More Deliberate Every Day

Pollan On What We Eat

If you haven't had an opportunity to read Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food yet, the video below is a great summary of some of the key points of the book, delivered by the author himself.  Enjoy.

Conversations with Wendell Berry, Post #3

Today we turn again to the book Conversations with Wendell Berry edited by Professor Morris Allen Grubbs of the University of Kentucky (whose basketball team, sadly, did not advance to the second round of the NCAA men's tournament yesterday).  For those of you not following along at home, I began this series with Post #1 and continued it with Post #2.

Reading interviews with Wendell Berry that span thirty-five years certain themes emerge, as I've mentioned before, which serve to define the thinker and give shape to his understanding of the world.  One of those key themes with Berry is the idea of marriage.  When I use the word here, I mean not only the marriage that exists between two consenting adults who choose to commit to each other for a lifetime, but also the marriage we have with the natural world around us.  It is the commitment element, as well as the mutual gratification, that is important to Berry.  He speaks to it pointedly in an interview conducted in 1991 by Vince Pennington for The Kentucky Review.  In the discussion, Berry points out that fail to solve many of our society's problems because of our insistence on dualistic definitions, not out of lack of knowledge with which to tackle them:

We tend to think -- the people in Washington, for instance, the people in state houses, in capitals -- that there can be a distinction between people and the air they breathe, for instance, or people and the food they eat, or people and the water they drink.  And obviously this is an absurd distinction:  there is no line that you can draw between people and the elements they depend on.  That's why the term "environment" is so bothersome to me.  "Environment" is based on that dualism, the idea that you can separate the human interests from the interests of everything else.  You cannot do it.  We eat the environment.  It passes through our bodies every day, it passes in and out of our bodies.  There is no distinction between ourselves and the so-called environment.  What we live in and from and with doesn't surround us -- it's part of us.  We're of it, and it's of us, and the relationship is unspeakably intimate.

What I get from Berry here is this:  we speak of the environment in the abstract because it has been so disregarded in the economic decisions that have impacted it, but in reality that abstraction is an error in our thinking.  To be apologists for the economic decisions by referring to the environment as something separate from us is to play the game as the abusers would have us play it -- separated so that it can be managed and manipulated into serving our will.  In reality, our relationship with the world around us is interdependent and transcends the relationship we have with the economic interests that would destroy it.  Recognizing the right-ness of this approach we realize what needs to be managed and manipulated are the economic interests.  And that they should be handled from the perspective of the needs of nature, human and non-human equally.

This recognition of the relationship between us and our world, Berry suggests, represents a marriage more profound than that we share with a partner:  it is a commitment to be wisely interdependent come what may.  It parallels traditional thinking about marriage in that it is not conditional:  once we agree to the bond, once we recognize it, our lives are forever changed.

Love is not just a feeling; it's a practice, something you practice whether you feel like it or not.  If you have a relationship with anybody -- a friend, a family member, a spouse -- you have to understand by the terms of that relationship to do things for those people, and you do them whether you feel like it or not.  If you don't, it's useless.  You're not always going to feel like it.  This is what you learn as soon as you become a farmer, for instance.  Once you get into a relationship with even so much as a vegetable garden, you realize that you have to do the work whether you want to or not.  You may have got into it because of love, but there are going to be days when you are sick and you're going to have to do your work anyhow.  With animals, the work is even more inescapable.  There's no way out if you have a milk cow, no reprieve.  A cow doesn't know that you're sick.  She doesn't say, "Well, since you're sick I just won't make any milk."  She makes the milk, and you've got to get it.

So we commit to the land and to each other, and we expect economic interests to respect that commitment as a primary motivation.  Why hasn't this worked in the past?  Because government has evolved, at least in the United States, to represent the interests of economics above the interests of people and the land.  And that role has resulted in a ravaging of our natural resources to produce profit at any cost.  This is not the role government should be playing, in Berry's thought.  From a 2003 interview with Jim Minick at Appalachian Journal:

The government ought to prevent people from destroying things outright.  It's so obviously a question that the government needs to ask:  what right does a mere person have to destroy forever a mountain or a watershed?  And the government isn't asking that question.  What right do we have to burn up all the oil and all the coal in, really, a very short time?  Wes Jackson is saying that this is the "prodigal" era of our history.  He means it's the era when we squander our birthright, the era in which we use up most of the fossil fuel and most of the soil.

Sound familiar?  Pay attention to the headlines and it will.  Berry espouses the principle of making decisions that will influence our children to the seventh generation.  And when you live by that approach, using up all the oil or burning all the coal isn't a reasonable action, since it will leave your ancestors in a situation of extreme need.  Instead, we should be making decisions that are closed-loop, fully conscious, deliberate.  We should be taking from the earth only what we can replenish, even if not immediately.

There's such a thing as a principle of return.  That you're a living creature implies that you have a right to take from the world what you need to maintain yourself, to live and go on.  The compensating principle is the principle of return.  You must take but you also must give back, so that the cycle completes itself over and over again.  The Wheel of Life -- of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay -- must turn, and it must turn in place.

A marriage worthy of a lifetime commitment.  In the final post on this worthy book I'll turn the discussion toward the mutual gratification element of the marriage commitment.  How does this response to the natural world lead to joy?  How do we reconcile a more physical commitment to our land with the need to celebrate?  Berry has answers and we'll explore them.

Photo courtesy of Mathieu Struck at flickr and is shared under a creative commons license

Conversations with Wendell Berry, Post #2

This post continues a previous discussion on an book of interviews with Wendell Berry edited by Professor Morris Allen Grubbs that began here.

One of Berry's most jarring capabilities, to my mind, is his way of turning an offensive assertion on its heels by using the language of the offense against it.  An example is the way he uses the results of a global economy as an example of its failings, instead of attempting to argue the issue on a philosophical level.  Take the farm itself.  Anyone who encounters Berry rapidly comes to the understanding that he is an adamant supporter of the small family farm.  And while his reasons are many there are plenty of supports for this cause that he shares in the language of those who would disagree with his assertion.  For instance, in an interview conducted in 1983 with Gregory McNamee and James R. Hepworth for the Bloomsbury Review Berry argues that the best evidence for the viability of the small farm is unemployment, a phenomenon normally considered to be within the bounds of economics and social theory.

The industrial economy, Berry argues, leads by definition to alienation due to its need for more and more specialists to fuel increased profitability and efficiency.  In order to feed that need it demands schools that produce specialists who will also be voracious consumers thus demanding the very products the economy creates.  And while in a vacuum this may appear acceptable as long as both parties are willing, in reality both of the two parties is not committed in perpetuity to the relationship.  Because while the student commits herself to becoming a specialist, and by doing so limits her ability to change course in the future, the producer can at any time sever the relationship and leave the alienated individual without a basis for living.  In Berry's words:

People who have no neighbors, for instance, must buy help.  People who have neighbors have help.  Claims for the benevolence of the industrial economy are disproved by the phenomenon of "unemployment."  People become unemployed because of alienation from land and community.  People who own even tiny parcels of land on which they can work for their own support, and people who own shops or have trades or skills directly useful to their own communities, are not going to be unemployed.

The point being that an individual need never concern herself with unemployment unless she become completely dependent upon the industrial economy.  And the most direct, and in Berry's view preferable, method to sever that dependency is the small farm.  This path, in his view, is literally a national defense.

The government, for instance, thinks that national defense is making weapons, and the people go along and pay for it.  But soil conservation is elementary national defense.  So is people conservation.  So is the conservation of culture and intelligence.  So is the conservation of political liberty and of the economic independence of households and communities.  If the nation is to be defended, it may need fewer warheads and many more real shareholders, people who own homes, homesteads, small businesses, small farms.

Again, Berry brings two types of discussion into contrast and shows that they are not so different after all:  the political necessity of defense against aggression with the ecological necessity of defense against soil erosion.  Succumbing to either assault would be a catastrophic event.  The primary difference between the two is the significant profit motive inherent in the military industrial complex and the lack of profit motive to the small farmer.

Berry is a deep thinker, one who looks for analogies that others miss and draws correlations across the great multitude of learning he has been given the opportunity to experience.  While he began his writing career as an academic (and a poet), the many years that he has spent relatively untethered by the academic model (despite several official involvements at the University level) have resulted in a wide-ranging view of the world we inhabit and a unique sensibility that leads us to a better way of living in it. 

His admonition is that we should make ourselves less dependent upon those who would gladly take advantage of us.  Not such a controversial idea after all, is it?  And something that each of us could begin to do, today, in a variety of small ways. 

Conversations with Wendell Berry, Post #1

As spring hints at her arrival, I find myself much where I was a year ago, not too soon before this blog began, dwelling in the big, deep thoughts of Wendell Berry, whose guidance has become paramount to my own thoughts and inspiration.  So I'm going back to the books, and will be spending the next few posts meditating on some of his more significant themes, this time taken from a book of interviews compiled by Professor Morris Allen Grubbs titled Conversations with Wendell Berry.  What makes this particular book so interesting, apart from rarity of Berry allowing interviews at all, is the clarity and consistency of his ideas over a span of 35 years (the first interview included was conducted in 1973) and how those have not only changed little but really have expanded over that time.

Berry speaks to his idea of community in an interview from Mother Earth News issue 20 conducted by Bruce Williamson in that earliest year.  Community, in Berry's view, is not only a collection of individuals who live geographically close to each other, but rather an level of interaction that serves a specific defining purpose in our lives, without which society becomes unbalanced and ineffective:

You've got to have people who talk to each other a lot and who have experiences in common.  In a settled farming community old friends get together to work and one thing they do is tell each other again the stories they already know.  This is a complex community function.  They celebrate their old acquaintance that way, they celebrate themselves.  They alert each other to the realities of their lives and their history.  And the effect that it has on story-telling is that it improves the stories.

But the stories in the media today cater to the wish people have for everything to be new.  That's very much the emphasis in our arts today, for example.  That's not different at all from the Madison Avenue ideal that thrives on the establishment and immediate wearing out of fashions and fads.  Any culture building itself on this kind of novelty is bound to run thin.

Run thin, indeed.  And the astonishing thing about these comments is that they were made so long ago, and yet the phenomenon that Berry points to is one that has become obscene since then, going so far as to make week-night reality television the fodder for water coolers around the globe, intent as we are to unveil the new excitement of this week's American Idolatry.

What Berry points to, I think, is the notion that there is a wisdom in heritage beyond the trite constraints of doing things the way others did them.  He speaks often about the importance of listening to our ancestors, since they made endless mistakes only that we might avoid the same pitfalls.  He references an approach used by many Native American tribes that we should be considerate of the consequences of our actions to the seventh of our subsequent generations.  In doing so, we not only depend upon seven generations of our forebears to teach us, but also commit to being a teacher to those who come after.

New is not necessarily bad, though.  The Kentucky Bard is no mindless Luddite.  Rather he believes that new should always be introduced in the context of tradition to ensure that simple fashion does not forget the error of the past.  Youth, for instance, is a critical component of community.  But needs to be taken in the context that is appropriate to it.  In Berry's words:

There's a sort of gift to humanity that each generation of young people renews.  They feel in their bones what's desirable.  "It would be great if we could be free."  And the function of the older people in the society is not to oppose that, but to qualify it.  To say yes, it would be great to be free. . . but there are certain ways to get free that are going to surprise you and make stern demands on you.  The man who is most able usually turns out to be the man who's most free, not the one who's the most reckless.  The old are the ones who will put their hands on you and say, "Well, be a little steady now," or "No, you can't quit, you're not finished yet."

One of the things that rings so true to me personally about Berry's approach, outside the simple rationality of it all, is a balanced awareness that extremes are not a viable mode of operation for sustainable actions.  It's so easy when you come to something like food awareness, as is so often the theme of this particular blog, to imagine going whole hog into some kind of CSA-inspired communal living environment where Gaia-Philosophy rules the day and we become eco-warriors. 

More real than that, and more durable (a word I'll come back to) is a connection to the land, and to the people connected to that land.  A balanced path, if you will, that respects tradition as well as the energy of youth and inspiration.  That aspires to sustainability and fidelity.  More important than revolutionizing the way we live our lives, says Berry, is recognizing our lack of any type of independence, then determining what needs to be done to change our parasitic ways and stand for and by ourselves.

I mean the independence by which a person provides some of his own needs and which permits him to do what he sees to be right without the approval of a crowd.  That's why Thomas Jefferson said you need to keep as many people as possible on the land.  That's necessary for democracy.  You need to keep people independent in the way that the ownership and care of a piece of land can make them.

If the ideals and aims of young people have lost energy, it's because they haven't the stability of a commitment to one place and one community.  I think they're disposed to drift around until they find a suitable community.  But no community is suitable.  There's plenty wrong with them all.  I could construct an airtight argument for not settling in my own community.  The fact is that I'm spending my life constructing an argument for being here.  [emphasis mine]

And there it is, isn't it?  We are not what our position or status or past makes us but what we chose to be.  Happily I re-read these words bemoaning the plight of youth and their wayward ways only a day after reading the fine New York Times piece by Allen Salkin that profiles young urbanites who've established themselves, in what I would call a positive protest to this modern world we live in, on a farm.

Berry did what so many of us have done:  he left home, became well-educated, traveled to and stayed in the urban metropolises of the world.  That he went back home to the patch of soil from which he originated was not a defeat or an escape or a reversal, but rather a positive protest on his part.  What he has done since then is approach his community, much the way he approaches his farm, by choosing to assume value in the traditions and the methods that his ancestors depended upon.  What he has found as a result is that the land, much like the people who have cultivated it for generations, have a wellspring of messages for us.

If only we would listen carefully.

Janet Maslin On Michael Pollan at the NY Times

Janet Maslin has a piece at the New York Times this morning reviewing Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, which she describes as

a tough, witty, cogent rebuttal to the proposition that food can be reduced to its nutritional components without the loss of something essential. “We know how to break down a kernel of corn or grain of wheat into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again,” he writes.

She goes on to point out that while some of the material that is covered in the book was also addressed in the previous title, The Omnivore's Dilemma, that this pass at the material is more succinctly focused on what to do about the so-called dilemma, versus how the dilemma came to be.

Having read most of the book these last two days, I would put it a different way.  The book is a natural extension of the previous title, building on the key points made in the 2006 book but extending them into a series of practical advice on how to change your life as a consequence.  Included are not prescriptions -- he doesn't tell you what to eat precisely -- but what he calls "algorithms through which to make food choices" -- ideas that have been covered in books as diverse as his previous one,  Food Fight, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  What results is a self-help book for people who are passionate about making More Deliberate decisions.

Pollan traces the origins of our current, deadly state, to the rise of reductionism in food policy, when the so-called "experts," as Wendell Berry might put it (he was an adviser on the book), began talking about nutrients and stopped talking about food.

Mr. Pollan shows how the story of nutritionism is “a history of macronutrients at war.” If the conventional scientific wisdom has moved from demon (saturated fat) to demon (carbohydrates), creating irreconcilably different theories about the health benefits of various foods, it has also created an up-and-coming eating disorder: orthorexia.

“We are,” he underscores, “people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.” This book is biliously entertaining about orthorexia’s crazy extremes. A recent “qualified” F.D.A.-approved health claim for corn oil makes sense, Mr. Pollan says, “as long as it replaces a comparable amount of, say, poison in your diet and doesn’t increase the total number of calories you eat in a day.”

So where does this leave us?  We are at a crossroads where we have clear and real choices -- we can continue to eat blindly, being led by marketers and convenience, or we can open our eyes and begin to eat food again, real sustainable grown-in-the-ground food.  Food raised by people we can meet and know and build relationships with. 

It takes time, it takes effort.  But it brings joy and health and community.  Pollan's book provides a solid road-map for the journey, one that everyone should take the time to carefully peruse.

On Wendell Berry

I mentioned some time ago that I am reading a newer book titled Wendell Berry:  Life and Work which is a compilation of essays both scholarly and anecdotal taking a careful look at the iconic Kentucky author.  Normally I move through books rather rapidly, but I've purposely been taking my time with this one, as it is the first time I have been able to review Berry from the outside, since most of my exposure has been through his words directly.  What has become apparent is that Berry's voice is consistent across work and life, since the stories his friends share about interacting with the man demonstrate that his admonitions are not just thought, but lived.  In lieu of a lengthy digest post this morning, or a diatribe about the downward spiral of the Farm Bill, I instead share with you a quote from the essay "An Economy of Gratitude" by Norman Wirzba:

One of Berry's definitive contributions is to have shown us that the dream of an unencumbered autonomous life is false and delusional.  We are not self-determining gods whose livelihoods require no regard for ecological or social circumstance.  As embodied creatures who eat, drink, and breathe, we are necessarily and beneficially connected to natural habitats, myriads of (large and microscopically small) organisms, and the evolutionary processes that sustain us all:  because we live in and through flesh we undoubtedly also live in soil.  As social beings who converse, plan, argue, and celebrate, we clearly depend on others to nurture us into adulthood and to equip us with tools of language and understanding and with gifts of friendship and purpose.  If we truly are moral beings, then we are beholden to and accountable for these biological and cultural contexts that give us life.  Quite rightly, therefore, Berry concludes:  "There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy.  Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence."  We are all implicated in the living of one another and could not possibly survive or thrive alone.

This fact of our mutual implication and need for one another can be a source of joy.  But it can also be perceived as an unwelcome burden because it raises in a profound manner the need for self-restraint, or, as Berry puts it in Life Is A Miracle, submission to the demands of propriety.  All life is costly and precious because it is secured on the basis of cycles of life and death:  in order for an organism to eat and grow, others must die.  Human beings, however, are unique in this web of life because we can discern whether our eating and growing are extravagant and wasteful or unnecessarily destructive.  We can contemplate, based on careful consideration and regard for our life-giving neighborhoods, whether the patterns of our living can be justified as contributing to a common good.  In this possibility we see our nobility.  In its refusal we witness our mutual ruin.

Choose to survive and thrive in a community, then, or the alternative.  And the alternative is, unfortunately, not long-lasting.

Hints On Pollan's New Book

Hints about Michael Pollan's new book hit the internets yesterday over at Grist where columnist Tom Philpott interviews the author about the upcoming title.  In Defense of Food:  An Eater's Manifesto, due out in January, takes the themes of Pollan's earlier books a step further, looking at ways we can integrate them into our everyday lives.  From the interview, in Pollan's own words:

It really comes down to seven words: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." What is food? How do you know whether you're getting food or a food-like product? The interesting thing that I learned was that if you're really concerned about your health, the best decisions for your health turn out to be the best decisions for the farmer and the best decisions for the environment -- and that there is no contradiction there.

We're giddy with excitement.

More Wendell Berry

In case you hadn't noticed, I'm a rabid Wendell Berry fan, and can think of few things more worthy of filling posts on this blog.  Today we go back to the essay "Discipline and Hope," included in the slim volume A Continuous Harmony.  In this quote, Berry speaks about how it is appropriate to use things, versus the way we are more likely to be doing so in our so-called modern world:

A consumer is one who uses things up, a concept that is alien to the creation, as are the concepts of waste and disposability.  A more realistic and accurate vision of ourselves would teach us that our ecological obligations are to use, not use up; to use by the standard of real need, not of fashion or whim; and then to relinquish what we have used in a way that returns it to the common ecological fund from which it came.

The key to such a change of mind is the realization that the first and final order of creation is not such an order as men can impose on it, but an order in the creation itself by which its various parts and processes sustain each other, and which is only to some extent understandable.  It is, moreover, an order in which things find their places and their values not according to their inert quantities or substances but according to their energies, their powers, by which they cooperate or affect and influence each other.  The order of the creation, that is to say, is closer to that of drama than to that of a market.

Which is to say that we should think about how our actions are impacting the natural world around us by using the natural cycles of ecology versus fighting them.  The way we approach our world (whether it be landfills or strip-mining or supermarkets) is in a Faustian defiance of the natural order in it, ignoring the rules etched clearly by its rhythms. 

Often, people read Berry and come to a quick assumption that he advocates a return to the "old ways," that everybody should get rid of their computers and cell phones and go live off the land again, the ox pulling a plow to break resistant land.  And while there is no question that Berry himself has chosen to live a life not far from that picture, I don't believe that is what he advocates at all.  Rather, what Berry so consistently says, over a lifetime of work, is that we have to take what we've learned from those old ways, combine it with what we have learned through modern science and practice, and create a new way that includes and contains both.  A harmonious approach to living with our environment in which we harness the natural forces of life and the earth to aid us in our needs, instead of fighting against us. 

From my vantage point, it sounds like Berry wants to evolve, which is something I want to be involved with.  Stepping forward into the future, smarter from our mistakes.

Thinking Little: One More Time

We spoke previously about Wendell Berry's essay "Think Little" which we recently read in the book A Continuous Harmony.  This post will complete our discussion of that essay.  Toward the end of the piece, Berry states what could be a summarizing position that explains why this blog was started in the first place and underscores what has been the most completely consistent theme you've found here over the last six months:  if we change ourselves, it will change the world.

What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds.  We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth's ability to produce.  We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world.  But we will also see through the fads and fashions of protest.  We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue.  Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that our only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy our place -- a much humbler place than we have been taught to think -- in the order of creation.

What strikes me so forcefully about Berry's writing is the way in which his passion for the land consumes the entire universe around him.  He sees that "war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues" and that, consequently, there is no such thing as "separate issues" at all but rather the totality of our living interacting with the totality of our world.  As such, only by changing how we live can we change the world we live in.  We don't have to change, but not doing so will eventually result in irrevocable destruction.

The principles of ecology, if we will take them to heart, should keep us aware that our lives depend upon other lives and upon processes and energies in an interlocking system that, though we can destroy it, we can neither fully understand nor fully control.  And our great dangerousness is that, locked in our selfish and myopic economy, we have been willing to change or destroy far beyond our power to understand.  We are not humble enough or reverent enough.

This last line, I think, summarizes Berry's view of his fellow man.  He sees the earth around him, the sky above, and is dumbfounded at the unutterable perfection of it all, then turns his gaze and sees his fellow man bulldozing and strip-mining and toxifying it.  He is a minister of the church of the land, and he is telling us we need to return to our knees and ask forgiveness from the earth for the brutality we have given it in return for its blessings.  "Think Little" is an essay that is damning in its intent, but offers a redemption beyond our understanding:  get humble and reverent and the earth will return your efforts with a renewed bounty.

It's Sunday morning.  Make this your prayer and meditation.

---

The Squirrels have squeeked. We attended last Wednesday's Slow Food Memphis dinner at the Inn at Hunt Phelan but haven't had the nerve to try to put the experience into words.  Lo and behold, the Squirrels beat us to it (or got us off the hook, as it were).  They posted yesterday about the event, and did it full justice indeed.  I guess sitting next to the guest of honor helps to cement your position on the food, huh?  From their post, speaking of rancher Michael Lenagar, of Neola Farms, and our first course, Oxtail Soup:

We have been fans of, and friends with, Michael for a while now. We were delighted to be sitting next to him at dinner. Michael is a wonderful study in contrasts, a plainspoken rancher and a sophisticated wine connoisseur. The epitome of the simple country boy and a forward-thinking environmentalist.

When it comes to his food, Michael leans more to the simple country boy side. Looking at a bowl with one tiny meatball, Michael said, "when I think of eating beef, this isn't what I usually have in mind." When the broth was added, Michael took one whiff and said, "oh yes, this is our beef. You can tell our beef by the smell." The oxtail broth was the absolute liquid essence of beef.

And there's much more, including our experience with tongue, at the Squirrel Squad.  Also, a photograph of the tongue in question at the Slow Food Memphis events page.

 

Berry: Thinking Little

Continuing on in our reading of Wendell Berry's A Continuous Harmony we come to one of his most famous essays, "Think Little."  In this short work Berry speaks to the disconnection we have allowed between ourselves and our environment, and how that disconnection portends to destroy the great gifts that we have before us, many of them free of charge.  One of the problems with the environmental movement, he wrote in 1972, is that the people that make up that movement are at risk of not being able to think for themselves, and thus the collective voice is diminished and easily co-opted by those who would use it to sell.

We cannot feed or clothe ourselves, or entertain ourselves, or communicate with each other, or be charitable or neighborly or loving, or even respect ourselves, without recourse to a merchant or a corporation or a public service organization or an agency of the government or style-setter or an expert.  Most of us cannot think of dissenting from the opinions or the actions of one organization without first forming a new organization.  Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.  Dissenters want to publish their personal opinions over a thousand signatures.

This idea is as relevant today as it was in '72, given the recent barrage of greenwashing  becoming more prevalent in the mass media.  And while we're all for institutions, government corporate or whatnot, becoming more environmentally conscious and changing their practices toward sustainability, one should be cautious believing what you read and see.  Berry goes on to speak of the American Citizen as consumer first, individual second.

In this state of total consumerism -- which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves -- all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken.  We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.  Most of us are not directly responsible for strip mining and extractive agriculture and other forms of environmental abuse.  But we are guilty nevertheless, for we connive in them by our ignorance.  We are ignorantly dependent on them.  We do not know enough about them; we do not have a particular enough sense of their danger.

This speaks, particularly I think, to why I believe Berry deserves to be recognized as an example of mindful living.  For what he is getting at is the idea that our actions have consequences, whether it be towards our natural resources or the people that share this planet with us, and to not fully understand those consequences is to choose ignorance over understanding.  Mindfulness is the act of fully understanding both the ever-present Now and how this current moment stretches across consequences to impact the greater world around us.  Being Deliberate, in my definition, is exactly the opposite of the ignorance of which Berry speaks.

Most of us, for example, not only do not know how to produce the best food in the best way -- we don't know how to produce any kind in any way.  Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.  And for this condition we have elaborate rationalizations, instructing us that dependence for everything on somebody else is efficient and economical and a scientific miracle.  I say, instead, that it is madness, mass produced.  A man who understands the weather only in terms of golf is participating in a public insanity that either he or his descendants will be bound to realize as suffering.  I believe that the death of the world is breeding in such minds much more certainly and much faster than in any political or atomic arsenal.

The italics in the last line are mine, not Berry's.

This goes along with what I've said from the first days of this blog -- while there's no question that a changing world can occur faster when governments and businesses are leading the way, the reality of the situation is that the change must occur first in the people or we're at risk of engaging in nothing more than marketing.  So if we want to build local food communities, if we want to change our impact on the environment, if we want our children to be safer and more capable of self-sufficient, we have to first start with our neighbors.   Change the cul-de-sac first, then go on to the subdivision.

More on "Think Little" to come.