The Homestead Gardener-Thoughts For the New Season
- By DERRICK GENTRY-
“Am I a sheep?”
That was reportedly the question that Fred Rogers, a Presbyterian minister, asked his wife in his final hours on earth. He was alluding to this well-known passage in the Book of Matthew in the New Testament:
When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. (Matt. 25:31-33)
Yes, Mister Rogers is a sorely missed public figure and role model in these times. But I must confess that I was a little upset to learn of this deathbed anecdote (which I am told is dramatized in the recent biopic starring Tom Hanks). This passage from Matthew is one of many in the Bible that I have never really understood … although on one level, I understand it all too well.
Perhaps I am biased and overly sensitive; perhaps I have a subconscious tendency toward “goatsplaining,” as someone who pals around with goats and gives them aid and comfort while trimming their hooves.
The New and Old Testaments are both full of homespun wisdom that reflects a culture rooted in animal husbandry and small-scale agriculture. There are parables about seeds and how they may or may not germinate in different soil conditions, about the sustainability of seven-year crop rotation plans, about the time to sow and the time to reap, and much else.
Unfortunately, all that store of imagery is not so easy to translate into a proto-permaculture vision of community resilience. There is more base tribalism in the Bible than we sometimes would like to admit. There is also a fair amount of senseless animal cruelty. At least the goats are given the dignity of symbolizing something: The poor Gaderene swine were simply innocent bystanders sent off to their death as a footnote to a parable about exorcising evil spirits (or something like that). The story of the Gadarene swine later attracted the highlighter pens of Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Thomas Aquinas and was interpreted to mean that Christians have no moral responsibilities with regard to non-human species. (Thank goodness for St. Francis going down on record with his alternative take on all creatures great and small…)
At any rate, parables about separating sheep from goats seem particularly unhelpful at the end of this dismal Year of Our Lord, The Plague Year of 2020: a year of division, isolation, despair, deluded self-righteousness, and mythic fears and desires with regard to an imagined final reckoning. I strongly suspect that Mr. Rogers would have framed his deathbed question differently if he were still with us.
Of Fallen Idols and Aborted Conversations
One positive short-term plan I have for the new year is to write a review of Chris Smaje’s long-awaited new book, A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth. Smaje’s book raises a number of critical questions about food autonomy and community resilience in an admirably honest and complex manner. Smaje is himself a small-scale grower in the eastern corner of Somerset England.
Not long after I began reading the final draft of Smaje’s book, I came across a piece published months earlier that raised many of the same questions that Smaje raises. It was written by an American named Chris Newman, a small-scale grower in the eastern part of Virginia who writes (provocatively, though very intelligently) on various issues related to food sovereignty. In his piece, Newman made some critical observations about his fellow Virginian – Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms.
Salatin has been something of a celebrity in the conversation about local foods and sustainable agriculture, ever since Michael Pollan profiled him in his 2006 book the Omnivore’s Dilemma. Salatin is a prolific writer himself. He describes himself on his widely read blog as a “heretic” and a “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer,” producing locally raised meat that he claims is “beyond organic.”
In his critique, Newman simply raised questions about the social and economic sustainability of the local agrarian business model that Salatin has been representing and promoting for nearly a generation. Newman pointed out that in some respects, Polyface Farm is a problematic model in light of the fact that Salatin inherited his considerable acreage and has a steady staff of unpaid “interns” as farm laborers. In place of the heroic entrepreneurial model, Newman envisions local food cooperatives.
In spite of their generational difference, Salatin and Newman are fundamentally on the same page in terms of their ideals and what they actually do on their respective farms.
So what was Salatin’s reply to Newman’s stimulating and fresh critical perspective? Take a moment to imagine what might have been…and then turn your gaze upon what it actually was: an intemperate and unproductive response, which included a bizarre non-sequitur rant on race (against charges of racism that had nowhere been made) as well as large helpings of condescension. You see, Newman is mixed-race, with Black and indigenous ancestry.
I will not paraphrase or quote from Salatin’s blog post in reply to Newman, since it is readily available online, but I will say that it is uninspiring reading material: offensive, beside the point, and, for sincere lack of a better word, plain dumb. Salatin made the issue personal, as perhaps is to be expected from someone who has built a cult of personality and trades in image and charisma.
I cannot say that I feel disillusioned, since Salatin has never given me much cause for developing illusions in the first place. But I am deeply saddened, as we should all be, about the important conversation that was initiated by a bright young person and terminated by an older man with a bigger business and a bigger reputation. That conversation now seems unlikely to happen, or at least not involving these two voices.
In August of this year, Mother Earth News announced that it would sever all ties with Salatin, a long-time contributor to the magazine, due to “a significant ideological impasse” on important social issues. The online response among the various spectators was predictable: there were impassioned defections and defenses, claims of “cancel culture” at work, and a palpable sense of victimhood and persecution—all of which can serve to further reinforce the self-image of any self-styled heretic.
The Newman-Salatin exchange was a painful spectacle to watch, particularly since the apotheosis of Salatin occurred with the assistance of Michael Pollan, the Berkeley professor and popular writer for the New Yorker-reading cosmopolitan set. Sustainability makes strange bedfellows, and readers of Pollan (myself included) eagerly embraced the idea of Vedanta Shiva and Joel Salatin and others sitting at the same table as an inclusive, multi-national, multi-ethnic coalition of enlightened agrarians. That image now seems a bit tarnished.
I do not think Salatin is a “bad man.” He is neither a goat nor a sheep; he is simply an imperfect specimen of homo sapiens, as we all are, who has made it clear that he has a lot to learn about the world around him. And for someone who describes himself as a humble and devout Christian, Salatin seems to have remarkably little understanding of the theological concept of Original Sin—which, in this country, has to do with the continuing legacy of “wringing one’s bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.”
Along with Saint Francis, we still have Wendell Berry to look up to as a role model of a public figure, a great man who has absolutely no interest in matters of greatness. Berry has never given a TED Talk, and he does not seem to have a Twitter account (at least not as of this writing). The image of Berry that keeps coming to my mind is the famous photo of him (featured on the cover of his book, The World-Ending Fire) sitting quietly by himself at his writing desk, looking out the window while deep in thought—thought that is slow, silent, and deliberate. He looks almost like a pensive Abraham Lincoln.
I Hereby Resolve…
I have never felt so at a loss for words as I feel at the end of this long year. Frankly, my New Year’s Resolution thoughts have turned briefly to imagining how far I can get by without graven images and icons, without the concept of identity itself, even without words.
One thing I think I can resolve to do better this next year—even though I am reluctant to do so, since it involves words—is to make a personal effort to take seriously and to take to heart what Chris Newman and people of his generation have to say. Their critique of what I assume and what I do and what I aspire to do is all part of their vision for a better future, and that is the same future that I need help envisioning.
As someone who has identified himself with the “alt tradition” of small-scale self-reliant living, there are also a few specific resolutions I now feel the need to make.
The first resolution has to do with the challenge of maintaining critical distance while still remaining a part of the flock (so to speak). There is a certain danger in cultivating a separatist mentality and an anti-social attitude of distrust toward The Establishment. A hubris of self-righteous “us-them” thinking can easily set in, which we justify by our opposition to a system that is broken – whether it is industrial capitalism, the food system, or Big Pharma. All of these systems are broken, of course, and Vandana Shiva and Michael Pollan and Chris Newman and Joel Salatin all agree with each other about that, and I am in their company. But positioning oneself as an outsider, seeking to unplug and distancing oneself from the status quo, entails certain responsibilities—social responsibilities, in fact.
Take, for example, another provocative and much-discussed blog post by Joel Salatin, the Lunatic Farmer, published in March of this year under the title, “I Want Coronavirus!” In this piece written in the early days of social distancing and other preventative measures, Salatin makes a homespun heretic’s case for the notion of herd immunity, encouraging healthy people—those who eat healthy “beyond organic” foods and live a healthy life close to the soil—to go out of their way to expose themselves to this new virus that will make them no sicker than the common cold (so long as you eat right, live a healthy lifestyle, and therefore have a guaranteed robust immune system).
The general response to the blog post was about as you might imagine. And because Salatin has become such a spokesperson for the alternative agriculture movement, the uninformed and grossly irresponsible half-truths that he broadcast regarding COVID-19 did not do much good for the image of the movement more generally. The incident reminded me of Salatin’s renegade role model and one of the founders of the American organic foods movement, J.I. Rodale, who in the 1950s infamously challenged the polio vaccine program: “Isn’t there a better way of conquering polio,” he asked, “than jabbing all the children in the country with a needle?”
I do not want to undermine a cause that I firmly believe in. But I regret to say that people like Salatin and even Rodale himself have already done that discrediting work. There is a word for the form of heresy to which self-styled heretics often succumb: kookiness. And I think it is high time that we call it out, call it what it is, and make a sincere effort to distinguish genuine critical thinking from genuinely dangerous thinking.
If we are looking for true role models who illustrate how to avoid these tendencies I have highlighted, then we might look to the example of Sir Albert Howard—the British founder of the organic movement in England, and whose work Salatin references in his COVID piece and (ironically) misreads and misrepresents. Albert Howard was a trained scientist who was well aware of the dangers of misleading analogies and sloppy thinking more generally. Howard’s sympathetic but highly critical response to the sketchier pseuduoscientific claims of the Biodynamics movement, one of the precursors to the organic movement, is a model of independent thinking that stands apart without being anti-social or “fringe” in the negative sense.
The sad lesson of this year—or, even sadder, the long-standing truth that this year has reminded us of—is that we are not in fact “all in this together” nearly as much as we would like to think. As we approach a new year, the question on my mind is not whether I am a sheep or a goat, a heretic or a conformist. The most pressing question for me at this moment is whether my thoughts and actions and relations are centripetal or centrifugal in nature. That is to say, I want to become more aware of the ways in which I contribute to social cohesion and harmony and a shared sense of reality, in contrast to the ways in which I contribute, however unintentionally, to fragmentation and division. Right now, I do not think I have a clear enough sense of what forces I am contributing to in my day to day living. I hope to spend the next year getting more clarity through interaction with others, exploring ways to live in a cooperative manner among the mixed flock.
Mister Rogers, if you can hear me, please show me – us – the way forward.
