Perhaps sustainability is always more complicated than it seems. We devote our attention to recycling and discover that our public health is becoming public obesity and public diabetes. So we work to restore public health, only to discover that another element of sustainability has now slipped through our fingers, slick as fresh liver that we have to scramble across the kitchen to pick up. Indeed, I have spent time working on health issues in our town and, from there, gone to a meeting of about thirty folks in town forthrightly called the “racism committee.” For several years they got together once a month to talk about what they could do to reduce the racism in a town steeped in a century and a half of it. Further, the difference between the wealthy and the poor in our community is grimly visible; our women’s shelter is fully occupied with battered and frightened spouses; and gay men and lesbians move about freely only because of their courage. At some level, good health or not, the community is not a community but a collection of fractured enclaves—racial, ethnic, economic, gendered, religious—and the fractures are deep enough that we may never be able to knit them. If we can’t, our town is not sustainable but will come apart at the seams.
There is a familiar metaphor one hears in workshops on sustainability these days. It is the image of sustainability as a three-legged stool. The three legs are the environment, our social life together, and the economy. This is meant to represent a habitat for a sustainable culture. The image is popular—and poisonous to the cause of sustainability.
When we think about sustainability, we commonly think first about the natural environment. The initial interest of wilderness advocates was in protecting habitat for the sake of humans, at first for our aesthetic pleasure and our psychological or spiritual health. A bit later, as our understanding increased and the extent of destruction grew clearer, we became concerned for our physical health. Now we are gradually moving beyond our anthropocentric concerns and including the health and well-being of other creatures, recognizing that we are all related and that the health of all, both psychological and physical, is interconnected: the death of the snail darter or the spotted owl is but a symptom of our own failing human health, the dying cell that presages a dying organ that will destroy the larger body.
The source of our environmental concerns is easy to see. Driving over Snoqualmie Pass in the early evening, we can see the clear-cut hills, and the runoff from the rain covers them like a sugar glaze, glistening in the dusk as the water cascades over them to flood cities in the lower reaches. The logging roads, zigzagging across the slash, are even uglier—scars that will not heal in my lifetime nor my children’s, nor their children’s. In the Midwest we cross old bridges, look at what appears to be beautiful habitat for fish, and remember the warnings that we should not eat them because toxic materials accrue inside their bodies and will also accumulate in our own. Even on these gentle prairie slopes, the signs of erosion are too often clear. No matter where we live or travel, we can all point to environments that have been devastated, and we ache to stop the damage and make them new again and whole. That is one aspect of the habitat for sustainability requiring our immediate care.
More recently, the desire to create sustainable communities has led us to consider social health as a second habitat that requires our attention, the second leg of the stool. One of the fundamental assumptions of our efforts to achieve sustainability is that we are all in this together, uncomfortable as that may sometimes make us. “For nature demands that all things should be right and harmonious and consistent with itself and therefore with each other,” said Cicero, the old Roman senator, more than two thousand years ago. In business transactions we “are obliged,” he says, to tell a customer everything that would be useful for him to know, remembering “that nature has joined mankind together in one community. . . . So everyone ought to have the same purpose: to identify the interest of each with the interest of all.”1 How much we have forgotten since Cicero’s day. We don’t get far without the involvement and aid of others. This, too, has parallels in our agriculture.
Geneticists’ selection of plant or animal characteristics, described by Wes Jackson in a talk on genomes at Wartburg College in Iowa—selecting for a single plant virtue while ignoring others—has its equivalent in our social environment. It is called ethnic cleansing. The former represents a dead end for biology; the latter, for society.
Language diversity is as critical to a sustainable culture as biological diversity is to the rest of creation. Worldview, I think, is less dependent upon sight than on language, and when a language is lost, the way that language can see the world is lost too. It lies beyond revelation by other words. Consider the sense of loss when you know your children and grandchildren will never see the world the way you do, and you know that is not only because the world has changed so much but also because they do not have the vocabulary to see it with. You know the perceptual capacity you have is being extinguished in your children, dimming their vision. No wonder American Indian people often feel disoriented, alienated. They are aliens in the land of their birth, blinded by the loss of words. If justice does not require that the dominant culture maintain languages different from its own, then compassion requires it, and ultimately wisdom, the mother of compassion, requires it, for each language is a window on the world. No one culture or language can provide us with a comprehensive, all-seeing worldview. We need all the worldviews that many languages make available to us, all the possible ways of seeing the world that many languages allow. The world now holds about 6,700 languages. Linguists estimate that by the end of this century one-half of them will be gone. We need the diversity of languages for the possibility of their healing insight and their expansive connections to other worldviews, just as we need rainforests for their undiscovered healing medicines. The loss of native languages is a loss beyond words, and it imperils not only their speakers but all humans. Indigenous peoples around the world have the same right to keep and use their language as English speakers have to keep and use English. Yet the toxic pattern of “English only” that the United States, particularly our education system, has followed is as brutal as gladiatorial combat.
Recent world events have shown again that the old colonial days are dead, and the so-called new world order of the mid-1990s was just colonialism behind a new mask. In the social world, as in the natural environment, whatever creates imbalance creates an unsustainable world—whether that imbalance is racial, economic, or educational, and whether we think of it in terms of consumption, access to real information, or opportunity. So our social life—all those elements of work and love and family and ritual and celebration and grief, and all the babble of voices in their myriad tongues—is as critical to creating a sustainable, regenerative world as is our care for the natural environment. One of the virtues of the image of the three-legged stool—and the concept of sustainability—is that it reminds those of us who love wilderness that the social side is also critical to a healthy habitat for a sustainable culture.
Now consider the third leg of the stool: the economy. As it stands in the current metaphor, this third leg is separate from the environmental leg and from the leg that represents society at large. But to separate the economy from the environment and the society grants it an independence it neither has nor deserves and lends it an authority that exceeds its real power. Every economy has an impact on the environment—even the highest-technology, theoretically pollution-free economies require energy and leave toxic detritus behind. And any economic system that exacerbates the gap between the wealthy few and the impoverished many makes a world that cannot sustain itself. Separating the economy from the society and the environment is fatal to the creation of a sustainable culture. It may lead us to make allowances for commerce and industry, allowances that inevitably result in harm to our natural and social environments. We have already made excuses for them too often, to the harm of the earth and ourselves. The economy is a human creation, a social phenomenon with powerful, most often destructive impacts on social and environmental health. The economy belongs not in a separate category but as one of many social indicators. Despite the claims of economic determinists, the economy is merely a subhead we have to work on along with racism, education, the arts, and cultural opportunities.
Let me be clear here. I am not trying to diminish the importance of the economy or of jobs, for healthy societies generally have healthy economies. But a growing, even booming, economy, we have learned to our confusion and sorrow, does not necessarily lead to a healthy society. Witness America from 2000 to the present. Any well-paid economist will tell you that the economy is doing fine. Any farmer, migrant laborer, or factory worker will tell you that the economy has gone south. Indeed there is evidence that a wealthy society is less healthy for both the environment and the local culture than a poor one and that even poverty-stricken economies can sustain cultures that last for a thousand generations and create astonishing works of art, thought, and craftsmanship.
If we have a strong, flourishing economy but we abuse our children and assault our spouses, where are we? We are a far cry from a sustainable community. During my years on the Anchorage Child Abuse Board, I saw pictures of a baby covered with cigarette burn marks, all laid out across the tiny back in deliberate patterns, as if tattooed, and pictures of the pulped faces of women attacked by their husbands. I know women who have been hit; I have seen the blackened swelling. Those who care about the environment cannot dismiss these as social issues. If humans are part of Nature, as our environmental rhetoric insists, such scenes are a blight not only on our social life but on the landscape—a blight on the landscape just as surely as a clear-cut is—and are as fatal to a sustainable culture as any economic collapse. Too often those of us who love the wilderness have used rape as a metaphor for the loss of trees or whales and ignored the rape that is not a metaphor.
Such abuses are beyond the reach of the economy and have nothing to do with income or education or social class. They are immune to the amenities that wealth affords, and reducing poverty won’t touch them. Lawyers do it and laborers do it; doctors do it and trash collectors do it; college professors and those who quit school in fifth grade do it. And those of us who do not do it know that somewhere down inside ourselves, hiding in the shadow inside us all, is a self in us that could do it too. If humans are a part of Nature and not something outside it, an abuse victim falls like a felled tree.
When we separate the environment, the society, and the economy into three legs, we fall into the trap that our science and philosophy have laid for us for four hundred years. We separate humans from Nature, and the economy from both as if it were something beyond human influence, equal to the natural and social environments in its independent authority. But the economy is a human cultural construct, never independent from either the environment or society, and only a part of those other aspects of the habitat for a sustainable culture—not separate, and nowhere near equal. Further, when we separate a concept like sustainability into three parts, we reduce something that is incredibly complex to something that is intolerably simple. The natural world and our lives in it are far too complex for that image. To come closer to reality, we have to reintegrate all three of those metaphorical legs into a single leg.
The idea of a one-legged stool may appear foolish to our contemporary minds, but it is an image that will serve us well here. It is the image of my grandfather’s milking stool. It had only one leg. The balance was provided by Grandpa’s sitting on it. Without that it would not stand up but would lie on its side where he tossed it in the corner with a smooth swing as he stood up from milking the last cow.
Grandpa’s sense of balance leads us into another inseparable environment that I think is critical to both a healthy society and healthy ecosystems. It is the first element in a sustainable culture, the first arena that needs our attention and care as we seek to create a sustainable life. It is an element entirely left out of the image of the three-legged stool, and out of most discussions of sustainability. I don’t have a satisfactory name for it, but this other environment has something to do with the idea of a spiritual habitat. I am not thinking of “spiritual” in any traditional religious sense and am not limiting it to that aspect of our lives wherein lie such characteristics as compassion or empathy. This environment is intellectual, emotional, and, well, spiritual. Grandpa’s sense of balance was not entirely physical; it stemmed from a right spirit as well. At the same time we work on a regenerative life for the natural and social worlds, we must work on ourselves, on setting ourselves right. In the Hua Hu Ching, Lao Tzu asks,
Would you like to save the world from the degradation
and destruction it seems destined for?
Then step away from the shallow mass movements and
quietly go to work on your own self-awareness.
If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken
all of yourself.
If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world,
then eliminate all that is dark and negative in
yourself.
Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your
own self-transformation.2
Remember the Qur’an’s warning? “Allah does not change a people’s lot unless they change what is in their hearts.” The key first step toward the creation of a sustainable habitat for our natural and social worlds lies in the health of this third, interior, spiritual environment. It has to be the healthy, intelligent, wise, caring, internal base from which we create health for ourselves by creating health for everything else. Such an apparently altruistic impulse comes only from the internal spiritual habitat I have in mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, so grandly wrongheaded in so many of his grandest ideas, was also right in some. He thought that “the problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul.” He adds, “The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit.”3 Emerson implies that if we tended to this personal, interior life first, the others would be taken care of automatically. In this he echoes his friend Thomas Carlyle, with whom he surely discussed such matters. Carlyle writes, “To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; all but foolish men know that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects in himself.”4 The world needs all of us involved in this process of self-transformation. None of us are exempt, none are unnecessary to the work that needs to be done.
Though we may not be able to measure our inner intellectual, emotional, or spiritual life, we can see measurable expressions of that life. The health, harmony, balance, beauty, and intelligence—or lack of these—in our towns and our countryside are a direct outgrowth of the health of our souls. If what comes out of our cities and flows into our rivers is garbage, that is one unhappy measure of the state of our spiritual life, a sign that there is still a little garbage in us.
The heart of sustainability for agriculture, according to Wes Jackson, lies in the state of the nutrient supply in the soil. Take that last phrase metaphorically and it becomes the base for the health of the natural environment and for all the other aspects of a habitat that will support a sustainable culture as well. Soil, not landscape, is the soul of all our earthly enterprises: social, economic, environmental, spiritual—however you want to name or categorize them. The nutrients for the social environment are reflection, thoughtfulness, empathy, compassion, and understanding. The special nutrients of the internal environment are restraint, reflection, and deliberateness, perhaps what Buddhists would call “mindfulness” or Confucianists would call “selfcultivation.” That mindfulness or self-cultivation will take account of the genius of the place, as Wes says all good agriculture does—in this case our human, interior place—and then will act deliberately in light of what it knows and acknowledge “the reality that we are billions of times more ignorant than knowledgeable.”5 When we finally get the right balance of these nutrients mixed in the soil of our souls’ interior life, we will be on the way toward creating the habitat for a sustainable life. It is helpful to note that many healing rituals of indigenous peoples are aimed precisely at restoring balance and harmony within the person who is ill. The assumption is that illness stems from being out of balance with one’s environment. Our own balance on the one-legged stool, derived from accepting our place in Nature rather than fighting to expand or reshape or deny it, will keep everything upright. The primary resource for the development of this area of the habitat for a sustainable culture is language, the vehicle for stories, songs, poems, and the means for exploring philosophy, theology, and even spirituality.
Yet another reason for putting all these legs (and ourselves) together is that we no longer have the luxury of working on these aspects of a healthy habitat for a sustainable culture one at a time. They are equally in need. We cannot save the whales and neglect our central plains. We cannot protect the great wilderness landscapes and ignore our topsoil. We cannot protect old growth forest and ignore the health of our spiritual lives. Neither can we retreat into our spiritual lives and ignore the trees and whales. That won’t work; it won’t save us. Whatever we create out of that single-minded approach will be but a fragment of what is necessary, and we have to be bent on creating a healthy whole. If we could stand on Dead Horse Point five hundred years from now, that spectacular promontory above the vast canyon country of southern Utah would still astonish us with its expansive beauty. The only apparent difference might be that the slim, silver sheen far below, where the Green and the Colorado rivers now flow together, would be invisible, the water dried up and gone. Indeed, if our current practices continue, all our topsoil and all our clean water will be long gone. In too many places in our natural environment we have overgrazed our winter range, both literally and metaphorically. In our social world we have only a thin layer of topsoil—tolerance—for people and cultures that are different from our own. When times get hard, there is nothing left to nourish us, and we snarl over limited profits or limited resources. It seems clear that the work of spiritual regeneration has to begin now.
These intertwined aspects of life—the natural and the social, and the balance that comes only from our own personal interior—when taken together, seen as a single entity, become the habitat, an ecosystem, for a sustainable culture. When we have them in the right balance they will provide enough winter range to get us through the starving time, will make us strong enough to hold on till the coming spring.
For those who insist that there have to be three legs to our sustainability stool, we should at least rectify the names of those three legs, as Confucius suggests. Rather than Nature, society, and the economy, we can give them more accurate names: subsistence, sustainability, and spirituality. The reasons for this will become clearer as we continue, but if my notions about those three have any merit, they are appropriate for our stool because they are also inseparable.
For now, consider “Ask Me,” a poem by William Stafford, part of a little series of poems about the Methow Valley in the North Cascades of eastern Washington, that has lingered for years in the workbasket of my thinking about sustainability.
Sometime when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.6
That last line seems to me the master key. We’ll know we’ve got our environmental priorities; our society’s social, political, and economic priorities; and our personal, spiritual priorities right when we have listened to the natural world carefully enough that we can say with Stafford, “What the river says, that is what I say.” In The Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry tells us, “The earth will solve its problems, and possibly our own, if we let the earth function in its own ways. We need only listen to what the earth is telling us” and then change our most interior life and practice.7 Listening to the river is the way, the tao, that will both heal and empower our spiritual life, enabling us to transform our corner of the culture, moving it toward health for our environment and our society.
Another Stafford poem, “Where We Are,” has always accompanied the first. If you know the territory, think of the Methow Valley, the high Cascades. If you don’t know this particular territory, imagine your own high plains or timbered hillside above a stream. It will be entirely appropriate.
Fog in the morning here
will make some of the world far away
and the near only a hint. But rain
will feel its blind progress along the valley,
tapping to convert one boulder at a time
into a glistening fact. Daylight will love what came.
Whatever fits will be welcome, whatever
steps back in the fog will disappear
and hardly exist. You hear the river
saying a prayer for all that’s gone.
Far over the valley there is an island
for everything left; and your own island
will drift there too, unless we hold on,
unless we tap like this: “Friend,
are you there? Will you touch when
you pass, like the rain?”8
Notice here that Stafford is talking about a special, though very common, kind of rain. Not a trash mover and gully washer, but a soft er rain. This is no violent storm, confronting us with ruin, but the soaking rain we need after drought, a bringer and sustainer of life, the rain that heals.
Nevertheless we may still be lost: “Your own island / will drift . . . unless we hold on.” Notice the shift in the pronouns here from “your” to “we.” One glistening fact of our time is that we all need each other now—both the friend and the stranger—perhaps more than ever in the history of the world. The earth, and life as we know it, is peculiarly imperiled just now; we are all more vulnerable than we have ever been. The question then remains for all of us, “Friend, / are you there? Will you touch when / you pass, like the rain?” How we answer will determine whether we have a culture with a future.