Weekly Feed: American Indian Heritage Month, Cross-Cultural Film, Preservation & Sustainability

Bruno Nanguka in Radio Tanzania's archives; Jonathan Kalan, NPR

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

• November is the 22nd annual American Indian Heritage Month! Follow Smithsonian Education to keep apprised of events and articles. Begin your celebration with "Deer Dance Song (medley)" from the 1965 Smithsonian Folkways album "Music of the Pawnee."

• Last week, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson declared the city "America's Farm-to-Work Capital," kicking off a campaign celebrating Sacramento's vibrant restaurant culture and the bounty of the surrounding farms and agriculturalists. "The mayor and others said their general goal is to brand Sacramento as a food capital the way Austin, Texas is known for its live music scene and annual Austin City Limits Music Festival," writes Ryan Lillis in The Sacramento Bee. 

• The Life of a Language, a documentary short directed by Paul Donatelli, is one of many new films screening at the American Indian Film Institute 2012 Film Festival:

• "Wendell Berry, the farmer/writer from Kentucky, is perhaps our nation's best-known advocate for small and mid-sized farms. In a recent lecture, Berry talked about how our rural landscapes have often been replaced 'with a heartless and sickening ugliness.' He offered what is needed to counter that ugliness: Affection." Here's the full op-ed written by Practical Farmers of Iowa Executive Director Teresa Opheim.

• PBS recently aired Rafea: Solar Mama, "a documentary funded by Sundance's Documentary Film Program and The Skoll Foundation's Stories of Change. This film is one of the first honored by the Hilton Worldwide LightStay Sustainability Award, an award created to acknowledge documentaries that showcase the connections between sustainability, economic growth and community development."

Brooke Shelby Biggs of the Independent Lens Blog discussed the making of Solar Mamas with producer Mette Heide; find the interview here.

• As the election loomed, Ray Ring of High Country News looked at the impact of the Latino/a electorate in the West: "When Sen. Jon.Kyl, R-Ariz., announced his retirement in 2011, pundits predicted the GOP would easily hold the seat this November. After all, Arizonans last chose a Democrat for Senate in 1988, when as The Wall Street Journal reminisced, 'gasoline cost less than 90 cents a gallon ... and stirrup pants were in.' Yet Democrat Richard Carmona – a former Surgeon General and Spanish-speaker of Peurto Rican descent – is running neck-and-neck with Tea Party Republican Jeff Flake, even though it's Carmona's first high-profile race and Flake is a six-term congressman."

• "Radio Tanzania was the country's only station from its birth in 1951 until the mid-1990s, when competing stations came on the air and state-controlled radio became irrelevant. The station's archives include poetry, drama, speeches and loads of the music now known as zillipendwa. The word translates literally to 'the ones that were loved'; a looser translation would be 'golden oldies.'" Listen to NPR's recent story about the Tanzania Heritage Project and its co-founder, Rebecca Corey of Dar es Salaam University, and the efforts to preserve some of Tanzania's most memorable sounds.

Weekly Feed: Collaboration, Ecology, Digital Media and Food for Thought

Photograph of the Fennimore Art Museum

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

• "Rural art museums face distinct challenges when it comes to building audiences for exhibitions and programs," writes Paul D’Ambrosio, president of the New York State Historical Association. “Unlike our counterparts located in urban areas or population centers, rural art museums must compel their audience to travel a good distance to partake of their offerings, and they must tailor their exhibitions and programs to the particular patterns favored by those travelers. At the same time, they must do so while building a donor and sponsorship base that is likewise not local or at least only seasonal.” The Fenimore Art Museum of rural Cooperstown, NY, found a solution through regional collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking. 

Photograph from the Aldo Leopold Foundation Archives

• “Rising before daylight and perched on a bench at his Sauk County shack in Depression-era Wisconsin, [Aldo] Leopold routinely took notes on the dawn chorus of birds. Beginning with the first pre-dawn calls of the indigo bunting or robin, Leopold would jot down in tidy script the bird songs he heard, when he heard them, and details such as the light level when they first sang. He also mapped the territories of the birds near his shack, so he knew where the songs originated.” 

Using these astounding records, two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have managed to recreate the sounds that surrounded Leopold seventy years ago, compiling the various calls and sounds described and compressing them into one five-minute audio track. Listen here.

Folks may also be interested in perusing this 2011 program anchored at Arizona State University: Rethinking the Land Ethic: Sustainability and the Humanities. 


The Migrating Mural by Jane Kim from Jane Kim on Vimeo.

Artist and science illustrator Jane Kim is on a mission to educate travelers and everyday commuters about the wildlife around them. Following the routes of America’s endangered migratory animals, Kim pulls off the highway to transform the sides of old barns and houses into murals of the animals who seasonally pass by. View Kim’s Kickstarter video here.

New York Times; Kiersten Essenpreis

• "We’re Here, We’re Queer, Y’all" is a must-read New York Times editorial addressing regional stereotypes. Professor Karen Cox also edits the Pop South site and tweets at @SassyProf.

• Standing Bear’s Footsteps crafts workshops and classes for the youth of the Ponca Tribe in Nebraska and Oklahoma. Available on the project’s website is a collection of brief interviews conducted and filmed by Southern Ponca students in a digital media course. In this clip, "Mikhael Laravie, a 7th grade participant in Standing Bear's Footsteps Youth Media Camp, interviews his grandmother Lola Laravie asking about her childhood growing up on a farm in Nebraska."

Bringing It To The Table

Arkansas State Folklorist Mike Luster at the Roundtable; Jennifer Joy Jameson

By Rachel Reynolds Luster, Contributing Editor

Last month Art of The Rural joined a host of artists and cultural workers from around the country in Fox, Arkansas for the 2nd Annual Meadowcreek Roundtable. The gathering brought together people working in the fields of folklore, literature, film, ethnomusicology, ethnobiology as well as others with an interest in community action, bioregionalism, social justice, and local food systems.

The original concept for this retreat was born from conversations following a panel presentation at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in 2010 where I, my husband Mike Luster, and our friend and colleague Meredith Martin-Moats of The Boiled Down Juice presented a panel entitled, Community Based Folklife Practice.

We called for an interdisciplinary holistic approach to community renewal and sufficiency, and a lively conversation followed for nearly an hour after the panel. That discussion bore an online component, the Community-Based Folklore Practice Facebook group, which broadened the conversation to include additional artists as well various voices from around the nation and across multiple disciplines ranging from community-engaged design to peace and justice activists alongside the many folklorists working in the public sector, and the Meadowcreek Roundtable was created to serve as the physical manifestation of that open conversation.

We call it the Roundtable because we firmly believe that some of the best conversations come at the table, or in preparing and enjoying meals. For three days we gather, we talk, we cook, we eat, we play music, we walk and swim. This year we enjoyed several wonderful films including Witch Hazel Advent by Fayetteville, Arkansas, filmmaker Sarah Moore Chyrchel. There are babies and dogs there too.

Angel Band by The Meadowcreek Singers by joyamerica

More than anything, we try to identify what we see that we’d like to change in terms of cultural practice and/or its impediments, the funding structures that dictate what work is fundable, how culture (whether it be rural/urban, fine/traditional) is represented in media, where we might draw inspiration from one another and those “doing it right” across the country and how we can contribute to, in Gandhi’s phrase, being the change that we want to see. And then we go home and set out to do it, renewed and inspired. This year was no exception.

The American Folklore Society has generously supported the retreat for the past two years. This year, The Arkansas Folklife Program at Arkansas State University and that school’s Heritage Studies Department sponsored the event as well. Thus far, we’ve been able to keep the gathering free for attendees including registration, lodging, food, and childcare. We prepare the meals together from scratch and everyone chips in to do whatever else needs doing. It’s a truly beautiful thing in a lovely place. The Boiled Down Juice has also posted a story about the Meadowcreek Roundtable that offers a more in-depth discussion of the Meadowcreek property and its history and links to many of this year’s gathering’s attendees, their organizations and their work.

Here's two of this year's participants reflecting on the experience:

For me, the Meadowcreek Roundtable has been an incredibly important resource. The meetings have fostered invaluable and directive conversation with peers and senior colleagues that have stayed with me long after the weekend of the roundtable. For two years, I've come in with ideas and questions about how to carry out meaningful cultural work. Each time, I have come away with substantial mentorship, leading me to ask deeper questions about the intersections of folklife and cultural sustainability, and encouraging me to proceed boldly. - Writer and Folklorist Jennifer Joy Jameson

I came away from the Meadowcreek Roundtable retreat inspired and full of new ideas. In fact, on the drive home, a fellow attendee carpooling with me and I conceptualized a creative collaboration for our own community which we are in the initial stages of implementing. Without a designated time and place for such creative incubation to occur, I doubt we would have seen this project materialize, let alone make it to fruition. - Filmmaker Sarah Moore Chyrchel

If you and your organization would like to support or participate in next year’s gathering please contact us. We’d love to have you at the ‘Table.

Readings: The Egg And The Machine

Food Security; larger, high resolution images available at The Lexicon for Sustainability

Today we offer a Readings selection from Robert Frost: his 1923 poem "The Egg And The Machine."

This work anticipates a perspective that would gain even greater momentum after World War II, as American citizens -- many who benefitted the comforts of industrial Empire -- began to lament a lost connection with the land, and with agricultural tradition.

As Thomas Hardy would also register, the railroad at once eroded local culture while also allowing for easier commerce (economic, intellectual) with urban areas. To view rural place, or rural traditions, as a "better" or "more honest" than urban life was to engage in a distorting pastoral vision that ignored the intricate links between city and country. This compulsion, still alive and well today, damns the rural to "the past," and allows people to pick and choose which elements of rural life to celebrate.

Robert Frost, a master of ambiguity and layers of meaning, seems to allude to much of this in his poem (he would no doubt love how The Lexicon of Sustainability illuminates these levels of knowledge) -- even the perfectly-rhymed couplets suggest a harmonious pairing that the poem's narrative sets out to complicate. "I am armed for war," the speaker concludes. But, Frost leaves us to consider, at what cost?

The Egg And The Machine

He gave the solid rail a hateful kick.
From far away there came an answering tick
And then another tick. He knew the code:
His hate had roused an engine up the road.
He wished when he had had the track alone
He had attacked it with a club or stone
And bent some rail wide open like switch
So as to wreck the engine in the ditch.
Too late though, now, he had himself to thank.
Its click was rising to a nearer clank.
Here it came breasting like a horse in skirts.
(He stood well back for fear of scalding squirts.)
Then for a moment all there was was size
Confusion and a roar that drowned the cries
He raised against the gods in the machine.
Then once again the sandbank lay serene.
The traveler's eye picked up a turtle train,
between the dotted feet a streak of tail,
And followed it to where he made out vague
But certain signs of buried turtle's egg;
And probing with one finger not too rough,
He found suspicious sand, and sure enough,
The pocket of a little turtle mine.
If there was one egg in it there were nine,
Torpedo-like, with shell of gritty leather
All packed in sand to wait the trump together.
'You'd better not disturb any more,'
He told the distance, 'I am armed for war.
The next machine that has the power to pass
Will get this plasm in it goggle glass.'

Wendell Berry's Jefferson Lecture: "It All Turns On Affection"

On Monday night Wendell Berry delivered "It All Turns on Affection," the 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center. Each year the National Endowment for the Humanities offers this lectureship, "the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities." 

Mr. Berry's talk covers an extraordinary amount of ground -- from an epigraph from Howards End, to memories of his grandfather's struggles with the economies set in place by the American Tobacco Company, and to many locales and texts in between. Well-versed readers of Mr. Berry's prose and poetry will no doubt share my sense that this essay revisits (and re-contextualizes) many of the concerns of his work -- closing some circles, but opening up new ones as well. 

There is much to quote and discuss within "It All Turns on Affection," yet, in this brief piece, I'll include these two paragraphs, moving in how they call on all citizens -- rural and urban -- to return to first principles to find their relationship to place and practice:

I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong. A large machine in a large, toxic, eroded cornfield is not, properly speaking, an object or a sign of affection.

Folks can find a transcription of the lecture here, along with an interview and further information on past Jefferson Lectures. Below we will offer video of Mr. Berry's talk, which is preceded by remarks by Jim Leach, the chairman of the NEH, and Bobbie Ann Mason, who reads from Mr. Berry's poem "Leavings." If the embedded video does not properly play on your browser, please find the permanent link here:

[video removed due to formatting problems; please visit the link above]

Also, as a fitting epilogue to the lecture, Mark Bittman has written an extraordinary piece today in The New York Times about his recent visit with Mr. Berry in Port Royal. Mr. Bittman receives a call three hours after leaving the farm from Mr. Berry, with this addendum:

“Mark,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that.”

TONIGHT: Live Broadcast of Wendell Berry's Jefferson Lecture

Here's further news on tonight's live stream, from Ivy Brashear of The Rural Blog:

Poet, essayist, novelist, farmer and conservationist Wendell Berry will deliver the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities tonight at 7:30 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. The National Endowment for the Humanities will be video-streaming the lecture live. The annual lecture is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for intellectual achievement in the humanities.

Ivy Brashear's article continues here. 

Changing A Food Desert, One Metro Stop At A Time

One of Farm to Family's Mobile Markets in Saint Louis

Despite its place amid some of the midwest's most fertile soil, Saint Louis is plagued by large food deserts - both a testament to suburban migration begun in the 1960's, but also to racially-motivated zoning and business models that survived in the city well past the Jim Crow era. [The BBC has recently discussed this history, in this excellent television report.]

The Sappington Farmers Market, a cooperative between Missouri small family farmers and rural entrepreneurs, has acted to help combat the scourge of urban food deserts by opening a series of Farm To Family mobile markets that will sell fresh produce and local goods at four bus/train stations. The Saint Louis Metro is allowing the markets to use the space free of charge, without asking for a share of the profits. STLToday offers further information, interviews, and photographs. 

What is so encouraging about this effort is its panoramic vision of local food's place in an urban locale; while Farm To Family also offers opportunities for weekly shares in a CSA program, and while they are connected with the successful Sappington Farmers Market, they are also branching out from the comfortable confines of the traditional local foods movement.

The farmers following this philosophy are an inspiration, and an example of thinking about "the whole horse," as Wendell Berry would write, in an essay of the same name:

We can say, without much fear of oversimplifying, that the aim of producers is to sell as much as possible and that the aim of consumers is to buy as much as possible.

But experience seems increasingly to be driving us out of the categories of producer and consumer and into the categories of citizen, family member, and community member, in all of which we have an inescapable interest in making things last.

Folks can follow these individuals' mission here; many thanks to City Farmer for leading us to this story.

To The New Year 2012

From the Foster-Fluharty Farm; Matthew Fluharty

from Sabbaths, 2005

VI.

I tremble with gratitude
for my children and grandchildren
who take pleasure in one another.

At our dinners together, the dead
enter and pass among us
in living love and in memory.

And so the young are taught.

          - Wendell Berry

Finding Sustainability In "Generation Organic"

From the 2011 Young Farmers Conference; Maggie Starbard, NPR

Many thanks to the folks who have shared news of this report by Dan Charles broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday: "Who Are The Farmers of 'Generation Organic':"

For decades, as young people have been leaving farms behind, the average age of the American farmer has been rising. The last time the government counted farmers, in 2002, the average farmer was 55-years-old.

But there's a new surge of youthful vigor into American agriculture — at least in the corner of it devoted to organic, local food. Thousands of young people who've never farmed before are trying it out.

Mr. Charles's piece proceeds to tell the story of The Young Farmers Conference, hosted by the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Tarrytown, New York. Located 25 miles north of Manhattan, the Center is a fully-operational farm that works to train farmers and design public outreach programs that communicate the benefits of "healthy, seasonal and sustainable food." In particular, the Center is charged with a mission to bring this message to children, that next generation of consumers and potential farmers. 

Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture. Film by Local Projects from Stone Barns Center on Vimeo.

The Center fosters some extraordinary rural - urban connections, and, as exemplified by their introduction to the Young Farmers Conference, they also focus in detail on that other aspect of farming - the fact that farming is a business. The Center is also raising a new generation of rural entrepreneurs. 

All of these facets of the mission revolve around what Dan Barber, of the well-known Blue Hill restaurant and farm, shares in the video above: that "you need to be inspired by a place, and have that place become a part of that experience."

This is echoed in the voices of those emerging farmers who participated in the 2010 conference:

Voices from the 2010 Young Farmers Conference from Stone Barns Center on Vimeo.

More than most media produced about "generation organic," or whatever one wishes to call this movement, this video gives me great hope. As a child of the Farm Crisis, I lament the extent to which the sustainable agriculture movement is portrayed in a pastoral, romantic light -- a kind of soft-filtering of Wendell Berry's hard truths.

We are not having a serious discussion about the "sustainability" of this movement (culturally, economically) until we've brought the mass of new urban-born farmers into discussion with those farmers and communities rooted in their rural place, until we have "conventional" and "organic" farmers sitting down at a table together. Too often the urban/university-driven dynamic to this movement can seem to slight, or outright condemn, those farmers who have lived for decades on the land. That attitude is the least sustainable element of the movement.

Yet, when we hear this diverse group of young farmers explain their motivations, we can't help but be heartened. As we look forward to 2012, I hope to bring more news of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture and The Young Farmers Conference.

American Georgics: Old and New

Plowing It Under; Thomas Hart Benton, 1934

To start off the week, I'd like to point folks toward a recent review published in The Englewood Review of Books by Art of the Rural Contributing Editor Rachel Reynolds Luster. American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land is the latest title in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series published by Yale University Press, and it features a roster of writers who will be well-known to our readers, but also some folks new to us. 

Here's the introduction to “For Farmers, For Landowners, For Citizens and Neighbors:”

American Georgics: Writing on Farming, Culture, and the Land, offers readers a concise and well-heeled collection of agrarian thought and writings from the founding of our Republic through the current wave, including speeches, essays, excerpts from novels, and poems. The writings in this volume trace the evolution of “the economic, political, social, and ecological dimensions of agrarianism” (372). Some of the authors will be most familiar to readers of agrarian writing including James Madison, Henry David Thoreau, and Wendell Berry; others, such as Jesse Buell, Louisa May Alcott, and Nate Shaw (Ned Cobb), will come as delightful surprises. The collection is rich in many ways but one of its greatest strength comes from the variety of perspectives offered but perhaps the most striking aspect of reading American Georgics is its undeniable relevance to our current political, economic, and agricultural moment.

Georgics, as a poetic form and sensibility, can be traced back to Virgil. Unlike his Pastorals, these poems merge considerations of mythology and poetics with elaborate descriptions of agricultural practice. I heartily recommend David Ferry's translation of the Georgics; folks can hear his reflections on the poem and its translation on the excellent ThoughtCast site.

John Dryden once called Virgil's Georgics "the best poem by the best poet." Here's an excerpt from the Third Georgic, as translated by Mr. Ferry:

If raising sheep for wool is your concern,

Be sure to avoid pasturing where the grass

Grows high, and you must keep your pasture clear

Of caltrops, burrs, and other bristling growth.

From the beginning be sure to choose for your flock

Only the sheep whose fleece is soft and white; 

But no matter how white the ram, if there are veins

Of black on the underside of his moist tongue,

Reject that ram and look for another one,

So that the newborn lambs won't be dark-spotted.

O Moon, it was with a lure of pure white wool

That you, if what we're told is true,

Were captivated by Pan, Arcadia's god,

Calling you to the innermost forest glade,

And, so it is said, you did not spurn his call.

Rural Farmers Feeding The Occupy Movement

Produce from western Massachusetts farms; Actions and Investigations

As a companion piece to today's article considering Crystal Bridges, Alice Walton, and the Occupy Movement, Contributing Editor Rachel Reynolds Luster has just sent word of Feed the Movement, a grassroots effort by farmers in the Northeast to help feed the Occupy gathering in New York:

WNYC has also profiled the work of the folks on the ground in city who gladly receive this food and then work to prepare it to be put to use on Wall Street. Jennifer Hsu writes of how one OWS member and an unemployed chef are cooking for thousands of people each afternoon:

Every night at Zuccotti Park, dinner is served around 7 P.M. What protesters may not realize is that their meals are made from fresh, organic produce donated by a dozen or so small farms located throughout the Northeast.

Since the early weeks of the protest, regional farmers have been coming down independently to Occupy Wall Street to donate fruits and vegetables. In those days, meals were prepared in volunteers' homes. Yet, as the protest quickly gained momentum, food preparation needed to get more organized, and Occupy Wall Street set up a daily dinner operation out of a soup kitchen in East New York, Brooklyn.

Farmville Files: Pastoral Romance

 

Longtime readers will remember a time on the site over a year ago when we posted a number of articles under the "Farmville Files" moniker. At the time, we thought of the series as a way to utilize the popularity of the Facebook application as a way to talk about what the online game had to say about pop culture's representations of rural people and agricultural work. 

As this morning's article on The Farmer-Veteran Coalition suggests, there's much more work to be done on this front -- especially in linking agriculture to culture and to the arts. While there are many excellent sites related to sustainability and local food systems, we'd like to add our own perspective to these issues through a revitalized "Farmville Files" series of articles and contextual links. 

To those ends, I'd like to share "Pastoral Romance" by Brent Cunningham; it's a provocative essay originally published in the Food issue of Lapham's Quarterly this summer. This piece focuses on two self-confessed urban foodies' sojourn in Huntington, West Virginia and their efforts to eat (and promote) local, sustainable agriculture. 

If this sounds like a scenario you've heard a thousand times before, give Mr. Cunningham's essay a read. He covers the "'bourgeois nostalgia' [that] pervades the food-reform movement," and a number of other issues that can make some elements of the organic food phenomenon a thorny subject. There may be, after all, some unsettling philosophical connections between the attraction of Farmville and those irresistible tables of produce at an urban farmers market. 

Here's the opening paragraphs of Brent Cunningham's "Pastoral Romance:"

Betty Jo Patton spent her childhood on a 240-acre farm in Mason County, West Virginia, in the 1930s. Her family raised what it ate, from tomatoes to turkeys, pears to pigs. They picked, plucked, slaughtered, butchered, cured, canned, preserved, and rendered. They drew water from a well, cooked on a wood stove, and the bathroom was an outhouse.

Phoebe Patton Randolph, Betty Jo’s thirty-two-year-old granddaughter, has a dream of returning to the farm, which has been in the family since 1863 and is an hour’s drive from her home in the suburbs of Huntington, a city of nearly fifty thousand people along the Ohio River. Phoebe is an architect and a mother of one (soon to be two) boys, who is deeply involved in efforts to revitalize Huntington, a moribund Rust Belt community unsure of what can replace the defunct factories that drove its economy for a hundred years. She grew up with stories of life on the farm as she watched the empty farmhouse sag into disrepair.

Recently, over lunch in Betty Jo’s cozy house in a quiet Huntington neighborhood, I listened to them talk about the farm, and I eventually asked Betty Jo what she thought of her granddaughter’s notion of returning to the land. Betty Jo smiled, but was blunt: “Leave it. There’s nothing romantic about it."

The Lexicon of Sustainability

Biodiversity Vs. Monoculture, with farmer Rick Knoll; The Lexicon of Sustainability

Grist recently highlighted an art project that many of our readers will be very excited about: The Lexicon of Sustainability. Douglas Gayeton's work mixes collage, handwriting, photography, technical knowledge and vernacular spirit into eloquent illustrations of sustainability's central tenets. Many thanks to Rachel Reynolds Luster for the tip.

Here's Tejal Rao writing in Grist:

Gayeton got the idea for the Lexicon project about two years ago, in the middle of a dinner party, when a guest butchered the definition of "food miles." If Gayeton could define and build out the language of sustainability, he thought, he could give people the tools they needed to bounce around real ideas. To make a change. Gayeton identified 100 key terms and began visiting the farmers, fishermen, foragers, and chefs across the country who could help him define them. "I simply spend time with them. I don't know what I'm doing in advance and I don't storyboard anything. I just listen."

The artist shoots an average of 1,000 photographs with each of his subjects. He then prints the photos out, cutting and pasting up to 100 of them together to create a massive collage (the smaller pieces are four by five feet; the larger ones can cover a wall). From here, Gayeton takes the stories of his subjects -- their thoughts, recipes, ramblings -- and writes them down on a sheet of glass, which is layered on the collage and shot again, the text floating dreamily above the image. This painstaking process, even with the assistance of a small team, takes Gayeton about three weeks.

Mr. Gayeton's work is such a surprising and direct approach that it's hard not to get excited, and not to get lost The Lexicon of Sustainability site. Beyond that, I sense that the artist has pioneered a new kind of visual art and media storytelling strategy, a technique perfect for telling the deeper history of a place or a practice. Among the folks Mr. Gayeton is planning to spend time with is Wes Jackson--and I'm excited for how this art could visualize Mr. Jackson's historically and culturally deep understanding of a single field. I also think of "A Native Hill" by Wendell Berry; I can only imagine how Mr. Gayeton could bring-to-image the story of how Mr. Berry reclaimed his farm, how, written underneath a seemingly-simple patchwork of fields, human and agricultural narratives spread across each other like a series of dizzying transparency sheets.

Beyond that, many of us working to advocate for rural place, culture, and arts could think about how some variation on this visual approach could help bring our stories to life--and to new audiences.

Here are two video clips. The first is an explanation of the project, while the second is a stunning visualization of the process Mr. Gayeton utilizes for all of his Lexicon pieces.

Introducing ... The Lexicon of Sustainability from the lexicon of sustainability on Vimeo.

FORAGING: from "The Lexicon of Sustainability" from the lexicon of sustainability on Vimeo.

Rural Poetry Series: Patrick Kavanagh

 

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) was born into a farming family in County Monaghan, Ireland. He spent the first part of his adult life farming those same fields in the small townland of Inniskeen, an experience which gave rise to the long poem many consider to be his masterpiece, The Great Hunger.  Despite the pastoral fantasies many urban poets projected onto the Irish rural, Kavanagh's poem told the story of the economic, cultural and even sexual poverty of life "beyond the pale." For its frankness, and for the ways in which it threatened the politically-useful images of "the Irish peasant," The Great Hunger--as with James Joyce's Ulysses--was banned in Ireland upon its publication.

In the years following The Great Hunger, Kavanagh continued to present the realities of Irish rural life--but also its communal mysteries. After surviving lung surgery, Kavanagh created a series of lush and circumspect poems that unified rural and urban experience within a timeless and benedictory continuum. (See "Canal Bank Walk")

Midway through this poetic career, Patrick Kavanagh composed "Epic," a poem that looks back on his rural place, and its local peculiarities, at the moment when the outside world was bracing itself for World War Two. While poets from Ireland, America and beyond cite "Epic" as an influential affirmation of local culture, Paul Muldoon--one of the rural-born Irish poets to inherit Kavanagh's concerns--points us towards considering the complications of assigning one "importance" over another. We find this profound and simultaneously ambiguous poem related to many of the recent articles and conversations we have featured:

Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided: who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting 'Damn your soul'
And old McCabe, stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
'Here is the march along these iron stones'.
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was most important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Farmville Files: Living The Dirty Life

photograph by Deborah Feingold

One of the most fascinating narratives of this fall's season of new books is the long-awaited emergence of Mark Twain's unexpurgated autobiography; I've thought again of the Hannibal, Missouri native this morning, as I received suggestions to visit NPR's interview with Kristin Kimball, author of The Dirty Life.

Just under 150 years ago, Mr. Twain helped found the literary sub-genre we know call "travel writing," with his Innocents Abroad. Flashing forward to this season's publishing cycle, we have the chance to encounter Ms. Kimball and her own narrative of traveling upstate from the high-culture and high-couture world of New York City's East Village to interview an enterprising young farmer. The story she relates in The Dirty Life is one of unlikely matches, as the city girl falls in love with the organic farmer and, in the process, discovers the poetry and vitality of agrarian life. 

Of course, these "back to the land" narratives, coupled with books on urban-hipsters and their rural arts, now offer a kind of romance and escape just as commercially viable as Mr. Twain's genre of travel writing (indeed, Ms. Kimball began as a travel writer). If you're reading this from a computer screen somewhere in rural America, or if you number among our country's rural diaspora, your reaction to this recent trend may fall somewhere on a sliding scale between hopeful optimism and downright cynicism.

The difference here, with Ms. Kimball's book, seems to be her honesty and her sense of perspective--how the back-breaking, never-ending work of running a 500 acre CSA is also profoundly satisfying and life-affirming. 

NPR's interview with Ms. Kimball, and an audio-slide of Essex Farms, can be found here.

An Appalachian And Agrarian Response to the Tragedy in the Gulf

photograph by The Associated Press

The people of the Appalachian Mountains and Louisiana bayous have a lot more in common than fiddle tunes and distinctive accents. More than most, they are called on to sacrifice to satisfy this nation's appetite for fossil fuels. And more than most, they are economically dependent on energy production.

Last week The Rural Blog posted a link to an editorial (quoted above) from the Lexington-Herald Leader that articulated what many folks, especially those in the Appalachian region, may have been thinking since the early days of the explosion in the Gulf Mexico. In the words of the editorial staff, this latest tragedy has "a familiar ring" to it. It follows the metric of all extraction economies in that it is tremendously lucrative and yet vastly destructive on all levels: the environmental, spiritual, and social. And especially in an "economic downturn" its oversized fiscal footprint disarms innovative and sustainable ideas in the region. Throw in lax regulatory oversight and a lack of political will in the statehouses and Congress, and what we see in the Gulf is Mountaintop Removal's first cousin. 

Certainly, the anger and resignation that our nation is working through this week--as officials warn that the oil may leak into the ocean for many more months--is of a kind similar to what many of us who may be from the Appalachian region are well acquainted with: that complicated and tortured understanding of how we all are linked, all implicated, to an industrial model that is destroying the structure of our communities all the while it puts on a show of setting up a few beams to hold things in place. 

This line of thinking has led me back to the work of Wendell Berry, and to the absolutely prescient short essay he wrote in the weeks after the September 11th attacks--Thoughts in the Presence of Fear. What Mr. Berry saw in that piece, and in the national conversation that followed 9/11, was an opportunity to engage in a kind of reappraisal of how, as a nation, we are carrying ourselves in our world, in our environment and in our local places. As an agrarian argument, it's worth revisiting in light of the events in the Gulf. Here are the first three sections: 

I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.

II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a “new world order” and a “new economy” that would “grow” on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be “unprecedented”.

III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and investors who believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the prosperity was limited to a tiny percent of the world’s people, and to an ever smaller number of people even in the United States; that it was founded upon the oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that its ecological costs increasingly threatened all life, including the lives of the supposedly prosperous.

Continue reading Thoughts in the Presence of Fear at Orion Magazine, and as always, make sure to visit Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky for more insight.

An Almanac For Moderns: Late March

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

 

March Twenty-Seventh

First to grasp biology as a science, Aristotle thought that he had also captured the secret of life itself. From the vast and original body of his observation, he deduced a cosmology like a pure Greek temple, symmetrical and satisfying. For two millenniums it housed the serene intelligence of the race.

Here was an absolute philosophy; nothing need be added to it; detraction was heretical. It traced the ascent of life from the tidal ooze up to man, the plants placed below the animals, the animals ranged in order of increasing intelligence. Beyond man nothing could be imagined but God, the supreme intelligence. God was all spirit; the lifeless rock was all matter. Living beings on earth were spirit infusing matter.

Still this conception provides a favorite text of poet or pastor, praising the earth and the fullness thereof. It fits so well with the grandeur of the heavens, the beauty of the flowers at our feet, the rapture of the birds! The Nature lover of today would ask nothing better than that it should be true.

Aristotle was sure of it. He points to marble in a quarry. It is only matter; then the sculptor attacks it with his chisel, with a shape in his mind. With form, soul enters into the marble. So all things are filled with soul, some with more, some with less. But even a jellyfish is infused with that which the rock possesses not. Thus existence has its origin in supreme intelligence, and everything has an intelligent cause and serves its useful purpose. That purpose is the development of higher planes of existence. Science, thought its Adam, had but to put the pieces of the puzzle together, to expose for praise the cosmic design, all beautiful.

March Twenty-Eighth

The hook-nosed Averroes, the Spanish Arab born in Cordova in 1126, and one time cadi of Seville, shook a slow dissenting head. He did not like this simile of Aristotle's, of the marble brought to life and form by the sculptor. The simile, he keenly perceived, would be applicable at best if the outlines of the statue were already preformed in the marble at it lay in the quarry. For that is precisely how we find life. The tree is preformed in the seed; the future animal already exists in the embryo. Wherever we look we find form, structure, adaptation, already present. Never has it been vouchsafed to us to see pure creation out of the lifeless.

And Galileo, also, ventured to shake the pillars of the Schoolmen's Aristotelian temple. Such a confirmed old scrutinizer was not to be drawn toward inscrutable will. The stars, nearest of all to Aristotle's God, should have moved with godlike precision, and Galileo, peering, found them erring strangely all across heaven. He shrugged, but was content. Nature itself was the miracle, Nature with all its imperfections. Futile for science to try to discover what the forces of Nature are; it can only discover how they operate.