Maybe it’s because it’s my birthday, and Wendell Berry was the first writer I ever met, about 30 years ago. (My dad introduced me to him at a draft horse auction.) Maybe it’s because I just bicycled past the organic dairies outside the small North Carolina town where I’m living this fall, and remembered groups of hippies (no disrespect! – including my parents!) laboring to sell bushels of vegetables from under the interstate overpass in Charleston, WV, 50 miles from home and a lot of gas in a (then!) ancient flatbed truck. But I’ve been noticing how one generation makes the next possible.
Really, it’s mostly because in the last two weeks I’ve re-read two important and very different books about food, land, and people: Berry’s “The Unsettling of America” (1977) and Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma” (yesterday, today, and tomorrow in every bookstore). Pollan’s writing has crystallized the energy around local, regional and sustainable food, brought it squarely into public awareness, and probably helped make it bigger (maybe helped a lot – it’s hard to say). They’re vastly different books. Berry’s is a jeremiad by a literary Appalachian farmer (and English professor, plus former student of Wallace Stegner’s and friend of Ken Kesey’s): its major sources include William Blake (“energy is eternal delight”), Shakespeare (a beautiful reading of a scene from King Lear), and, not especially explicit, but pervasive, Berry’s Christianity, centered on the goodness of Creation and the sin of division from it. Pollan’s, which needs less introduction, is systems theory and vicarious gourmandizing, courtesy of a somewhat faux-naif narrator who manages, with enormous energy and ingenuity, to trace the ecological sources and effects of industrial, local (and Whole Foods’ “industrial organic”), and hunter-gathered foods.
They exemplify totally different cultural styles. Berry has a lot to say about how WE SHOULD LIVE. Pollan has some information and suggestions that YOU MIGHT LIKE. One, that is, addresses a congregation, or an audience of earnest seekers after righteousness. The other speaks to a loose affiliation of the curious and well-intentioned, who would prefer to do right if it were not too hard, but would really rather not be hassled about it. So it is not surprising that Pollan has his own shelf-end display about my local chain; Berry’s publisher claimed in August that it didn’t have his book at all, then dug up some copies in October.
But without Wendell Berry, there would be no Michael Pollan. Pollan’s book sets out the same core arguments as Berry’s, with more detail and detail of a different kind. Some of the difference is just the difference between the two writers. Some is the knowledge created by thirty years of people, some inspired by Berry, who have been working closely with land since he wrote, learning things they can now display for Pollan and, by way for him, for everyone.
The premise of Berry’s book is that eating is a cultural, ethical, ecological, and political act, because producing and consuming food is the basic link, the metabolic tie, between a living thing and the rest of life, as well as the so-called inanimate nature that sustains it. Logically enough, he says (and this is equally the core of the book) the same about agriculture, how we get food from the world. He claims that a single moral logic follows through how we treat land, how we treat one another in producing food, and how we treat our own bodies in eating what we do (and how we do). He says at various points in The Unsettling of America that whatever degradation we visit on the health of the land and the plants and animals that we eat we will ultimately turn up in the health of our bodies.
Pollan’s astonishing chapter on corn, subsidies, chemical fertilizer, and human health makes Berry’s point afresh, irresistibly. By making fertility from fossil fuels, driving industrial agriculture overtime to produce mountains of cheap calories, American farm policy, with plenty of help from agribusiness (and there’s not much difference between those two), has sacrificed land health and human health to abstract, short-term maximization: more corn! more calories! more profits! He is equally disturbing on our “successful” attempt to raise meat on the industrial model, which takes animals off the land, turns them into antibiotic-filled breeding grounds for superbugs, generates big-time pollution, and spins off a beastly truckload of pain and suffering on the way to the slaughterhouse.
Berry contrasts two ethics: that of the abstract maximizer and that of the nurturer. If you already believe him, it’s lovely; if you don’t, it probably seems sentimental. Pollan shows that the balance sheets of companies (and the sometimes desperate farmers who produce commodity corn) can be blossoming while land and human health veer toward collapse. At least in the present food economy (partly thanks to gross subsidies, economists will rightly point out), maximizing profit and “maximizing” anything like health are aim that seem to pull in opposite directions.
An environmental economist would say, sensibly, that you just have to get big ag’s balance sheets to reflect health and environmental externalities, such as fertilizer runoff, increased diabetes rates, and so on, and then the market will do its magic. Maybe (any move in that direction would help). But Berry argued, or poetically asserted, that the most health-promoting forms of agriculture couldn’t be abstracted into generalized techniques, that (like good manners – one of Berry’s lovely formulations and unlikely to persuade doubters) good farming required close attention to context and judgment about what will best keep any piece of land in productive health. The more Pollan examined the farming of the book’s hero, land restorer and eccentric sustainability artist Joel Salatin, the more he concludes that no accounting or regulatory formula can make fungible what this guy does: he knows his land very, very well, and he will not do anything with that doesn’t contribute to its long-term health.
Berry drew on William Blake, mainly, to contrast biological energy, the annual intake from the sun, turned into nutrition and fertility by photosynthesis and digestion, with fossil energy. The first, Berry argued, tends to harmonious cycles. The second tends to runaway hubris, with the poetically ordained result. This contrast was as basic to Berry’s book as the ideas of health and nurturance. Pollan spells out the system effects of each source: fossil fuels are a kind of distorting ecological subsidy, enabling us to live beyond our long-term planetary means, and potentially locking us into unsustainable ways of doing things. At every point, reliance on these fuels enables industrial agriculture to ignore soil health, land-friendly scale, and the virtues of mixed agriculture in favor of super-concentrated, industrial-style food production. (Return to the beginning for the effects of this on health.)
I am huge admirer of both these writers. I think their differences are important and telling. Berry is, in a deep sense, a conservative with doubts about whether modernity, mobility, consumerism, and individualism, let alone secularism, are compatible with a living world. Pollan, as far as I can tell, is hoping that we will decide to buy the good stuff, and that what Berry wants is good. I recognize that Berry’s view is one of the really serious conservative arguments. And I hope that Pollan, who ignores such arguments, is right.
And, of course, neither writer is a demiurge. Berry was drawing on more than a generation of ecological thinking and agricultural neo-traditionalism, though his was one of the first serious attempts to think through the revolution in environmental ideas that happened in the 1960s and and 1970s, and to tie it to a serious look at how we live. And Pollan was drawing on many people who came after Berry (though, as I mentioned, a lot of them had read Berry).
But. There is a Michael Pollan only because there was a Wendell Berry. Today that makes me happy. Someday maybe I’ll tell the story to a child, in the course of explaining why people write books, and why they plant seeds.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
Can the wilderness spirit help to address climate change?
It has become conventional to say that the conservation tradition associated with the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society has nothing to offer in confronting climate change and today’s other environmental problems. This assertion depends on a few other claims. One is that “environmentalism” is unsuited to the nature and scale of today’s problems, especially climate change, because environmental values are negative and defensive on the one hand, and, on the other, reliant on a naïve and untenable contrast between humanity and nature. The second challenged claim is that, whatever its more specific defects, such language is vague, motivationally weak, and thus a presumptively poor resource for addressing the next generation of environmental challenges.
But this is almost entirely wrong. The American environmental tradition has always been centered on human values and engaged in the ever-shifting politics of democratic life. It has been, in fact, a politics of consciousness, aimed at enabling people to encounter the natural world in ways that both perceive its objective features more exactly and induce experiences such as sublimity and harmony. Aldo Leopold’s account of the purpose of public-lands management as achieving new levels of “receptivity” and “lovel[iness]” in the human mind captures exactly the human-centered and culturally innovative character of this program.
In earlier posts I began sketching the Romantic and Progressive traditions in American environmental politics. This is a reflection on how the resources of each might bear on our current problems.
What might be productive in the Romantic tradition would require making two elements of that tradition more explicit, basic, and thoroughgoing—in a word, radicalizing them. The first radicalizing development is to make explicit a basic but elusive idea. What is finally valuable in nature, according to this tradition, is not specific individuals, species, or places, nor even an ideal, undisturbed condition, but qualities of natural systems. Leopold, again, captured this idea when he made “integrity, stability, and beauty” the struts of the “land ethic” that emerged from decades of work in wilderness advocacy and other conservation politics. Even though this phrase is now sixty years old, it repays careful attention. These are not qualities of unchanged, “wild” nature, but goals for active management, both of wilderness and of densely inhabited places, such as farming regions. Moreover, these qualities blend objective characteristics of natural systems with attitudes and experiences of the human beholder. Integrity here means, roughly, resilience, and describes a system that can persist through both endogenous and exogenous changes. Beauty, by contrast, is a quality made actual only in a person’s culturally mediated encounter with a part of nature. So understood, these qualities are not at all obsolete as guides in engaging climate change. Instead, they address questions of just the kind that managing a global atmospheric system (within the considerable limitations of human competence to do so) must raise: questions of what qualities are valuable in our eyes in such a system, and what is necessary to maintain those qualities.
The second radicalizing development follows closely on the first. It is a sharp counterpoint to simplifying and nostalgic tendencies. It requires an embrace of the fact that environmental politics is centrally about a choice of futures. Such politics poses values to guide those choices, and so points, not backward to a lost idyll, but forward to human decision. It differs from more familiar techniques for steering toward the future, notably cost-benefit analysis, in that it engages not just the choice of means, but centrally the choice of ends, of what we value and why. Democratic politics has repeatedly changed both the set of viable alternatives and the metrics by which they are evaluated.
Carrying forward the Romantic tradition into climate politics might also require deepened engagement with another basic theme: identification of the qualities of mind and experience in which encounters with the natural world enrich human consciousness. Two issues have often made this question elusive. One is the tendency to confuse the touchstones of aesthetic experience with the values they embody and evoke, so that conservation has seemed to be simply about Yosemite Valley or the blue whale, rather than an attitude toward the natural world that is associated, but not identical, with conservation of such places and species. The other difficulty is that the natural world’s meaning for the human mind has figured in quite diverse ways across the history of environmental values. For the Transcendentalists and certain early Sierra Club figures, including Muir, nature’s patterns revealed those of the mind, which participated in the same ordering principles. From the Wilderness Society forward, encounters with the natural world have mainly been seen as unique opportunities for insight, but not access points to metaphysical principle. The Romantic tradition itself, then, contains temptations both to lose sight of the issue of consciousness altogether and to dismiss it as intractably vague.
The version of this tradition with the most to offer in climate change takes the direction of the Wilderness Society, leaving metaphysics aside in favor of the quality of mind that appreciates natural systems. This approach concentrates on two rather opposite facts. One is that the natural world is deeply intelligible, composed of principles and relationships that, once grasped, enrich perception by making it patterned and significant. The other is that the world outstrips human understanding, both at its largest and smallest scales and the furthest reaches of complexity, so that intelligibility is always bounded by mystery. Taken together, the experience is simultaneously of beauty—an orderly world which we can understand and in which we belong—and of sublimity—a world beyond us, in which we are always in some degree alien and potentially overwhelmed.
Recall the version of this idea that emerged from the work of Aldo Leopold and the Wilderness Society: that nature is at once deeply intelligible and basically mysterious, and appreciating this enriches the mind. This account may seem abstract, but just such ideas, worked into habits of perception, have provided key motives for the major conservation episodes of the last two centuries. Moreover, it may be that climate change brings home precisely this set of qualities in the natural world: that the earth is familiar and alien, subject to our mastery but also, past a certain threshold, able to overwhelm us. This description captures changes in which the same technology that for now makes the planet so serving of human ends threatens soon to make it terribly inhospitable to human life. It almost surely expresses something about atmospheric processes whose basic logic a child can understand, but whose systemic implications are beyond confident prediction by a civilization’s worth of computer-enhanced climate science. And, maybe most important, it resonates with the image of a planet astonishingly rich in life yet shielded from deadly radiative heat and endless cold by a thin layer of air that is now ineluctably something humans have made.
This attitude might provide the motive for political demands to create a carbon-neutral economy, as earlier changes in views of human beings, economics, and politics spurred demands to replace slavery with free labor, and the rise of Sierra Club culture drove a new agenda for conservation. It might cast compliance with the strictures of such an economy as a feature of a good life, not just a nest of inconveniences. It might, for instance, tilt political judgments between very different alternatives, such as relatively costly carbon-neutral policies and relatively inexpensive “geo-engineering” proposals to do such things as launch orbiting mirrors to reduce the earth’s solar exposure or seed the atmosphere with sulfur particles to the same effect. It is one thing to compare the relative expenditures for these competing approaches. It is quite another to experience a basic discomfort in imagining a carbon-choked atmosphere kept cool only by mechanically fending off solar radiation, knowing that, if the satellites failed, the planet would almost immediately enter a period of drastic and unpredictable climatic instability. That prospect, of course, represents a bundle of probability-discounted costs; but one might also experience discomfort because she believed such an engineered atmosphere lacked beauty, integrity, and stability, or whatever parallel terms emerged as public language for a healthy and desirable atmosphere. This perception of the costs of a geo-engineering solution to climate change would extend to the global atmosphere a way of valuing nature that has importantly motivated earlier conservation and environment regimes: a marriage of ethical, prudential, and aesthetic regard for complex and resilient natural system.
The second great theme of American conservation politics, interwoven with Romanticism, is the Progressive ideal of expert management in the public interest. These two themes have sometimes seemed at odds, and they draw on undeniably contrasting aspects of the modern temper: the self-transcending and rapturous on the one hand, and the calculating and instrumentally rational, on the other. The contrast is easy to overdraw, though. Romantic developments have frequently provided the goals that Progressive management has served, while managerial expertise has not been narrowly instrumental, but has engaged such purpose-guiding questions as the character and scope of national community.
Progressivism is, among other things, an approach to economic regulation based on the claim that economic life is, at its core, a matter of qualitative values. At least since Pinchot and Roosevelt put “conservation” at the center of a national program of economic management, environmental values have figured not just in the functionality of the economy, but also in its legitimacy. These values have included the intergenerational solidarity that Pinchot demanded and an idea of using resources in a way that enables natural systems to reproduce themselves indefinitely. By analogy, in a liberal market regime, the numerus clausus principle of property law and the Thirteenth Amendment (to take two examples with somewhat different emotional resonance) are not restrictions on markets, but building blocks keyed to the purposes those markets serve. Regulations aimed at atmospheric health might play the same role, serving not as exogenous constraints, but as endogenous constituents of markets.
To develop this distinction conceptually: markets are defined by both constitutive regulation, which makes them what they are, and exogenous regulation, which adjusts them, as it were, from outside. The contrast, however, is not natural or otherwise fixed. Constitutive regulation describes those features that we regard as intrinsic to a certain form of economy, as if they were “just there,” such as the prohibition on involuntary servitude and the fixed number of estates in real property. Political developments can change the domain of constitutive regulation by putting new principles, such as atmospheric health, at the center of legitimate markets. The Progressive tradition in environmental values has done just this with conservation principles in the past, and the idea of an economy constituted and assessed by a standard of atmospheric health would extend that tradition.
Note that there is a basic complementarity between the Romantic and Progressive developments sketched here. The two traditions might coincide in the same set of values: systemic qualities such as beauty, health, and integrity. As argued earlier, these are the kinds of values that the Romantic tradition might lead Americans to embrace in climate politics. They are also the qualities that Progressive developments might place at the center of a new generation of constitutive economic regulation.
But this is almost entirely wrong. The American environmental tradition has always been centered on human values and engaged in the ever-shifting politics of democratic life. It has been, in fact, a politics of consciousness, aimed at enabling people to encounter the natural world in ways that both perceive its objective features more exactly and induce experiences such as sublimity and harmony. Aldo Leopold’s account of the purpose of public-lands management as achieving new levels of “receptivity” and “lovel[iness]” in the human mind captures exactly the human-centered and culturally innovative character of this program.
In earlier posts I began sketching the Romantic and Progressive traditions in American environmental politics. This is a reflection on how the resources of each might bear on our current problems.
What might be productive in the Romantic tradition would require making two elements of that tradition more explicit, basic, and thoroughgoing—in a word, radicalizing them. The first radicalizing development is to make explicit a basic but elusive idea. What is finally valuable in nature, according to this tradition, is not specific individuals, species, or places, nor even an ideal, undisturbed condition, but qualities of natural systems. Leopold, again, captured this idea when he made “integrity, stability, and beauty” the struts of the “land ethic” that emerged from decades of work in wilderness advocacy and other conservation politics. Even though this phrase is now sixty years old, it repays careful attention. These are not qualities of unchanged, “wild” nature, but goals for active management, both of wilderness and of densely inhabited places, such as farming regions. Moreover, these qualities blend objective characteristics of natural systems with attitudes and experiences of the human beholder. Integrity here means, roughly, resilience, and describes a system that can persist through both endogenous and exogenous changes. Beauty, by contrast, is a quality made actual only in a person’s culturally mediated encounter with a part of nature. So understood, these qualities are not at all obsolete as guides in engaging climate change. Instead, they address questions of just the kind that managing a global atmospheric system (within the considerable limitations of human competence to do so) must raise: questions of what qualities are valuable in our eyes in such a system, and what is necessary to maintain those qualities.
The second radicalizing development follows closely on the first. It is a sharp counterpoint to simplifying and nostalgic tendencies. It requires an embrace of the fact that environmental politics is centrally about a choice of futures. Such politics poses values to guide those choices, and so points, not backward to a lost idyll, but forward to human decision. It differs from more familiar techniques for steering toward the future, notably cost-benefit analysis, in that it engages not just the choice of means, but centrally the choice of ends, of what we value and why. Democratic politics has repeatedly changed both the set of viable alternatives and the metrics by which they are evaluated.
Carrying forward the Romantic tradition into climate politics might also require deepened engagement with another basic theme: identification of the qualities of mind and experience in which encounters with the natural world enrich human consciousness. Two issues have often made this question elusive. One is the tendency to confuse the touchstones of aesthetic experience with the values they embody and evoke, so that conservation has seemed to be simply about Yosemite Valley or the blue whale, rather than an attitude toward the natural world that is associated, but not identical, with conservation of such places and species. The other difficulty is that the natural world’s meaning for the human mind has figured in quite diverse ways across the history of environmental values. For the Transcendentalists and certain early Sierra Club figures, including Muir, nature’s patterns revealed those of the mind, which participated in the same ordering principles. From the Wilderness Society forward, encounters with the natural world have mainly been seen as unique opportunities for insight, but not access points to metaphysical principle. The Romantic tradition itself, then, contains temptations both to lose sight of the issue of consciousness altogether and to dismiss it as intractably vague.
The version of this tradition with the most to offer in climate change takes the direction of the Wilderness Society, leaving metaphysics aside in favor of the quality of mind that appreciates natural systems. This approach concentrates on two rather opposite facts. One is that the natural world is deeply intelligible, composed of principles and relationships that, once grasped, enrich perception by making it patterned and significant. The other is that the world outstrips human understanding, both at its largest and smallest scales and the furthest reaches of complexity, so that intelligibility is always bounded by mystery. Taken together, the experience is simultaneously of beauty—an orderly world which we can understand and in which we belong—and of sublimity—a world beyond us, in which we are always in some degree alien and potentially overwhelmed.
Recall the version of this idea that emerged from the work of Aldo Leopold and the Wilderness Society: that nature is at once deeply intelligible and basically mysterious, and appreciating this enriches the mind. This account may seem abstract, but just such ideas, worked into habits of perception, have provided key motives for the major conservation episodes of the last two centuries. Moreover, it may be that climate change brings home precisely this set of qualities in the natural world: that the earth is familiar and alien, subject to our mastery but also, past a certain threshold, able to overwhelm us. This description captures changes in which the same technology that for now makes the planet so serving of human ends threatens soon to make it terribly inhospitable to human life. It almost surely expresses something about atmospheric processes whose basic logic a child can understand, but whose systemic implications are beyond confident prediction by a civilization’s worth of computer-enhanced climate science. And, maybe most important, it resonates with the image of a planet astonishingly rich in life yet shielded from deadly radiative heat and endless cold by a thin layer of air that is now ineluctably something humans have made.
This attitude might provide the motive for political demands to create a carbon-neutral economy, as earlier changes in views of human beings, economics, and politics spurred demands to replace slavery with free labor, and the rise of Sierra Club culture drove a new agenda for conservation. It might cast compliance with the strictures of such an economy as a feature of a good life, not just a nest of inconveniences. It might, for instance, tilt political judgments between very different alternatives, such as relatively costly carbon-neutral policies and relatively inexpensive “geo-engineering” proposals to do such things as launch orbiting mirrors to reduce the earth’s solar exposure or seed the atmosphere with sulfur particles to the same effect. It is one thing to compare the relative expenditures for these competing approaches. It is quite another to experience a basic discomfort in imagining a carbon-choked atmosphere kept cool only by mechanically fending off solar radiation, knowing that, if the satellites failed, the planet would almost immediately enter a period of drastic and unpredictable climatic instability. That prospect, of course, represents a bundle of probability-discounted costs; but one might also experience discomfort because she believed such an engineered atmosphere lacked beauty, integrity, and stability, or whatever parallel terms emerged as public language for a healthy and desirable atmosphere. This perception of the costs of a geo-engineering solution to climate change would extend to the global atmosphere a way of valuing nature that has importantly motivated earlier conservation and environment regimes: a marriage of ethical, prudential, and aesthetic regard for complex and resilient natural system.
The second great theme of American conservation politics, interwoven with Romanticism, is the Progressive ideal of expert management in the public interest. These two themes have sometimes seemed at odds, and they draw on undeniably contrasting aspects of the modern temper: the self-transcending and rapturous on the one hand, and the calculating and instrumentally rational, on the other. The contrast is easy to overdraw, though. Romantic developments have frequently provided the goals that Progressive management has served, while managerial expertise has not been narrowly instrumental, but has engaged such purpose-guiding questions as the character and scope of national community.
Progressivism is, among other things, an approach to economic regulation based on the claim that economic life is, at its core, a matter of qualitative values. At least since Pinchot and Roosevelt put “conservation” at the center of a national program of economic management, environmental values have figured not just in the functionality of the economy, but also in its legitimacy. These values have included the intergenerational solidarity that Pinchot demanded and an idea of using resources in a way that enables natural systems to reproduce themselves indefinitely. By analogy, in a liberal market regime, the numerus clausus principle of property law and the Thirteenth Amendment (to take two examples with somewhat different emotional resonance) are not restrictions on markets, but building blocks keyed to the purposes those markets serve. Regulations aimed at atmospheric health might play the same role, serving not as exogenous constraints, but as endogenous constituents of markets.
To develop this distinction conceptually: markets are defined by both constitutive regulation, which makes them what they are, and exogenous regulation, which adjusts them, as it were, from outside. The contrast, however, is not natural or otherwise fixed. Constitutive regulation describes those features that we regard as intrinsic to a certain form of economy, as if they were “just there,” such as the prohibition on involuntary servitude and the fixed number of estates in real property. Political developments can change the domain of constitutive regulation by putting new principles, such as atmospheric health, at the center of legitimate markets. The Progressive tradition in environmental values has done just this with conservation principles in the past, and the idea of an economy constituted and assessed by a standard of atmospheric health would extend that tradition.
Note that there is a basic complementarity between the Romantic and Progressive developments sketched here. The two traditions might coincide in the same set of values: systemic qualities such as beauty, health, and integrity. As argued earlier, these are the kinds of values that the Romantic tradition might lead Americans to embrace in climate politics. They are also the qualities that Progressive developments might place at the center of a new generation of constitutive economic regulation.
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