Open Friday Thread: Sustainability through affection
Check out
’s moving essay on childhood and memory at .The emotional core of my Tuesday post comes from Wendell Berry’s 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, “It All Turns on Affection.” Here are a few more excerpts from that rich text.
Berry recalls that James B. Duke (the tobacco mogul) was “terrifyingly ignorant, even terrifyingly innocent of the connection between his industry and his philanthropy.” Yet surely Duke understood that his profits allowed him to be charitable. What do you think Berry means by “ignorant” and “innocent” here?
Absentee landlords in farm country illustrate the economic principle of externalities. Not only is conventional agriculture subsidized by the federal government, it is also subsidized by rural people who absorb the costs of polluted rivers and streams, higher cancer rates, harm to pollinators and other beneficial insects, and more. You might say that the absentee farm owner is also terrifyingly ignorant of and perhaps terrifyingly indifferent to the true cost of farming.
Berry again: “Duke would not necessarily have thought so far of the small growers as even to hold them in contempt. The Duke trust exerted an oppression that was purely economic, involving a mechanical indifference, the indifference of a grinder to what it grinds. It was not, that is to say, a political oppression. It did not intend to victimize its victims. It simply followed its single purpose of the highest possible profit, and ignored the ‘side effects.’ Confronting that purpose, any small farmer is only one, and one lost, among a great multitude of others, whose work can be quickly transformed into a great multitude of dollars.”
But the principle of economic externalities means that we all function more or less like James B. Duke. We are all versions of Joe Burrow, Blake Griffin, and the other athletes in the Patricof Co investment group. We benefit from the mechanical indifference of systems that we cannot see, whose cruelty to others we never witness. How do you try to compensate for externalities, or resist this indifference in your own mind and heart?
I once taught Kelsey Timmerman’s Where Am I Eating? alongside Berry’s essay. The book was the sequel to Where Am I Wearing?, which traced Timmerman’s clothing back to the places where it was manufactured. I wonder if my students remember either of those books or if the effort to remain mindful of externalities in an economic system that explicitly tries to hide them is just too difficult to sustain.
Berry writes that sustainability “requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay—what Albert Howard called ‘the Wheel of Life’—should turn continuously in place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted.” But humans require stewardship, too, through “a cultural cycle, in harmony with the fertility cycle, also continuously turning in place. The cultural cycle is an unending conversation between old people and young people, assuring the survival of local memory, which has, as long as it remains local, the greatest practical urgency and value. This is what is meant, and is all that is meant, by ‘sustainability.’ The fertility cycle turns by the law of nature. The cultural cycle turns on affection.”
That is, the antidote to James B. Duke and to Patricof Co is to know the places where we live and to build relationships with the people in those places. I like the idea that nurturing affection or goodwill is just as important as building soil fertility. One way I try to do that is through gardening, which not only brings me close to the place where I live, but also opens up conversations. A landscaper in our neighborhood asked me about my deer fence recently, which opened up a conversation about microclimates in our rainy valley. A local farmer delivered some straw bales for my garden, and I asked about his apples, since we eat a steady diet of them. It’s been a hard spring for him — warm too early, followed by hard frosts — he’s looking at a diminished apple crop. I can’t do much about that except to buy what apples he does manage to harvest. But there is at least a sense of interdependence at that scale of human connection.
To support that more hopeful note, here are a couple of TED Talks I used to teach alongside Wendell Berry. I haven’t checked in on Ron Finley or Majora Carter in a while, but I hope that Ron’s gardens are doing well out in L.A. and that Majora has brought a little more green to her urban community.
How do you practice sustainability through affection for people and places? What are your favorite books, films, or public talks on the subject?
Wonderful piece Joshua! I've come across several essays/articles on gardening as an act of sustainability, today, but Berry's notion of gardens as a form of sustaining community memory is another aspect to gardening as a political act that I rarely see mentioned. Thanks for sharing this.
Just in case it might be of interest, I wrote a piece for a food publication called 'heated' a while back about Wendell Berry's influence on Michael Pollan's writing: https://heated.medium.com/the-wendell-berry-quote-that-frames-michael-pollans-environmental-writing-8695d70d7f1c?sk=04d226b368468e00fdf980b2c626c23c
On sustainability through affection
As my life has progressed, I have found myself more and more to be, as one colleague put it, "the keeper the of the lost." I have always gravitated to the marginalized, and especially those whose marginalization is invisible. Invisible because no one cares, or because people don't see it as marginalization. I know the maintenance people, whom others pretend don't exist. I "see" them, offer even the quiet dignity of being recognized as a colleague, and persist for years on end. I see you. I will know if you are unwell. I will know if you are gone. I will remember you, even if we never speak a word. One of my colleagues gave me the now-cherished title of "keeper of the lost" when I was looking after another colleague, who is embittered by hardship, by what should have been, and who is shunned by the others. It's not lost on me that the marginalization is as much ethnic as dislike for her calling them out on unprofessionalism.
I mention this kind of affection because, as I often do, I find the lost, the unspoken, the accepted but never quite comes to mind. I could have written about my experiences of rural community, which is still new to many urban dwellers, but I seek to find those whom others hide in plain sight with their disregard. Sometimes I find whole communities, and sometimes just a solitary individual who didn't really need my help.
Maybe sometime I'll write about Joe Runningwater.
I rarely write of such things, and I cringe at how much I write of what I do, because reactions in the past have treated it as so weird or pretentious. I will admit that I've grown world-weary at the gravitational pull of social unseeing. But I do think it will be better received here.