Why try to create what Prescott Bergh, the Wisconsin farmer, calls a sustainable culture? Because the disparate efforts that we are making now, though essential, are too small for the task that confronts the world. Our myriad efforts to create a sustainable aspect of our lives together include sustainable agriculture, sustainable communities, sustainable energy, sustainable economies, sustainable ecosystems, sustainable bioregions, sustained yield in natural resources like timber or fisheries . . .
But apparently no one is trying to bring all those efforts together, to think about ways that we might create a sustainable culture that will take into account not only humans but also all other creatures, the health of plants and soil and landforms. Richard Norgaard, professor of economics and environment at the University of California, Berkeley, author of Development Betrayed, and chair of a United Nations nongovernmental organization special committee on sustainability, remarked to me in 1998 that he had hoped his committee would fulfill that larger integrative function but that he had been disappointed in that dream. “Everyone is off, busy at their own tasks,” he said; “no one is keeping an eye on the big picture.”
Further, the folks working on sustainable economies do not often talk—at least at any length or depth—with those who are working on sustainable communities, doing sustainable agriculture, developing sustainable yields in timber or fish, monitoring air or water quality, or creating curricula for our schools that will help our children take better care of the world than we have. Not many focus on the task that transcends those, on how we might create a sustainable culture, a system that will incorporate all those efforts and restore a semblance of wholeness to our cultural life. And few talk about the spiritual nature of such an enterprise, the issue that lies behind our efforts to create environmental health, social justice, and a sound economy. How ironic it would be if those whose first principle is that everything is connected were to fail to create a sustainable whole because we failed to connect with our colleagues working toward the same end.
We can create a sustainable agriculture and still have an unsustainable planet. We can create thousands of sustainable communities and be left with an unsustainable world. We can build sustainable economies and still lack other essentials that will create a sustainable life for all. And who, except the self-destructive, wants to work toward an unsustainable culture?
Since Prescott posed his question about a sustainable culture, others have reinforced it: “Thus the agricultural assumption that nature is to be either subdued or ignored is embedded in the larger cultural assumption. Therefore we should not expect sustainable agriculture to exist safely as a satellite in orbit around an extractive economy,” writes Wes Jackson in Becoming Native to This Place.1 Creating a sustainable agriculture, a sustainable economy, or a sustainable community or making any other sustainable effort is not an end in itself. Each is a means to that larger end of creating a sustainable culture. If a sustainable culture is the goal, as Prescott said, or a regenerative culture is our best destiny, as Ben Webb, an environmentally minded Episcopal priest in Iowa, suggested, it might be useful to take a look at really long-lived cultures to see just what characteristics might have contributed to their longevity. Perhaps other cultures can teach us what we cannot seem to learn for, or from, ourselves.
Wes raises other interesting questions in Becoming Native to This Place. Writing about his home county in central Kansas, he points out that, according to archaeological evidence and observations recorded in early explorers’ journals, in the sixteenth century more than 25,000 people lived within what is now Rice County. The land then, Wes says, supported about 35 persons per square mile. The first settlers came with their plows in the mid-nineteenth century, and by 1927 the population was reduced to 15,000 people and falling.2 By 1935 the topsoil was blowing away, and dust was clogging the buildings, machinery, and everyone’s lungs. The great photographer Margaret Bourke-White wrote of watching cattle “run around in circles until they fall and breathe so much dust that they die.” It got so bad, she wrote in May 1935, that “farmers dread the birth of calves during a storm. The newborn animals will be dead within twenty-four hours.”3 Such farming practices as Americans had implemented by the end of the nineteenth century were not sustainable, and we did not make them sustainable in the twentieth. According to Wes Jackson, the Rice County, Kansas, population fell to just 10,400 in 1990. “Why this huge decline in numbers of people? Were the natives more sophisticated at providing their living than we are?” 4 Good questions.
I am not a trained anthropologist, though I am familiar with the literature of that field, but my experiences in Montana and Alaska lead me to suggest that we have something to learn from indigenous peoples. I have not had enough experience to comprehend ancient practices fully. No nonnative person I know has. Indeed, many Eskimos and Indians are no more apt to know their traditions well than an average American citizen is to know American cultural history well. During the years I lived in Alaska, there was little indigenous literature available in English or in the native languages. There were great storytellers in the twenty languages still in use among traditional people, but the literature of village people was just beginning to blossom; its beauty and mystery and truth were already apparent though not yet abundant. What I am drawing on here, in the face of our own need to create a sustainable culture, is what I heard and saw while traveling as director of bilingual education for the state and as a wandering director of the Alaska Humanities Forum, our state-based humanities program. In both cases I was trying—am still trying—to understand the differences between indigenous cultures and our own and to discover what we might learn from our indigenous relatives.
A good anthropologist might once have described an indigenous people as a group defined by its members’ common culture and common territory. In recent years the definition has expanded to include knowledge systems. My own use of “indigenous” is looser. All I mean by the term is that such folks seem at ease in their place and their tradition, and that ease seems to stem in part from their longevity in that place and that tradition and in part from their development of a language that allows them to recognize the place and subsist in it along with its other animals, plants, spirits, and geologic forms. The place, the tradition, and the language have generated a kind of wisdom, which is greater than knowledge. Thus not only is a contemporary Yup’ik elder indigenous, but so are Confucius and Heraclitus, Lao Tzu and Empedocles. They are all our elders, regardless of the traditions they and we represent. I know some contemporary farmers whose wisdom makes them my elders. And I have been fortunate to know Austin Hammond, Martha Demientieff, Nora Dauenhauer, Elsie Mather, Oscar Kawagli, Eliza Jones, Rachel Craig, and other Alaskan native people, including former students like Archie and Pooch and Andy who, though much younger, were wise with the wisdom of the land and the tradition they were part of. Throughout this text I am picking the brains, and I hope the spirits, of my elders.
My personal experiences have allowed me to glimpse some tantalizing elements of indigenous life. I lived for more than a quarter century in Alaska and was fortunate during that time to visit often in Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut villages. I was there in times of grief and celebration, in blizzards and summer rains and long days of bright sun, in times of harvest and of holing up. The people of those traditions live successfully in climates and conditions most others would see as harsh if not hostile. Over millennia they developed sophisticated, complex, integrated, and meaningful cultures, yet in recent years their cultural integrity has suffered enormous onslaughts. The symptoms of their shock and pain are well known and easy to see: suicide, alcoholism, family violence, all on a scale unknown in years past. We have to acknowledge that our American educational systems, churches, military, industries, and commerce have all been part of what Ivan Illich calls “a five-hundred year war on subsistence.”5 There is no justifiable defense for the cultural devastation, ethnocide, and even efforts at genocide that Western institutions have wrought since Europeans’ arrival on these shores.
Genocide? If that seems like a bleeding-heart exaggeration, consider General William T. Sherman’s telegram to General Ulysses S. Grant after the Fetterman debacle at Fort Phil Kearny, near Story, Wyoming, in 1866. The fort’s mission was to stop traffic headed for Montana on the Bozeman Trail, a trail that had been forbidden by treaty with the Sioux. Instead it let them pass, protecting settlers headed north, who plundered the resources of the country as they went. Inexperienced and contemptuous of “primitive” Indians, Captain Fetterman, a West Pointer stationed at Fort Phil Kearny, had once bragged that with eighty men he could ride through the whole Sioux nation. On December 21, he and eighty-one other soldiers were pursuing Sioux warriors with the intent to kill as many as possible. Fetterman and his troops, riding against orders, chased a handful of warriors over a ridge they had been forbidden to cross. Out of sight of the fort, they confronted Red Cloud and overwhelming numbers of Indians, who killed them all. They had been decoyed into a neat trap set by an unschooled warrior wiser and more knowledgeable than they about the country and the tactics it offered.6
On December 28, 1866, Sherman wired Grant, “I do not understand how the massacre of Colonel Fetterman’s party could have been so complete. We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children. Nothing less will reach the root of this case.”7 The italics, of course, are mine. Sherman didn’t think there was anything especially unusual or noteworthy in the language, and he couldn’t have transmitted that in Morse code if he had. Reservations and boarding schools would seem to have taken a more benign course than Sherman’s troops, working for assimilation of Indian children into mainstream American culture, but the purposeful result was the death of the Indians’ tribal culture, the end of Indians— ethnocide, some would say, but not genocide.
And yet, despite these peoples’ losses, their indigenous view of Nature, the complexity of their relationships, and the courtesy systems they have created for dealing with one another and with all other creatures provide a complicated, elaborate, but useful model worth exploring. Even in the most acculturated remnants of many tribes, there is a core of integrity. Sometimes it seems only a vestigial remnant of internal coherence—a unity of worldview or spirit that the fragmented American culture has not had since leadership was vested in a landed gentry along the East Coast, perhaps not seen in the West since Julius and Augustus imposed it briefly two thousand years ago.
That integrity is reflected in the unity of the humanities, sciences, mores, and daily life that one can yet find in small Alaskan villages. In many villages still, there are no dancers, as we recognize dancers, for everyone dances. There are no artisans, as we recognize artisans, for everyone is an artisan. All the women in Tununuk make baskets. The baskets are neither art nor artifacts but utensils. Though one or two women are known to make exceptionally fine baskets and some make extras for sale in museums and gift shops around the state, there is little distinction between this periodic activity and other periodic activities such as berry picking and cooking. There are also storytellers, who incorporate everything the people need to know in their stories. They are not stories in the sense of Western literature but tales that include what all people might hope for in their own literature: survival skills, history, biology, geography, animal wisdom and psychology, entertainment, theology, ethics, and art—all rolled into a story told to the whole village, accomplishing an equal and universal education that mainstream American culture has yet to achieve. What distinguishes those stories from what is conventionally called literature is not that they are less literary or that they are oral but that they are seen as essential to the life of the people, while in nonnative cultures many think that literature can be set aside or ignored. Stories are seen as irrelevant to commerce, politics, industry, or science unless they can make money. Best sellers that can be transformed into movies are the exception that proves the rule. But I cannot imagine a school curriculum in traditional Eskimo culture that would segregate history, literature, art, religion, science. They are so closely related one might hear a murmur: such knowing is all one. When we separate these things, we do not reflect any greater critical or analytic skill but merely our fragmentation and disintegration, our inability to do for ourselves and to be whole persons.
Cultures have persisted for thousands of years without agriculture, without industrializing, without banking, and without literacy, but there has never been a culture, so far as we know, without music, stories, and poems. Nor has there ever been a long-term culture without an educational enterprise, and that education has always moved in two directions: back, to learn the stories of the past and get them right, and forward, to transcend the past and create a more viable future. And always, from the first campfire conversation till just recently, that education has covered the range of what we now call the humanities, the sciences, and the arts. The goal of that education—until the last few decades, when the goal has shifted to job skills—has always been wisdom: intelligence, intuition, information, knowledge, and keen insight put in service to the community to enable “the people” to survive. (And, in indigenous cultures, “the people” includes four-leggeds and bird people as well as two-leggeds.)
From earliest days, one consuming human desire has been to know why things are the way they are, and our greatest stories have tried to account for the primary “why” and “what” questions: Why is there evil? Why do the innocent suffer? Why are we alive? What is our purpose here? What is the meaning of our lives? No matter our culture, our knowledge, or our educational system, we have rarely been willing to settle for knowing simply how things work. At least till now. There now is an inclination among academics to believe that the humanities are about books, that they are dependent on the written record and therefore could not have existed before literacy. Our own National Endowment for the Humanities has been known to promulgate that very notion. The simplest insights of anthropology and even casual conversations with folks who do not have advanced degrees indicate that nothing could be further from the truth or more arrogant. Contrary to the claims of academe and the NEH, important as books have become to the humanities, the humanities did not begin with books, and they will not end when the last book has been tossed aside.
Just as there has never been a lasting culture without the humanities, there has never been a culture without a skilled application of the scientific method. The abilities to observe accurately, to create hypotheses, to test and retest those hypotheses over time, and to create meaning around our observations, tests, and the facts that grow from them have been in place since the first hunter in the world took a shortcut to attempt to intercept game. He soon knew whether his hypothesis was right or wrong, and next time he could reframe his mental arguments about where his quarry might go. Indigenous agricultural experiments with plant and animal genetics, as long as nine or ten thousand years ago, and their ancient recognition that biodiversity was critical to sustainability, support the same notion. To believe that the scientific method was invented or systematized by Newton and Bacon is to misread history by about two and a half million years.
The arts, despite their role as a frill in our contemporary culture’s school programs, are always just as primary as the sciences and the humanities in the longest-lasting cultures. I have seen exquisitely carved and engraved ivory oarlocks from an Eskimo skin boat. Neither the carving nor the engraving was essential to the function of the oarlock, which would have worked just as well if plainly or even crudely carved. But they were essential to a hunter’s profound aesthetic sense, integral to his understanding of himself and his most meaningful work, a means to honor the animals he hunted and to become the kind of hunter he wanted to be. The world’s most ancient pottery and basketry attest to the same impulse to understand and create beauty, and at levels one hundred thousand years back, we find small, perfectly executed carvings, some naturalistic, some stylized, almost abstract. Some of those carvings are made of bone, which is hard enough, and some of stone, which may be harder still. They speak of highly developed aesthetic senses, patient sciences, and technologies created with time, intelligence, and muscle, all put in service of art and subsistence. Why? Because we cannot live long without beauty.
Indeed, beauty is essential to sustainability, according to agrarian and plant breeder David Podoll. I asked him what his criteria were for selecting seeds. “If you walked farmers out into a field of trial plots of different strains of wheat or oats, emmer or millet, and asked them to pick one,” David told me, “and then asked why they picked it, the most common first response would be to consider, shrug, and say, ‘Oh, it’s just beautiful.’” David said it took him a while to learn about the importance of beauty. Now he believes that “all the most durable qualities of a plant, or of a sustainable food system, follow on from beauty. The criteria for sustainability [have] to include beauty.” His comments give us some new ideas about the nature of beauty and what might constitute it. And about the criteria for sustainability.
Once, while working with his brother Daniel on saving seeds from a particular kind of squash, David also learned that plants have “spirit.” The color of the seeds was washed out, the skin didn’t seem right, they were tough, and the seeds were hard to get at. The barn the brothers work in got pretty quiet. “Those squash just had a sour spirit,” David said. But then they moved on to another strain, and the weight was so hefty, the color so bright, the fruit so firm, the seeds so white and so easily freed that the whole barn brightened up. He and Daniel were talking and laughing, and the seed saving went along briskly and pleasantly. “Those plants just had a better spirit,” David told me with a grin, “and it affected the whole place.” In a conversation in David’s living room, Nebraska farmer and organic certifier Tom Tomas unwittingly echoed David’s view. “The measure of healthy soil, of good health, is beauty,” he said, and then added, “It means that you have found the balance between raising food and doing no harm to the natural environment.” David’s and Tom’s views are neither science nor religion. They are more important: they are indigenous.
Another characteristic of all those means of learning for long-lived cultures is that they are not as fragmented and uncommunicative across disciplines as they have become in more specialized cultures. Indeed, often the same person is the basket maker, potter, quill worker, food and medicine gatherer, and dancer; or the carver, storyteller, tool and equipment maker, hunter, and dancer. Each one understands the science, technology, aesthetics, and lore that allows proficiency in every arena. Such learning is not less complex; it is as difficult as any other, and traditionally it was undertaken without tools and equipment for study. It includes metaphysics along with other learning. Marie Meade, a Yup’ik Eskimo from the Kuskokwim villages, reveals through the words of the people that making masks, presenting them in dances, drumming, and singing are all “our way of making prayer.”8
For the longest-surviving cultures, the sciences, the humanities, and the arts were shot through with the sacred. Nature and the sacred, wisdom and the sacred, were inseparably linked. Rituals for establishing those ties were part of every child’s education and every adult’s daily practice. Indeed, it was intense, personal awareness of the sacred that led to the simultaneous, and equally important, creation of the arts, the humanities, and the sciences. In our time the sacred has come uncoupled from wisdom; wisdom uncoupled from knowledge; knowledge unhooked from information; information unhooked from facts; facts disconnected from data; data disassociated from firsthand observation and experience. Our culture seems to have forsaken wisdom in favor of all the latter—at a time when wisdom is our greatest need and would be its greatest asset. Personal observation and experience are now relegated to “anecdotal information,” a very diminished status compared to that of data. That is an odd stance, since the best science is still rooted in observation and experience, either in the lab or in the field. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?” T. S. Eliot asks. “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”9 It may be that in the long run (where intelligence and wisdom always lie), we will discover that the great contemporary tragedy is the exaltation of information. One can easily discern the distinctions Eliot makes: Information leads to a quick killing on Wall Street; knowledge leads to a sound economy of the kind professional economists define for us, in which the economy can be deemed “booming” though millions starve and more millions lack food security. Wisdom leads us to a healthy culture that provides subsistence sufficient for the whole community without crippling the next generation’s chance to subsist as well.
There has never been a culture that lasted for long while ignoring its land base, extracting so much from the land’s capacity to nourish that it could not regain its own composure and regenerate itself. It is a truism that everything comes from the land and goes back to it, and the land comes first. Sustainable traditional cultures were too small and too mobile to utterly consume all their resources. Nevertheless, they paid closer attention to their resources than we have learned to do so far. In our time it is population growth and resource exploitation—not for the survival of the people, but for increased wealth among the already wealthy—that have brought us to outstrip our resources.
Long-term cultures are profoundly, rather than superficially, democratic. They have courts, but they do not have representative governments and they do not have to balance legislative and executive branches. Their kind of participation avoids a 51-49 vote in which the winner takes all and leaves the community torn, half its population aggrieved. Former chief justice Arthur Goldberg told me in 1971 that “democracy and the rule of law mean that you consent to lose,” but there are indigenous cultures far longer lived than ours in which people talk things through with one another long enough that no one loses. The notion that modern democracy began during the reign of John, king of England, or with John Locke, or during the American Revolution is to misread our political history as greatly as we do the history of science.
There has never been a long-term, sustainable culture that did not keep an eye on reciprocity, balance, and harmony as matters of official public policy, incorporating constraints on the behavior of its people toward animals and plants and the world generally, as well as toward one another, so that the human life of thought and activity and the larger ecological life could all participate with least harm to the other, a kind of democracy of the biota. Those old cultures had an honest, comprehensive accounting system that did not allow for “external” costs. Nothing was considered external.
Long-term cultures developed rituals of restoration, ways to bring the exile home and to restore balance and harmony between individuals and the culture, and between the culture and the ecosystem. These, too, were matters of official policy. Where are the concerns for restoration, for bringing the exiles home, and the rituals for reestablishing balance and harmony in our public hearings about land use policies, the spread of a global economy, mergers of megacorporations, economic development, or metro sprawl? Where are these concerns in the policies of our major environmental organizations that often seem focused on driving perpetrators at least into court and further into exile? Where are these concerns in the policies of our corporations that often paint environmentalists as destructive fools, tree huggers out to impoverish neighbors and businesspeople and stop economic growth? Indigenous policies of balance and harmony do not limit fairness to the humans involved but include the entire ecosystem in which humans are also a part. One has to take the neglect of these things in official policy to be another indicator that we do not yet have a sustainable culture, do not have much understanding of Nature in spite of our science, and have lost our way in the world.
Long-lived cultures tend to be “civil” cultures, with elaborate courtesy systems in place to avoid confrontation and alienation. Among some Athapaskan peoples on the Yukon, for example, it is considered impolite to ask a direct question. While preparing for an elders’ conference, Holy Cross elder Martha Demientieff told me that someone who wanted to know why the elders had done something in the past might muse, in their presence, “I wonder why they did that.” An elder would be free to respond to the musing yet not compelled to answer. In contrast, the direct question “Why did you do that?” might feel like a trap or even an indictment, for the interrogative demands an answer. Eskimo linguist and writer Elsie Mather once told me that among Yup’ik people along the Kuskokwim River, disputants sometimes seek out a third party to act as go-between, so the two parties do not have to face each other in a showdown that might permanently rupture the social fabric. In Tlingit cultures, it is the uncle, not the father, who trains the young boy in hunting and fishing and the skills necessary to maintain a respectful life in both the human and wilderness societies. That way, youthful chafing or outright rebellion against discipline is not aimed toward the father, and the nuclear family can maintain decorum, explained Ellen Hays, a Tlingit from Sitka, Alaska. Similar courtesy systems extend to game, fish, and the rest of the environment, so that what we call “civility” ramifies throughout the culture and includes all of the natural world. I do not want to romanticize here by making villages seem conflict free; villages are often torn by difficulties, for example, between two large family groups, and individuals have their differences. But each culture tries to anticipate and head off such events and offers civilized systems to mend broken relationships. Modern American culture now seems to tend toward revenge, or to prefer separation and punishment— jail—for those who disrupt it or fail to follow its taboos.
Contrary to popular perceptions of “primitive savagery” and tribal warfare and violence, there has never been a long-lasting culture based on war, violence, repression, or slavery for the majority. There haven’t been many cultures, long or short, without warfare, but in the longest-surviving cultures it was sporadic, usually seasonal, often more “aggressive ritual” than murder. The long-term siege was not seen as a necessary strategy. Troy is a recent event. Philip of Macedon, Alexander, Genghis Khan—all were upstarts on the land who diverged from the most ancient cultural growth. I am talking about cultures that have been around since long before the Greek polis, as well as before the Confucian flourishing of China, another relatively recent occurrence. The purpose of war among indigenous peoples was most often theft of women and trade goods and rarely—very rarely—territory. The cultures that have followed a violent or oppressive course have most often been broken apart by internal conflict or by weakness induced by too great attention to internal controls; so much of the available resources go to control that the capacity to defend against invaders is diminished. The old rule of the western movies is ironclad: there is always a faster gun. Sooner rather than later (in the definition of longevity we are using), the alpha male goes down and the oppressor becomes the oppressed, for the violent cultural center cannot hold. Two essential characteristics of a sustainable culture appear to be what we now call social justice and peace. Resorting to violence is always a clear sign of a culture at risk rather than a culture of strength.
And again, because this is perhaps the most important observation, there have been cultures that persisted for thousands of years without literacy, but there has never been a sustainable culture without healthy stories. Our real power in America, unrecognized, lies neither in our military nor in our economy but in our capacity, limited though it often feels, to tell ourselves healthy, rather than crippling, stories. What follows may help clarify the distinction between healthy and crippling stories.
Many sustainable farmers believe that sustainability is about experimenting with new agricultural methods, or old ones, and fighting the politics and power of monoculture agribusiness. I think they’re writing a new story about how to farm in this world—a healthy story that will transcend and replace the story that has been drilled into our farmers’ heads for fifty years by agricultural industries and land grant colleges. Their story has been that chemicals will work miracles, that bigger is better, that good farming is a business to get rich in rather than a way of living on the land—a crippling story that helped create a crippled and now crippling agri-without-culture. Living on the land has to include sound, sustainable business practices as well as intimate, personal knowledge of the land, crops, water, and livestock. Agriculture under the leadership of transnational agricultural industries is not improving. After all, how sustainable is a farming system in which sons or daughters cannot, or will not, farm? How sustainable is an agricultural system whose toxic runoff pollutes the wells and city systems of its urban neighbors who are the market for its produce? How sustainable is an agriculture whose pesticides and herbicides kill its workers?
Our culture has insisted for a couple of hundred years now that the primary unit of value is the individual—an individual’s ability to realize himself (herself, alas, didn’t figure into this until recently) regardless of consequences to others, to the larger culture, or to the land. That is non-sustainable nonsense. There has never been a sustained culture in which the individual exceeded the community in value. So now we need to create a story that puts individual freedom back into responsibility to the community, a community embedded in, surrounded and sustained by, larger social and ecological communities. Indeed, in the oldest cultures, recognition of the unity of the human with Nature was so clear that both were part of the same social and even linguistic order. If we can reintegrate individual freedom into the community, individuals will rediscover the freedom that can be found only in community, and we will have a healthier story to tell ourselves and our children.
In our homes, our schools, and often our churches, children have been told for years that Western culture is the best in the world, that God has blessed us above all others and loves us most, and that Anglo males are the strongest, bravest, best, and smartest humans in the world, real can-doers who can solve any problem regardless of scale. That’s nonsense, of course, another crippling story that has crippled or destroyed the lives of millions of non–Anglo American citizens and many Anglo women as well. It’s a story that also diminishes, and ultimately demeans and degrades, Anglo males. Most of us are pretty much like everybody else of whatever color or country, struggling to make our way in an unsustainable system. The new, healthy story of how to live together will recognize ethnic, linguistic, and gender diversity as differing forms of biodiversity and as values equal to biodiversity. That healthy story will also acknowledge that, whether rich or poor, if we are trapped in an unsustainable system, we will all go down. There is no way that wealth will buy us either safety or a way out.
Science cannot save us for three reasons. First, science is expensive, and now it works for the highest bidder. The highest bidders, even in universities, are often transnational corporations whose object is not sustainability but short-term shareholder profit. Second, though science does ask important questions, it does not even want to ask some of the questions critical to a sustainable culture. Those questions are basic ethical, moral questions of our relationships, questions that science eschews as too subjective to be amenable to hard scientific inquiry. The healthy questions that lead to healthy stories from our own history have to do with democracy, equality, opportunity, compassion, and freedom. Information, sometimes critical information, comes from science; wisdom for our living in the world comes from other stories. Third, even science can be found napping, lacking the foresight and policy influence to command sufficient attention to direct research to appropriate questions. We may well pass a point of no return before we can recognize it and thus fail to survive the impact of climate change, for example, or the chemical pollution of our environment. Scientists, alas, are no more inclined than the rest of us (and perhaps less inclined) to see the big picture or take the long view, to examine the thousand-year implications of their activities.
The new global economy is a white whale called progress; commerce and industry are our Ahab in mad pursuit; and we are all the Pequod’s crew. Who will be our Ishmael, left to tell the tale? My bet is that it will be someone Yup’ik. I remember Robert Clark, a Yup’ik Eskimo from Bristol Bay, saying that although he had a powerboat, and used it, he continued to practice using his kayak because “there will come a time when you and all your machines will be gone again. We will be back to old ways. Then I will be ready.” Clearly, Robert did not believe that we ignorant white savages would be around for the long haul.
Our economics, social life, politics, and schools have also insisted that having more toys is better than having fewer toys; that buying stuff is good for us; that we have to keep up with (or, rather, exceed) others in our consumption; that a high-paying job can take the place of meaningful work; that low-paying, meaningless jobs that demean our humanity are better than none, and we should be grateful for them because they will turn us into decent citizens; and that a free market has the same beneficent powers as a just god. But capitalism rests ultimately not on innovation or entrepreneurship or brains or even a free market—those are just stories we Americans like to tell ourselves because they make those who are successful look good. At its base, industrial capitalism’s success rests on exploitation of resources (consider the state of the environment, and the ways industrial polluters have found to externalize costs), racism (consider agriculture’s exploitation of members of ethnic minorities for picking and industries’ use of them in food processing plants), child abuse (remember those children of the Industrial Revolution left to sleep under the bridges after years of standing at looms pumping the treadles until they grew into their misshapen and deformed teenage bodies, at which time they were fired—and consider that America had laws to protect dogs before it had laws to protect children), sexism (consider the use of women in maquiladoras and “free trade zones” today), and war (consider the lingering impact of the Great Depression until World War II and the subsequent persistent development of war industries that helped generate a robust economy, an economy in which military production and weapons are still so important—and growing rapidly again—that dismantling it would trigger massive unemployment and economic collapse). Weapons are the United States’ biggest commercial export. The Enlightenment has some very dark corners.
But as much as, or perhaps even more than, all these, contemporary capitalism rests on consumption: government and corporate consumption of resources, technology, and scientific research, and citizen consumption of market goods. As big a business as any in our culture is an unexamined and unchecked advertising industry designed to get us to consume, another crippling story rather than a healing one. We are asked to consume not only material goods but ideas, policies, whole worldviews that are presented with all the persuasive skills and battering psychological hype that can be bought. We are under assault, being laid siege by hype: corporate hype, political hype, military hype, educational hype, commercial hype. The U.S. government would have us believe that we can fight terror by getting back to our shopping as soon as possible, even if it’s limited to duct tape. As our civil rights have declined in recent years, freedom has come to mean the freedom to choose among sixteen brand names of one product. When the market was local and what was made (that is, manufactured, made by hand) was essential goods, consumption and production were closer, and the goods people bought, or bartered for, served their work and their lives and often fed their aesthetic senses as well. Now the majority of what the culture produces is nonessential, aesthetically unsatisfying frippery and frills. One result of this is that American consumers frequently spend more money on the package than on the product. No wonder we have become participants in an unsustainable culture that is eating itself, and us, out of house and home.
Our typically American romance with growth has resulted in a mandate for agriculture that has destroyed our small farms and small towns and raised havoc with our topsoil. For fifty years now, that cultural mandate has been get big or get out. Those who farm have heard it as a continuous din from corporations, land grant universities, and the government, all institutions we once believed in and relied upon. They have been telling us a story that cannot sustain us for the long term and has not served us well to date. It has resulted in growths we do not want—in our wives’, mothers’, sisters’, and daughters’ breasts and our husbands’, fathers’, brothers’, and sons’ colons and prostates. This is the harvest of a culture so bent on growth with all possible speed that it will pour a hundred thousand chemicals into the earth and atmosphere, into our lakes, groundwater, and oceans, before it has a clue about the long-term effects of a single one of them.10
These are just some of the unhealthy stories we have been telling ourselves. They have been killing us, literally, but they are so powerful and we so want to believe them that we have ignored what they have done to foreshorten our future.
One thing I learned from talking with farmers and touring farms the last few years is that agriculture is one of the sites where the environment and social justice intersect. So, too, science and the humanities, information and the wisdom inherent in stories meet—or fail to meet—in profound ways on every farm. If the first rule of sustainability is that all things are related, then all these elements are essential to a sustainable culture, critical not only to the larger urban culture but to agriculture.
So we’ve got to find a new story to tell ourselves about sustainability and the land, and we’ve got to find it fast. Farmers are falling like flies, too many by their own hand. Too many bought the myths of chemical miracles and “big iron” machinery that have imprisoned them in an unsustainable life of debt and failure. They too often lose the race against debt, volatile prices and markets, crop disease, and the many insect species that respond more rapidly to changing circumstances than humans do and outstrip our own inventive capacities. Our chemical pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics cannot keep pace. That is evidence, one has to assume, that soybean aphids are simply more intelligent than the soybeans they crave, and that both the aphids and the soybeans are inherently more intelligent species than the humans who are bent on destroying them. Genetic modifications and chemicals are only patches, short-term fixes that so far have proven more destructive than constructive, although there has not, as yet, been either interest or time enough to do the studies of their long-term effects.
We have known of the ties between landscape and human and animal health for many years. The latter two depend on the first. Our rural social scientists have known for at least half a century that when land health declines, our economies decline, rural towns and their populations and markets shrink, and churches, schools, colleges, banks, and businesses cut back and close. Psychologists and social workers know that when the land’s health declines, stress increases; depression, alcoholism, child abuse, and spouse abuse also increase; whole populations are uprooted; and intellectual and spiritual resources are depleted. Botanists, agricultural scientists, and chemists have known about the links between the health of the soil and the health of everything else for even longer. In the Western tradition, Lucretius, Hesiod, Cato the Elder, Caesar, Cicero, and Seneca knew it a couple thousand years ago. On the Eastern side, Confucius, Lao Tzu, and the Buddha knew it too. And indigenous cultures knew it millennia before all of them. Why should it be so hard for us to understand today? Everything that we know and cherish depends on the health of the land, and the physical basis of that is now, again, clear and absolute. When agricultural systems are damaged by biological simplification, environmental costs escalate and the human economic, personal, and social costs skyrocket. Confident in our own superior knowledge, we have forgotten—or ignored—the insight that everything we do affects everything else. Now our land, our communities, and our human spirits are all in need of healing.
In 2007 Grand Forks, North Dakota, celebrated the tenth anniversary of the great flood that brought the town to the front pages of newspapers across the nation, looking like World War II photos of Stuttgart. The Red River valley of western Minnesota and eastern North Dakota is mostly flat, an ideal landscape for row crops, so corn, soybeans, and sugar beets have predominated for years with their concomitant chemical inputs, lack of ground cover for much of the season, erosion, and flooding. It was this row crop agriculture on vulnerable lands that caused Grand Forks to sink beneath the river. Our land grant colleges and universities are implicated in this; they have been telling and retelling that story of bigger is better and quick chemical fixes and high interest loans from the hucksters, and we need to help them find a better story to tell.
I’m not a practicing farmer and have no desire to be one, but I’ve had enormous respect for farmers since I came to know my German immigrant grandfather when I was a little boy. He was a farmer in Iowa, a dairyman who delivered milk in town and raised sheep, pigs, horses, chickens, and a large garden—a significant portion of which went to gladiolas. One of the images that lingers from my earliest childhood is of Grandpa walking out in the dusk after supper, crossing the lane that led from the county road into the farm, ducking under a row of pines to stand in a small plowed field of rich, black Iowa loam lying deep on the field, reaching down to pick up the microorganism-saturated dirt that crumbled so easily in his hand, and spilling it into the evening breeze. He was not gloating over his ownership or rejoicing in his ability to dominate the land—a notion anyone who has ever farmed or ranched finds incomprehensibly idiotic—but was simply feeling self-possessed, at peaceful ease after a day of hard work. Like any craftsman savoring the material he works with and loves, he was a good man who simply loved good soil.
When I was nine I worked all summer for my uncle Bernard Eden in Calamus, Iowa, cultivating corn and beans. I began on a little gray Ford-Ferguson tractor, but during the summer, as the corn and beans got taller and my driving skills improved, I graduated to a much larger—or so it seemed to me; it was the one Uncle Bernard drove—Allis-Chalmers. I learned something about work then, about long hours, about the way the land demanded attention and care if it was to yield its bounty, and, I must admit, about the pure privilege of consumption on a Saturday night in town with four well-earned dollars in my pocket—a whole week’s wages after board and room—exactly enough to buy a pocketknife I coveted.
I admired both Grandpa and Uncle Bernard, and I can support sustainable farming efforts in part because I appreciated their good efforts, admired both their knowledge of and love for the land and its critters, their capacity for hard work, their generosity, and their rock hard integrity—characteristics I often recognize in those ranchers and farmers I’ve come to know in the West and the Midwest, and in other folks I know like them.
I have also supported other elements necessary to a sustainable culture, serving for years on the board of the Center for Children and Families in Anchorage, trying with colleagues and friends to get a grip on child abuse. I have spent time developing public programs in the humanities in several states on the assumption that the humanities are essential to indigenous cultures that have sustained themselves far longer than Western civilization has to date, hoping that bringing the humanities to bear on issues of serious public concern will help to sustain my culture. I have served on arts councils for the same reasons, on commissions looking into public health issues, on committees trying to find ways to reduce racism, in environmental organizations; I have consulted on poverty, and tried to write my own poems and essays. All of these I see as fitting parts of a larger whole, the effort to develop a sustainable culture built on a healthy spirituality and an awareness of our subsistence base. I believe that the soil of that spirituality, the indispensable element that nourishes a healthy spirituality, lies less in religions than in language—in a culture’s best stories, songs, and poems—some of which do, indeed, come from its religions.
Perhaps I seem a hopeless romantic, and naive to boot. But the alternative these days seems to be cynicism. I will happily trade cynicism in for a clear view of how the world actually works and will cling to hope, wherever I find it, that a vision of a sustainable, compassionate, respectful culture can yet be realized. We can find our way toward that vision from the models of indigenous peoples that are still at hand, indeed, in all of our own inner spiritual and intellectual resources.
I’ve been committing myself to one quixotic cause or another all my life, but now I see sustainable agriculture as part of a larger cause that, if it turns out quixotic, will spell catastrophe. So I’m willing to work on sustainable farming, and these other fronts as well, in the hope that they all move toward creating a sustainable culture. What we learn from truly long-lived cultures is that if we desire sustainability, we will focus more on language, music, and stories than on technology and economic development. One virtue of such a view is that science, too, can tell us useful stories that provide us information and knowledge needed to create health—but those stories must take their place alongside the stories that come to us from the humanities and the arts that provide us with the wisdom necessary to create a culture that can sustain us all.
Evidence is mounting that indigenous knowledge may be not a romantic but a realistic route to the future, even for agriculture. It is revealed in the wisdom of the ancient practices of peasant farmers in Latin America. Nearly three decades ago, archaeologists uncovered more than 170,000 hectares of Indian farms in use three thousand years ago. Those farms consisted of “raised fields of seasonally-flooded lands in savannas and in highland basins,” writes Miguel A. Altieri of the University of California, Berkeley. “These platforms of soil, surrounded by ditches filled with water, were able to produce bumper crops despite floods, droughts, and the killing frost common at altitudes of nearly 4,000 meters.” In 1984 Peru’s state agencies and nongovernmental organizations began to assist farmers in recreating those ancient beds. They found that the raised beds and their water-filled ditches helped to moderate temperatures and extended the growing season significantly. This method led to higher productivity than did the use of chemical fertilizers. In the Puno district, conventional methods average one to four tons of potatoes per hectare per year. In the Huatta district, contemporary farmers who implement raised beds have produced a sustained yield of eight to fourteen tons of potatoes per hectare per year.11
Altieri reports on another ancient system of terraces that was recreated in Peru, “Crop yields have improved significantly. For example, potato yields went from 5t/ha [tons per hectare] to 8t/ha and oca yields jumped from 3 to 8t/ha.” All this by following a “conventional” practice in use a millennium before the ancient Greeks. At the time of Altieri’s report, there were “1,124 hectares of terraces and 173 hectares of drainage and infiltration canals.” The results: “Enhanced crop production, fattening of cattle and raising of alpaca for wool have increased the income of families from an average of $108 per year in 1983 to more than $500 today [1994].” Altieri documents similar successes ranging from organic farming in the Andes and other places to agroecological approaches similar to those used in Brazil.12
All those developments, and our best hope for achieving a sustainable culture, stem directly from getting back to basics: rediscovering indigenous intelligence, eschewing mainstream American culture’s bent toward arrogance, and combining that new-old wisdom with our own knowledge.