[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Where Have All The Joiners Gone?

[Bill Totten]

by Bill McKibben

Published by Orion Magazine (April 13 2008)


Cheap fossil fuel has made us what we are. Which is to say: rich,
powerful - Look at us! We can make the ice caps melt! The oceans rise!
But something else too: cheap fossil fuel has made us the first people
on Earth with no need of our neighbors. Think, in the course of an
ordinary day, how often you rely on the people who live near you for
anything of practical value. Perhaps carpooling your kids to school or
soccer. If you live in a rural community, there may be a volunteer fire
department, which keeps your insurance affordable. But your food, your
fuel, your shelter, your clothes, and your entertainment most likely
come from a distance and arrive anonymously at that. A meteorite could
fall on your cul-de-sac tomorrow, disappearing your neighbors, and the
routines of your daily life wouldn't change.

Now imagine how different things have been for almost all of human
history. Two hundred years ago, if an American wanted to eat a hamburger
for dinner, he needed to be able to convince his neighbors to, say, help
him build a barn in which to store hay to feed his cows all winter. And
to help him harvest his wheat crop. Likely they would have come together
to thresh it - there wasn't a surplus of machinery. A neighbor would
have slaughtered the cow and another would have baked the bread, unless
it was all done in the family. The same went for what was considered
women's work. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, in a wonderful article in the
journal Feminist Studies, showed that our notion of the self-sufficient
farm family was bunk. There was a lot more to do than just berrying or
washing or husking or quilting. Say you needed some homespun woolen
cloth: there were eleven separate tasks involved, from herding sheep to
dressing the fabric, and, as Ulrich noted, "it would have been an
extremely unusual family that commanded the tools, skills, and labor to
perform all of these steps at home ... What was true of wool was also
true of flax", she said, "for a family might grow its own; have it
retted, swingled, and hackled by a flax dresser; bring it home for
spinning and reeling; send it out to be woven; and then consign it to
the bleach fields or dyer for finishing".

Some of this exchange might have been paid for, much of it bartered, and
a lot of it simply unaccounted for, since the reciprocal hand-lending
was inevitable. Douglas Harper, in Changing Works (2001), a poignant
account of the dairy farms of northern New York, interviews farmers old
enough to recall the time when "we would pitch in and go help. Everyone
wasn't so busy then. Oh, they had time or something." You can read about
it in Wendell Berry novels; if you want to still see it in operation,
you may need to visit an Amish farm.

That's because the advent of cheap fossil fuel, and the prosperity,
globalization, and specialization it allowed, changed, well, everything
for those who went along (which is to say, everyone but the Amish). You
could look at almost any profession - baker to banker - but let's stick
with farming. When you depended on horsepower and human labor, you
needed help. When you depended on high-powered machinery, you simply
didn't. Once you had a big combine, you could do it yourself. As one
farmer told Harper, all of a sudden "there was no need, no call, really,
to go see them ... I don't think anyone has anything against anyone -
you just don't have any need to be there". And all those machines let
farms grow steadily bigger, which had as its logical result a far
greater physical distance between the farm families who remained.

We could count this as simply the way of the world except for two problems.

One, of course, is that the era of cheap fossil fuel may be coming to an
end, either because we run out or because we take global warming
seriously and seriously cut back. Either way, the massive, invisible,
industrialized methods we've come to rely on for feeding and clothing
and fueling our lives may start to break down.

And the other problem is that we may break down. We weren't designed to
be this distant from our neighbors - we descend from apes who spend most
of the day grooming each other for the practical purpose of removing
lice and for the even more practical purpose of building the deep bonds
that give their lives security and meaning. The economic life of Homo
sapiens has always been about that kind of contact - until now, until
us. Research has shown that when we live on car-filled streets, our
number of close friends drops by half. We eat half the meals we used to
with friends, family, neighbors. Forget about the flax-swingler; our
clothes come through the ether from the mysterious geography of Lands'
End. We don't need each other anymore, and that's the saddest thing
we've done - sadder even than the scourge of climate change, which at
least is anonymous and impersonal.

Once we've started down this road, it's hard to turn back; being a
neighbor is a skill like any other, and it's a skill we've increasingly
lost as we've turned into hyperindividuals. Say you need the proverbial
cup of sugar: do you turn to the neighbor or turn the car on and drive
to the store? One survey found that three-quarters of Americans didn't
have a real relationship with the folks who lived next door. (New
upscale houses now routinely come with dual master bedrooms, since even
the talent for being a mate seems to be dwindling.) The big question for
this century may turn out to be how fast we can relearn the skill of
neighborliness.

Take farming again. The local food movement is helping to build demand
for small farms. If it continues, we may someday reach the point where
we once again have more farmers than prisoners in America - which will
be a good thing, if we're hoping to grow our food with less oil. But if
that's going to happen, it will take more than farmers' markets - it
will take farming communities, with enough small growers in the
neighborhood to teach each other what needs doing. One of the best young
farmers in my corner of Vermont, Spencer Blackwell, recently graduated
from several seasons of growing grain and beans on the Intervale land in
Burlington - a kind of incubator for young farmers with a dozen little
start-up farms in any given year. "Maybe it was a little bit what it was
like in the 1800s, when every other person was a farmer", he says. "You
need to know something - what's the best time to plant oats as a winter
cover crop - and there's someone right around to tell you". You can
borrow equipment too, which is helpful because, as Blackwell points out,
almost everything at the implement dealer is designed for mammoth farms.
"I don't want to grow a thousand acres of broccoli - I want to grow five
acres", he says.

For the rest of us, who aren't planning to actually till the soil
ourselves, relearning neighborliness means joining a CSA or going to the
farmers' market (where shoppers have ten times as many conversations per
visit as they do at the Shop 'n Save).

It means putting solar panels on our roofs and tying them into the grid
so that our neighbors can cool their beer with the sunlight that falls
on our shingles - and, of course, it means buying that beer from the
local brewery. It means buying CDs when the artist is selling them after
a concert, and listening to your local public radio station instead of
the XM satellite - from - nowhere. It means not just supporting the idea
of mass transit but getting on the darned bus sometimes.

It means embracing nonindependence - which to us may seem un-American,
but in fact it is just the opposite. Tocqueville, in the greatest clichè
of American political science history, called us a nation of joiners.
We've gotten away from that - become a nation of drive- around- by-
ourselfers. But in a world that seems likely to grow a little tougher
all around, with weird weather, rising prices, and falling profits, a
neighbor is what you'll need most.
_____

Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College; many of
his essays are collected in the new Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an
Active Life (2008).

(c)  2008 Orion Magazine

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/13/8259/


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