From the Empirical Archives: Capsized by Shannon Rooney

Capsized

Shannon Rooney

Originally published in the December 2012 issue of Empirical

Buzzing with river energy–

that’s what happens

when you tip your canoe.

River otters swim into your mind,

and you can’t sleep.

The bald eagle

swoops down into your heart

and pulls forth

a silver fish.

Smells of willow and river moss

haunt me,

and I see again

that huge blue heron

as he rises into flight,

his broad wings shimmering

as I float past him.

Be sure to visit the Empirical website to subscribe!

If you are a writer and are interested in writing for Empirical, check out this link to find out how to submit.

From the Empirical Archives: Globster by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Globster

Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Originally published in the December 2012 issue of Empirical

It is a pebble-grey day. We step out of the inn and onto the greypebbled beach. The air is cold brine, gusting our hair. We grimace against it. Our arms are linked, our feet heavily shod. There is no one else on the beach, save the silhouette of a fisherman and someone’s Newfoundland dog.

We came in the middle of down season, and have since lost track of time. Claude’s watch stopped on the first day of vacation. Neither of us would be able to say whether it is morning now or afternoon. We wake every day in a brown-shadowed void. The bed linen is heavy, and has a stale smell that is neither his nor mine. Every day, awakening in that void, my throat is rimmed with despair. I want nothing more than to sleep it away, to lose the whole day in sleep.

Then there is the sickness. It rises in me like a cold sea wave.

Claude has murmured hotly into my ear. He has told me that we are in this together. My conch has been filled with the condensation of his words. Never, ever, did I imagine I’d love a man called Claude.

The Newfoundland is sniffing at something up ahead. Its tail beats the air, a coal-blackened duster. “Perhaps we could get a dog,” says Claude.

We approach the dog. It remains intent on the thing that it is sniffing. The thing is pale, water-bleached. It spreads across the pebbles like a pile of vomit, something choked up by the sea. The smell of it is dull, putrid: a smell of living flesh, reduced to its most shameful elements.

I am still thin, beyond suspicion. I look young and thin in my big coat, almost young enough to be Claude’s daughter. The thing inside me, surely, amounts to much less than the mouthfuls of pale vomit that I have issued into the toilet bowl, morning after morning.

“Barkly! Barkly!” a woman calls the dog from the cliffs above the beach. It continues to nose the glob, the carcass. Claude squeezes my hand and tells me not to worry, that it is probably only the remains of a squid or whale, washed in from the sea.

I do the only thing that I can do; I vomit. It forms a foamy layer, like frogspawn, on the surface of the water. I think that the sea must be full of such waste.

Be sure to visit the Empirical website to subscribe!

If you are a writer and are interested in writing for Empirical, check out this link to find out how to submit.

From the Empirical Archives: Maman, Maman by Jaime O'Neill

Maman, Maman

Jaime O'Neill

Originally published in the December 2012 issue of Empirical

It is bitter cold on Omaha Beach two weekends before Christmas, and so my daughter, Sionann, sits in her car, watching her Paris friends survey this site she knows so well, having brought a succession of visitors from her Normandy house here to this old killing ground to share in the homage she pays to all the young men who died on this stretch of sand so long before she was born.

Her friends sprint near water’s edge, running against the cold wind that cuts across the channel and through their winter coats. Even in the car, she can feel that wind. She turns up the heater, and she turns up the music, too–Joan Baez singing “Ave Maria” in German. It is music my daughter has known since she was an infant, a Christmas album we bought when she was three months old and have listened to every Christmas since then, more than forty years. She is, at first, swept up by nostalgia and it takes a few moments before she even realizes the language Joan Baez is singing in, and how that particular song sung in German must resonate with the ghosts who inhabit this gray seaside terrain, all those young German men who died here more than half a century ago, calling out for their mothers with their dying breaths.

Then her friends–the four of them part of a choral group Sionann has invited here to sing carols in her village–run back up the beach to where she sits in the car. Their cheeks are red with the cold, and they bring that salty Atlantic cold into the car, a gust of it on their coats and the surface of their exposed skin, but they are all aglow with laughter and vitality as

Sionann starts the engine and they turn away from the beach to drive inland where they are expected, where they will sing carols at the retirement home in my daughter’s village, just a block from her house in a town called Cerisy Le Foret–Cherry of the Forest–a place liberated by some of the men who survived the landing on this beach weeks after their comrades fell here, turning the water crimson and staining the sand where they bled their young lives away.

The place my daughter drives to is on a street renamed, in fact, for the infantry division that pushed the Germans out in that summer of 1944–Avenue 2 “e” Division Indian Head, an unwieldy name, but an honor no post-war Norman would speak against.

At the retirement home, the old people are assembled in the large common room, in wheelchairs and on sofas, awaiting the arrival of this odd American girl and her friends–British and American ex-pats, and a Parisian, plus a couple of people from the village who spent the evening before rehearsing the songs in my daughter’s living room, singing around the fire in her hearth, all those old songs of hope offered up for so long in the dead of winter, songs sung against the cold and the dark–“O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” “Away in a Manger,” “Petit Papa Noel,” “Stille Nacht.” And they sing more recent holiday songs, too–“Blue Christmas,” for example, with my daughter vamping an Elvis impersonation that makes the old people clap their hands together and exclaim in French.

And, when they pause in their singing–this unexpected invasion of young people come to sing them the season–one of the old women begins to sing a song in French that translates to “We’ll Never Be Twenty Again,” and when her singing is met with delight, she sings the song again, all the way through, with the visitors joining in, the sentiment as true for them as it is for the octogenarians who live in this place.

There is a tree in the corner, sparsely decorated, but the lights blink on and off–red, blue, golden–and the pine smell does battle with the odor of urine and antiseptics that hangs wherever the elderly are warehoused, in France just as everywhere else.

Then there is an interlude for punch and petit-fours and my daughter, who is–you’ll forgive a father his pride perhaps the sweetest human being in either France or the country of her birth, notices a stricken old woman, well over 90, slumped in a wheelchair, her face an utter ruin, tears spilling down the slack flesh of her wrinkled cheeks.

Many would ignore those tears, of course, and many would turn away from the obvious pain in this woman’s face. Many would join the conviviality of the nurses and the attendants around the punch bowl, would pretend not to have seen those tears, would avoid the uncomfortable proximity to a stranger’s sorrows, especially the sorrows of an elderly woman who may be addled, and who is, in all likelihood, beyond solace. But Sionann, bless her heart, is not such a person. She goes and sits next to the woman, hears her muttered calls for her mother–“Maman, Maman”–and takes the woman’s bony old hand in her own while she tries to think of what to say, of what there is to say.

Finally, she says something, words in French meant to be soothing. They are universal, the sentiments my daughter expresses in that moment, words meant to bring comfort, though they feel dry and hollow in her mouth.

“But,” the old woman replies, her voice hoarse and hushed, “I am so very sick.”

Sick enough to call out for her mother, long, long dead. Sick enough to grip the hand of this stranger who, though not her mother, has come to her in answer to entreaties that echo those she made when she was a little girl with a scraped knee, calling for her mother to come and take away the pain and make the fear go away, back when her mother was alive and young, long before German soldiers came to this place, or American soldiers either, and clashed in places near here where she had played as a child.

“It’s all right,” my daughter says, “you’re going to feel better soon.”

And then, in the way such words get spoken, she says it again, and still again, stroking the limp and mottled hand with each repetition, herself now become, in this moment of grace, the mother to this now motherless old woman.

The choir re-gathers at the front of the room, beckons my daughter to join them, and she bends to kiss the old woman’s cheek before taking her place with her friends who sing Schubert’s “Ave Maria” in Latin, though none of them knows exactly what the words mean.

The young people who came to sing in this place raise their voices again for those who draw near death, for those who live less than a stone’s throw from an abbey dating back a millennium, where people of this region have gathered in the dead of a thousand winters to raise voices in song and supplication, singing praises to a child, and to that child’s mother.

In Greek meter, in Russian mate, in German mutter, in Sanskrit matri, in Irish mathair, in Spanish madre, in Mandarin ma, in Swedish mor, in Arabic umm. Across the sorrowing globe we call out for our mothers in prayers secular, or prayers religious, offered to our mothers, or our idea of mothers, or to the mother of us all.

Then it is time for the residents of the home for old people in the cherry of this forest to go to their separate rooms and their beds, and then it is time for the younger ones who came to sing for them to leave, to return to the world where the young will gather for a late dinner around my daughter’s table before they, too, take themselves to bed and offer their whispered or unspoken prayers in the darkness, just before sleep, seeking comfort, seeking peace, seeking to push back the bad and troubling things for yet another night, yet another day. The hopes and fears of all the years. The prayers of untold billions of hearts on thousands of unrecorded winter nights like this one my daughter knows on that cold Norman coast so far from her own mother, so very far from home.

Be sure to visit the Empirical website to subscribe!

If you are a writer and are interested in writing for Empirical, check out this link to find out how to submit.

From the Empirical Archives: The Threat and Promise of Rural Development in China by F. Thomas Trotter and Zhihe Wang

The Threat and Promise of Rural Development in China

F. Thomas Trotter and Zhihe Wang

Originally published in the December 2012 issue of Empirical

China’s stunning economic and industrial growth is breathtaking in its scope. This was confirmed by the extensive coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games. The world saw the dramatic changes in the urban face of the nation. But behind the glittering landscapes lies an urgent challenge that is still to be faced. How will China feed its people?

The concentration of industrial enterprises in the eastern part of the nation has profoundly shaped the landscape. Ten cities have populations of about 10 million and urban growth continues. Yet the amazingly rapid modernization of China thus far has barely scratched the surface of the nation’s rural life. President Hu Jintao has asked the nation to work together on a project called “Building New Countryside” under the slogan “putting people first.” He has said, “the only way to ensure sustainable development of the national economy and continuous expansion of domestic demand is to develop the rural economy and help farmers become more affluent.”

But what will Hu’s “sustainable development” mean for rural China? China’s leadership faces a daunting problem. Acceptance of Western industrial models has proven extraordinarily successful in manufacturing. So the probability is that Western industrial models will offer agricultural planners an immediate solution. If so, there will be predictable catastrophic consequences. The most dramatic consequence will be a vast dislocation of population. If peasant farming is replaced by corporate farming, productivity of labor would be increased. Indeed fully ‘modern’ agriculture in China would only require about 13 million farmers, or only 1% of China’s population. Then China would have to absorb the hundreds of millions of people who will become surplus labor in the countryside. It is estimated that nearly 800 million people would leave rural areas and move to cities. Or, to use a more dramatic illustration, an additional 80 cities, each with a population of 10 million, would be required.

Another consequence flows from the fact that modern industrial farming is driven by petroleum. Adding commitment to petroleum to drive agriculture is problematic given the present reality of scarcity of oil and the prospect of exhaustion of oil reserves in the foreseeable future. We now know that CO2 released from burning fossil fuels is negatively affecting the biosphere upon which all life depends.

Agricultural modernization means increased irrigation, and petroleum-based farming results in more pollution of water. Water is already scarce in northern China and much of what remains is polluted. The melting of the Tibetan glaciers due to global warming threatens water shortages in central China as well. A further by product of modern agriculture is soil degradation. With all our scientific ingenuity, the challenge of producing food without erosion and salinization remains. Pre-modern and modern agriculture present a history of environmental devastation.This on-going devastation is due to the 10,000 year old practice of cultivation. Plow any land long enough and it will turn into a desert of sand or a field of rock.

Is there an alternative to the dangers of industrial agriculture in China? Modernization of agriculture follows quite naturally from what some intellectuals are calling the “First Enlightenment.” This was based on following the European Enlightenment in adopting the mechanistic world view as the basis for development. Mao and other 20th-century political figures correctly discerned that China needed to commit itself to Western methods of industrialization to become a modern nation. In that commitment, however, there was a tragic rejection of a culture that involved a way of life and an ethical consensus that had sustained the Chinese people for millennia. The most egregious evidence of the rejection of China’s cultural achievements was the excesses of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

Partly in reaction to the Cultural Revolution, many Chinese began to re-appraise Chinese cultural values. These include respect for family and community, respect for the earth and other forms of life, respect for tradition and the rituals that hold people together, a sense of the spirituality found in harmony between people and nature, and a way of living (Shangquing) that provides peace in human affairs.

Contemporary industrialized society in China appears to have rejected these classical values and any form of Western ethic other than the private freedom in the market place. Many Chinese are now concerned about the future of a society that lacks any cohesive moral teaching.

The main reason for breaking with the Chinese tradition was that it had not encouraged the development of advanced science and technology. Recently many Chinese are re-thinking the possibility of linking traditional values with science and technology. Some have called this the “Second Enlightenment.” They have been encouraged to believe this is possible by their encounter with the Western philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Although Whitehead has been largely ignored in the West, eighteen Chinese universities have established centers to promote study of his thought.

Whitehead’s philosophy suggests that traditional Chinese thought can connect with contemporary science. Whitehead built a non-mechanistic conceptuality for science based on relativity theory and quantum theory. His “process philosophy” (as it has come to be known), or “philosophy of organism” (as Whitehead himself referred to it), is closer to the basic way of thinking of traditional China than to the mechanistic and reductionistic philosophy to which the First Enlightenment wedded progressive movements in China. Some Chinese intellectuals are now calling for a Second Enlightenment that unites much of their Chinese heritage with the cutting edge of contemporary science.

The Second Enlightenment has implications for many fields.

Thus far its most extensive application has been in education. But today rural development and agriculture are top priorities. Rather than simply supposing that agricultural development requires the acceptance of Western industrial models, the Second Enlightenment calls for a second look at earlier cultural values and the wisdom of traditional Chinese farmers.

Traditional models of agriculture include the use of organic fertilizers. In the Tang Dynasty (618 AD to 907 AD), emperors encouraged “circular” agriculture. Pigs produced organic fertilizer which produced food which made possible the acquisition of more pigs. Although China’s population has grown dramatically in the last two millennia, its traditional agriculture has so far met basic food needs. Even today the Chinese feed one-fourth of the world’s population on only seven percent of the world’s land surface. Instead of displacing the wisdom of traditional agriculture, the Second Enlightenment calls for working with farmers to overcome problems of production they identify.

Reflecting on Chinese cultural tradition and stimulated by the constructive postmodernism of Whitehead, there are some general principles rising into agricultural planning: (1) The fertility of the eco-system must be recognized and respected. (2) Bare soil must be recognized as a crime against the earth. (3) Biological and solar-intensive farming systems should prevail. (4) Agriculture is more than food and fiber production.

Traditionally, plowing has been used to control weeds by maintaining bare soil. Herbicides are a remarkable invention, but weak resistance to these widely used chemicals is prevalent after just 30 years of use. The modern ‘Green Revolution’ can now feed 6.5 billion people, but not sustainably. Ultimately the soil itself will be exhausted by current practice. Today’s modern farming practices and technologies cannot continue for the next 100 years.

Only in the past 20 or so years has dry-land agriculture begun to demonstrate how to grow crops without cultivation. ‘No-tillage’ (no plow) farming systems keep the soil covered by green or dry vegetation. This system has been widely adopted in some parts of Australia and the USA. No-tillage farming systems have been shown to greatly reduce soil erosion, particularly wind erosion. But these systems are entirely dependent on petro-chemicals, particularly herbicides to control weeds. Dependence on petro-chemicals carries with it more environmental degradation.

Another major problem in China is that as rural population becomes denser, farms have become smaller. Farming methods that produced a decent living a century ago on larger plots of land cannot support families today. Either there must be some migration to the cities or even more intensive agricultural practices. Furthermore, the question of who owns the land remains a severe problem for rural populations in China as in many other places.

Modern agricultural economy is not resilient. It is fragile and is easily broken. It cannot withstand climatic and social shocks. Modern agriculture feeds billions of people in thousands of cities by shipping food great distances in fossil fueled ships, trains, and trucks. Take for example greater New York City of 15 million people. 3,000 train cars a year transport food from all over the world to feed this megalopolis. Each year 100 million bananas are imported from plantations in Central and South America. Other fruits and vegetables (1.4 billion kg/yr) are imported from over 25 other countries in the northern and southern hemispheres. 100 million kg of fish from 300 different species are transported from around the globe in constantly refrigerated containers.

New York would begin to starve in less than one week if the global or local transportation and refrigeration systems failed. This vast food distribution system is totally dependent on fossil fuels, well-maintained rails and roads, airports, and good governance (lack of war and free trade). Remember the consequences of a twelve-hour storm (Katrina) and subsequent flooding on the population of the small city of New Orleans? Social order collapsed, people became thirsty in twelve hours and hungry in twenty-four hours. Any city in China is similarly dependent on fragile food supply networks that could be disrupted in seconds as occurred after the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province.

It is possible that concern about these vast problems will overwhelm thoughtful planning and lead to despair. Should this happen and no significant change take place, rural China might be left to stagnate. The social dislocation of this failure would have enormous consequences, not just for China, but for the entire world. Remarkably, China’s leadership is more open than that of most nations to recognizing problems of this sort. They are not content with slogans but are taking action in positive directions. In 2005, the central government launched an experimental project to establish a “Green GDP.” Cities and provinces, including Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Liaoning, Zhejiang, Anhui, Guangdong, Hainan, Chongqing, and Sichuan have all joined the project. Now concluded, the project’s findings are being studied and evaluated by the government and by concerned NGOs. There has been a remarkable development of eco-villages, eco-counties, even eco provinces to contribute to the growing concern for environmental planning.

Can the Second Enlightenment find a practical program for the development of agriculture in China? If so, does it have a chance of getting a hearing from decision makers in the West? Perhaps. The daily headlines about peak oil, global food shortages, social unrest in countries where agriculture is being modernized, and the obviously unsustainable nature of modern industrial agriculture may combine to cause Chinese leaders to seek an alternative.

By the year 2030, China’s population is predicted to increase by another five hundred million people, and most of these people will have to be accommodated in cities. If China takes the agricultural modernization route, the grim scenario of vast population shifts to urban centers may well continue. But we are saying that it may avoid that by careful planning. Nevertheless its cities will certainly have to absorb most of the population increase. China loses about 1 percent of its agricultural lands to urbanization and industrial sprawl annually. 

So how will China feed its people? 

China’s problem is the world’s problem. Lester Brown, the leading environmentalist in the world and founder of Worldwatch and the Earth Policy Institute, forecasts “when China turns to world markets on an ongoing basis, its food scarcity will become the world’s scarcity; its shortages of cropland and water will become the world’s shortages.” The economic and political consequences are unimaginable.

We Americans are only beginning to awake to the reality of world food crisis and the political and social consequences of such a disaster. Now is the time for thoughtful reflection and action to support research in agricultural sustainability and survival of the world’s fragile agricultural resources. In a tentative but definite way China’s leadership is moving in the right direction. We ignore China’s initiatives in reshaping agriculture at our peril.

Be sure to visit the Empirical website to subscribe!

If you are a writer and are interested in writing for Empirical, check out this link to find out how to submit.

From the Empirical Archives: A Rich Country by Hugh Mercer Curtler

A Rich Country

Hugh Mercer Curtler

Originally published in the December 2012 issue of Empirical

In one of his travel notes written in 1788, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “What a cruel reflection, that a rich country cannot long be a free one.” He was even then concerned about America’s preoccupation with the accumulation of wealth as an end in itself. As Jefferson saw it, the reason wealth interferes with freedom is to be found in the captive nature of avarice.

As it happens, Aristotle had the same thought more than two thousand years before Jefferson when he attributed the breakdown of aristocracies to the unnecessary accumulation of wealth; the aristocracy degenerated into an oligarchy, rule by the rich. The problem as Aristotle saw it was that the rulers lose sight of the common good out of a growing concern with their own self-interest.

Jefferson, along with other eighteenth-century American thinkers, came to call concern with the common good “public virtue.” It was supposed to be a republican virtue and should keep men away from the lure of self-interest and the accumulation of unnecessary wealth and luxuries. But both of these thinkers were putting their fingers on a central problem that worried the founders of this nation: what are the effects of unnecessary wealth on a republic?

In The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787, Gordon Wood, quoting from a sermon delivered in 1778 by the Rev. Payson, has this interesting paragraph for us to ponder: Because it was commonly understood that “the exorbitant wealth of individuals” had a “most baneful influence” on the maintenance of republican governments and “therefore should be carefully guarded against,” some Whigs were even willing to go so far as to advocate agrarian legislation limiting the amount of property an individual could hold and “sumptuary laws against luxury, plays, etc. and extravagant expenses in dress, diet, and the like.”

Though a number of the framers of our Constitution were themselves deists, we must recall the prevailing influence of both the Puritans and the Quakers on the minds of those who prepared the nation to revolt against England. This is especially so in an age in which the conservative element among us tends to emphasize the influence of the Christian religion on the founders of this nation while at the same time they promote the conflicting myth of free enterprise capitalism–which was never regarded as an ideal in the minds of the colonists. In fact the early colonists insisted that “commerce. . . had destroyed England’s soul”; it was beneath the true calling of human beings who are at their best when they remain close to the earth and control their appetites and desires.

Much of this thinking stemmed from their reading of the New Testament, of course. But many of them were avid readers of history and were convinced that excessive wealth and luxuries were among the major causes of the downfall of the Roman republic, which they greatly admired. They advocated “enterprise,” to be sure, but there were both legal and moral restraints in many of the colonies against the unlimited gathering of wealth and luxuries–laws against entail, primogeniture, and even monopolies. Indeed, as Wood tells us, “A preliminary draft of Pennsylvania’s Declaration of Rights even contained an article stating ‘that an enormous Proportion of Property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the Rights and destructive of the Common Happiness of Mankind,’ and therefore should be discouraged by the laws of the state.”

The very problems the colonists were most concerned about have come to pass largely as a result of the combination of the role of very wealthy individuals–like the Koch brothers–and multi-nationals, who have bottomless pockets when it comes to playing poker at the political table. The rest of us hope to get by by bluffing. Let me expand. According to the American Association for Justice, the Koch brothers fund the political group called “American Legislative Exchange Council” that involves thousands of legislators around the country who push bills through that favor the corporations at the cost of the health and well-being of the majority of the population.

Judged from the perspective of Jefferson’s America, such people and such groups are a big part of what is wrong with this country today. As of this writing, the Koch brothers allegedly plan to spend $400 million of their hard-earned money to get Obama out of the White House and keep control of the Congress. They might succeed, of course, because money talks; and after the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, the amount of money spent by the wealthy on the November elections could buy a small country–or a large one that’s deep in debt. After all, the family oil business the Koch brothers own rakes in an estimated $100 billion a year. The sky’s the limit!

But note the irony in the fact that people like this will spend millions of dollars to buy politicians who will guarantee that they get to keep most if not all of their wealth in the future. I dare say they see it as an investment. Some of the wealthy 1%, I understand, even buy politicians on both sides of the political aisle. 

That way they can’t lose.

The interesting question is what on earth the founders would say about this turn of events. They were suspicious of capitalism in its raw forms. As mentioned, a number of the colonies had restrictions on the unfettered growth of capitalism. They saw that as a sure way to aristocracy which they distrusted almost as much as they did royalty. Many were still wedded to the comfortable notion of mercantilism, which was what they were used to as British citizens; it favored the involvement of the government in the financial affairs of its citizens. These were men who, for the most part, knew that humans left to their own wiles would get into a dog-eat-dog fight over wealth and they didn’t want to see that either.

People like Jefferson saw the future of this country in terms of a paradigm in which people would remain close to the earth or own small businesses and earn enough money to be content and have whatever they required to live a good life, but no more. “More” was not necessary and it could lead to moral blindness. Initially the founders, especially the Southerners, didn’t even want a federal bank, though Alexander Hamilton finally persuaded them to go in that direction–as a matter of necessity. And many of the wealthy citizens helped support the young nation (and the revolution) with money out of their own pockets. This was the way to practice “public virtue.”

The attitude toward money in this country in the eighteenth century was quite different from ours now. For the most part money was seen as a means to an end, simply. There were remnants of a deep-seated medieval distrust of money and what it did to people–ultimately stemming from Christ’s admonitions regarding the rich in the New Testament. Just read Dante’s Inferno and try to figure out how many of those in Hell are there because of their relentless greed! That attitude took centuries to die out, but it is now pretty much a thing of the past as, thanks to people like John Calvin, we think that wealth is a sign of talent, ability, and even, perhaps, God’s favor. You cannot have too much. If you do, you can always go out and buy yourself a government–like the Koch brothers.

There are lessons here for us to learn. We like to think we live in a Democracy even though the founders saw it as a republic governed by representatives, not the people themselves. The people were not thought to be wise enough to govern themselves, though through education they would learn to practice public virtue and at least come to recognize those around them who were worthy of elected office. And some would become well enough educated to lead the others. This is why Jefferson established the University of Virginia: he saw education as essential, especially in a republic. Those who remained in school long enough would be recognized as especially able and elected to public office. The cream would rise to the top. 

Jefferson envisioned a “natural aristocracy” governed by the brightest and best minds the country could produce. James Madison tended to agree with him–as he did on so many other issues. The idea goes back at least as far as Plato’s Republic. But it is clear that, as Aristotle foresaw, our “natural aristocracy” has degenerated into an oligarchy–given the fact that those with great wealth are the ones who choose those who govern and later tell them how to govern. And the wealthy are clearly preoccupied with their own self interest in the form of maximum profits. So Aristotle was correct in his notion of what factors lead to the degeneration of an aristocracy, even though he saw an aristocracy in a different light than Jefferson did. And Jefferson, echoing the Rev. Payson, was also correct in saying that a rich nation could not long remain a free one. 

Let me explain.

By world standards ours is a very rich country, though it is the top 1% who have the bulk of the wealth. But our conviction that we are one of the freest nations on earth is based on the misperception of what freedom is: that it is a function of the number of choices we have rather than our ability to decide for ourselves what is worth choosing. We do have a great many choices, heaven knows. But this is what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty” and it is clearly a part of what freedom is all about–we must be free from restraint in order to act at all. And we must have a variety of things to choose from. But Berlin also focused attention on “positive liberty,” or the freedom to choose intelligently, which comes from knowledge and awareness of implications. To the extent that we are unaware of what is going on about us, we as a nation fail to achieve positive freedom. As long as the wealthy continue to control the governing body, not to mention the media, whereby they are able to divert attention with entertainment and games, we will continue to maintain the illusion that we are free because we have negative liberty. We can choose the channels we want to watch: more is better. But until or unless we also have positive liberty, unless we come to know which channels are worth watching, we are not truly free–not fully free in human terms. Free citizens know which candidates are worthy of public office and will elect them accordingly. 

That was Jefferson’s dream.

It is not likely that the wealthy will give up their wealth. And as long as they can buy politicians who will pass the laws that give them tax breaks and subsidies, they will simply continue to amass photo : Charlie Nguyen wealth–while insisting all the while, incorrectly, that they are realizing the ideals of the founders of this nation. Thus, if the citizens of this nation are to regain any semblance of their full human freedom, the only hope is education whereby we come to know what freedom is and realize that it does not come down to the number of loaves of bread on the shelves at the local box store, or the number of cars at the dealership. As suggested above, freedom is a function of knowing which bread is healthy and which cars are the lemons: it is a function of knowledge and the capacity to think about what we know. Job training certainly won’t get us there, though it is what the wealthy want us to embrace and what the schools are currently focused upon. It is only through education properly conceived that we can realize this capacity to make informed choices. That is why a liberal education is vital to our political system as originally conceived: it sets us free and keeps us free. 

Let us be clear about this.

Liberal education properly pursued leads to the ability to use one’s mind. One would hope, therefore, that everyone in this country, if not the world, would want as much as possible. But we confuse schooling with education, despite the fact that there are a great many people who are well-schooled but who are badly mis educated. They may be well-trained to do a particular thing, but they cannot use their minds and are captives of every intellectual fad that passes their way. This is the result of job training, and while corporate CEOs will complain from time to time that their employees can’t use their minds properly–they can’t speak coherently, write a clear memo, or organize their thoughts–they would really prefer that these people simply do what they are asked to do. Otherwise, why aren’t the corporations taking the lead to make this nation first in the developed world in education instead of being, as it is, among the last? It is not America that leads the developed world in education; it is tiny Finland.

In a republic like ours, it is essential that all citizens acquire the capacity to use their minds, to know whether or not they are being led astray–to keep an open mind, stay on top of what is going on around them, and think their way through all the nonsense to see if there is a kernel of substance at the center. Liberal education properly pursued will assuredly lead to this end. But even if schools do their job and lead us down the path to an education, it does not stop there. Education properly conceived, lasts a lifetime. In the end, it would appear that Jefferson was right. Corporate wealth which controls the political machinery in this country is at loggerheads with both the ideals of this republic, and in so far as it fosters job training in the place of education, it also limits the possibilities that the citizens of this republic can remain free.

Be sure to visit the Empirical website to subscribe!

If you are a writer and are interested in writing for Empirical, check out this link to find out how to submit.

From the Empirical Archives: Renewable Ignorance by Herman Daly

Renewable Ignorance

Herman Daly

Originally published in the December 2012 issue of Empirical

We are all born pig-ignorant. Upon having accumulated a lifetime of knowledge, we all promptly die. Ignorant babies replace learned elders. Knowledge is a depleting resource; ignorance is renewable. Yes, libraries and data banks grow, but knowledge finally has to exist in the minds of living people to be effective and evolve; unread books, unseen videos, and un-accessed hard drives are inert. They are also subject to destruction by teeth of time: fire, flood, mildew, and moth, as well as that modern bookworm, the computer virus.

Like Sisyphus we push the rock up the hill only to have it roll back down again. Progress is not completely illusory. However, it is three steps up followed by two and a half steps backward. Successive generations repeat earlier mistakes. They also invent new ones. Any solution to a given mistake is usually forgotten within two or three generations and we have to learn it again. But it is not all bad—after all, babies are delightful and happy while old people are grumpy—ignorance is bliss.

Life consists of more than knowledge. Life expectancy has increased, so the old know more when they die, leaving the babies with still more to learn. A massive transfer of knowledge each generation is an unavoidable necessity. This transfer is not automatic. It requires two decisions. The old must decide what knowledge is worth their effort to teach, and the young must decide what is worth their effort to learn. Some knowledge passes both filters and becomes the basis for guiding the future and for discovering new knowledge.

Other knowledge fails to pass one or both filters and is lost. Just as the world is always only one failed harvest away from mass hunger, so it is always only one failed generational transfer away from mass ignorance. What do we know about these two generational knowledge filters? What do they let pass and what do they filter out? I really don’t know the answer, but I have one speculation, taken from E. F. Schumacher’s reflections on Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes.

Aquinas said that even uncertain knowledge of the highest things is worth more than certain knowledge of the lowest things. Descartes believed otherwise, that only knowledge that had the certainty of geometry was worth retaining, and uncertain knowledge should be abandoned even if it pertained to higher things. These two filters have very different selection biases. In their extreme forms they represent opposite errors of judgment about what knowledge to keep and what to jettison.

Which error are we most likely to commit today?

I believe we overemphasize Descartes and pay too little attention to Aquinas. I take Aquinas’ “higher things” to mean purposes, knowledge about right purposes. Lower things I take to refer to techniques–how to efficiently do something, assuming it should be done in the first place. We have overdeveloped our relatively certain knowledge of technique, and left underdeveloped our less certain but more important knowledge of right purpose. The old seem more interested in teaching technique than purpose, and the young obligingly seem more interested in learning technique than purpose. So we develop more and more power, subject to less and less purpose. As physicist S. Weinberg says, the more science makes the universe comprehensible and subject to our control, the more it also seems to render it pointless, and the less our control is guided by purpose.

These thoughts remind me of a public debate I participated in at LSU in the 1970s regarding the construction of the River Bend Nuclear Power Plant near Baton Rouge. I presented economic and safety reasons for believing that the plant should not be built, that there were cheaper and safer alternative sources of electricity, etc. After my presentation, a nuclear engineering consultant from MIT made his rebuttal on behalf of Gulf States Utilities. 

It consisted entirely of presenting a scale model of the reactor core and explaining how it worked. He never replied to any of my arguments or said a word about why the reactor should be built. But his exposition of technique easily won the public debate. Afterwards everyone crowded around his model pointing to this and that, asking how it worked. “How to” questions of technique totally displaced “what for” questions of purpose. Maybe I needed a scale model meltdown of a reactor core!

Maybe I needed a course in public relations.

I might as well have been whistling Dixie.

Also I am reminded of a conversation with a friend who was the film curator for the Library of Congress. He told me that digital recording techniques were now so advanced and cheap that the Library would soon be recording and preserving everything that appeared on TV, or YouTube, or the radio, or Twitter, etc.  Historians and scholars could then decide what was important and valuable. Librarians would avoid this difficult qualitative decision, and at the same time feel good about themselves for not imposing their value judgments on future historians. While I understand this point of view, I cannot share it because it seems to me yet another example of “how to” questions displacing “what for” questions–a displacement likely to be continued by the “value-free” future scholars for whose benefit this almost infinite attic of junk is to be saved.

Knowledge is offered as a panacea these days. Young people are urged to go deeply into debt to “get a degree,” and are assured that the growth economy will allow them to pay it back with interest and still come out ahead. Many have been disappointed, and more will be. As one who has spent over forty years in universities, I am doubtful about this exaltation of knowledge; even though in arguing for a steady-state economy I have appealed to physical limits, not knowledge limits, leaving open the question of how much qualitative development could be supported within a biophysical steady state without quantitative growth. Also the “knowledge limits” I have appealed to are themselves knowledge–knowledge of physical limits, mainly the laws of thermodynamics, rather than any inherent limits to knowledge itself. 

Although I am eager for knowledge to substitute physical growth to the extent it’s possible, the basic renewability of ignorance makes me doubt that knowledge can save the growth economy. Furthermore, knowledge, even when it increases, does not grow exponentially like money in the bank. Some old knowledge is disproved or cancelled out by new knowledge, and some new knowledge is discovery of new biophysical or social limits to growth. New knowledge must always be something of a surprise–if we could predict its content, then we would have to know it already and it would not really be new. Contrary to common expectation, new knowledge is not always a pleasant surprise for the growth economy–frequently it is bad news.

For example, climate change from greenhouse gasses was recently new knowledge, as was discovery of the ozone hole. One thing I have learned about universities is that much of what is taught in them today is based on the labor theory of value–“it was hard for me to learn this, so it must be worth teaching it to you.” This is a poor generational filter, and is even found in economics, which of all disciplines should know better! Also, much abandoned knowledge should have made the cut but did not. Indeed the whole field of history of economic thought has been cut from the curriculum to make room for more econometrics–the art of pretending to measure ephemeral and tenuous correlations among ill-defined variables in a world where the relationships to be measured change faster than the data for estimating them accumulates.

The classical economists’ concept of the stationary state economy did not totally disappear, but almost.

Is just trying to save everything a solution?

No. Do I have a solution? No. So I will stop here and simply ask that we all, young and old, pause, and calmly consider the proper balance between the “what for” and the “how to” questions as filters for the generational transfer of knowledge. Let’s help the babies deal better with the perennial problem of renewable ignorance.

Be sure to visit the Empirical website to subscribe!

If you are a writer and are interested in writing for Empirical, check out this link to find out how to submit.

From the Empirical Archives: The World of Actress and Director Tara Browne

The World of Actress and Director Tara Browne

Richard Jones

Originally published in the November 2012 issue of Empirical

To the ears of Canadian filmmaker Tara Browne, “diversity” signifies considerably more than a feel-good word. It sums up every facet of her life, both the good days as well as the downright ugly ones. With seven ethnic streams jockeying for position in her DNA–Austrian, British, Scottish, Hawaiian, Philippine, Spanish, Chinese–she could hardly avoid the mantle of diversity.

Browne grew up in a charming middle class neighborhood in Vancouver, British Columbia. The neighbors all looked nice. However, a person’s façade of gentility does not necessarily guarantee an inner core of civility.

“I stood out–which I hated,” Browne recalls. A little blonde, blue-eyed girl once said to her, “Your hair is brown, your name is Browne and your skin’s brown too.” Another time, neighborhood punks in a car chased Browne and her brother and sister. “They tried to scare us–and they certainly did,” she admits.

Browne’s parents were not spared from violence. When the family went camping, people threw rocks at her parents’ tent. Ethnic hostility did not cease with rocks. “When I was a little girl, about seven, I witnessed a neighbor shout out racist remarks to my father,” she recalls. “He thought my father was the gardener.” After some more angry words, the neighbor and her father began throwing punches at each other.

Later in her life, Browne’s varied background became a negative factor when she auditioned for a role. “I have a difficult time fitting into the mold of casting,” she says. “I’m not Asian enough, not white enough, not Spanish enough. A casting director even told me that to my face. He is a friend and he told me [that’s] the way the business is.” All these elements began shaping her concept of diversity.

Perhaps that is why she refuses to be bundled into someone’s little box of ethnic clichés.

“I am many things,” says Browne with formidable justification. “I don’t like to be put in one category.” Consider her degree in criminology which preceded her studies in the performing arts. Browne’s father told her the only way she would gain respect was to get an education or make a lot of money by ascending a corporate ladder or becoming a lawyer or a doctor. Browne says, “I kind of bypassed all that and became an artist. I took the harder route. What can I say? I like challenges!”

But first, she spent four years in Simon Fraser’s criminology program, where she sought to understand “how social and political life is shaped through power.” If one considers criminology and art unrelated, one would do well to dust off Alexander Pope’s pithiest aphorism: “The proper study of Mankind is Man.” That includes not only saints and sinners, but also the bulk of humankind harboring both personas within their crania.

On the path of the digital film

In 2005 she began studying method acting at Methodica Acting Studio in Vancouver, receiving a diploma in 2007. From there, she found a platform at Vancouver’s Pocket Stage that specialized in cutting-edge playwrights. Canada’s film world began taking notice of the versatile young woman on Vancouver’s stages, offering Browne a role in The Ovum Factor by Marvin L. Zimmerman. Some have called this venture to the Amazon an “eco thriller” crossed with indigenous respect for protecting wildlife systems.

Then Europe called. Browne headed across the Atlantic to star as the “Asian Girl” in a NIVEA beauty commercial that aired across Europe. While in Hamburg she directed an all-German crew and starred in The Audition, a short film inspired by Jane Martin’s play. She managed this neat trick although she does not speak German.

Back in Canada, she set up residence in Toronto in 2010. After careful thought, Browne decided that a film career offered the most efficacious vehicle to support her vision. Thus she launched her own “independent platform of artistic vision.” Named Diversity Face Films, it was in no way modeled on any Hollywood studio steeped in tent-pole mentality. She defined her goal as one “to create human stories of diversity that help generate greater integration, inclusiveness and understanding. We seek to break down differences and to help build greater social harmony.”

To ensure that the world would take her seriously, Browne has emphasized state-of-the-art quality. She described her goal as becoming “a new independent film platform that produces high-quality, visually beautiful, thought-provoking films dedicated to diversity. That includes [diversity in] actors, stories, and crews. We are here to promote diverse faces, diverse stories and diverse film crews from around the world.”

Ethnic equity remains a far off goal in the film industry. “When you go into a video store, look at all the covers on the DVDs and movie posters,” she suggests. “Then count how many ethnic [minorities] are playing the leads. . . . Then go outside the store and walk around your neighborhood [and] see if this is equal representation.”

“North America is largely made up of immigrants and yet when you turn on a TV it seems that the actors are mainly white with a [few] African Americans [to] make up for all other races. . . . I’m not saying all of Hollywood is racist. I think there are several factors involved. There is just not a lot of encouragement for ethnic people in the arts from their families. . . . That’s why it’s important to focus on your inner self . . .your unique self. Stop trying to fit in.”

Browne encourages minorities to stay true to themselves. “In the end, we should all focus inwards. That’s where the power is.. . .” Who else can create an authentic minority viewpoint? “Ethnic people have a tremendous opportunity to tell their story. It’s just that being an artist is not promoted very much amongst immigrant families.”

Diversity implies that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ways that an individual might approach any problem. To take advantage of diversity, her crew on every project includes members from a wide number of backgrounds. This not only offers many alternatives to consider, but more creative solutions. On a broader palette, this could serve as a model to bring better understanding and broader paths to a more just world.

Following the Picasso dictum “Art is a lie that tells the truth,” Browne produced The Poacher, a western unlike any other. The theme demonstrates that women can take on challenges as well as men. The script casts the mother as Native American and the father as white. “I purposely wanted to have a mixed-race family. I wanted to show that such families did in fact occur during these times in the Wild West,” she says. Browne called for a number of rarely encountered techniques. Set in the backwoods of Langley, British Columbia, the film uses several devices to create an 1890s flavor, including sets with elaborate period pieces.

The black and white photography and the silent film opening add an antique patina– until the first gunshot knocks us out of our seats. By then we are primed to accept Browne as a hard-riding, sharp-shooting woman. Not surprisingly, in real life Browne is both.

In addition to creating a different story, Browne put special importance on achieving “high production value.” To this end, she worked with a 60 man crew. The experienced professional team included photographer Pieter Stathis (some 40 movies on his credits) and Italian set designer Luca Carati, who has worked his magic in Europe, Asia, and North America. “I had a beautiful art director and a wonderful crew,” Browne says. “The film had an estimated value of $178,000, but I did it on a shoestring budget of $2,000 because I pulled favors. Period.”

In Elinor Svoboda’s recent gender bending fiction film, It Remains Unsaid, Browne starred as the principal antagonist. Composed by twin musicians Tegan and Sara, this Toronto production featured Browne as a torn and confused lesbian “coming out” in early adulthood. 

Currently Browne has accepted the lead role in Delerium, a Gothic horror film by Allen Legacy. Unlike most groan-and-gore epics, this one has a strong point of view. It will address breaking a cycle of domestic abuse, certainly an all-too-common practice in the world.

In the film, she says, “I had to do a fight stunt scene. [In that scene] I felt the pain of a woman in an abusive relationship. It was so painful. I thought, this is what I have to do, for those women stuck in a violent domestic relationship. For some reason I feel like I have a responsibility for this world and it’s just the beginning I think. I just wish I could do more.”

Meanwhile, Browne wrote a “semi-autobiographical” script inspired by the life of Buffy Sainte-Marie. The Grammy-winning Native American folk singer gained fame for her war protest song “Universal Soldier.” Browne calls Sainte-Marie “a truly remarkable woman who continues to make positive changes in the world through her music.”

Four decades later, Browne aims to “bring forth a message of peace and activism . . . for everyone to see. We plan to produce an award winning short which brings forth Buffy’s message of peace.” Browne is just the right person for the project. “I have been researching her life since 2008,” she says. Here, Browne’s ten years of training as a classical pianist and a knack for vocals came into play. This film marks a new level for Browne. “We are being backed by a well-known production company in Toronto,” she says. “This is my first well-financed production.” She plans to use this as a base for a future project. “From this film we are spawning the feature film.”

Here and there, after college, Browne absorbed uncountable examples of abuse by megalomaniac power mongers from classic literature through tomorrow morning’s newspaper. Even more inflammatory were first hand accounts related to her by the victims of persecution who had fled to Canada to avoid death or torture. The melding of Browne’s skills–and an encounter with a refugee from Burma (now Myanmar)–led her to write, produce, and direct I Met a Man from Burma in 2011. The award-winning film highlights the experiences of freedom fighter Ler Wah Lo Bo. This character-driven documentary short explores the oldest on-going conflict in the world. The narrative is expressed through the eyes of Ler Wah Lo Bo, a Burmese refugee. As a former revolutionary fighter for the Karen National Liberation he turned activist. The film touches on the current state of Burma with a focus on the use of child soldiers.

A number of festivals have accepted this documentary, including the Berlin International Film Festival, Berlinale Film Cloud, where it was chosen out of a thousand entries. It also appeared at the Vancouver International Film Reel Causes program, Toronto’s Hot Docs. Most recently, The Female Eye Film Festival in Toronto added I Met a Man from Burma to its screenings.

The film caught the attention of SHAW TV. An interview with Browne soon followed, reaching an estimated three million viewers. Soon, local newspapers and magazines contacted her, requesting interviews. Browne sent the Canadian immigration minister a copy of the film. About two months later, the minister called Ler Wah on May 6, 2012, to say that an upgrade from refugee status to full citizenship would soon take place. A film can generate more virtues than simply “putting butts in the buckets.” The proud filmmaker smiles the smile of satisfaction with this humanitarian act.

“I feel this is my biggest accomplishment so far in my life,” she says.

Be sure to visit the Empirical website to subscribe!

If you are a writer and are interested in writing for Empirical, check out this link to find out how to submit.

From the Empirical Archives: Molar by Carol V. Davis

Molar

Carol V. Davis

Originally published in the November 2012 issue of Empirical

In the end, the sky did not fall,

nor the earth move, for that matter.

Only the squat tooth rumbled

in its cage, saying:

Enough confinement, set me free!

Worried it would incite its neighbors,

urge the other molars to take up the chant,

loosen from their moorings, I pleaded

with the dentist to see me on his day off.

When he turned off the spot light and

lowered the chair, he warned of a

year-long relationship.

I regretted that call, sure this

half-hour encounter would cause

an earthquake in the bank account.

Why is every small decline of the body

a betrayal, as if a treaty had been broken

or a faithful ally switched sides without warning?

I stepped out of the medical building,

the sky darkening under the threat of rain.

Circling crows landed in pairs on the broken sidewalk,

one to distract the woman, the other to snatch her purse.

Or maybe they knew what went on behind closed doors.

Were going to make a run for it, gathering those gold

and silver nuggets the dentist surely hoards.

Be sure to visit the Empirical website to subscribe!

If you are a writer and are interested in writing for Empirical, check out this link to find out how to submit.

From the Empirical Archives: Steal This Religion by Ian Dees

Steal This Religion

Ian Dees

Originally published in the November 2012 issue Empirical

Last Christmas, a new church was born. In December 2011, the Swedish Ministry of Finance officially recognized the Missionary Church of Kopimism, a religion whose core value is the free exchange of information–in other words, copying.

From the Empirical Archives: Roots of Ages by Scott Bontz

Roots of Ages

Scott Bontz

Originally published in the November 2012 issue of Empirical

In the beginning, there was no soil. But there was rock.

And weathering and gravity made the rock into particles, and bacteria, plants, worms, and legged things pitched in to make soil. And it was good enough to farm. But, lo, the crops that raised civilizations were annuals.

Soil-building vegetation was mostly perennials. And after harvest of annuals the soil was naked, and it blew and washed away. And what was left was not so good to farm. Farmers brought the soil gifts of legumes and manure, and eventually of anhydrous ammonia. This fed the grains that fed civilized humanity. The new fertilizer fed it so well that humanity owed near half of its life to a product of burning fuels that took even longer to form than soil. But the grains remained annuals.

And the soil still blew and washed away, and farmers moved to lesser and even more vulnerable land. Some in science saw humanity headed downstream with the soil. And a few finally asked, “Can’t farming work more like the natural vegetation that forms soil, but still feed us?” And they studied and decided it could.

And they began breeding plants to achieve perennial grains, and testing how these might grow in species mixtures, like prairie. They knew this would take much longer than six days or even six years. But after much fundraising and educating and painstaking field and lab work, they coaxed more and bigger seed from perennial plants once wild, and they bred tame annual plants to behave more like perennials. And they saw this could be really good.

*

There is the first chapter in what could be called a genesis of natural systems agriculture. Or, of synthesizing  evolutionary biology, ecology, modern genetics, and farming. The work that I have tried to sketch in a fun way has become a serious endeavor, if still marginally funded, at several organizations around the world, including in Australia, China, Canada, and the United States.

The oldest current player–though the Soviets tried first, only without modern genetic know-how–and the central player is The Land Institute, near Salina, Kansas, which has six PhD-level researchers plus technicians developing perennial wheat, sorghum, and sunflower, and domesticating the perennial intermediate wheatgrass and a protein-rich, nitrogen-fixing prairie legume called Illinois bundleflower. Wheatgrass, for which the institute has a trade name, Kernza, might be a commercially viable grain in another decade.

The nonprofit has through the recession continued to increase its budget, to $2.3 million, and collaborates with the researchers elsewhere. Its wheatgrass and other crops will essentially be public domain. These plants won’t require farmers to buy and plant seed every year. With less tillage, they will take less money for fuel and machinery.

And in working more like a natural system, mixtures of perennials should need less of the other high farm expenses, fertilizer and pesticide. About half of The Land Institute’s funding comes from foundations, half from individuals, and a sliver from the USDA. These crops do not yet interest agriculture corporations.

Wes Jackson, who grew up on a farm near Topeka, Kansas, and earned a doctorate in genetics before he quit a tenured university position and founded the institute in 1976 at age 40, recently has pushed for investment much bigger and broader.

He examines the danger of population growing while farmland degrades and the crutch of fossil fuel declines. He studies the advances over the past decade by his researchers and others toward a solution in perennial grains. And he sees convergence for a decisive, historic moment. Two years ago he, along with farmer/writers Fred Kirschenmann and Wendell Berry, proposed a 50-year federal farm bill, to look far beyond the traditional five-year bills and solidly support work that will take decades.

Now the institute proposes a 30-year effort enlisting more than 160 scientists on five continents. The $1.64 billion cost divided over the years would be 24 times the institute’s own current spending. But in total it would cover four months of the old federal ethanol subsidies.

Another comparison: the three-decade proposal is less than one tenth of the $18.7 billion annual budget for NASA. Jackson has said we are of a culture that keeps looking to the stars, thinking it beneath us to look at the soil. We don’t appreciate the material that supports all of our dreams, and the biological creativity without which we cannot be, let alone be scientists and artists. Jack Eddy wrote in an essay called “A Fragile Seam of Dark Blue Light,” Earth is where “a thin blanket of air, a thinner film of water, and the thinnest veneer of soil combine to support a web of life of wondrous diversity in continuous change.”

Change to that thinnest veneer since humans became farmers 10,000 years ago, and a change accelerating with increase of population and machinery, includes growing even thinner. In “Earth,” geologists Edward Tarbuck and Frederick Lutgens say erosion is a fate of almost all soils. But pre-human flow of sediment to the sea is estimated at just over nine billion metric tons per year, they say, and now the loss is about 24 billion. Gauging wind erosion is harder. But in the 1930s Dust Bowl, a perfect bomb of drought and farming, the Plains’ rich soil palled Washington’s sky en route to Atlantic grave. To build an inch of soil takes from half a decade to more than a millennium. Global averages have been calculated at 150 to 450 years. 

Meanwhile, Australian scientist Joe A. Friend writes in an essay called “Achieving Soil Sustainability,” in many parts of the world an inch of soil disappears every one to 10 years. He says that a majority of world soils are being mined faster than they can be regenerated.

Tarbuck and Lutgens see this net loss on more than a third of world croplands. Friend says of soils, “They are intrinsically nonrenewable and may become completely unusable within a few generations.”

Agricultural civilization’s band of instigators 400 generations ago didn’t foresee this. And when they perceived an advantage to planting seeds, they favored those of annuals. As Land Institute scientists and John P. Reganold of Washington-State University detail in Scientific American, the earliest domesticates, emmer-wheat and barley, caught the Neolithic eye with large seeds. Further favor came to individual plants with traits such as high yield and easy threshing–it was their seed that people replanted. Replanting with annuals comes every year. So the first farmers unwittingly applied evolutionary selective pressure to quickly domesticate these choice annuals. Some perennial plants might also have big seeds. But they did not need to be replanted. Through no real fault of their own, they did not benefit from the same selection and fast improvement.

Now most of our food comes directly or indirectly, as animal feed, from cereal grains, legumes, and oilseed crops, all of them annuals. Wheat, rice, corn, soybean, and sunflower seed transport and store easily, and pack protein and calories. They occupy about 80 percent of agricultural land.

But annuals have relatively shallow roots, most of them in the top foot of soil, and live only until harvest. Perennial roots commonly tunnel down more than six feet. Unlike annuals, perennials must invest in building enough underground tissue to survive the winter. But that tissue can improve the ability of annual seed to spring into above-ground growth by weeks. Photosynthesis earlier and after harvest lets perennials build both seed and resilient infrastructure.

In a century-long study of soil erosion, timothy grass, a perennial hay crop, proved more than 50 times more effective in maintaining topsoil than did annual crops. Scientists have documented a five-fold reduction in water loss and a 35-fold reduction in nitrate loss from soil planted with alfalfa and mixed perennial grasses as compared with soil under corn and soybeans. Perennials sequester carbon, the main ingredient of soil organic matter, by 50 percent or more than do annually cropped fields.

Jackson saw that Kansas’s tall-grass prairies were highly productive year after year even while they built and maintained rich soils, with no fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides, and with what rain they relinquished running clear instead of muddy.

He foresaw agriculture working this way, with both conservation of the system and production for our food.

This change is radical–going to the root–and trying to achieve perennial grains has had critics. They say that to match the seed yield of annual grains, perennials would have to give up the carbon that makes winter-hardy underground tissue. That assumes that the amount of carbon available to a plant is fixed, so what goes to making seeds comes at the expense of structures like roots. But plants are flexible. They can change both the total size of their carbon “pies” and how the pie slices are allocated. A wild perennial in its highly competitive prairie or forest might make only small amounts of seed. But farming’s law and order relieves plants from competition.

The same seed can become a bigger plant. And over years breeders can select for plants that produce less of something like competitive stem height, and redirect the carbon to make more seed. Thus Green Revolution scientists dwarfed plants and doubled grain yields. (They also used more fertilizer.) Perennials have a longer growing season than annuals and already can make more above-ground growth. In a University of Illinois side-by-side study, unfertilized, perennial Miscanthus outproduced fertilized corn by half again, with one-fourth the energy input. Land Institute researcher Lee DeHaan has doubled wheatgrass seed size and yield and not made winter weaklings.

Achieving perennial grains demands much human work and will take decades. But perennials have shown their potential. Like other agricultural scientists, the developers of perennial crops both directly domesticate wild plants, selecting the best from within one species, and breed annual crop plants with wild relatives. In direct domestication researchers get straight to increasing the frequency of genes for desirable traits, such as easy separation of seed from husk, seed that doesn’t fall before harvest, large seed, taste, strong stems, and high seed yield. In this way, Native Americans turned wild sunflowers with small heads and seeds into the familiar large-headed and large-seeded sunflower.

Land Institute scientists are domesticating intermediate wheatgrass, Maximilian sunflower, and Illinois bundleflower. Recently joining in the work with wheatgrass is the University of Minnesota. On the hybridization track, The Land Institute breeds annual crop wheat, sunflower, and sorghum to wild relatives, aiming to combine good crop traits with perenniality, along with perennials’ resistance to pests and disease. Washington State also works on perennial wheat, and researchers at three other US institutions are interested in making corn perennial. Food Crops Research Institute in Kunming, China, is developing perennial upland rice hybrids.

Of the 13 most widely grown grain and oilseed crops, 10 are capable of hybridization with perennial relatives, Land Institute researcher Stan Cox said. This all has come through traditional plant breeding, without insertion of foreign DNA. No solitary gene can switch a plant to perennial.

Cross-fertilizing plants of different species, often of different genus, is tricky genetic business, with many sterile failures. But through lab work and crossing back to fertile parents comes success. Triticale, a hybrid of wheat and rye, was born this way a few decades ago. Cox now has hundreds of perennial sorghum plants.

*

So here is a possible second chapter to the story of nature and agriculture.

Just as they learned to save eagles and redwoods, people came to champion soil, so lowly for so long, but so vast, rich, and mysterious, and often so fragile, its loss the loss of Greece, Carthage, and Rome, its continued endangerment also endangerment of those eagles, redwoods, and people.

They learned to see how in the natural economy perennials build principal. They saw how other life made do, wildly, on interest, and how the great plow-up that was farming spent down the principal. They saw this through art and science bought with those riches. And through that science and art, they saw a way to preservation. And in the end, there was soil.

Be sure to visit the Empirical website to subscribe!

If you are a writer and are interested in writing for Empirical, check out this link to find out how to submit.