Martin’s post last week describing the first slaughter (and I use the word “slaughter” advisedly) in our new endeavor as purveyors of bison meat elicited a comment that urged us to consider the ethical fault line (presumably) running through every conscience, that unsteady place where we find ourselves rationalizing our actions to ourselves or to whatever audience our imaginations conjure up.

Martin tried to make his/our unease clear with the post’s title: Bloody Hands. So I’m wondering once again about the ethics of carnivorocity, as visible and treacherous a fault line as abortion, euthanasia, gun control, climate change, or cloning: when you stand on one side of the fault line, it’s easy to think that the earth itself will justify you when it opens up and swallows the dummies over there, proving that you were on the right side, at which point you can stop worrying all the time, for heaven’s sake, and go on your merry way without thinking about the issue ever again.

As usual, diving into the conversations available on the internet just sucked me deeper into the murk. A defense is available for every possible position and offered with wildly varying degrees of civility: meat-eaters supporting vegans and trashing vegetarians; meat-eaters sneering at any thought of self-restriction; vegetarians and vegans calling meat-eaters all sorts of names; vegetarians acknowledging that some meat-eating is environmentally acceptable; meat-eaters acknowledging that American meat production and consumption is for the most part grotesque. What’s a utopian-minded bison rancher to think?

Serendipity, as usual, is my guide: in chasing internet rabbits down their holes, I found a momentary resting place in a review of Maggie Kozel’s book The Color of Atmosphere: One Doctor’s Journey In and Out of Medicine. After describing a flummoxing patient she had as a second-year medical student, Kozel said, “[I] devoured the answers without asking the right questions.”

Of course, if you’re obsessive the way I am, then you’ll immediately begin worrying about what the right questions are, as in, if I’m “right” then others must be “wrong.” One of the hallmarks of the debate about meat-eating and its impact on the environment or the individual soul is the array of statistics and science that each side has amassed to prove the objective superiority of its argument. I’ve been persuaded by both sides and neither side, depending on the time of day, what I’ve just read, the weather, my most recent meal, and/or the health of my family, among other random criteria.

In other words, I don’t think science and statistics by themselves allow us to ask the right questions, since apparently convincing evidence can be found to shore up either side. Eating is one of those human activities rich with multiple levels of meaning; expecting questions directed at a specific level to adequately address the full range is a little like expecting a monoculture to support the diversity a polyculture allows. Although science poses some vitally important questions when it examines the issue of meat-eating, the nature of its inquiry must ignore other equally pressing but less quantifiable questions, such as, what conditions allow a multi-species community to flourish? Does eating meat (by humans) contribute or detract from our community’s flourishment (a word coined by our friend Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison)?

I hear the howls of protest even before I finish typing this sentence: how do you measure flourishment? Who decides the standards? Invalid! Too subjective! Well, yes. That’s what makes this a fault-line issue: it addresses the limits of our humanity and so necessarily includes subjective experience. To be honest, I don’t know how to measure flourishment; I suspect you just know it when you see it. And when you see it, you’re moved to describe it, knowing that the urge will be frustrated to at least some degree because flourishment, like all fruit, is the result of such a complex interaction of elements in space and time that any description will be incomplete. And of course it’s not a steady state; it waxes and wanes as circumstances change and sometimes double back on themselves.

In this context, the question of whether meat-eating is ethical can be answered unequivocally: it depends. One of the preconditions for flourishment is a sense of justice, a perspective that includes but also rises above the immediate tit-for-tat concerns of fairness. The scope of justice includes not just humanity but the earth itself—and perhaps the cosmos. It unrolls over the course of history, recognizing that particular injustices sometimes take generations, centuries, or millennia to wither, even with the powerful witness and effort of prophets and their followers. As I said in an earlier post, it may be that vegetarians and vegans are living forward into a time where justice is more fully realized. At the same time, issues of fairness and justice press at us every moment in this world where the lion and the lamb cannot yet lie down together, where predators are a vital part of an ecosystem that has developed in sync with domesticated animals.

Can meat be produced and consumed in a way that encourages justice and, hence, flourishment? I think it can. There are multiple instances of communities and societies that eat meat and live within that delicate balance that looks to the long-term well-being and dignity of the system as a whole, places like Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, although there are many, many others. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.) There are multiple instances of communities and cultures flourishing without eating meat, most notably for the purposes of this post the Hindu cultures whose vegetarian cuisines I eat with great pleasure. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.)

Likewise, there are communities and cultures that eat meat without flourishing, including most of the industrialized world, where concern for short-term profits and their consequent incitement of unrestrained appetite smother any hope of flourishment under mountains of animal excrement and anguish. Those places that encourage us (in the industrialized world) to measure the value of food in one way only—cheap is best—smother flourishment. Food is at the center of family, of community, of myth, of life. To reduce its essence to a single component is to denature its multivalent nutritional value.

Back to the ethical fault line, that place we stand uneasily, knowing that we may be swallowed: may those of us who recognize the fault line join hands—bloody or not—across the chasm and help each other seek the firmer footing of justice as our foundation. Flourishment will surely follow.

What we’re reading
Heather: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (still!)
Martin: Rodney Crowell, Chinaberry Sidewalks

As I dog-paddle through the sea of books threatening to drown not just me but the overwhelmed shores of my bedside table, I found these sentences: “For those who draw near and offer themselves before God, satisfaction of hunger is neither an end in itself nor a wholly ‘secular’ event…. [E]ating is a worshipful event, even revelatory; it engenders a healthful knowledge of God.” When I read this, I thought, “Ah, I am a member of the tribe that believes this.”

I briefly met Ellen F. Davis, author of Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible and professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke Divinity School, when she spoke at our church about ten years ago, and I immediately developed a helpless intellectual crush on her. The crush is not diminished by the fact that Our Hero Wendell Berry wrote the foreword to the book and is quoted at the beginning of each chapter.

Davis’s basic claim is that the fertility and habitability of the Earth—and particularly of Israel—are the best indices of the health of the covenant relationship between God and his people. She writes beautifully about that stickiest of words in Genesis 1, when mankind is given “dominion” over the earth. Made in God’s image, we are meant to exercise dominion as God does, and in Genesis 1, the way God exercises dominion is to exclaim in delight over the goodness of his work, and then to declare a day of rest for his delightful creation. Reckless topsoil depletion, toxic pesticides, and Confined Animal Factory Operations, among many other current agricultural practices, would probably not pass the Delight Test.

I read all this with a double vision: on the one hand, I underline passages, write notes, and spray exclamation points in the margins. On the other hand, I think about my neighbors in the Hill Country, many of whom are very conservative Christians, and I wonder how they would react to Davis’s scathing comparison of pharaonic agricultural and economic policies (the ones that made God really, really mad) with the practices of American agribusiness. I’m not sure the book will get a lot of traction here. (Well, or anywhere; the book’s title is so unsexy it might as well be wearing a suit of armor.) And yet it seems to me so clear that Davis’s analysis is Right and needs to be broadcast.

So how do you convince someone you’re right? Well, here’s how not to do it: the way the American conservation movement sounded its earliest notes, at least politically. The current issue of Orion magazine carries a feature story entitled “Conservation and Eugenics: The Environmental Movement’s Dirty Secret.” Charles Wolforth, the author, links Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, with its emphasis on patriotism and conservation, to the propagation of “higher races,” as opposed to Native Americans, Eskimos, and other “lower races.”

Wolforth writes, “These ideas had been developed at Ivy League and other universities, at museums of natural history and anthropology in New York and Washington, in learned societies and in scientific literature. When… world’s fairs focused on the West, the link between natural resources, morality, and racism was drawn ever more explicitly.” Pointedly, Wolforth quotes from Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech, arguably the launching of the modern conservation movement:

Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on. Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.

It also, apparently, involved practicing eugenics.

Awash in my sea of books, I am a descendent of this tribe. No wonder it’s hard to convince many people I’m right.

When I walk through my beloved Austin neighborhood, I’m often beset with the same double vision I have when reading the prophetic environmental writing I’m prone to read. I walk through my neighborhood pleased—delighted—with my wonderful neighbors and their well-tended homes and gardens. As I have mentioned before, walking a couple of blocks can take forty-five minutes or more, depending on who else is out and about and what news needs to be exchanged, which dogs need to be admired, whose children are doing fabulously or exasperatingly nutty things. How can this be a bad thing? And yet I can’t help but be aware of the multitudes of cars, the endless whir of air conditioners, the trucks bearing pesticides that fertilize lawns, the lights that are on all night, the sprinklers running even as it rains. (We, too, are guilty of some of these.) How do you convince people without double vision that the goodness they’re seeing in their way of life is resting on something destructive?

In the fruit of the American environmental movement there is a noxious worm: a sense of righteousness that often gnaws its way into self-righteous tribalism. The ways in which we eat and live are often markers of who we are; when told (or bullyragged) to change these ways, it can seem as if something essential in us has been condemned, most particularly when judgment comes from outside the tribe. Like triumphalist Christians who refuse to acknowledge the ugliness and violence that comes bundled with the hope and beauty of Christian history, triumphalist environmentalism will foment ill-will from people whose health and livelihoods could be enhanced or saved by its message.

Every movement must have its prophets. Traditionally, prophets haven’t been the sort of people you want to invite home for dinner; they eat locusts, dress in skins or nothing at all, sit in cisterns, moan a lot—that sort of thing. The true prophets get listened to not because they’re scare-mongering but because they always have an accurate sense of their tribe’s history, an acute awareness of when it has fallen away from its original goodness. They include themselves in their judgments. Despite their very visible eccentricities, there is an essential humility to them. When I pull up behind a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that says “Drill Here Drill Now Pay Less” (along with a Rick Perry sticker) and my first impulse is to jump out of my car and bash in the windshield, I know I’m no prophet. We’re both driving, after all, and I need that gas as much as the other driver does. I’m not passing that humility test.

So where does that leave my tribe, the irritable non-prophets of the environmental persuasion? As an oldest child, I always like to have the right answer to pass on—and enforce, whenever possible. My tribe is frequently stymied. But here’s one thing: invite someone over for dinner, someone not of the tribe. Feed them something that’s beautiful, that’s grown in accordance with the revelatory economy of food kindly produced. And think about this passage from one of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems:

Leave your windows and go out, people of the world,
go into the streets, go into the fields, go into the woods
and along the streams. Go together, go alone.
Say no to the Lords of War which is money
which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees,
yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds
and the animals and every living thing, yes
to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.

What we’re reading
Heather: Thomas Perry, Strip
Martin: Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America