Bringing It to the Table (24 page)

 

NO UNIVERSITY THAT I have heard of, land-grant or other, has yet attempted to establish its curriculum and its intellectual structure on Sir Albert Howard’s “one great subject,” or on his determination to serve respectfully and humbly the local population. But a university most
certainly could do so, and in doing so it could bring to bear all its disciplines and departments. In doing so, that is to say, it could become in truth a university.

At present our universities are not simply growing and expanding, according to the principle of “growth” universal in industrial societies, but they are at the same time disintegrating. They are a hodgepodge of unrelated parts. There is no unifying aim and no common critical standard that can serve equally well all the diverse parts or departments.

The fashion now is to think of universities as industries or businesses. University presidents, evidently thinking of themselves as CEOs, talk of “business plans” and “return on investment,” as if the industrial economy could provide an aim and a critical standard appropriate either to education or to research.

But this is not possible. No economy, industrial or otherwise, can supply an appropriate aim or standard. Any economy must be either true or false to the world and to our life in it. If it is to be true, then it must be
made
true, according to a standard that is not economic.

To regard the economy as an end or as the measure of success is merely to reduce students, teachers, researchers, and all they know or learn to merchandise. It reduces knowledge to “property” and education to training for the “job market.”

If, on the contrary, Howard was right in his belief that health is the “one great subject,” then a unifying aim and a common critical standard are clearly implied. Health is at once quantitative and qualitative; it requires both sufficiency and goodness. It is comprehensive (it is synonymous with “wholeness”), for it must leave nothing out. And it is uncompromisingly local and particular; it has to do with the sustenance of particular places, creatures, human bodies, and human minds.

If a university began to assume responsibility for the health of its place and its local constituents, then all of its departments would have a
common aim, and they would have to judge their place and themselves and one another by a common standard. They would need one another’s knowledge. They would have to communicate with one another; the diversity of specialists would have to speak to one another in a common language. And here again Howard is exemplary, for he wrote, and presumably spoke, a plain, vigorous, forthright English—no jargon, no condescension, no ostentation, no fooling around.

 

NOTES

1
An Agricultural Testament
(London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 4.

2
Sir Albert Howard,
The Soil and Health
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 11.

3
Louise E. Howard,
Sir Albert Howard in India
(Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Press, 1954), 162.

4
The Soil and Health
, 11.

5
An Agricultural Testament
, 196.

6
The Soil and Health
, 22.

7
Ibid., 18.

8
Ibid.

9
An Agricultural Testament
, 25.

10
The Soil and Health
, 1-2.

11
Sir Albert Howard in India
, 42.

12
Howard, as quoted in
Sir Albert Howard in India
, 190.

13
Sir Albert Howard in India
, 170.

14
Ibid., 42.

15
Ibid., 44.

16
An Agricultural Testament
, 9.

17
Sir Albert Howard in India
, 222 and 228.

18
Howard, as quoted in
Sir Albert Howard in India
, 37-38.

19
Sir Albert Howard in India
, 224.

(2004)

H
ENRY DAVID THOREAU wrote somewhere that hundreds are hacking at the branches for every one who is striking at the root. He meant this as a metaphor, but it applies literally to modern agriculture and to the science of modern agriculture. As it has become more and more industrialized, agriculture increasingly has been understood as an enterprise established upon the surface of the ground. Most people nowadays lack even a superficial knowledge of agriculture, and most who do know something about it are paying little or no attention to what is happening under the surface.

The scientists at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, on the contrary, are striking at the root. Their study of the root and the roots of our agricultural problems has produced a radical criticism, leading to a proposed solution that is radical.

 

THEIR CRITICISM IS made radical by one crucial choice: the adoption of the natural ecosystem as the first standard of agricultural performance, having priority over the standard of productivity and certainly over the delusional and dangerous industrial standard of “efficiency.” That single
change makes a momentous difference, one that is historical and cultural as well as scientific.

By the standard of the natural or the healthy ecosystem, we see as if suddenly the shortcomings, not only of industrial agriculture but of agriculture itself, insofar as agriculture has consisted of annual monocultures. To those of us who are devoted to agriculture in any of its historical forms, such criticism is inevitably painful. And yet we may see its justice and accept it, understanding how much is at stake. To others, who have founded their careers or their businesses precisely upon the shortcomings of agriculture as we now have it, this criticism will perhaps be even more painful, and no doubt they will resist with all the great power we know they have.

Even so, this is a criticism for which the time is ripe. A rational denial of its justice is no longer possible. There are many reasons for this, but the main one, I think, is the virtual meltdown of the old boundaries of specialist thought in agriculture—a meltdown that I hope foretells the same fate for the boundaries of all specialist thought.

The justifying assumptions of the industrial agriculture that we now have are based on a reductive science working within strictly bounded specializations. This agriculture, an agglomeration of specialties, appeared perfectly rational and salutary so long as it was assumable that efficiency and productivity were adequate standards, that husbandry was safely reducible to science and fertility to chemistry, that organisms are merely machines, that agriculture is under no obligation to nature, that it has only agricultural results, and that it can be confidently based upon “cheap” fossil fuels.

The inventors of this agriculture assumed, in short, that the human will is sovereign in the universe, that the only laws are the laws of mechanics, and that the material world and its “natural resources” are without limit. These are the assumptions that, acknowledged or not, underlie the “war” by which we humans have undertaken to “conquer” nature, and which is the dominant myth of modern intellectual life.

IN THE DAYS of human darkness and ignorance, now supposedly past, we found ways to acknowledge the sanctity of nature and to honor her as the common mother of all creatures, including ourselves. We conducted our relations with her by prayer, propitiation, skilled work, thrift, caution, and care. Our concern about that relationship produced the concepts of usufruct and stewardship. A few lines from the “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie” that Edmund Spenser placed at the end of
The Faerie Queene
will suffice to give a sense of our ancient veneration:

Thus, though he was a Christian, Spenser still saw fit at the end of the sixteenth century to present Nature as the genius of the sublunary world, a figure of the greatest majesty, mystery, and power, the source of all earthly life. He addressed her, in addition, as the supreme judge of all her creatures, ruling by standards that we would now call ecological:

And then, at about Spenser’s time or a little after, we set forth in our “war against nature” with the purpose of conquering her and wringing her powerful and lucrative secrets from her by various forms of “tortious Injurie.” This we have thought of as our “enlightenment” and as “progress.” But in the event this war, like most wars, has turned out to be a trickier business than we expected. We must now face two shocking surprises. The first surprise is that if we say and believe that we are at war with nature, then we are in the fullest sense at war: That is, we are both opposing and being opposed, and the costs to both sides are extremely high.

The second surprise is that we are not winning. On the evidence now available, we have to conclude that we are losing—and, moreover, that there was never a chance that we could win. Despite the immense power and violence that we have deployed against her, nature is handing us one defeat after another. Even in our most grievous offenses against her—as in the present epidemic of habitat destruction and species extinction—we are being defeated, for in the long run we can less afford the losses than nature can. And we have to look upon soil erosion and the spread of exotic diseases, weeds, and pests as nature’s direct reprisals for our violations of her laws. Sometimes she seems terrifyingly serene in her triumphs over us, as when, simply by refusing to absorb our pollutants, she forces us to live in our mess.

Thus she has forced us to recognize that the context of American agriculture is not merely fields and farms or the free market or the economy, but it is also the polluted Mississippi River, the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico, all the small towns whose drinking water contains pesticides and nitrates, the pumped-down aquifers and the no-longer-flowing rivers, and all the lands that we have scalped, gouged, poisoned, or destroyed utterly for “cheap” fuels and raw materials.

Thus she is forcing us to believe what the great teachers and prophets have always told us and what the ecologists are telling us again: All things are connected; the context of everything is everything else. By now, many of us know, and more are learning, that if you want to evaluate the agriculture of a region, you must begin not with a balance sheet, but with the local water. How continuously do the small streams flow? How clear is the water? How much sediment and how many pollutants are carried in the runoff? Are the ponds and creeks and rivers fit for swimming? Can you eat the fish?

We know, or we are learning, that from the questions about water we go naturally to questions about the soil. Is it staying in place? What is its water-holding capacity? Does it drain well? How much humus is in it? What of its biological health? How often and for how long is it exposed to the weather? How deep in it do the roots go?

 

SUCH ARE THE questions that trouble and urge and inspire the scientists at The Land Institute, for everything depends upon the answers. The answers, as these scientists know, will reveal not only the state of the health of the landscape, but also the state of the culture of the people who inhabit and use the landscape. Is it a culture of respect, thrift, and seemly skills, or a culture of indifference and mechanical force? A culture of life, or a culture of death?

And beyond those questions are questions insistently practical and economic, questions of accounting. What is the worth, to us humans with our now insupportable health care industry, of ecological health? Is our health in any way separable from the health of our economic landscapes? Must not the health of water and soil be accounted an economic asset? Will not this greater health support, sustain, and in the long run cheapen the productivity of our farms?

If our war against nature destroys the health of water and soil, and thus inevitably the health of agriculture and our own health, and can only
lead to our economic ruin, then we need to try another possibility. And there is only one: If we cannot establish an enduring or even a humanly bearable economy by our attempt to defeat nature, then we will have to try living in harmony and cooperation with her.