[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Destined for Failure

[Bill Totten]

by Jason Peters

Orion magazine (November / December 2008)


I AM ASTONISHED by the number of academics convinced that the infusion
of a few technological electrolytes will cure the pounding hangover sure
to punish us for partying so recklessly in the hospitality tents
sponsored by Cheap Readily Available Oil. People with five or seven
letters after their names are clinging to the delusion that energy and
technology are interchangeable, that when one goes into decline the
other will arrive to take them up the mountain for a weekend of downhill
skiing.

This error persists for any number of reasons, among them the fact that
higher education has largely become a faith-based institution governed
by the motto "In Progress We Trust". But perhaps a more immediate cause
is that as participants in an increasingly abstract economy we have
simply let ourselves live in a kind of blissful ignorance about oil -
how it was formed, what we use it for, how we get it, what and whom we
destroy in the process. And so as a teacher I have often wondered
whether general-education curricula should include an interdisciplinary
course on oil - and whether passing such a course should be a graduation
requirement.

This is part of a larger question concerning the problem of ecological
illiteracy, that unselective pestilence as likely to infect a professor
as a frat boy. Too many of the guests and tenants in academia bear a
striking resemblance to that clueless freeloader at the end of The Great
Gatsby who shows up one night after Gatsby's death, unaware that the
party is over.

But it is, and it's high time we who teach started saying so, because
lean times are coming. For example, our dependence on the food system,
which is run by oil from farm to table, will waste no time teaching us a
few things about how incompetent we are. That many of us with impeccable
academic credentials will be among the first to starve means only that
chickens do come home to roost: we are the confessors of an educational
creed that dismisses the value of the domestic arts and sends graduates
out into a world of surrendered skills and purchased necessities. We are
the diploma retailers who have allowed students to assume that the
machines and the ungraduated will supply all their real needs. We have
let these students major in Getting Ahead. We have strip-mined the local
talent, converted it into "graduates", and shipped it to Big Important
Places. Deracinated and deracinating vandals that we are, chasers of
whatever grant money inflates our egos, we have taught students to be as
we are: citizens of every place, which is to say citizens of no place -
that is, not citizens at all, but parasites.

It's time for something better.

On every campus we need large, highly visible vegetable gardens that are
tended by everyone who likes to eat; cafeterias that provide, insofar as
they can, only local foods; compost heaps steaming next to these
cafeterias to remind us to pay our debt to the soil. We need
administrators committed to dismantling, not enlarging, our vast system
of technological dependencies, and professors committed to living
defensibly and responsibly and competently before their students. Our
foreign studies programs must become local studies programs. Our new
buildings must be made to run on energy sources that will still be
available when the buildings turn fifty or a hundred.

We can't ignore the problem of ecological illiteracy any longer. It must
become a prominent curricular concern all across higher education. And
no one should graduate who doesn't know what oil has done for us - and
especially what it has done to us: made us fat, lazy, stupid, and
incompetent. This won't cut it.

_____

Jason Peters teaches English at Augustana College and is the editor of
Wendell Berry: Life and Work (2007).

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