Point One: When we attended the Alliance for Artist Communities conference in Chicago several weeks ago, I found myself eagerly awaiting the start of a session entitled “Earned Revenue and Artist Residencies.”

Point Two: The other day, as Martin and I drove past the Kerrville Tractor Supply Company parking lot, always stacked with neat piles of gates, troughs, feeders, and such, I looked carefully to see if there was any nifty bit of equipment that we needed but hadn’t thought of.

I understood at that moment that someone must have performed a brain transplant on me in the dark of the night. Here are the kinds of sessions I would have expected to look forward to at the conference: “Why We Need More Poets”; “Why Food Should Be the Center of Every Residency Experience”; “Why All Residents Should Be Required to Stare at Bugs and Birds for Three Hours a Day”; “Remedial Programs for Residents Who Don’t Like Chickens.” Here are the kinds of stores I normally eye with pleasure: book stores, kitchen supply stores, stores with great selections of cowboy boots. Earned revenue? Farm equipment? Huh?

Points Three through Five or Maybe Seven: Recently I’ve read a number of interesting articles in the New York Times, some of them in the business section (more evidence of a brain transplant), about such issues as the transformative power of excellent design in the public places of poverty-stricken communities; the involvement of the Danish government in the redesign of unsightly power towers in rural Denmark; the surge of young entrepreneurs (examples: the practitioners of “Gandhian innovation” in India, the Unreasonable Institute) who see that for-profit business and social justice are not at odds with each other; the powerful but unfocused energy of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Also, the proposed Christo project over the Arkansas River in Colorado in which environmentalists, government agencies, and artists are tussling over how, if, and why the project should proceed.

What has linked these disparate subjects in my mind is a sense that we are witnessing a radical shift in thinking about the nature of commerce. In my lifetime, business has been a stand-alone subject, like medicine or law. As an academic discipline, it has been completely separated from the humanities. There may be writing requirements for business majors, but they’re usually specified as such. Studio art for business majors? History? Philosophy? I haven’t seen them cross-listed in any departments I’ve studied in. Business has been cordoned off and cordoned itself off.

One of the reasons I enjoyed the session on “Earned Revenue and Artist Residencies” was its underlying assumption that there is a fruitful overlap between the arts and business beyond the mere sale of art objects. Most of us attending the session represented residency programs, ranging from very urban to very rural, from huge to tiny, from brand-new to venerable. Given the roller coaster of the economy and the shrinking of foundation funding, there’s a real sense of energy around the question of how residency programs might become more, or even fully, self-sustaining financially. What for-profit goods and services might residency programs provide, especially when they charge artists nominal or no fees for their residencies? The arts are so automatically relegated to the nonprofit world that the question frequently doesn’t even arise.

One of the participants in the discussion runs an organic farm outside Toronto and is able to provide space for artists and make a comfortable enough living between farming and renting space on her farm for workshops and events. An emerging program in Ajo, Arizona, is planning to use some of its space—an old public elementary school—as a motel that will feed its paying guests excellent local and organic food (they’ll have their own garden), making use of the cafeteria kitchen already in place. In fact, the twining of food and its place in the production of art was a persistent sub-theme of the conference.

All of this led me to wonder how Madroño Ranch could more closely unite the business of the ranch with the mission of the residency program, which was why the Tractor Supply inventory suddenly looked so interesting. What on the ranch could supply the artists in their work? And how could the artists contribute to the function of the ranch? How might the art and writing produced at Madroño waft beyond the perimeter fencing and generate appetites for new business and beauty in the community around us?

Wondering in a vague way about Nice Big Questions is one of my favorite pastimes, which is why I was so pleased to find the very concrete story about power lines in Denmark. The rapid growth of wind and solar energy production in Europe has led to the need for much larger power poles, which are undeniably unsightly. Even as people understand the need for them, no one—especially in rural communities—wants them spoiling the views. (These nasty things are going up all over the Texas Hill Country, every bit as blighting as huge billboards.) To help mitigate the NIMBY response to the power poles, the Danish government commissioned a contest among design companies to see who might come up with a less intrusive structure than the starkly utilitarian poles. While I can’t say that the winning design is anything I’d want on my own property, the very fact of the contest pointed to a way of thinking that’s foreign not just because it’s Danish: aesthetics matter, even when it comes to the most practical of issues.

Of course, the most practical of questions behind the most practical of issues is: what will it cost? How are the costs justified? Most of points three through six I watched in the fields inside my head related to those questions. In Denmark there seemed to be a shadow bottom line floating just below the financial one: can we make what we build beautiful? Can it be of a pleasure (or at least not a blight) to the community? The piece on well-designed public spaces in poverty-stricken areas noted that the addition of bright color to housing projects, or of new stairs to replace a steep, eroding dirt walkway in a slum, injected a sense of hope, order, and civic pride where it had been sorely lacking.

In these instances, government has pointed to the need to consider more than one bottom line when spending money. Many young entrepreneurs (this is a very interesting generation coming up) are aware that there isn’t necessarily a conflict between the need to make a living for themselves and making the world at large more livable. They operate with the assumption that there is more than one bottom line; their business must succeed financially. But they measure success not just in income to the company but measurable usefulness to the community in which they work. One of the impetuses behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, I think, is the (so far unarticulated) recognition that businesses, especially financial institutions and transnational corporations, have hewed to a single bottom line: short-term profit for shareholders.

Obviously a company needs to be financially profitable, but I think there is a sense that many of these shadow bottom lines need to be as visible and material as the financial ones in order to judge a business as truly successful. Does a business add to or detract from the beauty, health, social coherence, and ecological systems of the community in which it operates? A business may offer a lot of low-paying jobs and operate profitably but still gets an F-minus in the beauty, health, social coherence, and ecological factors. Is it a successful business? The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification program is at least a template for how such bottom lines might be developed.

Maybe businesses—especially big ones—could offer residency programs for artists and environmental scientists, recognizing that the costs of such a program are as necessary to operations as paying for the lights. Maybe business and the arts (liberal and otherwise) can develop a new relationship, one that is more than just a charitable donation at the end of a financially solvent year. Maybe the arts are as important to business success (especially in a climate-changed world) as steel is to bridge-building. Maybe I’m standing out in one of the pastures of my mind, mooing to myself. And maybe there are some restless young business-oriented people ready to figure out how we might bring these shadow bottom lines clearly and boldly into view.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Johnson, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God
Martin: Denise Markonish (ed.), Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape

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

I’m a lousy housewife, which, in my initial phase of housewifery, is exactly what I aspired to be. Not for me the bourgeois passion for clean baseboards and orderly closets, especially after graduate school in literature in the mid-1980s, in the wake of second-wave feminism. Not for me the fate of the American suburban woman as Betty Friedan described it:

freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of.

Nope, I was going to be an independent, defiant, equal-rights-demanding sort of woman who kept her mind on higher things and never, ever got a pedicure—which is why I completely fell in love with Dorothea Brooke, one of the main characters in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. So complete was my admiration for Dorothea that our younger daughter Thea is named for her.

In re-reading Middlemarch for the first time in many years, I find that my self-identification with Dorothea’s high-minded knuckleheadedness was spot-on. What my younger self missed, of course, was the author’s attitude toward it. In the first chapter, Dorothea and her much more practical younger sister Celia are looking through their dead mother’s jewelry. Dorothea, fond of renouncing things, at first tells Celia to take all “the trinkets” for herself. Says the narrator: “Celia felt a little hurt. There was a strong assumption of superiority in this Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond flesh of an unenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution.” A few lines later, they find an emerald ring and bracelet they hadn’t known about before, and Dorothea’s eye is caught by their beauty, “[a]ll the while her thought was trying to justify her delight in the colours by merging them in her mystic religious joy.” And we’re only on page nine of 766; the buds of Dorothea’s knuckleheadedness blossom in a leisurely and luxuriant way, flower after flower bursting into a gaudy and most unpuritanic riot in the course of the first 250 pages.

Needless to say, Dorothea doesn’t aspire to housewifery (nor, because of her gentle birth, does she much need to), but one of the minor heroes of the novel is, in fact a housewife. Susan Garth is wife to Caleb, a kind and financially inept land surveyor and agent. Before marrying, she was a governess, and after marrying she runs the farm, raises their six children, and continues to take in pupils, earning money for her sons’ formal educations. She makes her students “follow her about in the kitchen with their book or slate. She thought it good for them to see that she could make an excellent lather while she corrected their blunders, ‘without looking,’—that a woman with her sleeves tucked above her elbows might know all about the Subjunctive Mood or the Torrid Zone—that in short, she might possess ‘education,’ and other good things ending in ‘tion,’ and worthy to be pronounced emphatically, without being a useless doll.” Like everyone else in the novel, Mrs. Garth has her weaknesses, but her creator clearly admires her independence, intelligence, hard work and excellent housewifery skills, which include planning ahead and refusing to let anything, material or emotional, go to waste. When her son begins to snack on the peels from the apple pie she is making, she says, in between pronouncements on grammar: “That apple peel is to be eaten by the pigs, Ben; if you eat it, I must give them your piece of pastry.”

One of the most notable differences between Mrs. Garth and Betty Friedan’s housewife is that one is an independent producer in a local economy and one is a consumer in a transnational economy. Mrs. Garth’s life is the one from which science and labor-saving devices have freed Betty Friedan’s housewife, as they free her to choose whatever she liked in consumer goods. I want to make one thing clear: I’m not made of stern enough stuff to lead Mrs. Garth’s life, but along with the narrator of Middlemarch, I’ve come to see the unexpected power and vital importance of the place she and her spiritual sisters (many of whom are still around) occupy.

Speaking with an urban farmer friend the other day, I heard about the persistent policy roadblocks in the way of small farmers and the bureaucratic tactics that restrain and even stifle connectivity among local food producers. Although no complaints have ever been raised by customers of this farm in the twenty years of its operation, no sicknesses reported, the assumption of the Texas Department of State Health Services—and apparently of most governmental agencies that deal with food—is that non-factory produced foods are inherently riskier than factory-produced ones, even though the evidence is overwhelming that the reverse is true. My friend’s glum assessment was that the real issue, masked by the apparent anxiety over health concerns, is Big Ag’s desire to stomp out competition posed by small, organic farmers and farmers’ markets, which have grown at a remarkable pace in the last few years.

In “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” an essay that infuriated me when I first (mis- or under-)read it years ago, Wendell Berry muses on the responses he got from another essay published in Harper’s, many of which expressed outrage over his revelation that his wife types his manuscripts after he finishes handwriting them and accused him of exploiting her. He responded that the feminist outrage ignored two possibilities: that marriage can exist as “a state of mutual help,” and that households can operates as economies. The marriage and home that he has in mind looks very much like the Garths’ and

makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both the wife and the husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-protection, a measure of self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction. Such a household economy may employ the disciplines and skills of housewifery, of carpentry and other trades of building and maintenance, of gardening and other branches of subsistence agriculture…. It may even [he says slyly] involve a ‘cottage industry’ of some kind, such as a small literary enterprise.”

He hastens to add that what he says about this kind of marriage applies to men and women equally, and then calls for “a broader, deeper criticism…. The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that woman and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else,” particularly as it is practiced by global and “sentimental” capitalism, which operates a lot like sentimental communism: they both demand the sacrifice of “everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and beautiful” for the sake of security and happiness for “the many” at some unspecified future time. In freeing transnational corporations from the responsibilities practiced in local economies—knowledge of the needs and capacities of a particular place—our economy produces an astonishing number of products under the condition that consumers “agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.”

To be honest, I can’t really assess Berry’s pronouncements: my assumption is that, at least to some extent, he paints with broad strokes and tars good and bad alike. I’m pretty sure that there are big businesses with a profound sense of civic involvement and responsibility. Even so, I take very seriously my farmer friend’s assessment that Big Ag is out to crush competition, even if Big Ag would never admit that such is its goal. Even if it’s not, the policies Big Ag’s political muscle put into place have that effect. If the free market is the natural force we’re so often told it is, then, like a natural force, it requires a polyculture for true health, a carefully maintained balance of local, national, and international business. Just as humans can’t thrive when they destroy the delicate intricacies of topsoil or the webs of interdependency in particular ecosystems, so businesses—even big transnational businesses—will eventually cease to thrive if they undermine the necessary balance in which local economies can thrive.

Which brings me back to the unlikely power of Mrs. Garth and all those household economies that produce goods and services, those households that are not just centers of consumption, like the one described by Betty Friedan. These little centers of independence and self-reliance are beacons in the dark described by Wendell Berry and my farmer friend, revolutionaries in a war that most of us barely know is being waged. Who knew that excellent, productive housewifery could be an aspiration for high-minded knuckleheads? If Dorothea Brooke were to appear today, she might very well be a local organic farmer or some other tough-minded local entrepreneur. She might look a lot like Mrs. Garth.

What we’re reading
Heather: George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
Martin: James S. Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend

This week, during a solo trip to Madroño, Heather spent much of her time knocking on doors in Kerrville, Bandera, Medina, Tarpley, and vicinity, hoping to convince chefs and restaurateurs to buy locally raised, grass-fed bison meat from the ranch. Our initial herd of fifteen animals has grown to thirty-six, including a couple of young males who have already, by their obstreperous behavior, nominated themselves as the first to be harvested this fall.

I’m not particularly objective, of course, but I think she could make a pretty compelling case to those potential customers. To wit:

• Bison meat generally has more protein, iron, and nutrients than beef or chicken;
• Bison meat is lower in fat and calories than beef or chicken;
• Our bison spend their lives ranging freely on Madroño’s 1,500 acres, and never set foot on feedlots;
• Our bison are never injected with or fed growth hormones, steroids, or any other supplements;
• To ensure the quality of the meat and reduce stress on the animals, our bison will be field-harvested on site under the supervision of a licensed inspector from the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Another point we hope to emphasize is that, since we’re a small-scale, local operation, our customers will also be our neighbors, which means we’ll be accountable and responsive to them in a way that Big Agriculture isn’t. It also means that every penny our customers spend on our meat will stay right here in Central Texas.

Our hope is that the sale of bison meat, eggs, and produce from Madroño will (eventually) provide significant financial support for the residential center for environmental writers we hope to open at the ranch. We know there’s a growing market in Austin for fresh, local, sustainably raised food, but we’re not planning to sell in Austin—too complicated and expensive logistically, plus we wouldn’t want to compete with our friend and mentor Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison—so we’re hoping to find a comparable demand in the area right around Madroño. (And based on Heather’s schmoozing this week, the early returns are encouraging.)

Make no mistake, though: going into business—especially the business of turning a creature into a commodity—presents all kinds of challenges for a couple of recovering English majors. Virtually all of my adult work experience has been in the nonprofit sector; shifting to something that is explicitly designed to make money, no matter how noble we believe the cause to be, is a bit of a shock. (A couple of years ago we were told that the mother of one of our daughter’s schoolmates referred to us as “just a couple of old hippies.” She did not intend it as a compliment.) As entrepreneurs, we are babes in the woods.

I imagine our first bison harvest will be quite an adventure, as will the processing and distribution that will follow. We’re already moving out of our comfort zone—I’m pretty sure Heather never imagined herself as a salesperson—and confronting a couple thousand pounds of dead buffalo will move us even farther into unknown territory. I mean, business plans? Financial projections? Balance sheets? Puh-lease!

Of course, it’s probably good for us complacent old hippies to be forced out of our comfort zones occasionally; we just have to hope that we don’t make a total cock-up of it.

On the other hand, maybe we don’t want to get too caught up in this whole mercantile thing. I’ve been reading Ian L. McHarg’s influential book Design with Nature, originally published in 1969. McHarg, an expatriate Scot who pioneered the field of environmental planning in the United States, writes witheringly of the prevailing view in his adopted homeland: “Neither love nor compassion, health nor beauty, dignity nor freedom, grace nor delight are important unless they can be priced. If they are non-price benefits or costs they are relegated to inconsequence. The economic model proceeds inexorably towards its self-fulfillment of more and more despoliation, uglification and inhibition to life, all in the name of progress—yet, paradoxically, the components which the model excludes are the most important human ambitions and accomplishments and the requirements for survival.”

Of course, McHarg is hardly the first thinker to decry a fixation on financial gain. In the sixth century BCE, Lao-Tzu put the same sentiment somewhat more pithily: “Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench.” In a similar vein, I Timothy tells us that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” (I Timothy is also the source of the phrase “filthy lucre,” by the way.) Jesus himself reminds us, in Matthew’s gospel, that “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”

And yet, and yet… we live in a fallen world, and money is an intrinsic part of it. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but money itself is not necessarily evil. (Or, as Peter J. Gomes writes in The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, “Wealth is not a sin, but it is a problem.”) The trick, obviously, is to learn money; to use it; to see it as a means to an end, not an end in itself. I mean, why can’t Madroño become an example of enlightened capitalism, a model of a countercultural way of thinking about commerce—a way that emphasizes the small-scale, local, sustainable long term, instead of the bigger-is-better, metastatic, smash-and-grab short term? I think we’ve all seen enough of the latter way of thinking, and its consequences, to last us a good while.

Of course, it’s easy for me to preach self-righteously about the corrupting dangers of the profit motive; we’re unlikely to make enough money selling bison to threaten the state of our souls. Indeed, just breaking even seems like an ambitious goal right now. I’m sure we’ll be writing more about Heather and Martin’s Adventures in Business-Land in the weeks and months to come. In the meantime, pray for us – and our bank account.

What we’re reading
Heather: Richard Powers, The Echo Maker
Martin: Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (still)

This week I’ll begin with a parable from my favorite set of wise weirdos, the desert fathers, forerunners of Christian monasticism.

A brother said to Abba Poimen, “If I give my brother a little bread or something else, the demons tarnish these gifts, saying it was only done out of a desire for praise.” The old man said to him, “Even if it is out of a desire for praise, we must give the brother what he needs.” He told the following parable: “Two farmers lived in the same town; one of them sowed and reaped a small and poor crop, while the other, who did not even trouble to sow, reaped absolutely nothing. If a famine comes upon them, which of the two will find something to live on?” The brother replied, “The one who reaped the small, poor crop.” The old man said to him, “So it is with us. We sow a little poor grain, so that we will not die of hunger.”

In the life that sought to be perfect in the love of God, neighbor, and self, the seeker had to give up the need to be beyond reproach and simply do the best he or she could. Early church scholar Roberta Bondi, an Episcopal priest, has written of this eccentric collection of early Christians whose baffling exodus into the Egyptian desert began in the fourth century. She says, “It must have been a great temptation to the early Christian monastic to try to codify the moral law for himself or herself in such a way that there would be no ambiguity left, that one could always know what to do without having to take responsibility for the suffering of others that might result from one’s moral action. Unfortunately, there was no way to avoid having to use one’s own judgment then, just as there is no way now, once it is granted that the goal is love rather than fulfilling a legal code.” Virtuous actions could even be roadblocks on The Way if the actor’s motive was simply to feel pure or, worse, look down his Roman nose at his apparently less virtuous brother.

With all that said, I’d like to make a narrative- and logic-defying leap to John Tierney’s column in last Tuesday’s New York Times. In it, he approvingly reviews a new book by Stewart Brand, the compiler of the Whole Earth Catalog, which came out in 1968 and helped inspire the original Earth Day. In his new book, titled Whole Earth Discipline, Brand urges the environmentally minded to “question convenient fables” and offers up seven lessons, updating what he sees as myths to be discarded. Among them are several that immediately got my back up, including (as summarized by Tierney) “‘Let them eat organic’ is not a global option”; “Frankenfood, like Frankenstein, is fiction”; and “‘New Nukes’ is the new ‘No Nukes.’”

Heresy, right?

On Wednesday, Martin and I attended a conference at City Hall on the Slow Money movement in Austin. The keynote speaker was Woody Tasch, author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. Tasch, a venture capitalist, foundation treasurer, and entrepreneur, hopes to update nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions of fiduciary responsibility to reflect the economic, social, and environmental realities of the twenty-first century, largely by devising ways to invest in local food economies. Although he is idealistic, Tasch offers some trenchant assessments of the nature of risk in conventional bottom-line investment strategies. The conference also featured several panel discussions with various local organic food entrepreneurs, expounding on the possibilities for investment opportunities based on local businesses. At one point, one of the panelists—who sells beautiful eggs and organic chicken feed—exclaimed to the audience: We can feed the world with organic principles, and we don’t need genetically engineered foods to do it, either! Raise your hand if you agree! And many in the standing-room audience raised their hands and cheered.

Orthodoxy, right?

One of the things I like about Tasch is his pragmatism, despite his utopian goals. As someone who has been lost in the fog of literature, religion, and family for many years, I was glad to hear his analysis of the market as neither good nor bad, but simply an elemental force that, like water or fire, can work for good or ill. He doesn’t believe that any single scheme (even his own) will save the world, but rather calls for an economic polyculture that includes various ways of and goals for investing, not just the usual American emphasis on maximum monetary return on investment without regard for the consequences.

A question from the audience arose: I want to invest in strictly local businesses. How do I find the ones that won’t sell out to national or international companies later? How do I stay pure? His response: you can’t. And why would you? Some companies will, and some won’t. The market has its seasons and needs multiple species of business in order to flourish in times of plenty and times of drought. There is no one “right” way to participate that is beyond reproach. If your goal is to invest in your community with a moderate rate of return, you can’t worry too much about purity. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Tasch admonished, hearkening back to the high-minded pragmatism of Voltaire.

As a recovering perfectionist and helpless idealist, I find this to be good news: that the ideal of purity in the world of investment—and elsewhere—can work against good and genuine change. To be honest, I have no idea whether organics are the only way, whether genetically modified crops are required in the global battle against hunger; whether the benefits of nuclear power outweigh the risks. Nor do I have a very clear idea of how I’ve arrived at a conception of purity that rejects these possibilities. I have always found John Tierney—the New York Times reporter—to be a lively and reliable source of information. In my local food community, I’ve found a fount of practical wisdom about the world in which small, independent producers must run three times as fast over rougher regulatory terrain than larger (and largest) producers to keep their place in the economic culture, even as it becomes clear that a flourishing economic ecosystem requires the presence of small farmers. How do I choose between these divergent views, when I find each of their expounders to be trustworthy guides?

American culture currently encourages, even celebrates, the immediate rejection of ideas that aren’t genetically identical to the ones commonly held. In this harsh monoculture, I find relief in the generosity of the desert fathers. Do the best you can, even if you don’t always meet your own—or your peers’—standards. Question those standards regularly to see why you have them, especially when they become shining purity badges that encourage you to condemn others. As soon as you condemn your fellow traveler, you’ve wandered off the road. Remember that there’s no way to produce any kind of crop without getting dirty.

What we’re reading
Heather: the Dalai Lama, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality
Martin: Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Joel Salatin, a farmer in Virginia, has developed a philosophy and practicum of farming that is simple and radically countercultural: use the needs and desires of the land, the plants, and the animals to direct farming decisions. As a consequence, his Polyface Farm is not only phenomenally productive, it annually increases the amount of chemical-free topsoil on the land and allows its animals to lead comfortable, healthy, chemical-free lives.

Here’s the real point of interest: the farm consists of about 550 contiguous acres, and Salatin and his family intensively farm only about 100 acres. The rest is “unused” forest; his pigs do forage for acorns there, and some of the trees are selectively milled, but about 80 percent of his land is apparently ignored.

This unused land is considered wasted by conventional farming standards, which would have Salatin cut down the forest and expand his operation, but he’s convinced that the productivity of his actively farmed land requires all those unused acres. They provide the ecological ballast for his doughty craft, helping reduce evaporation in the fields, providing wind breaks, permitting the existence of a complexity of interaction between flora and fauna that supports the entire operation.

Salatin’s insistence on the need for this apparently unproductive forest seems to have a parallel in the rhythms of sleeping and waking and the perception in our culture that sleep is time wasted, time that could be used “productively.” While some people seem to have a genetic mutation that allows them to sleep less than the general population and still function well, most of us become significantly less productive, not more, when we try to cut back on our sleep. Studies show that people become psychotic when deprived of uninterrupted sleep over extended periods; forced wakefulness is a well-known torture technique. (Any college student can tell you this.) Even so, our out-of-kilter culture continues its assault on this maddeningly “unproductive” necessity.

Just as they need to eat, to work, to worship, people—and maybe all creatures—need time dedicated not just to sleeping, but to dreaming as well. People whose sleep is subtly interrupted at the dream phase eventually develop the symptoms of those denied all sleep. (I don’t think I’m making this up.) Dreaming time, like Salatin’s untouched acreage, is necessary to the health and integrity of individual organisms and their ecosystems. I’ve come to think of the planet’s shrinking wilderness as its dreaming time. The list of activities or places declared unproductive by the market culture has grown significantly during my lifetime: time to cook, to play (if you aren’t a child, and sometimes if you are), to make music or art (if you’re not an expert), to observe a sabbath, to allow plants and animals to grow at their own pace, to make money that benefits whole communities rather than just a few individuals. By consciously using the word “rest” in our mission statement, we want to mount the ramparts and defend the borders of dreaming time.

What we’re reading
Heather: Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith
Martin: David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football