nothing we do in this mortal coil ultimately matters that much, that everything will be left behind and transformed into something utterly unlike anything we have here--has always rung true to me, and beautifully so. I have, of course, greatly elaborated upon and revised this insight over the decades as I’ve lived and learned more, but it has stayed with me all the same.

And fortunately, as time goes by, I hear this insight ratified by men and women whom I have ever reason to believe are closer to God (if still every bit sinners) than I. Two of them spoke to us about this last week, at General Conference--and while I've no doubt their theological articulations of what this kind of acceptance of Jesus may mean for us would differ dramatically from mine, I take solace in their words all the same. First, Elder Holland, who reminded us of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, and then speaks on:

This parable--like all parables--is not really about laborers or wages any more than the others are about sheep and goats. This is a story about God’s goodness, His patience and forgiveness, and the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a story about generosity and compassion. It is a story about grace. It underscores the thought I heard many years ago that surely the thing God enjoys most about being God is the thrill of being merciful, especially to those who don’t expect it and often feel they don’t deserve it. I do not know who in this vast audience today may need to hear the message of forgiveness inherent in this parable, but however late you think you are, however many chances you think you have missed, however many mistakes you feel you have made or talents you think you don’t have, or however far from home and family and God you feel you have traveled, I testify that you have not traveled beyond the reach of divine love. It is not possible for you to sink lower than the infinite light of Christ’s Atonement shines.

Whether you are not yet of our faith or were with us once and have not remained, there is nothing in either case that you have done that cannot be undone. There is no problem which you cannot overcome. There is no dream that in the unfolding of time and eternity cannot yet be realized. Even if you feel you are the lost and last laborer of the eleventh hour, the Lord of the vineyard still stands beckoning. “Come boldly [to] the throne of grace,” and fall at the feet of the Holy One of Israel. Come and feast “without money and without price” at the table of the Lord.

Jesus is the Bridegroom, the Master of the Feast, and He intends to feed every one of us, prostitutes and publicans and soldiers and sinners all. That is the invitation which moves me--beside which, all the other (in my view often somewhat literalistic and extravagant) promises and particulars of the plan of salvation seem to me to pale in comparison. That was Saturday afternoon, but Sunday morning was still to come, when Elder Uchtdorf spoke with the joy of one who knew God's grace:

Our Savior has spoken so clearly on this subject that there is little room for private interpretation. “I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive,” but then He said, “of you it is required to forgive all men"....God is our Father. We are His children. We are all brothers and sisters. I don’t know exactly how to articulate this point of not judging others with sufficient eloquence, passion, and persuasion to make it stick. I can quote scripture, I can try to expound doctrine, and I will even quote a bumper sticker I recently saw. It was attached to the back of a car whose driver appeared to be a little rough around the edges, but the words on the sticker taught an insightful lesson. It read, “Don’t judge me because I sin differently than you.”

We must recognize that we are all imperfect--that we are beggars before God. Haven’t we all, at one time or another, meekly approached the mercy seat and pleaded for grace? Haven’t we wished with all the energy of our souls for mercy--to be forgiven for the mistakes we have made and the sins we have committed? Because we all depend on the mercy of God, how can we deny to others any measure of the grace we so desperately desire for ourselves? My beloved brothers and sisters, should we not forgive as we wish to be forgiven?

To be forgiven: that's what I want out a church. That's what I want out of God: that my proud and rebellious soul will, to my great and eternal amazement, be forgiven. As one to whom grace and forgiveness is given, how can I not extend the same to others? That's the Good News, right there: as Jesus loved us and is with us, we must strive (and fail, and strive again) to love and be with one another. Everything else is, I think, just details. And God, I believe, contrary to popular rumor, is in the Big Picture, not the details.

"This is for Trayvon"

So said the Boss has he tore into this new classic of his (now a dozen years old, and as angry and as despairing as ever) a week ago at a show in Florida. The man's albums may have gone on autopilot, but live, Springsteen has still got it.

Two Comments on the Killing of Trayvon Martin

Both of them from blogs, and both of them better than anything I could come up about this absurd, horrible tragedy. First, Ethan Gach from The League of Ordinary Gentleman, on the obvious--but all too often ignored--fact that our (perhaps justified) paranoia about crime and our (certainly unjustified) fetishizing of personal liberty runs into problems when it is extended to include a rather simply piece of deadly technology: that is, essentially allowing anyone who feels threatened to use a gun:

The reality of the matter is that in Florida the law will protect you if you gun someone down because you felt “reasonably” afraid for your life. Referred to as the “Stand Your Ground” laws, 16 other states have them....Reading through the news stories, I haven’t found anything that says Trayvon was armed with a gun or even a knife. Or anything that says he was threatening Zimmerman with either of these weapons. Which makes it appear as though Zimmerman got a bloodied nose and decided to slaughter a 17-year old teenager because of it....

People have a right to carry around hunks of intricately designed metal that can shoot tinier hunks of metal with the ease of contracting a single muscle group. These tinier hunks of metal, upon making contact with human flesh, will continue on, either burrowing deep within one’s body, or blasting out the other side. In order for someone carrying one of these tools around to use it on me, and be justified in doing so, they need only feel afraid.

Of course, self-defense is only a legal and moral abstraction. And has no bearing on actual circumstances, the reality of which is that Trayvon, will still be dead, because another person killed him, no matter what the police, FBI, or Justice Department find out later on. And for no reason other than that someone had the effortless means to do so, and a system of justice that would condone it.

Second, my old friend Michael Austin, who is just getting better and better at this pundit thing, reasoning how the situation in Florida essentially suggests an abandonment one of the most fundamental basics of the liberal order: namely, a social contract which assures us that the use of force is going to be subject to the rule of law:

For Thomas Hobbes, civil society was pretty much a no-brainer. However bad it might get (and Hobbes lived through some pretty bad times), it was better than the alternative, which was a worldwide and eternal version of The Hunger Games called the state of nature, also known as the state of war. In this latter state, the only law that applies is brute force. Whoever can take stuff gets to keep stuff, until someone else takes it again. Killing people while taking their stuff is optional, but not discouraged. In the state of nature, Hobbes famously opined, the life of man (and woman) is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”....

Fast forward from the English Revolution to February, 2012, when Trayvon Martin, a young African-American man, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain with a long history of harassing people on the street. He (Zimmerman) was told by police operators not to pursue Martin, yet he did so anyway, shooting him in cold blood while the young man begged for his life. Three weeks later, Zimmerman remains free, even though he admits to killing an unarmed seventeen-year-old boy, because, police say, they cannot dispute his narrative of self-defense.

Not getting arrested because of a “Stand-Your-Ground” law is a very different thing than claiming self-defense at a trial. Anybody accused of murder has a fundamental right to make the case that he or she was acting because of a perceived threat, and juries have been known to be very sympathetic to such claims. If George Zimmerman were acquitted by a jury on the grounds that he was defending himself against a perceived threat, I would be very disappointed, but I would ultimately accept it as a verdict reached through the rule of law. Trayvon’s family would, in such a case, at least have their day in court....

[In the absence of any attempt to introduce law into this terrible event, so say that if] only Trayvon had been armed, he would have been able to stand up for himself....This reasoning leads us directly back to the Hobbesian state of nature. If everybody has to walk around carrying their own weapon, and shooting before being shot, than there is ultimately no point in having a government, for we do not live under the rule of law. If Florida cannot find a way to at least bring Mr. Zimmerman to trial...then they do not deserve to be a state, having failed in the most fundamental responsibility of the social contract.

"Inch by Inch, Row by Row..."

"...gonna make this garden grow. / All it takes is a rake and a hoe / and a piece of fertile ground."

I do love that song, in all its versions. And I believe it too--every year, come March or April, when the rain promises to come but it hasn't quite yet, I break out the rototiller, and tackle our little garden spot. This year was no different--it's spring break here, and last Saturday turned out to be a great day to see how well our soil as settled over the year we left it fallow.

From what I can tell, looks like it's fertile and ready. Which means that the only different difference from last year is that I finally decided to do something about all those rocks we'd collected over the years for a decorative rock garden which clearly wasn't ever going to happen. Borrowing a line from Robert Frost, I built myself a wall.

Since our backyard plot opens right up to an empty, grassy field (used as a parking lot for a neighborhood church), we've long thought we need to extend the fence or build something to mark the boundary, and set our garden off from the weeds. I'm not sure if this mighty 10-inch barrier will do much to keep the rabbits out, but I'm unreasonably proud of it all the same.

And now, on with the spinach, lettuce, and potatoes! (The tomatoes will come later.)

Wes Jackson, Localism, and the Carbon-Based Community

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

A couple of days ago, I had the lucky opportunity to listen up close to Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute here in Kansas, give a lecture at Newman University (just across the road from my home here at Friends University). It was one of the most intellectually stimulating and inspiring lecture-performances I've ever heard. The title was “The Prairie as a Measure for a Sustainable Agriculture," but what he was really talking about, as I thought about his particular approach to "sustainable agriculture," was what it means to be part of what might be called a "carbon-based community." The point being, of course, that all of human life--all biological life on this planet, period--is carbon-based, and that therefore a concern over the use (and misuse) of that chemical bedrock of our existence as living, eating, growing, interacting beings should be central to how we arrange our lives. For Jackson, as it is with his old friend Wendell Berry (who I've taken students up to The Land Institute to listen to before, as I've done other times), this kind of concern mandates some attention to, as Alexander Pope put it long ago, "the genius of the place."

Wes Jackson's place is the prairie, and to understand--really, to come at things from his perspective, to "re-appropriate"--the carbon-based genius of the prairie is to confront what he and others have famously called the "10,000-year-old problem": agriculture, and all the ways it has both made humanity what it is and can be, for both good and bad. Jackson happily took us listeners back to the Paleolithic, and asks how much 10 millennia have changed human beings. We still mostly eat grass--the #1 grass in the human diet worldwide being rice, with #2 being wheat, and #3 corn; add together all the grass, throw in the seeds and legumes, and you have 70% of all the nutrients the human race consumes. The question of how we consume this stuff which sunlight and water makes out of hydrocarbons is thus inseparable, in Jackson's view, from almost any debate about human civilization--including, most centrally, how we arrange ourselves in relation to these consumables. Jackson sketched out his argument visually, suggesting that throughout the history of our species there have been occasional discoveries that have changed how we arrange ourselves in relation to the range of carbon energy sources available in the ecosphere: first came human innovations in soil use and the development of settled agriculture, providing us with regular sugars for our bodies to burn, but after that came using forests as a regular fuel to burn in forges that melted copper and iron, then came burning coal (and later oil and natural gas) to power turbines and regularly generate electricity. Through it all, human institutions and forms of knowledge adapted to and shaped the consequences of this carbon-based relationship, with all sorts of unforeseen consequences.

Which adaptation does Jackson think most crucial for explaining our present condition? On the basis of his lecture, perhaps it was the separate, early 20th-century discoveries by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch which led, through their use of natural gas, to nitrogen fixation, and thus to the creation of industrial ammonia. Such industrial ammonia has made possible a revolution in agriculture, so much so that over half the protein nutrients consumed by all the human race--whether they come in the form of grasses or meat from animals which eat those grasses--have this industrially fixed nitrogen somewhere within their chemical make-up. It (along with the many other industrial transformations of the century which preceded the rise of chemical fertilizers and industrial agriculture, though perhaps none of them have had as much impact as those laboratory realizations nearly a century ago) has made it possible for millions--no, billions--of people to leave behind the farms and communities which, at one time, existed in an organic relationship with the naturally available carbon in the countryside. The power to energize the people in those cities (through food) could be trucked in from elsewhere; the power to move those trucks (though oil) could be shipped in from elsewhere; the power to open up those oil fields and protect those shipping lanes (though the U.S. Air Force) could be delivered from elsewhere; and so it goes.

Jackson delivered this argument--and, to be clear, I am adding on to and elaborating some of his points here--through some remarkable visuals: for example, drawing on the work of Howard T. Odum, Jackson paralleled the relationship between "photosynthesizers" (the organic structures which reflect and make available the energy possibilities within carbon resources--agricultural crops, for example) and "concentrators" (the organisms which gather and concentrate that realized energy--like human beings) which exists on a microscopic level, within a rain forest, or within a Kansas prairie. Through every discovery and technological appropriation of each carbon pool, his pictures made clear, we have enabled the creation of a new relationship--a new distance--between the concentrators (us) and the most fundamental sources of energy (the sun, the soil, and the prairies where the grasses we consume grow) upon which we carbon-based life forms need to flourish. And with that distance, there is loss. Jackson's most arresting visual made this clear:

Norman Rockwell painted "The County Agent" in 1948, and used as his model an actual county agent, doing rounds on the farms of Jay County, Indiana. It is fairly easy for most audiences to look at this painting and see in it a nostalgic invocation of white America's agrarian past--the red-paneled farmhouse, the horse and calf and chickens, the kids with the 4-H projects and a presumably intact, multi-generational family looking on. Jackson sees that, but he also sees more: "What is clear, with a little study [of the painting], is that expertise and youth are central while tradition and experience are peripheral." The county agent has the knowledge and authority, and is educating the youth into this mode of thinking; the received knowledge of the family is becoming somewhat irrelevant to agriculture as it was being practiced (measured, assessed) in 1948, and would be into the future. And how that has been born out! As the industrial-fertilizer-fueled Green Revolution (which surely improved the nutrition and extended the lifespans of tens of millions of people, but which also, Jackson argued, presumed that 1) bigger yields were always a sign of success, 2) traditional technologies and ways of life and relationships to the land were always an obstacle, and 3) agriculture was a industrial science, and not necessarily, much less fundamentally, related to our carbon-based ecosystem) extended its reign, from the decades following World War II until our present Monsanto-dominated moment, and resulted in ever-more specialization, ever-more technical expertise, and ever-less actual connection, through a family or locally sustained community, with the land from which we fed ourselves. The land-grant universities, which had been designed to be aids to development of learning amongst those people who tended to the land, actually hastened this development, spreading a gospel of specialization that hurried students off in distant directions, away from the food and energy that makes human civilization--and networks of healthy communities--possible in the first place.

Jackson ended on a realistic, yet hopeful note. Clearly, we are not going--we shouldn't want to--turn back the clock entirely, if only because that would result in a vicious, radical de-population of our race (though he was willing to argue, strongly, for a "no-growth, even de-growth, economic model"). But what we can hope to do--and this is central to The Land Institute's mission--is push for an intellectual sea-change, a "sustainable Green Revolution," this one based on perennial crops (which do far less damage to the soil, and are far less dependent upon industrial fertilizers, because they--duh--grow back year after year, and thus don't have to be replanted in ground which is re-tilled by the latest oil-consuming tractors again and again and again). The Land Institute has had its successes with Kernza, a perennial wheatgrass, and they are working in China on the perennialization of upland rice. For now, though, the idea of shifting our planning for food away from annuals dependent upon both the tastes of carbon-concentrating populations and the desperate attempt to stave off final depletion of the earth's carbon pools, and towards perennialization and localization is hard going. Jackson, and others at The Land Institute, have gone to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and to audiences around the country, preaching the gospel of thinking small (local) and long (time-wise), rather than big (farm-size and yields) and short (only until the next budget cycle!). They push the idea of a "50-Year Farm Bill" which would move this country from putting 80% of its acreage into annual crops--which invariably privileges the large producers who can buy oil barrels and industrial fertilizers by the ton, and which therefore of course contributes to concentrations of expertise and financial resources, continuing to kill off mid-size operators and small towns--to a model which they project by 2050 would double the percentage of farmland given over to annual vegetable crops--the market for which, as competitive as it is, being still better for small and mid-size producers than is the case for rice, wheat, or corn--and reduce the reliance on annual grains to only 20% of this nation's farmland, with the rest used of perennial grains or forage crops for animals. And, as you might expect, neither Democrats nor Republicans are exactly lining up at The Land Institute's door.

The breakthrough will probably not be political, though one can and should keep trying. The real moment for change, Jackson said hopefully, will come when the land-grant institutions start embrace the idea of "marrying ecology with a vision of perennial agriculture." Then, perhaps, we'll see all the ecologists, botanists, entomologists, plant breeders and others which The Land Institute helps to train--training them to be anything but "county agents," but instead people committed to bringing the knowledge of the carbon relationship to life in the hands of all of us who are living off and from the land--start finding jobs that will connect them with a carbon-based community (whether in Kansas or in Kazakhstan) which can be locally sustainable, as life on earth is supposed to be. To create an army of people committed to the carbon-based communities which we all must sustain, and to sustaining them justly, is for Jackson a 30-year mission, one almost certainly won't live to see (he's 75), but we could all hear the passion in his voice; shaking his head in disbelief, he pointed out that paying for the education of such an army of young gardeners and local innovators would probably cost, at current tuition rates, about one-third of the ethanol subsidy offered to corn farmers in 2012 alone. "We've got to quit treating soil like dirt!" was his conclusion; we need to treat as not a disposable commodity, in other words, but an essential partner, as I would put it, in the carbon-based communities wherein we become the humans we may be.

Or at least that was almost his conclusion--but not quite. I asked him one question: what can small colleges--like Newman University, where he was speaking, or Friends University, where I poke about with my own small efforts to get students and others thinking about community and sustainability--do? His eyes sparkled a bit, and he said that the most important thing is to get out of our usual silos of thought; to break down categories, for us and our students, because only then will the truth that "history and philosophy are the most practical of the liberal arts" be realized. There is a need for connection, for affection (and here he gave us a sneak peak of Wendell Berry's upcoming Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, an address which Jackson has read through as a rough draft), and for teaching students the value of sticking around a place long enough to learn something of its "genius." The prairie can teach us stuff, as it has Jackson, assuming one recognizes the value, as he did, of sticking with the prairie long enough, and thinking hard enough about what all those relationships under its surface and around its inhabitants (human and otherwise) might have to offer. I would guess that he might say that any place where things grow, one can find genius. But you need may need to break away from the usual academic and professional trajectories, and their of gospel of booming ever outward, and instead look down and around, if you want to see it.