2024 Interview on Sustainability between Pando, John Cobb, and Mary Elizabeth Moore

“The Temptation of St. Anthony,” Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516). Fire threatens to rage over the landscape in a scene populated by strange and eerie creatures. Image courtesy of the Rijks Museum.

Living in strange times

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by Pando Populus | Jan. 21, 2024

We try to sit down with Pando’s founding Chair John Cobb as often as we can to talk about the big ideas related to creating a more sustainable world. This time we invited Mary Elizabeth Moore to the conversation. Held over Zoom, and edited for clarity and length, this discussion focuses on doing purposeful work in difficult times, and the philosophical assumptions it implies.

John Cobb has been called the most significant philosophical theologian of our time and is the leading authority on the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and chair of Pando’s Board of Directors.

Mary Elizabeth Moore is Professor Emerita of Theology and Education and Dean Emerita of the School of Theology, Boston University. She is vice chair of the Cobb Institute Board of Directors, in Claremont, CA where she lives in retirement.

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Pando: If I had an artist’s gift, I’d paint our reality today like Hieronymus Bosch painted his five centuries ago, only more bizarre and twisted.

We live in frightening times. How should this affect the work in sustainability that we do? How can it not? At any rate, at what point is it only prudent to give up on change-making and hide under a rock?

I don’t want to sound unduly pessimistic, but who can read the newspaper without asking these questions?

John Cobb: Every year as things get worse, more people say we must act. At this moment, I think our responsibility is to fulfill our calling to do what we feel is right.

For example, last year, I felt called to do something about US-China relations. I believe that there is no possibility of making the changes that need to be made in the human relationship to the planet, physical planet, unless the United States and China work together. It’s about the cooperation of the two major countries.

Mary Elizabeth, your thoughts?

Mary Elizabeth Moore: I appreciate the way John approaches the question through the China-U.S. relations lens and the larger geopolitical situation. For many, however, the demands for survival are so immediate that looking at the large geopolitical picture is challenging and can lead downhill to despair that undercuts any kind of movement toward ecological justice.

We hear the term “ecological justice” a lot, but what do you mean by it?

I’m not only talking about justice for poor communities that are affected by ecological damage. I’m also talking about justice for the trees and the rivers and the rocks. I think to be drawn into that, we need a radical cultural change. My own attention has been focused on cultural change of this kind.

I believe that if we’re going to give our best to reversing and repairing and protecting what’s left, we need to work in several directions at one time and I think what John’s proposing is a very important direction.

Where do you put your own energies with an ecological justice focus in mind?

I have cast my energies into working on smaller projects and cultural change in local communities – taking that route for larger and global impact.

Describing the beginnings of the environmental movement, Vandana Shiva wrote that when small communities around the world started to take note of and discover other small communities working towards similar goals around the globe, the environmental movement really took off.

Local work can seem small potatoes. But the idea of communities of communities linking together can create serious impact.

Yes, and this is why I find the work Pando does to be so extremely hopeful. It may not be changing the world in an instant, but it does spread ideas and projects which are networked together and have the effect of building a new kind of culture. I’m convinced that that is one very important way to go.

Do you think that the local approach to change-making has had much of an effect on how this kind of work is done?

Yes, and we can see this even in the work of the United Nations. Instead of the United Nations taking their own experts around, as they used to do so much of, they are beginning to bring the local experts together to present to one another. And then they work on problems together. And to me, that is an extremely important reversal of culture. Expertise is being drawn from people who are passionate and are working on ecological protection and change and reparation in their own communities. And they’re learning from one another how to do it, and so the work they’re doing is spreading. It’s very effective.

I think that a big part of this approach is that it’s only in local settings that we learn to listen and observe and touch and feel all of creation. So it’s not just learning from diverse human communities what we need to do, but it’s also learning from the trees and the ants and the other animals and the ways they work together, collaborate.

But, if we ignore a more global approach, can’t we get lost in just caring for our own survival? Surely, even at a local level, we need to maintain a global outlook.

I think it’s too easy to separate the local and global – even in drawing from the wisdom of plants and animals.

I know this is a little far out, but take in the fact that ants are the largest species in the world. Collectively, the weight of ants is more than half of the weight of all other animals, including humans, put together. And, they’re spread all over the world.

I use that as an example because to learn from ants is to attend to the global phenomenon of ants, not just the local. Everything, including what’s done locally, is affected by policies that are not only local but global.

My concern is to develop and to learn from the diverse local communities and aspects of creation in order to develop policies that are protective and reparative as much as possible.

And then where the, where things fail at the policy level, and the threats just seem insurmountable, then I think you’re also saying that a local focus at least forms a foundation for resilience – community resilience – to some extent, right?

And it provides a site for mourning. Mourning is a very important part of what needs to happen. If we don’t feel the destruction, we’re not going to be inspired to do anything about it. It’s important.

John, let’s get you back in on this. There was an issue brought up by Alfred North Whitehead at the Apostles club when he was a student at Cambridge in the 19th century. The club was for intellectual discussion, with different topics each week. The topic for one week was, “Shall we beat our heads against brick walls?” and Whitehead answered yes. And then defended it.

Whenever I think of the work any of us are doing on these issues, I think of beating our heads against brick walls. It can feel that way.

But are we really called to beat our heads against brick walls? If so, how do you defend it to everyone who doesn’t want to end up with a very sore head?

John Cobb: Living in history and taking a moral stand inevitably means you’re going to wind up with a sore head one way or another. What that means is that you have to ground a notion of going up against great odds with some sense that in doing so, you’re on the side of what’s right and good and beautiful – and that those values are actually meaningful and real. It’s hard to maintain the courage you need without some sense that the universe is on your side – that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” as the Rev. Martin Luther King put it.

I think that the modernization of the university is one of the major causes of our having lost the ability to think about important matters and ground them. The university holds the ideal of value-free education, but in the absence of values, money fills the void – and education becomes just a tool to make more money. Where that’s the case, it becomes divorced from its true mission – which is serving the common good and trying to do something about the problems that loom on the horizon.

You make this critique as a person whose life was in the university, as a professor. This is true for both of you, of course.

When I single out the university for criticism I am really trying to focus on some key issues that might make a difference quickly because I don’t think we have much time,historically speaking. And on a positive note, I think that the universities are more open to being transformed than they have been for a long, long time.

If the university system were to collectively decide that its job is to save the world, it can go beyond what any other institution of civil society has done. If the enormous resources of the university were rightly used, it could make a rather quick difference.

So that if we have five or ten years before we have to say it really is too late on many important fronts, the transformation of the university may be what we should be working on.

Mary Elizabeth, I’m sure you’d love to break in here.

As John knows, my views of the university are different from his. I have the same ideals, but I see much more of those ideals being embodied in universities than he does.

I have been in higher education for 40 years now and in actual universities for 20. I see what universities are doing that matches what John is saying. And not just in the last two or three years, but I’ve seen it for the 20 years that I’ve been in universities, and before that as well. I’ve had very few colleagues who value learning just for the sake of learning or as its own endpoint, but see higher education as a powerful engine for good.

I would love to go a step further and say, what are the metaphysical assumptions that really are necessary for us to make in order to, as Whitehead put it, continue to hit our heads against brick walls in an effort to bring about change?

I am fearful that we’re in a culture in which even talking about those metaphysical assumptions is so out of fashion. But we’re living in a time when, in fact, without making those assumptions and without discussing them explicitly, we’re really handicapped in our ability to respond to the historical situation we’re in.

I’m curious how either one of you would both respond to that.

The modern dominant metaphysics is a major obstacle. Even so, nobody believes it. I haven’t found anybody who really thinks they are robots.

You’re talking about a materialistic view of the universe where the purposes and meanings we experience and the values we treasure aren’t given the status as being really real — but something we add onto reality, like some sort of decoration to an otherwise material world. But if these things aren’t really real, then it’s hard to think of ourselves as being more than an assemblage of nuts and bolts — or zombies or robots, as you put it, at the end of the day.

But unfortunately, that’s what we teach for the most part.

You’re referencing the fact that metaphysics has no place generally speaking in a discussion of physics at the university.

And physics holds the status as defining what’s most real among academic disciplines.

One approach is to confront the matter head-on, as philosophy might do. Or…

If we can talk about the world as one in a crisis that human beings have contributed to making happen, and then focus our attention on what needs to be done, I think we still have hope. And, I am seeing this hope in Pando and beyond.

How so?

Well, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has recognized that, because climate change is so urgent, we should no longer be neutral when discussing it.

This is a very prestigious academic association, of which you’re a member, saying that education should not be value-free when it comes to the climate.

I also was very interested when the announcement was made of the new president of Columbia University. It was said she had just written a book about values. I have no idea what’s in that book. But the simple fact of it said to me, the climate in higher education is changing. Writing a book about values is now a good thing for an academician to do. Even for getting a good job. I was writing on ethics at a time when doing so kept you at the margins.

So, I’m really hopeful that we can say we made a mistake in thinking that reason – which is simply the accumulation of facts and arguments from facts about facts – could be separated from questions of purpose, value, and life.

Education should grow out of human experience, and experience doesn’t separate facts from values but embraces the whole of life.

Mary Elizabeth?

I would add that the ability to have those conversations has been fueled by years, even decades, of action in that direction. And, I think the kinds of projects that Pando does, the kinds of projects that local communities do – these are actions that often are what open people to talking about the issues in a larger form and writing about values and higher education and so forth.

In the ‘90s, Jay Lifton discovered that the people who were least depressed and least ready to give up on peace were those who were active in the peace movement in some form. And some research has taken place over the years since then has reinforced what Lifton discovered. And that is the kind of action that needs to happen in order for people to have avenues to express their passions and their concerns, and also avenues for people to be open to and explore the metaphysical questions.

I love the connection between action and hope. But Mary Elizabeth, how do you ultimately ground your hope? Action is presumably part of that, but what metaphysical grounding keeps you from just, you know, giving up?

Mary Elizabeth: First, I understand hope is a choice, not an attitude. Optimism is an attitude, but hope is a decision to look for the possibilities.

I’m very much influenced by Alfred North Whitehead and the understanding that the world is always in relationship and is always in process. It is always moving so that no moment is the endpoint, and we’re never going to reach an endpoint. But every moment contributes to the potential of the next moments that are coming, and that potential is so important for the salvation of the world.

You cannot guarantee what the future is going to be. But you can contribute to the potential for flourishing, the potential for justice, the potential for the well-being of all creation.

And I think that is our duty as beings, not just as human beings. Animals and plants have their duties that come out of their natural ways of being.

Each of us doing our part to build potential, where we can. It’s a beautiful articulation you’ve offered.

I will add one other thing. The theologians who’ve written on hope have almost always written on that subject out of dire circumstances. Out of having been in life and death circumstances where not only would their lives personally be threatened, but they saw the whole world or the whole culture being threatened. And the urgency that that brought led them to seek hope.

Jurgen Moltmann is an example. But there are so many examples of this. Hope has been a major theme among Latin American liberation theologians. It’s been a major theme among many feminist, womanist, Mujerista, theologians and so forth. Because it’s a necessity in order to seek ways that open possibilities for something better.

John, you’re a philosopher and philosophical theologian, how do you ground the work you do?

John Cobb: I will talk specifically about God.

I think that if reality as a whole has no values, no preferences, and if nothing contributes intentionally to the survival of valuable things or cares about the increase of values and so forth and so on, then I think it is very difficult to find grounds for hope or to ground any of the work we aim to do.

But if we believe that there is that which favors values – and I think there’s all kinds of scientific evidence actually today that the universe favors life – I think that gives some assurance that even if we humans have a very hard time imagining how we can get from where we are to where we need to be, that there is something else working in that direction.

If we can really open ourselves to its guidance, we have no way of knowing what’s possible. So to me, that’s very important.

To the contrary, I think that value-free thinking of the kind that so much of education has tried to encourage, accompanied by the notion that everything that happens is predetermined in a material world, is not a context in which hope can emerge or be sustained for long.

A final question for you both, given all you know about the state of the world and what you’ve said above: if you were the parent of a young child working for the common good in a major metropolitan area, or would you pick up and flee – to some nice, quiet place? Or would you stay put? If the world were going to hell anyway, why not try to carve out a pleasant niche someplace where it’s not quite as bad?

I haven’t given that any thought. I think I’d just stay with the world as it went to hell.

If there are possibilities of helping a city become more self-sufficient, I think that’s very important. And smaller cities probably have a better shot at that, than the bigger ones.

Frankly, even though I talk about surviving a lot…

Planetary survival, civilizational survival, species…

…yes, at this juncture in my life, I personally have no interest in surviving. I’m ready to go.

Mary Elizabeth, how do you respond?

I think it’s a wonderful question – do we head for the hills or do we stay and do the work we feel called to do, with hope? And I think it begs another question, Why? Why would you head for the hills or why would you stay where you are if you’re in a city? Or why would you move to a big city if you’re not already there? I think the why is the bottom line question, and you framed it originally in terms of rearing children.

I think that a family might ask, in what environment can we contribute the most and can we help our children grow in the most thoughtful and full ways to love the Earth and all the peoples and creatures on it? And, I think you can do that in the middle of a city, and you can do it in a rural area, and you can abuse it in either. I think it’s really a matter of calling and preferences, but the real question is, how can we live in this place in a way that contributes to flourishing?

I have friends who, when they retired, moved and a couple who before they retired, moved into a rural area and are developing the capacity to live off the grid. Some have already accomplished that and I completely admire that. It hasn’t been my calling but I think it’s beautiful when people do that. I also see how people live in cities, crowded cities, in ways that are really caring for the earth and other peoples and are really making a difference in the world.

And I think maybe the best example is the indigenous people who choose to live in their tribal communities, or their nation’s communities, because that keeps them in touch with their roots, their traditions, their ways of life that are more conducive to the survival and thriving of the planet.

And I think those are all good decisions and different people will make different ones. If it were not for those people, the indigenous people who make those choices, we would be impoverished as a nation in terms of thinking ecologically, because of what comes out of those communities. So for those people who’ve made that choice, that is just a huge gift to the rest of us.

I would hope that people who make other choices are making a similar kind of gift out of their own choices, because cities can be extraordinarily humane. And they can also be extraordinarily destructive. They’re usually a mix of everything. But you can make a good life for the planet and the beings on it in the middle of a very busy city, as well as in the countryside.

It was truly a pleasure. Thank you both.

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Wendell Berry: The Cranky Farmer, Poet and Essayist You Just Can't Ignore

Wendell Berry reads one of his poems from at the 2014 Festival of Faiths. (Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

Wendell Berry: the cranky farmer, poet

and essayist you just can’t ignore

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by James T. Keane

December 07, 2021

A writing project for America’s Advent reflection series last week gave me occasion to revisit a favorite poem (“IX”) by an author who knows more than most about seasons, both liturgical and agricultural: Wendell Berry. Now 87 years old, this man of many labels (Is he a farmer? A novelist? An environmental activist? An essayist? A poet? A cultural critic? A cranky old professor? A Christian prophet?) has been a voice of practical reason and concise cultural commentary in his more than 80 books published over six decades.

My own first encounter with Wendell Berry’s writings was not through his poetry, but his essays. It came in college, when a philosophy professor (now retired, he recently ran for governor of California; philosophy professors rule) assigned Another Turn of the Crank, Berry’s book of five essays on the global economy, health care, forest preservation, private property and wealth and ecology. In a 1995 review for America, Patrick Samway, S.J., wrote that “all of these essays address the mind and heart with the same forcefulness and clarity as the writings of Annie Dillard, Henry David Thoreau or Wallace Stegner.” To that august list I think I would add distributists like Peter Maurin and G. K. Chesterton and early Garry Wills (included here mostly so I could write “early Garry Wills”), but at the time my college-student reaction was a simple one: Did Wendell Berry just leap off the page and hit me over the head with a fencepost?

"My reaction was a simple one: Did Wendell Berry just leap off the page and hit me over the head with a fencepost?"

The writing was lyrical but commonsensical and practical. Berry, who had returned decades before to the farming life of his childhood and was an advocate for time-tested agrarian living, drove home the point that the United States had been built on certain principles - 

respect for the land, shared small communities and economies, the handing down of tried and true traditions and lifestyles, an assumption that a life of faith was a natural one, a management of resources that allowed for seasonal cycles

- that were all being abandoned, sacrificed to the gods of technological innovation, individualism, commercialism and unfettered capitalism.

I argued in my final paper for the class that Berry was right, but his solution was wrong: The only solution was Christian Marxism. (Can it be there was only one year I was 21? It must have been a long one then.) In sharp, practical prose reminiscent of Berry himself, the professor tore my essay apart. But I still remember the book well.

If you ask Berry’s many fans, that slim volume isn’t usually among their favorites. Berry first made his bones with his poetic works of the 1960s and 1970s, like The Broken Ground (1964), and many environmentalists and distributists hold dear his 1977 collection of essays, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. His novels—the first, Nathan Coulter, was published in 1960—have their own fans, and you can usually find them gravitating toward his “Port William novels” like Hannah Coulter (2004) or Jayber Crow (2000). (Keep your ears peeled next time you’re at the farmer’s market—one chance in 12 that guy selling you homemade mead named his son Jayber.)

"Keep your ears peeled next time you’re at the farmer’s market—one chance in 12 that guy selling you homemade mead named his son Jayber."

In a 2019 review for America of What I Stand On, a husky two-volume anthology of Berry’s writing edited by Jack Shoemaker, Jon Sweeney identified exactly when he became a Wendell Berry enthusiast: at the age of 16. The owner of a bookstore in the suburbs of Chicago that Sweeney haunted as a teenager gave him two of Berry’s books, The Wheel (a book of poems) and Recollected Essays, and said “I think you should get to know this author.” Sweeney did her one better, becoming so obsessed with Berry’s writings that he decided a few years later to undertake an impromptu pilgrimage to Berry’s farm in Port Royal, Ky. Alas, Berry wasn’t home, but it didn’t dampen Sweeney’s enthusiasm for his writings.

  

“There is always movement in Wendell Berry’s sentences. He writes about what he has experienced, what he has learned, and always with humility for what he does not know. The natural world is his primary teacher: its rhythms, its largesse, its mysteries,” Sweeney wrote:

“And in the essays, the natural world often reflects how change in humans is also natural, inexplicable and possible. I think this is what many who love his writing appreciate most about Berry, whether they realize it or not. For his Christian readers, this becomes an expansion of what we understand as conversion.”

The focus on conversion can seem a bit ironic in Berry’s case, because at first glance he doesn’t seem to be much of a fan of change in general. “He frequently questions society’s attempts to improve things, modernize or make ways of living more efficient. Those words—improve, modernize, efficient—might as well be in quotation marks whenever they appear in a Berry essay. He doubts them consistently,” Sweeney continued.

There were moments in the anthology where Berry made Sweeney’s hackles rise: “He is not always right. Any essayist worth reading will anger and annoy you from time to time. Berry can be cranky.” On the other hand, “his wisdom, and his call to better habits, is too essential. To ignore Wendell Berry is like trying to ignore your grandmother: You just can’t.”

“There is always movement in Wendell Berry’s sentences. He writes about what he has experienced, what he has learned, and always with humility for what he does not know."

Two years before Sweeney’s review, Anna Keating wrote a review for America on Laura Dunn’s new documentary, “Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry.” In the film, an 83-year-old Berry “reads his essays in a Southern drawl over images of his working farm, the land he and his family have cultivated in Kentucky for five generations. He and his wife returned to this land after graduate school, in search of home and sense of place or, as William Faulkner once called it, ‘significant soil,’” Keating wrote.

The filmmakers never interview Berry on camera; rather, they try to take viewers into Berry’s world: “You hear the sound of footsteps as an unseen person walks through the hills or around the farm. You get to know some of the people Berry loves: his wife and collaborator, Tanya, his daughter, Mary, and his fellow farmers, both industrial, subsistence and organic.”

Berry, Keating wrote, “is an advocate of small farms, rural communities and Judeo-Christian values like kindness, all of which have been harmed by ‘get big or get out’ industrial agriculture. His life and work bear witness to the fact that it is never Christian to say, ‘I can do whatever I want with my own land’ or ‘my own body.’ We are stewards, not owners. What’s more, the attitude of ‘I can do whatever I want’ is toxic to earth and water, family and community.”

Keating owns a small business with her husband, and has a particular interest both in Catholic social teaching and in distributist writers, including the aforementioned Chesterton and Maurin but also Hilaire Belloc and Dorothy Day. She defined distributism as a way of thinking that “seeks to unite what has been separated, labor and capital, through the ownership of small businesses and farms or through the ownership of tools and a trade or through participation in a guild, so that wealth is not consolidated in the hands of a few wealthy individuals (capitalism) or in the hands of the state (socialism).” She found that the life Wendell Berry has created and the views he espouses “both are in line with this vision and can prove helpful to Catholics, serving as an antidote to the many ills of our time.”

There’s plenty more in the America archives on Wendell Berry, including this 2009 appreciation by fellow writer-farmer Kyle T. Kramer and this 2017 interview by Sean Salai of Berry’s daughter Mary, the executive director of the Berry Center in New Castle, Ky., a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the legacy of her father.

"His life and work bear witness to the fact that it is never Christian to say, ‘I can do whatever I want with my own land’ or ‘my own body.’ We are stewards, not owners."

 - James T. Keane, Senior Editor at America

The Seer: A Portrait of Wendell Berry - Movie Clip

May 25, 2016

#MSPIFF: Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry

Mar 30, 2017

The Berry Center:

A Present Day Iteration of the Producer's Program

Sep 27, 2016

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2335444/

A Timbered Choir

by Wendell Berry

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,

for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake

of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.

Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned

at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories

where the machines were made that would drive ever forward

toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw

the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;

I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.

I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered

footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments

of those who had died in pursuit of the objective

and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according

to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget

that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective

as if nobody ever had pursued it before.

The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.

the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free

to sell themselves to the highest bidder

and to enter the best paying prisons

in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,

which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects,

which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress,

to the completed sale, to the signature

on the contract, which was to clear the way

to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home

would ever get there now, for every remembered place

had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.

Every place had been displaced, every love

unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant

to make way for the passage of the crowd

of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless

with their many eyes opened toward the objective

which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,

having never known where they were going,

having never known where they came from.

Wendell Berry

Ecological Civilization - Red China is Turning Green

Urban background solar panels, Shanghai, China. | Photo: iStock

BEIJING, CHINA

Red China is turning green

https://asiatimes.com/2019/02/RED-CHINA-IS-TURNING-GREEN/ 

In the rush to modernize, China neglected its environment, but now its growing middle class is demanding environmental responsibility.

by Jan Krikke

February 25, 2019

“Even an entire society, a nation or all simultaneously existing societies taken together are not owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of households].” – Karl Marx, Das Capital, Vol 3

China is a country of big numbers. Every year it has between 80,000 and 180,000 “public disturbances.” The government stopped releasing most protest statistics several years ago, when the annual number of “mass incidents” surpassed 100,000. Among these incidents are many environmental protests against heavy-metal pollution, dangerous chemicals, toxic waste, and pipelines, while corrupt bureaucrats playing footsie with environmental regulations. The Chinese government routinely condemns the protests, but it is often forced to react to the “will of the people.”

In one celebrated case, the authorities in the industrial city of Dalian ordered the immediate shutdown of a controversial chemical plant after thousands of people took to the streets to protest. In the Sichuan city of Shifang, thousands of residents rioted for three days against the proposed construction of a molybdenum-copper-alloy plant. After police arrested several protesters, residents besieged city hall demanding their release. The next day, the city announced that it would scrap plans to build the plant. Similar incidents have been reported throughout China.

Most protests are organized spontaneously on social media. They lack an obvious leader, making it hard for the government to arrest “ringleaders.”

Even documentaries on environmental issues can shame the government into taking action. Last year Chinese cinematographer Wang Jiuliang produced Plastic China, a documentary on China’s import of waste from mostly Western countries. The movie went viral on the Internet after having been shown at the Sundance Film Festival. Chinese authorities blocked Internet access to the movie, but a few days later, the country banned all import of foreign waste.

Plastic China | Trailer | Available Now

Jun 7, 2017

Journeyman Pictures

A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste.

Sundance-Selected Documentary Plastic China available on:

• iTunes: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/movie...
• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Plastic-China-...
• Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/plasticchina
• Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/movies/...

For downloads and more information visit:

http://www.journeyman.tv/film/7020 

Wang Jiuliang: Besieged by waste

Aug 8, 2011

China Daily Global

Between 2008 and 2010, he visited more than 460 landfills around Beijing and took about 10,000 photos. In 2011, his first documentary film about waste, Beijing Besieged by Waste, showed audiences the state of waste pollution in Beijing. Wang Jiuliang is a 34-year-old photographer who spent all of his money to document the landfills around Beijing and draw people's attention to problems caused by waste. In an interview with China Daily, Wang talked about his experience shooting the documentary and his opinion about waste pollution and consumption behavior.

In the rush to modernize, China neglected its environment. Now that it has lifted 700 million people out of poverty and raised living standards dramatically, people start demanding clean air, clean water and clean food. The middle class in China’s large urban centers have started to embrace organic farming after a series of food scandals that included bacteria-infected vegetables, melamine-injected milk, counterfeit baby formula, and pollution-poisoned fish.

Throughout China, farmers are reverting to traditional farming methods without modern fertilizers. Farmers in Huinan county, Jilin province, raised 5,000 ducks in rice fields, feeding them on grass and prawns. It eliminated the needs for manual weeding and chemical pesticides. In southern China, farmers discovered that a native breed of spiders leaves webs among the vegetables and feed on hard-to-detect whiteflies, eliminating the need for harmful insecticides. Grass that co-exists with crops functions as a regulating factor of the microclimate by keeping the soil humid. Farmers on the outskirts of Shanghai found that trees, bushes, grass, insects, birds and cattle can co-exist. They are turning their farms into natural habitat.

Ecological civilization

President Xi Jinping has also jumped on the green bandwagon. In a major change in government policy, he announced that the country would pursue an “ecological civilization” to ensure “harmony between human and nature.” Sounding like a true Taoist, Xi added:

“We, as human beings, must respect nature, follow its ways, and protect it. The government will encourage simple, moderate, green, and low-carbon ways of life, and oppose extravagance and excessive consumption.”

He added that the government would “step up efforts to establish a legal and policy framework that facilitates green, low-carbon, and circular development, promote afforestation, strengthen wetland conservation and restoration and take tough steps to stop and punish all activities that damage the environment.”

Xi’s speech could have been written by John B Cobb Jr, an American theologian, philosopher and environmentalist who is highly influential in China. Cobb is the pre-eminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology that emphasizes ecological interdependence – the idea that every part of the ecosystem is reliant on all the other parts. His ideas have resonated with Chinese thinkers. Cobb is co-founder the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California, which now has 30 academic institutions throughout the world, 23 of which are in China. Cobb has taken a leadership role in bringing process thought to the East, most specifically to help China develop a more ecological civilization. This goal is now written into China’s constitution.

Several years ago, while China’s ecological crisis was making global headlines, Cobb sounded a contrarian note. “The hope of ecological civilization lies in China,” he said, pointing at four factors that give China unique advantages to realize its goal.

First, China has a long tradition of emphasizing the harmony of nature and humanity, which has enabled Chinese civilization to survive for thousands of years.

Second, unlike the US, China still has thousands of traditional villages and hundreds of millions of farmers who continue doing small intensive and meticulous farming.

Third, China’s political system is able to mobilize massive social forces to cope with major crises such as the ecological one.

Fourth, the Chinese government has shown its determination to create an ecological civilization by writing this goal into both the party’s constitution in 2012 and China’s national constitution in 2018.

Greening the planet

Cobb could have added that China is now the world’s largest player in clean-energy development. The country makes 60% of the world’s solar panels and surpassed Germany in 2015 as the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic energy. In January it pledged to invest US$367 billion in renewable power generation – solar, wind, hydro and nuclear – by 2020. The investment will add about 10 million jobs to the already existing 3.5 million jobs in the sector. China already produces nearly half of the world’s wind turbines, at a rate of about two every hour.

In 2017, China stopped or delayed work on 151 planned and under-construction coal plants, in response to flat-lining of demand for coal power. The affected coal power plants have a capacity equal to the combined operating capacity of Germany and Japan (95,000 megawatts) and cost around $60 billion. The boom in China’s renewable industry and a slowdown in energy demand has left China with hundreds of coal plants it doesn’t need. Newly increased targets for solar power, five times the current US capacity, will put more pressure on coal-fired plants.

China also plays a key role in the greening of the planet. Data from US National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellites have revealed an increase in global foliage. A research team studying NASA satellite images found that global green-leaf area has increased by 5% since the early 2000s, an area equivalent to all of the Amazon rainforests. At least 25% of that gain came in China, the result of its ambitious tree-planting programs. Overall, one-third of Earth’s vegetated lands are greening, while 5% are growing browner. The study was published on February 11 in the journal Nature Sustainability.

The Chinese government first used the term “ecological civilization” at the 17th Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2007. Growing environmental protests and China’s opportunity at global leadership in the renewable technology sector made the aim of ecological civilization a timely step. Xi noted that the focus on gross domestic product is a great obstacle to ecological civilization, adding,

“We shouldn’t judge one to be hero or not merely according to GDP. Instead, we should look at welfare improvement, social development and environmental indicators to evaluate leaders.”

Marx would have agreed. In 1844 he wrote: “Man lives on nature, [which] means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”

JAN KRIKKE

Jan Krikke is a former Japan correspondent for various media, former managing editor of Asia 2000 in Hong Kong, and author of Leibniz, Einstein, and China (2021). More by Jan Krikke

Wendell Berry - Essays on Thinking Green - Session 4 of 4

Amazon Link

"Here is a human being speaking with calm and sanity out of the wilderness. We would do well to hear him." —The Washington Post Book World

The Art of the Commonplace gathers twenty essays by Wendell Berry that offer an agrarian alternative to our dominant urban culture. Grouped around five themes—an agrarian critique of culture, agrarian fundamentals, agrarian economics, agrarian religion, and geobiography—these essays promote a clearly defined and compelling vision important to all people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary American culture.

Why is agriculture becoming culturally irrelevant, and at what cost? What are the forces of social disintegration and how might they be reversed? How might men and women live together in ways that benefit both? And, how does the corporate takeover of social institutions and economic practices contribute to the destruction of human and natural environments?

Through his staunch support of local economies, his defense of farming communities, and his call for family integrity, Berry emerges as the champion of responsibilities and priorities that serve the health, vitality and happiness of the whole community of creation.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Apr 26, 2016

* * * * * * * * *

• Week 1 - 9/9: "A Native Hill," "The Unsettling of America," "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," "Think Little"

• Week 2 - 9/16: "The Body and the Earth," "Men and Women in Search of Common Ground," "Health is Membership," "People, Land, and Community" 

• Week 3 - 9/23: "Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community," "Conservation and Local Economy," "Economy and Pleasure," "Two Economies," "The Whole Horse" 

• Week 4 - 9/30: "The Idea of a Local Economy," "Solving for Pattern," "The Gift of the Good Land," "Christianity and the Survival of Creation," "The Pleasures of Eating"

* * * * * * * * *

Prof. Michael Stevens, Ph.D

SESSION 4

WENDELL BERRY'S AGRARIAN ESSAYS

by Michael Stevens

Course: #12-The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, with Michael Stevens, 

Professor Stevens has revised the essays we will discuss this week:

Week 4 - 9/30: With regard to our final class period, we will finish “Conservation and Local Economy,” and then move quickly through “Economy and Pleasure” and “Two Economies”—finishing with: “Solving for Pattern,” and “The Gift of the Good Land.”

* * * * * * * * *

If any reader wishes to help me by editing the transcription below so that it may be

fitted into-and-around the graphics above it would be appreciated. Once done please 

email me with your work so that it may be published and replace what I have here

transcribed by actual lecture without edit. Thank you. - re slater

TRANSCRIPTION

by Michael Stevens

September 30, 2021

4.1

Unknown 0:11

Are, unlike people. He's going to also mention the courses teaching for us in the spring. So you know what that's going to be because of that window bear. So

Unknown 0:26

yeah, that's good. So, excellent. So, let's go prove it, so I guess I had gotten the word final word but write that down and we heard that directly from Sonia. So welcome everybody again it's such an incredible pleasure to do this, and I just, it's much on my mind I was just able to teach long follows poetry underneath a tree in front of the garden library, held my class out there, every Tuesday and Thursday, except one day so far this semester. And it's been great to be outside in science, so I'm in the mode when I come down here I've been outside. Although fans sitting under a tree for an hour and a half an hour trying to get up and needs to help me around and so it's kind of Route cinders, I don't know what time it is not an evergreen it's not thank God, but there's definitely barfing roots and so on. And so we're back and we're gonna take one more run and you know I, I guess I might apologize for, as I often do in my silibinin for an aggressive reading program that was probably overly aggressive for others. It was excitement on my part to get through all these essays and talk about it but of course once you start talking about one, then you're, it's hard to just fly through them, so I'm glad we didn't, so we'll see if we can make it through and I'm really hoping if I jump ahead a little bit here and skip over one of the ones that economy it's because I really want to get to the last two I gifted the good land, and solving repattern because I think those are sort of solution. If there's solutions to be had from window, they're kind of minimize there. So, if you are interested in coming around in the springtime, so I've made a plug for my colleague netvanta Philosophia to anything by Martin Spence my British colleague is awesome. He's great, great thinker, great guy. One thing I'll say about Mark maybe I didn't mention this is he was a neat one for like four weeks this summer. I think he had actually quarantined for the first few weeks there although his parents were there was a coordinate now, as it were, and then setting up a study rut. So I filled in as a surrogate American uncle, because his kids started really baseball, like my greatest achievement with his family is like get them to play baseball. Martin knows nothing about this. So Caleb I've seen him as like a kind of a third baseman sounds pretty good pull hitter and so on but I think the daughter Eleanor is playing T ball softball is really maybe the one who's got the scale and then there's the left handed daughter. You can turn her into a pitcher, you're gonna be in there's gonna be events, I'm working on it with the baseball. Baseball and softball. But doing three jobs. Next year 1922 1922 to 2022 is the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Wasteland TSLA it's really the signature poem of modernism. I did my dissertation work at the University of Dallas on TSLA it took me about four years to complete the thing. I feel the trauma, even as I speak of that but it's not it's done and gone it's done, it's done. And so I am really excited to bring TS Eliot's poetry, to the floor and as I mentioned, I think I may have mentioned one time here. His love letters to Emily Hale, the American woman who apparently was his first love, but they're never very nice are like four times over the course of 20, his letters to hurt were just recently released at Yale University where they had been kept in storage for 50 years after Emily Hales death. And I don't, it was during the COVID so I don't know if TS Eliot scholars are having their Harvey's on the parking lot waiting for this to happen so they could, they broke open the literal wooden boxes and brought out the letters, apparently they were kind of boring, so he's not really known as a love poet anyway you know but you know something new from TS Eliot and the whole world of scholarship. Heard letters to him he had destroyed. So, so he just got his love, but I didn't hear anything. Yeah, so we have one side of the story. So that I'm going to offer a course in Eliot's poetry which is really his ideas which are amazing in the middle of his poetic journey he has a conversion to Christianity, it's an extraordinary story in and of itself, and becomes sort of the foremost, we've got about four quartets before most kind of Christian they're approaching the planet century from a guy who was discovered to be the wasteland the skeptical agnostic, really struggling with any kind of hope. And then on the other side of that guy who wrote murder the theater on Four Quartets during magic that conversion narrative but from here, we'll see if we can finish up window with a bang. We left off. I'm already. I'm already having trouble with Sonia with advancing it with arrow keys. So, first, first error immediately should I see that go ahead and go back in.

Unknown 5:09

I'm sure it's not working, left or right. Huh, okay. Yeah, go ahead

Unknown 5:17

and stop sharing and then reshare. This guy's it's happening on my other one too. Okay, So I'm going to go back down to share screen again, a different view of everything here for a minute, everybody has a different view of everything. And we'll put this back up. And who knows why computers control our lives and, and, yeah, there we go, I leave it like that maybe is it safer to go to the me go here typically to this way. Yep, this is good. Okay, I'm gonna actually minimize this too, so. So we left off right about here, and you're just like, what do we do, we left off in the middle once again so we're, we're talking a little bit about the tragedy of colonialism, one of the great lines I had a student who a senior thesis essay in humanities on the colonisation of rural America kind of one of the very idea right that rural America has actually treated like a colony by the powers that be in corporate America. When he says, The Power of absence the economy wants national now International, that is without limited it's created without mercy and exploitation has come down to dwell on rural America, this kid wrote an amazing thesis, and actually decided to move back to NASA alone in Michigan up in northern where he was going to take the offer to become an assistant manager at McDonald's, they are where he worked throughout high school and during college breaks because he felt like he really wanted to. That was the center of that small community and community gardens, he wanted to try to make it the kind of place for philosophical dialogue, which I had not heard of McDonald's before doing that he had all kinds of amazing ideas and he was going for it and I was like, I need to really want to bring it because he said, I want to push back on rural America just this dying place when there's nothing I want to do it from the inside out starting in the McDonald's. Check in with him and Caleb, see how that's going. We see some hope present in the middle of that as Wendell says anyone who's driven through rural America rural Michigan right but the earth we have before us is still about being a beautiful day, you're just like this system, a wonderful thing. Let's not lay it to waste. We must learn again to see that present world for what it is to help of nature is the primary ground of hope. If we can find the wisdom and the ability to accept nature's our teachers that we see always right, the move, agriculture, culture, that how we treat the world around us the literal world in which we dwell in which we are a part of as organic beings right mammals and humans is how we're going to kind of treat each other at a kind of sociological level right there's a, there's a seem to be direct corollaries. But we see how lovely nature is and how, how rejuven Ettore it is, and we think we could, we could get to a better place rather than a worse place, think about that lecture last night about how do we get beyond the divides of America just divides of ideology and so on. Is there even a thought to get to another place that feels healthy to everybody right says, protect nature is our teacher those these divides can be overcome, as it were by seeing each other with humility and with a kind of propriety. As a fellow human being who deserves respect but also who can learn to listen into dialogue with me. You have no hope we're in trouble right but not have that help we're going to be in trouble so he keeps pushing back toward that. And then he says this and that we all we all know that there's a, you know, a sharp critique that almost eclipses hope and then he kind of pulls it out of the fire over and over again. I don't know, recognize failure might come division of true and lasting help and you're hoping so let's, let's hope it can happen. And he says it here, we face a choice that is starkly simple we must change or be change. If we fail to change for the better. We will be changed for the worse. We cannot blunder, our way of the health by the same sad and foolish chokes by which we've wandered into disease anybody who's tried to just like I'm just gonna start eating better and exercising so, you know, I blundered my way toward that several times I've never gotten there right you know, I have a plan and just kind of New Year's, New Year's resolution type of thing we won't work. We will see the standard list deeds of industrial communism and industrial capitalism, equally have failed. Now, when she wrote this still in the Cold War was, I won't say the Cold War was raging because it's kind of a rage and it's cold, right. But you know what the Soviet Union was attempting to become industrialized communism, alongside industrial capitalism and that the you know the West. I think social needs and research that there's a Nobel Prize address right they're equal, equally going to collapse right they're equally can be equally destructive as systems.

Unknown 10:03

So, the aims of productivity, profitability, efficiency limitless growth as well when it was powered unless mechanization and automation that can enrich and empower kids, and in some circles right even see that list and be like, yes, productivity, profitability, efficiency, you're at least growth in well there's not one of us girdle. Well, power would be seen as really destructive Wendell says sooner or later if that's where we're going, limitless is the word right, those things will ruin us all. When I heard on the radio that it's likely the last catch of fish in the Atlantic fishery Northland fisheries probably gonna be around 2050 And there's not going to be caught again. And then the last sustainable harvest on the topsoil, we still have on the Great Plains is within the lifetimes of our children. 25th the 22nd the last harvest before you have to completely reconstruct the opposite of their chemical means and so on, right, because it'll be depleted. I was just like well that's an electrode on my children and that's, that's scary, scary like okay we cut down trees and stuff we don't know our food. No more growing the food of our fish, who knows what's happened to you know industrial farming and the kind of diseases that can happen with that, that would devastate because of the unhealthy modes by which the worker produced, you're going to be people like my colleague Matt bonds are growing his heaven as animals and as farmers are suddenly going to become this nexus of like, he already finds he can't grow enough cows and pigs eat on a small scale or vegetables because so many people are worried about the safety of food. They want locally grown organic foods and just grass fed, things that they know where they came from and they know that they're not going to themselves be harmed by their own food. So I think that's kind of that's a direction of hope and I'm not saying that as a desperate sort of like get into the bomb shelter right but rather a direction of hope is that we had a bunch of the smaller sustainable farming operations providing food and that you could directly pay them to raise it in summary, the relationship between consumer and and grower that's really instead of through grocery store chains and traveling so those are the kinds of things I think he's talking about. So, look for possible solutions. But ultimately, it's also urgency, there's an urgency to find those solutions that he seems to articulate and then think this is a line I was reading with my son, my oldest son, he was really struck by, you know, when it has his little pocket book and notebook where he writes everything down he's, he's going all the way with a lot of my quirky elements so everything's done by hand in these paper notebooks that he folds. So he helped the community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger ultimate ultimately mysterious form of creation, right. Everything is connected there it's not just people and everything else for us, right that you can talk about later. So health is possible but disease is certainly not just possible and probable but present. You know so diseases present disease modes health is possibility, if we kind of change. These are all coming out of by the way we're right in the middle and, particularly, we're still right in the middle of conservation and so I was heartened by the way, I live in the city of Grand Rapids and have ever since I moved to Grand Rapids so I've been a city dweller ironically I grew up as a country get greater already my wife's from Ireland, Right actually born in born and lived in Manhattan for several years and then did that on Long Island. So we got to kind of the halfway point between us. A small city, you can get to the country really nicely. The lake is there which in my case is a lot nicer than the Long Island Sound or the beaches of Long Island, by the way, but I see this as a city dweller I feel a little bit like totally Karthik window saying and yeah I live on the city lot of point to two acres surrounded by concrete all around us. Here the highway over here and airplanes going overhead. Now it's hard to buy this, it's at least conceivable that the useful changes might be started or helped along by consumer demand in the States. This is how farmers markets run this is a community supported agriculture but this is how my colleague has city dwellers, buying a quarter of a cow or half a cow or whatever, though I had to drive up into Costa County to actually go to the butcher shop, because it was, it's very difficult with butchers. That's what he said. And there was like a year long wait so he found a budget so I drove up. Let's just say I was on a dirt road by the end and I wasn't sure that minivan was going to make it through. Right. And I saw a sign and it had a huge deer head with animals and then a small pig and a small cow and I was like okay this is the place 90% venison, and I 10% They were livestock and I went in there and they butchered, and so on. And so it seemed to be from the cities, which is where most of the people, well, who eat the food.

Unknown 14:55

There is for example evidence of a growing concern about urban consumers about the quality and purity of food once this demand grows expensive and competent enough, it will have the power to change the agriculture, if there is enough left of agriculture, by the end of the change of always, always a little bit of a, there's urgency here okay. So I think I've seen it happen somebody ran out that's what is, what an urban place perfectly situated with all the agriculture around us, and I mean like food, agriculture, not just massive fields of wheat, but different kinds of food variations of food the fruit, the amazing fruit growing that goes on here. If you're, if you want to include that in there the locally produced beer with a heavy coalfields of hops and growing their own wheat hops locally and so to make their beers and wines. It could happen, but it's also the case that probably most of the food being in Grand Rapids wasn't grown around here. It's a, it's a small slice, And then what we have even in Meijer where there's some locally grown things are DFW and somewhere that, but you're at least making inroads into the system. And it seems like consumers I'm always reminded of this as a professor, that there's problems in this school I don't have to tell the students listen, they listen to students, you guys go and complain about it because you don't want to get intuition. They don't listen to professors because they paint us, why they want to listen to us, but when we're problematic and running, you know, but you provide the money so always that the student or a student parents, holy cow, lots of things will will be offered and change your donor especially right. Professors are supposed to be kind of curmudgeonly and dropping things, but if the people who will say we're no longer eating the food mire that is providing everyone that needs to be locally sourced at scienza. Byron has made changes we've seen. I mean, it's a multi billion dollar corporation, but they've made changes and brought in localized things and tried to. Granted, you don't really know where most of the meats came from. You still don't know where a lot of the vegetables and fruit came from but you know where some. And that's different than yesterday. And if you go into the farmers market right or get into a CSA we pick it up at somebody's house or, you know, out of the park there, you know, we're all so it could happen he needs to say something that I've mentioned a couple times. Aside investigation for everybody about economics is the, is distributed GK Chesterton is going to come up with the idea, along with Hilary Golok another Catholic thinker of the early 20th century. It is a habit is a midway between socialism and capitalism, but it's not, it's not a compromise between the two of them it's a completely different system really rooted in Christian Social ethics. So what one of those says here in this kind of disrupts distributed distributed ism though he doesn't use the term as much as possible the food that is consumed locally ought to be locally produced on small farms processed in small non polluting plants that are locally owned, we must do everything possible to provide to ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small usable share of the country now. Central to distributed ism is that everybody has the opportunity to own a small piece of property, and to participate in ownership. And, but it's also the case distributors ideas are very much at work in some, some of these companies so you might really like admire like King Arthur Flour company owned by its employees right and kept to certain standards and so on completely kind of a distributist. It makes you feel better on buying the flowers a little more expensive than like Pinnacle flower, but you feel really good about buying it because you kind of know that he goes beyond that. Plus it's really good flower especially the white grown wheat that doesn't quite overwhelm you with the whole wheat, Tastes but it's still whole wheat, Patagonia clothing company. Now it's a little more expensive right and it also has kind of a hipster trendy hipster vibe for young people and so on but that's, that's a distributors model owned company, so different than just top down. Boehner and labor are different models. And to think about everything, everyone having some ownership in this idea of production of food or food production might be the place where it could really be done. But food production is taken on a massive industrial twists and turns so

Unknown 19:09

you're really privileged to live in a city where that's part of the ethos, right, it's part of the that's the deal. There's not just the farmers market, but a number of CSA apps are available in Grand Rapids, that decent prices, one of my limits, and it's eliminated the Farmers Market owner and others, is that it only seems to be sort of white suburban people who get involved in those things can we, can we bring this kind of food justice and equity to other populations within our urban area. So that's, that's something that is, if you ever see the group that works out of the Madison Square area for good routes, that's their desire taking a food truck through neighborhoods to sell produce, not a food truck where you're gonna go buy a taco but it's like, $11 this way Chuck's really sticker shock or not the not the one playing by Cucaracha that's selling ice cream for a sketchy $5 Like popsicle that your kid is obsessed with like what you do. But I mean Bootstrap is like we have fresh produce right right here right now, we're bringing it to the people and things that you might cook things that you might enjoy. So those are the kinds of things he gets excited about and so modes of hope. I'm going to just wait with the economy and pleasure into economies because I really want to talk about these last two. For today, in In APA, these are important ones as well. So, if you remember economy pleasure which I think was originally assigned like three weeks ago or whatever it is you know here it is finally where we where we've arrived. You know, he gets, he's really tough many economists in general I think this is one of the quotes that it's painful for somebody from academia, right because academia, sort of sits back and thinks about these things, you know it can't, because economics professors somewhere, kind of dictate how things work. The Economist sits in the column of professional tenure, ouch, and government subsidy, commenting and explaining for the elimination of the pressing public if those who fail happened to be fellow humans neighbors children of God citizens or public that's outside the purview of the economist so it's like well the four and a half percent will not benefit from this, but 94% You know, coming up with plans and ideas. But one doesn't seem to make, like any kind of scheming and benefit abstracts human beings at the person titles or says yeah there's going to be some, some losers and some people left out of this, but it's really going to work over here that to him that, that strikes him as kind of like atavistic like almost kind of like a Darwinian universe of the natural selection, you know, the strong will survive and there's always going to be some people knocked out who are weak and so on, but what about the weak, it seems like Christ as his particular love for the weak and marginalized and so on. So that he sees this, this pushing in a direction that chosen further right. There's another implication in the limitlessness of the idea of competition that is politically even more ominous. Namely, that unlimited economic competitiveness proposes an unlimited concentration of economic power, economic energy like any other free for all tends inevitably towards dominance by the strongest so competition is what makes things work so let it, let it go to competition but competition, always ends up with the strong conquering and people losing out right and Is that acceptable as a way that we do our business on a daily basis. The strong surviving the weak being being left behind or being marginalized. So there's, there's nobody, there's no economic economist, right, working within the capitalist market system right, who's not going to say your competition is at the root of it and often say competition is good, sometimes you can say well that's God's method. Right, we're competitive capitalist economy as God's most scripture, which I've talked to my own colleagues in economics right that's it. That seems like a structure. Because that seems to be based and rooted well it's the best way to work within a fallen world zone. Yeah, but it kind of, kind of like privileges the fallenness rather than the redemptive, to a certain extent right so, but then immediately someone say well you're a socialist is like Why does it always go to that. No, I'm not a socialist that I don't see a whole lot going on in socialism, generally, but I often will actually sort of tongue in cheek say Distributism is kind of like pushing back a little bit, you know, Most economists have not heard of it, or look looking for another, a third way, we've all thought of that politically like is there a third way. There's no other way. And so, by the way, if you're interested in third party politics at all or just just investigating. You will find you should look at the platform of the American solidarity party.

Unknown 23:42

It basically is rooted in Christian Social Teaching called Catholic Social Teaching, it's, it's like a political platform from top to bottom that you're like, Wow. Yes, now granted they only got like 360 votes in the presidential election and the presidential candidate. The last time was, was a former magician from Northern Michigan and evolutionist. So I don't know if you should advertise that if you're promoting a presidential candidate as the best candidates and allusions and last time it was a guy will look like an older Amish man he was a teacher California so I get it, it's ideological it's in the real politic, it's not gonna go too far but it's like, it's just like something you can believe so, but if it's just competition and the survival of the fittest and so on. It feels like that system is going to grind down actual human beings. He goes into that a little more and I'm just going to skip over this slide and jump to this one right here, possible solution you can look at the other side and if you look at that essay right it's, it's like the system is kind of skewed, but what about pleasure as an end, derived from good work, not simply from winning a competition but from getting good work so he says, Where is our pleasure. But in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world I always like his phrasing most interested in this phrasing in the presence of the world, aren't we always in the presence of the world like we're here. But I think you mean something like aware of our place within the order of things and that kind of appropriate humility right and resting in that, rather than there's a voice and hopefully everything's okay on campus around the Beltline because I seem to have been hearing certain sirens for about five minutes and I'm hoping I live right by a fire station too so I'm almost near to it. When my mom visited she was freaking out like three or four times what's going on. She lives way out the country is like not just by ambulance and police cars going all over the place. In the right sort of economy. Our pleasure would not be merely an addition or byproduct or reward, it would be an empowerment of our work, and it's indispensable measure. So, taking pleasure in the work will sweeten the work, and you'll also say this was good work we took appropriate pleasure in it. Pleasure. A Nanda Kumar Swami said perfects work, and I say a little bit more Swami in a minute. He lives from the box every here and then I've got a picture I think. He lived from 1877 to 47 It's one of these. Somebody made mentioned last week or the week before I think seems to be some Eastern thought, at times at work in Windows, he certainly really familiar with like 60s and 70s kind of Eastern thought some of his poetry, seems to have been under the influence with his good friend, and Zen Buddhist, Gary Snyder, poet, still alive I think it's already filtered he just passed away tonight historic poetry. So, that he's learned a lot from kind of sustainability, as it's articulated out of the great religions of the East, if you will. So I Swami is this interesting person. He. Here's a quote from him that sounds like window and then say a little more about him. It is fundamentally the economists at World Trade that makes industrial civilization a curse to humanity. This is a nonlinear term. And from the industrial concept of progress in line with the manufacturing enterprise of civilization that modern wars that have arisen and will arise, it is on the same and proper soil that empires have grown and by the same renewable civilizations have been destroyed. He himself was a Sri Lankan who lived under sort of British imperial role and it was kind of educated in the British British system kind of like Gandhi himself was right and came to see that this right now the most populous country in the world and the world's largest democracy in the right as we see it today although probably its own sets of problems, obviously, not least of which is horrific COVID situation they're in touch with Mission India compared to Grand Rapids which I have some friends who work there, like, 500 million people with COVID mean that's more people than there are in America, and access to vaccinations, low to none. Which made me hear when I heard from somebody that Pfizer in Kalamazoo right that if something went wrong with raw temperature on vaccinations or they're kept in the wrong temperature and so they were just discarding them so as I just said I bet the people may be able to hear, we'll take a risk. That was in the wrong refrigerator I'll take a risk on them and bring that over here but I understand there's, there's more at work that my uncompassionate right there's litigation probably and all kinds of stuff going on there, legitimate concern so, so he lived in the kind of Indian subcontinent and not Sri Lanka and experience what he saw was being on the wrong side of the global industrial system and he became interested in kind of sustainable and organic ideas, agriculture and other ones. Yes, system. Well, Yes, he's talking about the industrial project.

Unknown 28:49

I mean, the matter in modernism. If you look back in history when they didn't have that. There was no there was, there wasn't such a good place to live, either.

Unknown 29:00

Right, so we want to place that actually, yeah you want. In fact, one of them would probably come in. And I think there's something to it that for many people, a system like Feudalism was not really an empowerment of most people either right so that nobody owns exactly one one person per province or whatever. So, the idea that could probably is never really existed before, and that's something that he often says the idea I'm looking for has never really existed before, but we could see it existing which is this vision of a million communities around the world where there's a sustainable agricultural system, and local, local vision of how we might do, industry and so on, you'd have to kind of ramp back certain massive manufacturing things to do it and it's not clear that it will ever be done but it's not something that's been done before. It's something to aim for and, and it's in a modern sensibility that we make that aim right it's not by a reversion backwards but something for it yes is there.

Unknown 30:00

The last essay, we talked about Marion County, Kansas, we'll go from Kansas, where, what is the highest per capita bank deposit for American County, and the jails and courthouses. There were no millionaires. It's just equally. The other thing about eating locally. I would never have had an avocado or a kiwi it's probably in that works best if you live in a climate where you're writing things for grilling. You know we get through here, part of the year. That's right, the rest of the year.

Unknown 30:42

It's interesting, I just don't. Have you ever read, Barbara Kingsolver to Animal Hospital miracle, you know, the one thing that had to fudge was having olive oil, because you couldn't, you couldn't do it and the I don't think what they did for Tina did herbal tea or something like that. But the real estate had to have a bunch control event to be able to make survive for a year, I'm just waiting to grow within 20 miles, you can survive, certainly you can you can definitely make it if you ever go to a coffee shop, they're rubber bands pastry you know they're trying to have a kind of store where almost everything comes from Michigan but much of it comes from their own farm. And you realize you'd have to change your dietary radically. In some ways, but would also expand it in other ways, and that it's a challenge that. If you don't have to undertake it you don't really feel like okay you know that's why I think Barry has said several times, it's probably when some kind of food crisis happens or some kind of breakdown of the grid or something like that, that will recognize okay that we, We've gone way beyond even as omnivores, way beyond where we probably can or should sustain now if you want to have a kiwi admire in February from New Zealand or I guess they were working in February because New Zealand summertime right, or a watermelon in February and Meyer were that, you know, how do we do that right that's not normal. So I just by the way, speaking of local, local produce you see my, let's I watered it down now. My team is at home, homebrew now. It's rose hips is harvested off of my rose bushes, yesterday the roses, which are related to Greg apples and roses are related to apples and you can kind of tell them the flavor of it is or something and you boil Not really but I don't have to boil it down. And I didn't even watch them or anything so hopefully I'm not being anyway. I don't think there's E coli adult here but it just really my vitamins, but also pleasing because like I just made that from things I got out in my backyard right and we tried to, we tried to do the crab apple jelly as well it's like 1212 grams of sugar for every couple scrambles palatable. When you got another problem. Hopefully it came from the not from the sugar beets or whatever you use honey that's a lot of local honey we also had beehives for a while though and then I started to check our neighbors and said there's a whole conversation with that and I was actually out of, out of city ordinance and other conversation we had, we had to transport living beehives by night and I didn't want to talk about that experience but I've recovered from the same interface of living my son. So sometimes the ideal is it runs up against neighborliness, which is good right there. And a pretty almost catastrophic way but all is good now it's all good. And I just realized we've got to be the human looks first right, the human relationships, and we start from there and then we'll figure out how to mortar and arrange things as best we can and that's kind of, he understands we'll do it as best we can, it's, it's not a complete overhaul overhaul of life and going off the grid. He himself has admitted many times I've never been figured out how to get rid of the petroleum economy, because I could never get rid of my pickup truck, like I never leave my pickup truck behind okay so at least. Here's a distro some guys haven't any images. This course will be at three different phases in his life, kind of, the young student living under British imperialism, something of the mystic midlife, and then back to a kind of gentlemanly. He's pretty interesting I looked him up and read some stuff about him one of the fathers of living Cobourg organic radicals. And there's a mixture of kind of anti imperialism, and kind of localism sustainability you go into that. It's a different narrative than you would get from like, Wendell, or an American writer and so on but pretty interesting. I enjoyed glancing I've taken note of his work a couple of times when I was reading through your window. That might be a side by side reading. Of course he turns to the tobacco harvest problematically at this point which he admits to even in his. Some of his essays about tobacco and now they've abandoned tobacco complete in the very center and they tried to me redo things right, We've talked about that we do agriculture without tobacco in the center for small Kentucky farmers, it's going to be a huge paradigm shift. As, as I heard Wendell his daughter speak when I saw him last night Louisville and his daughter was on stages like we really want everything that worked in terms of the tobacco industry itself, except a non carcinogenic product. Okay, so we had a we had a change.

Unknown 35:11

He says tobacco cutting is a ritual that remembrance old stories are retold and that an absent or remembered I'm always moved by the memories of those who keep it for the older generation that stays really alive. At the center of really how do we educate ourselves in some of the best talk I've ever listened to. I had heard during these times. What a great line. I'm especially moved to think of the care that is sometimes taken to speak well that is to speak fittingly of the dead in the absence, the conversation one feels is ancient, and in a good way right. It's part of a long line work that's done in community, not just work done in community but build sustains and nobles is right, you want your kids to work and so on but you realize that the vision of work that will be gotten from a very early time if you go to work at Wendy's or something like that it's probably going to be the opposite, like, work it's horrible. My kids at work in a variety of fast food places. My daughter has moved into the lucrative, though I think emotionally distressing realm of nannying, where you get attached to the kid and you don't even have to college and then it gets confused. Are you the mom. So there's all that you know so she's my other son has worked in library, you know your idealize because you love books and writing and so on but you end up like just shelving things for three hours or trying to help somebody get on Microsoft or whatever. And it's not quite the ideals, you know, you come away a little stressed, but we all know that that's kind of what your work that does that for you. If you could ever find that spot where your vocation. I'm super privileged to be a teacher, where what I'm doing that actually is making a living is also entering and bringing alongside, there is the grading of the freshman essays that makes up for it. That's, that's, that's where I make the RADWIN that's where you, that's where you suffer for the cause, right, it has not gotten less suffering with freshmen essays over the last generation

Unknown 37:07

to come through to fifth grade. Yeah, that's a

Unknown 37:11

teaching person fun and then he dropped back that's why I love Paul right because hey, there's no way to get the quizzes, tests or essays.

Unknown 37:20

Why do you think he inserted that into C fitting, like that. Yeah, like he had to clarify this you know well. Does that mean he you could also say things that weren't flattering, but

Unknown 37:33

I think somebody told a story about somebody that was, you know they made a huge mistake they kind of several of his characters who I love and it's fiction. I think of early culture, one of the best characters ever. But he never married King Helen and they had a child together and it was kinda it was like a dead end but never claimed him as his kid and so, and then at the end of the life, he's like, I did think John and I, there's a fitness even to cricket if you want to call it critique or to speak on that mic but my dad, who was a severe alcoholic brother told me that all that I talked to my kids right I want to speak fittingly on them I can only speak well, because I'll say you know that this wasn't good. But I want to speak fittingly, I do want to speak well, because he was a hard working guy and he did a lot of things that were. And by the way, became a Christian while that cancer that it was like a miraculous story for another for another time that I still am not even still pinching myself. The pinch myself. But yeah you speak fittingly, it was, how does he say the caretaking. These are guys that cut tobacco things old farm guys and so on and you figure this kind of conversation is going to be, what, like, thoughtfully in always visit my backyard is always with kids present kids running around and younger people there and you got that there's, there's an education going on. It's made me think a lot about how I do talk about. We live far away from even our grandparents were likely to go from New York where we raise the kids here in Grand Rapids, so it's all my story almost all with occasional visits and phone calls and, but it's a lot of it's like having chosen in my life that really good. There's a lot of negativity in the past and even playing from negativity bad things happening, but she's like you know, speaking of good things. She's a good chat for me. Speaking of good things and use those as lesson threads. Because, just, it just make fittingly when you think of the negative, you can just grouse about it all day long because it's just a matter of a federal job that was like,

Unknown 39:35

Aaron's going the other way around here about Confederate descendants of people in, you know, they refuse to believe that there was anything noble about those. Yeah, those are their ancestors.

Unknown 39:47

Well I've been in some room my house because I do a lot of stuff if I can take it to the ground, and civil roundtable if you want to come to that October 20, and I used to speak frequently but I did a hiatus when I was like the youth group with my kids and lost my Wednesday nights or whatever. So I returned now I get older. And I like to get in October because I wear the uniform I do a little reenactment, or I do a little like clock I don't even feel. It's all well. I've done a couple of them in July this room. Never sweated sometimes his wedding I did scratchy itchy. But, you know, to talk about Robert D layer, talk about Stonewall Jackson, people are like okay you know as a Christian. You're on the wrong side of things there, I get. You have to speak fittingly, I speak fittingly about that. And I'm not sure I'd really in the property lease military tactics, either because it was pretty brutal it's all you know everyone's done a General Grant but you know it's so to speak, fittingly while also offering your team is, I guess it's, It's a sign that you, you care even about the thing you don't agree with, which is I guess maturity, we find ourselves getting there to get over like, you know, it's not just like, cut and dry and attack this and go for that so I think there's something in here in the tobacco harvest provides an opportunity, I mentioned, my colleague netvanta We argued in our book, someone who has a question. Somebody got it to me so I wanted to address it at various stages in whether it's actually kind of exclusionary. And I thought this might be a good place among the among the essays, at this point to talk, whether it's exclusionary whether it be, whether it's sort of actually kind of parochial and sort of closed, not a place for kind of multiculturalism and things like that and it's interesting when I, when I wrote the book when we were in the cultivation of life and my colleague Matt Lanza, we, we were confronted with that question in the, when we did our little book tour kind of q&a is something that we thought a lot about an address.

4.2

Unknown 0:11

bad things are happening, but she's like you know, speaking of good. She's a good check for me. Speaking of good things and use those as lessons right it's like, we have to just, just speak fittingly when you think of the negatives right, you can just browse about it all day long, because it's just a matter of a federal job that was like

Unknown 0:31

Eric going the other way, you hear about Confederate descendants, people, you know, they refuse to believe that there was anything noble about the

Unknown 0:42

present their ancestors would have been in some room my house because I knew a lot so if I can sneak into the kind of similar table if you want to come to that October 20, and I used to speak frequently but I did a hiatus when I was like doing the youth group with my kids had lost my Wednesday nights or whatever. So I returned now my kids. And I like to meet in October because I wear the uniform I do a little reenactment, or I do a little like talk I don't even feel real. It's all well. I've done a couple of them in July that's brutal. I never I sweated so much is wearing that did scratchy itchy. But, you know, to talk about Robert E Lee or to talk about Stonewall Jackson, people are like okay you know as a Christian, I get that, but you're, you're on the wrong side of things there, I just, you have to be critical. Let's be fittingly about that. And I'm not sure I'd really hit the property lease military Catholics either because it was pretty brutal it's all you know everyone's done a General Grant but you know it's so to speak, fittingly while also offering critique is, I guess it's, it's a sign that you, you care even about that thing you don't agree with, which is I guess maturity, the above, find yourselves getting there as we get older, like we didn't I, you know, it's not just like, cut and dried and attack this and go through that so I think there's something in here in the tobacco harvest provides an opportunity, I mentioned, my colleague Matt Bonzo we argued in our books and wondered as somebody got it to me so I wanted to address it about Barry's vision and whether it's actually kind of exclusionary. And I thought this might be a good place among the among the essays, at this point to talk, whether it's exclusionary whether he, whether it's sort of actually kind of parochial and sort of closed, not a place for kind of multiculturalism and things like that and it's interesting when I, when I wrote the book when we were in the cultivation of life and my colleague Matt Lanza, we, we were confronted with that question in the when we did our little book tour kind of q&a s and it's something that we thought a lot about an address and in the term we came up with is it seems to me what Wendell Berry voice says is that a healthy community has very, very permeable. It's very permeable boundaries in fact it's not parochial, what we call, there are human sized bowls, people can come and go, anyone could come in anyone could go, that's a healthy community that people will leave you can't coerce them not to leave. That's not healthy. It's like something together right you're ever that's a community that's unhealthy we cannot. Likewise, people can come in either people who are other factors, and that happens and various different people come into exploit it will come in where certainly people come in with a very different, very different perspective, there's a, there's a welcoming of alien and stranger if you will, had to seize the goings on now that he seems to think is out for help the community, but it doesn't always work that way. If you read his fiction and when people would be like, well, he's got this nostalgic fiction of the small town of you right away. Well this is not actually it's not very nostalgic it's not very it's fraught with tragedy it's fraught with mistakes in terms of racial relations in and around portfolio is fictional, there's there are many African American people live there and there's a heritage of slavery. Some of them are for our incredibly powerful figures within evictions under there's also wrong that's done and it's the whole thing. It's the whole story and I think he wants us to see what's good and what's bad and this to me, that's, that's what fiction does it holds up a mirror of us Lovera think holds up a mirror to life and so on so you look at it like what you got to figure out like, Whoa, is that what it's like here, so I think community can become easily parochial and idealize and that's that's sometimes when people want to form communes and communal communal living and just generally a couple of moving in the Bruderhof in New York saying, you know, that's a very intentional from the meta egos community where it's could also be dangerous, because it can also start to get imagine. Can we, are we at least open to anybody, and people coming by, that's why I really love the Catholic Worker Movement Dorothy Day her writings. If you've never encountered the writings of Dorothy Day or Peter Martin, who was a French priest from Quebec, and she was in New York City and kind of skeptical kind of POTUS who had a conversion to Catholicism, the Catholic Worker Movement is very powerful in this regard, both in their, in their houses of hospitality and urban places and on the Catholic Worker farms, both which still exist, anybody could come and claim people were really mean people who were dysfunctional people who were not with the program, and they would welcome them into the community they made a commitment that anybody could come here from any background people who just want to be there to explode because you kind of live communally for free and so on, free level.

Unknown 5:41

And she said, I learned the most from those who I could kind of least bear having they're talking about reaching across the boundaries to the alien stranger behave or to its stranger sounds good but it's a refugee family, our church just set a refugee camp next couple of public streets down here on a cliff, I think in a house, it's a company's family, you know, trying to help them up. That's one thing. How about somebody who just cannot stand, who just comes into your church and is like in your hospital or small group right and just seems to want to cause problems all the time. That's a stranger right there, right. Like, I'm not trying to get you to think of people. I remember growing up my church again and so people were coming in there and it was just like, Oh no, what happens to people, especially, it was Easter morning I hadn't seen in a while, and I looked in the church before my family even went out and they were both, but I thought to myself, what's the point. What's the point of Easter. It's like what am I, you know, and they were problematic and I interacted with both. Yeah so I think it's it's it's an open question. I mean, one of the rights from his experience, which is wider ranging than just rural Kentucky but rural Kentucky is the name thing. So he rents from a limited framework intentionally because you can't rent university you can only write the money now. But I do believe in again. Speaking of, you know, openness to a broader cultural conversation that's much in here right now. If you ever take a look at his book, The Hidden wound out the best book on racism written by white Americans, according to Ellen Wolf of Wall University, written in 1971. It's about his own family's direction with slavery and his heritage in his past and the land itself but he always goes to the land right agricultural and cultural and rest reckoning with that wrestling with everything because of profound thinker on race relations in America, decades before the conversation, open kind of opened up as it is not who's way ahead of way ahead of the curve on that. But I think it's a valid question because community can start to feel. Keep using the term parochial, it can, when it's working, you have the tendency to want to kind of close it off and let it work and not keep it wide open and not try to, you know, because there's a, there's a safety and that there's an intelligibility there. It's the nature of our world right is that not sure you can really sustain that or do that over the world that's kind of, we live in a city now I've really come to appreciate this, this refugee hub which is Grand Rapids, both departments between here and my church my churches is a block from Calvin Harris and Burton elementary church. They're kind of better together. Within walking distance. The world has come to us. The apartments that come out apartments, Islamic community, people from 10 Different nations from Islamic community. We do basketball camp that little girl wearing full covering I think over her faces on my basketball team and we do a wrestling camp over there it comes over to, you know, just like mission work, it's come to us to be Christ community is to open doors and say, I'm in here and obviously you want to say here the gospel of Jesus Christ. And also, how can we help you guys. So, yeah community is tough. I think he knows community is tough and I think it knows it will stretch and I think Wendell, is aware that there's a tendency to want to be safe and kind of little bit close to the best but I don't think you've come up against that idea he knows that that's there. Again, reading the fiction would would kind of show his awareness of the difficulties of community, just throw that out there to economies, I'm just going to say one word I might not say any maybe just I'll just say the last thing on this slide so I can make sure I get to those last two so if you ever wondered what it is I don't know it's one of those things there's things like why did you make us read it and now you're not even laughing competitiveness cannot be the really principle for the great economy, remember that's kind of like the kingdom of God that's kind of like the real economy that we work for everybody competitiveness cannot be the really principle, the great economy is that aside, we can join nor spell it was in a French way there are these other set asides within it. Thus, it is not the sum of its parts but a membership of parts can externally join to each other, indebted to each other, receiving significance and word from each other in front of the whole so there's his turn really, that's the key turning all of his fiction, even cause some of his stories, you know, six stories about the membership of 4 million, I believe when they go through the character comes up with the idea, who what we are here together is not just neighbors and some word membership,

Unknown 10:40

which can have dangerous ramifications, right, like church membership who's on the membership roller who isn't right, you know, membership can have that kind of in and out, but for him it's like you have committed yourself to belong. Never you don't get voted, it's that you stay that you're willing to be there long haul, that's how you become a member of. So, membership is this kind of tacit commitment to each other, and to everyone and everything there. And that principle of not not competition of membership members together, members of the rest of the world. What's a really different spin on economics. And I think it's Wendover wrote an article I think it was in Harper's Magazine called Bostian economics, speaking of the modern industrial world right, we're basically made a, we've made a Faustian bargain, give us an exploit all these resources to have pleasure right now and everything we want right now, and our children and children's children, and everyone and where's the patient. Where's the deal. Gone. Let's go. Well they start much equality, let's get in space you have to go to Mars or whatever, or the Martian right let's go live somewhere else like Why ruin the planet Phillipsburg Morales. So, membership would mean changing a lot of things about how we function with each other and with the world. It's, it's possible to make some of those changes food as a place and as bonds and colleagues as food is everybody eats every day unless you're fasting or dieting or something. Everybody eats food every day, Even a sudden fat shake, I believe is some food product or if you're doing a meal replacement bar I think it's right, it's not something that's good. So we have to think about that relationship and also we were around each other around the people every day and what we, what would it mean to interact as members. Part of about, by the way I've tried it in my neighborhood association with my own favorites, people don't necessarily want that. Right. I guess you should you should expect that. That's weird, intimate, friendly, like, like make our lives together, it's, this is America, dude. Get off my property, get my yard. Right, get your dog off my yard. We'll live our separate lives are separate spheres. However, through that seems like only during tragedies two people actually connect. I still remember that the most everyone was together to share it with each other so it was on a neighbor's house burned down. And everyone's out at like three o'clock in the morning in the street, people are in neighborhoods sobbing in her shoulder people around each other's man's had to talk with each other, even met each other down the block over years. Memberships tough many tragedies are instructed to us to function like that and that measure of lovable ability might suggest, I'm going to jump ahead to these two. Oh by the way he mentioned, here's, here's another reading supplement, if you've never read I got three different covers of this, I think I had the one on the left. It's always beautiful but he actually made perfect Schumacher, who was a friend of windows in the early 70s He also wrote the Guide for the Perplexed a really interesting worldview book. He was a German emigrated to England, who at one point ran like the coal. The English coal in a government coal industry console or something it's a kind of wild government job right, and then became persuaded of kind of minimalism. And when Joe mentions his the chapter called Buddhist economics. You don't have to become a Buddhist to practice it right. And this idea and this was, you can imagine how this book, blew the minds of seven early 70s kind of comments that the minimalist movement. I think the, the one on the left looks like a 70s cover that looks like. That looks like something that doesn't look very happy to be in the middle, middle cover I don't go to original cover. I don't know what's going on this looks 80s To me, this gets kind of sci fi I don't know where that went. I have to see what here these additions are in the book and there's a couple of others. So that's a book to read and Windows said he had many conversations with Schumacher and was extremely stirred by his vision of kind of like scaling back in order to sustain what's meaningful. So let's go to these two quickly so Sabater pattern, I love this essay, and then I'm going to finish and get to the good land. So solving for pattern is. If you look, as you look at the essay you recognize,

Unknown 15:11

he's down on solutions that do more harm than good. No doubt, right, so no doubt, That's obvious. But happens all the time, right. So so the unintended consequences or ignored consequences, or I sure hope this doesn't happen consequences happening all the time right so as he says here the solution that causes ramifying series of new problems, such as monocultures have like 50,000 acres planted all over, like popcorn, tend to be accompanied by a set of agricultural economic problems soil erosion, soil compaction epidemic infestations and test suites disease, accompanied by a set of agriculture economic problems, and a set of community problems so the problems all compound. If you just plant ball in this entire county of Nebraska all corn, certain kinds of pests will take over there. That's primitive like it will it will deplete the soil of whatever corn desires, and, and you can't really grow up on that long unless you put that back into chemicals and stuff, and then you don't have any small farmers anymore because the whole thing is gone, you know and you created a whole seven. In order to simplify agriculture and that's always his, that's what he says tell us about his touchdown right, you've created an enormous ripple effect of problems. So that can't be good as a solution to where do you turn that what do you what do you do to solve. So the only way out, he says is where health, it's a word we've seen before for him. Not production is the primary name. And here, simplifying it again I think of Schumacher his influence on how small is beautiful. I'm sorry. No, my bad, simplify and actually actually complicates the view out of the realm of pattern, see this quote, I'm not sure what I said makes sense. Let's see what he said. The whole complex of problems, whose proper solutions, add up to health, the health of soil, plants, animals farm and farmer farm family farm community a pattern and pattern so the idea is that it's actually complicated to find the good solution that works. You have you have to recognize the vastness of the patterns of connection. I think that's what I was trying to say, in sort of clarifying confusing what he's saying. Right so that we want to get to a simple solution that works but it requires, not a complicated industrial solution but recognizing how connected all these things are patterns of connection, yes, welders I was

Unknown 17:32

pastor Center volunteer there, and certainly to families who have recently lost a loved one.

Unknown 17:40

There is a man hungry, tirelessly and when my heart is broken. I agree. Breathing is not the problem, it's the solution. You really grabbed me it was like, so true because when you try to skip over grieving or covering up for Medicaid or mental health or

Unknown 18:01

living together. Yeah, I think you're right readings are part of a complicated pattern to make it look at the five stages of grief, you know, it can't be made linear. Anybody who's read me knows that better outside it has to be seen within the context of. And I think of even something like mental health but how are you eating What's your sleep habits nearly students who are struggling with depression, anxiety, how much is that going to kill hours at night drinking caffeine all night, video games or whatever or not, you know, there, there's a lot of other things because pattern, I want you to feel good about yourself. But it's gotten complicated, and I think you're right on and that's a great, that's a great model of to get back around to a solution that's healthy is to recognize the complexity of it in an appropriate way. This is for you. Sonia, I put in upstate New York very because you mentioned the upstate New York dairy farmer who decided to downscale everything and still have in stock and so on So Sonia is also from upstate New York and from, from crime dairy farming country.

Unknown 19:05

I would have given you a picture of my farm in upstate New York, but

Unknown 19:09

I thought this might this kind of resonate with you a little bit though.

Unknown 19:12

Yeah of course.

Unknown 19:14

I don't know who's fighting this so I'm just winging this out here I guess it's I guess it's this document so I'm not gonna have a copyright on the models of this are often current trips so this guy's counterintuitive, it's one of those so what are you doing certain things often decided to go into fertilizers and just pick up a newer pick which there are some massive manure pits now among these farms it's out there scary places and scary places in some ways right yeah but it's, it's, it's natural. It's just all you hope it doesn't make it to the groundwater and so and having that's a problem so you have to do it the right way. He began to ask the fundamental question about the nature of the creatures and the land he was dealing with and to ask if he could not bring about some sort of balance between their needs of his own. If he wasn't talking to the cows. I don't think directly, but what do they need. They need to walk around their animals, this is what they're meant for what are they meant for walking around eating grass and so on, some grain is okay you know it's, they're meant to live a certain way to just have as many as I can in my barn is not what they're meant to do and actually it leads to all kinds of unexpected consequences for me. Not the least of which is health issues for the animals, the need for all those external factors to be brought in to kind of sanitized. So here is a couple of these Herefords I'm sorry Brian has more than I knew the red ones. Maybe Hertford for black and white ones and I grew up around here but obviously I don't know. Everybody here. I only had Holsteins okay if you are hosting that's a black and white so I don't want to offend you by having another breed because some of the loyalty is pretty intensive on the dairy farms Holstein on a hair right. So my brother in law and he was getting out of this lake and the Finger Lakes, when he was going to beef cattle from Santa Gertrudis that looked kind of like Indian cattle when he went to Black Angus, why he said because they are in demand, they're not necessarily better tasting sound but if you got a Meyer, Black Angus, like Boober unless you get the Japanese before the massage they call the Barbie for 200 pound or whatever and then massage them while they're up on legs and stuff and so on to the Black Angus is at ease you know it was a kind of an economic decision, but once in a while. They'll bring in a bowl, which that's a scary thing and you you have to stay far away from home, and through the breeding zone once a while Black Angus will come out red. And he's like, it's problematic because the buyers are like Wait what's going on there. I thought maybe supposed to be black, some black angus can't be red but you know, when you're dealing with, like, wait a minute, what is that that doesn't add up to me and so and so that becomes problematic and that they spray paint them or what they do or just kind of like, he's the he's the redheaded stepchild but just stays out there she is, I guess what the others were taken away. We were out there once, visiting and he had the bowl out there, he's like no one can go anywhere near that. Not even on the quad runner. Don't go anywhere near, what's happening there, because that bowl is what you imagined bowls to be and actually have a ancestor of an uncle, this great, great meeting, who was gored and killed by gnome. There, it's for real, but he tried to walk across the field or something like that in foolishly, and he cannot run them, and they're not nice creatures and so on, but these are like nice cards so these cards are good here and then ready to be living out in the pasture, it's so real as Robin kind of you can see some of the rules that are going through them you realize they start to sound you hear the window phrases again right. A good solution accepts given limits. Improves balance symmetry harmony. Why wide margins if something fails something else could work it's not everything, all or nothing right it's, it's, there's a wisdom. It almost sounds like kind of folk wisdom right yeah, make sure it all works together to it is, it is what what's going on right. It is a way to kind of function in concert with the world but with the years before you could kind of dictate to the world how you wanted it to be a good solution always answers the question, how much is enough that idea of enough Yes, that's a conversation you have with your kids right you know early and often like enough. So assume you know if you want your kids to like support, World Vision kids and like look how many employees we have plenty of LEGO sets that have not just been in that giant heap of Legos that can ever be repaired resuscitated, that's in the basement. Right. And think about this kid over here you know so nothingness and the desire for the scale back but also to make sure, others might have enough right it's not just about high enough. That's just to get a good solution. Industrial voice assumes it's all you can get, that's, that's the philosophy and economics right there, keep on rolling here so he comes around to the phrase organic. The farmers mindedness body that is management labor work together, is it's really its heart amongst farming, farm farmer and farmer one thing and organism,

Unknown 24:09

the questions of the question and the organic endurance of this organism is a question about sufficiency and integrity of the pattern that the word organic can be usefully admitted to the series of standards like is it all woven together that makes it organic, it's not just it's got the USDA approval or you don't use chemicals is the whole thing is this thing happening here. I thought of that even with my own household, but our kids are just trying to like do things together, Let's work together on things right, seems highly difficult to deal with like 16 year olds for whatever reason right let's, let's do something functional together. Why would you ever suggest that. But the idea that also, like, your thoughts about your life and how you want it to be answered are somehow jiving with what's happening while you're doing what's actually going on there's a, that it's not always just I wish it could be something different but are you bringing those two things together somehow and making your life more organic. So then he also suggests that this will require restraining, Right, the ability to accept and live within limits to resist greed and pride, a good solution then must be harmony with good character cultural value moral law, it always, it always goes back to the big picture for him right of just concert with the very fabric of the universe, but I was interested in, he says it's restraint that will be needed. Not new ideas and creative ideas for how to get there but that we, that we could actually this is the modern world we live in a postmodern world right. The thing we most need to understand this to restrain rift right scale back from usage, if you will try to give space for the other place the space, the people that restraint is the one task which is, which is a hard virtue to sell to the new generation of people. If you thought about restraint. You know it's one of the virtues the cardinal virtues prudence or whatever that was, they're not the ones that are very attractive. But restraint actually leads to humility which is really what lets us discover kind of get back around to the thing itself. It's one of the in a couple of minutes for questions, let me just say this about get to the good land, I want to get to the quote that really moved my son even mind. You're going to Genesis and so on.

Unknown 26:55

Feeling what's actually going on, that it's not always just a wish it could be something different really bringing those two things together somehow and making your life more organic. So then he also suggests that this will require restraint, right, the ability to accept and live within limits to resist greed and pride, and good solution that must be in harmony with good character cultural light monologue it, it always, it always goes back toward the big picture for him right not just the concert with the very fabric of the universe, but I was interested in, he says it's restraint that will be needed. Not new ideas and creative ideas for how to get there but that we, that we can actually this is the modern world, or the new the postmodern world right. The thing we most need to understand is to restrain drift, right scale back from usage, if you will try to give space for the other place the space, the people that restraint is the one task which is, which is a hard virtue to sell to the young people to a, to a new generation of people or it can be thought about restraint. You know it's one of the virtues the cardinal virtues prudence or whatever that those are not the ones that are seemed very attractive. But restraint actually leads to humility to really look at what you just discovered kind of what we already believe. Just want to leave a couple of minutes for questions, let me just say this about getting the good land, I want to get to the quote that really blew my son he didn't find, you're going to Genesis and so on. I did love this quote here, he talks about Genesis But that's painful let's go to the conquest of Canaan, which was ugly and so on but there was also this good within it. And he says, the bottom interesting take on the command of sabot, looking at their fellow field, people are to be reminded that the land is there is only by gift, it exists in its own right, and does not begin or end with any human purpose that's why you're supposed to take Sabbath. My work is not going to save me and left field life fallow that, so it's not our productivity that sustains our lives right we depend on God and your to believe, give it a. Give it back. Every 50 years. So I found a picture of a fellow killed when I look up my mind is saying show me a fallow field and this, somebody came up and it's like this one looks like what I was thinking, it's, it's just been left to grow the little green fuzz that grows when you're just like we're not following it this year. Let it rest just resting out there with the, with the weeds or Sehgal on the edge of it so on. And there's a sense of depth okay to let think of extending out to our lives, it's okay the fallow the patients that a strain is give space for living for life didn't happen appropriately. So I don't know if this is better than the dairy farmer picture but I just like this I mean I was just meant to Bella fields, you do a search on the internet and weird pictures from a nap nets get scandalous or something but just like strange how in what ways that a fallow field or like weird means going up and down. So I was going to finish with this. Yeah, this is the one that Ethan love that he wrote in his. This is one of his like pull out his own notebook remember what we walk around the block and read sometimes we've been reading Windows essays like the bottom quote here, charity, even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the creator's love for you just like Will that be just that's not luck. But, yeah, charity for one person doesn't make sense unless you try to extend to lovely creation that God loves. So there's. So the idea of love is, is diminished if it's just, I love this person, this person over here and so on it. Just don't. That love is meant to overflow. Certainly it's manifested individual loves right, you love certain people but for very obvious reasons, with an intensity that in a, in a fidelity right that's not to love every love all as part of the creative order is as an overflow of what love is right, as you understand it is this powerful trope around. You finish the requirements of this complex charity cannot be fulfilled by smiling and abstract and emphasis on our neighbors and the scenery, if you read this essay at length in love has to be enacted charity is an active. To love is to work towards some end. That is the good of the person or the thing, it can never be abstract

Unknown 31:42

can't love everybody at the love. You can extend out love toward the creative working but that's true, the way we live, right, you can certainly sit back and say Oh I love this I love that song, it has to be natural. My friend is 100. And I'm drawn to that as a full. Now there's a lot of loving to do, and there's a lot of loving that needs to happen right, but he suggests that's that's where we'll start with that. I think I ended it there. Now I go into a little bit Windows sounding like a Nigerian Dutch Reformed worldview here in Australia it's like it sounds a little bit like hyper Vollenhoven thrown out. Maybe l Walters creation regained I think as his book, Calvin in the 50s copper years in Canada a great figure depending on our campus. And it begins to suggest right that we can live Christian Lee which just struck me as kind of reformational period language all aspects of our life to try to what we would price pursue this and what we can do this. I think it's, I don't think he would ever say though, if you read our book we kind of bring Hyperion worldly language over alongside Wendell Berry's ideas. I don't know if he went. I don't know if he read that chapter, he said he didn't read the whole book would be scientific, but he'd like to party read so I'm gonna figure that out. So I was really struck by that it has to be lived out in an ordinary existence right, this, this, this love, and against the heroic, right, Samson like poses really, this really moved me, I guess, it may be easier to be Samson, to be a good husband or wife, day after day, it could be years. I mean, everybody wants the heroic virtues of the heroic stance, but life is actually lived down in the trenches and that's a good thing. Down at the furrows I'd say for what they've done for us. That's what we seek help with any questions comments in the last few minutes or so many of you have any of your side of things. I got one of those somehow at the Calvin College and I don't even know how I did that in some weird way we got that. Yeah, I don't know if he took him all the way there I don't know we're going to be pretty close.

Unknown 33:52

Yeah. Like he said it's not a system, this is not a philosophical system. This is a set of ideas and thoughts rooted in the earth and in relationships that can help us figure out ways to step out and live better. I guess more helpfully. Yeah,

Unknown 34:13

I like the paragraph on 299

Unknown 34:15

A little bit down on how you know how to build a fence, keep yourself out of this water supply there

Unknown 34:27

with your, with your beehives dogs right you've got in this house. Yeah, that was my best effort and love. Yeah, yeah, we're the mascot. Just, you know, ask, Hey, is there something we can do for you guys in the neighborhood that those neighbors are actually after many, many years trying to get to have a baby like what can we do for you guys. We help you how the other. You realize they're functional adults and somebody never had a kid before in the mid 30s and seven and eight, what can we do for you. We just just tried to extend, not like we're experts but we had children and we survived it. I think we can offer you guys just wanting to live in a way that I go back to zero, I went to the woods so I could live deliberately. He says he went to look, what's the word deliberately did not get to the end of my life and realize that yes, every day about the pandemic situation seems like just kind of went the same, it was like 2019 kind of the free world. But, my thought was something with the very center because they had to cancel an event because the pandemic and sound like take care of you know we, there's too much going on in our county right now. I think you know he one of the things he would say is it's, it's, it's a because he said this in every context. Really the nature of the global capitalist system rings all kinds of risks of this sort. And that's not just new to us that's been around since the 1450s when the Black Death was brought into the port of Venice, right. It's like stretching out global, global economy, which has been around a long time, at least since the 1400s. And there's unintended consequences, some of its invasive species. Right, Asian carp, kind of get into Lake Michigan, humans that garlic mustard or whatever it aren't the actual species like poison ivy bad enough already live here and go out here right, but also things like this that just take everyone by storm and also that the tremendous vulnerability with which we just assume we can get away with kind of doing anything we want to do with any kind of thought I think one of the things are pandemic and shown. There's been forced restraint, right, which is how to simulate like for some kind of enlightening effect for others a really tough psychological effect really tough because it's not how we live, and to not you know, although many people for hundreds of years, even my wife said, their kids were at home, and it's like supporting a test like this was like in the 80s or 70s so the kid didn't have anything to do to your mind, your bike around the block or something to come back and there's nothing to do again, no one's around, okay that's a welcome to our lives, you know, just kind of just trying to make in the wintertime you know when you couldn't really go anywhere you just had to kind of make new. I think it's, I wouldn't say he's like happy about it but I think he would probably say it's definitely showed the points to some of these unhealthy modes and practices that we take for granted that have led to something that's really disastrous that nobody wants to happen. Nobody wanted to happen or wants to happen, that is now kind of taken hold but I mean, what I see from the very center is like we got to practice neighborliness, and as you said we can't be holding big events and, you know whatever spreader of events and so on, even though they're going to have a big festival for their local rural reading group it's that we can't do it. We got to back off from that. And I'm sure there's black people in our county as in every county What are you talking about you know it's a bit it's you know that I had my own church I just used to generally love my neighbor, a charactering for flop. As an elder. So as elders we said we're gonna wear these all the time and even I was the last one wearing one right and then people started to network, you know, people got an oxycodone just like this no this not because I enjoy it. But because I just want to say hey I'm here about. I should have got one of the smiley face on it, but those are kind of a little bit and I think a little creepy maybe you know what it's like. So, yeah, it's, it's, uh, but he you know he drives to Sam. I just stay around the house, most of the time anyway and I kind of jokingly, he has like this national and international following but he couldn't do it and like I don't know about any of it, but there have been on the internet. Nobody can still respond to letters and stuff. I'll be interested if he writes the volume I heard about on racism in America now that he's working on that he said as long. It's going to be a long book. So 87 year old guy writing and he wants to. He's, he's delivered delivery is kept writing

Unknown 39:24

poetry and stories just kind of making them up a little bit at a time they slow down, slow down the pace. As we all know, right, but it's like it's kind of like the book he wants to write to address, kind of divisiveness in America and I think, especially through the ratio like you know the racial divisiveness which has been a topic of concern for him for a living for nationals. So you would think of rural white Kentucky and would not be the person to speak on that but for him it's like it's organic to his concerns. That's one of the concerns that rises up, but failed immunity. So, one of the times I wrote to him, someone from Baylor University Press asked if he could do a book with them and asked me about right to window. And I did he's like I said no to you because I already have like five other books planned with Shoemaker record or whoever's publisher is no no, and I have a lot of writing left to do with I've already committed to with them. So, probably more than, in my own lifetime. And I was like, kind of, you know, disappointed that I wouldn't be able to kind of work it but also like really hard, man this guy still. Yes,

4.3

Unknown 0:01

It's a he did sam i just stay around the house most of the time.

Unknown 0:12

Yeah.

Unknown 0:15

Like you said it's not a system it's not a philosophical system this is a set of ideas and thoughts rooted in the earth and then relationships that could help us figure out ways to step out and live

Unknown 0:28

better I guess more helpful

Unknown 0:32

Yeah, I like the paragraph on 299 a little bit down on how you

Unknown 0:38

ever if you don't know how to build a

Unknown 0:42

supply whether they're

Unknown 0:46

your boat your beehives,

Unknown 0:49

dogs, right? He died in his house. Yeah, that was my best line. Yeah, yeah, we're NASA.

Unknown 0:57

Just

Unknown 1:00

you know, ask if there's something we can do for you guys in the neighborhood that those neighbors are actually after many, many years trying to navigate it like what can we do for you guys? We help each other you realize they're functional analysis done but they never heard before in the 30s. And so what can we do for you? We just just tried to extend not like we're experts, when we've had children, we survived it. I think we can offer you guys

Unknown 1:25

just wanting to live in a way that I go back into the route I went to the woods so I can live deliberately.

Unknown 1:31

So he says I went to the woods to look deliberately did not get to the end of my life and realize I prefer to live

Unknown 1:39

Yes.

Unknown 1:41

The other day about

Unknown 1:44

a

Unknown 1:46

pandemic.

Unknown 1:52

Seems like just trying to

Unknown 1:55

I want to see him it was like 2019 COVID pre world.

Unknown 1:59

But my thought, at the very center because they had to cancel an event because of pandemic It sounded like take care of you know, we there's too much going on in our county right now. Nick, you know, he, one of things you can say is it's it's it's a because he said this in other context.

Unknown 2:15

Really, the nature of the global capitalist system brings all kinds of risks of this sort. And that's not just new to us that's been around since the 1450s when the Black Death was brought into the port of Venice, right? It's like

Unknown 2:29

stretching out the global economy, which has been around a long time at least since the 1400s.

Unknown 2:36

And there's unintended consequences, some of its invasive species, right? Asian carp kind of get into Lake Michigan anyone has that garlic mustard or whatever it might be actual species like poison I think that enough already live here as well here right? but also things like this that just take everyone by storm and and also that

Unknown 2:58

the tremendous vulnerability with which we just assume we can get away with kind of doing anything we want to do at any time so I think one of the things I've had never been shown

Unknown 3:08

there's that force restraint right which is how to seemingly like for some kind of a lightning effect for others that really tough psychological effects really tough

Unknown 3:21

because it's not healthy

Unknown 3:24

and

Unknown 3:32

you know, although many people for hundreds of years even my wife said

Unknown 3:36

my kids were at home and it's like as a supporting it sounds like it was like the 80s or 70s so the kid Yeah, I think they would go ride your bike around the block or something come back and there's nothing to do no one's around Okay, that's a look into our lives you know, just kind of just trying to make in the wintertime you know, you couldn't really go anywhere you said to kind of make new

Unknown 3:57

I think it's I wouldn't say he's like happy about it, but I think he would probably say it's it's definitely showed the points to some of these

Unknown 4:05

unhealthy modes and practices that we take for granted that have led to something that's really disastrous, like nobody wants to happen, nobody wanted to happen or wants to happen. That is now kind of taking hold but I mean, what I see from the very center is like we got to practice neighborliness. As you said, we can't be holding big events and you know, whatever spreader of events and so on even though they're gonna have a big festival for their local rural reading group it's that we can't do it. We got to back off from that

Unknown 4:34

and I'm sure there's plenty people out there Tony as an every kind of like, What are you talking about, you know, but it's, you know, I put my own church I just use the template Love, love my neighbor, a character character plot, as an elder chose the elders. We said we're gonna wear these all the time and even I was the last one wearing one right? And then people started to not wear that, you know, and cleared up as people got vaccinated. I was just like, I'm just doing this, not because I enjoy it.

Unknown 4:58

But because I just wanted to say, Hey, I'm here.

Unknown 5:01

I should have got one of the smiley face on it those are kind of love and they can get a little creepy you know it's like so

Unknown 5:08

yeah it's it's uh, but he, you know he drives us and you stay around the house most of the time anyway and I kind of jokingly he has like this national and international following but he can't go like I don't know about any of it on the internet, nobody kind of Does he still responds to letters and stuff.

Unknown 5:27

Yeah,

Unknown 5:28

I'll be interested if you've read to the volume I heard about on

Unknown 5:33

racism in America now that he's working on that he said as long it's going to be a long book. So 87 year old guy writing and listening. He wants to his his, his kept writing.

Unknown 5:50

Poetry and stories just kind of making them out a little bit at a time they slow down slow down pace, as we all know, it's like it's kind of like the book he wants to write to address divisiveness in America I think especially through the ratio that you know, the racial divisiveness which has been a topic of concern for him for genetics

Unknown 6:11

so you would think of rural white Kentucky would not be able to speak on that but for him it's like it's pretty organic to this concerns as one of the concerns that rises up of failed immunity

Unknown 6:24

so one of the times I wrote down someone for Baylor University Press and asked if he could do a book with them and asked me if I would write to Wendell

Unknown 6:33

again he's gonna say no to you because I already have like five other books planned with Shoemaker record or whoever's publishers now and I have a lot of writing left to do with I've already committed to with them so probably more than in my own lifetime and I was like, kind of you know,

Unknown 6:49

disappointed that I wouldn't be able to kind of work with but also like really hard I

Unknown 6:56

guess I just want to thank you for that window bear and you're teaching this you can just join us I kept records and reading them with you guys talking about him it's like it feels like I'm cheating right this is what I this is what I love. I love the rest of the book I'm kind of glad At first I was like oh man Why did the body hurt when we got into where it's a little bit fraught right a little bit perilous and he's it's not like a perfect This is not scripture? He would be the first one to like what do you don't even compare me what do you do here? I think it just it gives good critiques but it always offers waves of hope that they were going to be tough to read and I just that rings true with the critiques may be true

Unknown 7:35

but there's a lot of critics and then you're just like depressed

Unknown 7:38

and then there's some people are hopeful let's do it. It's like I don't think it doesn't seem likely.

Unknown 7:44

This is more realistic idealism or an idealistic realism or I don't even know where I put it that I've just found to be

Unknown 7:53

really encouraging for a lot of my thinking is going in and young people students it's like it never hurts to see the possible what's going on.

Unknown 8:04

I think for young people today the narrative along these lines is is like some from another planet

Unknown 8:10

world

Unknown 8:11

and I've just felt my mission is to try to bring that and to encourage everybody at any point in their life

Unknown 8:19

people especially starting off in life

Unknown 8:21

can't get out or have a because they're so it's so fraught for young people and there's so much possible but it seems so chaotic scattered and brazen is like rootedness is in this great sense is incredibly beautiful things

Unknown 8:38

not something the right way. Because it needs it fundamentalist or smoking mode. You can't move the claustrophobic it's on it's actually what you'd like most desire to be part of

Unknown 8:52

my daughter works for new city urban blocks where some of you like urban park and also they weren't

Unknown 8:58

just like

Unknown 9:00

like he said a lot of small kids came in and didn't even know where carrots came from.

Unknown 9:06

People's appeared on the ground. I was like she committed a miracle. Like why they didn't want anything to do with the carrots. But

Unknown 9:13

here's my problem, right? And you're just you're introducing the world that people the world we fall into, we should

Unknown 9:20

not the sort of invented world that's kind of tenuous that we've kind of created or generated that's kind of so often made through screens, not the main screens would be about seven or eight minutes.

Unknown 9:31

Michael,

Unknown 9:33

Audrey has a question. And she would like to know, do you see his perspective as having utopian seats?

Unknown 9:45

That's a question that I think is a good question to ask. I mean, I

Unknown 9:51

think probably the thing where I would say no, I don't is when I read this fiction

Unknown 9:57

because

Unknown 9:59

you can

Unknown 10:00

Read the poetry and at times gather a kind of visionary set of books.

Unknown 10:06

The essays, you know, in their critique, and they're sort of like, you know feel like they're maybe pushing toward an idealized vision but when I read the fiction, I would suggest you wanted to start somewhere with read the novel Hannah Calder told from the perspective of a woman over the course of like 60 years of their life in football

Unknown 10:24

or as it's not utopian, it's it's

Unknown 10:27

it's hopeful of a world that has never existed before. Yeah, it's not a static because the world has never existed before. It's not go to the past.

Unknown 10:40

But a world that never disappoints sounds utopian, except, you know, utopia, the idea of utopia even when Sir Thomas Moore wrote that book utopia that the deep 50 means no place

Unknown 10:52

that you kind of nowhere it's not it was a little bit of a bit of a ironic thing. For him, it's all a place it was placed.

Unknown 11:01

And people placed it people really, it's not a no place, it could never be a no place. Are you telling me and you know, it's it's particularized so sharply the vision that he has, that I just feel like that's the right way. That's that's the, that's the right acreage for

Unknown 11:22

me, it does no good to think of a world that is and someone that nobody really dwells, and possibly could even dwell on this nearly a thought experiment.

Unknown 11:31

For him, it's always about the particulars. So it's not dystopian, thankfully, which is kind of what young people like to watch and read and so on, but they're not quite sure why just don't do this. I don't think it's utopia. It's topia, there we go. Place the place in Greek. It's totally

Unknown 11:52

so it, it pushes you back to particulars and find your way and your particular place and people and learn how to live and dwell well. That's, that's the best, that's the best you can get. That's the best you best world you have shorter the kingdom.

Unknown 12:08

So I'd like to separate the ladies complements your running course. And and I think there should have been grades

Unknown 12:16

should be awarded in April. So

Unknown 12:20

I will, I'll take the teachers I'm using a great day, I often get the teacher evaluations from the undergrads, which usually doesn't feel like a plus, generally speaking. So I'll take whatever, I'll get built up here, just getting ready for my evaluations and get in the semester, after I wrote my essays and so on. And so that the best way to get evaluations is people really love what you're talking about. And you don't get many grades. You get a good grade. So I'd like to thank you. So

Unknown 12:45

his vision of the earth reminds me of that poem I listed here Brian Earth crammed with heaven.

Unknown 12:53

Every cabin shrub a fire with Scott, thank

Unknown 12:58

you.

Unknown 13:09

I think

Unknown 13:12

right? Yeah, you know, it's, it's, and that doesn't just have to be like a Hawaiian island or a gorgeous scene. It's where you dwell right in my little backyard I fell in love with so deeply over the last 19 years, we went there. And he would look at it as out of control, we'd read craze, like pumpkin patch out of control with grape vines growing up inside of trees, it's odd, but I just find it and when hummingbirds come in, they're on the bone. And when the bees were there, and they were hanging themselves, feeling that kind of utopian, not utopian. I guess that's not already when he was in Tokyo, that feeling kind of topia connection to it.

Unknown 13:47

That's, it's really interesting. My kids feel the same way and they're just like this backyard. Horrible. It's gonna be no, but it's like we'll find your place. I don't have to force it on people, you'll find your toolbox. And you'll find kind of like your connection with what all that's good and right and so is sort of right there. I couldn't meet more religiously up there and I could try to keep track a little bit more about

Unknown 14:13

some of the outrageous

Unknown 14:16

growth the things that I did grapevines and things like that. I just like to see them grow. My pumpkin vines are in my apple tree. They're up there they're

Unknown 14:25

down. Grapes growing in the apple tree. It's gone out of control. My neighbors must

Unknown 14:31

remain essential.

Unknown 14:33

area. The Wild space of love back there is.

Unknown 14:37

Hopefully neighborliness is once in a while I noticed

Unknown 14:41

it's a right behind. This is a Navy testing industry and the six girls adults with disabilities live there.

Unknown 14:47

Most of them have lived there in over 10 years. My daughter is really good friends. I love the

Unknown 14:53

Calvary church come over and I noticed they quietly trim all over the vine. Anything that hangs over the fence gets like champion cleared out. So I do

Unknown 15:02

I guess they they're exercising neighborliness to our game by just putting it all back in silence I always feel bad

Unknown 15:08

but you know it's neighborliness like everything's working progress loves love to activity

Unknown 15:15

so I love this if you get a chance to do Matt bonzo that's a memorable name

Unknown 15:21

it's a philosophy of food or whatever it's called really it's got a lot of good stuff to say something about us so local food for cost us market rate on Reddit full doctrine congressmember event events pastry

Unknown 15:39

I got the sci fi yeah

Unknown 15:43

yeah

Unknown 15:45

yeah

Unknown 15:48

yeah scary and I got to work against pastries for a few years it's the opposite culinary experience right dance which I love not bringing health to my body as having to pick her up and so in the long run over there you can kind of like you know, yin and yang a little bit by some local whatever but I appreciate it took some students in there and the owner gave him a long talk about sustainable farming and so on It was really

Unknown 16:15

but it's you know, it costs its costs in a real sense right you you will invest in that me over against the maybe divide Sega

Unknown 16:26

or Apple

Unknown 16:31

I don't know who does I know that's it's tough to find like we're getting blueberries and strawberries But yeah, I don't know I try to find an apples that are growing because on our campus and trees are just left or whatever and just kind of get my apples as as we can. But I don't know I don't have those are dropped. It's highly

Unknown 16:50

pesticide read when you read about like the most dangerous crap. So you should be watching this. See, like, oh, whoa, I haven't watched any of these things. So be interesting to know more about those lines. And then some people would say USDA Organic labels are a little bit of a ruse, right? But you know, you you're looking for people who are kind of

Unknown 17:08

looking for stuff that's that you don't feel like there's places there's dangers of eating it right? You might have to just be

Unknown 17:17

I'm not sure about

Unknown 17:19

the blueberries or the apples.

Unknown 17:21

Anywhere.

Unknown 17:24

They go there you run against maybe idealism, you run against farmers who would just say it's not sustainable to do at a certain level without using these things. And I understand that those are very real because there's family businesses and livelihoods. And then maybe you find an old orchard where somebody owns an old orchard, you can just kind of let people come in and pick it so I think we've got a couple of places like these old trees we don't family, they've been there for 40 or 50 years. My apple trees over 50 years old and started my property was there before the neighborhood was built to last April through that didn't the orchard. I don't spray with anything, there's worms and every Apple might have applesauce or cider, which we've done. You have to cut up everything.

Unknown 18:01

But you feel like okay, it might be worth it. To do that we often will we often will use insider or something like that. He said, my kids just do a press where they just pop up on the boards and crush it down. It's out there no matter what and to do that

Unknown 18:15

as a

Unknown 18:16

shared labor after age 12. her teenage years went somewhere else but we're working on. Thanks to everybody and Sonia, thanks to you the amazing production. This, this whole area and skate worked really well this room didn't feel intimidating at all, but really good. You're on the screens and stuff. So

Unknown 18:35

well, thank you for everything. We're delighted to have you with us again. And I look forward to working with you in the spring on TS Eliot. So think it's in a totally different direction. I don't believe he was ever on a farm or any garden and his whole life. Never kind of Okay, so we're going in a different direction, though. He does talk a lot about agrarian ideas actually. TS Eliot. So that's going to be my next. I saw one photograph of him in a country of state wearing john Hearst. They're writing trousers and boots. I don't know he's on a horse, but he's trying to look country. But he didn't write much. He just looked like somebody who showed up. They're like, okay. So very, very urban event many times down to St. Louis to his birthplace in the tsla Society beats down there.

Unknown 19:16

And

Unknown 19:18

But eventually, in his Christian poetry kind of coming back.

Unknown 19:26

The land interestingly, we'll talk about that when we get there. And I have actually written and presented at Grand Valley before on the rhizomatic relationship underground, to her roots system between gslv Wendell Berry. I'm not sure I persuaded everybody that was not that's my grand unifying theory that I've come up with Bob Dylan and the whole thing.

Unknown 19:49

Thanks, everybody.