Why learn native wisdom? Because if we want to think about a sustainable culture and find ways to create one, we have models right at hand, as Gary Snyder indicates in “Axe Handles.” The models have roots and forms in several cultures, but in each case they grow from antiquity. I’m thinking here of Eskimo and Indian cultures in Alaska, whose roots are older than even those Chinese sage kings who preceded Confucius, and may be three times as old as Western culture. They have been around long enough; there must be something we can learn from them, if we have sufficient humility and wisdom of our own.
What are the links among subsistence, sustainability, and spirituality? We are in a fix, caught in a species die-out at a rate never before seen. Our earth, upon which we remain totally dependent, has become infected by its own chronic wasting disease, losing its “ten thousand things,” as the ancient Chinese called the myriad creatures, plants, animals, and rocks that cover the planet; we have gotten caught in our own desires, greed, conceits, and arrogance. And there lies the heart of it. The evidence seems clear now that the real root of these issues, both cause and cure, lies not in our science or technology but in our own spiritual and intellectual poverty—or, more hopefully, in our own spiritual and intellectual resources. Those Neo-Confucians from around the twelfth century would have called these “the heart-mind.”1 Mary Evelyn Tucker, one of the great scholars of Confucianism, sums it up in a sentence: “Nature is seen as a ‘resource’ to be used rather than a ‘source’ of all life to be respected.” She concludes that our division of life into matter and spirit, and our sense that spirit is superior to matter, “has given rise to a crisis of culture, a crisis of the environment, and a crisis of the spirit.”2
There is a paradox at work here that puzzles many of us. Religions are booming around the globe, with adherents willing to lay down their own lives, and the lives of many others, to foster faiths that are not alive and awake to their own best spirituality but are now given to revenge, power, violence, and excess. All the great religions and philosophies and their indigenous forebears that we know of insist that revenge, power, violence, and excess prohibit our living out a faith that must include others in the arena of our concern—must protect the weak, feed the poor, and treat the ten thousand things with deepest respect. We are failing on all counts while politically and socially powerful persons who practice Christianity, Islam, and Judaism ignore their own most basic precepts and subvert their religions’ best intentions and hopes. We are fortunate that there are cultures far older than those of the desert trinity from which we can learn another wisdom that may save us yet.
This book is not a how-to guide that shows us some easy way to get out of this mess. It contains essays, meditations, about the concept of sustainability. It seems important to me to consider the concept because my own experience in small towns in the Midwest and West leads me to think the concept is not widely understood. If we do not understand sustainability, we cannot live toward it. If we do not live toward it, we have a foreshortened future that leaves our children in jeopardy. Yet, as I listen to friends in business, I find that many still see sustainability as a radical environmentalism that threatens commerce. They seem to believe that economics is the great determiner of every human action and that a growing economy is our only avenue to a viable culture. That view ultimately destroys the land, impoverishes the largest number of people, and reduces our spirituality to deciding which religion pays the best, makes us most comfortable with our wealth, or helps us gain affluence and influence friends. On the other hand, friends working to protect the environment or create sustainable communities or sustainable agriculture often see the local chamber of commerce, the powerful elites who now rule the country, and especially transnational corporations as impediments to, if not enemies of, a sustainable future. Folks on each side of that divide work hard to thwart and punish their colleagues on the other side. I believe those practices work against our hopes that we might have a sustainable future and that our children might have decent lives.
I have put sustainability between subsistence and spirituality in the subtitle of this book because, although all three are equally urgent, sustainability is the central issue I am trying to understand. All cultures are subsistence cultures, though we Western descendents of the Enlightenment no longer recognize ourselves as a subsistence people utterly dependent on the land in the same way that a Yup’ik Eskimo, for example, is. This seems to fly in the face of anthropology, which reduces indigenous peoples’ life on the land to an economy. Some speak of subsistence peoples living at a “mere subsistence level,” which to them is mean or even deprived. That has not been my experience of people living that life. That subsistence life we recognize among traditional cultures risks occasional hunger, no doubt, but it runs no more risk of hunger than our own system, which has produced ample food for all and yet left millions starving, and millions more—even in our own nation—without food security. Village people feed themselves pretty well and far more equitably by comparison. Some think our cash economy distinguishes us from more “primitive” cultures. Such talk clearly means that current American culture is not primitive, is not a subsistence culture. Yet talking with farmers, as I did for From the Farm to the Table: What All Americans Need to Know about Agriculture, one thing becomes abundantly clear: we are still as dependent on soil health, on our land and waters and what they produce, as any culture that ever existed.3 Thus all cultures are subsistence cultures; not all cultures are sustainable. We can turn our backs on our subsistence life and deny it, as our culture has tried to do. But the result of that denial will always be an ignorant and exploitative use of the soil and other resources, no matter how advanced our technologies may become. We can never become a sustainable culture if we deny our own dependence on subsistence, our dependence on the land. Our technology will not save us, and it is not separable from the earth, despite our faith in it. Our soil is closer to our salvation, if we can overcome our tendencies to ignore and abuse it.
The most important task in our time is not to protect the land or create social justice but to create a sustainable culture. Why try to create what Wisconsin farmer, teacher, and part-time philosopher Prescott Bergh calls a sustainable culture? Prescott first used that phrase, in my hearing at least, when a small group of farmers and businesspeople got together to talk about organizing a conference on sustainable agriculture. At the beginning of that meeting, Prescott said, “There’s not much point in talking about sustainable agriculture if you don’t have a sustainable culture to back it up, and America doesn’t.” We are so consumer oriented, he said, that we are destroying ourselves, eating ourselves out of house and home. His statement revealed to me how narrow my own vision of sustainability was. I had to look at sustainability on a much broader and deeper scale than I had conceived. One thing is clear: the path to a tolerable future does not lie in continual economic growth. That is a fatal path to follow. A path to a tolerable future inevitably leads through subsistence and spirituality and works toward sustainability. This book tries to shed some light on that path by speaking to the concept rather than providing another how-to look at what needs to be done. It is, appropriately I think, about relationships, in this case the relationship between spirituality and subsistence, and the relationship of each to sustainability.
I believe that our spirituality is at the core of the problems we face, whether they are environmental or in the realms of economics, social justice, and simple humaneness. This is not a new idea. But I have yet to attend a meeting, lecture, or workshop on sustainability that addresses it. It gets mentioned occasionally, and there are murmurs of assent, and then we quickly turn back to the more “practical” and more comfortable work that needs to be done. One sign that spirituality is the most fundamental issue is that we prefer to work on changing others, through war if necessary, rather than changing ourselves. Both the Qur’an and the Bible have something to say about that: “Allah does not change a people’s lot unless they change what is in their hearts,” says the Qur’an (13:11). “Don’t look for the mote in your neighbor’s eye while you have a beam in your own,” warns Jesus (Matt. 7:5 [Revised Standard Version]). Confucius, too, considered this. Working to transform oneself toward a wise and sagacious character, which Confucius called “selfcultivation,” is a primary task in the Confucian traditions. Until we have ourselves in order, Confucius holds, our families, our community, our state, the very stars in their courses will be in disarray.4
Questions about subsistence, sustainability, and spirituality will come up again and again in various forms in what follows. This is in part because of my own uncertainties. I have to wrestle with these matters myself, and I assume others do as well. The issues caught in Prescott’s statement are so huge, so complex, that for a time I hardly knew where to begin. My thought for now goes like this: Where to start, obviously, is with myself, not the whole world. If I can get myself right, if we can get ourselves right, as our most reliable forebears from many cultures have shown us, the culture may begin to tilt toward a more sustainable character. Thus spirituality, my own in this case, your own in your case, is one key to creating a sustainable culture. Reconceiving the subsistence life is a second step. Out of a combination of those efforts, we may be able to take a third step: to work toward becoming a sustainable culture. If we have time.
These essays are my attempt to look squarely at subsistence, sustainability, and spirituality. Experience in a variety of jobs and an even greater diversity of volunteer activities has led me to think that my concerns for the environment and social justice are linked and that the key link is a spiritual and intellectual one. Though taking care of the environment and creating social justice are not the most important tasks, they are absolutely essential components of a sustainable culture. With a clear understanding of our spirituality and a clear view of the subsistence nature of our society, sustainability takes on a form that we can all understand and work to create.
I begin with this confession: I believe that our spiritual lives are rooted not in creeds and scriptures or particular beliefs or rituals but in our use of language and stories. Language shapes thought and behavior and informs our spiritual life. We create balance and harmony, Confucius says (as I read him), by clarifying our words. Both government and persons function best by “the rectification of names.” Epictetus, the first-century Greek philosopher, echoes Confucius and his own Stoic colleagues when he says, “One of the clearest marks of the moral life is right speech. Perfecting our speech is one of the keystones of an authentic spiritual program.”5 He does not need to add that those who deliberately misuse words cannot provide moral leadership. In the Christian tradition, John’s gospel (1:1–3) tells us that everything is created by the logos, the word, a notion that was abroad in many cultures long centuries before John.6
These essays contend that the issues we face are issues we have created for ourselves and that with self-discipline, perseverance, humility, and considerable luck we may yet rectify them. And that we will never create a just and justifiable economy or a just society, or treat the environment rightly—all essentials for a sustainable culture—until we find a spiritual life that fosters greater respect for our neighbors, including our neighbor trout, as poet Richard Hugo puts it, our neighbor tree, our neighbor bird.7 The key to that spiritual life finally lies in getting our words straight and using them to create healthy stories, songs, and poems. Clearly, one thing I am trying to do here is organize in a coherent pattern the thousand ideas that have moved through my head from myriad sources over the years. The question I’ve had to wrestle with is, How do these notions relate to one another to provide a way to a sustainable culture?
Though the spiritual element of a sustainable culture remains impractical in the common view, there is an urgency about it. Our primary concern at the moment, the loss of fossil fuel, is but one of the forces converging on us now. Climate change is another and perhaps far more devastating concern. Loss of irrigation water, groundwater, and drinking water is another. Soil loss, and the loss of nutrition in the soil that is left, brings additional perils. The decline in fossil fuels will inevitably be marked by an accompanying decline in any food supplies that are dependent on long-distance hauls and oil-based pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. With the loss of oil come the loss of plastics, the loss of computers, and the loss of electricity. Our racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, and homophobia, and the ever increasing gap between the rich and the poor, bode to be as essential and as difficult to resolve. Each of these is but a cultural fragment; none, destructive as they may appear, are fundamental. Each represents only part of our task, and we must look at the whole as well as these fragments. Alas, America is no longer a moderating force in these matters but an exemplar of their persistent virulence and a trigger for increasing them. As these forces converge on us, violence is apt to accompany them. A 2003 report prepared for the Department of Defense warns that climate change will be accompanied by escalating political violence and social discord. The authors conclude, “Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life.”8 It is most practical then to work on the most fundamental elements of our humanity while we work at the most pragmatic tasks before us: not to create a strong economy but to figure out how to survive and feed ourselves.
We may not be able to turn aside the troubles facing us, but we can cultivate a spiritual life, creating an individual and social spirituality that may short-circuit the violence and lead us to take care of one another and the earth. If we do not work on that fundamental, the worst is sure to come. But history also shows us that difficulty can unite us in a common cause, one aimed at creating a sustainable culture, avoiding the violence, and not just surviving but emerging from the conjunction of these forces more fully human, more respectful of one another and the world, than we have ever been in the long history we can trace. I hope it is clear that developing the spirituality I propose does not require giving up any religious belief or personal faith. You can comfortably remain a Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Hindu, animist, or whatever is most personal and still adopt a spirituality that supports sustainability. I am urging a spirituality that leads to sustainability; my outline of it may not be yours. Between us, respecting each others’ efforts, we can keep working on it. If we do, we may yet have a future as a species and as a global family.
I call these “vernacular essays” because their tone is oral; they are as close to my own voice as I can make them. They are also vernacular because they are inclined toward the anecdotal, for I believe in the power of stories as a principal means to transform us as individuals and as a culture. I know myself to be embedded in the mainstream American culture, but “mainstream American culture” is a phrase I don’t often use in conversation because it is an abstraction that distances us from our participation in the culture. Often in these essays I refer to “our culture” or “our American culture,” which may lead some readers who feel alienated from the mainstream to think this book is not for them. They may say, “Well, it may be his culture, but it sure isn’t mine.” Yet I persist because even the most alienated among us are also participants in this culture. For those of us who live here, it cannot be avoided.
I remember, years back, early morning conversations with homeless Eskimo men in Anchorage. They might seem to be nonparticipants, cultural drift wood abandoned by the mainstream, stripped of all their bark: no driver’s license, no bank account, no voter registration, no home, and even on some cold days no jacket. Not always sure of their next meal but knowing all the Dumpsters in the alleys behind the fine restaurants and hotels on Fourth Avenue. Yet I listened to them talk about how it was when they were in the army in World War II or the Korean War. Enlisted men. Participants. One told about being kicked off the bus near his base in the South because “the driver thought I was black. He thought I was black. No, I tell him, ‘I’m Eskimo. I’m Eskimo.’ He don’t know Eskimo. He made me get off the bus. He never heard of Eskimo.” Everyone bent back with laughter. Once another said, perhaps remembering Korea, “You get shot, you feel nothing. I got shot, didn’t feel nothing, just spin around and fall down.” Another took it up, “Shock. That’s shock. You don’t feel nothing, that’s right. Just fall down.”
Wounded expat participants in our culture, these men camped under Visquine in a gully above the creek down near the “native” hospital. They showed me how they kept their sleeping bags dry. Twine between the trees, the plastic draped just so, a couple of cement blocks from who knows where holding down the edges. “Works pretty good,” they told me. Our conversations often took place over Egg McMuffins in the McDonald’s on the corner of Fourth and C at a little after six o’clock in the morning, when the place opened. They came in to warm up, hunched over, hugging their mugs of coffee with both hands, bowing their heads over the cups, breathing in the vapor. Participants still. What could have been more American in 1980 than hanging out in McDonald’s?
I have been in court on Monday mornings when they were under arrest, again, for holing up in an abandoned building during a cold spell, or for being drunk. The judge read those still dazed men sitting in the docket, chins on their chests, their rights in English, a second language for all, and that at a third-grade level. The judge spoke so quickly to get the ritualized announcements over that I could not understand what he said though I was sober: “I’m-going-to-tell-you-your-rights-and-I-want-you-to-listen-carefully-because-I-am-going-to-tell-you-one-time-and-one-time-only . . .”
Those men may never read this book or live the way I do, yet they are participants in our culture. Regardless of how we want to disown it, at some level we all participate, and it is ours. So I write of “our culture,” meaning all of us who live here. I want everyone to feel ownership in the things I describe. I want to be up front and personal. It is not the government that is creating the “consume, consume” din in our ears but our government. I describe some unhealthy stories that prevent sustainability, but these are not stories that mainstream Americans have been telling themselves. They are stories, alas, that we, all of us, have been telling ourselves. It was not abstract Western institutions that practiced ethnocide in our public schools in villages across Alaska. It was me, teaching in Naknek, imposing myself and my culture on students whom I knew personally and whose elders spoke a language that was not mine. I don’t want any reader thinking it was mainstream American culture doing it; it was me, my culture, my fellow teachers, our culture, we who were doing it. At Sand Creek, it was not the militia but our militia that returned with genitalia stretched over their saddle horns, and it was we who applauded and cheered Colonel Chivington and his men. That’s us too. Not our best us, but us. Even when our government does things we would stop if we could, it’s our government. Our government, our culture does things every day that I despise. But the fact that I despise those things does not mean that the government is not mine or that I am not a participant in the culture.
The good thing is that we also know there is a much better “we” available to us every moment. We see that finer participation in our culture every day in friends who suffer loss but are never diminished, in coworkers who have a compelling vision of how the world might become a better place and work toward it for all they are worth. We know people who have found their place and are at home, even in this world, with all its confusion and devastation, and work to clarify our vision and end our pain. We know people who, without any deliberate effort, help us to become better than we would have been if they were not in our lives. We see it in ourselves when we find worthwhile work or act on our own generous impulses. You will find some gleaming figures of hope in these pages too. They also are us, and they, too, represent our culture at work.
“Our culture” in my usage includes Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism, Buddhism . . . They are all us too, a common heritage. “Our culture” includes all ethnic members, folks of all sexual orientations, visitors on visas who are but temporarily “ours,” immigrants from other nations. It’s all America, and each of us is caught up in the same social and environmental processes.
Only if we acknowledge our participation can we protest against whatever is unhealthy, unwise, unfair, unhallowed, unsustainable. We are all in this together, including my Eskimo friends telling their stories of participation and alienation in McDonald’s and living under transparent plastic tarps in the gully. They were fine fellow participants in our culture.
So these are mostly stories, vernacular stories that come from my own experience, from my conversations with friends, and from my reading. In that sense they are genuine essays, a means of thinking my way into these issues. As essays they are exploratory and tentative. They are an invitation to conversation as well as a means for me to find out what I really think. At least for now.