Sheep Love and Thanksgiving Reading

I'm not sure that's a good title for this post. It's hard to tell what kind of pervs will find this blog on Google. Oh, well... Joash and Frost spent yesterday afternoon away from the rest of flock. We're pretty sure that Frost is "with child" today but she has been one of our later lambing ewes in the past so maybe she didn't catch. We'll know in the spring.

This morning over breakfast, I read The Man Who Created Paradise: A Fable by Gene Logsdon with fantastic photographs by Gregory Spaid. The front cover photo, along with several others, was shot in Knox County, Ohio which is our neighboring county to the southeast. Knox County is a mid-Ohio hotbed of sustainable agriculture. The pastured pork, grass-fed beef, 100% grass-fed mozzarella, and organic chicken feed that we buy all comes from there. The story is about Wally Spero, a man who reclaims strip-mined land in southeastern Ohio with his old bulldozer, "Alice," and turns it into a small farm paradise. Thirty years pass and a thriving rural community grows up amid the ruin of the raped land of Appalachia. It was a very good read and especially appropriate for Thanksgiving.

I'm also continuing with Wendell Berry's collection of essays, Another Turn of the Crank. The second essay is "Conserving Communities." In it, Berry chronicles the fate of rural communities as America has replaced agri-"culture" with agri-"business."

The message is plain enough, and we have ignored it for too long: the great, centralized economic entities of our time do not come into rural places in order to improve them by "creating jobs." They come to take as much of value as they can take, as cheaply and as quickly as they can take it. They are interested in "job creation" only so long as the jobs can be done more cheaply by humans than by machines. They are not interested in the good health - economic or natural or human - any place on this earth. And if you should undertake to appeal or complain to one of these great corporations on behalf of your community, you would discover something most remarkable: you would find that these organizations are organized expressly for the evasion of responsibility. They are structures in which, as my brother says, "the buck never stops."

And:

The governmental and educational institutions from which rural people should by right have received help have not helped. Rather than striving to preserve the rural communities and economies and an adequate rural population, these institutions have consistently aided, abetted and justified the destruction of every part of rural life. They have eagerly served the superstition that all technological innovation is good. They have said repeatedly that the failure of farm families, rural businesses, and rural communities is merely the result of progress and efficiency and is good for everybody.

I could go on and on but for the sake of space (and copyright rules) I'm going to select some individual sentences that give a sense of what the author is communicating:

"...as we now begin to see, you cannot have a postagricultural world that is not also postdemocratic, postreligious, postnatural - in other words, it will be posthuman, contrary to the best that we have meant by humanity."

"[Promotors of the so-called global economy] believe that a farm or a forest is or ought to be the same as a factory; that care is only minimally necessary in the use of the land; that affection is not necessary at all; that for all practical purposes a machine is as good as a human; that the industrial standards of production, efficiency, and profitability are the only standards that are necessary; that the topsoil is lifeless and inert; that soil biology is safely replaceable by soil chemistry, that the nature or ecology of any given place is irrelevant to the use of it; that there is no value in human community or neighborhood; and that technological innovation will produce only benign results."

"American agriculture has demonstrated by its own ruination that you cannot solve economic problems just by increasing scale and, moreover, that increasing scale is almost certain to cause other problems - ecological, social, and cultural."

"Long experience has made it clear - as we might say to the liberals - that to be free we must limit the size of the government and we must have some sort of home rule. But it is just as clear - as we might say to the conservatives - that it is foolish to complain about big government if we do not do everything we can to support strong local communities and strong community economies."

Get the book. Read it.