Some time ago, I realized something disturbing.
Despite having a decent memory and an above-average attentiveness to the city around me, I couldn’t remember buildings once they were demolished. They vanished from my memory as quickly as from the street. Driving by an empty lot, I couldn’t say what used to be there. Worse, the erasure was immediate -- not like a memory that faded over time. This was deletion. It made no difference if the building was there last week or last year. I couldn’t recall it.
I’ve had the same sense of ghostliness in the aftermath of stillborn projects. I worked for years on a light rail line that never got built. Today you’d be hard-pressed to find six people who could say where it was going to go. Same with colleagues. When people leave organizations, they are missed for what they accomplished but not for what they would have done. And when people leave us for good, our grief is backward looking. One of our area’s beloved chefs died tragically this past weekend. We know the enormous measure of that loss through Naomi Pomeroy’s extraordinary restaurants and recognition. But what we should mourn is what she’ll now never create.
The defect in our awareness is our paltry grasp of potentials. We don't miss what's unrealized, what can only be imagined. A corollary to this sad fact is that we’re really bad at recognizing decline, which is the unmaking of potential. We catch on to decline only after it’s done most of its work.
I read recently that we don’t actually gain weight in middle age due to slower metabolisms, as was long thought. Rather, our metabolism stays roughly the same, but in our 40s and 50s, cumulative weight gain finally becomes noticeable. Our health problems are almost always like this. They come on slowly or occasionally quickly, but we hardly notice what we’re dealing with at the start. We rely on accumulated evidence before accepting that something is truly happening. Evolution has decided it’s best not to jump to conclusions.
The threats we evolved with, however, aren't quite those we need to neutralize now. I'm finding it impossible not to think about decline these days, with democratic norms falling even faster than heat records. How did we arrive here? When exactly did constructive political debate become impossible in this country? Did we notice, years or decades ago, abortion rights in the US and human rights in the middle east and Ukraine sliding into the abyss? When did we decide against free-range childhood?
The miserably tricky thing about decline is never really knowing how bad things are and how much worse they might get. It should be enough to notice worrying trends, but it's not. Trends change. When we do perceive decline, we don’t know how to calibrate it. Only after arriving at the Port of Too Late do we finally figure it out.
Wendell Berry’s concluding essay in What Are People For, “Nature as Measure” (1989), makes me think it doesn't have to be this way. There’s a bug in the system that’s got us brainwashed. It’s not that we don’t notice decline, Wendell might say. It’s that we aren’t sufficiently noticing, period.
We've normalized contradictions that underpin, and undermine, our economy and society. Like for example an agriculture that produces a surplus of food while destroying the growing conditions that make that surplus possible. Or a justice system that uses exceptionally high incarceration rates to further our freedom. A money system that relies on debt to create wealth. Lax gun laws to keep us safe. Energy policies that ensure we will never have enough energy to cool the world.
What we do notice -- what we’re sharp as hell about, is productivity. What we’re trained to see and schooled to do, from our first to our final years, is produce. Our public, private and nonprofit institutions, all running on money, hew to that purpose. Regardless of mission, we are all about delivering the goods and services. You can draw a short, straight line from the far-too-simple gospel of Production to the many wicked problems we’re facing today, from toxic politics to global heating. The Productivity standard has a godlike effect. Everything bows to its rule.
In the single-minded pursuit of productivity, Wendell writes, we bought the economists’ line that “competition and innovation would solve all problems, and that we would finally accomplish a technological end-run around biological reality and the human condition.” His subject is agriculture, of course, and as far as food production is concerned, the problem of productivity has been solved, for the moment at least.
But, he says, by every other measure, productivity as a single standard has failed abjectly. The evidence is everywhere in rural counties; exhausted and parched soil, broken and absent farm families, eroded waterways, forsaken wildlife, disappearing aquifers. The very stuff that makes agriculture productive over the long haul is going away, or has gone.
That’s an old story by now. It's one we know, and is the throughline of Wendell Berry’s 60-year argument. But in its putative inevitability, and our apparent futility to do anything about it, I don't think it's different from our other slow-motion tragedies. We also now know the story of climate change. We know about rampant inequality. We know about systemic racism. We know about state-sponsored violence against innocents. What we don’t have, or at least what I don’t have, is a heuristic to resolv6e these unjust ways of sharing this planet.
Wendell offers one here. It’s the replacement of the Productivity standard with the simple/not-simple idea of “nature as measure.” Not so we all become agrarians or ecologists. But rather so we learn how to stay in conversation. That’s what nature requires of us, were we to finally admit it. That’s all that's asked of us, really, if we’re ever to learn how to be at home with others.
What if we began with agriculture? Our treatment of the land and water has surely, through that god awful Productivity standard, infected our politics and institutional life. Wendell writes:
Industrial agriculture, built according to the single standard of productivity, has dealt with nature, including human nature, in the manner of a monologist or orator. It has not asked for anything, or waited to hear any response. It has told nature what it wanted, and in various clever ways has taken what it wanted. And since it proposed no limit on its wants, exhaustion has been its inevitable and foreseeable result. This clearly is a dictatorial or totalitarian form of behavior, and it is as totalitarian in its use of people as it is in its use of nature.
When did we lose constructive political discourse? When we normalized taking without asking. Which is exactly how we’ve been treating nature and people since we landed on these shores a few hundred years ago. We've probably been losing our political way ever since, and what’s happening now is more like middle aged weight gain -- a longstanding condition that's finally emerged into view.
What I like about “nature as measure,” and about walking with Wendell generally, is how relevant and timely these ideas are, and how applicable they are beyond the farming ethics that inspired them. There is no debate of course that both land and people are a part of nature (climate change is bringing the late adopters along real fast now). So why shouldn’t we adopt a standard that is actually singular, that includes, rather than excludes, our own health and that of our places? If you’re lucky enough to know anyone from an indigenous community, they will assure you, if the land does not thrive, then neither do we. The bug, the brainwashing, persists because we Euro-Americans have never lived this way.
We’re a couple hundred years into the Production is God era, and I’m fairly certain the curtain is coming down on that epoch. But because decline is unknowable, so too is the conclusion to this radical experiment. Do we avoid the very worst and make a turn toward something more sane, more whole, as Wendell instructs? Or will we bump along the bottom of wherever we’re going, until all of it -- the land, the institutions, the people, are exhausted beyond regeneration?
In either case, it isn’t going to happen all at once, nor all in one place. It will happen, as it only can, freed from a fate predetermined by “gigantic politics, economics and technology.” The reunion of ecology and economy is inevitable, and the practice of that fusion will not occur in the abstract. It will play out locally, indeed is playing in a few precious places already, farm by farm and ranch by ranch, where stewards are in conversation with the land they love.
In time, the rest of us will learn not to impose on the world a vision that sees it as a stockpile of raw material, "indifferent to any use that may be made of it.” Instead, this better measure will give us the confidence of thought and language to help producers to
…ask what nature would permit them to do there, and what they could do there with the least harm to the place and to their natural and human neighbors. And they would ask what nature would help them to do there.
The Productivity measure was invented as a path to some new Eden “constructed entirely by human ingenuity." But what we can now comprehend, even without seeing the bottom of our decline, is how that standard has reduced and enslaved us, and how it continues to belittle us.
The change can start today, with each of us. We can unlearn our monologuing habits. We can check to see if we’re really in conversation with the people and places we love. We can call out the harms we see and insist that our home place not be treated as though it were any place. That each person not be treated as though they were any person.
It’s time, Wendell concluded (35 years ago), for us to stop inflicting damage. What we've produced, sadly, and maybe most of all, is a predisposition to abuse the very sustenance of our lives.
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