World Ark Magazine - January/February 2008 - (Page 19) village that was the center of its own attention, that did most things for itself, to a vending machine. Or less. WA: Many of our readers have connections to farming themselves, so could you tell us a little about your own farm? WB: As long as our children were at home we had a fairly elaborate subsistence economy here. Had two milk cows, finished a couple of meat hogs a year, raised our own poultry. We’re older now, the children are gone, so we’re just raising sheep—32 ewes at present. We have a team of work horses to do the work we have to do, and a pretty good garden. The garden gets three or four big loads of manure every year. WA: Which really helps with the productivity of the land, right? That’s one of the things that Heifer teaches to its project partners. WB: That’s observing what Sir Albert Howard calls the Law of Return. And it is a law. What you take you’ve got to give back, or else what Howard called the Wheel of Life won’t turn. The wheel turns through birth, growth, maturity, death, decay and back to birth. Round and round. If you don’t keep that wheel turning, you finally exhaust the land. WA: Today, so much of the effect that our consumption has on the world happens without us knowing. Is it important for us to actually see our personal give-and-take with our environment, our effect on the world? WB: It’s important at least that we understand our economic relation to the world, the way we live from it, the way we do or don’t take care of it. I think the conservation movement unwittingly helped to drive a wedge between us and our land by implying that we could live most of our lives in circumstances that don’t quite suit us—doing work that doesn’t suit us, work that makes us say, Thank God it’s Friday—and then somehow, on vacation, go to a national www.heifer.org park and reconnect with the natural world. But of course that’s not a connection. WA: It’s a way of thinking that treats the natural world as a precious object, not a part of everyday life. WB: These people get in their cars and go west across Kansas, which feeds them, and they never look at it, because their chins are on the dashboard looking for the Rocky Mountains. Wes Jackson has watched them doing that. No snowy peaks in Kansas. My own testimony about this is that I know we can connect to nature in a better way. You don’t have to go to the Rocky Mountains to confront nature, to learn from it and ask the necessary questions. If you go to a good farm that has been properly and gracefully fitted into a place, then you can see that real questions about the terms on which we live have been asked, and answered. Suppose a family in Louisville is connected with a CSA [community-supported agriculture program] out here. We don’t have any great stands of old-growth timber around here, no great wilderness, no high waterfall, no snowcapped peak, but say that this family would come out, by invitation of their farmer, and have a picnic in the woods on her good farm. And they would see where the food is coming from while they’re there. They would see that you can have a nice outing even in such ordinary countryside as that. They would see how you can live in a place like that, and that living there requires respectable intelligence. And it seems to me that in their minds the breach between the city and the country would begin to heal. Lauren Wilcox is a freelance journalist and a former World Ark associate editor. She lives in New Jersey with her husband. Lauren recommends these favorite Wendell Berry works: What Are People For? (Essays); The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry; Given: Poems; Jayber Crow: A Novel. January/February 2008 | WORLD ARK 19 http://www.heifer.org
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