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

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

Last weekend was the fourteenth annual Texas Book Festival, one of my favorite events of the year. The TBF, held in and around the State Capitol, is sort of the literary equivalent of the ACL Music Festival in Zilker Park, without the dirt, pot smoke, and bleeding from the ears.

The TBF offers the public a chance to see favorite authors in the flesh (and discover new favorites) via readings, signings, panel discussions, award programs, etc. This year, my favorite session featured Dayton Duncan, Ken Burns’ collaborator on the PBS documentary series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea and the author of the beautiful companion volume of the same name.

Duncan spoke eloquently and emotionally (he actually wept a couple of times) about the importance and beauty of these treasures. I had sworn that I wasn’t going to buy any books at this year’s festival—the stack of unread books on my bedside table had long since reached life-threatening heights—but I couldn’t resist buying Duncan’s book… along with Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for Heather. Still, I think I showed admirable restraint; two books, by my standards, is nothing—nothing!

Among the other notables appearing at this year’s festival were Woody Tasch (An Inquiry into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered), Douglas Brinkley (Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America), and Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America), as well as Richard Russo, Corby Kummer, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jane Smiley, Margaret Atwood, Taylor Branch, Jeannette Walls, Jonathan Lethem, David Liss, and (an old family favorite) Rosemary Wells.

In previous years, the smorgasbord of scribblers has included heavyweights like Robert Caro, William Least Heat-Moon, Richard Price, ZZ Packer, Rick Bragg, Bud Shrake, Sherman Alexie, Roy Blount Jr., and Christopher Buckley. Local literary luminaries like Sarah Bird, Bill Wittliff, H. W. Brands, Kinky Friedman, Amanda Eyre Ward, Jim Magnuson, John Burnett, and Dick Holland usually put in an appearance as well. In fact, as used to be the case when I was young and foolish and still insisted on attending the ACL Festival, my main problem is always that so many people I want to see are scheduled to go on at the same time.

Basically, it’s just a big ol’ literary theme park, with great food (this year’s vendors included Ruby’s BBQ and Torchy’s Tacos), live music, cooking demonstrations, entertainment for the kiddies, and just about everything else a bibliophile could ask for. Plus it’s at the State Capitol, which is a totally cool building, and when the weather’s gorgeous, as it was last weekend, there’s just no better way to spend a weekend. Best of all, and unlike the ACL Festival, admission is free!

What we’re reading
Heather: Jeffrey Greene, Water from Stone: The Story of Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve
Martin: Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life