The Good Farmer

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

This is a conversation that needs to happen. Increasingly I feel sure of it; I just don't know how to go about it when so many have completely forgotten the genuine terms of human survival. Many adults, I'm convinced, believe that food comes from grocery stores. In Wendell Berry's novel Jayber Crow, a farmer coming to the failing end of his long economic struggle despaired aloud, "I've wished sometimes that the sons of bitches would starve. And now I'm getting afraid they actually will."

Like that farmer, I am frustrated with the imposed acrimony between producers and consumers of food, as if this were a conflict in which one could possibly choose sides. I'm tired of the presumption of a nation divided between rural and urban populations whose interests are permanently at odds, whose votes will always be cast different ways, whose hearts and minds share no common ground. This is as wrong as blight, a useless way of thinking, similar to the propaganda warning us that any environmentalist program will necessarily be anti-human. Recently a national magazine asked me to write a commentary on the great divide between "the red and the blue" -- imagery taken from election-night TV coverage that colored a map according to the party each state elected, suggesting a clear political difference between the rural heartland and urban coasts. Sorry, I replied to the magazine editors, but I'm the wrong person to ask: I live in red, tend to think blue, and mostly vote green. If you're looking for oversimplification, skip the likes of me.

Better yet, skip the whole idea. Recall that in every one of those red states, just a razor's edge under half the voters likely pulled the blue lever, and vice versa -- not to mention the greater numbers everywhere who didn't even show up at the polls, so far did they feel from affectionate toward any of the available options. Recall that farmers and hunters, historically, are more active environmentalists than many progressive, city-dwelling vegetarians. (And, conversely, that some of the strongest land-conservation movements on the planet were born in the midst of cities.) Recall that we all have the same requirements for oxygen and drinking water, and that we all like them clean but relentlessly pollute them. Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt.

We don't much care to think of ourselves that way -- as creatures whose cleanest aspirations depend ultimately on the health of our dirt. But our survival as a species depends on our coming to grips with that, along with some other corollary notions, and when I entered a comfortable midlife I began to see that my kids would get to do the same someday, or not, depending on how well our species could start owning up to its habitat and its food chain. As we faced one environmental crisis after another, did our species seem to be making this connection? As we say back home, not so's you'd notice.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print