Climbing that Local Tree of Subsistence

"Hope is not a consumer product. You have to generate your own hope. You do that by demonstrating to yourself that you are brave enough to face reality and competent enough to deal with the circumstances that it presents. How we will manage to uphold a decent society in the face of extraordinary change will depend on our creativity, our generosity, and our kindness, and I am confident that we can find these resources within our own hearts, and collectively in our communities."

James Howard Kunstler (2007, Making Other Arrangements)

Increasingly we’re seeing the source of tyranny on localities has been the dependence on out of district, out of state, and out of country resources. We have developed this reliance over many years, but if citizens want to improve the quality of their community’s products, politics and place, they must take up new responsibilities and make things work at the local level for everyone. The current system, which relies on vehicles running on an exhaustible resource to deliver produce out of season, does not work for everyone and everything. It depends on the cheapest labor and product. Many of the other concerns a community might have (from quality of life to quality of the place they live) are dashed.

The Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture estimates that the average American dinner plate “travels about 1500 miles to get from farm to plate.” Localities have taken many risks to rely on this current system. The agricultural guru Wendell Berry has detailed them in Conserving Communities. “The great, centralized economic entities of our time do not come into rural places in order to improve them by ‘creating jobs.’ They come to take as much of value as they can take, as cheaply and as quickly as they can take it” (Berry, 77).

The fortunate external creation of this local system that provides for its own subsistence is the ability to develop community and place. Meaning when a community supplies its own resources and services, it accomplishes more than its own sufficiency. Each writer, from David Orr to Daniel Kemmis to Terry Tempest Williams speaks to the need to develop a self-sufficient local economy, because from the community level, citizens can affect the change they desire and provide for their own well-being. Williams mentions a system of stimulation in Engagement; a system of interdependence that a local place and community can offer citizens who are struggling with an issue. “Out of our shock, anger, and affection for each other, the Castle Rock Collaboration was formed. We had no money. We had no power. We had only our shared love of home and a desire for dialogue with the open spaces that defined our town” (Williams, 2). This is not to say that isolated communities are the answer to all national and international issues. Ideas and concepts must continue to be spread, just not on the backs of semi-trucks, which have been and will always be an ineffective way to transport resources in the future.

The community also provides a system where long-term infrastructure and methods of distribution can be created by the commonwealth. Essentially communities can provide for themselves. Hany C. Boyte is confident that such an undertaking provides citizens the opportunity to do good work, but to also take a “deep stake” in their community. “When we help to build something, we experience it as ours” (Boyte, 3). Boyte sees citizens as creators rather than protesters or consumers. By demanding that citizens once again command this pride in the public production, and in alluding to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Great Depression, Boyte establishes that a transition is possible and desirable. This belief provides the structure for Jefferson’s vision--that a local economy is a healthy economy. “The health of democracy and that of the economy can be maintained only if citizens control the basic circumstances of their lives and livelihood” (Orr, 112).

There are few people who can speak to this better than the nomadic writer, Alan Thein Durning, who discovered that his lack of place was the source of his recurring unhappiness. “The truth was I lacked any connection to my base in Washington, D.C., and for some reason, for the first time, it shamed me” (Durning, 259). After this realization he keenly built the case for community and place in This Place On Earth by using land as a metaphorical taproot for a group of people, binding them to the environment for which they are all dependent.

There is a cornerstone obstacle that provides a suitable challenge to the long-term development of subsistence and sense of place within a community. Durning notes that the reason we are currently incapable of producing more of what we need locally lies not in a lack of information or knowledge, but in our inability to motivate ourselves. “People know enough, but they do not care enough” (Durning, 261).

We know the damage that the “superstores” leave localities to grapple with. We know the things they cannot and will never solve. James Howard Kunstler accurately listed what lies on the killing floors of these national stores in Making Other Arrangements. However, he is not the first person to slip on the slippery superstore floor of consciousness. He writes, “Not only have they destroyed multilayered local networks for making and selling things. They have destroyed the middle class that ran them, and in doing so they destroyed the cultural and economic fabric of the communities themselves” (Kunstler, 4). We know, but we haven’t been motivated enough to act out of our long-term mutual interest.

So how do we motivate people to do what they know can renew a local economy? This is essentially the dilemma facing the revival of Thomas Jefferson’s vision--how do we make a system that echoes David James Duncan’s mantra, “less is more…enough is plenty,” and makes it palatable for the majority of people when we know it is good for the long-term sustainability of ecology/environment, economy/employment, and equity of society? Growth seemed sustainable in the eighteenth, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, his “vision was never really tried. Instead, it was dismissed in the national rush to expand to continental proportions and to become a world power” (Orr, 113). This was a rational conclusion in those centuries, because the scale of the Earth reinforced it. Durning put it another way--“The Earth is such a big place that it might as well be no place at all” (Durning 161).

Writers in the twenty-first century, however, have made the switch and are attacking the need for local subsistence from many angles. Naturally this need is getting mixed reactions, even amongst people in the Environment and Community class. Kunstler’s piece, for example, seemed to present an assortment of lifestyle changes that will result from resource reductions. From transportation to democracy and government to education--our system will change, he implies. He framed these changes as not good, not bad, but realistic. “In general, the circumstances we face with energy and climate change will require us to live much more locally, probably profoundly and intensely so” (Kunstler, 4). I sensed that during discussions, the class understood the reality of Kunstler’s future portrait, but they couldn’t sink their teeth into what will be the necessary lifestyle of local subsistence and farming that we will come to adopt.

Two students split on the issue completely. One mentioned the prospects of this system, saying it would be indicative of a progression for our community and our place to have more control over what we produce. Another student believed that this system would be a regression because our nostalgia for Jefferson’s vision would push us back against the progress we’ve made since the eighteenth century. This is a very discouraging response, but it’s understandable, because Kunstler’s vision of the future seems awkwardly disconnected from the national debate between presidential hopefuls. Communities must take account for their own future, because at the national level, subsistence is not a popular. But how can a person within a community develop this responsibility?

Alan Thein Durning, David Orr and Daniel Kemmis each believe that in order for a person to assume responsibility for their actions, he or she must have substantive connections to their environment as well as their community. They must be able to witness and experience both positive and negative human actions on an environment, and they must struggle with these actions. Just as Missoulians are now seeing the effect of more than a hundred years of mining on local rivers and streams that wash down to them, they can also radiate pride in their valley when they hike to the top of Ch-paa-qn Peak in the Lolo National Forest. Within a place, society requires a motivation built on local potential, because, as Durning puts it, “It may be possible to diagnose global problems globally, but impossible to solve them globally. There may not be any ways to save the world that are not, first and foremost, ways for people to save their own places” (Durning 161). That is to say that communities can solve many of their own problems, including food, water and energy, if they’re willing to accept their shared love of place and tackle the differences that separate them. David Orr exudes wisdom in the statement, “If we want better politics, we must first design better ways to meet our essential needs and remove the sources of tyranny from our lives.”

Berry, Wendell. 1996. Conserving communities. Pp. 76-84 in Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, edited by William Vitek and Wes Jackson. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Boyte, Harry. 1997. Builders of the commonwealth: Citizenship as public work. Journal of Public Affairs, vol. 1. (6 pages).

Durning, Alan Thein. 1999. This place on Earth: Home and the practice of permanence. Pp. 256-265 in Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place, edited by David Landis Barnhill. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kunstler, James Howard. 2007. Making other arrangements: A wake-up call to a citizenry in the shadow of oil scarcity. Orion. January/February: 22-29. Available on reserve or at: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7/

Orr, David. 2002. A politics worthy of the name. Pp. 104-117 in The Nature of Design. Oxford: Oxfod University Press.

Williams, Terry Tempest. 2004. Engagement. Orion 23(4): 50-59. Available at: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/143/

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