The Future of the Land

Discussion

DR. BREUNIG: What, if any, changes do we need to make culturally in order to address some of the land questions that we raised yesterday?

DR. JACKSON: I think we need to talk about food, and about mobility and connectedness. In both cases, we need to make a very clear, accurate accounting of the real costs of how we eat, and the real costs of mobility and connectivity that we prize so greatly.

Yesterday I talked about some of the real costs of food. Many of them are invisible. You don’t see them because they’re in another region. We just found out that some chocolate is produced by child slave labor in the Congo. We certainly don’t see the pollution in Iowa, and I don’t see the pollution that’s caused by growing cotton in Texas.

But we need to begin to assume these costs, to take a clear-eyed look at these things and refuse to shove them under the table. I have two recommendations, and I put them in sort of a rude way. The first is, find yourself a farmer; and the second, learn to cook.

Most of you in your generation know how to cook, but my encounters with students and also even a lot of people in my generation tell me that people don’t cook anymore. It’s very common to eat out at least once a day and have prepared food the rest of the time. And when you do that, you are really cut off from the source of sustenance in a very profound way.

But there are movements to revitalize farmers’ markets, as Karen Enyedy is involved in, and that’s happening all over the country. There are efforts all over the country to create stronger connections between local food production and people’s eating, whether it’s in a fancy restaurant like L’Etoile in Madison, Wisconsin, or Chez Panisse in San Francisco, California.

Those fancy restaurants have led the way to more affordable efforts. There is a wonderful, inexpensive restaurant in Waterloo that we go to regularly called Rudy’s Taco. And it is not a chichi place. The prices are quite reasonable. He serves organic chicken, locally produced beef, organic pork. All of the beans, rice, and tortillas are locally produced, either right in Iowa or in Wisconsin. The tomatoes are local and pesticide-free all year round. He buys them from a greenhouse nearby. The lettuce in season is also local.

People are recognizing the values of connecting with local farmers and becoming more fully part of the local ecosystem. And that, of course, means that the consumer begins to have leverage. One can say, "Well, did you have to spray your sweet corn this year?" And when they say no, you say, "Well, that’s great. I can always cut out a few worms."

The corollary to eating locally is that there is less processing. The food processors that used to be all over—creameries, canneries, and the like—are gone. In order to really begin to eat more locally, we’re also going to have to invest in local food processing.

Maybe we can do things differently than we did before. Maybe we don’t need to have Mom at home full-time, cooking meat, potatoes, and gravy. Maybe there are other ways to do this that are a little bit more attuned to our current structure of living.

When my husband tells audiences that they should find themselves a farmer, I like to add, you should also find yourself a wife, because eating locally means preparing vegetables and cutting things up and spending time with your food. But this is a very valuable and rewarding activity, and it can keep us out of trouble if we spend time doing basic things.

I think we also need to calculate the real cost of mobility and connectivity. When we talk about the economy growing and all the wonderful things we can do on the Internet, we rarely acknowledge that all of this is on the back of physical infrastructure.

Infrastructure is a real cost of doing business, and in my home state that has meant several highway projects that were planned through prairies and wetlands. Conservationists and nature lovers had to battle the "Department of Single Occupancy Vehicles" to save these places and the rare plants and animals that live there.

I prefer this name because if a state Department of Transportation were really serious, it would be planning for buses and trains and bikes, not just cars and trucks. A big cultural change in our future is to change the way we think about the actual costs of mobility.

And that also goes for connectivity—cell phones and Internet access. These have infrastructure costs that are real. There are right of ways that have to be dug, there are cables that have to be buried, and it’s getting crowded out there. There are places where people are having to make some sacrifices in the area of cell phone towers. Communities are finding themselves staring up at a big ugly cell phone tower in their neighborhood.

And so I think that, increasingly, communities are going to have to assess these costs of technology and mobility, along with their benefits, and ask whether this is what they really, really want for now and also for their children. Because that infrastructure lasts a long time.

DR. BREUNIG: Bill, what are the key cultural changes that you think are required in order to forge a new relationship, or perhaps a better relationship, or a different relationship? Or do we need to make any changes at all with respect to our relationship to the land?

DR. JORDAN: Well, that’s obviously a big question. But I think it’s interesting to consider it from the perspective provided by the work of ecological restoration.

I pointed out that environmentalism has been very slow to adopt restoration even as a strategy for conservation. But we are doing that now, and I think that bodes extremely well for the future. I think, however, that to really get over the watershed here into a world where we can really think of ourselves as citizens of the land community, we are going to have to come to terms with some things that half a century ago our environmental thinkers consistently overlooked. Leopold wrote that we must learn to think of ourselves as "plain members" of the land community, and I think that’s a good idea insofar as Leopold was trying to emphasize that we are, in fact, members of a land community.

But I think there’s a danger in placing too much emphasis on the plainness of our citizenship. For one thing, we aren’t really all that plain. For better or worse, we are peculiar—or at least strikingly distinctive—in certain ways. And for another, all species are like that. They are all peculiar and distinctive—different from all other species.

Those differences matter. And they can be troubling—think, for example, of the "difference" between a predator and its prey, and the "political" implications of that.

We talk about diversity and about celebrating differences. But we usually celebrate differences only when they don’t really make a difference—when they don’t hurt, as we do when we paper over the difference between ourselves and other species, telling ourselves that we are just "plain citizens" like all the rest.

I think that in celebrating difference and change, and the prospect of communion, as a writer like Thomas Berry does, we overlook the difficulty and the pain involved in this. And I would say that this is the great challenge for us today—to face up to the fact that communion and beauty and meaning are not easy and natural, but actually require hard cultural and emotional work.

From what little I know of the arts, theology, and anthropology—the disciplines of relationship—there’s no reason to think that these things are easy or that they ever have been. And I think a fundamental assumption of our culture way back, hundreds of years, at least to the Enlightenment, is that it is easy.

There’s an amazing account of this in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which the savage comes to the world controller and says he has been reading an old copy of Shakespeare, and that it’s amazing, wonderful stuff. This is beautiful—tragic and beautiful. Why don’t you do this stuff? he asks. And the world controller says, pityingly, You don’t understand. That’s beauty. We don’t have beauty. We have happiness.

Of course, what Huxley meant by "happiness" in the context of Brave New World was a horrible life of emotional convenience, of sexual promiscuity, of shooting up on drugs, of getting everything you wanted.

This idea—that beauty and happiness are antithetical, and that beauty is a higher value than happiness, and is gained at the expense of happiness—I think is something that we’re going to want to explore. If we don’t, then I think we may not get—or deserve—beauty, or community, but something more like the world controller’s "happiness." The kind of community and beauty we’re going to have is going to be as different from what those words used to mean—to Shakespeare, to the Australian Aborigines, and the pre-modern people generally—as "cool" in the suburbs is different from "cool" where it begins, in the ghetto, where it was invented, out of a kind of grim necessity, to make your way in the world.

Conclusion

Robert Breunig

The topic of the 2001 proceedings of the Texas Philosophical Society was "The Land." Speakers were selected to address various issues related to the land. Inspired by the familiar saying that "Texans love their land," I asked keynote speaker Laura Jackson to address the question "What does it mean to love the land?"

During the Sunday summary session I asked our panel of speakers and audience members to address an additional question: What key cultural changes—if any—are needed if we are to love our land in a way that restores rather than diminishes its health and beauty as well as its ecological well-being? What follows is a synthesis of comments from that session and my own closing comments on these two questions.
At the start of the summary discussions, speaker Bill Jordan spoke to the issue of cultural changes that could benefit the land. In considering what it means to be, in Aldo Leopold’s words, "a plain citizen of the land community," Jordan explored the idea that being a "citizen of the land community" is not necessarily "plain" or easy. Jordan observed that it takes hard cultural and emotional work to become a citizen in "communion" with nature, a citizen who values beauty above happiness. "Beauty is a value higher than happiness," Jordan noted, and one that includes pain as well as pleasure.

I would contend that within such a concept of beauty lies an understanding that the many features and forces of the natural landscape—rock, soils, water, plants, animals, precipitation, fires, floods, and predation—relate to each other as a functional whole. These forces of nature can be harsh, even deadly, but at the same time beautiful in that each plays a part in the whole of creation. This leads to the deeper understanding that what affects one aspect of nature also affects the whole.

In turn this deeper understanding suggests that our culture must learn to value the rest of nature as much as we value ourselves. A cultural change in how we define "community" is needed. We must extend the notion of community to include all life forms that live in the place we inhabit. For if we persist in defining community as only our human community, we will continue to destroy the rest of creation around us—and ultimately threaten our own existence.

Keynote speaker Laura Jackson, in her remarks during the summary discussions, stressed that we must assess the environmental costs of our technologies, including those of food production, mobility, and connectivity. Jackson suggested that we change our economic culture by adding these costs to the price of goods and services sold. For example, in food production the post-World War II "green revolution"—with its extensive use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides and the widespread clearing and conversion of land, crop cultivation, and drainage of wetlands—costs us heavily in soil erosion, water pollution, and human health. To cite just one result, pollution from croplands and livestock operations carried by the Mississippi River is the primary cause behind an oceanic "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, which now covers 8,000 square miles—an area larger than the state of New Jersey. In mobility and connectivity our technologies bring additional pollution and land fragmentation, also costing much in terms of esthetics. Roads mar and fragment the American landscape and contribute to sprawl. Jackson pressed the issue: At what point do we say the damage is enough? Can we begin to think in terms of consolidating the infrastructure and impacts of technology and connectivity rather than proliferating them? Can we convert the "green revolution" in agriculture into a new revolution based on sustainable growing practices?

During the discussion session member Jerry Supple suggested that ethical investing is yet another required cultural change needed for the preservation of land. We as stockholders are demanding profits at the expense of the environment, Supple pointed out, and until we recognize and correct this, we are contributing to the degradation of our land and environment.

Speaker Parmesan and member Lloyd Lochridge each suggested that our culture should replace an era of conflict between environmentalists and developers with one of communication and compromise. In this shift, those who seek to protect and conserve the land would form relationships and alliances with those who seek to develop it. In this new era, both sides would seek a better understanding of the other’s perspectives and concerns: developers would realize that good environmental policies can be good business, and environmentalists would realize that land preservation becomes more feasible in a strong economy.

The summary discussion session entailed lively comment about the need for public access to natural land and about stewardship of land in public versus private hands. Jackson encouraged us to include rural communities in the picture and to remember that land preservation is not only about preserves and parks for urban dwellers. Public policies that enable people to make a living by owning land and farming it sustainably, or by starting rural businesses rather than sprawling into new suburbs, can also contribute to preservation of open space and environmental quality.

Speakers Parmesan and Sansom agreed with Katherine Smith, Jerry Supple, and others in the audience that land is not necessarily better cared for when it is in the public domain. Some private landholders have proven to be excellent stewards of the land. However, there was a general consensus that public access to natural areas for coming generations will be key to the preservation of a land ethic. Terry Hershey expressed a concern that Texas is 50th in the nation in parkland per capita.

To ensure a future in which every Texan will have the opportunity to form a meaningful relationship with the land may require some deep changes in our thinking about settlement patterns, perhaps even a new "American Dream." Would it be possible for our culture to move from the American Dream of home ownership on a sizeable plot of land to a new concept that is sometimes referred to as "clustering"? This concept embraces more compact living patterns in exchange for the preservation of a healthy natural landscape with public access to natural areas.

Perhaps the biggest cultural change needed is the simple recognition that we are not in control of nature. While we have exerted great influences upon the forces and cycles of nature, we can now see that we are not in control of the consequences of this influence. For example, widespread use of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s led to one of the first realizations of this fact and nearly cost the extinction of many bird species, including the American bald eagle. More recently, air and thermal pollution are understood to be responsible for a global warming pattern that is predicted to erode biodiversity, diminish crop yields, flood shorelines, and bring about other undesirable outcomes long into the future.

We need to recognize our dependence on a healthy landscape that is ecologically whole. And we need to learn to work with nature rather than in opposition to nature to maintain a healthy landscape. Such a landscape will be diverse, containing the full spectrum of plant and animal species representative of its region. Such a landscape will function to provide clean water, clean air, and the continued accumulation of fertile soil needed for both wildlife and human populations.

The proceedings were marked by a general consensus that the education of children will be key to any cultural changes we desire to effect in support of a genuine love of the land. Children need to learn about place in a very deep way—through a kind of learning that isn’t happening today. Just as children learn all the other essential survival skills, such as reading, math, science, and social skills, so too is knowledge of one’s own place on earth an essential skill—to know the landscape, its watershed, soils, plants, animals, and the relationships among all these things. For example, because plants form the foundation of life for animals and people, our culture needs to educate our children and all of our citizens about the unique plant heritage of each and every place. It is best to learn these things firsthand, through direct experience. Future generations of Texans, if the current trend of estrangement from the land persists, will have no concept of what a natural landscape is about.

In summary, loving the land is not solely about valuing the land as an economic resource, though that is of course part of why we value it. Those of us who make our living by farming and ranching or in forestry, mining, and other activities may especially value land for its economic benefits. Beyond this, there is an emotional attachment to the land that leads to a deep concern for its future, for its character, its soil, its water, and all the things that live upon it. This kind of love is rooted in a deep connection to the land, in an intimate knowledge of the land.

How will Texans of the future be able to love the land if it is a land they don’t see and have access to, a land they don’t walk upon? If we want future generations to love the land as our ancestors did, we will have to take an approach to education and cultural experience that is different from the one our culture is taking today. We will have to find a way to re-instill in ourselves and our children a deep understanding similar to that known to people who lived directly off the land, but also informed by our increased understanding of the biological sciences and ecology.

At the end of the day we must ask ourselves: Can a Texan be a Texan if he or she does not know the land and love the land? It is a proposition for all Texans to ponder.