FREE RANGE: FOOD, NATURE, PLACE, AND MORE

Beyond the bottom line

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Martin

During our recent backpacking trip across northern England, my buddy Bruce and I overcame mild hypothermia, frightening falls, nearly constant rain, gale-force winds, aching feet and ankles and knees, multiple blisters, blackened toenails, and one extremely crummy hotel with no hot water, but in some ways the most dispiriting thing we faced was the number of villages we passed through that lacked any kind of local business.

Not so many years ago, almost every small town and village in England could boast both a pub and a post office, which doubled as a general store. In recent years, however, such establishments have been disappearing at an appalling rate. The Sunday Mirror reported in March that three post offices were closing every week, and Nia Griffith, a Labour Party member of Parliament, was quoted in The Telegraph a couple of months later to the effect that losing a post office “rips the heart out of the community.”

The same could be said of the loss of the village pub. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), an English consumer group, says that 29 British pubs close every week, a remarkable figure that actually represents an improvement over the 53 closures per week reported in 2008. According to CAMRA’s research, “84 percent of people believe a pub is as essential to village life as a shop or post office.”

Well, you can count Bruce and me among the believers. We didn’t buy all the Ordnance Survey maps covering our 200-mile route ahead of time, confident that we’d be able to purchase them as needed in village shops along the way. And we also thought that if we decided to forego our usual on-the-trail lunch of a piece of fruit, a Kit-Kat bar, and a few sips of water, we’d be able to stop at a village pub for a hot bowl of soup, a hunk of crusty bread, and a half (or full) pint of cider instead.

As it turned out, we were wrong on both counts. Several times we wandered off the edge of our most recently purchased map, only to discover that the next village(s) or town(s) through which we passed had no post office (or any other shop), forcing us to rely on the vague, inaccurate, and sometimes outdated information in John Gillham’s slim book Lakeland to Lindisfarne: A Coast-to-Coast Walk from Ravenglass to Holy Island, of which we each carried a copy. Occasionally we simply had to guess which direction to head, trusting in our common sense and our compasses; the former, sadly, proved somewhat less reliable than the latter.

And on several grim mornings, as we struggled through horizontal rain and howling winds, chilled and soaked to the bone, the thought of that soup and cider awaiting us at the pub in the next village was just about the only thing that kept us going… only to discover that the pub in the next village no longer existed, and that our lunch would be a cold and grumpy one, consumed as we sat shivering on a piece of turf or, if we were lucky, an actual bench by the side of the road.

The decline of the small, locally owned business is not only a concern Across the Pond, of course; it’s happening here, too, and there are good reasons to deplore it. An article by David A. Fleming and Stephan J. Goetz of Penn State University in the August issue of Economic Development Quarterly argues that small, locally owned businesses have a much more positive effect on local economic growth than do large, non-locally owned businesses (i.e., chains and large corporations). “Local ownership matters in important ways,” explains Goetz. “Smaller, locally owned businesses, it turns out, provide higher, long-term economic growth.”

That was also the conclusion of the New Rules Project, a program of the Institute for Self-Reliance, which found that locally owned businesses recycle more revenue into the local economy, create more jobs, and require less infrastructure than chains. A 2009 study of financial data from fifteen locally owned businesses in New Orleans concluded that only 16 percent of the money spent at a SuperTarget store stayed in the local economy, as opposed to 32 percent of the money spent at local retail outlets. (A 2003 study of eight locally owned businesses in Maine concluded that three times as much money stayed in the local economy when customers bought goods and services from locally owned businesses.) Another 2009 study concluded that the opening of a Walmart on Chicago’s West Side led to the closure of about one quarter of the businesses within a four-mile radius.

I don’t think that all chains and large corporations are necessarily evil, but I do think that we need to find an alternative to the tyranny of the bottom line. We need to create a system in which efficiency, global reach, economies of scale, short-term return on investment, and the like are not the sole determinants of business success, a system in which a locally owned business in a small town or village stands a realistic chance of survival against the Big Box just up the highway. What would it actually take to create such a system? I have no idea; Heather and I are, after all, perhaps the only two people ever to have graduated from Williams College without taking a single economics course. But I think I have an idea of what that system could look like.

The September 26 issue of The New Yorker contained a lovely story by Peter Hessler about Don Colcord, a druggist in the tiny town of Nucla, in southwestern Colorado. “He is, by the strictest definition, a bad businessman,” writes Heller.

If a customer can’t pay, Don often rings up the order anyway and tapes the receipt to the inside wall above his counter. “This one said he was covered by insurance, but it wasn’t,” he explains, pointing at a slip of paper on a wall full of them. “This one said he’ll be in on Tuesday. This one is a patient who is going on an extended vacation.” Most of his customers simply don’t have the money. Each year, Don writes off between ten and twenty thousand dollars, and he estimates that he is owed around three hundred thousand dollars in total. His annual salary is sixty-five thousand dollars. Over the course of many days at the Apothecary Shoppe, I never saw a customer walk in whom Don doesn’t know by name.

“It’s just a cost of doing business in a small town,” he says. “I don’t know how you can look your neighbor in the eye and say, ‘I know you’re having a tough time, but I can’t help you and your kid can’t get well.’ ”

By most standards, Nucla, Colorado, is not much of a town. Since its uranium-mining heyday in the Fifties and Sixties, writes Hessler, the population has dwindled to a few hundred, and is still dropping. The school board, strapped for funds, recently decided to cut back to a four-day school week, and the last local doctor died fifteen years ago. But the people of Nucla are fortunate indeed to have a man like Don Colcord in their midst, someone willing and able to look beyond the bottom line in his devotion to his community. Unfortunately, there aren’t many such people around, which means that Bruce and I, on our next backpacking trip, will probably find even fewer places to buy a hot lunch on a cold, rainy day, and will take care to buy all the maps we need before we leave.

What we’re reading
Heather: Gregory Orr, The Blessing: A Memoir
Martin: Calvin Trillin, Trillin on Texas

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Re-wilding the monocultural self

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Heather

While reading the recently published Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, by Emma Marris, I found myself simultaneously cheering and exclaiming with a steely squint: Hey! Real conservationists can’t think this! You’re just giving ammunition for them to lob back at us. Slippery slope turns to avalanche turns into apocalypse! Who the heck to do you think you are?

Now that I’ve finished the book, I’ve decided to go back to applauding Marris for her cheerful heterodoxy and passionately common-sensical approach to conservation issues in the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I began reading with no problems. In the first chapter she says,

Nature is almost everywhere. But wherever it is, there is one thing it is not: pristine. In 2011 there is no pristine wilderness on planet Earth…. [Humans are] running the whole Earth, whether we admit it or not. To run it consciously and effectively, we must admit our role and even embrace it. We must temper our romantic notions of untrammeled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended to by us.

So far so good. Recent climate change and the cascade of new realities resulting from it are clear to virtually every scientist and conservation-minded person on the planet. (Insert punchline about Texans and their three-term governor here.) She explains that environmental sciences, especially in the United States, use a baseline, a reference point which, in formulating conservation goals tends to assume an ideal time of pristine, stable wilderness to which nature itself yearns to return, hearkening to a time before the destabilizing pressures of human occupancy. We fouled nature up, so it’s our ethical duty to restore it to its original, Edenic state.

But then she makes things really messy. From what point do we date human occupancy for the sake of conservation goals? And where? Many scientists assume that the time before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas is the time to which we must reset the clock. This is the baseline that many conservation-minded Americans (like me) also assume, most likely unquestioningly (like me). (One of the reasons I call myself a utopian—i.e., not a realist—is my hope, expressed in an earlier post, that human stewardship, particularly by ranchers, might at some point not be the worst thing that ever happened to the Earth.) First of all, religious fundamentalists aren’t the only ones to believe that the Garden of Eden existed as a historical reality. The idea that there has ever been a stable, self-perpetuating ecosystem is problematic:

We are a short-lived species with a notoriously bad grasp of timescales longer than a few of our own generations. But from the point of view of a geologist or a paleontologist, ecosystems are in a constant dance, as their components compete, react, evolve, migrate, and form new communities. Geologic upheaval, evolution, climactic cycles, fire, storms, and population dynamics see to it that nature is always changing.

Nor do scientists always know what any particular ecosystem actually looked like at any pre-baseline time. Nor does the Edenic model take into account the fact that many native peoples had purposeful management systems before the arrival of Europeans. Finally, this baseline is also increasingly impossible to achieve, either through restoration or management practices, because the pressures of climate change and population growth have made turning back the clock about as feasible as stuffing a sixteen-year-old boy into the shoes he wore when he was eight. It isn’t going to happen, especially if he didn’t actually have any shoes when he was eight.

The pristine wilderness toward which so many conservationists aspire is, in fact, an American construction that came into being along with Yellowstone National Park and the science of the nineteenth century, which saw nature as essentially balanced, static, unchanging in its equilibrium. Contemporary environmental sciences clearly demonstrate that the natural world—before human “interference”—never stood still for long. Some of the most revered natural phenomena—old growth forests, for example—can be the result of climactic anomalies, like long wet spells that interrupted wildfires cycles. And what do we do about issues like the mountain goats at Yellowstone, which are now beloved by tourists, but were introduced from several hundred miles away in the 1940s for hunting purposes?

Well, I can cope with the reality that the Wizard of Oz is actually working levers behind a curtain, even as I’d like to be able to ignore him. But one of the unexpected revelations of that unveiling really hooked me under the ribs: the chapter entitled “Learning to Love Exotic Species.” I have often moaned and groaned about the non-native fauna—the fallow, axis, and sika deer, the feral hogs, and the various other oddities—that wander through Madroño Ranch and compete for food with the natives, especially in this drought time. I’m also a member of an advisory board to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, the mission of which is “to increase the sustainable use and conservation of native wildflowers, plants and landscapes.” I recently sat in on an excellent and nuanced presentation on invasive species by Damon Waitt, the director of the center’s Native Plant Information Network. I know as surely as I know that north is up and south is down that natives are good and that invasives are bad. But Marris upends the poles and says, think again. Non-natives can be not only not malevolent but actively useful. While some exotic species (a term she prefers to “invasives”) are “rowdy nuisances” that need active and emphatic controlling, there are far more “shy foreigners” who work for the good of their new ecosystems. In fact, there are human-managed—that is, artificial—landscapes filled with exotic species that outperform their “natural” cousins, if performance is measured by biodiversity and provisions of services to all inhabitants and not just humans.

This is when I began to ask the “just who does she think she is” question with my arms akimbo, which is when I realized it wasn’t my scientific, based-on-facts knowledge that was being challenged (it doesn’t take much); rather, it was my own self-identity as a conservation-minded layperson. I was adhering to an orthodoxy I hadn’t realized I subscribed to. I learned at my mother’s knee that any orthodoxy’s tires need a good kicking before you buy. I had climbed into this orthodoxy (a Prius, naturally) without doing so and found that I might be stuck on the side of the road with a flat.

In Marris’s rambunctious garden, however, the side of the road might not be a bad place to be stuck. If it were managed for biodiversity, for beauty, and as a part of a much larger ecosystem—as a stop for migratory butterflies, for example—a stranded motorist might enjoy the wait for help. We’re so used to thinking of “nature” as something outsized and grand and hard to get to that we frequently forget that it’s quite literally underfoot or falling on our sleeves as we walk along a city sidewalk. While it’s not entirely within our control, there are more ways for human being to engage in a fruitful relationship with nature than we currently allow ourselves to imagine.

Marris’s call for biodiversity everywhere—in industrial sites, apparent wastelands, back yards, hybrid ecosystems developed for economic gain—made me realize that unexamined orthodoxy often leads to monoculture, be it agricultural, social, political, intellectual, or spiritual. In industrial agriculture, monocultures rely heavily on pesticides, ridding crops of insects that in a healthy polyculture can be absorbed into the system (sometimes requiring intensive human labor). In the national discussion about immigration, there seems to be a sector demanding social monoculture, using terms that sound very much like the prejudice in environmental circles against “invasive” species. The extremes in both political parties are demanding that their candidates spray any bipartisan thoughts with herbicide. When she first messed with my assumptions, I mentally doused Marris’s proprosals, hoping the threat to my preconceptions would go away. Despite the huge short-term returns of monoculture (in my case, the sure knowledge that I was right), the reality of radically diminished liveliness looms just past the identical crop rows. Re-wilding monocultures of the mind, the heart, and the land—acknowledging that there is no single solution to any complex problem—sounds like a critical strategy in the face of what sometimes feels like a threatening future. According to Marris, it’s our duty to manage nature, but it’s a duty leading to pleasure, beauty, and liveliness. As she urges, “Let the rambunctious gardening begin.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World
Martin: H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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Bruce and Martin’s big adventure

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Martin

In the three weeks since our last post, I’ve been off backpacking some 200 miles across northern England with my friend Bruce Bennett, a veteran of several previous coast-to-coast walks and a man who knows the Lake District better than many natives.

Two Septembers ago, as I related in an earlier post, Bruce and I hiked from Ravenglass, on the Irish Sea, to Scarborough, on the North Sea. This time we followed a different route, once again originating in Ravenglass but heading in a more northeasterly direction to Lindisfarne, an island off the Northumberland coast, just below the Scottish border.

This year’s trip was a good bit more exciting, and not necessarily in a good way. We endured the usual blisters and blackened toenails, but also a scary fall; the gale-force remnants of Hurricane Katia (that’s Bruce in the photo above, being buffeted by the wind as we made our way from Garrigill to Allendale Town); mild hypothermia; an almost constant rain (not that I expect much sympathy on the latter from Texans who’ve been dealing with heat, drought, and wildfires in our absence); and, perhaps cruelest of all, an ice-cold shower in Hexham, as our crummy hotel’s hot-water heater was broken. In addition, the book we were more or less using as our guide, Lakeland to Lindisfarne: A Coast to Coast Walk from Ravenglass to Holy Island, by a fellow named John Gillham, proved to be frustratingly vague and hard to follow.

We certainly enjoyed some wonderful moments along the way: a beautiful day’s hike from Wasdale Head to Elterwater via Styhead Tarn, Sprinkling Tarn, and Angle Tarn, with incredible views of the Lake District from Great Gable; a convivial dinner with Heather’s English cousin Tony Jowett at the Haweswater Hotel; the unexpectedly fabulous (except for the squishy beds!) Temple Sowerby House; sharing a breakfast table at our B&B above the Garrigill post office with a young German couple who were hiking the Pennine Way from south to north; a conversation in the bar of the Cheviot Hotel in Bellingham with our new friends Ian, an Anglican priest, and his wife Jackie, who live in Wales; the lovely Oronsay House in the charming and bustling town of Alnwick (pronounced “Annick”); beautiful walks beside the River Coquet and the River Aln; our customary pint of cider in the local pub at the end of a long day’s tramp; up-close views of Dunstanburgh, Bamburgh, and Lindisfarne castles on the North Sea coast; and more. On balance, however, I’d have to say that this year’s walk was not an experience that either of us would wish to repeat.

Indeed, when Bruce’s wife Margaret picked us up at the airport upon our return to Austin last Saturday, she asked, “Did you guys have any fun at all?” After a brief but thoughtful pause, Bruce and I responded that yes, we did, but I think our salient feeling about the trip is a good deal of pride in just having survived the bloody thing.

And I use the term “bloody” advisedly. On our very first day on the trail, as we made our way to Wasdale Head, we decided to deviate from Gillham’s route along Whinn Rigg and walk up the eastern shore of Wastwater instead, since it was foggy and raining up top. What we didn’t realize was that the footpath shown on our Ordnance Survey map as proceeding up the eastern shore of the lake soon disappeared in a huge field of enormous, razor-sharp, rain-slick rocks. It took us about an hour to pick our way slowly and cautiously across this pile of scree, during which I almost fell many times and Bruce fell twice; the first time, he gashed his left hand pretty deeply, cut his eyebrow, and gave himself what quickly turned into a spectacular shiner, though he somehow managed to avoid breaking his glasses. (We decided that, if anyone asked about his injuries, we’d attribute them to a bar fight, but no one did.)

Three days later, while making our way from Troutbeck to Haweswater, we had another, erm, exciting experience. As we were ascending Nan Bield Pass, we encountered howling winds so strong (Bruce estimated them at 70 miles per hour, though of course we had no way to measure them) that we each got knocked off our feet, and I almost—almost—became accustomed to the eerie sensation of the wind picking up my backpack and trying to move me a few feet sideways. Just as Bruce reached the summit, a particularly strong gust from behind propelled him stumbling over the top; when he regained his balance, he threw his head back and yelled, uncharacteristically (Bruce is usually the mildest of men), “This is un-f—ing-believable!” Whereupon he turned around and saw the shocked faces of an English family who had preceded us up the pass and were huddled in the little shelter at the top. (He apologized profusely for his salty language.)

A couple of days after that experience, we had our third and final scare. We were hiking over the North Pennines from Temple Sowerby to Garrigill on a day that quickly turned cold and wet and windy as we were ascending Cross Fell. With limited visibility, we lost the path in the rain and fog, and found ourselves wandering about the top of the fell for a half hour or so, hoping to strike the trail again. By the time we did, we were both soaked and freezing; with our teeth chattering uncontrollably, we stumbled into Greg’s Hut, an old miner’s shack maintained as a shelter for walkers.

Greg’s Hut was as chilly and bleak and bare as it is possible for a hut to be; I had been fantasizing about teakettles and crackling fires, but the only furniture in the place was a few plastic stacking chairs scattered about. Nonetheless, we took advantage of the fact that it was out of the wind and rain to exchange our soaked shirts and socks for dry, put on every layer we had with us, and eat all the Kit-Kats and apples we had with us before venturing back out. I don’t know if Greg’s Hut actually saved our lives, but it might have. (We bought a couple of those airline-sized bottles of Scotch at the next opportunity and carried them with us for the rest of the trip, in case of similar emergency, though we didn’t have occasion to use them, thank goodness.)

All in all, it was quite an adventure, and it was a relief to return to Austin, hot weather and all. A mutual friend reports that Bruce said he’s never doing one of these trips again, but we’ll see how he feels in a couple of years. If he’s game for another coast-to-coast and still needs an out-of-shape middle-aged sidekick to accompany him, well, he knows how to reach me.

What we’re reading
Heather: Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World
Martin: Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

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Ta ta for now!

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Martin

Tigger: TTFN (Ta-Ta for Now)

We’re now into our third year of blogging; today marks the 106th consecutive Friday that we’ve published a new installment of our musings, including three guest posts, one by each of our kids. (We hope they’ll write more.) Today’s post, however, will be our last for a few weeks, as Heather and I have voted unanimously to grant ourselves a brief sabbatical.

By the time you read this, I will have departed for another backpacking trip across northern England with my friend Bruce Bennett; our itinerary will take us some 200 miles in two weeks, from Ravenglass on the Irish Sea to Lindisfarne (Holy Island) on the North Sea. While I’m gone, Heather is hoping to hole up and work on a book project on which she’s collaborating with her fabulously talented sister, Isa Catto Shaw. For the next few weeks, then, neither of us will be producing a weekly blog post.

Duke Ellington once said, “I don’t need time, what I need is a deadline,” words that have become a sort of mantra for our blogging selves. Some weeks the ideas and words just seem to come pouring out; other weeks coming up with a thousand (more or less) coherent (more or less) words on any topic feels like heavy lifting indeed. In either case, putting together a new post every other week has been a revealing and useful discipline for each of us. I believe that our writing has sharpened under pressure (I think of Louis Howe’s advice to Eleanor Roosevelt on public speaking: “Have something you want to say, say it, and sit down”), and that we have both found resources within ourselves of which we had no previous inkling; the surfacing of these unexpected ideas and connections has been a great and unexpected pleasure. I also believe that our collaboration has been a great boon to our marriage, especially as our nest has emptied, and that each of us has discovered new ways to delight in and complement the other.

With all due respect to the Duke, though, time—more specifically, time off—is exactly what we’ve decided to grant ourselves (and you) as we all stagger toward the end of this awful summer of record-setting heat and drought.

The gift of time, and of quiet and nourishment, is exactly what we hope our residents receive from us, and pass on, in the form of creative writing, thinking, art, to a wider audience. Madroño Ranch, this beautiful place that we have come to occupy through no particular merit of our own, has been a gift of great richness to us and our family. How could we respond except by trying to share it with others? Lewis Hyde, in The Gift, writes that “when the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant.” This belief is the true underpinning of what we’re about at the ranch.

When we started this blog, in September 2009, Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing, Art, and the Environment existed mostly in our heads; at that point we didn’t even have a real Web site. Since then, and most particularly in the last eight months, we’ve made astonishing progress.

Since we harvested our first two bison in late January, we’ve managed to sell virtually all the meat—close to 600 pounds!—and have seen our herd increase to forty-three animals. We’ve also hosted six wonderful residents, with four more scheduled to arrive in the next few months, and a series of ethical hunting and fishing “schools” which have been featured in Texas Monthly and mentioned in the New York Times.

The residents who have graced us with their presence so far are an extraordinary group: Melissa Gaskill, a science and travel writer from Austin; Stacy Sakoulas, a painter from Austin; Juli Berwald, an oceanographer from Austin; Julia Clarke, a professor of paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin; Sasha West, a poet from Austin; and Jenny Browne, a poet from San Antonio. We’ve enjoyed getting to know each of them, and admire their work tremendously. But you may have noticed that all six are of the female persuasion, and based in Central Texas. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we’d love to figure out how to broaden our pool of applicants to include writers and artists from other parts of Texas (and beyond!), and also perhaps the occasional male. (Though two of the four upcoming residents are men, and one of them lives in Virginia.)

And we (by which, of course, I mostly mean our ranch manager, the amazing Robert Selement) also need to arrange our next bison harvest, and finish out the Hunters’ Cabins where residents will stay, and install the rainwater catchment tanks at the Main House, and figure out what to do about the invasive pond weed that is threatening to choke the lake, and plant the vegetable garden and orchard, and (most important of all) figure out how to make it rain, and and and….

In other words, we still have a great deal of work to do before we can declare Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing, Art, and the Environment a success—before, in Lewis Hyde’s terms, the gift is fully in motion. We hope and expect to return from this sabbatical refreshed and inspired, but until then Free Range will be on hiatus. We hope that you, Faithful Reader, will understand and excuse this interruption, and will return once we’re back up and running again, presumably in late September.

In the meantime, many thanks for reading, and we’ll see you in a few weeks!

What we’re reading
Heather: T. C. Boyle, When the Killing’s Done
Martin: H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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A furry flurry of fully furrowed brows: my beef with Freeman Dyson, part II

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Heather

Shar-pei

My previous post revealed the furry fury of the fully furrowed Kohout brow, especially when a flurry of furry brows furrow in unison. I’m a Kohout by marriage, not birth, and therefore, perhaps, I do not wield the full power of the brow, but I’m no slouch, either.

The source of my current furrow fest is this: a month after taking on Freeman Dyson—and clearly knocking him out—I’m still struggling with his assertion in the introductory essay of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010 that environmentalism has “replaced Marxism as the leading secular religion of our age,” and that it “doesn’t have much to do with science.” Although he says he’s hopeful about the future because of the environmental movement, it’s hard to ignore the comparison with Marxism, which by most standards was a dismal failure when put into practice, however exalted its intentions in theory.

I agree with the assessment that environmentalism is a secular religion; what annoys me is the implication that scientists sit on a higher rung of the ladder of knowledge than environmentalists, who are somehow contaminated by their quasi-religious fervor and therefore need to be quarantined to a lower rung. Scientific ways of knowing trump religious ways of knowing.

I also got an email from a friend of mine, a formidable public theologian, who reminded me that the natural world is no replacement for the most amply understood Christian God. He wrote: “I do have a theological quibble (probably more than a quibble) with your view that nature in some way reveals God. If it does, I’m not sure I like this god very much.” As Robert, our redoubtable ranch manager, is prone to say: well, hell. I’m aggravated by the implication that an abstracted theological way of knowing trumps experience of and reverence for nature.

So where’s a huffy environmentalist Christian (or sometime Christian) supposed to stand on the ladder of knowledge, especially if she’s wearing a skirt? Well, any eight-year-old with playground experience can answer that one: get off the ladder and go play somewhere else.

I’m setting up an opposition that’s perhaps unreasonable: from what I’ve read, Dyson honors the mystery and gravity of the natural world, as I know my theologian friend does. But I can’t quite shake the feeling that two of the magisteria of human knowledge—science and religion—tend to regard the natural world as a mere springboard to a more important kind of knowledge: science seeks to control nature and its processes, Christianity to transcend them. Environmentalism at its best requires that we seek understanding of the endlessly changing framework into which we as a species have been born, and that we work for the short- and long-term flourishing of both framework and species. Environmentalism demands a recognition of limits. I think it can be a vital safeguard for both science and Christianity for just that reason.

In his book Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, Roger Shattuck, late professor of modern languages and literature at Boston University, examines the vexed borderlands between constructive and destructive human knowledge, first in myth and literature, then in the case histories of the atomic bomb, the human genome project, and the Marquis de Sade. In a chapter entitled “Knowledge Exploding: Science and Technology,” he examines the boundary between pure and applied science and wonders if there really is one. Science operates on the assumption that scientists can safely move between two distinct realms, but Shattuck concludes that there is a lawless and often unacknowledged no-man’s-land between the two: “The knowledge that our many sciences discover is not forbidden in and of itself. But the human agents who pursue that knowledge have never been able to stand apart from or control or prevent its application to our lives.” Scientists, Shattuck believes, are often unable to move cautiously when they enter the realm of forbidden knowledge.

Freeman Dyson, who later came to work with most of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project and who now heartily disapproves of nuclear weaponry, said this in 1980:

I felt it myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands. To release the energy that fuels the stars. To tell it do your bidding. And to perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky, it is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles, I would say, this what you might call ‘technical arrogance’ that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.

And yet in his book The Scientist as Rebel, published in 2006, Dyson writes: “Science flourishes best when it uses all the tools at hand, unconstrained by preconceived notions about what science ought to be. Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature’s imagination is richer than ours.” “New and unexpected,” however, does not necessarily lead to flourishment for all. Dyson’s prediction that we can technologize our way out of the depredations of excessive carbon emissions has a hollow ring for those of us anxious about the lawless borderlands around forbidden knowledge.

Environmentalism at its best can provide science with a prophetic voice, a voice that looks back to a time of equilibrium and harmony within a community, assesses present troubles in light of that ideal, and outlines the consequences of continued disequilibrium. (At its worst, of course, it just sounds condemnatory. There are plenty of stiff-necked literalists in the environmental movement.) In these times when technological advances come so quickly that it’s hard to know what their long-term effects might be, environmentalists can act in the way an ethics panel in a hospital might act, looking to a wider context for particular cases than the science (or business) at hand. Given scientists’ track record of falling in love with the glitter of their tools, the prophets of the environmental world can provide them with a corrective slap.

At the other end of my furrow, environmentalism can provide Christianity with what Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis calls “a wholesome materiality.” (Or it can if the scientists in the movement don’t look down their noses at the part of environmentalism that draws its power from the subjective realms of art and religion.) Within Christianity is a powerful riptide pulling its followers away from the material world, a tide that runs through misreadings of scripture as well as tradition. In her wonderful (really!) book Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, Davis proposes that the Bible takes the health of the earth very, very seriously. When Israel remembers both its covenant with God and its place within the intricately interconnected creation of Genesis 1, then the land drips with milk and honey and everyone is fed. When Israel forgets its covenant and its place, its sin results in devastation of the land. This devastation is not a poetic image: it’s meant quite literally. Thunders the prophet Jeremiah:

I have seen the earth, and here, [it is] wilderness and waste;
And [I look] to the heavens—and their light is gone.
I have seen the mountains, and here, they are wavering,
And all the hills palpitate.
I have seen, and here, there is no human being,
And all the birds of the heavens have fled.
I have seen, and here, the garden-land is now the wasteland,
And all its cities are pulled down,
Because of YHWH, because of his hot anger.

The well-being of the earth is inseparable from human behavior: if we remember that we are meant to be stewards of all the creation (including humans) in a way befitting us as the images of a creative, just, and merciful God, then all will be well. When we forget who we are, our forgetting is made miserably visible on the face of creation, like Dorian Gray’s portrait. Our forgetting is not merely a matter of personal misbehavior, as many Christians seem to think; we forget the enormous scope of creation and delicate balances within which we have our being. In trying to stand on top of creation, we often crush it.

I agree with my theologian friend that it’s dangerous to assume that you can observe the natural world and thereby know the full nature of God. In some ways, that would be like thinking you can reliably deduce knowledge of parents through the behavior and character of their children. Yet the mark of the parent is inevitably found on the child (in this case, both human and non-human creation): expunging God from the operations of nature that are distasteful or terrifying to human sensibilities (by, for example, killing all alpha predators despite their vital place in the biotic community) is as troubling to me as the insistence of some scientists on wandering in the borderlands without a map. Environmentalists in the scientific world can help restore human awareness of the “wholesome materiality” of creation, to look for the intricate and hidden relationships that bind us to one another and make us family—or neighbors, in the salutary command that we love God, neighbor, and self without separation.

Now that I’ve cleared that up, I declare that the era of furrowing is officially over.

What we’re reading
Heather: Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Martin: Stephen Harrigan, Remember Ben Clayton

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Listapalooza: top ten summer songs

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Martin

Flip flops - just pick one up, by Jairo [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Nothing says summer like record-setting heat and drought—nothing, that is, except possibly the Beach Boys.

As this apparently endless summer drags on (and on, and on), I thought it might be fun to do a top-ten list of all-time favorite summer songs.

This post, our 104th, means that we’ve been churning out a new blog every Friday morning for two full years. Two years! We’re proud of that consistency. Some weeks, however, the pressure to produce a profound, thoughtful, beautifully crafted essay is just too much, especially when my brain feels like it might actually be boiling inside my skull. Those are the weeks we publish one of our top-ten lists, and this week was definitely one of those weeks. So, rather than trying to fight it, I decided instead to just go with that summer vibe.

Some of the ten songs listed in chronological order below are sort of mindless-bopping-around fun and others are sort of wistful-awareness-of-time-passing fun. Most of them are from the Sixties, when I was growing up; all of them, at least to me, are intensely evocative, summoning memories of the tinny sound of transistor radios and the unctuous smell of suntan lotion. Of course, nothing is as subjective as personal taste, and I’m sure you have your own personal sonic Proustian madeleines. I’d love to hear about them.

Martha and the Vandellas, “Dancing in the Street” (1964). This churning Motown classic gained unwanted (and unwarranted) notoriety in the wake of the riots of the mid- and late 1960s, when some interpreted it as a call to violent action.

The Beach Boys, “Caroline No” (1966). As I said above, you just can’t do a top-ten summer songs list without the Beach Boys. I can’t stand their early stuff, but I’ve always been a sucker for this sad and dreamy number, from Pet Sounds.

The Rascals, “Groovin’” (1967). Blue-eyed Afro-Cuban soul, a near-perfect car radio song. I feel so relaxed!

The Rolling Stones, “Street Fighting Man” (1968). Anyone wondering why the Stones were seen as a threat to civilized society should just listen to this. Even if you can’t understand the cynical lyrics, the music fairly hums with menace.

Stevie Wonder, “My Cherie Amour” (1969). In my childhood memories, this exuberant love song is always playing on someone’s car radio. It came out when Stevie was still a teenager!

Crosby Stills and Nash, “Marrakesh Express” (1969). Duuuuuude. The hippified first single from CS&N’s debut album. Do I smell patchouli?

Malo, “Suavecito” (1972). A flawless confection (sort of “Groovin,’” part two) of Latin percussion, brass, and rock.

War, “Low Rider” (1975). A sly and irresistible blast of harmonica-fueled fun from East L.A. that blends funk and Latin influences into a paean to slow cruising—remember, this came out shortly after the 1973 gas crisis.

Don Henley, “The Boys of Summer” (1984). Classic over-the-top Eighties pop, with lots of electronics and huge drums. God help me, I still love it.

Kat Edmonson, “Summertime” (2009). You didn’t really think you’d get out of here without a version of this Gershwin classic, did you?

What we’re reading
Heather: Amanda Eyre Ward, Close Your Eyes
Martin: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

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Children of dawn: sin in the twenty-first century

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Heather

Fall and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, by Michelangelo

Sin is behovely, but all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. (Julian of Norwich)

Sin is our only hope. (Barbara Brown Taylor)

The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)

At dinner the other night I managed to elicit a full-brow furrow from Martin and Thea both. Considering the Kohout talent for growing hair, a full-brow furrow is a fierce and fearsome thing. Two furrowed Kohout brows is enough to send the insecure in search of a blankie, a pacifier, and a nice safe closet. I’m glad Lizzie and Tito weren’t there, because they might have furrowed as well, presenting far more furrowing than any reasonable person should ever be expected to stand up against.

The cause of dismay was my claim that sin is a useful category by which to examine human affairs. “You can’t call people sinners!” said my shocked and furrowed daughter. She was entirely right on one level, of course. We had been talking about the horrifying events in Norway, in which Anders Breivik, a thirty-two-year old radically conservative Christian (or perhaps “Christian”), killed 77 people, most of them children at a summer camp, many of them related to members of Norway’s ruling elite who presumably crafted the weak anti-immigration laws that allowed the recent influx of Muslim immigrants that so unglued the shooter.

History tends to support this maxim: virtually anyone who thinks he’s been given the power to condemn his neighbors for what he perceives to be their sins will be at the heart of a tragic, absurd, and/or evil situation. The track record of self-proclaimed prophets is pretty bleak. Thea’s well-taken point was, I think, that if I call someone a sinner, I’m at the top of a slope slippery with the blood of innocents. To many, calling someone a sinner implies that you’re in a position to judge, somehow not implicated in the fray. If you see sin around you and identify it as such, then somehow you remain outside the fire of judgment. You are rendered innocent so long as someone else is guilty. It seems like a good deal, especially if you’re someone inclined to condemn others (like “Christians”). It seems like a very bad deal if you’re the sinner or if you have any anxieties about absolutist legal codes.

Even so, sin is a concept we’re naïve to dismiss, whether or not we identify ourselves as religious. In the broader culture of the United States, there are two gauges by which we measure perceived or actual misconduct: mental health and the legal code. Misconduct is the result either of mental illness or willful disregard for civic order. While these are necessary ways to gauge human misconduct, they don’t cover the full range and depth of human experience. To imagine that they do creates a story about the human person and human culture that’s missing a bunch of pages in the middle. (I’ve cribbed this analysis from Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderful book Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation.)

One of the problems in talking about sin is that it’s a word in a technical lexicon. Just as projection is one of those ideas bandied around by people who’ve never studied Freudian theory or its nuances (like me), sin has spilled over its technical boundaries and thereby become diluted, distorted, and generally misunderstood. As far as I can tell, it’s as misunderstood within the Christian community as it is outside of it, in part for the same reason: it’s considered to be a subset of either mental health or the legal system and not its own discrete and rich category.

While Anders Breivik probably has mental health issues and clearly broke all kinds of laws, I suspect that there are many other reasonable people besides Thea who would balk at identifying sin as an important component of his story, although it may be that story’s most salient component. While breaking laws is often a side effect, sin’s primary work is the precarious, discordant elevation of the self above the sturdy, harmonious network of God, self, and neighbor. With that definition in mind, you can be a law-abiding, mentally healthy member of a community and still be a sinner. Indeed, if you’re a Christian, you’re guaranteed to be one; that’s what the story of the Fall is about.

One of the persistent themes in both testaments of the Bible is that God is the only judge of sin because humankind has a severe allergy to identifying sin as sin when it’s tied to self. We have a very long history of pointing a finger at our neighbors and saying, “S/he made me eat it.” In writing the covenantal community’s early history, the biblical writers were uneasy with the idea of kingship. Even when the kings were beloved of God—and most of them were not—the Biblical writers point out time and again that human authority is almost ludicrously unable to judge with any regularity what’s pleasing to God.

I’m exercised about sin because so many critical misunderstandings of it seem to be spotlighted right now, and I’m trying to figure out how it is that I’m right and they’re wrong. The governor of Texas is about to declare himself a candidate in the Republican presidential race, having struggled to discern if he’s called by God to do so. The backdrop of his declaration will be the rally last Saturday in which he and several thousand others prayed for a troubled America. He prayed for the military and political leaders who cannot see the light in the darkness. There was no indication that he thought he might be one of those blind leaders. For all the Bible-reading that went on, no mention was made of the fact that in the Bible God never gives the rich and powerful more power when they ask for it. Instead, God regularly undermines them by granting it to the least or youngest in the community.

In a terrific op-ed piece in the Austin American Statesman, Jim Rigby, a local Presbyterian minister, pointed out the absence of several other key Biblical passages at the rally, like the passage in which Jesus expresses a clear distaste for public shows of prayer. The common thread among the passages Rigby mentions is an awareness of our steady insistence on seeing sin as something “out there” without any indication that it resides ineradicably “in here” as well.

But there’s a problem for those who see sin as residing ineradicably “in here,” who believe that we must struggle constantly to set self-interest under the discipline of a higher and more generous law. Reinhold Niebuhr, whom I always seem to read in the deepest, hottest part of summer, calls these “children of light,” in opposition to the “children of darkness,” the moral cynics who “know no law beyond the self.” According to Niebuhr, the problem is that the children of light are dumber than doorknobs. They fail to account for the power of sin in both individual and collective lives, and even within and among themselves. Children of light tend to think that if they reform, correct, educate, convert, clean house, start over, then human affairs will radically improve. Niebuhr says fuggedaboudit: “no matter how wide the perspective which the human mind may reach, how broad the loyalties which the human imagination may conceive, how universal the community which human statecraft may organize, how pure the aspirations of the saintliest idealists may be, there is no level of human moral or social achievement in which there is not some corruption of inordinate self-love.”

Niebuhr identified Marxists as children of light whose stupidity allowed their creed to become “the vehicle and instrument of the children of darkness.” I believe that Perry and his followers are also children of light. Their creed is that eliminating homosexuality and abortion, giving free reign to business, and insisting on Christianity’s primacy will renew America, a creed as naïve as Marxism and as easily made into the tool of moral cynics. Of course, as a self-confessed utopian, I’m a child of light as well. I’m looking for admission to another group, made up of what I’ll call children of dawn. They know the power of sin, they work to name it in themselves and in the world, and their despair or anger at knowing that they can’t conquer it by themselves is overridden by hope and generosity. I think of St. Paul, that proud Pharisee, who opened the doors of Christianity to the uncircumcised and the eaters of unclean foods and invited them to come in, sit down, and eat. More recently, I think of people like, say, Nelson Mandela, but children of dawn don’t tend to be particularly visible until you bump into them in the darkness. The hospice nurses who helped us through my mother’s death were children of dawn. The friend who tells you a hard truth with great love. The artist who brings new beauty into the world. The teacher who gives his students his best work and requires that they return it with interest. The attorney who works on death row. The director of a no-kill animal shelter who cooks Thanksgiving dinner for all the creatures in her care. The soldier who struggles to treat the enemy with respect.

It’s a long list, thank goodness, and unrestricted by any creed or class. There’s no litmus test for joining it, other than the willingness to do the wretchedly hard work of forgiving each other, ourselves, and the world again and again and again. Most of us would rather sleep in than be children of dawn. But when we wake up and acknowledge sin’s destructive power at work within each individual, corporation, and nation (even and especially the ones we love); when we approach each other with the profound humility that this knowledge engenders; when we move ahead in good faith knowing that we may be wrong and need to change course, this is when the power of sin begins to loosen its grip. Furrow all you want, but that’s why I think sin is behovely, and the acknowledgement of sin is our only hope.

What we’re reading
Heather: Reinhold Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses
Martin: Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

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Grape-Nuts, dynamite, and drought

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Martin

Dynamite

This summer in Central Texas has been extraordinary even by our hellish standards. Yesterday the official state climatologist (did you even know we had one of those?), John Nielsen-Gammon, reported that July 2011 was the hottest month in Texas since we began keeping records in 1895. The historical average of days per year with triple-digit temperatures at Camp Mabry, just up the hill from our house in Austin, is 12; two years ago we fell one short of the record of 69, set in 1925. But yesterday marked the fifty-first day this year (and the nineteenth in a row) at or above 100, and the 107 recorded at Camp Mabry was a record high for the date. Since we are just barely into August, I’d say we have an excellent chance of finally breaking that 69-day record this year. Go team!

Even more distressing than the heat, though, is the drought. (Was it really only last September that heavy rains drenched most of the state?) Yesterday Nielsen-Gammon announced that we are now in the midst of our worst one-year drought ever, though yesterday was also the day that the Austin American-Statesman ran a story with the headline “Current drought pales in comparison with 1950s ‘drought of record,’” which was apparently supposed to be reassuring.

The story, by Farzad Mashhood, argues that the 1947–57 drought in Texas, which one state official called “the most costly and one of the most devastating droughts in 600 years,” was worse than our current drought. Robert Mace, the deputy executive administrator of the Texas Water Development Board, told Mashhood, “The drought we’re in is severe, but it ain’t your grandpa’s drought.”

I guess this too is supposed to make us feel better, but Mashhood goes on to note that the current drought “has surpassed the 1950s drought in two of three key areas,” and that the period from October 2010 through June 2011, during which 10.97 inches of rain fell at Camp Mabry, as opposed to the average 25.53 inches, is the driest on record. And then, toward the end of the story, Mashhood tosses in this little gem: “There’s no way to tell how long this drought will last, but meteorologists are seeing signs that another La Niña is building and are predicting another dry year in 2012.”

I think that’s the one that really got me. How the hell can you write almost 1,200 words arguing that the 1947–57 drought was worse when you don’t know how long the current drought will last?

Even if the experts are wrong about next year, the long-term prognosis is grim. According to the Texas Drought Project, “climatologists who have studied both the history and the computer models on Texas rainfall have concluded that the state is headed for a very long period—possibly marked in hundreds of years—wherein rainfall continues to decrease, and more of the state becomes desert-like….”

Having read Tim Egan’s The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, I am not particularly excited about the prospect of desertification. In his remarkable book Egan quotes Hugh Hammond Bennett, the iconoclastic soil conservation pioneer, who believed that “we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized.”

A few years later another far-sighted thinker, Aldo Leopold, wrote at the very beginning of his seminal A Sand County Almanac, one of the Ur-texts of American conservation, that

We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect…. That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.

Of course we’ve learned a lot about soil conservation, and conservation in general, in the decades since Bennett and Leopold issued their gloomy pronouncements. But have we really changed our essential attitude toward the land? Treating the land (and water, and air) with love and respect may be “an extension of ethics,” as Leopold wrote, but it is also a precondition of our survival. As the artist Mark Dion put it:

We have a test ahead of us, in terms of our relationship to the natural world. If we pass the test we get to keep the planet.

One of my favorite bits of Texas trivia involves C. W. Post, the Michigan cereal manufacturer who gave the world Post Toasties and Grape-Nuts. In 1906, hoping to start a Utopian farming community in Texas, he bought 225,000 acres in Garza and Lynn counties and established the town of Post City, now known as Post, the seat of Garza County.

Beginning in 1910, having noticed that rain was a scarce but precious commodity on the High Plains, Post embarked on a long and costly experiment which involved setting up firing stations along the Caprock and detonating dynamite charges at carefully measured intervals for several hours at a time. Four years and thousands of dollars later, Post, who had suffered two nervous breakdowns as a young man and who was in declining health, finally gave up. In May 1914, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Santa Barbara, California.

I’ve been thinking about Post, and also about Robert St. George Dyrenforth (who used explosive balloons and artillery in an unsuccessful attempt to bring rain to Midland in 1891), as this hot, dry, punishing summer drags on. Their efforts testify to the importance of rain, and to the credulity of humankind, especially where something we want and need so badly is involved. A century later, we scoff at the “concussion theory” of weather modification, as we do at the earlier belief that “rain follows the plow.”

Then again, desperate times call for desperate measures. If the experts are right about La Niña, you may soon be hearing a series of loud booms echoing from the Madroño hills.

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Doria Russell, Doc
Martin: Amanda Eyre Ward, Close Your Eyes

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Food science: Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, and the Old Testament

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Heather

Gene Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein

When I was in seminary, my Old Testament professor Michael Floyd spent some considerable time and effort trying to disabuse us students of the thought that we were somehow more spiritually advanced than our ancient Israelite ancestors who codified the complicated instructions governing community life set forth primarily in Leviticus. The peculiarities of the purity codes, which propound dietary laws and identify various human conditions as clean or unclean, tend to cause an outbreak of severe neck pain in sophisticated post-moderns due to the angle at which we look down our noses at such ridiculous, primitive thinking.

If you think you aren’t governed by purity codes, Michael said, then do this: take a spoon and spit into it, then put the spoon and its contents back into your mouth. Sounds of disgust arose from the class. Why is that such a gross idea? he asked. The spit’s not gross when it’s in your mouth; why does it become unclean the second it leaves your mouth? He forced us to consider the conditions by which we individually or collectively declare things or states as clean or unclean. He required us to wonder how we had learned these codes. He asked us if different groups had different codes, and how these usually unexamined codes applied to people outside the group.

Michael said (at least, I hope he said; I took his class years ago) that he had concluded that the codes in Leviticus, as strange as they may sound to our ears, are in some ways more humane than the invisible codes that govern contemporary culture(s), because, first, everyone knew explicitly what the codes are; next, everyone became unclean and thus set apart in the course of daily life (menstruation and the emission of semen, for example, caused uncleanliness); finally, there were routine procedures (washing, offering sacrifices) that usually rendered the unclean clean again and reintegrated them into communal life. In the Levitical codes, being unclean isn’t the same as being bad or evil or inferior; uncleanness is a necessary component of life, not a judgment.

When codes are unspoken and invisible, however, as they are in most of contemporary America, it becomes much harder to integrate those considered unclean into the community, since there are no explicit mechanisms for doing so, and often no recognition that everyone routinely bears the burden of uncleanness at some point or another. Because mainline American culture doesn’t think it has any purity codes, uncleanness can become a permanent status: think about race, poverty, sexual orientation, foreignness. And lest it sound as if progressives have risen above purity codes, think about political correctness: every group has some version of the clean and unclean, ways of thinking or being that render one impure, ways of segregating those considered unclean. In contrast to the Levitical codes, the invisible contemporary codes condemn those who are unclean as bad, evil, inferior, and offer no way into the community that renders those judgments.

I’ve smashed Michael’s elegant distinctions into an inelegant mass so that I can argue that dietary laws designating clean food from unclean food are alive and kicking today, and that, without realizing it, Americans have cultic feelings about food, giving it the power to determine who/what is clean or unclean, who should be part of or excluded from a particular group. If you think that the passage in Leviticus (11:20–23) that forbids eating four-footed winged insects except if their legs are jointed above the feet is peculiar, then you haven’t been paying attention to the weirdness of the current food wars.

Last Sunday’s New York Times Sunday Review section featured a piece by Mark Bittman with the title “Bad Food? Tax It and Subsidize Vegetables.” My first impulse was to agree with him completely: he argues that American dietary choices are, generally speaking, so wretched from a health perspective that government intervention in the form of taxation of soda and perhaps other junk food is warranted—especially since these bad choices add tens, maybe hundreds, of billions of dollars to government spending in health care.

Now, Mark Bittman is a cook, a food writer, and a long-time columnist for the Times. In some ways, we’re members of the same tribe. I use his cookbooks. I’ve given his cookbooks to my children. His most recent book is Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating. A fake sticker on the cover says: “Lose Weight, Heal the Planet.” I really like and agree with Mark Bittman. I don’t drink soda; I’ve never liked it, even as a child. It would cost me nothing if soda were taxed. In other words, there’s no reason I shouldn’t agree with him completely.

Except that I read many of the 273 comments posted by readers on the Times Web site and realized that he had written about something that has cultic status: the way we choose to eat. This food fight is not just about food. In his article, Bittman writes about the food-self and its relation to everything from quotidian family matters to personal responsibility to government philosophy. How could it not result in a heated discussion, or maybe even fisticuffs?

One particularly articulate negative response wondered if the foods Bittman deemed unhealthy would be taxed in high-end restaurants:

And what does the avenging Mr. Bittman propose as taxation penalty for the spiced fresh pork belly on Cafe Boulud’s menu? How about the salade frisee at Bar Boulud, (described by New York Magazine as containing “too many fatty pork lardoons”) or the Dunkin Donut-inspired beignets de morue? Does he make no mention of the celebration of fat and carbs so many upscale restaurants offer because these items are served to urban “sophisticates” and not the unsophisticated rubes whose lives his proposals would manipulate? Or does the mass production and delivery of affordable, corporately produced comestibles just not sit well with him on principle?

Food is not just about food; it’s about personal and tribal identity. If nutritionists, government policy wonks, chefs, organic farmers, conventional farmers, economists, eco-radicals, or concerned citizens think we’re talking about “just” food, then we’re going to sound as peculiar to each other as the Levitical laws sound to many contemporary Americans. We will use each other’s views to identify each other as unclean without knowing that’s what we’re doing.

In its most recent issue, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture published an article blandly entitled “In Defense of Food Science,” a reference to my guru Michael Pollan’s most recent book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. If you’ve read Pollan, you know that he consistently pushes back against “food science,” by which he means processed foods. If the label on a food makes any health claims or lists more than five ingredients, avoid it, he says. The four authors of this unassuming piece take quiet issue with him. They say that Pollan “makes valid criticisms of the modern food industry and offers some useful recommendations for improving the health and well-being of the population.” They are clear and precise about the ways in which they agree with him. They take issue, however, with Pollan’s persistent emphasis on organic local foods, especially for “those who live in challenged economic conditions, in areas where the growing season is short, or who have busy working lives.”

The authors refer to the gap between science and the arts that physicist and novelist C. P. Snow pointed to fifty years ago in his seminal book The Two Cultures, a gap they claim has narrowed somewhat since the book’s publication. Food in particular offers a bridge between the disciplines, a “prime opportunity for science, art, craft, and the humanities to engage constructively with each other.” The article points to the ways in which food science has offered us incontrovertible (at least to me) advances in understanding about foods. They point to a need for mass-produced, inexpensive, and convenient foods, given the realities of the age. “We are not suggesting that a diet should be based entirely on processed foods, but every type of food has a place in a balanced diet. The focus should not be solely on processed versus whole food, but also on good-quality processed food versus poor-quality processed food.” They point out that some foods that we now consider “wholesome” are, in fact, processed: cheese, cream, beer, olive oil, vinegar. They concede that many processed foods are nutritionally null and void but insist that this is not and need not always be the case—that food science can and must be a tool in helping fix our current broken food system.

As someone who has railed against mass-produced processed foods, I’m a little flummoxed to find myself agreeing with them: I’ve always identified “food science” with the soulless stuff we eat alone without knowing or caring where it came from, the stuff we put in our mouths that has more to do with unconscious identifications than with the conscious pleasures of eating well-prepared food in community. Despite their white coats and hairnets, in other words, I’ve considered food scientists unclean. Well, well. I’m going to have eat my own words, a heavily processed meal filled with unconscious identifications. In my last post, I moaned about the tendency among disciplines to demarcate their own turf so emphatically that heavy traffic and frequent discussion about the surprising and fruitful overlaps among them becomes difficult, if not impossible. For my tribe of proponents of local and organic foods, that would mean we would talk to other tribes with particular expertise on food topics—food scientists and conventional grocery store operators, for example. People who eat at fast-food restaurants. People who don’t like to cook. People offended by foodies. This may give me a terrible crick in my neck from looking down my nose. But it may also make my invisible purity codes more visible, and thereby begin to offer a way to reintegrate a fragmented and self-reinforcing discussion.

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Doria Russell, Doc
Martin: Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels with Herodotus

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Unexpected connections

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Martin

Diagram of a network

Only connect! (E. M. Forster)

The world is getting smaller, we are told. New technologies are bringing what used to be distant, unknown, and unattainable, to our desktops and telephones; we can communicate instantly with people on different continents, sharing documents, photos, texts, songs, whatever. Even, God help us, Tweets.

Our world here in Austin has also grown smaller, but in a very different sense. It sometimes seems that hardly a week goes by without some unsuspected connection revealing itself, much to our surprise and pleasure.

For example, Heather mentioned in a previous post how in 2005, at the Sustainable Food Center’s Sunset Valley farmers’ market, she suddenly realized that the man at the Thunder Heart Bison stand, from whom she’d been buying bison meat for several years, was Hugh Fitzsimons, whose grandparents lived across the street from her grandparents in San Antonio, and with whom she’d attended St. Luke’s Episcopal School in San Antonio.

And this: many years ago, during one of my early midlife crises, I decided that I’d had enough of the word trade and quit my job at the Texas State Historical Association to try my hand as an artist. I rented a studio at a complex on Guadalupe Street between 17th and 18th Streets, moved in my easel and drafting table and paints and brushes and pencils, and waited for inspiration to strike. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited some more.

Eventually, I came to my senses and went back to the TSHA, hat in hand, and managed to get back on the payroll, and my life returned to what passes for normal around here. But several years ago Heather met a fellow rower, Kevin Barry, and his wife Barbara; we had long since become good friends with them when we learned, quite by chance, that Kevin, a newspaper publisher by trade, had once owned a studio complex in Austin. On Guadalupe Street. Between 17th and 18th Streets.

Here’s another one: last year we met the young novelist Philipp Meyer and his wife Alex at the Austin home of our friend Jim Magnuson, the head of the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. We very much enjoyed chatting with Philipp, the author of American Rust and a Dobie Paisano Fellow, and some time later he invited us to a party at Paisano Ranch. Then we found out that he had been asked to write a feature for Texas Monthly on Hog School at Madroño Ranch; that article appears in the magazine’s August issue.

Then there’s this: last May we met Elizabeth Burnett, who works in development for Williams College, and she asked about other Williams alumni in Austin. I mentioned the novelist Amanda Eyre Ward, whom I’d met several years ago, and Elizabeth gasped: it turned out that she and Amanda were not only classmates at Williams, but fellow graduates of the M.F.A. writing program at the University of Montana.

Shortly after we met Elizabeth, our friend Becca Cody suggested that her friend Juli Berwald, a freelance science writer in Austin, might be an excellent candidate for a residency at Madroño Ranch. We corresponded with Juli, and among her references was (of course) Amanda Eyre Ward. Another connection! Juli suggested her friend Julia Clarke, a paleontology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, as another potential resident; after corresponding with Julia, we quickly agreed that she was a slam dunk, but it wasn’t until we finally met her in person that we determined that she and I are both graduates of the Branson School in Ross, California. Last month Juli and Julia spent a couple of weeks at Madroño Ranch, and, acting on a suggestion by Elizabeth Burnett, we’re going to host a gathering of local Williams and Amherst alumni on August 10 at which Amanda will discuss her new book, Close Your Eyes, with Juli serving as the M.C.

Here’s the best one, though. Six years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Rita, Lucy Nazro, the head of St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, asked us if we’d be willing to put up a young man named Tom Mehaffy, a student at Monsignor Kelly High School in Beaumont, who’d been displaced by the storm. Of course we agreed—you just don’t say no to Lucy Nazro—and so for several days we had the pleasure of hosting an extremely pleasant and polite young man.

Flash forward to one night several months ago, when we ran into our pal Tink Pinkard and his wife Leah with Jeremy and Alison Barnwell at Fabi and Rosi, one of our favorite Austin restaurants. That night Tink introduced us to Elizabeth Winslow, who co-owns Farmhouse Delivery, a cooperative CSA here in Austin, and who, coincidentally, also happened to be dining at Fabi and Rosi. (Tink works for Farmhouse Delivery when he’s not out fishing or hunting.)

We had been hoping to get to know Elizabeth better, especially since our older daughter started working at Farmhouse Delivery a few weeks ago, and had finally managed to make a date for her to come over and have a drink at our house in Austin last week. Then we got an apologetic email from her saying that she’d have to reschedule, due to an unexpected visit from her father and younger brother.

A few days later we got another email from Elizabeth with the subject line, “OK, so here is something REALLY crazy!” In it she wrote that last Monday, the day she had planned to come over to our house, as she and her father and brother were driving out to Lake Travis, they were recalling relocating to Austin from their native Beaumont in the wake of Rita. Elizabeth asked her brother, “What was the name of the family you stayed with?” Sure enough, Elizabeth turns out to be Tom Mehaffy’s older sister. What are the odds?

I don’t know what, if anything, all these coincidences and connections mean. Perhaps they’re simply an indication that we move in extremely claustrophobic social circles. But I find them fascinating, and inexplicably enjoyable. One of the persistent complaints about twenty-first-century life is the anonymity, the sense of isolation, of being alone in an enormous crowd. We long for connection, for that sense of being known by someone else; we want to feel that we are part of a community.

That’s the selfish little secret behind much of what we’re doing at Madroño Ranch. We’re obviously not getting rich—not yet, anyway—by offering residencies and raising bison, so people sometimes wonder why we bother. My only answer is that getting rich isn’t the only way to measure success (though we wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to it!). Connection, the sense of belonging to a community of smart, kind, interesting, thoughtful people—people like Hugh and Kevin and Philipp and Amanda and Juli and Julia and Tink and Elizabeth—is its own reward.

What we’re reading
Heather: J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Martin: Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

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