The Unsettling of America

A few days ago, I started reading Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Excellent book. Berry is a prophet for our time, calling into question a culture which can disconnect and insulate itself from every natural process and which encourages the division of every individual from the community of humanity. His principles and perspectives are exceptionally natural, practical and sensible, but that's what you'd expect from a farmer, and that's what he is.

If you find anything I have to say interesting or provocative then you would do well to read Wendell Berry - many of his perspectives seem like much more intelligent, much more experienced, and much more eloquently expressed versions of my own. Here's an excerpt which presents the general thesis of the book (so far as I've gotten):

The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation.

Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common—not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them to us at the highest profit. It fragments the Creation and sets the fragments into conflict with one another. For the relief of the suffering that comes of this fragmentation and conflict, our economy proposes, not health, but vast "cures" that further centralize power and increase profits: wars, wars on crime, wars on poverty, national schemes of medical aid, insurance, immunization, further industrial and economic "growth," etc.; and these, of course, are followed by more regulatory laws and agencies to see that our health is protected, our freedom preserved, and our money well spent. Although there may be some "good intention" in this, there is little honesty and no hope. [emphasis mine throughout]

Berry wrote these words in the 1970s, and they are ever more true today. He is no conspiracy theorist, nor is he a ranting alarmist—he simply looks at our society from outside of our time, rejects the metanarrative of progress, and discusses what he sees rationally, point by point.

Unto us a son is given...

Joelle gave birth to our first child this morning. It was a pretty powerful experience, and I am incredibly happy.

Our son is named Lane Thomas. He is named after my step-grandfather, Rudolph Lane Atkins, one of the kindest, most genuine men I have ever known and the best friend within my family I have had. The choice of Lane’s middle name comes mostly from its status of being one of the few names that we liked on which both Joelle and I could agree. I think a boy named Thomas will be in quite good company, sharing the name as he will with some very good men I’ve known, including Tom Perkins and Tom Keating; with the learned farmer and political philosopher Thomas Jefferson, whose character of homo universalis I am drawn to emulate and whose perspectives on personal liberty and personal and social responsibility I espouse and promulgate; with the honest “skeptic” of the Gospels who did not wish to delude himself with unsubstantiated hopes but, when confronted with experience, readily accepted and joyed in the implications of his expanded reality.

I’m sure Joelle does not share all my reasons for liking the name, but that’s OK.

The Problem with "Regulation"

As the US fumes over how much money was paid to AIG execs in bonuses, I sit with, paradoxically, both the knowledge of and absolute disbelief in how incredibly gullible, underinformed, and downright stupid the average American is.

Those of you who are among the "outraged" may be mad at me now. Okay.

We've known about the bonuses for months - they are honoring contracts from over a year ago. See what else the current administration and congress have known about all along, and actually helped create.

The problem with this AIG business is that Congressional laws, Executive programs, Federal Reserve monetary policy, and federal and state financial regulators all had a hand in creating this mess. Their policies created the conditions which allowed the housing bubble and the opacity of derivatives contracts which have now given the world economy a turbulent ratcheting down of its belt size. Their policies and decisions turned a localized market overexpansion affecting a few states into a full-blown crisis that will, before it plays out, have drastic structural consequences to world finance, almost certainly bring about substantial geopolitical changes, possibly ignite new or expand existing regional conflicts, and likely shift the world reserve currency regime away from the American dollar (as Russia is already calling for - you think things are rough now? Just wait until the American dollar is no longer buoyed by its world debt- and commodity-denominator status). You know what the worst, and the most condemning, part of it all is? AIG played completely within the government-sanctioned rules, as this article from the Wall Street Journal makes clear.

No one administration is entirely at fault here - the causes of the conditions which gave rise to this debacle directly stretch back to the Clinton Administration, and, it may be argued, much further. Politicians - IF they should ever decide to point fingers within their ranks rather than at AIG execs and Tim Geithner - will undoubtedly say it is one administration's or one party's fault, but that is not the case. It is the fault of the notion of government economic planning and regulation, and nearly every administration since Andrew Jackson's has been guilty of that.

Why does the government - whether Congress, the president, the Federal Reserve banking conglomerate, or even their best and brightest Ivy League economists - think it can successfully regulate (assuming any one of them could even understand) every aspect of the country's economy? A better question - why do average citizens, who regularly complain about Washington's ineptitude, trust the government to understand and regulate the economy? Government intervention always has unintended consequences and always creates winners and losers, skewing the playing field to the benefit of some.

My same question asked above - why does the government think it can successfully regulate - applies just as aptly to food policy. On Monday, Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) went into effect. The idea is that all fresh fruits, veggies, and meats should be clearly marked as to where they came from. A good idea. But meats have more requirements, and fish have even more. For domestic small livestock producers and aquaculturists, this means additional costly paperwork and animal tagging when their profit margins on their small-scale enterprises are already low enough. Some may accept that this may very well be the cost of better regulation and food safety measures and that small producers will simply have to run more efficient businesses to stay competitive, and that's fair.

But, as always, government regulations are hypocrital. COOL does not apply to any food which has been processed in ANY way - smoked, emulsified, mixed with other ingredients - and does not apply to the ingredients included in processed foods. So, we can still import the salmonella- or E. coli-infested spinach from Mexico, but we'll sell it as prepared fresh mixed salad greens so no one will ever know the difference. We can import chicken from melamine China but we'll cook it and put it in some other finished product so we don't have to mention China on the label. You can read the USDA's own release here, or the MSNBC story here.

This law specifically aids food processors and large agribusinesses. Surprise, surprise. And, I suppose, the inverse is true - that this law specifically targets small producers - but I prefer not to take the angle of emotionalism when I can take the angle of fact.

As Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, Congressional leaders whose campaign funds are essentially owned by financial interests, continue to spout off ideas how best to solve this "crisis" and then deflect criticism away from themselves onto corporate execs when the plans become unpopular, and as new government regulations on food safety are revealed to be a farce to aid large businesses, I ask this: when are we going to denounce this hypocrisy for what it is? When are we going to hold our governments and our elected officials responsible? Will the average citizen be willing to turn off his iPod, quit watching March Madness, quit being entertained for just a few minutes, put partisanism aside, engage his critical faculties potentially for the first time in years, take some measure of responsibility for himself, and ACT in our society as a citizen? (Oh, and you Canadians, this means you too - your government and its misguided policy-making is even more ubiquitous than the American, albeit, thankfully, much less corrupt.)

So that's the problem with "regulation" - that it always benefits some disproportionately, and there's always enough wiggle room while being completely within the regulation to create massive disturbances, whether in the world economy or in individuals' health.

What's the answer? Expect every citizen from the time of his or her childhood to take an active interest in our society and responsibility for his or her actions within it. Yeah, I know, about as likely to happen as fair policy coming out of Washington. I suppose that's a topic for another day.

Obama and Food

The outcry of the demos brought some changes yesterday. I read here that President Obama, in the wake of the most recent salmonella scare, wants to change the way foods are regulated for safety. Now this is a good idea, one I am not opposed to. But notice what Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack wants to do: create one regulatory entity to handle ALL foods, rather than the eleven which currently do a marginally satisfactory job of it. Again, from a regulatory standpoint, a great idea - one entity should be able to do a much better job of communicating with itself and effecting consistent regulation than eleven entities could do.

However, there is one little problem with this scenario: Vilsack is bought and paid for by big-ag interests. To some degree that is reasonable since he comes from big-ag Mecca - he's the former governor of Iowa. The problem comes when someone who represents the interests of industrial agriculture wants to consolidate all food regulation under one agency - then, the big-ag companies need only to influence a few people to keep their interests protected by policy. Consolidation of oversight is a good idea; consolidation of power is not.

Food safety was also the central issue of Obama's weekly YouTube address. I must point out one glaring omission of President Obama's teleprompter-read take on the issue of food regulation: recalls are voluntary. Public safety policy has been written to protect the profits of food processors. It came out quite some time ago that the peanut plant so recently in question knew it had tainted product in its facility, but chose to let this go unreported, believing they had dealt with the problem. Another bad policy problem we have in such situations is this: if a processor does issue a recall, it is extremely difficult to legally hold them responsible for sickness or death, since it is assumed they did what they could to correct the concern. If we want to ensure food safety, we either must have inspectors active at every single one of the 150,000 domestic processors (AND all the foreign ones, or at every port of entry) OR we must make it clear that companies and involved individuals will be held legally responsible for EVERY case of food poisoning. Since neither of these alternatives is practical or economical on such a level, perhaps we should seriously look into the idea of a decentralization of food safety regulation. There is no reason to believe the private sector could not do this well; otherwise, how did private organic labeling work so well for so long? Some groups think we should require mandatory labeling of ALL pertinent health information (origin, GMO content, pesticides used, etc.) on all packaged foods; at the very least, we could simply allow this labeling to even be LEGAL, as some of it now is not. Informed consumers acting through a market-driven demand for information on their foodstuffs could strongly enhance safety, and likely enhance overall health at the same time.

One last little note - the banning of "downer" cows from the food supply is a no-brainer. This should in no way be seen as some great achievement, but I suppose I should thank President Obama for finally doing it. Such laws should have been in place decades ago, and likely would have been had not big-ag interests had such a hand in crafting public safety policy. Now we should also ban "downer" chickens and pigs, as the lines bred for industrial-ag use and the confinement operations which raise them create animals which often cannot even stand under their own weight since their bones, muscles, and joints are so underdeveloped for their size. Some may say here, "That doesn't mean they're sick or at all dangerous." True, but how does the slaughterhouse worker tell the difference in the couple seconds he takes to kill the animal and put it on the line?

If you think I'm overreacting, or if you have doubts about how our food is processed, take a look at this video. Unfortunately, it's from PETA, an organization whose leaders have some very screwed up views, and unfortunately also, the intent of the video is to encourage vegetarianism through pity and shame rather than to expose the practices of industrial farming. Anyway, it's worth a look, and I hope you come away from it with a desire to encourage and give patronage to local small farmers who raise their animals with genuine care.

Food safety for the nation does not begin with government, but with the individual reinserting himself into the food production process and making informed decisions in his own self-interest.

What's wrong with this picture?

Beautiful, isn't it?

The expanse of amber wheat, the windbreak in the distance, the perspective of distance you would never experience in North Carolina.

I really do love living here in Saskatchewan sometimes. I could do with a month or so less of winter, a little more of a drawn-out autumn like we have back in NC, and without a few cultural practices I find annoying, but all in all it's a pretty good life. Seeing fields stretching to the horizon in every direction is sure a change of perspective from forested, hilly NC. And the sunsets! Unbelievable.

And the people here are different, too. These wide-open expanses, the rurality of this region, and the primacy of agriculture as livelihood sure do rear a different type of person from the busy, demanding, self-centered East Coast suburb. Not that social conditions here are idyllic, just different.

But can you tell me what's wrong with this picture?

Maybe you don't think anything is wrong, and maybe you won't agree with my assessment once I tell you what I think is wrong. Or maybe you've just never thought about these issues in the ways I do. Either way, hear me out.

I see a few things wrong here, things which matter a great deal to me as "causes", things I could "fight" if I were so inclined. Some of these things a great many social and environmental groups do indeed "fight" with protests and political action and petitions, all those democratic tools of discontent. I'll discuss each of the things I see wrong in future posts; for now, I'd like to give a somewhat lengthy introduction to this line of thought. Get a cup of tea and settle in.

The things I see wrong with this picture all stem from one fundamental concept of modern life that I see as seriously flawed: centralization. Centralization of governmental policy decisions, of capital and credit, of land use/zoning decisions, of the production of energy and other consumable goods, of food production/supply/processing, of economic policy, of security interests. I see all of that in this picture. Yeah, I know, I'm pretty screwed up.

I care a lot about the idea of sustainability. That's a term we hear a lot about these days, but I don't think many of us understand it. When I hear people casually using the term in the media, advertisements, etc., I notice that there is often more of a "maintainability" color to their discussion: "bio"fuels, alternative energy sources, organic farming, even different techniques of oil and gas production. Not that these things are inherently bad, but they are not sought after because they are truly sustainable but because they offer us different (and potentially less destructive) ways to maintain our current standard of living.

The problem is our current standard of living is in no way sustainable. And neither is our way of living. And neither is the centralization necessary to keep up either our standard or our way of living.

For the sake of increased productivity (and, therefore, for increased earnings and thus standard of living), workers moved production out of the home and into the workshop, out of the individual workshop and into the guild, out of the guild and into the factory. Ever since Frederick Taylor developed the idea of "scientific management" for factory workers in the late nineteenth century we've known the benefits, and the adverse effects, of the centralization of procedural decisions in the workplace and, by the extension of the factory model of management and of a few new inventions to the "industry" of agriculture, on the farm. And with the widespread use of the assembly line by Henry Ford came the realization that people acting as cogs in a machine could easily out-produce even highly-skilled independent, decentralized workers. We can accomplish so much more in this way, but at what cost?

Centralization of political and social institutions and specialization of labor were once beneficent hallmarks of civilization. Now, outside of a few select professions, they are little more than a way for the corporate boss to jerk us around. Specialization of labor creates the situation in which the centralization of planning is necessary to keep all the "cogs" working to potential (except in very small-scale communities with truly free markets - but market-moderation just doesn't work on the level of entire modern societies). Centralization of planning means those who do the planning have power over those so planned for. For evidence, take one look at the corporate atmosphere of today's average workplace and the stress and dissatisfaction it brings.

But what does this have to do with sustainability? Centralization for the sake of efficiency makes us act in ways that are not sustainable, since it removes the individual from the process of production of those things necessary for life. In agrarian societies, and within the last century in predominantly agrarian regions of "developed" nations, the majority of the people individually or as family units performed the tasks necessary for living and, hopefully, earned enough money to buy those few luxury and specialty goods they could not produce themselves. When one's labors are directed at producing those things necessary to live there comes a moderating influence which curbs consumption of extraneous goods. That moderating factor may be as simple as extra free time or as serious as the necessity to survive, but it is there; the moderation comes because one's labors are directly producing the majority of goods for his livelihood. Moderation in consumption conserves resources, thus enabling sustainability.

Another issue arises here: the agrarian (or otherwise predominantly self-sufficient) landholder-worker has a natural incentive to conserve his goods, to conserve his resources, and to improve his holding, since his continued survivability depends upon these elements (that is why the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer was, and is, so powerful - it could have, and should have, worked. But Jefferson did not foresee the California gold rush or the Civil War or the Irish potato famine or the rise of industrialism or the massive demographic shifts in their wake). Direct personal interest in the continued productive capacity of those things under one's care tends to steer one away from over-production of goods, an inefficient waste of labor and resources. This disincentive to waste directly enhances the chances for sustainability.

In today's society, moderation makes for bad business. We've seen that evidenced in the credit bubble. Even the limitations brought by the natural productive capacities of resources are circumvented through chemical means and by the outsourcing of production to foreign lands.

Those individuals who do produce in today's centralized system - industrial-scale farmers, hydropower operators, miners, factory workers - only produce one small element of the entire chain and never truly have an appreciation for what it takes to produce all the other goods of everyday life, and therefore are never moderated in their pursuit of those goods.

In fact, as long as goods enter the economy by no effort on the part of those not directly involved in their production (the vast majority of workers for any one specific good), then there is neither a moderating limitation on consumption nor a disincentive to work as a cog. In fact, the opposite is true: the ease with which a variety of goods not produced by the individual may be procured encourages the individual to work in his specialty all the more, to make more earnings, to procure more goods. That is why modern economic theory can legitimately be based upon the assumption of perpetual growth - because perpetual demand is a given within its framework.

And so we keep working, trading our time for money, paying taxes on our earnings, using the remainder to buy the stuff we need and want, hoping to "retire" someday. All the while we are investing and trusting more fully in the centralization of our economy and of political power into "a few strong hands".

Haven't the events of the last year shown us that centralization of finance opens up world markets to drastic blows from a small percentage of faulty investments in a very few localities? That centralization of food processing can have far-flung deadly effects when something goes wrong, and that centralized food safety regulation fails horribly when one processing plant slips through the cracks? That centralization of government power cannot help but create winners and losers in any of its endeavors? That centralization of economic thought leads to "corrective" responses tantamount to the original problems?

And in any way did any of this centralization add to the sustainability of current human endeavor? No. No, we just pass the buck to someone else, to someone on the other side of the world, the country, the aisle of Congress, or to a different generation entirely. The responses of centralization tell us to keep spending so our GDP doesn't look so bad and so China can still afford to subsidize our "stimulus", to hold more debt than we can afford so we won't put any more pressure on the banks, to trust the new regulatory regimes which will in time fail us just like the old ones did. And in the meantime we continue to rape the earth.

In the end, the individual lives and dies. In the end, every notion of existence is decentralized. Why, then, do we go along with centralization and the loss of personal liberty it brings? Why do we trust the centralized powers even though they exploit the earth and destroy peoples' lives? Is it just because it's easier, or is it simply to slough off responsibility for one's own actions onto the group?

So, what's wrong with this picture?

The Scent of Green

So here we are...

I never thought I'd have a blog. Of course, I swore I'd never have a Facebook account, but I signed up for that a few weeks ago, too (thanks a lot, Jason). I always made fun of people who felt compelled to share their lives with the great anonymous Web and its tired-eyed denizens.

But as I accept the current facts of my life - namely, that my life is changing drastically (with my first child on the way in a matter of days), that our world is changing (in the wake of this current hubristic crisis), that I am so far away from my family and so many of my friends (it's official - today I received notice that Immigration Canada has approved my application for Permanent Residency, so I'll be staying for a while...so long, North Carolina) - well, I want a way to deal with those things, and talking through type is a way to do just that.

Maybe I'm just bored after six months of winter. I've looked at this white landscape long enough. I've already ordered all my seed for this year's garden, so I don't have that to distract me anymore.

There's this amazing thing that happens around this time of year in this northerly of a climate. One late winter day you'll wake up and there will be a different quality to the sunlight when you look out the window. And then you'll go outside and you'll feel a breeze coming from the south. And then you'll catch it - just this faint scent of something fresh, something normal, but something you've not smelled in a long time - the scent of green, the smell of plants somewhere farther south that aren't still covered in the snow you see all around you, the smell of spring. And then you know that this long winter will soon be over. This is something I never experienced growing up in North Carolina, but I look forward to it more than Christmas in my new Saskatchewan home.

And that yearning is part of the reason for the name of this silly blog, but it's not all. The scent of green is pretty important to me, in a few ways. Over the last few years I've begun to enjoy gardening, so much so that I've put plans in place to make a living farming. I've come to realize that helping the earth do what it does to help people do what they do is a pretty cool way of life, as a hobby or as a job. Some would very reasonably even consider it a vocation, a calling. But as I watch us humans do what we do I realize we have some pretty screwed up ideas about how all this is supposed to work, and about how it all did work for countless millenia before a few inventions over the last 150 years changed everything. But more on that later.

Those of you who know what it is to wave a crisp American dollar bill by your nose know another meaning of the scent of green, maybe the one which first registered when you saw the title of this little adventure in storytelling. I didn't choose this name because I like money, however, but because so much of what is going on in our world today is about the economy. Precisely, about how little "economy" we have left, buried under mountains of debt and greed and vain hope. I don't want this blog to devolve into nothing but my little soapbox, but I will talk about these things from time to time, and I'd love to have your opinions on these matters and on what I have to say about them.

And, lastly, to be my normal unwholesome self, the scent of green may very well call to mind the olfactory corollary to the sight of the inside of my soon-to-be-born child's diapers, but that imagery is only an unfortunate consequence of thinking too long too late at night about a title for my blog. It was strictly adolescently derivative and in no way played a part in the choice of my title. That's my disclaimer, likely the first of many you'll see here, since I can't seem to open my mouth without offending somebody.

I hope you'll enjoy keeping up with me here. I hope I can renew old friendships, maintain the ones I have, and come across some new ones with what I have to say here.

So, here's to this little journey of ours