Friday, 8 Nov 2002

ABINGDON, Va.

My last day with you, the viewing (reading?, surfing?) audience. I’ve appreciated the opportunity, truly, and hope I’ve provided interesting reading. Before I get to the details of this last day, and my profound and poignant parting thoughts, let’s get some contact information out, for everyone who might want to follow-up:

Appalachian Sustainable Development
P.O. Box 791
Abington, VA 24212
Phone: 276.623.1121
asd@eva.org

We’re always interested in hearing from other groups working on similar issues or trying different approaches to the same types of challenges. We occasionally do consultations, and frequently lead workshops and seminars. We also autograph baseballs, but that’s $20 a pop, plus shipping …

The rain has finally subsided, though the ground is still too wet for garlic planting. We sent our friends from “Good Morning America” home with some beautiful garlic (this year’s crop) and jars of our Appalachian Harvest organic tomato sauce. I was hoping to “plug it” on national TV, but no such luck. We will be testing Internet sales of the sauce starting later this month.

This morning, I loaded some logs in our Taylor stove, a water-jacketed wood stove that heats our house and a small greenhouse. This year’s wood pile is hickory, a bit of red oak and black locust, each a wonderful wood in its own respect. Locust is probably the best burning wood overall — slow burning, with a lot of BTUs, not quite as hard to split as hickory. Locust is also a legume tree, meaning that its nitrogen-fixing ability enables it to grow in and help restore depleted soils.

Heating with wood is not without environmental problems, although it’s not as bad as burning coal or oil. We do it at home for two reasons: I enjoy it, and it keeps us in touch, very intimately, with just where our heat comes from. All three of our kids participate in some way, more each year, as they get older. I believe that the act of turning your thermostat up is quite different, once you realize that you’ve got to find, cut, split and stack the wood, and you have to walk outside to load the stove at 6:00 a.m. Time will tell if this affects our children’s energy-consumption habits.

At ASD, it’s much the same challenge, albeit on a larger scale. Millions of people agree that family farms should be preserved, that corporate concentration in agriculture is dangerous, and that reducing or eliminating toxic chemicals from farming is an urgent need. But what do they, what do we do about it? The same is true in forestry, where there is widespread concern about clear-cutting, soil erosion from logging, and similar problems. Yet, few people know where to take that complaint.

We have not yet proved it, but my proposition is this: To fundamentally change our relationship to the ecosystem and to other people, we need to move from habits of extraction and consumption, to habits of creation, that is, habits that build community and sustain the ecosystem. Wendell Berry has called this a shift from “bad work” to “good work”. As he says in his essay, “Conservation is Good Work”:

We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of the individual place or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for everyone of the places and everyone of the workers on Earth.

Here at ASD, we’ve embarked on a modest attempt to do “good work” in the context of our farms and forests, our food and buildings. To do this good work, we need not only the farmers, the loggers, and the landowners, but also the consuming public ready to choose willing to pay for this honorable work.

It’s been fun! Hope to hear from some of you.